Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography 9780823287970

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Dictionary Poetics

Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors

Dictionary Poetics Toward a Radical Lexicography

craig dworkin

Fordham University Press new york

2020

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Contents

Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography

1

1

Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary

33

2

Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A”

48

3

The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series

77

4

Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer

101

5

The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the Poetry of Tina Darragh

129

6

Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge

161

Acknowledgments

185

Notes

187

Index

239

Dictionary Poetics

Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography Neither is the dictionary a bad book to read. There is no cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion—the raw material of possible poems.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books”

Different dictionaries will produce different results.

—Bernadette Mayer, “Experiments”

Surveying the state of literary criticism in the early twentieth century, William Carlos Williams decried the fact that most critics, seeing only chaotic clutter, “ haven’t the vaguest notion why one word follows another, but deal directly with the meanings themselves.”1 The fundamental premise of this book is that to read in ways less distracted by the “meanings themselves” and more in tune with the writer’s methodology not only exposes and clarifies the pattern beneath the clutter—revealing the logic with which “one word follows another”—but also provides a more robust access to those meanings themselves, including meanings that are not discernable from other perspectives. The new ways of writing pioneered by modernist avant-gardes, in short, invite new ways of reading commensurate with their modes of composition. When abstraction erupted in painting at the end of the 1910s, it not only changed the look of art, introducing a new formal language and range of possibilities for painterly practice, but it also altered the demands placed on art history and criticism.2 Certain modes of critical practice had to be retooled or abandoned altogether in order to accommodate the ruptured illusion of the pictorial plane. Traditional iconography, for example, no longer made sense when faced with a monochrome canvas (or, at the very least, it required its own abstraction in turn, and an equally radical rethinking of what might be meant by an “icon” under the new dispensation). The same was true for musicology following the advent of atonality. The second movement of Brahms’s first piano sonata, say, affords certain readings: tracing the minor-key deviation of folk themes in relation to the C-major tonality of the opening and concluding movements’ harmonic

2 / Introduction

frame, for instance. However—even if one could reimagine what might be meant by “theme” in the context of dodecaphonic serialism—the very idea of a key signature is no longer meaningful in a thoroughly atonal context. At a minimum, a composition like the first book of Pierre Boulez’s Structures solicits other musicological approaches. Although modernist writers also began to compose in radically new ways, we have largely continued to read twentieth-century texts as if nothing had changed. The basic thesis of this book is that those new ways of writing require new ways of reading that are willing to follow their lead. If, as Louis Zukofsky, predicted, “there will have to be a / redefinition of writing,” then there will have to be an attendant redefinition of reading as well.3 As one first step in that direction, this book seeks to provide a proof of concept: Learning to read in the way the avant-garde writes can yield significant interpretive payoffs, open other wise unavailable critical insights into the formal and semantic structures of a composition, and transform our understanding of literary texts at their most fundamental levels. As the following chapters repeatedly demonstrate, passages that at first appear to be discontinuous, irrational, whimsical, or outright nonsensical suddenly appear logically consistent, rationally structured, and thematically coherent when read in the light of an avant-garde compositional procedure. The analyses here allow one to make sense of literature that would other wise remain opaque, cryptic, mysterious, or meaningless. Consider, for illustration, the extraordinary opening of the thirtyeighth chapter of Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels: Sword etc., flat part of an oar or calamity, sudden vio-dashing young fellow, lent gust of wind; forcible stream of leaf, air, blare of a trumpet or horn, blamable deserving of Explosion as of gunpowder, blame, find fault with Blight; censure, Imputation of a blatant Brawling noisy, Speak ill, blaze, Burn with a blameful meriting flame, send forth a flaming light, less without blame innocent, torch, firebrand, stream of blamelessly blameless flame of light, bursting out, act-ness, worthy of blame, cul-blaze, Mark trees by pable, paring off part of the bark, mark blanch, whiten, par-out a way or path in this manner. . . .4 The prose executes quick cuts between impacted rhymes (“sword” / “oar”; “flaming” / “blame”; “blanch” / “path” / “manner”), alliterations (“pable, paring” / “par” / “path”; all the bl– words), and modulated recombinations (notice the play of f, l, n, and t in “flat” / “fellow, lent” / “forcible . . . leaf ” / “find fault with” / “flaming light, less,” etc.). With that phonemic

Introduction / 3

patter and the paratactic phrasing of short, grammatically incomplete units, Kerouac’s chapter presents itself an instance of “spontaneous bop prosody”: improvisational, expressionistic, rapidly reorienting itself with the same abstractionist impulses on display in Jackson Pollock’s paintings or the soloing of instruments in bebop.5 The entire chapter continues in this mode, unspooling a patchwork of dizzying phrasal fragments. For all its abrupt disruptions, the style of the passage betrays its origins with what Clark Coolidge will elsewhere identify as the “syntax” of the dictionary, in this case, appositional series and the prepositional noun phrases featuring “of,” “with a,” and “in this manner.” 6 Kerouac has pursued something like “prose in the state of its home dictionary,” as Coolidge would write in one of his mid-1970s poems.7 Without access to the particular edition of the dictionary at hand, a reader might suspect Kerouac of irreverently disrupting the coherence and authority of the reference book with extended flights of aleatory improvisation; the passage styles itself as a riff, or goof, or caprice. When read alongside his novel, however, the “Students’ Graded School Edition” of Webster’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language reveals the poetics in play to be both unexpectedly simpler and far more telling (see Figure 1). The lingering trace of the dictionary in the passage may be self-evident, but only through a comparison with the exact dictionary consulted by Kerouac—the specific typography of page 61 of that particular edition of the Laird & Lee Webster’s—does the poetics behind the anomalous chapter become clear. To begin with, even the page selected for transcription resonates with the novel, which recounts Kerouac’s time stationed in an isolated fire lookout on Desolation Peak, in the Cascades of northern Washington, where lone scouts were tasked with keeping keen eyes through the cold nights. Accordingly, the entry for “bleak” in Webster’s would have spoken to Kerouac: “1. Unsheltered; desolate; cheerless. 2. Cold; cutting; keen.” The final entry of the page, moreover, ends with the word that came to Kerouac in a vision just a couple of years before, christening the literary movement of a generation for which he would be canonized as a patron saint: “Beatified.”8 Whatever the reasons Kerouac was ultimately moved to focus on this particular dictionary page, he was not reading straight down alphabetically, or skipping in ecstatic agitation from one impulsively chosen phrase to another. Rather, he is simply reading straight across the center rule as if the page were typeset in a single block of prose rather than in two columns.9 The practice recalls the description given by Malcolm X of his autodidact lessons in a Norfolk prison: “In my slow, painstaking, ragged handwriting, I copied into my tablet every thing printed on

4 / Introduction

Figur e 1. Blamable to Blessed: page from Webster’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1903), the source for a chapter in Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels.

that first page, down to the punctuation marks.”10 Far from recording a per formance of spontaneous improvisation or idiosyncratic whim, the dictionary reveals that Kerouac is in fact transcribing by rote, retracing the page, unwavering, with the reverent attention and undeviating discipline of a Sofer Setam. Starting at the top left of the page, where the entry

Introduction / 5

for “blade” continues from page 60, “[Cutting part of a knife,] sword, etc. 3. Flat part of an oar,” his transcription persists, oblivious of the gutter, to the second column’s entry for the verb form of “blast,” which begins at the top of the column midsentence: “[Affect with sudden violence] or calamity.” The “sudden” that Kerouac proceeds with, however, comes from the first definition of “blast” as a noun: “Sudden violent gust of wind.” Kerouac records the dictionary page’s hyphenation, returning to the second line of the first column after “Sudden vio-” for the fourth entry of “blade” to denote a “Dashing young fellow” and again continuing on across to the second line of the second column to pick up its “[vio-]lent gust of wind.” The transcription continues, skipping the parenthetical indications of phonetics and foreign-language etymologies and omitting numerals and the abbreviated designations for parts of speech, but generally respecting capitalization and hyphenation as Kerouac pingpongs from “blame” to “blatant” to “blameful” to “blaze” to “blanch” and “blanc-mange” and so on, back and forth across and down the page to “blanket” and its neighboring “bleed.” The passage, accordingly, is less like an improvised fantasia on the found material—or even the ordered, systematic resequencing of texts from the OuLiPo or Conceptual Writing—and instead is more like a variation of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s “fold-in” method: an extension of the radical collage of the cut-up method. Burroughs explains the technique, which he likened to a flashback in narrative film: “a page of text—my own or someone else’s—is folded down the middle and placed on another page—The composite text is then read across half of one text and half the other.”11 In the case of the Webster’s student dictionary, with its two columns, the fold comes readymade. With the aid of the dictionary, the chapter in Desolation Angels aligns more directly with one of the signature innovations of the postwar avant-garde, and it can be heard to more clearly take part in the textual dialogue between Kerouac and Burroughs that included their 1945 collaboration And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, Kerouac’s work on the manuscript of Naked Lunch (for which he would supply the title), and the direct inspiration of his “spontaneous prose” on Burroughs’s literary experiments.12 Kerouac, it turns out, was not the only writer to employ the dictionary as more than a reference work to be occasionally consulted with discrete queries about individual words. Trying to stay as attuned to the minute particulars of a dictionary’s textual disposition as Kerouac in his transcribing, the following chapters document a number of writers who have used particular editions of specific dictionaries to structure entire works. Spanning most of the twentieth century, this study considers the

6 / Introduction

work of five poets: Louis Zukofsky and George Oppen, two “Objectivist” writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s; Clark Coolidge and Tina Darragh, two “Language Writers” with books from the 1970s and 1980s, respectively; and Harryette Mullen, a post–Black Arts writer who flourished in the 1990s. On the surface, Zukofsky’s hermeticism is a long way from Darragh’s narrativized accounts of her own reading, and Oppen’s terse, clipped snapshots are stylistically even further from Mullen’s exuberant song. Nonetheless, this unlikely anthology corroborates a literary tradition that has been argued for on other grounds entirely. In a touchstone essay from 1973, Charles Altieri distinguished between “symbolist and immanent modes of poetic thought,” as a way to understand the poetic theories that undergirded postmodern poetry.13 About the same time, Marjorie Perloff similarly recognized that the most innovative poetry emerging over the 1970s had retroactively reshaped the canon of modernism, making some figures more relevant than others; as the title of her essay put it: “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”14 The Language Writers who were troubling the symbolist and romantic traditions of the creative writing canon were themselves actively interested in the Objectivists who had been excluded from anthologies like the Norton and whose works had gone largely out of print.15 More recently, critics have gone out of their way to insist on the legacy of Language Writing in Mullen’s poetry.16 Beyond substantiating and reinforcing this broad narrative of revised literary history, my analyses here confirm or refute more local arguments about the poets in question. In each case, reverse-engineering a poem with the help of its source has not only opened the way for new interpretative readings but also has allowed the critical record to be set straight on a number of counts. Among other points, consulting the correct dictionary establishes the true origins of the name for the “Objectivist” poets, which is found not in precision machine lenses as has been assumed, but rather in an eye disorder, as well as the direct connection between Zukofsky’s two totem animals: the praying mantis and the horse. More specifically, because critics have been unable to locate the exact reference works credited in Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary, they have been unable to establish the details of his compositional procedures, much less ascertain the significance of his deviations from those rules. Similarly, the dictionary reveals that, contrary to the received readings of George Oppen’s early poetry as “not ordered by any overarching narrative design or ‘rule,’ ” and posing riddles with unfathomable secrets, his “discrete series” is in fact connected by a lexicographic scaffolding.17 The layout of specific dictionary pages explains the most opaque passages in Tina Darragh’s poetry (as well as correcting previous close readings

Introduction / 7

and even the author’s own accounts of her compositional process), and they show how Darragh, like Clark Coolidge, treats the dictionary as a three-dimensional, sculptural object. Finally, the dictionaries employed by Harryette Mullen ground what might appear to be her most abstract wordplay in referential, precisely denoted, and culturally charged terms while at the same time revealing the racial identities of her sources to be far more complicated and mixed than has been previously assumed. Later in this Introduction I will suggest why writers with a certain poetics would be drawn to the dictionary in the first place, but for now I want to note that while the narrow focus here is limited to this single compositional practice—just one of the remarkable ways in which the avantgarde has sometimes written—I undertake the project with the larger goal of an expanded, experimental critical methodology in mind. My hope is that this study will suggest alternative routes for scholarly research that will similarly trace some of the other techniques proved by an avant-garde literary tradition that is now well over a century old. In the process, we might discover commensurate reading techniques, along with new critical vocabularies, a wider repertoire of analytic approaches, and a more flexible set of methodologies appropriate to the abstraction that radically transformed literature—even if that transformation has not become the familiar narrative for literary studies. Writers have had a long head start on handling language in new ways; it might be time for readers to start to try to catch up. As a first step toward closing that gap, my readings here situate themselves at an oblique angle to the “surface” and “distant” readings recently christened by literary critics. With a clever substitution, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s “Surface Reading” abjures a revelatory reading in order to reveal the surface that has been hidden by prevailing “symptomatic” reading practices; the veiling surface has become, for them, paradoxically the very thing veiled.18 My project here performs a similar sleight-of-hand when read against traditional hermeneutical methods. To be sure, I am indeed demonstrating things that the poems under consideration do not readily give up (patterns of signification, encrypted referents, the deformations of other wise unseen and unmentioned signs, and so forth); such structures and relationships are in fact “not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible” from the perspective of conventional reading.19 But rather than divulge the political ideologies or psychological repressions sought by symptomatic readings, through their various symbolisms and decodings, my readings here disclose certain structures inherent in the material surfaces of a text but illuminated only by means of another (dictionary) text. Instead of latent meanings demystified by

8 / Introduction

Marxist or psychoanalytic readings, my readings reveal the networks of signifiers laced across the surface of texts themselves and bearing the imprint of their origins: printed objects in particular typographic arrays, words within page spaces, and the three-dimensional volume of (bound) volumes. In place of symbols, the dictionary poetics here articulates a set of material surfaces, mapping metonymies rather than summoning metaphors. The chapters that follow distill a reading practice more concerned with exhaustive description than aesthetic evaluation. More focused on the linguistic rather than the literary (in Paul de Man’s terms), this methodology is more inclined to the indexical—gestures of pointing out—than to rhetorical argument, and it is unashamed to be satisfied with the literal rather than reaching for the figural.20 Above all, it everywhere traces inscriptions rather than representations. In its radical formalism, which presumes that literary texts are not autonomously separate spheres but that they nonetheless are capable of generating the theoretical, political, and critical structures necessary for their own apprehension, the present book offers a version of the practice of “critical description” that intrigues Best and Marcus. In such a practice, “the purpose of criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says about itself.”21 Assuming that “texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves,” such readings undertake a patient, open, articulation of networks of signifiers dispersed across a space in which “depth is continuous with surface and is thus an effect of immanence.”22 Or, to put this another way: Models of depth and presence generate the “pairs of oppositions: present/absent, manifest/latent, and surface/depth” that animate symptomatic readings, which imagine a truer meaning disguised or obscured by a deceptive or false or unreliable surface.23 In my work here, in contrast, the text is imagined to be more like Roland Barthes’s conception of the literary work, wherein “l’espace de l’écriture est à parcourir, il n’est pas à percer [the space of writing is to be traversed, not pierced].”24 That textual surface requires analysis in order to reveal modes of signification that are not repressed or dissembled, but simply dispersed. The lateral extent is broad enough that patterns and structures— even though they remain unhidden and plainly on the surface—are nonetheless difficult to discern without comparison to a source text, or a view of signifiers unclouded by the semantic referents beneath their own inky surfaces, or an aggregation of terms from across a grammatical, discursive, or narrative expanse. In that aggregation my project shares a certain procedure with the “distant reading” that has evolved from “a patchwork of other people’s re-

Introduction / 9

search, without a single direct textual reading,” as Franco Moretti boasted, into the visualization of networks discernable after the computational analysis of relatively large quantitative data sets—often entire corpora.25 Although the present study draws its elements from the widest horizons of the text, including its intertexts, it certainly does not abandon “direct textual reading” and its readings are very close, microanalyses of the elements it aggregates from across the traditional boundaries of semantic and rhetorical divisions (sentences, stanzas, cantos, even one book from another). The nature of the intertexts here, moreover, establishes the distance between Dictionary Poetics and traditional source studies. Again, the difference hinges on the degree of literalism and materiality. Rather than seek allusions, ideational borrowings, or the genesis of an author’s thoughts, the texts I read in tandem demonstrate the collage of language from its particular materialization in printed books and the affordances and constraints of the typographic page. Instead of a general, abstract, discursive cultural atmosphere, these intertexts carry the bibliographic precision of language fixed in print. In her discussion of the intertexts of Lautréamont’s Poésies II, Julia Kristeva recognizes the need for precisely such textual specificity in an accounting of sources: “il serait nécessaire d’établir quelles éditions de Pascal, de Vauvenargues, de la Rochefoucauld, Ducasse a pu utiliser [it would be necessary to determine which particular editions of Pascal, Vauvenargues, and Rochefoucauld Ducasse had put to use].”26 Kristeva’s theorization of the relation among texts, in fact, may offer the best precedent for my own approach. Proposing a literary semiotics that would “trouver les formalismes correspondant aux différents modes de jonction des mots (des séquences) dans l’espace dialogique du textes [find the corresponding formal structures between different modes of articulating words (or sequences) in the dialogic space between texts],” Kristeva understands writing as a kind of reading: “le texte littéraire s’insère dans l’ensemble des textes: il est une écriture-réplique (fonction ou négation) d’une autre (des autres) texte(s) [the literary text inserts itself into the set of texts; it is a carbon-copy writing of another (of other) text(s)].”27 Despite her recognition of the importance of specific editions and the real, bodily materiality of texts, Kristeva is theorizing a mathematically abstract set-theory model of cultural interlocution, and she argues, echoing Roland Barthes, that “tout texte se construit comme mosaïque de citations, tout texte est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte [all text is constructed as a mosaic of citations, all text is absorption and transformation of another text].”28 The cases here, however idiosyncratic and anomalous, are thus strikingly literal versions of more

10 / Introduction

general literary processes. But there is a middle ground as well; in their dynamic “manière d’écrire en lisant [mode of writing by reading],” the authors I consider foreground what is one of the most remarkable developments in poetry over the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and I hope that my analyses will provide one model of how a critical engagement of other literary works “written by reading” might proceed.29 With even a cursory consideration, the dictionary suggests a number of different approaches and genres, and I want to begin by demarcating some of the ground the present study will not attempt to cover in any depth. To begin with, I am not here considering works with a surface style modeled on the layout of the dictionary, or troping its formal conventions in a superficial way. Exemplifications of the genre include Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary; Gustave Flaubert’s Dictionnaire des idées recues (plus its update by Jennifer Moxley and Steve Evans as their own Dictionary of Received Ideas); and Georges Bataille’s Dictionnaire critique.30 More recently, Lohren Green’s Poetical Dictionary: Abridged reworks dictionary entries with an ear toward aestheticizing their language and blurring the transitions between distinct denotations. In his introduction, Green laments the lack of vividness to the words defined in conventional reference books, with their clinical air of dispassionate information science.31 In contrast, however, he rhapsodizes that “sometimes in the traditional dictionary the page falls away” in the way that a vivid painting creates an illusion that renders the canvas invisible.32 Echoing the sentiment, Victor Contoski’s “Dictionary Poem” figures the dictionary as a vampire sucking the blood from poetry books.33 In the chapters that follow, we will encounter the exact opposite: poems made vital by the dictionary because writers have tried to break the illusion of the dictionary’s detached disinterest and expose the rough weave of the canvas beneath. Seeing the reference book as both microscope and symptom, an artifact that simultaneously brings to light aspects of a culture that it also itself expresses, one literary interrogation of the dictionary would endeavors to make it confess to the prejudices and partisan positions in which it is inevitably implicated and which its impersonal, apodictic style belies. Such literature isolates or foregrounds aspects of a reference work in order to lay bare the ideologies inherent in even the most ostensibly objective and documentary collections. Despite the best efforts of editors, the anonymous, aggregated, collective cultural voice speaks more than it intends. Solmaz Sharif’s 2016 collection Look, for instance, turns euphemisms for violence into sexual innuendo by juxtaposing terms from a Defense

Introduction / 11

Department dictionary of military jargon that collects unclassified terms that are neither service-specific nor have entered into common, nonmilitary usage.34 In both its typography and intentions, Look looks back two decades to Rosmarie Waldrop’s A Key Into the Language of Amer ica, which “involves deletion or substitution” of textually “key details” from the eponymous Roger Williams treatise.35 Published in 1643, Williams’s ethnography was subtitled An Help to the Language of the Natives in That Part of America Called New-England, and it became the first systematic vocabulary, or dictionary, of Narragansett, the now extinct dialect of Algonquin once spoken in the region that roughly corresponds to present-day Rhode Island. Waldrop’s Key emphasizes the social valences of Williams’s English definitions, reminding readers that language instruction, and the dictionaries in its ser vice, are always implicated in larger cultural enterprises—in this case, interactions between indigenous communities and Europeans that included not only commercial trade but also contemporaneous armed conflicts all up the Eastern Seaboard, with major wars involving the Powhatan, Pequot, Lenape, and Iroquois and including all the other conflicts that would culminate in King Philip’s War. Language, and language instruction, as tools of imperial force in concert with military and police action are the implicit theme of Angelo  V. Suárez’s Philippine English: A Novel, a dictionary-based book with a political focus similar to Look, but with a more ambitious formal experimentation. Composed by extracting the usage example from a Philippine-English dictionary (not, one should note, a Filipino–English dictionary), Suárez allows the illustrative phrases and sentences to suggest the narratives inherent in their sequence.36 The novel retains the chapter structure of the dictionary’s alphabetic form, and it records all of the phrases in the order in which they occur in the original reference book.37 As with most paratactic collages, general themes and registers recur just often enough to permit semantic connections. In the following excerpt, for example, the body (in terms of its labors, liquids, infirmities, and consumptions), written texts, governmental officials, and automobiles lace a tenuous consistency: She writes poetry. Poetry in motion. The needle’s point. Boiling point. This is the point of the story. On the point of deciding. To point a gun. To point north. She poked the spider with a stick to see if it was still alive. He poked the letter under the door. He poked his head around the corner and offered us a cup of tea.

12 / Introduction

A flag pole. What is their foreign policy? It’s a good policy to save. Shoe polish. He sings with polish. Let’s polish off those cakes. It’s not polite to reach across people at the table. Even though she was very angry, she tried to remain polite. He hates the politics of his job. The heavy traffic pollutes the air. To ponder the question. A pool of blood. The car pool. To pool our resources. A poor student. He’s in poor health. Her exam results were very poor. You poor thing, it must be really painful. I’ll pop in and visit him. Pop the books on my desk. Pop group. A popular school captain. Popular music. The students pored over their books. Sweat comes out through your pores. A railway porter. The premier gave her the education portfolio. A portrait of life in the Middle Ages. In the book, she was portrayed as a rather weak character. To pose as a policeman. The virus can pose a serious danger to the elderly. A posh car.38 Cakes follow tea, naturally, and the haste of polishing them off prefigures reaching “across people at the table.” Similarly, a “car pool” makes sense in a city where “heavy traffic pollutes the air”—perhaps caused by those “posh cars” driven by commuters who could have taken the “railway” instead. The porter on that railway provides a model of physical labor that might cause one to sweat with the exertion, against which the effort of the student’s anxious labor might be measured. But then again, on second reading, that sweat might instead be symptomatic of a fever, and the poor exam might refer to a medical examination rather than the testing of the school students, as when later sentences narrate: “This poem is a specimen of my work. The doctor took a specimen of my blood for tests” and “I attribute my bad marks to being sick on the day of the test.”39 Another pairing again brings the two themes together: “An oral test in French. Oral hygiene.” 40 Something here, in any event, is viral, painful, and involves needles and a pool of blood that echoes the “car pool.” Though perhaps instead of phlebotomy that blood follows from poking the spi-

Introduction / 13

der, or from shooting the pointed gun. Even more tenuous possibilities could lead the reader to ask whether the “rather weak character” is the woman to whom the portfolio is given, and whether it contains “a portrait of life in the Middle Ages” or if that portrait is instead the topic of one of the books popped on the desk, or pored over by students, and so on. Answers, of course, are not forthcoming, but to “ponder the question” is “the point of the story.” Indeed, when pondered, the themes—aggregated cumulatively across the entire book—turn out to be less innocent and unrelated than they at first appear. The educational motif evident in the cited passage thoroughly pervades the text. On the one hand, this theme reflects the secondaryschool audience of the novel’s source: the Anvil-Macquarie Dictionary of Philippine English for High School.41 Suárez’s book is thus metapedagogical: instructive about the instructional textbook that is its origin. On the other hand, however, the classroom emerges alongside other recurrent motifs: traffic and automobile accidents; physical violence; crime and punishment: thievery, police, the judiciary, prison. These topics are examples of what Caleb Beckwith has termed “politicized micronarratives running throughout the entire ‘novel.’ ” 42 Removed from their dispersed locations in the dictionary, the sample sentences reveal a larger preoccupation when compiled and concentrated: the “appareils d’état [state apparatuses]” of a “société de contrôle [control society]” explicated by theorists such as Louis Althusser and Gilles Deleuze (following a lead from William S. Burroughs).43 The military presence of the United States in the Philippines dates to the declaration of military rule in 1898, with control passing from Spain with the Treaty of Paris, and has persisted even after the Second World War in varying guises. English has thus followed on the bootheels of a foreign army, and the significance of a dictionary of “Philippine English” is inflected accordingly. In tandem with the institutions of more overt bodily regulation and discipline frequently mentioned in the dictionary’s example sentences, such as the army and police, English for High School—and the classrooms in which it was deployed— played its part in the political regime that included “public education in the Philippines, used by America to spread English as the language of bureaucratic colonialism.”44 “Schools hope their discipline will make us good citizens,” as the Anvil-Macquarie succinctly states the aim.45 Like Williams’s Key into the Language of America, Maria Lourdes Bautista and Susan Butler’s dictionary of Philippine English played an equivocal role, both promoting and rebuking the colonizing with which it was engaged.46 If reference “books are a tool for gaining knowledge,” they are also a tool in the orchestrated scenes of classroom discipline and regimentation

14 / Introduction

described again and again by the example sentences in the AnvilMacquarie.47 Moreover, with sentences involving law enforcement and criminal justice as ubiquitous as those involving pedagogy, the schoolroom discipline takes place against a background of pervasive physical violence and repressive force, as civic bodies are disciplined with threats and punishments ranging from the corporal to the capital. When encountered individually, on their own, the example sentences may seem to be innocuous, incidental, and randomly invented illustrations of grammar and usage. One at a time they seem focused on the word being defined. When brought together in Suárez’s novel, however, their message is abundantly clear; the micronarratives of law enforcement and classroom conduct offer advice to the dictionary’s student users: “work according to the rules.” 48 The three examples of “institute,” for just one example, are telling: “To institute a new government department. To institute rules of conduct. A literary institute.” 49 Equally regulated and physically dangerous—because they are so accident-prone—automobiles constitute another key motif in the dictionary’s illustrative sentences. Ironically, the recurrent accidents point to a theme that does not occur by accident, and Suárez reveals the theme of out-of-control cars even though the dictionary’s language is out of his control. The motif, moreover, dovetails with the theme of criminal justice because the automobiles in the AnvilMacquarie are also the frequent objects of theft. Indeed, based on the preponderance of evidence in these sentences, larceny would seem to be the specific crime so often mentioned by the dictionary’s sample phrases, which recount every thing from petty embezzlement to organized gangs to freebooters: “the bloodthirsty pirates took no prisoners,” and “the pirates shared their booty of gold.”50 With that framing of theft as piracy, the significance of this motif for Suárez’s project becomes clear. Within the Philippine English dictionary the theme fits with the other micronarratives about criminal justice, but when transcribed in Suárez’s novel it aligns the new work with the poetics of appropriation at the heart of Conceptual Writing and turns it into “a story about pirates.”51 Books, in the Anvil-Macquarie, are associated with private property and theft: “the book belongs to him”; “this book is my property” “somebody took my book.” The dictionary implies one ethos with the sentence “the poems are printed by courtesy of the author”; Suárez implies another when his preface confesses that the phrases were “lifted directly.”52 Several pairings, accordingly, signify anew in their appropriated context: “She committed the poem to memory. He committed a crime”; “An accurate copy. An accurate account of the accident”; “I’ve requested a copy of the book but haven’t received it. To copy a painting.”

Introduction / 15

Additionally, books are figured as substrates for new writing: “abuse of library books by scribbling in them”; “to autograph a book”; “to censor a book.” Indeed, the dictionary’s sentences sometimes seem to carry the seeds of their future literary fate; they mention “a novel idea” and often figure books as something to be abridged and reiterated, as Suárez’s novel has in fact done: “I read an extract from his latest book”; “this book is a condensation of a much larger novel”; “this novel is just a variation of all his other books”; “the story for the film was adapted from a French novel” (elsewhere discriminating “the film version of the book”); “I originally wrote six pages but I condensed it into three”; “He condensed his story into just a few pages” and into “another book” altogether. Philippine English: A Novel, thus follows a literary tradition of reframing appropriated texts in order to lay bare some aspect of their language, thereby critiquing their implicit presuppositions. In the same vein, Felipe Cussen’s Letras also takes the dictionary as a source to be appropriated according to predetermined rules, with an absolute minimum of authorial intervention, ascertaining a number of cultural symptoms in the process. Letras presents itself as an abecedary, compiling all of the definitions of each letter or digraph in the various editions of the official dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. First published in 1780 as Diccionario de la lengua castellana reducido a un tomo para su más fácil uso, ya sin las citas de los autores [Dictionary of the Castellan Language Condensed in a Single Volume for Ease of Use and Without the Authors’ Citations], the academic Diccionario saw two revisions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before realizing its most recent iteration in 2001.53 Along the way, even the simplest guides to pronouncing individual letters became fraught with cultural and colonial politics, as the entries reveal various shibboleths of regional distinction. Galicia, for instance, retains the antiquated soft pronunciation of the x, while in the Canary Islands one hears a seseo, or the “indistinción fonológica respecto de la s [phonological lack of differentiation with respect to the s]” when z “se articula como una s en que la lengua adopta posición convexa, generalmente predorsal, con salida dental o dentoalveolar del aire [is pronounced like an s, in that the tongue adopts a convex, generally predorsal position, with a dental or alveolar-dental expulsion of air].”54 By interpolating the entries from each edition, moreover, certain changes can be tracked over time, as when the aspiration of the h, for instance, spreads from “de algunas zonas” (some regions) to “de numerosas zonas” (numerous regions) of the “americanas y en determinadas voces de origen extranjero” (the Americas and in certain accents of foreign origin).55 In Andalucía and Extremadura, its vehemence before a vowel gives it the force of an x or

16 / Introduction

j—though not the x used in Mexican Spanish, as a later entry qualifies, or the archaic voiceless palatal fricative preserved in Asturian and the distinctly Chilean pronunciation before certain vowels.56 Other traces of geopolitical history could be teased from Cussen’s magnification of what may be the least read sections of the dictionary, but his focus on the individual units of articulated Spanish speech suggest that we might also read Letras in relation to sound poetry and in particular with respect to the sonic explorations of Christian Bök’s Eunoia. Where Letras is structured so that it devotes a separate section to each phoneme, Eunoia devotes each of its chapters to a single English vowel. The work is a serial lipogram, in which chapters are permitted to contain only univocalic words sharing the same single vowel (that is, the only vowel allowed in the first chapter is a, the only vowel that appears in the second chapter is e, and so on); the book thus corrals the variety of sounds represented by each grapheme, rather than a monotonous repetition of a single sound. Like Suárez and Cussen, Bök’s project exhibits the exhaustive, comprehensive impulse of Conceptual Writing by seeking to use all of the univocalics in English.57 Moreover, Bök sets a precedent for turning to the dictionary as a source for his textual mining; its vocabulary is drawn from combing through the three volumes of the 1976 edition of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. Although Bök confines his search to this one particular reference book, the point is not to exploit its idiosyncrasies or reveal its biases but rather to appeal to the comprehensive neutrality of its voluminous compass and the inclusiveness of its three thousand “unabridged” pages. As with the OuLiPo (which I discuss in Chapter 6), whose members also turned habitually to the dictionary as a source for their textual permutations and algorithmic poetics, the lexicographic imagination behind Eunoia takes the dictionary to represent the dream of a complete compendium of language—or at least a dataset large enough to yield a sense of representative and impersonal lexical samples. One can sense the same hope in Marcel Duchamp’s instructions to “prendre un dict. Larousse et copier tous les mots dits ‘abstraits,’ càd. qui n’aient pas de référence concrète [take a Larousse dictionary and copy all the ‘abstract’ words, that is to say, those which do not have concrete referents].”58 Elsewhere, Duchamp proposes using the dictionary for a sort of secular sortes biblicae, though one in which the answer is always known in advance. The dictionary, in this imagined ideality, exhibits such a dispersed uniformity that Duchamp can propose a linguistic theory as a mathematical theorem: “10 mots trouvés en ouvrant au hasard le dictionnaire [10 words found by opening the dictionary at random]” by one per-

Introduction / 17

son and ten selected through the same method by another person “ont la même différence de ‘personnalité’ que si les 10 mots été écrits par . . . intention [have the same difference in ‘personality’ as if they had been written with intentionality].”59 Chapter  4 will look in more detail at a performed dissolution of the dictionary, but here the sense is that the vast scope of the dictionary—a lexical ocean in which literary style has been dissolved—effects the disappearance of unique, differentiable character; the note continues: “ou bien, peu importe, il y aurait des cas où cette ‘personnalité’ peut disparaître [or else, same difference, it would be the case where that ‘personality’ can disappear].” 60 However impersonal the flat, scientific tone of most dictionaries may be, an interest in the dictionary, in contrast, might itself reveal a distinctive personal tic; a number of the notes for Duchamp’s Grand verre, as it happens, make recourse of the dictionary as a source for artistic production. One proposes: “parcourir un dictionnaire et raturer tous les mots ‘indésirables.’ Peut-être en rajouter quelques-uns. Quelquefois remplaces les mots raturés par un autre [go through a dictionary and cross out all the ‘undesirable’ words. Perhaps add a few. Replace some of the scratchedout words with others].” 61 Another directs: “acheter un dictionnaire et barrer les mots à barrer. Signer: revu et corrigé [buy a dictionary and cancel the words to be cancelled. Sign it: reviewed and corrected].” 62 During visits from Duchamp, as his friend Denise Browne Hare recalls, “there was a lot of looking up words in the dictionary. I had an old, classic Larousse, and at some point Marcel would nearly always get it out. He loved the format, the little illustrations on every page.” 63 Working from a book that was published, perhaps not coincidentally, in the year of Duchamp’s first readymades—a 1913 Webster’s Secondary School Edition Dictionary—Doris Cross began overpainting its own readymade pages just as Duchamp was enjoying his seminal retrospective.64 Her “Dictionary Column” works begin with the idea of the dictionary’s inclusive dream: “every thing is here,” she opines, “it is only to be seen and found. We are surrounded with every thing.” 65 But her practice recognizes the contingent, material, specific reality of that immersive ideal: “I am not involved with design,” she protests, “I am just involved with the idea of leaving things—in this case, words, where they are found.” 66 We will see a number of writers leaving words where they are found on the dictionary page, while variously obscuring their surrounding lexical contexts, but Cross echoes her demurral about design with a later insistence that her work with words was not literary: “I’m making connections, not writing poetry,” she remonstrated.67 Depending on one’s definition of “poetry,” the opposition is not self-evident, but perhaps the connections Cross

18 / Introduction

had in mind were less between the words she left visible than between her own painterly interventions and the visual illustrations that already decorate and disrupt the columns of dictionary text with pictorial woodcuts and zinc-cut prints. The degree to which those “ little illustrations on every page” can serve the definition of words is the central hypothesis of the experiment undertaken by graphic designers Felix Heyes and Ben West in 2013. The team translated the Oxford Pocket Dictionary by replacing each of its lemmata—21,110 of them, in sequence—with the first image returned by a Google search for the dictionary headword. The results immediately disprove the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. While the corresponding terms are often easy to deduce, even the most obvious emblem sends the reader searching for language from the image’s prompt. More than anything, the work puts pressure on the operation of the index and the referent, corroborating de Saussure’s insistence that words are not the names for things—in which case the thing, or an image of the thing, might stand in for the word—but rather signs among others of their own kind. Looking for the definition of a word in the dictionary, the reader of Heyes and West’s translation realizes, one is looking not for the thing but for the other words that describe that thing. Moreover, as with the other reference books we will examine in the following chapters, their choice of source text is relevant and resonant. The new, visual edition inserts itself as a mirror between the revolutionary lexicographic methodology of the New English Dictionary that would become the Oxford English Dictionary and the algorithmic methodology of Google’s search engine. From its inception, the reference work outsourced the labor of lexicography. In 1857, two years before the New English Dictionary was even formally proposed, the Unregistered Words Committee of the London Philological Society sought volunteers to seek words not recorded by any dictionary, and James Murray—taking over as editor under the aegis of Oxford University Press in 1879—famously made “An Appeal to the English-Speaking and English-Reading Public,” netting thousands of responses (a strategy continued with television word hunts on the BBC and an online platform, oed.com, which includes appeals for evidence of earlier uses of targeted individual words submitted by the editors).68 Aggregating user-generated content and the statistics of other users’ searches, Google engages in a technologically updated, dynamically variable version of outsourced labor—but where the informants are also the authors of the vernacular language of linguistically indexed images. Any visual illustration—as the Google-imaged dictionary makes immediately visible—is culturally fraught and contingent: never self-evident or

Introduction / 19

Figur e 2. Cecil Giscombe, “Notes on Region,” from Prairie Style (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), featuring snippet of a page from a pre-1970s edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language; illustration by Joseph Guerry.

innocent, even in its plainest sketch—and always open to historical revision. Cecil Giscombe’s Prairie Style makes the same argument in a considerably more understated style. Giscombe—like Duchamp—also seems attracted to the visual illustration from a dictionary (Figure 2); one poem in his book reproduces a narrow strip from the center of a dictionary page as a sort of epigraph to its chapter “Notes on Region.”69 Taken from a pre1970s edition of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, the excerpt includes an illustrated entry for cornet that depicts a man— possibly African American—playing the instrument with calm focus but a stilted orthogonal posture (later editions of the New World Dictionary replace this image with a more naturally postured musician, who is more easily read as white).70 An image within the image of the photocopied dictionary page, the illustration resonates with some of the themes of Giscombe’s book, which include numerous musings on race and sound (both as music and noise). In particular, the image recalls a line from the book’s second poem: “half the time the allegory’s music, how song goes with its cornets and saxophones.”71 In that poem, with foreshadowings of later references to Frankenstein’s monster, the closure of allegorical logic is described, anthropomorphically, as “human looking: big boned, about as noisy, parts missing or left out, parts overstated.”72 Indeed, the cornet might be overstated in the logic of the dictionary page’s inclusion in Giscombe’s book, its brass a bit too brash as the image stands out from the small print of the text, since directly across the column one finds the entry for “cornbelt,” the very region that serves as the Midwestern setting for many of the poems in the book’s central long section. But there are “parts missing or left

20 / Introduction

out” there as well, as when the Webster’s definition of “corncake” as “johnny cake” omits both its cultural roots (“the cake is said to have its origin in the slave communities of North America,” as the Oxford English Dictionary elaborates) and its early alternate spelling: “journey-cake”—a name that speaks directly to the nomadic, itinerant community of the “Tribe of Ishmael” at the center of the book’s narratives of fugitivity.73 Moreover, parts of the dictionary page itself, obviously, are missing entirely from Giscombe’s selective snippet. Perhaps not coincidentally, Prairie Style—presented in part as an explicitly autobiographical account— was indebted, as Giscombe acknowledges in the very first entry in the extensive “Acknowledgments,” to “extended talks with my teachers at Cornell”—a name that appears on the original Webster’s page, directly below the portion quoted by Giscombe, with the entry for the University’s founder: “Cornell, Ezra.”74 If the meaning of the image of the dictionary page in Prairie Style seems “purposely ambiguous” (as Webster’s puts it), or as “having different significations equally appropriate or plausible; capable of double interpretation; ambiguous” (as the Oxford English Dictionary defines “equivocate”) that may well be all to the point, since the book opens with an unacknowledged quotation from the New World Dictionary etymology for “equivocate”: “to have the same sound, to be called by the same name.”75 The visual epigraph may be “of uncertain bearing or significance,” but its various possibilities begin to suggest the force and affordances of a dictionary recognized as a unique printed artifact and not as an imaginary ideal of comprehensive authority, information science, or the dream of a collective cultural unconscious. The Oxford English Dictionary explicitly aims not only to be “authoritative” but also to achieve “a Platonic concept—the ideal database.”76 Or, as Anatole France defined the dictionary: “l’univers par ordre alphabétique [the universe in alphabetical order].”77 Comedian Steven Wright gets at the same sentiment with the quip: “Don’t you love the Oxford Dictionary? When I first read it, I thought it was a really really long poem about every thing.”78 Sam Winston tells a version of the same joke in his visually unconventional A Dictionary Story, where words riot over the page in contrast to the orderly columnar conventions of the dictionary.79 A bibliographic fairy tale, Winston’s Story narrates the despondence of the OED, which “had all the words that had ever been read” and “could say all the things that could ever be said” but was not itself a book about anything and “made very little sense” when read “from start to finish.”80 The language of the dictionary deforms Winston’s parable by echoing each word with a fragment of its definition. The incipit “Once there was a time,”

Introduction / 21

for instance, returns as “one time and no more / introducing a sentence / an objective existence / par ticu lar instance / a period when something occurs / at or during which time.”81 And so on. Winston’s story is further disrupted by the visual scatter of letters and words across the pages of its uncut and unbound imposition sheets; the nonlinear flurries of print come to order only with the introduction of a structure as comprehensive and meaningless as the dictionary itself: the alphabet that contains all words but is not itself a word. With a formal and material force that will appeal to the writers I discuss in the following chapters, the alphabet supersedes, as a purely formal organizing principle, the putative semantic focus of the dictionary that it will structure with a materiality inherently opposed to any ideal of utopian completeness. Indeed, in contrast to the idealized abstraction of an imagined reference book aspired to by the OED and presumed by writers like Duchamp, Dictionary Poetics considers idiosyncratic uses of real, concretely particular, printed dictionaries. Like Giscombe with his collage, the writers studied here recognize the dictionary as an actual book—something that can be cut and copied—and not an abstract concept, generalized genre, or theoretical compendium. In some instances, that recognition begins with an understanding of the page as a space for organizing and arranging text. Op. cit. by Felix R. Hodgson (one suspects a pseudonym), for instance, emphasizes the format of the dictionary by taking illustrative quotations from the online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (www .oed.com) and dispersing their constituent parts—date of the published work; the author, title, and page reference; and the quoted passage itself— through three, palm-sized, unpaginated print-on-demand volumes.82 In the first volume, that is, one finds a single year (or terminus ante quem) printed on each page; each page in the second volume contains a line such as “W. Davenant Wks. (1673) 312,” “L. Hughes Montage of a Dream Deferred 39,” or “E. Dickinson Poems (1955) i. 376.” Op. cit., in short, undoes the traditional dictionary’s ordinatio (the way in which intellectual activities, ideological beliefs, and the formal structures of a text can be seen to dynamically construct and support one another).83 Volume 3 reveals that the entries, with winking irony, are for the word “page,” which although it begins with denotations indicating “a boy or servant” moves to “senses relating a leaf or side of paper” and to verbal senses naming precisely what the convention of citation used by the Oxford English Dictionary undertakes (“to note by means of a page reference; to refer by page number”) and how the online edition is structured: “to process data (esp. to display text, etc.) on a screen, by paging; to move through and display text on a screen one page at a time.” With its sorting and isolating

22 / Introduction

principles, Op. cit. negatively dramatizes—by rendering inert—the chance encounters that take place on the physically fixed pages of the print editions of the Oxford English Dictionary: words that happen to come together on the same leaf, or in vertical proximity, or across the column from one another, on account of the unforeseeable mesh of mechanisms by which alphabetization, type (font and face), design (page trim and column width) and the details of setting (indentation, hyphenation, and so forth) determine the layout of a book. Part of the ordinatio of the dictionary is the distinctive range header of its mise-en-page: the first and last lemma on each page, printed at the top corners to permit readers to take in the scope of the entries at a glance. The implication is that readers wish to quickly locate a specific word, known in advance; the dictionary imagines that its user has a word in mind before opening its pages. Conversely, as we will see in the chapters to follow, one hallmark of the avant-garde’s use of the dictionary is to allow the reference book to suggest the vocabulary to be used in a new literary work. As Lyn Hejinian phrases the distinction: “where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies.”84 Alastair Johnston highlights this tendency in an elegant little artist’s book, Cafe/Charivari, Charlatan/Chrom, which reproduces the lined headers from selected pages in Heath’s German Dictionary, leaving the rest of the page blank.85 Johnston presents the isolated, chance pairings of the range words as irreverent, minimalist found poems. Divorced from the dictionary’s main text, and freed from their utile function of narrowing the reader’s search for a particular word, the paired terms open themselves to the slightest narrative confections. The first opening, for instance, offers “Bunk Burst” and “Bursting Butt,” suggesting the unfortunate excesses that might cause a bed to collapse or a defecation to spew. Taken together, however, the pairings further suggest the kinds of speech typically excluded from the earnest, scholarly dictionary. “Bunk,” colloquially short for Bunkum, denotes “humbug, nonsense” and “empty clap-trap oratory”; it derives etymologically from the irrepressible and insincere harangue by Felix Walker, the congressman for Buncombe County, North Carolina, that delayed voting on the Missouri Compromise.86 Walker continued not from political conviction but merely to appease his constituency; in other words, to bring us back to “bursting butt,” he was “talking shit.” At the same time, “Burst” also refers to the rhetorical mode of spoken language, denoting an impassioned speech or cry, as in the “vehement utterance” of an “outburst.”87 But the sincerity of a burst positions it as an antonym to “bunk,” a relation reflected in the layout of the page which prints the words at diametric poles—as far apart as possible but

Introduction / 23

on the same axis. Such connections may feel like a bit of a stretch, especially since in Heath’s German Dictionary “Bunk” is defined in its sense as “die Schlafbank; die Schlafstelle, das Schiff-bett [the day-bed, the sleeping space, the ship’s berth].”88 And yet, to dismiss another interpretation of the word as empty nonsense reinscribes the very term such criticism wants to exclude: “bunk” (as “bunkum”). This self-reflexive gesture is typical of Johnston’s attention. Referring to its own letterpress production, other headers in Cafe/Charivari include “Press-work,” “Prest-,” and “Unroll”—while the “Colophon” appears in the middle of the book as if the prank of a “Charlatan” or “Comedian” compositor undertaking “Mendacious Merrymaking”—all words from Johnston’s brief chapbook.89 With a similar attention to the mise-en-page of a reference book, Laurence Aëgerter’s Meeting on Paper uses the headers from an out-of-print illustrated Dutch dictionary in juxtaposition to the vintage color-process illustrations that happen to fall beneath them, even though the pictures are related to another entry on the same page.90 As in Cafe/Charivari, however, the rest of the page has been erased. Where Johnston’s readers are invited to grammatically or thematically connect the two header words, Aëgerter’s readers are encouraged to contemplate the metaphoric connection between the word and the image—and further, to guess at the absent entry to which the photograph might have originally corresponded. For instance, “proces-verbaal [summons]” is set above a print depicting a line of masked and hooded monks, holding smoldering tapers and a crucifix aloft—in other words, a processie (processional). Both word and image, moreover, refer to activities that depend on public submission to institutions of authority and judgment, whether secular or sacred. More specifically, the pictured crucifix might recall Pontius Pilate’s summons of Jesus for trial. Alternately, priests are said to be called, or summoned, to their vocation, though the masked processors in the solemn image suggest a scene of reverent if not ominous silence—or even vows to that effect—so that any “verbal process” (to calque the phrase) seems unlikely.91 At the same time, the elevation of the crucifix might recall the doctrine of verbum caro factum est, the word made flesh, and the Bible’s various performative utterances by which deontic modalities effect new realities— beginning “in the beginning” with the jussive exhortation “‫[ יְהִי אֹור‬vehi’or, Let there be light]”—a verbal process indeed! The headers of the reference books selectively erased by Aëgerter and Johnston are corollaries of the fact that the original volumes are selfindexing; the alphabetic sequencing of the dictionary’s lemmata allow readers to locate words by their spelling.92 This aspect of the reference book’s ordinatio, just one distinctive facet of the logic of the dictionary,

24 / Introduction

has been implicitly explored by Lyn Hejinian in Writing Is an Aid to Memory, which projects that particular logic of the dictionary into verse form, spatializing its conceptual principal as a typographic structure. At a glance, the poems in Hejinian’s book appear to be expressionistically positioned free-verse lines, erratically indented in a post-Poundian tradition influenced by a sense of “composition by field.”93 On examination, however, the ostensibly idiosyncratic lineation is rigidly fixed; each line is indented according to the first letter of its first word: Lines beginning with an a are set to the left margin, those beginning with a b are indented one space, those with a c, two spaces, and so on. “Numerical the alphabet,” as one line blurts out, both describing and performing it mathematical equation, set thirteen spaces from the margin. With these “sentences of the alphabet,” as the book itself declares, one finds the “solid and mighty alphabet, chronic in an exact place.”94 At one point (note the spacing), the poem muses: I suppose a dictionary with a rhythmic base an impulse of remembering could show what I could In fact, the conventions of the dictionary—its particular way of speaking— not only show the way to Hejinian’s unique verse form, but they also explain the notoriously hermetic and opaque first line of Writing Is an Aid: “apple is shot nod.”95 In the abbreviated idiom of the Oxford English Dictionary, a work Hejinian specifically mentions in her poetry, shoot records its past participle form as “pa ppl. shot.”96 One example of “a ppl,” or a past participle, is “shot.” The reader familiar with the dictionary nods in concurrent understanding. The systematic structure of the dictionary’s alphabetic ordering brings together words that are unrelated, even if they appear to be identical, and writers might exploit those vagaries of spelling and homophony. Emily Dickinson provides one example. She confided that “for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion,” referring to her 1844 edition of Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language.97 Richard Benvenuto has argued not only that Dickinson used that dictionary in writing her poems, but also that “discoveries can be made about her language by reading it as she did.”98 If, as one of George Oppen’s poems puts it, “one moves between reading and re-reading,” between the dictionary and the poem that follows it, one can apprehend not just compositional histories but obscured semantic structures. Such an approach, in short, allows us to see connections “that would not be apparent . . . without knowledge of her dictionary.”99 Benvenuto points out the untrustworthiness of critical readings based on the erroneous presumption, which held sway for some

Introduction / 25

time, that Dickinson’s “Lexicon” was the 1847 Webster’s—an important book in the history of lexicography, to be sure, since it was the first of the Merriam series of dictionaries, and a plausible candidate, but not the intertext that offers the insights into Dickinson’s poetics offered by the earlier edition. To test Benvenuto’s claims, one might read “My period had come for prayer” together with her “only companion.”100 Perusing the 1844 Webster’s, one finds that “step,” meaning “in Russ. an uncultivated desert of large extent” (derived from the Russian степь, which we would now typically spell “steppe”), is just one step down from “step” (from the Anglo Saxon stæpe) meaning “one remove in ascending or descending.” The orthography and consecutive placement lend authority to the reader who would see a calembour in Dickinson’s lines “those who pray / Horizons— must ascend— / And so I stepped opon the North.” The manuscript implies that Dickinson considered “stood,” “reach,” and “touch” as alternatives to “step,” and some publications have made a substitution from what one critic has called these “dictionary options.”101 But in the context of paired puns on “prayer” and “prairie,” “orison” and “horizon” (the “great circle whose plane passes through the center of the earth,” as her Webster’s defines it), the plain of the “vast prairies” (“extensive tract[s] of land, mostly level, destitute of trees and covered with coarse grass”) encountered in “the North” would indeed be the “large extent” of desert “steps” (for steppes). To exploit the alphabetization of the entries in the dictionary—like the various attentions we have seen to the fixed contingency of print and the relation of text to image—recognizes a materiality to language. These practices appreciate that printed words, making particular visual arrangements on the page, are themselves visual marks that take up space, extensive and opaque. Moreover, the material word is constituted in its doubly articulated turn by nonsignifying, nonreferential, alphabetic marks. In Chapters 4 and 5, we will see writers extend this understanding of text to the book itself, manipulating the three-dimensional properties of the dictionary as a sculptural, geometric object in space. More generally, the alphabetic structure of the dictionary abstracted by Hejinian and leveraged by Dickinson indicate part of its appeal to the literary avant-garde. Although the dictionary would ostensibly seem to privilege reference, with its devotion to the denotations and connotations of words and their uses in specific discursive circumstances, the alphabetic structure at the heart of the reference book depends on the sheer material sequence of the signifier. The dictionary’s alphabetization blatantly displays the logic of the signifier, and the fact that language has properties other than the symbolic referencing of its signified. In addition to signifying

26 / Introduction

concepts as units in a sign system, words also refer to other words by virtue of their material properties. Dramatizing the fact that words can attract other words according to schemes other than reference, the dictionary offers a version of language familiar to the literary avant-garde; its elaboration of a chain of signifiers—precisely calibrated to each single difference of every single letter in sequence—displays one complete map of language oriented away from the communicative function (as Jan Mukařovský defined the verbal art of poetic language).102 Indeed, if one well-rehearsed move of the avant-garde has been to deprecate mimetic signs in favor of a system in which texts refer not to some imagined external world but to their own material constituents—language, in short, that is “about” language—then the dictionary becomes an exemplary model: a book of language all about language, a book of words about other words. Moreover, the dictionary is not only self-referential, but also self-reflexive; in a sufficiently comprehensive dictionary, the words in the definition of a lemma will themselves be found as lemmata elsewhere in the dictionary. “On peut en effet considérer la châine des définitions comme le discours autonome que le langage tient sur lui-même [One could, in effect, consider the concatenation of definitions as the autonomous conversation that language holds with itself],” as Marcel Bénabou speculates, explaining elsewhere: “le langage tourne en rond et fonctionne en circuit clos [language runs in a circle, operating in a closed circuit].”103 Not only do words point to words, ad infinitum, in a perfectly closed system, but the monologue of the dictionary provides those circuits with their own motivating commands (“see,” “confer,” “compare,” and so forth), so that “le dictionnaire devient un être vivant [the dictionary becomes a living being].”104 Or, as Hejinian writes: “Even words in storage, in the dictionary, seem frenetic with activity, as each individual entry attracts to itself other words as definition, example, and amplification.”105 As we will see in the chapters that follow, writers have learned not only from the self-referential structures of the dictionary but also from its recursive form. The dictionary, in short, can contain the definition of dictionary. It can define define. For Bierce and Flaubert, the mise-en-abîme of definition and definer is a means to display ironic wit; they gloss their genre, respectively, as: dictionary, n. A malevolent literary device for cramping the growth of a language and making it hard and inelastic. This dictionary, however, is a most useful work.106 dictionnaire: En dire: “N’est fait que pour les ignorants.” (dictionary: Say of it: “it’s only for the uncultured.”)107

Introduction / 27

Without having the dictionary slander or perjure itself in these ways, Johnston too recognizes the same reflexive turn when he includes the felicitous header “Word-Book,” in Cafe/Charivari.108 Heath’s dictionary points to das Wörterbuch, but in addition to being a synonym for dictionary, in English “the term is sometimes used specifically to avoid the implication of completeness or elaboration of treatment characteristic of a dictionary or lexicon,” while still indicating a collection of words from a particular language arranged in alphabetical order: precisely what describes Johnston’s selective abridgement of Heath’s Dictionary.109 In the chapters that follow, dictionaries will provide privileged insights into particular poems, but those poems in turn will offer insight into the conceptualization of language implicitly theorized by the dictionary, and the ways in which its doxa of presuppositions and ideologies can be détourned. If the dictionary poetics investigated here reveals a certain attitude toward language and writing, one might look beyond the handful of poets on whom I focus in these chapters in order to find other moments in which literature reflects a lexicographic imagination (as we saw, for example, with Emily Dickinson). Indeed, while Dictionary Poetics keeps its attention focused on a number of American writers, that restricted scope is more a matter of practical exigency than any sort of nationalist argument. It would take an entire other book to account for the lineage of une poètique dictionnaire that follows from Stéphane Mallarmé through writers like George Bataille and Michel Leiris to the OuLiPo and—in what is perhaps the apotheosis of an experimental lexicography—the later works of Francis Ponge.110 The lexicographic imagination that takes form in other languages and literary histories could be as readily researched by those with the competence I lack. Let me end with one final example of where an investigation of that French lineage might begin, by way of illustrating once more what I mean by a dictionary poetics: the use of the inherent logic of the dictionary as a generative, structuring device and not just as an authoritative compendium to check correct spelling or to confirm the precise use of le mot juste. In Mallarmé’s sonnet which begins “Ses purs ongles très-haut,” the central crux of the notoriously hermetic and opaque poem comes in the form of the word ptyx: “Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx, / Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore [On the credenza, in the empty room: null ptyx / Abolished bibelot of meaningless sound].”111 Mallarmé hoped (or so he claimed) that the word was a neologism. He boasts that it was generated merely from the sonnet’s sonic patterning and the requirements of versification when faced with a paucity of available French words; “je n’ai

28 / Introduction

que tois rimes en ix [I only have three yx rhymes],” he pretends to despair in a letter to his friend Eugène Lefébure, continuing to implore, “avec l’impatience ‘d’un poète en quête d’un rime’ [with the impatience ‘of a poet in search of a rhyme’]”: “concertez-vous pour m’envoyer le sens réel du mot ptyx, on m’assure qu’il n’existe dans aucune langue, ce que je préférais de beaucoup afin de me donner le charme de le créer par la magie de la rime [think hard and send me the real meaning of the word ptyx, I’m assured it does not exist in any language, which I would much prefer, since it would tickle me to have created it through the magic of rhyme].”112 Mallarmé was to be disappointed, although the word is in fact the result of a similar formal exigency. Ptyx was generated not by verse form but by the form of the dictionary. In standard Greek lexicons, nouns are entered as lemmata in their nominative singular declension, even if that form does not appear elsewhere in the written record. In the case of ptyx, the word is a conjecture based on the declensions that were in fact used, in order to interpolate it into the dictionary’s structured arrangement. As Michael Riffaterre explains: “the word ptyx itself is a hypothesis of lexicographers, deduced from a rare Greek word found only in the plural or in obliquedeclension cases, ptykhes.”113 With a formal purity that Mallarmé would surely have appreciated, the word ptyx thus appears not for its meaning— it may never have been used for semantic purposes in Greek—but only for its formal properties: a signifier in an alphabetic chain, deformed by the force of grammar in accordance with the lexical patterns of other words. Mallarmé hoped that the word existed in no dictionary, but in fact it exists only in the dictionary.114 In line with the poem’s negative ontology (“salon vide,” “aboli bibelot”), the ptyx is “null”: a cipher, a term with no content but a necessary structural position, a placeholder. In other words, sign and referent coincide; the object referred to in the poem stands analogous to the word that refers to the object: ptyx is a placeholder in both the sonnet’s rhyme scheme and also in the elaboration of declensions demanded by the dictionary’s structural scheme. However, if ptyx is a word only ever first uttered by the dictionary, it speaks, in its own voice, only of the dictionary’s form. Generated by the format of the lexicon’s layout, it refers at a further material remove to the format of the book itself: the folds of the quired pages bound between hinged boards. The earliest mention of writing that survives in Greek occurs in Book VI of the Iliad, which describes words inscribed in a hinged [ptykto, πτυκτῷ] tablet: “with tokens charged, of dire import, on folded tablets trac’d.”115 The folded forms there are analogous to those found in a passage from Aeschylus’s Suppliants, in which the king contrasts writ-

Introduction / 29

ten words with the spontaneous speech of a decree: “this is not inscribed in tablets or sealed up in the folds of books: you hear it from freely uttered speech.”116 The “folds of books [πτυχαῖς βίβλων]” not only records the sense of plural ptykhes as related to writing tablets, but it also introduces the substrate of the writing: the papyrus (βίβλων) that would eventually come to denote “book” itself. In Mallarmé’s sonnet, not incidentally, the “ptyx” is placed in apposition to a “bibelot,” which also hints at the codex through this etymology; as Gretchen Kromer argues, “the word, bibelot, is nearly a transliteration of the Greek biblos and is also close to the French bible”: The Book, secularized and resacralized as Le Livre in Mallarmé’s idealization of a “instrument spirituel [spiritual instrument].”117 Taking the form of a negated singular declension, Mallarmé’s ptyx may indicate something like a book with its cover torn off, or its boards unhinged; grammatically jarring, the singular construction may not even make sense, except as a marker of the negation of an object that no longer exits, in parallel to strangeness of phrases like “a trouser” or “a scissor.” In extended later usage, πτυχάς (the accusative plural) metaphorically denotes “the leaves of a folding door” or shutter (“ὁ κλείσας οὐρανοῦ δισσὰς π”), and Mallarmé extrapolates this sense of the ptyx to the empty room itself, reiterating the hinged boards of “volets attachés [clasped shutters]” in his description of the scene: “une fenêtre nocturne ouverte, les deux volets attachés; une chambre, avec personne dedans, malgré l’air stable que présentent les volets attachés [an open window at night, the two shutters clasped; within; an empty room, with no one inside it, despite the firm impression given by the clasped shutters].” With his repetition, Mallarmé doubles the doubled structure of the shutters. Furthermore, the impressions of the poem, as he describes them are “étagées” (layered): precisely the root sense of the folded form of πτυχάς (layers) in its earliest uses, according to Liddell and Scott.118 Self-reflexive, like the structure of the hinged boards of the shutters behind the mirroring properties of the glazed windows they enclose, the logic of the poem is, as the poem’s original title had it: “allégorique de lui-même [allegorical of itself].”119 Nul, in French, also denotes a silent letter, something registered but unheard, and elocution corroborates the index of the dictionary by “ptyx.” Like the resonant cavity of a conch, with its own ptyxic process, or the similar slight auditory respirations of a “salon vide,” Mallarmé heard his poem as a chamber of murmuring, and ptyx itself might be heard to make a barely audible murmuring of its origins.120 First, the pronunciation is constricted slightly by the metrical constraints of the Alexandrine line, which requires that ptyx be considered as a single syllable, despite the

30 / Introduction

distinct articulation of its two initial consonants in French. Second, Mallarmé knew that in English the orthography of the digraph indicates a lettre nulle (silent letter) producing a voiceless alveolar stop (as in pterodactyl or Ptolemy). Combining these facts, the word edges just a slight (p’tit) distance from the voiced stop which French speakers easily assimilate to the point of becoming “undistinguishable (acoustically and perceptually)”: /diks/.121 The word’s diction, in short, suggests the diction of diction, or dictionnaire, just as “bibelot” suggests the biblio- ghosting behind its evocatively elided pronunciation. The murmur of the word is hardly an “inanité sonore” in either case, and both would be good examples of the poetics Mallarmé proclaimed his poem pursued, in which meaning “est évoqué par un mirage interne des mots mêmes [is evoked by a mirage internal to the words themselves],” as he explained to a former teacher, to whom he referred, with a tender objectification, as one of his “chers dictionnaires de toutes les belles choses [dear dictionaries of all beautiful things].”122 Indeed, “l’oeuvre pure [the pure work]” to which Mallarmé’s symbolist sonnet aspired involved the transference of the unique facture of an individual’s spoken diction to the word itself, evoking the very passage from Aeschylus that assayed writing against the measure of “freely uttered speech”: L’oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poète, qui “cède” l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de leur inégalité mobilisés; ils . . . remplaçant la respiration perceptible en l’ancien souffle lyrique ou la direction personnelle enthousiaste de la phrase. The pure work implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words, by the clash of their motivated differences; they . . . replace the perceptible breath of lyric inspiration in antiquity or the individual inflection of inspired speech.123 In the lyrical economy of Mallarmé’s sonnet (both the lexical economy of the poem’s internal semantics and the larger genre within which the poem circulated), “ptyx” strains against the very limits of referentiality. At the extreme pole of the avant-garde tradition initiated by Mallarmé one finds a negative poetics of the dictionary in the linguistic abstractions and asemantics of зáумь (zaum) and neologism: a linguistic practice predicated on words that are by definition (so to speak) not yet in any dictionary. Although it lies beyond the scope of my project here, an extended investigation into poetic lexicography might explore the vanishing point of nonsensical words in the abolished reference book that cannot contain them. Such an investigation would polish the dictionary’s black

Introduction / 31

mirror: the dark glass into which the neologism stares, with the tain of the laminated ptyx flaking in the periphery.124 “I shall have to learn a little Greek to keep up with this / but so will you, drratt you,” Ezra Pound gnarled in the Cantos, posing a petulant version of the challenge faced by readers of all difficult poetry.125 To what extent can Mallarmé’s reader be expected to scour a lexicon of Attic declensions, or Kerouac’s reader be expected to track down the precise edition of some long out-of-print student dictionary? In some cases, the avant-garde does indeed ask that its audience do a little bit of work; if the reader of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land might reasonably be expected to look up the translation of the French verses he quotes from Paul Verlaine, say, the reader of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge might reasonably be expected to look up unfamiliar terms in the dictionary of African American slang on which her poem is based. In other cases, that’s not the point. Which leads to a certain paradox for my study: by following the lead of the avantgarde’s poetics, we risk spoiling the effects of its avant-garde poems. To be sure, discovering the hidden logics of absent scaffoldings can be deeply satisfying and intellectually exciting, but it can also collapse the fragile effects of mysterious wonder and perplexing strangeness that would seem to be the end of certain hermetic texts. Baffling opacity is sometimes the poet’s goal, not an invitation to dispel the occult lexical magic cast by a poem—even if we can discover how it was wrought by sneaking a peek into their grimoire glossary. In the end, my point is not so much that everyone should read this way, but merely to prove that they can. Whatever the claims one wants to make for the values of these works, on aesthetic grounds, they can no longer be so easily dismissed as nonsensical, meaningless, or impenetrable. Nor do I want to suggest that dictionaries are always the secret key to unlocking a difficult text; the works examined here are a small sample of the audacious diversity of experimental strategies. But I do hope that this book serves as confirmation that unconventional reading can have conventionally interpretive dividends. To that end, I offer it as a reminder that when faced with unusual and restive texts, alternative strategies for reading may yield rewards—or at least the knowledge that deliberate composition might be hidden behind the seemingly inexplicable surfaces of language handled and arranged on its own material terms. “Though there exists a viewpoint that an adequate description of poetic semantics with the help of lexicographic means is impossible,” as one critic has allowed, this book hopes to prove the opposite.126 The following chapters document the ways in which the dictionary—as the “raw material of possible poems” (to return to this chapter’s epigraph)—has been

32 / Introduction

a uniquely productive source to some of the most radical poetry of the twentieth century. In order to transform the suggestions of lexicography into poetry, Emerson realized long ago, “nothing is wanting but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage.”127 Dissecting the connective tissue of a few of the dictionary’s possible poems, Dictionary Poetics delineates their structures in a descriptive anatomy.

1 /

Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary A dictionary puts difficulties in the way.

—Basil Bunting, “Verse Translation” Capitalism begins when you open the dictionary.

—Steve McCaffery, “Lyric’s Larynx”

Two-thirds of the way through Louis Zukofsky’s remarkably strange prose narrative Thanks to the Dictionary, the text comments on its own form and hints at its mode of composition: “Thanks to the dictionary, this book will be prefaced. As against any dictator, there is that book containing the words of a language, modes of expression, diction.”1 To the reader who suspects that Zukofsky is quoting the definition of dictionary from a dictionary, he shows his hand at the end of the paragraph: “on page  327, Dickson City a borough in East Pennsylvania; on page 303, the hand has turned back, there is David.” Those pages do indeed correspond to pages in the 1930 edition of the Funk & Wagnalls Company’s Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language containing the entries for dictionary and David, respectively.2 They thus also explicitly indicate the two twined modes of Zukofsky’s idiosyncratic text. Drawing on biblical characters and plots, Thanks to the Dictionary recounts the story of King David from the books of Samuel and Kings. Simultaneously telegraphic and digressive, each of the erratic twenty-nine chapters (with the exception of the antepenultimate, which includes an extended span of more conventional prose) primarily draws its language from a single dictionary page. Seeing the work as procedural, Peter Quartermain posits that “the page determining the vocabulary of each episode was as a rule established . . . by a throw of the dice,” reiterating that “Zukofsky is retelling the story of David using a vocabulary in part determined by casting dice to find the dictionary page number.”3 As a careful reading of the dictionary pages reveals, the textual evidence argues, pace Quartermain, against any sort of aleatory procedure in their selection. In fact, the remainder of this

34 / Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky

chapter will argue for the significance of Zukofsky’s deviations from his ostensible “one-page” rule. But those dice—defined by Funk & Wagnalls and cited by Zukofsky as “cubes of bone or ivory marked on every side, with, from one to six spots”—do thematize the aleatoric aspect of the word store available to Zukofsky when he works from the corpora that happen to be found, fortuitously, on a given dictionary page.4 Thanks to the Dictionary also explicitly allegorizes the teasing dynamic of chance and calculation through its deployment—and avoidance—of the word “flukes.” In the work’s fourth chapter, King David assumes the perspective of a reader faced with a difficult text. Inevitably mirroring the reader of Thanks to the Dictionary itself, David seeks for meaning in a sentence whose syntax potentially grants agency to the very semantics he misconstrues: “the strained meaning before David interprets falsely, distrusts and suspects.”5 Whatever else is happening in this section, the suspicious reader—noting an eccentric lexicon that includes “District of Columbia” and “distyle” among “disturbance,” “distracted,” “distinguished,” and “distribution”—would be right to interpret the passage as a collage of language distributed on page 342 of Funk & Wagnalls: He might be a distome, one of a genus of parasitic worms classed flukes, from their short flattened triangular shape. He might be among a number, but only the distinguished back of the portico in the antes will regard his ultimate distribution. The scene might be the District of Columbia.6 Although the prose is radically paratactic, one can easily enough speculate about the plausible semantic connections; contemplating David’s plan to build a temple in the new capitol of Jerusalem might bring to mind the monumental columns fronting the neoclassical civic architecture emblematic of Washington, D.C., as a national capitol. Or, recalling King David’s renown as a strict and righteous judge overseeing criminal justice might summon an image of the imposing distyle façade of the Department of Justice building. Designed by Zantzinger, Borie & Medary with the help of Louis Kahn and built between 1932 and 1935, the construction of the edifice was exactly contemporaneous with the composition of Thanks to the Dictionary. Either route might then lead metonymically to the other’s destination. One would be harder pressed, however, to account for other vocabulary, and the reader may begin to distrust whether “distrust” occurs as part of any meaningful argument or whether it merely fulfills an alphabetic requirement by falling between “distill” and “disunite,” the parameters of page 342. Indeed, seeming to serve more as an occasion for quoting from the dictionary than any clear motivation for

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 35

the language selected from a given page, the biblical narrative provides a host to the parasitic proliferation of lemmata and the language of their definitions. Following the description of David’s confused hermeneutics of suspicion, for example, the passage continues with a subjective that echoes the reader’s own uncertain conjectures: “he might be a distome, one of a genus of parasitic worms called flukes.”7 While one would have to strain to reconcile worms with the section’s other topics, the entry does not seem entirely incidental, given that the word “flukes” recurs several pages later, although no longer in the context of trematoid worms: The boon companions feast, and the feast lasts—no argument or evidence addressed to the intellect of flukes. Parallel to the affections and the will, rolled one part on another or inward from one side, wind the coupled, coupled, twining herbs with their convoys of large showy trumpet flower, accompanying their property as of ships storing food at sea; the baggage train on land, the story continues thru 36 genera.8 The sleuthing reader will have found that Zukofsky has moved several pages earlier in the dictionary, to page 266. Collaging language from the entries between “convictism” and “coost,” the section opens by suturing the definitions for “convive” and “convince.” With an ironic inversion, the rational intellect—arising from “one of the folds of the brain,” as the passage mentions (in other words, from the dictionary definition of a convolution)—appears thanks to the serendipitous language of the dictionary rather than any reasoned authorial expression, while “flukes” appears—as one of only a handful of words in the section not quoting directly from the dictionary page—on account of Zukofsky’s willful intellectual intention. If readers in search of evidence were to turn to page 450 and look up “fluke,” they would find it on the very page which Zukofsky mined for the third chapter of Thanks to the Dictionary, although in selecting language for that chapter he twice passes over the word—which appears both as a lemma in its own right and also a few entries higher in the column as a synonym for the third iteration of “flue”— in favor of other definitions of flue (“an organ-pipe [of] flute or diapson [quality]” and a “chimney which had rid itself of all the gases of combustion”), as well as a host of other words: “flour” (“the ground and bolted substance of wheat”) and its homonym “flower” (“the dense head-like clusters of sessile florets”); “flummery” (“blank-mange”); and a selfreflexive “flourish” (“embellishment, but in brilliant and dashing style, thriving and prosperous—[to be at one’s best] as an author”) of the sort

36 / Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky

that might raise a work above the bland, “flimsy show” of a piece of flummery. Most of all, numerous denotations of “flow” predominate the passage. Indeed, when Ezra Pound admonished his acolyte in a letter that he “must now at once start on a study of technique of flow,” Zukofsky “wrote in the upper right corner of the page [of Pound’s letter], ‘See Thanks to the Dictionary for reply.’”9 The conjunction of stylistic “flow” and trumpet “flower” suggests the key term on the page that would serve as the source for the vocabulary of the concluding chapter of Thanks to the Dictionary: “voluble.” The word denotes both “having a flow of words or fluency of speaking,” and, in Botany, “twining.” Furthermore, although he again does not quote it from this context, “flukes” also appears on one of the two key dictionary pages for Zukofsky’s project, at the very locus of his central character: “on page 303 . . . there is David.” The illustration below the entry for the “masculine personal name” designating the “son of Jesse, slayer of Goliath; king of Israel; writer of Psalms,” corresponds to Davit, a word as close to the main character’s name as possible (and in fact perhaps deriving etymologically as an application of the proper name). The word denotes “a curved piece of timber or iron for hoisting the flukes of an anchor.” With these instances of usage and avoidance, Zukofsky works with and around “flukes” in three distinct ways: quoting it from the dictionary, inserting it freely among language quoted from unrelated dictionary passages, and twice detouring around passages in order to deliberately avoid the word when sampling language from dictionary pages that include it. In the process, his text has anticipated the reader who might wonder whether these connections are by design or by coincidence. “Flukes,” in Thanks to the Dictionary, is self-allegorizing. Whether the evaded instances merely happen to occur on those sampled pages “by lucky chance” (fluke) or represent the “failure or disappointment” (fluke) of a missed opportunity that Zukofsky might have exploited, they hint at the organizing potential of words that do not in fact appear in his text, but that structure it by their proximity to the words that he does chose to appropriate from the same dictionary page. To be sure, much of the distinctive strangeness of Thanks to the Dictionary results from the unlikely preponderance of alliterating words, brought together from different registers and clustering in paragraphs as Zukofsky aggregates language from their “ultimate distribution” on a given dictionary page. But consulting Zukofsky’s sources confirms that a surprising number of his exceptionally discursive, poetic, or surreal phrases in fact derive not from the curious inclusion of an unusual term or from two abruptly collaged entries, but from the verbatim supplements

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 37

of the dictionaries’ usage examples and the sentences with which they illustrate connotation. One of Zukofsky’s paragraphs, for instance, reads: —A wife may suffer from her husband constant neglect, while the negligence which causes a train accident may be that of a moment, and on the part of one ordinarily careful and attentive; in such cases the law provides punishment for criminal negligence.10 The passages are taken almost directly from the entry for “neglect,” although Zukofsky has substituted “train” for “railroad,” eliminated the possessive from “husband’s,” and replaced the italic emphasis of the key words with a regularized roman type (all in all, Zukofsky’s substitution of “apprentices” for “laborers” in the definition of “cooperation” in chapter 16’s “unions of apprentices and small capitalists” may be a more telling parapraxis). The reader is left to consider whether the deviations are a result of purposeful editing to effect a sort of composition-as-explanation by enacting a scrivening neglect or dramatizing a procedural negligence. On rare occasion, passages do not give up the secrets of their source, even after the corresponding dictionary pages are scoured. One paragraph, for example, moves from “stereogram” to “stereoscope,” adapting and mixing language from the definitions for “stereotrope” (“an instrument exhibiting moving pictures in stereoscopic relief, pictures which show successive phases of the motion being mounted on a revolving cylinder and viewed through stereoscopic lenses”), “steppe” (“one of the vast tracks in southeastern Europe or in Asia which are in general level and without forests”), and “sternforemost” (“with the stern in advance; hence: awkwardly; blunderingly”): No stereogram can relieve the moving plane’s successive flatness the intense light reveals. And yet, these move, not fixed in a lasting form: the vessel stern foremost, blunderingly; the sea upon itself mixing as with vast tracts of steppe simultaneously seen as thru a stereoscope.11 Quoted and paraphrased, the language all derives directly or in paraphrase from page 942 of Webster’s Collegiate—except for the unaccountable and uncharacteristic interpolation of the poetic phrase “the sea upon itself mixing.” Performing an analogue of the optical illusions the passage describes, the octameter phrase collapses the homophones “see” and “sea” with a persistence of hearing (as one might speak of the “persistence of vision”), superimposing light waves and ocean waves in a description of mixing that itself mixes referents—even as its own origins remain clouded. For the most part, however, the dictionary accounts impeccably for Zukofsky’s language, even when he does not appropriate it directly from

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the reference book’s pages. For example, after Zukofsky’s hand, palm open, has turned back to page 303, the resulting paragraph moves from the language in the entries for “date” (with the fortuitous paragram of “palm” and “psalm”) to “datio,” “date,” “dauphin,” “dative,” “dabber,” “daub,” “daubery,” “dative,” “daughter,” “daughter-cell,” and “datum”: Dates, dates! dates! the oblong, sweet, fleshy fruit! you headmen of barrios in the time of some event, in a point of time—the dauphin in abeyance, removable as apposed to perpetual! Who paints coarsely or cheaply—a dauber, a dabbler. Trickery, a sticky occupation. But this may not be disposed of at will: a female child, a cell divided from the mother cell, psalms, a conceded fact, number, quantity, point. Knowledge is but sorrow’s spy. The lark takes this window for the east.12 The elevated, literary language of those final lines returns, with an echo, in the final paragraph of the penultimate chapter: Knowledge is but sorrow’s spy. Wake all the dead! What ho! What ho! How soundly they sleep on the decks of the world in storms of love. You, that are more than our discreeter fear, Leaves scarce reach green, As if the silver planet, In this small lanthorn, would contract her light, and to implore your light he sings.13 Although these phrases are nowhere to be found on page 303 of the dictionary, or anywhere else in the reference book, the clue to their provenance is right between “datary” and “day”; the lines come from the poetry of William D’Avenant, “an English poet laureate” as the entry for his name explains.14 On other, equally infrequent occasions, one can retrace Zukofsky’s motivated itinerary through the dictionary. In the final chapter, for instance, he leaves records of several elliptical movements away from a given dictionary page. While the penultimate section primarily works the material on page 112 of Funk and Wagnalls (“battalion” to “bawty”), Zukofsky’s reading there of the electrical sense of battery (“an apparatus consisting of one or more cells, used in generating voltaic electricity”) leads him to page 1251 (“voile” to “voluntary”) and the entry for “voltaic pile,” from which he departs in turn, following the dictionary’s injunction to “see under galvanic,” consulting page 479, accordingly, and incorporating the entry for “galvanic battery” among the other language from page 1251: “a number of discs of two metals—the wives of David, the lives of David—one more oxidizable than the other and having between them this paper moistened with acids.”15

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 39

A few paragraphs later, at the transcendental conclusion of Thanks to the Dictionary, David hears the heavenly voice of Absalom’s “voix celeste” (an “organ stop,” as the dictionary specifies the musical terme de métier), which sounds “the note, the note above it, and the semitone below it.”16 Zukofsky thus enacts the turn to “turn,” from dictionary page 1251 back to 1208 and the ninth entry for the word: “Mus. An embellishment formed by playing a note, the note above it, and the semitone below it.” I suspect Zukofsky discovered “voix celeste” across the page from “voluble” (“turning readily” in the senses of fluency and twining), but his turn to “turn” would have been occasioned by any number of words on the page ultimately deriving from the Latin volutus and picked up on by Zukofsky who quotes the entries to several: from the “volt” that sparked his interest in various batteries to the other denotations of the word, describing a horse moving “partially sideways round a circular tread” or, in fencing, “a sudden leap to avoid a thrust,” as well as to the “tumbler” indicated by “voltigeur,” and the volumetric “measurement by comparison of volumes” and other passages derived from “volume”: “Fold, turn the papyrus. V = m/D. The amount of space includes the bounding surface of the solid—in music, the fullness of quantity, of tone—always the volume equals mass divided by density!”17 Ultimately, as “papyrus,” emphasizes—and like the interpolation of “this” in the preceding definition of galvanic battery—these turns from turns are self-reflexive gestures to the published version of the text, in the sense of “a collection of sheets of paper bound together; a book”—in other words: a volume. Zukofsky thus applies the same selfreferential twist to his own book that he recognized in the dictionary’s potential to define dictionary. Having followed the entries in the dictionary, and taken heed of the instruction to “apply then the difference of potential [i.e., volt] to this book,” the reader will realize that the opening imperative of the section—“turn, turn the leaf”—refers not to fall foliage or heliotropism, but to the pages of the printed text itself, in a borrowed instance of the musical volti: “a direction to turn the leaf” of a score. In Chapter 3 we will see Clark Coolidge develop this volumetric sense of the volume, extending it to the very definition of the dictionary itself as space, and in Chapter 4 we will see Tina Darragh activate the geometric understanding of the printed leaf as something to twist and turn with a performative poetics of the manipulated page. For now, the twentieth section of Thanks to the Dictionary offers another example of Zukofsky’s motivated digressions under the imperative syntax of the dictionary. The section draws most of its language from page 392 of Funk and Wagnalls, but it also incorporates a snippet from page 503: “the one eye which they hand from one to the other.”18 The

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interjection indicates that although Zukofsky does not anywhere quote from it, he had followed the instructions in the entry for “Enyo” to “see under Grææ,” the definition for which, accordingly, reads: “the daughters for Phoreus and Ceto. . . . They had but one eye which they handed from one to the other.” With one eye glancing ahead to the later page, turned by the hand and then back again, Zukofsky moves from the dictionary’s instructive “see” to the “eye” of the Graeae, handed back and forth between them. Another intrusion in the fifth chapter, “my three unequal and dissimilar axes with oblique intersections,” is similarly explained.19 The phrase quotes from the definition for “triclinic” (said of crystal forms), and can be found on page 1196 of Funk & Wagnalls. The rest of the fifth chapter, however, works primarily from page 642, which contains the first page of words beginning with the letter L, including “labradorite”: “a gray, brown, or colorless translucent to subtranslucent triclinic lime-soda feldspar.” In the terms we will see elaborated by Coolidge, Zukofsky has thus opened a rift in feldspace. The fifth chapter also contains two other phrases not found on page 642, and by attending to the their anomalous inclusion we can triangulate the otherwise hidden figure who ghosts behind the passage—haunting it like a specter (or, as Funk & Wagnalls puts it: an “apparition, fantom [phantom], ghost, shade, spirit”). In the chapter’s first paragraph, following language taken from the entries for “Labiche” (Eugène Marin), “label,” “labia,” and “labile,” one finds: “In their incoherent series of apparitions, military departments stacked with cartridges, torpedoes and every thing every arsenal has, sought for analyses and explosives heard of by the independent labor interest of parliaments.”20 Among language from the same page’s definitions for “laboratory” (“Mil. A department, as in an arsenal, where cartridges, torpedoes, etc., are made”), laborite (“a member of the Independent Labour Party”), and “Labour Party” (“A federation of tradeunions, socialist societies, etc. representing labor interest in Parliament”), Zukofsky has interpolated the definition for “fantasmagoria,” from page 423: “A changing, incoherent series of apparitions or fantasms.” Before settling back to its gravitational center among the L words on page 642 of the dictionary, the following paragraph then opens with language taken from the definition of “mystical” (“betokening a hidden meaning, emblematical”), from page 759: “It was among these that David, disguised, betokening a hidden meaning, and emblematically seeking his man . . . spoke affectionately.”21 Remote from any words on page 642, the motivation for these inclusions at first seems obscure—or mystical (“remote from or obscure to human observation, secret”)—but their mystifying secret can be found on a page in Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 41

We know from “A” if nowhere else that Marx was certainly on Zukofsky’s mind in the 1930s, and he makes a direct, cameo appearance later in Thanks to the Dictionary, at the end of the twentieth chapter, when Zukofsky quotes Marx without attribution: And live in those “historical processes” when “twenty years are but as one day—and” when “may come days which are the” concentration “of twenty years”—and the apprehension envisages several millenniums before and ahead: “the free development of each the condition for the free development of all.”22 That final phrase, famously, also concludes the second section of the Communist Manifesto (in Samuel Moore’s early authorized translation), while the speculation on time comes from a letter from Marx to Engels (9 April, 1863).23 Less direct, the trace of Marx’s language in the fifth chapter nonetheless leaves a distinct imprint. In Marx’s initial discussion of the fetishism of commodities in Das Kapital, the mystical and the phantasmagoric frame a visual analogy which would have sparked Zukofsky’s objectivist imagination. Where Zukofsky repeatedly defined his poetics as “the rays of an object brought to a focus” (a phrase we will excavate and explicate in the following chapter), Marx explains that a product transforms into a commodity, with simultaneously perceptible and imperceptible aspects, “in the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself.”24 Marx precedes this analogy with the claim that “Der mystiche Charakter der Waare entspringt also nicht aus ihrem Gebrauchswerth [The mystical character of the commodity does not arise from its use-value],” and he follows it with the assertion that “Es ist nur das bestimmte gesellschaftliche Verhältnis der Menschen selbst, welches hier für sie die phantasmagorische Form eines Verhältnisses von Dingen annimmt [it is only the definite social relation between people that assumes, from their perspective, the fantasmagoric form of a relation between things].” Marked by their deviation from the language of the governing dictionary page, the definitions for “mystical” and “fantasmagoria” form a relation between themselves, and like the image projected from a magic lantern, Zukofsky summons the ghostly trace of Marx without ever quoting him—or even directly mentioning the words “mystical” and “fantasmagoria” themselves. The words are thus used together to enact a version of their own definitions: a remote and obscure illusion created by the montage of other wise incoherent terms. Marx may be the tutelary spirit of Zukofsky’s early writings, and even the genius of objectivism, but the

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medium is the dictionary; without its background rule, telling deviations could not be registered. Marx is summoned only thanks to the dictionary. And once summoned, his presence not only informs the local context of laborites and labor parties, but it also shadows the larger political narrative of David as retold by Zukofsky in the age of Stalin. The poetics of absence in Thanks to the Dictionary operates in other ways as well, and as was the case with “fluke,” the words that Zukofsky does not transcribe from the dictionary page are often as revealing as the ones that he records. Consider the twenty-fourth chapter, for example, which gives voice to Bathsheba in a monologue that takes its form from vocabulary selected as Zukofsky moves down page 78 of Funk & Wagnalls: An aside of Bath-sheba sitting on the ashlar of his roof— His, the attribute of the subject, Lent goes, and I am still Astarte, female of forbidden divinity to all our known friends, David’s, on the squared stone of his mason-work.25 Dropping from ashlar (“squared stone . . . mason work”) to ascribe (using the synonym “attribute”) to Ash Wednesday (“the first day of Lent”), Zukofsky puns on the musical lentamente and the motionless sense of “still” to coax a macaronic “start” from the stopped “Astarte.” Subsequently, the figure of Astarte, as the dictionary explains, is identified with Ashtoreth, “the chief female divinity of the Phoenicians.” The goddess, worshipped by the Canaanites, may have been “forbidden” to the Israelites, but Zukofsky refrains from so much as even invoking the other name from Hebrew my thology just a few entries further down the column: Asmodeus (“an evil spirit; also, king of the demons”)—a figure (as we will see in the following chapter) who appears at a pivotal moment in the opening of the original version of “A” before again being exorcised in the final revisions of the poem. Similarly, in the eleventh section of Thanks to the Dictionary, Zukofsky juxtaposes the eighteenth-century scientist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (who proposed an octogesimal scale “in which 0° marks the freezing point and 80° the boiling point of water”) with an insect that appears indifferent to the measurements of the environment to which it naturally reacts, regardless of the metric conventions: “Réaumur, Réaumur, the fineness of your thermometric scale, rearguing freezing and boiling point, what can it mean to the mantis its legs folded in prayer.”26 Although the dictionary does not mention Réaumur’s contributions to natural history, the surreal conjunction makes more sense if one recalls that Réaumur was not only the author of the monumental six volume

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Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des insectes (1734–42), but that he combined his two interests in experiments into the relation between temperature changes and insect growth. “Reargue” may trace its motivation to the signifier’s near anagrammatic proximity to “Réaumur,” but the mantis’s development, according to the scientist, traces its growth the temperature measured by his recalibrated scale. Development itself is what it means to the mantis, but making the connection between the two seemingly unrelated terms requires recognizing a missing third term. The exact source of the phrases appropriated by Zukofsky must be similarly inferred. Although the concluding description in his passage comes from the Webster’s entry for “mantis” (on page 598, “mansard roof” to “marabou”) which describes the orthoptera’s “legs commonly held in a way suggestive of hands folded in prayer,” all of the surrounding language comes from page 804, “reality” to “rebellious” (hence “Réaumur” and “reargue”), where “a mantis” appears as the defining synonym for “rear-horse”—apparently so named because the insect’s distinctive angled upright posture and folded limbs resemble a horse rearing on its hind legs. Read on its own, Zukofsky’s text does not signal the connection, but Webster’s—when consulted in tandem with Thanks—reveals the direct link between Zukofsky’s two totem familiars: horses (a lifelong obsession to which I will return in the following chapter), on the one hand, and on the other the subject of his most well-known poems of the 1930s: “Mantis” and “ ‘Mantis’: An Interpretation.”27 While the mantis here may have been merely chanced upon, following the accidental lexis of a given dictionary page, it would have resonated in its cultural moment with the pronounced force of a specific allusion. During the very years Zukofsky was composing Thanks to the Dictionary and the “Mantis” poems, in the Brooklyn of the early 1930s, the praying mantis was a popular sensation. Widespread in Europe and Asia, the Mantis religiosa had been first identified in North America only at the turn of the twentieth century, “apparently confined to a small area near Rochester, including the towns of Charlotte, Summerville and Irondequoit.”28 The insect was a curiosity when it swarmed New York City in the summer of 1929, and newspaper articles recount the bewildered public panic. The infestation made such an impression, in fact, that it was still being referred to, years later, as a touchstone of collective trauma.29 Having seen the ways in which unmentioned terms and absent referents structure meaning in Thanks to the Dictionary, and how a figure like Marx can be alluded to without being directly named, we are in a position to recognize the way Thanks to the Dictionary comes to be entwined with the early movements of “A”—and to see how Zukofsky’s

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compositional practice discloses an enshrouded elegy at the heart of his seemingly playful prose.30 Just before Zukofsky names the two key pages of the Practical Standard Dictionary, by specific number, the Degrees chapter concludes: Dicentra, low, delicate perennial herbs, racemes of nodding rosecolored or yellow heart-shaped flowers, the bleeding heart is wellknown; doubly refracting crystals exhibiting different colors when viewed in different directions; solutions variously colored by different degrees of concentration; dicasts unaffected by blue-green- or redblindedness; Dick, bunting; dicky, bib or a small bird.31 Focusing on the avian entries illustrated at the top of the dictionary page’s second column (“Dick,” designating Spiza americana, is a kind of bunting; “dicky” denotes alternately “a pinafore or bib,” or a “small bird”), Zukofsky invokes his friend Richard Chambers, who had killed himself a decade earlier. “A”-3, an elegy for Chambers composed in 1928, just two years after Chambers’ suicide, concludes: “Lion-heart, my dove, / Pansy over the heart, dicky-bird.”32 With a translation of “coeur de lion,” the epithet for Richard I, and following the affordance of the shared first names, the lines establish a familiar convention of cognomination before applying it to Chambers’s hypocoric “Dickie,” transforming the unwritten pet name into a homonymic soubriquet: “dicky-bird.” In Thanks to the Dictionary, the chain of associations points back in the opposite direction. The dictionary page, moreover, illuminates the other terms that “A” also associates with Chambers. As Zukofsky must have noticed while transcribing part of the definition for the Degrees chapter, Funk & Wagnalls defines Dicentra as “a genus of low, delicate, perennial herbs, with a raceme of pretty nodding rose-colored or yellow heart-shaped flowers; the bleeding-heart (D. spectabilis) and Dutchman’s breeches (D. cucularia) are well known.” A flower, in the lines above, is also metonymically and metaphorically associated with the heart, which is emphasized as the hinge term between symbolic contrasts of fierce bravery (“lion-hearted”) and weak effeminacy (“pansy”).33 In addition to the flower specified by pansy, Zukofsky transitively associates Ricky with the pants specified by “breeches” in “A”-8, in a passage that recycles a number of earlier phrases associated with Chambers. From “A”-3, it repeats “trappings,” the “cemetery,” and the superstitious injunction, “No crossin’ bridges, / Rick’— / No bridges, not after midnight”; from “A”-6 it reiterates the exclamation “Spilt from the runningboard, Ricky!”:

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 45

Go where (not from the cemetery)— ... Go where (not alive on the running-board)— Trappings rise— No bridges, no breeches, not after midnight.34 Interpolating “breeches” in this series of Ricky’s other attributes affiliates the word with Chambers in turn. The sonic transformation of bridges into breeches—the short i extending its length and quantity to become its paired long e, and the voiced palato-alveolar sibilant affricate brittling to its unvoiced counterpart—makes formal sense, but why would breeches be one of Ricky’s attributes? Contemplating the connection between Ricky and pants, the attentive reader will recall the scene in “A”-2 where Richard is taunted by sailors’ “blue trouser seats—each alike a square inch— / sticking thru portholes, / Laughter, laced blue over torus, / Gibes from the low deck: ‘Hi, Ricky!’ ” Funk & Wagnalls defines “breeches,” in brief, as “trousers,” and the synonym might be enough to explain the logic by which “A”-8 associates Chambers with breeches, but the nautical setting suggests a further corroboration. In the context of the metaphoric use of “deck” and the proximity of “gibe,” which takes the alternate spelling “jibe” (meaning also “to swing or shift from one side of a vessel to the other, as a fore and aft sail”) recalling “jib” (“a triangular sail set on a stay and extending from the foretopmast-head to the job boom or the bowsprit”), the strange description of trouser fabric “laced blue over torus,” offers another connection between the trousers and breeches: a “breeches buoy” names “a lifesaving apparatus, consisting of canvas breeches, attachable at the waist to a ring-shaped life-buoy.”35 With its familiar appellations “bleeding-heart” and “Dutchman’s breeches,” “Dicentra”—in proximity to “dicky”—works to call up the ghost of Chambers in the way that definitions for “mystical” and “fantasmagoria” summoned the specter of Marx. The allusions to Zukofsky’s lost friend do not stop there, however. Chambers also makes an appearance in the grave-plot testament section of Zukofsky’s Poem beginning “The”, where he is incorporated with goldenrod: “Lion-heart, fratre mio, and so on in two languages / the thing itself a shadow world. / Goldenrod / Of which he is a part.”36 Goldenrod, significantly, also figures as one of the emblems which opens Thanks to the Dictionary: Perhaps next Ab, when the fast will not commemorate a Temple in ruins, Aaron’s rod, the serpent to blossom, will grow, goldenrod

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which flowers on long stems in that vacation a part of July and of August.37 As Michelle Leggott recognizes, in the course of connecting Aaron’s rod to Ricky, the season named is indeed the one “when the goldenrod flowers, and goldenrod is one of several plants with tall stems and yellow blossoms called Aaron’s rod.”38 The mise-en-scène befits an elegy; overshadowed by the symbolism of the ruined temple, Ab [‫ ]ָאב‬marks a period of lamentation. The season named also memorializes the text’s own composition; Zukofsky began composing Thanks in July 1932, and although it was essentially completed in the next year or two he finalized the work in August 1939. The writing thus runs from [Latin ab] Ab to Ab. That sort of self-reflexive turn, as I noted at the beginning of the chapter, is one latent in the dictionary’s ability to define “dictionary,” and Aaron’s rod carries a congruent connotation: “In similative and allusive use: a powerful force which devours or overwhelms every thing around,” particularly that of its own kind.39 As the biblical rod became a snake that devoured snakes, the dictionary becomes a system of words that devours words, a book that devours all other books, which have only ever cannibalized its corpora and supplied it with evidence in turn. In Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, as Leggott notes, goldenrod finds itself “entangled with one of the bind-weeds, Ipomoea pandurata.” 40 Bind-weed, as we have seen, also makes its appearance in Thanks to the Dictionary, in the guise of the definition for convolvulus: “[L. bind-weed]: a twining herb with large showy trumpet flowers.” Moreover, a description of the very species of plant worms its way through the penultimate chapter as well, inserting language from a botany text into the material Zukofsky has other wise largely taken, as we have seen, from page 112 of Funk & Wagnalls (“battalion” to “bawty”): There was a flower of the convolvulaceae. . . . And the flower was for, and of all of them: one sepal of the calyx. . . . They together were gamosepalous. And David said,—When it is this way, the corolla above up, gamopetalous, is indistinguishable, and I am perianth. . . . And they were beginning to stand apart one calyx, but four leaves, missing a fifth.41 The plant described here, bind-weed, otherwise known as morning-glory, explains the other interpolation of extraneous material in this convoluted chapter: the description of a glorious morning paraphrasing II Samuel 23:4, “it was that one morning springing shining out of the earth after rain.” 42 With its blooming, rain-fed flowers each equated with members

Funk & Wagnalls / Louis Zukofsky / 47

of the house of David, and its anatomy described as “beginning to stand apart” and “missing,” the convolvulus that twines throughout Thanks to the Dictionary ultimately blooms into a figure for intimate loss and separation. Accordingly, it would have underscored the poignant subtext of the letter Zukofsky would receive, years later, from Lorine Niedecker, from whom he had been separated, following the abortion of their child. Niedecker, one could assume, might well have remembered the figure of the convolvulus; she been present in Zukofsky’s apartment while he composed Thanks to the Dictionary, and she read it closely, writing out seventeen pages of selected passages longhand and eventually preparing the typescript from his complete manuscript.43 On April 25, 1949, she wrote: Dear Zu: . . . I mailed [Paul] wild flower books for your vacation. . . . Wish I could talk with him. I’d tell him about the jewel weed that grows here and Joe Pye way up over your head by a little creek and we cut it in the fall and take it in the house for winter bouquet. And bindweed (morning glory) that I have to pull off the little trees and plants to keep them from being choked out and in a week’s time they grow right back there again . . . However fraught the symbol of the bind-weed might have been for the two in their correspondence, it takes on a special import within Zukofsky’s text as well. Twining the definition of a twining plant through the voluble narrative and grafting the language of his external sources from botany to the dictionary’s structure and the family story of David, Zukofsky lays the ground for the metatextual circuit completed in the nineteenth chapter of Thanks to the Dictionary. With a sentence that enacts the splicing transplant it describes, he allows that the flora in question may ultimately—like morning-glory—be weeds: “There are scions to graft. They are, nevertheless, not ineradicable, if they prove unpleasant.” 44 Whether the vocabulary suggests textual elision and edited erasure, or patrimony and abortion, the cold tone of the distanced third person— the very mode of the dictionary’s definitive authority—should give the reader pause.

2 /

Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” I think I know every dot in your Gazes Dictionary.

—Yehoash, “Flowers and Thorns”

As we saw in the previous chapter, Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary is indebted to the particular dictionary consulted during its composition. As we will see in this chapter, his poem “A” also owes a debt of gratitude to the dictionary as well, on account of both direct borrowings as well as its model of lexical elaboration and looping, networked recursivity. In the very opening lines of Thanks to the Dictionary Zukofsky acknowledges as much. Following an epigraph implicitly evoking the unique resilience of writers in the face of adversity, the “Preface” to Thanks opens: “ ‘A’. Quoting the dictionary. Remembering my sawhorses.”1 Conflating the title of his long poem, the first half of which had been recently published together in one volume, with the first entry in the dictionary, the opening sentence gestures simultaneously toward two books, which the reader might productively place side by side. Pointing in one direction, the quotation marks seem to signal the citation from the dictionary described by the second sentence, in other words, an entry denoting “the first letter in the English alphabet; also, its sound. . . .” But Zukofsky was always insistent that the proper title of his own poem include those marks, mimicking the ubiquitous marketing of Ehler’s coffee in the late 1920s in Zukofsky’s New York neighborhood (at the very moment he was contemplating the cultural significance of coffee and its relation to Bach) (Figure 3).2 So pointing in the other direction, the quotation marks seem to indicate the poem, which the third sentence of the book corroborates with a recollection of the sawbucks of “A”-7:3 “A”, like Thanks, quotes from the dictionary, but the first quote from the dictionary—and the first quote from Thanks—returns “A.”

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Figur e 3. 1927 Ehlers Grade “A” Coffee print advertisement, the likely source of Louis Zukofsky’s title “A” (begun 1928, first installment published 1932).

One can begin to see this reciprocal interplay between reference work and literary text in the definition of the poetics under which “A” would be written. In the essay “An Objective,” Louis Zukofsky sets forth the terms of his modernist poetics in the language of the dictionary; the text opens with an italicized paragraph: An Objective (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus. That which is aimed at. (Use extended to poetry)—Desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historical and contemporary particulars. Like the essay that follows, which synthesizes several of Zukofsky’s earlier articulations of poetic principles, the opening had been adapted from his programmatic, “Founding-and-Manifesto” style statement for a special issue of Poetry magazine. In that earlier statement, titled “Program: ‘Objectivists,’ 1931,” Zukofsky specified that the second denotation derived from “military use,” just as the first pertained to “optics.”4 With these parenthetical usage indicators of diatechnical domain and a syntax of clipped appositive phrases, the passages read as a pastiche of the conventions of lexicography. Indeed, the source seems easy to find; thanks to “Thanks to the Dictionary,” we know that Zukofsky would come to use a 1930 Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary, where the second entry for objective states: n. 1. The objective case. 2. Optics. The lens or lenses bringing the rays from an object to a focus. 3. An objective point: originally a military use; that which is aimed at.

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Following the lead of Zukofsky’s own glosses, subsequent critical accounts often refer to the statement as a generalized “optical definition” or one “drawn from optics,” with more specific impressions taking the referent to be a microscope, glass lens, or camera.5 But as Etel Adnan might have asked, on reading the “Program”: “doesn’t the act of looking at an object become also one of its definitions?” 6 And indeed, the reflections, it turns out, are more complicated in their distortions and refractions; Zukofsky’s ars poetica, on close inspection, reveals the palimpsestic smudge of fingerprints from another dictionary as well. The stage-setting epigraph to Zukofsky’s two essays originated in a distilled précis of his poetics in the sixth canto of his book-length poem “A”: My one voice. My other: is An objective—rays of the object brought to a focus. An objective—nature as creator—desire for what is objectively perfect Inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.7 Although the lenticular, “visual register” of the various passages would appear to be identical, the discrepancies of tense and syntax are telling.8 Stylistically, the language throughout Funk & Wagnalls emphasizes the predicate when discussing rays, which actively pass and meet, diverge and converge, give, emit, reflect and repel, shoot and dart, emanate, throw, and focus in its definitions. Passive constructions, in contrast, along with the locative preposition of departure from rather than of, are the hallmarks of a different reference book.9 The underlying style of the passage from “A”-6 reflects not Funk & Wagnalls, but of the dictionary Zukofsky mentions in a letter to John Quinn in the winter of 1934: a 1917 Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.10 There, ocular pathologies are defined as “the condition of a lens or of the eye in which the rays of light from one point are brought to a single focal point on the retina” (“stigmatism”); “a defect of the eye or of a lens in consequence of which rays from one point are not brought to a single focal point” (“astigmatism”); and “Med. A condition of the eye in which the rays from distant objects are brought to a focus before reaching the ret ina; nearsightedness” (“myopia”). Zukofsky is drawing from optics, to be sure, but his dictionary language leads more to organic physiology than laboratory equipment, suggesting individual frailty more than precisionground machine perfection. Moreover, by looking past the presumption of optical prostheses, we can begin to see the logic behind the strangely insistent, anaphoric, and agrammatical phrases “My one voice. My other,”

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in which the sequence m-y-o- continues the unwritten but obliquely defined “myopia.” With a similarly indirect literalism, the myope himself appears in “A”-9 as one of the agents that generates value predicated on labor.11 With the optical language of focal points and (pre)vision (a “prevision / of surplus value” at the “foci of production”), the poem describes a point at which our wills “have effected value” “through close eye.” As in the “squinting cat eyes” of an academic poet delineated in the previous canto, “close eye” suggests a nearsighted peering, but it also points to the closed eye that is the literal translation of the word’s Greek etymology: myo- (from μύειν, myein, to close or to shut) + -ops (from -ωψ, the combinative form denoting an ocular condition, from ὤπ-, eye).12 Taking a step back, we can see that the recognition of myopia behind Zukofsky’s lines is itself a myopic reading. One must read quite closely— peering so near that one focuses below the level of the word—in order to register the closeness with which one must read. “A”, at this point, thus constructs a sort of allegory engine: “a small (or large) machine made out of words” that functions in order to manufacture its own formal figuration.13 With a similar self-allegorization of the poem’s own poetics, “A” elsewhere engineers a tension between two distinct perspectives: one, “farsighted / Not sure sense,” at a hypermetropic distance sufficient to perceive the large-scale patterns that emerge from the structure of the text, and the other close (eye) enough to isolate the written particulars.14 Consider, for example, the fourth canto, which recalls the main character of Thanks to the Dictionary. With a nod to King David’s guilty distress at the Ark of the Covenant’s humble housing, Zukofsky voices a lament for tradition: Dead loved stones of our Temple walls, Ripped up pebble-stones of our tessellation, Split cedar chest harbouring our Law Even the Death has gone out of us—we are void.15 The theme—along with the particular vocabulary of walls, pebbles, tessellation, and void—return a few pages later, in “A”-6: tessellation as sands of the sea, The Speech no longer spoken and not even a Wall to worship, Holy, laundered into a blank and washed over Tradition’s pebbles, the mouth full, The fugue a music heap, only by the name’s grace music (Fate—fate—fate—void . . .)16

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Given the other echoes between the passages, the musical terms elicit the tone in the earlier “stones,” just as the later littoral scene brings out the nautical sense of harbor. Indeed, even “wall” and “law,” near palindromes, seem to mirror one another in the reflected sections (“good laws uphold good walls,” Zukofsky will write in “A”-22).17 Indeed, Zukofsky may be punning on the French caillou (stone or pebble) in the nearby phrase “Callous stone.” In all events, the extinct speech in question would seem to be Classical Hebrew, a language thought by some to be uniquely adequate to sacred scriptures, in contrast to the Yiddish spoken by a younger generation. Using the Anglicized form of zhargon, a once common synonym for “Yiddish,” an intervening passage picks up the ventriloquizing decrial of a conservative orthodoxy against the secular vernacular: “we had a speech, our children have evolved a jargon.”18 Underscoring the insult, the voice continues: “Our own children have passed over to the ostracized, / They assail us— / ‘Religious, snarling monsters’— / And have mouthed a jargon.”19 Demarcating the generational divide from the other side, with an echo of the opening of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and a pun on the imprecating sense of “curse,” one line recalls: “my father’s precursors / Set masts in dinghies, chanted the speech,” and when the voice of that older generation rebukes “you write a strange speech,” Zukofsky tersely specifies: “This.”20 The self-referential demonstrative aligns the avowedly modernist, “objectivist” language of the poem itself with the vitality of the Yiddish it implicitly endorses by incorporating Zukofsky’s own English translations of verses by Solomon Bloomgarden, who (writing under the nom de plume Yehoash) had in turn translated classical Hebrew into the strangely modern-sounding speech of Yiddish.21 At the same time, while the collision of language games is clear, the particular languages are not ultimately specified, and when the lament is reiterated in the line “speech bewailing a wall,” Zukofsky opens the possibility of a third term that would set the modern Hebrew promulgated by Jewish settlers in the Palestine (over and against the holy language of biblical Hebrew) in an analogous relation to Yiddish (over and against Hebrew) and the modernist jargon of his difficult and restive poem (over and against the comforting familiarities of Edwardian verse).22 The hamfisted, bluntly punning inscription of the Wailing Wall in the context of that speech upholds the association.23 Zukofsky’s composition of these lines is exactly contemporaneous with the moment at which tensions in Palestine were coming to a head over the rights and practices in the vicinity of the section of the Western retaining wall known variously as the Buraq wall, Kotel, al-Mabka, or Wailing Wall. Bringing the symbolic object to a focus, events there took a “serious turn” in July 1929—just as “A”-4

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was being drafted.24 An incident on Yom Kippur 1928 had “directed attention to the historic significance of the Wall and its place in Jewish historical memory” as the foremost symbol of a lost age of splendor now reduced to a heap.25 The ventriloquized voice in “A” thus presents a lament en abîme: deploring the loss of the site of deploring loss. But the wall was again a flashpoint for the intersection of religious, racial, colonial, and political conflicts in the summer of 1929, as riots associated with the landmark spread. Reported widely, the “Wailing Wall clashes” mobilized American Zionists to organize, fundraise, and march in protest (including tens of thousands in Manhattan in late August of that year).26 The reaction, furthermore, was widespread; even though the structure was of dubious historical or dogmatic status to those who were not confirmed hierophants, the tensions at the intersection of public and private space around the rampart “transformed the Wall into a symbol of the Zionist struggle, even for secular Jews.”27 The crisis cathected to the contested section of the Western Wall in 1929 was precipitated by the breaching of a nearby cross-wall, which had been broken open in order to transform what had previously been an isolated cul-de-sac into a narrow through-street.28 Ironically, the situation was further exacerbated by another sort of wall removal: a screen or portable partition meant to separate male and female worshippers at the wall, which was confiscated by a local constable. For the collective psychology, the small-scale demolition of proxy and proximate walls may have prefigured a larger threat of the precarity of the venerated section of the Western wall itself and the proleptic specter of its natural or engineered collapse. In the version of “A”-2 first published in Poetry magazine, Zukofsky, revealingly, dwells on “the desire to break the cross-walls of the alleys.”29 Figuring walls not as permanent sites of impasse, but rather as impermanent and permeable, like the portable screen or the broaching revision of “blind alleys,” Zukofsky imagines those “cross-walls like locks of canal (never end-walls) / rising, replacing.”30 Against the contemporaneous topical politics of the summer of the 1929, the question of blind alleys and cross-walls in the first version of “A” read as decidedly more pointed and fraught political and religious references than they might at first glance seem today. More generally, as Zukofsky’s fluidly mobile architectures remind us, a wall can be made to ‘communicate,’ in the sense of the term as it is used in structural-design, by removing certain of its stones or beams.31 Communication, in this sense, is predicated on absence, and the impasse of aporia is thwarted by the space opened between the positive elements of the structure. The same is true for passages in Zukofsky’s poem as well.

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Triangulating the two parallel sections from “A”-4 and “A”-6 quoted above, the identical constellation of pebbles, walls, and law return in a set of lines in “A”-22: “weird’s lettered pebble / a pan plinth table of / law.”32 The “wall” here has been removed and replaced with the vocabulary of its structural parts: “pan,” “plinth,” and “table.” A “plinth,” as the Century Dictionary defines it, is “the flat square moulding or table” of an architectural member, such as the “band at the base of a wall, upon which the wall rests.” The Chambers Cyclopaedia—the third dictionary quoted by Zukofsky and the one that he would come to favor over time—corroborates the association of “plinth” with “table” as the part of a wall: “The plinth is . . . that flat square table under the mouldings.” Or as the Oxford English Dictionary expands: “the projecting part of the wall of a building, immediately above the ground,” as well as the “projecting course of blocks or bricks in a wall above ground level, by which the part of the wall above is made to be set back in relation to the part below.” Later in this chapter we will return to the importance of the word “course”; for now I want to keep to the architectural context in which a “pan” would denote “a horizontal beam fastened on or in a wall to support joists or rafters; a wall plate.”33 The communicative, structural space created by an absent term—what we might designate as significance “made / with an assemblage of naught”—also explains the persistent coupling of pebbles and law in Zukofsky’s lines.34 The other wise inexplicable pairing orbits a cryptic connection in the homophonic pair “mosaic” and “Mosaic”: the art of “tessellation” and the commandments of Moses.35 Etymologically, the words are completely unrelated, but the dictionary’s structure makes them proximate lemmata, “bringing together facts / which appearances separate,” as “A” describes its own poetics.36 The proper name, via Latin from the Greek Μωσῆς, was transliterated from what was most likely the Hebrew assimilation of an Egyptian word. The common noun, on the other hand, derives from the Greek μουσεῖον, “museion,” a place sacred to the Muses, employed perhaps because the walls of such shrines were decorated with distinctive stone pattern-work; the word thus shares its roots with “museum” and “music.” Indeed, the Old French form musique denoted gilt mosaic work, an association Zukofsky seems to hint at with the lines “by the name’s grace music” and “a sound akin to mosaic.”37 Despite their disparate origins, Zukofsky’s language of fracture (“ripped,” “split,” “heap”) slyly signals at the witty bridge between the homophones in their shared association with lapidary clastics: when Moses breaks the “table[s] / of law,” at the foot of the hill beneath the golden calf, he would have created, one can only imagine, a sort of abstract chance mosaic against the field of the ground.38 Moses thus sets the precedent for a frag-

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mented text—the very mode Zukofsky’s post-Poundian modernism will rediscover. Additionally, the name Moses completes the circuit with a further historical catenation: The small stones and pebbles of the topmost pan plinth of the Wailing Wall were widely thought to have been added by Sir Moses Montefiore. Pursuing such historic particulars in parallel with the chance, material particulars of the signifier, “the early sections of ‘A’ seek to establish, and at times restore, connective tissue between facts that appear as unrelated, unaffiliated fragments” (as Ruth Jennison has characterized the poetics).39 However occult, the passage between “wall,” “law,” and “pebble” is forthright, and exact. Zukofsky claimed repeatedly, to various friends, that his poetry was always “direct,” “clear,” and “plain to the simplest,” and he may have been sincere—merely failing to divulge that the connections between words, however straightforward, were strictly implicit.40 Zukofsky confesses, late in “A”-18, to “the reticence of / all my omissions,” but those omissions, as we have seen, communicate nonetheless. “Reticence” derives, etymologically, from “tacit,” the same source as the musical “tacet,” which directs “that the voice or instrument is to be silent for a time.” 41 Refraining from naming the hinging term for the two themes run in counterpoint, the poet is silent (tacet) as the connecting logic remains “implied, understood, inferred” (tacit) in order to compose “this figure that speaks and yet is silent,” because that silence establishes a discernible pattern, a metrics: “Measure, tacit is.” 42 “The rest,” as Zukofsky puns on the musical notation with a Derridean sense of surplus and supplement, “is accessory.” 43 The measured, negative space between positive terms is both what makes a pattern a mosaic and what permits the pattern to take shape, to signify at all, in the first place (recall Kristeva’s use of the term, as quoted in the Introduction). The temporary silence of one voice allows the lines of the others to be heard. “Let two melodies run counter / The tacit always present and apposite,” Zukofsky enjoins, and he keeps his counsel; even though the word “mosaic” itself is omitted in these reticent passages— and although it does not appear in “A”, in these contexts—it influences and orders elements of the poem which do appear, repeatedly, together.44 Like “myopia,” it accounts for locutions that other wise seem to be arbitrary, agrammatical, needlessly strained, or even downright incomprehensible. Moreover, the reticent omissions in “A” not only communicate between the poem’s overt vocabulary, but they can also communicate something about their own communication. The operation of the mosaic once again establishes a sort of formal allegory—an instance of poesis mise-en-abîme within the very poem that it created and that creates the

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conditions for a reading of its own occluded announcement. Only a mosaic-like reading, that is, reveals the force of the absent word “mosaic.” Only a reading practice that connects the dots between isolated and discontinuous terms in order to assemble a composite patterning, as the viewer does when considering a mosaic, can read the word that is not other wise printed on the page. “Mosaic,” in short, figures the very poetic method that produces it as a figure in “A”. In accordance with objectivist principles, which foreground the “interrelations” and “connections” of words, “rather than denotations,” Zukofsky transforms “words and their ideation into structure,” and with the single word “mosaic,” “one is brought back,” as Zukofsky writes in his essay An Objective, “to the entirety of the single word which is in itself a relation, an implied metaphor, an arrangement, a harmony or a dissonance.” 45 Indeed, with a “sound akin to mosaic,” the musical terms are directly relevant to the working of the word’s metaphoric relations and poetic arrangements in “A”, where Zukofsky establishes an explicit analogy between the musical, the mosaical, and the poetic. “Mosaic” thus also operates in the poem as a sort of second-order figure for its own figuration; the text, that is, presents the reader with a mosaic that includes the word “mosaic” as one of its tesserae, those “small . . . pieces of marble, glass, tile, etc., of which a mosaic pavement or the like is composed.” 46 Good art, as Zukofsky would later define it, is “an art reached with scaled matter.” He refers elsewhere to his book on Shakespeare as a “mosaic of quotations,” and in “A” the linguistic mosaic with “mosaic” arranges words that serve as the pebbles with which they are also discursively associated.47 Zukofsky hints at that association with the line “weird’s lettered pebble,” which seems to play on the etymology of “weird,” in the sense of fate, or destiny, in the Anglo-Saxon word wurde (which took, at times, the weird orthography of word), but in “A”-24 he flatly asserts the equivalence: “Words are pebbles.” 48 Rephrasing the language of fracture— “ripped” and “split”—an intervening line evokes the etymology of “poet,” from the Ancient Greek ποητής, an early variant of ποιητής (poeietes), or “maker,” in order to again link poetic language to mosaic art: “Maker— hard breaks his syllable. / Tesserae Graces.” 49 Perhaps echoing the “Grace notes” that open “A”-6 with their “appoggiatura, suspension, / The small note with or without a stroke across the stem,” the lines also recall the earlier “tradition’s pebbles” and the heap of the fugue which is called “by the name’s grace music.”50 That section, as we saw, ends with the tripled “Fate—fate—fate—void,” perhaps suggesting the broken and stammered syllable that led Demosthenes to keep pebbles in his mouth as a cure for stuttering, but also giving literal form to the three Fates, or Weirds, who,

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according to Hesiod’s Theogony, were the children of the “void” (χάος, chaos). In Hesiod’s revised account of their ancestry, they are also paternal sisters to the Graces, and so take their place among the “familiar triads” of “supernatural sisters” that clustered associatively in my thology in a prefiguration of the Muses.51 “So many graces of fate” (as Wittgenstein might say).52 Indeed, grace and fate (“grace” and “change,” as they appear later) merge into a portmanteau of personification, a prosopoeia of prosopoeia: “a source over / what change and chance bring— / unfaced and seeing all faces . . . not limned by lines graces / face: the body figures” (so many fates of grace).53 That family resemblance brings us back to the law which unites these passages in “A”: their mother Themis, the personification of natural law and divine order, or according to some accounts Eunomia, one of the three Horae, and the god of lawful conduct, whose name means literally “law-abiding.” In Bottom, the “mosaic of quotations” on Shakespeare, Zukofsky summarizes his parallel models of ideal art, each of which achieves its affect with “scaled matter”: “in Shakespeare with words, in Bach with sounds . . . in Ravenna mosaic with small colored stones.”54 The fitted pattern of hard stones suggests a typically Zukofskian pun on “scale” in the sense of the fitted laminae of certain animal cladding, but in looking to Ravenna, Zukofsky follows Ezra Pound, who would return with reverent verses to the mosaics in the Mausoleum to Empress Aelia Galla Placidia as a site, like the Wailing Wall, signifying lost splendor.55 Pound writes, in “Canto XXI,” of how “gold fades in the gloom / Under the blue-black roof, Placidia’s,” before remarking “the tesserae of the floor, and the patterns” of mosaic. In “A”-17, Zukofsky echoes: “The gold that shines / in the dark / of Galla Placidia, / the gold in the / Round vault rug of stone that shows its pattern.” When imagining “a sound akin to mosaic,” however, Zukofsky is thinking specifically of the patterned stone mosaics in the nearby Byzantine Basilica of San Vitale. He describes a processional group, including the solemn, wine-bearing semi-deified Empress Theodora and her attendant retinue, depicted in one of the apsidal panels on the southern wall of the sanctuary as if their eyes are grace notes dotting a staff line. These “tesserae graces,” the pupils of the graceful “Empress Theodora and court ladies” composed so that they are seen “looking into and out of the frame,” might suggest the metrical cadence of a poetic line, with their “rhythm of eyes / almost along a line.” Indeed, words, in rhythmic lines, may be like lettered pebbles, but “A” also binds mosaics with poetics in a more indirect and inferable (that is, more mosaic-like) way as well. In an earlier passage in the same canto, Zukofsky famously defines his art in mathematical terms, proposing a poetry symbolically attributed to calculus and using

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the graphic symbol introduced by Leibniz, which rhymes visually with the f-hole of the poem’s opening “fiddles / playing Bach”: About my poetics— music ∫ speech An integral Lower limit speech Upper limit music56 “Calculus,” etymologically, brings us back to the art of tesserae and the mosaic, since the pebble is integral, as it were, to each; the Latin word derives from the diminutive of calx, a pebble. And with this philological pun we can begin to make out the larger pattern of the mosaic of which the word “mosaic” is a part. Not only is Johann Sebastian Bach aligned with mosaics in Zukofsky’s triumvirate apotheosis (“in Bach with sounds . . . in Ravenna mosaic with small colored stones”), but he is also aligned, elsewhere in the canto, explicitly with calculus: “Bach took from the folk / Their church for a calculus.”57 Zukofksy also associates Karl Marx with calculus; in “A”-8, he quotes from a May 20, 1865, letter to Engels in a fairly direct translation: one cannot always be writing (Das Kapital) I am doing some differential calculus— the derivative of x with respect to y— I have no patience to read anything else58 The letter to Engels from which this passage is drawn, opens, not coincidentally: “Ich arbeite jetzt wie ein Pferd [I am now working like a horse].”59 Elsewhere in the canto, Zukofsky reckons the value of labor in terms of the unit of “horsepower,” and he accordingly makes a Marxist adjustment to his translation of the neo-medieval motto of Spinoza quoted in the objectivist passage (“nature as creator,” following the Latin natura naturans): “Labor as creator / Labor as creature”; that laboring creature, naturally, is equine: “obvious as that horses eat oats.” 60 “A”, to be sure, is filled with equestrian references, but the association of the horse with labor recurs in passages that, tellingly, strain to usher Moses back into the text directly. In one of the two passages in which Moses is mentioned explicitly by name, Zukofsky goes out of his way to evoke the sort of class liberation appealed to elsewhere in Marx’s letters. The passage makes an eccentric rewriting of the hebdomadal Sabbath established in Exodus 34: 21: “six days thou shalt work, but on the seventh day thou shalt rest.”

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Zukofsky makes a pointed interpolation to this schedule: “Moses released the horse / For one day from his harness / So that a man might keep pace.” 61 Later in the canto, Moses is again invoked as the measure of ancient life lived at a pace far slower than the frenetic modern world. As the city rose and fell, every thing “too much” As Fred Allen chid “for the Moses model human body” The greatest networks, THE most executive Carbon monoxide, noise and bubble gum Zukofsky’s lines do indeed paraphrase a spiel from the popular radio comedian Fred Allen, who blamed his retirement on “the sad state of radio and the increasing confusion of television,” which were part of physically unbearable pressure of contemporary existence: This insane modern civilization is too much for the Moses Model human body. Here we have an organism that was designed for Biblical times. Yet we expect it to cope with artificial lighting, executive board meetings, the din of automobile horns and soap operas, carbon monoxide, cigar smoke and bubble gum. No wonder we’ve all got ulcers and high blood pressure.62 Elsewhere, in relation to the increasing pace of the machinery in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times and the “age of gears,” Zukofsky writes: “There exists in the labors of any valid artist the sadness of the horse plodding with blinkers and his direction is for all we don’t know filled with the difficulty of keeping a pace.” 63 The pace of the horse, as we do in fact know from a careful reading of Zukofsky’s oeuvre, is a recurrent concern; he distinguishes “the horse’s forever” from other eternities, refers to “word time” as “a voice bridled,” opines that “the pace of the regiment is fixed by the walk of the slowest horse,” and puns on temporality in 80 Flowers with “horsethyme.” 64 But the pace of the horse, moreover, constitutes one term in the nexus of equine equations that ties Bach to the other horses Zukofsky has gone out of his way to associate with Marx and Moses, both of whom are already concatenated to Bach via the mosaic calculus of the “stone that shows its pattern” among the scintillating, disjunctive, abstracting distractions of this lexical lapidarium. Early in the book, Zukofsky locates the origin of the Bach family’s musical inheritance in the plodding pace of a work horse turning a millwheel. Unlike the “clatter of a water mill” in the gardens of the Köthen Schloss that disturbed J. S. Bach later in life, the rhythm of his great-grandfather’s mill inaugurated the family’s legendarily musical strain:

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The courses we tide from. Tree of the Bach family Compiled by Sebastien himself. ‘ Veit Bach, a miller in Wechmar, Delighted most in his lute Which he brought to the mill And played while it was grinding. A pretty noise the pair must have made, Teaching him to keep time. But, apparently, that is how Music first came into our family!’ A carousel—Flour runs. Song drifts from the noises.65 Anticipating the “wooden horses” of “A”-7, the “carousel” here turns out to be a near anagram of “course,” of course, with its “-our” sequence recurring in “flour” and its etymology running directly from “runs” (Latin currere). A course, in the sense of running, is a word associated with horses, and although its original denotation, “a gallop on horseback,” is now obsolete, it would have been the sense contemporary with the young Bach.66 Zukofsky thus frames the story of the horse with the language of equestrian pacing, reinforcing the structural parallel with the synonymous verbs “tide” and “drifts.” His own personal association of Bach with horses, quoted in Poem beginning ‘The’, also takes the form of a family history, with the talismanic phrase remembered from childhood: “If horses could but sing Bach, mother!”67 Following the story recounted in “A”-4, in which Bach ultimately learned to sing from the pacing of a horse, horses singing Bach would then redouble the echo, returning to the origin and playing back by playing Bach in a carousel or mill-course round like the fiddles that open “A”. Later, Zukofsky figures the musical simile explicitly: “four horses like four notes.”68 Even without such insistence, or any family histories, the links are soundly overdetermined. On the one hand, horses are already incorporated into those violins, both figurally and literally: the distinctive side curves of the instrument are known as the saddles, and the bows used to play them, as “A” later specifies, are traditionally made of “horsehair silk” (“horsetails for bows,” as it later telegraphs).69 On the other hand, the young Zukofsky might well have been struck, in the ways recorded in Michel Leiris’s autobiographical glossaries of childhood misapprehensions and parapraxes, by two key homophonic pairs which blur the register between Bach’s music and equestrian pacing: the cantor and the canter, the chorale and the corral.70

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Such loops are amplified in “A”, where the verse plots the intersection of words “meeting by chance or design”: by the serendipitous proximities of the signifier and the motivated designs of semantics.71 A similar macaronic slippage, in the phrase “muzjik’s noises,” for instance, underscores the work, or labor, inherent in a ‘musical work’; transliterated from мужúк, the “muzjik” or muzhik sounds like music but designates the prerevolutionary Russian peasant laborer.72 The peasant setting as a site for quasi-musical noise recalls the degree to which Zukofsky understands the horse as a symbol for labor: working the Bach family mill, set free by Moses, and the very figure for hard labor invoked by Marx himself. Marx, indeed, is never far off when the music of Bach plays through the early movements of “A”. Insisting on “the material clef of the music,” in which the currency of bank notes and the recurrent rhythm of musical notes are understood in economic terms; the value of “each note worth / Thought the clatter of a water-mill drew.”73 More directly, just as Zukofsky imagines workers on May Day “singing Bach as they dug,” he recalls “Bach’s first / music” for the “Leipzig Cantorate” with a quotation from the opening line of BWV 75: “Die Elenden / sollen essen,” which sets the theme for the cantata as a whole: “the wretchedly poor shall eat.”74 Similarly, when a scene of youthful amorousness is sketched in “A”-5 with a number of scattered lines including “chorale, the kids in the loft,” that attic gallery hangs indeterminately between the church setting of a choir loft or organ loft and the milieu of the eclogue: a hayloft among pasture fields of clover and weed. But the word is also haunted by associations of impoverished labor.75 The other lofts mentioned in “A” are part of the mise-enscène of the lower Manhattan “textile district” where Zukofsky’s relatives walked to work “two miles six days a week / As operators pressers and finishers” in conditions not far removed from the notorious Triangle Waist Factory, which was housed in the ironically named Asch Building at the intersection of Washington Place East and Greene Streets.76 The logo for the shirtwaist garment company, displayed on a floor-high billboard that graced the corner of the building at the eighth floor, might have caught the attention of a seven-year old Zukofsky: a large majuscule letter A overlaid on a circle. The fire at the Triangle factory, a galvanizing event for socialist labor reform and American union organizing, is foreshadowed in “A” by an ominous parenthetical in the fifth canto, which introduces the other sense of “loft” used in the poem: “New York, tonight, the rat-lofts / light / with the light of a trefoil.”77 As a glance at the Asch Building’s neo-Renaissance façade confirms, the lowest pan plinth was indeed adorned with trefoil fleur-de-lis moldings decorating terracotta capitals. Further architectural

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details emerge when the phrase “rat lofts” recurs in “A”-13, following a visit to “The Old Firehouse Museum on Duane Street”: “We saw the rat lofts on Greene Street / The red iron-doored windows which never opened.”78 When the event comes to be explicitly narrated on the following page, the reference to the loft is accompanied by the initial thought of horses paced to a gallop: “Nothing ran to a fire as fast as a thoroughbred / The Triangle fire how many corpses / Hasn’t burnt them—fire traps, rat lofts / Iron-doored, boarded—at last—coming down.”79 The architecture of the Asch lofts, improperly communicating, stand as a cenotaph, a memorial for lamentation that links the fatal working conditions of the sweatshop and the infamous “night of economic extinction” to the bewailed walls of the lower east side.80 The sinister fire light of these rat-loft scenes, furthermore, shadows a refrain—“light lights in air”—that might other wise seem to merely turn back on itself with a lilting beauty befitting its slight, diaphanous description, or be taken as an allusion conflating two of Pound’s best-known motifs: his beseeching figure for sincere, hygienic legitimacy, “let the light pour,” and his vatic passage from “Canto III,” “Gods float in the azure air.”81 In Zukofsky’s verse, however, that airy light is associated not with hushed hieratic awe but with the dire plight of poor laborers and the desperate organizing of international socialism. The phrase appears first in “A”-7: “light lights in air where the dead reposed.”82 The doubled first word can be parsed either as an adjective followed by a plural noun or as a noun followed by a verb. In either case, the phrase then opens the following canto, with the same geminate pairing: “And of labor: / Light lights in air.” When Zukofsky takes it up again later in the section, along with the recurrent suggestions of burial and flame-red billowing, the context of the laboring poor within the history of communism and the May Day remembrance of the IWW are unequivocal: “This is May / The poor are veining the earth! / Light lights in air blossoms red. . . . To this end, Communists assembled in London / Sketched the Manifesto of the party itself.”83 The lofty refrain, with it flittering alliterative waft, repeats four more times at the end of the canto, suggesting a slogan or work song for the laborers who both march and have been interred in March (the Triangle fire took place on March 25, 1911): “Labor, light lights in air, on earth, in earth.” Recalling the etymology of loft explains the insistence on the lights being “in air” for this funerary motto and figure of labor’s fatal risk in the garment factory rat lofts of lower Manhattan: the word, as recorded in the Century Dictionary, comes from the Middle English for “the air.” So when, in “A”-18, composed decades later, one reads “intentions blaze light lights: an order out of hiatus joining a chain,” the intention of “blaze”

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is clear from the phrase’s earlier associations even if not indicated by its clipped immediate context.84 With that recognition of an earlier association, the line, moreover, enacts the very structure it describes, both naming and exemplifying a logical order of the chain of concatenated terms still legible out of the hiatus of the hundreds of intervening pages in which they, tacet, do not appear. The line might be taken as a description of Zukofsky’s mosaic, myopic, dictionary poetics itself. A blaze, of course, is also the white streak of the face of a horse. “A” proposes the diametric inverse of the Triangle Factory fire scene in the opening movements of the poem, where the red light, fire, and emergency exit are configured as signs of leisure, affluent entertainment, and escape. Unlike the garment workers, passively trapped behind illegally locked doors and with insufficient exits, the protagonist in “A”-1 is faced with too many exits as he leaves a performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Matthäus-Passion. Controlling a miniature fire in contrast to the unmanageable fire in the Asch building, he narrates his passage through a Mephistophelean atmosphere of cigarette smoke and automobile exhaust: “I lit a cigarette, and stepped free / Beyond the red light of the exit.” The poem specifies that this scene depicts a particular performance of the “Passion according to Matthew,” “Rendered at Carnegie Hall, / Nineteen twenty-eight, / Thursday evening, the fifth of April.” The concert, which actually took place, was a legendary performance, much anticipated and long remembered. Almost half a century later, one historian of the venue commends the standing-room-only concert as “an event which remains one of the great evenings in the history of the hall in the minds of many professionals.”85 Featuring Ossip Gabrilowitsch conducting the heavily cut and edited score from the piano and presiding over the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (along with a boys’ chorus, from the 5th Avenue St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church, and an organ) the concert was the occasion for one critic to reflect that “Bach is coming into his own with our modern audiences.”86 In the audience that night, in fact, was the twenty-four-year-old Zukofsky, who had invited William Carlos Williams to join him.87 “It was also [the first night of] Passover.”88 The insistence on a specific date underscores the poem’s argument for understanding even the most timeless monuments of art as particulars inextricable from their historical moments. It is “impossible to communicate anything but particulars—historic and contemporary,” as Zukofsky insists in “An Objective.” Here, he stages the juxtaposition of abstract and particular as the blunt contrast between the unsustainable hush of the interior of the concert hall and the noise of the modern city outside. Gabrilowitsch had imperiously demanded “a silent reception of the

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masterpiece,” “requesting that there be no applause at any point during or after the per formance” so as to “preserve the dignity and simplicity which prevail whenever Bach’s masterpiece is given in church.”89 As soon as the correct exits had been found, however, the concert goers are met with the “honking” of automobiles lining the curb outside.90 Only from the vantage of the poem’s later sections, however, can one understand the pointed contrast staged between the crowd’s exit from Carnegie Hall and the workers blocked from exiting the crowded upper floors of the Asch building. The settings for the concert scene and the garment factory are each hellish, but where the horrors of the Triangle fire speak for themselves, “A”-1 relies on literary allusions and irony. The canto ends, for instance, with a line from the chorus of the Matthäus-Passion: “Open, O fierce, flaming pit,” and following the exit from the concert, Zukofsky collages snippets of vacuous “chatter” from “the voices of those who had / been at the concert” to comical effect.91 The excited question “What do you think of our new Sherry-Netherland!” for one example of ironic juxtaposition, seems to be answered by the immediately following line: ‘Lovely soprano / Is that her mother? lovely lines / I admire her very much!”92 The starker juxtaposition, however, follows from the fact that April 1928 marked the one-year anniversary of the only New York fire to rival the Triangle blaze in notoriety: a spectacular conflagration that engulfed the lovely architectural lines of the Sherry-Netherland hotel then under construction at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Ninth Street, a tenminute walk from Carnegie Hall. The site of “the first real skyscraper fire” in twentieth-century New York, photographs and newsreel images featured a nighttime view of the tower with its flèche spire alight, looking nothing so much like the iconic image of the legendary lighthouse at Alexandria. According to the New York Times, which featured the fire on its front page the next day, “uncounted thousands—probably hundreds of thousands” watched the “stirring spectacle” of the “gorgeous pyrotechnic display,” which was visible from as far away as Long Island and New Jersey.93 As in the society scene sketched by Zukofsky, who notes the “black full dress of the audience” at Carnegie Hall, worn in adherence to the “plain dark dress” requested by Gabrilowitsch in advertisements for the concert, “many in the crowd were in opera hats and evening dress” as they gawked from the streets below the flaming Sherry-Netherland.94 The more affluent held “fire room parties” in suites in the Hotel Plaza, with picture-window views of the neighboring cater-corner blaze.95 On the Lower East Side, a high-rise fire meant mass fatalities (146 died in the Triangle incident); fifty blocks uptown it meant entertainment. Where confusion over exits in the Asch building would lead to panic and death,

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confusion over the exit in “A”-1 leads only to irritation and social awkwardness: “Not that exit, Sir!” admonishes an usher, who is rudely rejoined: “Devil! Which?” In the first published versions of these sections of “A”, that devil is named, the usher speaks in dialect, and Zukofsky explicitly identifies himself as the protagonist: “‘No suh! / Not past that exit, Zukofsky!’ / ‘Agh, Satan! Agh—gh!’ . . . ‘Not past that exit, Zukofsky!’ / ‘Devil! what!—?’ ”96 Another demon is also invoked by name in the original version, possessing the usher, whom he displaces. Where the book version reads “The usher faded through ‘Camel’ smoke,” the earlier journal publication reads: “Asmodeus fading to ‘Camel’ smoke.” The allusion makes a certain metaphoric sense, given that in the book of Tobit the wrathful Asmodeus is also ultimately dispelled by smoke, while the Hebrew transliteration, Ashmedai, clarifies the voiceless palato-alveolar sibilant that brings the pronunciation of the name closer to “usher” and, in the context of the burning cigarette, reinforces the same macaronic pun that obtains to “Yehoash” and the Asch building itself.97 But the other proper name in that line is also significant. On the one hand, the brand name of the cigarette signals the contemporary world. Having introduced mass-produced pre-rolled cigarettes in “scientifically sealed” hygienic cellophane packages, Camel, at the time, advertised itself as the brand of “modern” taste. One of George Oppen’s early poems from the late 1920s, for instance, centers on seeing “Three / Clear /Packages of / CAMELS.”98 The product thus rhymes conceptually with the poetry of Yehoash in contrast to the conservatism of an older generation, and it functions as a marker of modernity like the Wrigley’s brand gum also mentioned at several points in the opening sections of “A”.99 In the teens, in fact, Wrigley’s associated its gum with cigarettes, explaining to consumers that Wrigley’s steadies the nerves “the same way tobacco steadies” them. Indeed, just a few years earlier, Jean Toomer had similarly taken an advertisement for Wrigley’s as a sign of contemporary life, in which scientific hygiene vies with traditional ethics, by juxtaposing the admonishment to “eat it after every meal” because “It Does You Good” with an evangelical billboard. In “A”-2, Zukofsky follows Toomer’s apposition of the brand name with Christian symbolism, interpolating the sign for the gum between “Rose of the Passion” and “crosses of straw.” “Collage construction,” as Charles Altieri has argued, “enables images to become a form of thinking.”100 Furthermore, where Toomer’s poem provokes a simulated chewing motion in the reader’s mouth with the final lines “the crowd / jaws jesus / jawing gum,” Zukofsky’s line “outwriggling the wriggly Wrigley boys” works to similar effect.101 Like the honking automobiles idling outside the

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concert hall, tobacco smoke and gum were ready facets of the modern world’s atmosphere, summarized by Allen as the “din of automobile horns and soap operas, carbon monoxide, cigar smoke and bubble gum.” On the other hand, the brand-name of the cigarette also points back to the ancient Moses-model world. Equally motivated by the pun on ash, the burning tobacco leaves of the cigarette that opens “A”-5 mimic the anthocyanin smolder of autumn leaves where “the branches of trees air / comfort.”102 The grammar of those lines is as stilted as the pose of the smoker whom Zukofsky describes making a public display of leisure; the trees air (in the sense of ostentatiously parading) comfort in a manner parallel to the speaker’s urbane, affected pose with the cigarette. The first version of these verses clarifies the purposeful disposition and mannered hesitation: “in the next hand, a cigarette . . . held vertically, / Held—held obliquely.”103 But the stilted syntax also seems to be deformed by the pressures of a set of lines two pages earlier and the homophonic pull of “treasure” on “trees air.”104 Where “A”-5 sets an arboreal scene of autumn sunset—from “Leaves, autumn” to “trees showing sunlight”—“A”-4 enjoins: “flames in last redness, allow me of your light.” And parallel to the burning leaf-edge in “A”-5, “A”-4 positions the quote “Wider is the ash around the fire” so that it negotiates between the lines “Of man and tree and sand” and “Treasures turned to sand.” The terms will coalesce again late in the poem, with “smoke from a heap of leaves burning / Around a tree trunk,” but even without that smoke we can see the logic that leads to smoking.105 Trees and sand, of course, are the setting of the iconic Camel cigarette package, which features Egyptian pyramids and date palms amid desert sands. Moreover, the “Camel” smoker who dispels Asmodeus in “A” does so like the camel itself, renowned for its consputing expectoration, in its native habitat: “as one who . . . spits across the sand dunes . . . I lit a cigarette.” (A “spit,” of course, is itself also a sandy landform). While the burning leaves turn to ash, the treasure of the “precious,” “costlier,” “more expensive” tobacco returns to sand: the topography of the desert landscape recreated in the sands of an ash tray—a miniature Sahara, home to the Camel once again.106 After the asmodean usher fades through “Camel” smoke, “the next person seen thru it” is a briefly glimpsed eleemosynary: “Greasy, solicitous, eyes smiling minutes after, / A tramp’s face, / Lips looking out of a beard, / Hips looking out of ripped trousers.” We are asked to speculate on the indecency of the view: the risk of the bum of the bum peeking through in an inverted version of the scene of sailors’ “blue trouser seats . . . sticking thru portholes” in “A”-2 (The sailors’ action suggests an alternate meaning for “moon” later in the canto, perhaps hinted at by the proximity of “gibe,” rather than “jibe,” and “gibbous”).107 There, Ricky is

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the butt of their taunting, here the beggar may well ask to bum a (cigarette) butt—two words that as anatomical euphemisms will recur as doubled refrains in “A”-7.108 In all events, the insistent language of vision in the post-concert street scene, in which the actions proper to facial features are displaced from one organ to another—the lips look while the eyes smile—underscores that the “Camel” here is “seen thru” the “eyes” of a needy person. Lest we fail to complete the punning phrase, the last term is also intimated by the mending called for by the mendicant’s pants; the trousers, ripped like the pebble stones of tessellation, are in want of a needle. Summoned in its very absence, the needle’s narrow aperture is all to the point in the parable from Matthew 19:24: “And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.” Once again, Zukofsky’s ocular poetics requires a reading as myopically close as one squinting to thread a needle.109 The subject of the biblical passage is apposite for Zukofsky’s thematic contrast of rich and poor in the early movements of “A”, where corporate boosters and industrialists boast of exploiting foreign slave labor.110 Among a number of heavy-handed puns, Zukofsky uses the language of the automobile’s mechanical operation (to shift, to idle) in order to underscore the disparity between a “country of state roads and automobiles,” and the “great number, idle, shiftless, disguised on streets” about whom “the Wobblies” are protesting. Those Wobblies, as it happens, may already have been alluded to, and the appearance of the camel again also provides “another kind of particular” in the historical context insisted on by Zukofsky’s poetics.111 Ron Silliman has argued for the significance of two serendipitous historical juxtapositions “reported on facing pages in the Friday [i.e., April 6, 1928] New York Times”: the Carnegie Hall Bach performance and the introduction of a new uniform for the Philadelphia Athletics baseball club, who retired “their old elephant logo for a large letter A.”112 On the very front page of that day’s Times, moreover, Zukofsky would also have read an article covering the “excitement at the Bronx Zoo.” The headline alone might have caught his attention, given how he had played with the phonetic pun on zoo in what Bob Perelman has described as “the horrible noise of his name,” writing, in the sections from “A” published in An “Objectivists’ Anthology, of the “zoo-zoo-kaw-kaw-of-the-sky.”113 The excitement, in any case, had come on April 5, when “the first camel born at the Zoo in many a month” was taking its inaugural public walk, on what one assumes were wobbly legs. For a writer attentive both to the politics of the Wobblies and to the poetics of onomastics, Zukofsky might well have been struck by the temporary name of the ruminant calf: “Wabbly.”114

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Whatever its ultimate origin, the camel brings us back to the Wailing Wall that also captured front page headlines in 1928.115 Due to the hyperbole of its metaphor, the biblical passage about the camel and the eye of a needle long ago became a intractable crux that “has occasioned much controversy among commentators,” as one early twentieth-century commentator frames the exegetical controversy. Following the fifth-century Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria, some understand “camel” as either a misprint, confusing κάμηλος (kamelos, camel) for κάμῑλον (kamilon, cable) or as a homophonic sailors’ terme de métier for the word meaning a thick rope or nautical line.116 The reading persists in notes to the Geneva Bible, and though often rejected or deprecated, this interpretation lingers even when others are preferred. Following Saint Anselm, an architectural explanation has been more frequently advanced; the same commentator adjudicates: “it seems pretty well established, that the term needle’s eye was frequently applied to a small door or wicket in an Eastern town.”117 But the reference was understood to be more specific still, locating the Camel as part of the network of structures that includes the Western Wall: At Jerusalem there was a certain gate, called the needle’s eye, through which a camel could not pass but upon its bended knees and after its burden had been taken off; and so the rich man should not be able to pass along the narrow way that leads to life till he had put off the burden of sin and of riches.118 “Camel” thus functions as one tessera in the mosaic that includes the communicating wall of the Mosaic tradition. Furthermore, like Moses himself, or the exit sign in “A”-1, they both allow one to make an exodus. Shakespeare understood the phrase in this architectural sense, as evinced in Richard II (v., 17): “It is as hard to come, as for a Cammell To threed the posterne of a small needles eie.” As Brian Cummings points out, Richard’s mix of metaphors conflates the “two alternative textual solutions”: “the ‘threed’ implies the ‘cable rope’ interpretation, while ‘posterne’ brings in the gate at Jerusalem.” The latter reading would have been available to renaissance audiences from Erasmus’ edition of the New Testament and the glosses that followed, such as: “there was a little Postern Gate in the Wall of Jerusalem, which was called foramen acûs, or the Needles eye, through which a Camel could not pass without Kneeling.”119 Zukofsky uses the metaphor in a similar sense of architectural constriction in “A”19, when he alludes to “Alighieri threading / a needle.”120 In Purgatorio, Dante describes the poets’ ascent through a narrow rocky crevice as threading through the eye of a needle: “che noi fossimo fuor di quella cruna [we were forth from out that needle’s eye].”121 In “A”-19, the thought

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seems to pick up a few stanzas later, with a pun on peer of an eye and the “pier” of the architectural needle: “the new / time of / forgetting pier / and lintel / for advantage / of being / slid thru / a door.”122 Zukofsky, however, had already introduced the phrase, obliquely, in the opening of “A”-5, with a narrow absence between the terms, so that the passage must be navigated by careful [th]reading: “Leaves, autumn. / Thread the middle. / A cigarette, / Leaf-edge, burning.”123 In “A”, the cigarette is a “Camel,” and in the metaphoric logic of the biblical parable the camel becomes the thread, which explains an other wise incomprehensible series of associations that—like “law” and “pebble”—structure language across hundreds of pages of Zukofsky’s poem.124 With a further displacement that first literalizes and then remetaphorizes the terms of the adage, the “eye” of the needle is blinded in a passage from “A”-10: “Sun and a bird busy— / between shutter and blind / Yellow thread.”125 If the camel is a thread, then the thread is a kind of animal, and “A”, accordingly, repeatedly pairs “thread” with the idea of an animal. In the first lines of “A”-5, the threaded middle of the cigarette and its leaves are figured as “an animate still life—night”; over a hundred pages later, in “A”-11, an “animal dies, thread gold stringing”; and in the penultimate canto, written decades after the “thread” of the “animate still life,” one finds a “thread animalcule.”126 The etymologies of “animal” and “animate” both lead back to the Latin anima, offering Zukofsky a possible pun on “air,” but the tension in Zukofsky’s phrasing trades more overtly on the opposition between the quick and the dead, living nature and nature morte, motion and stasis. Beginning in the seventeenth century, “animate” refined its more general sense of “giving life” or “quickening” to a more specific idea of putting into motion. The camel in motion, as we have seen, was what made Wabbly frontpage news, and the wobbly totter of his ambulatory display would have soon matured to the distinctive rocking pitch that gave its name to some of the most popular dance fads of the 1920s: Camel Hop, Camel Trot, and Camel Walk. If the Camel suggested a gate in Jerusalem, it also suggested a gait in Harlem. Among the more exaggerated and physical versions of the myriad vernacular ragtime dances that emerged from vaudeville, the camel steps were at the height of their popularity in the late 1920s. The dances, featuring up-tempo shuffles with erectly strutted torsos offsetting the shambling, languorous thrust of the hips rolling from the arcs of inwardly turned knees and toes, offered couples the opportunity for a scandalously extended and intimate embrace at the conclusion of the dance. As Rudolph Fisher enthused, in one of his short stories from 1925: “But such a dance! The camel walk. Everybody ‘cameling.’”127 Described by one

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contemporary as “a fit of rhythmic ague,” the step was deeply syncopated.128 The dance, in other words, was a central feature of the cultural moment featured at the end of “A”-6 as a counterpoint to Bach’s Kaffeekantate (BWV211), with the layout of the lines moving across the page like stepped dancers in syncopated chorus-line formation across the stage: “Connie’s Hot Chocolates,” A new Tanskin Revel The Hot Chocolate Drops and the Bon Bon Buddies dancing “off-time” for finale Before moving to Broadway, for a run at the Hudson Theatre in 1929, the “new Tanskin Revel” revue had originated as a cabaret at Connie’s Inn, a Harlem nightclub. Indeed, part of the comparison with Bach may draw on the fact that owner and impresario Conrad (“Connie”) Immerman was a German immigrant; in the passage that follows, Zukofsky emphasizes the grammatical and phonemic differences between English and German, explaining that Bach “wrote a Kaffee Cantata / Spelling it ‘Coffee’ as we do,” with the syntax of one of its refrains literally and unidiomatically translated: “Who had to three times daily / Coffee drink, is the German.”129 But Zukofsky also makes the connection explicit, culturally translating an eighteenth-century coffee as “a hot chocolate we’d say” and figuring the secular cantata, in contrast to the sacred subject of the Passion, as “a kind of ‘Hot Chocolates.’ ”130 With Louis Armstrong in the orchestra and soloing on trumpet for the entre’acte, Connie’s Hot Chocolates introduced Harry Brooks’ and Thomas (“Fats”) Waller’s “Black and Blue” (sung by Edith Wilson and Cab Calloway) and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” which would go on to have a stage life of its own. In all, the revue presented a fast-paced program that spanned twenty scenes of racially stereotyped regional vignettes, including skits and dances that would “make even a flapper blush,” as one Harlem society reporter put it.131 In the lines above, Zukofsky’s punctuation indicates not scare quotes but the title of show’s grand finale, with Margaret Simms leading the Bon Bon Buddies and company. In its lyrics, “Off-Time” names the very syncopation the score instructs its performers to simultaneously execute, with the lineation and lack of other punctuation encouraging a broken rhythm: “first hesitate then syncopate / while on the off-beat you punctuate.” Zukofsky himself, naming the song in his patently modernist poem, might have been heartened by the opening verse: “In these scientific days, / Everyone’s futuristic, / So you’ll find it always pays / When you are modernistic.”132

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If the syncopated gait of the dromedary lent itself to the popular imagination of modernistic Jazz Age New York, the movement of another kind of camel permits Zukofsky to expand the tessellated network that unexpectedly connects the musical and poetic pace of the horse to “blood,” “tide,” and “course.” Although they are not explicitly named in the passage, camels begin to explain the cryptic, clipped, paratactic opening to “A”-4: “(horses turning) / tide.” The referent of the couplet is clearer in the version of the passage as it first appeared in the 1932 An “Objectivists” Anthology: Carousel, Giant sparkler, boats, (Carousel) lights of the river, (Horses turning) tide turning, Lights that matter, Lights of the pier below.133 Viewed against the steady measure of “Lamposts from level of a light” and establishing a vertical motion in contrast to the horizontal arc of “lanterns swinging from horses,” the pier lights rise and fall with the motion of “camels” in the sense of the floats that buoy a pier or buffer anchored structures and vessels against the fluctuations of the tide. As one contemporaneous handbook defines the word: “the camels float between the ship and the dock, rising and falling with the tide.”134 By the end of the nineteenth century, the term had also come to stand, metonymically, for the floating piers themselves.135 “A”-11 opens with “river that must turn,” further emphasizing “the river’s turn,” and although the phrase might conceivably refer to the sweep of a river course, Zukofsky specifies the “tidal” natural of the “estuary” riparian landscapes in “A”.136 The scene of the tide turning at evening paints a punning allegory of the archaic translation of a quotation from the bass recitative of the Matthäus-Passion which opens “A”-3 (and returns at the end of “A”-6): “At eventide.”137 Like noon, a moment in which the sun—for an instant—neither falls nor rises, the instant of the turning tide (high or low) is the point of singularity between falling and rising; it is “even” as one might speak of an “even keel.” Once the connection between “horse” and “tide” has been established syntactically, with the carousel and its turning, the possible lexical relations proliferate in a turbulence

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of overdetermined eddies. Both are things that one can ride (“we have let it ride / with the tide,” as Zukofsky phrases it in “A”-12), and they are both also associated with “mount,” as well as “high”: one of the even points of the tide, “high” is also the call for a horse to turn (to the left, contrary to a right-turning “hup” command).138 “I walk the bridge,” the speaker in “A”-12 narrates, and “the water is all of my mind . . . the only word I think of is high.”139 “High,” we have seen, is the description of blood pressure in “A”, and blood is the term that triangulates the tide and the horse with music. Blood, in “A”, moves with a certain musical rhythm: “the blood’s motion” can be heard as the “blood in the ear,” where “the blood’s music repeats.”140 Specifically, exploiting the idiom by which both blood and tide are said to ebb (as in Walter Scott’s “The life-blood ebb in crimson tide”), Zukofsky describes the rhythmic, musical blood in tidal terms: the “blood’s ebb” is what makes “the blood’s tide like the music,” which is directly followed by the reiteration of the opening: “a round of fiddles playing / Without effort.”141 If the fiddles are tuning (to a concert pitch of “A”—whether the 440 Hz pitch of Zukofsky’s day or somewhere closer to 415 Hz for Bach), they are also turning, in their “round.” From the other direction, and at a further remove, “tide” itself turns back to blood, since one of its denotations is the “flow of blood”: “stream; current; flood; as, a tide of blood,” as the dictionary illustrates.142 “Flood tides,” a line in “A”21 reads, and one might note that the “tide” is the first definition of “flood” given by the Oxford English Dictionary.143 Additionally, the full rhyme between “flood” and “blood” underscores these other links between their connotations. One of those connotations follows from the word “pulse.” In “A”-12, recalling Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “the pulse of the tide of the sea,” Zukofsky figures the recursive repetition of “the sea fishing / Constantly fishing / Its own waters” as “the continuity” of “its pulse.”144 The word serves as a technical term in both composition and prosody “for a beat or stress in the rhythm of a verse or piece of music,” explaining Zukofsky’s cryptic announcement that “blood does not syllabicate pulse,” even as he elsewhere equates blood with “measures” and the “tone” of “heart beats.”145 Similarly, “pulse” and “impulse,” the opening subject of “A”-9, operate as the absent terms that structure the appositional couplet “man moved by his expectations / a beating heart”: to be moved (or “animated”) is the action of an impulse, while the heartbeat is the action that moves the perceptible arterial palpitations of the pulse. As “A”-22 exposits: “the blood’s motion—arteries to / veins and back to the / heart.”146 The “horse race” that follows in the sentence is a good reminder that both horses and pulses are said to race, just as course points both to horse and to blood:

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“to move with speed; race; as, the blood courses through the veins” (as Webster’s illustrates the usage). That circulatory system, in fact, is the very heart, as it were, of the model of poetic communication posited in “An Objective,” where “historic and contemporary particulars” include “ human beings as things their instrumentalities of capillaries and veins binding up and bound up with events as contingencies.”147 “Pulse,” moreover, is also one of the key terms in Zukofsky’s equine lexicon.148 In the horsethyme poem of 80 Flowers, for instance, one line reads “sorrow of harness pulses pent,” recalling the verses from “A”-12 that immediately precede the announcement of Zukofsky’s calculus poetics of the integral: “You remember / The houses where we were born / the first horse pulsed.”149 The usage is corroborated by the fact that idiomatically, horses are said to “have blood.”150 So while some have read the figure of the horse in “A” as a “simple shorthand for the poet himself,” the identification can be arrived at by induction.151 Poetics, in “A”, combines the continuity of the tidal pulse, which works “constantly,” and the patience Zukofsky identifies with the horse: “Poetics. With constancy.”152 With this lexical sphygmology, the text elaborates a series of phrases that follow something like a transitive property of poetry, and indeed we might have arrived at the proof from a more deductive method: horses, for Zukofsky are associated with a temporal pulse, pulse equates with blood, blood in “A” is inextricably entwined with music, music with tide, and therefore (confirming the same inductive hunch suggested by the particulars of “A”4) tide with horses. If elsewhere Zukofsky has quoted from the dictionary, here we can see him adopt and adapt the logic of the dictionary’s own structure for his poetic ends. Not only does the dictionary aggregate various denotations under a single lemma—as when “camel” indicates a North African quadruped, a jazz dance, a gate in Jerusalem, a brand of cigarette, and an element of marine architecture—but in defining each denotation the dictionary also points to other key words, which appear as their own lemmata, which in turn point to yet other terms, in an exfoliating network that knots an expanding net of nodes which might directly connect several—but not all—of the terms in an horizontal, dehierarchized series. The dictionary’s fundamental mode of definition, in short, constructs the very sort of transitive series exploited by Zukofsky to compose a poem that at any given line is oblique and incomplete but that when read as a whole reveals its most cryptically opaque phrases to be fully explained by the network as a whole. As we will see in the following chapter, when George Oppen understands that two distant Manhattan streets may be related by both being stops along a particular subway line, even though

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they are not contiguous stops, Zukofsky asks his reader to recognize that two words may be related as part of a series even though the intervening terms may not be explicitly stated. This, for Zukofsky, is part of what defines poetic “sincerity,” in which “shapes appear concomitants of word combinations.”153 A poem, for Zukofsky, constituted the context in which such shapes emerge from “words more variable than variables, and used outside as well as within the contexts with communicative reference.”154 By following such concatenations, the reader able to move between communicative reference and material similarity—between the logics of the signified and the signifier, the two axes that structure the form and the purpose of the dictionary itself—can see “what stirs in / his tracing a particular line / Tracing of lines / Meeting by chance or design.”155 “Stirs,” in fact, provides its own prime example: a word idiomatically associated with blood, which seems to be one of “lines meeting” in Zukofsky’s lineated meditation on family and literary ancestries. And perhaps further, liquid stirred up opens a pun on the equestrian accouterment of a stirrup. As Barry Ahearn remarks about the punning force of “words that do not appear” in a given movement of the poem but nonetheless inflect it: “they seem to be part of a constellation of shadowwords influencing the tide of the movement”—or, as we might invert the syntax with a Hegelian twist, given the context: the movement of the tide. The turn of the tide, in either direction, relates Zukofsky’s theme to his verse form (verse, ultimately, from the Latin vertĕre: “to turn,” picking up on the prosodic pun in the free-verse opening to “A”-3: “No meter turns”), but that turning also structures a series of terms that relate circular motion and sound to the horses and the tide. In “Thanks to the Dictionary,” recall, Zukofsky had already noted the term for a horse moving “partially sideways round a circular tread,” and at the beginning of “A”4, the carousel of wooden horses turns (one presumes) to a mechanical music roll accompaniment, and by the end of the canto, as we have seen, the sound of the mill wheel turned by the horse brings music to the Bach family. In that closing passage of “A”-4, with its explicit return to the “carousel” and the topic of sound, Zukofsky situates the trudging, circling horse in the proximity of “drift” and “tide.” The lute accompanying the rhythm of the elder Bach’s horse-powered mill establishes a contrast to the “clatter” that Zukofsky repeatedly employs to describe the sound of the watermill wheel that later troubled Johann Bach, a word he also uses to recall the “half-equestrian clatter of waves” in “A”-2, where “The sea grinds the half hours,” operating emolliently like Bach’s family mill and the “organ grinders” that sound in a later canto.156 Similarly, in “A”-13, poetry (“verse”), circular motion and the thunderous reverberating sound

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of the surf (“roll”), the movement of the horse (“gambol”: “an energetic or exaggerated leap or bound made by a horse”), and tidal waters all come together again with a declaration about those “who banter their verse / Droll roll and gambol of a playful . . . sea.”157 The themes again converge in the lines “Touched a wall of washed / Stones by the dock / Where a wood sang once. / Midsummer’s thorns and a lantern, / A dancing lamp at night . . . / Patience. / Truest horse.”158 The final lines reiterate the plodding stretch of the earlier lines “For Centuries / As true as truest horse.”159 Washed wood and horses will return in “A”-7 with a chiasmic pun on “hose” and “muzzle”: “nozzle of horse, washed plank.”160 The lines, on their own, are suggestive; the washed stone may expand on the ebb embedded in “pebble,” and at a further remove “sang” may pun on the French for “blood” (sang), as in the William Carlos Williams’s line “it’s a strange blood sings under some skin.”161 When the rider in “A”-21 counts on “the horse’s will / to be ridden,” Zukofsky lets slip the term that underwrites the logic of the earlier passages: “rote, fiddle / like noise of the surf ” and “rote tone” (so sonically close to a rote turn).162 As Webster’s confirms, “rote” not only derives from the rotating motion of a wheel (Latin rota) but also denotes “the noise produced by the surf on the shore”—the “clatter of waves,” as Zukofsky phrases it—as well as one of several medieval stringed instruments thought to be the ancestor of the fiddle, and the mechanical, unthinking, repetitious manner with which the carousel horses rise and fall as they rotate.163 The latter word, in fact, perhaps derives from the postclassical Latin rota, a musical composition in the form of a round, which led in turn to “a fixed or customary course.” Or, as Zukofsky puts it, recalling the drift of song from the noise of the millwheel: “the courses we tide from.” Indeed, given the semantic weight borne by the earlier “plinth,” one might recall that its synonym, “course,” is also found in the proper compound “plinth course” (“a projecting line of masonry immediately above ground level).”164 As with “flood” and “blood,” the rhyme of “course” and “horse”—both of which derive from the same etymological origin—draws attention to connections found in the dictionary’s repository of linguistic particulars, with its carefully calibrated denotations and historical lineages. “The courses we tide from,” becomes a refrain in “A”-5 before returning with a condensed variation in “A”-12, distilled simply to “courses tide.” The phrase inverts the expected syntax, since tides might said to course (“to move with speed”), but course and tide are also synonyms; Samuel Johnson’s frequently repeated gloss on “the tide of times” in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, gives “the course of times.”165 Similarly, one

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definition of a “course” is a “turn,” as in a verse, and the word specifically denotes the path of a horse, as well as the bartering or trading of horses.166 Even without returning to the stone architecture of the docks, where as we have seen a table denotes the “projecting course of blocks or bricks in a wall above ground level,” the precession is vertiginous. The couplet in “A”-4 is a course describing the course of a course coursing: “(Horses turning) / tide turning.” “A”, in this way, constructs “an assemblage of all possible positions,” pursuing what Zukofsky would identify as poetic literalization: “the art of furthering the same theme over and over and multiplying reflecting hallucinations of it to make it literal.”167 Ultimately, the attentive reader of “A” comes to see the formal, structural underpinnings of the poem’s very final thematic statement: “I feel / that every thing / is moving / and mixing / with every thing else.”168 The notorious difficulty of Zukofsky’s poetry may be less a matter of hermeticism than scale. What appears at the level of the line or phrase to be an abstruse, gnomic fragment reveals the coherence of its logic when read at a sufficient distance to perceive how the text has been “furthering the same theme over and over.”169 A given word may be abstruse, but the words that define it can all be defined, and ultimately comprehended, in turn. Course, blood, music, tide, horse—“the horse sees he is repeating” as the themes are furthered, over and over.170 One of the first reviews of “A” complained that it evinced “no coherence, no organization,” but that is true only if one is looking for thematic, narrative cohesion.171 Parataxis tells another story. Even if a “horse’s no stone,” they both serve as tesserae in the lexical pattern of “A”, negotiating between the ridden and the written, rote and wrote.172 Indeed, the dictionary reminds us that a “course” refers to a set of strings tuned in unison—the integrated, “one voice” that Zukofsky takes as the musical model for his mosaical poem, which assembles “one song / of many voices.”173 To hear the course, rather than the parts, is analogous to seeing the gestalt pattern of the mosaic as a whole, rather than the individual pebbles, which on their own appear disconnected, cryptic, and unmotivated. In the networks of definition and etymological lineage established in the dictionary, however, they begin to tell a coherent story. Even without contiguity, tesserae relate to each other in a metonymic way without referring to each other in a discursive way. “Each word is significant,” as Sandra Stanley phrases it, “even though the word may not signify a given meaning.”174 Or, to misquote a William Carlos Williams poem that Zukofsky knew well: “The horse moves independently, without reference.”175

3 /

The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series Rīm [Old High German]: series, sequence, number. Rim [pronounced 〈rīme〉]: an expression of thought in verse.

Georges Bataille, who authored a series of discrete entries in a “dictionnaire critique [critical dictionary]” for the journal Documents (1929–30), and who took part in the surrealist Encyclopédie da Costa (1947–49), tried to reimagine a reference work capable of declassifying, rather than taxonomizing, of disorganizing rather than ordering—one that could render senseless rather than signify narrowly, and that would negate rather than posit. When it came time to define his key critical term, l’informe, accordingly, he slyly gave its definition not from a dictionary, but in the form of a certain kind of dictionary: INFORME—Un dictionnaire commencerait à partir du moment où il ne donnerait plus le sense mais le besognes des mots FORMLESS—a dictionary would begin the moment it no longer gave the meaning of words, but their labors.1 The necessary conditions for such a dictionnaire de l’informe would be the operation of words rather than their signification. But if not denotation, what task might the dictionary’s words undertake? George Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series, published five years after Bataille staged his provocative lexicographical mise-en-abîme, offers an answer. William Carlos Williams, writing about Discrete Series, proposes one model for the toil of words. Williams argues that the significance of a poem cannot be found in its message, which he says would be redundant; he seems to reason that a poem which means simply what its words mean

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would be a kind of tautology.2 Instead, he proposes that the significance of a poem can be discovered if one is able to discern its operation as a mechanism; precisely how its words work reveal what the poem means. Construing the operation of words as interlocking parts of a poetic apparatus would allow Williams, a decade later, to famously define the poem as “small (or large) machine made out of words.”3 Intrinsic and economical, with a “physical more than a literary character,” Williams’s poetic machine is more a matter of function than style.4 The textual engine collapses the message of the poem into its form by making the self-evident structure of the machine—the logical, if opaque, movement of its parts— congruent with its meaning. A text’s “existence as a poem,” he declares in the essay on Discrete Series, “is of first importance, a technical matter, as with all facts, compelling the recognition of a mechanical structure.”5 He continues: It is the acceptable fact of a poem as a mechanism that is proof of its meaning and this is as technical a matter as in the case of any other machine. Without the poem being a workable mechanism in its own right, a mechanism which arises from, while at the same time it constitutes the meaning of, the poem as a whole, it will remain ineffective.6 Although Discrete Series may at first appear more like a black box than a transparent mechanism, or at least a perplexingly complicated apparatus that arrived without its users’ manual, to read its language against a particular dictionary, as we will see, provides the logical diagram that explains its functioning. Deterritorializing the definitional structure of the Oxford English Dictionary, Oppen’s book constructs a textual mechanism that simultaneously arises from and constitutes the meaning of its poems. Or, in other words, it exemplifies what Ron Silliman has characterized as the Objectivists’ “identification of method with content.”7 Louis Zukofsky would define this fundamental aspect of poetry as a text’s ability to record the “precise information on existence out of which it grows.”8 One might, accordingly, think of Objectivism as an extension of Imagism’s “direct treatment of the thing”—or what Zukofsky called “thinking with the things as they exist”—applied equally to the subject of the poem and to the language of the poem itself: a direct treatment of the thing, as it exists, but where that “thing” is the particular, concrete, linguistic material of the poem.9 “That’s what ‘objectivist’ really means,” Oppen clarified in retrospect; “people assume it means the psychologically objective in attitude. It actually means the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem.”10

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In a parenthetical aside in one of his letters, Oppen laments: “I thought too late—30 years too late—that the flyleaf [of Discrete Series] should have carried the inscription 14, 28, 32, 42 which is a discrete series: the names of the stations on the east side subway.”11 Printed on the flyleaf, the imagined numerical proem would have been a preface to the “Preface” that Ezra Pound wrote for the first edition of the book, and it might have been read as a translation of Pound’s own “In a Station of the Metro.” Oppen was both indebted to Imagism and anxious to distance himself from it, and his belated flyleaf further objectifies and condenses what is perhaps the most famous Imagist poem, simultaneously paying homage to and distinguishes itself from the poetics of Oppen’s mentor.12 For certain New Yorkers, in all events, it would have clarified the mathematical term Oppen took for his title, describing “a series in which each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term,” since the series of numerals are fixed, verifiable, and do not derive from the preceding terms.13 Although the series could be reversed, heading downtown toward City Hall, the terms could not be in another order, and each is empirically justified by the crosstown street of its station stop. But as often with Oppen, the referents are not as simple as they at first seem. The original Rapid Transit Commission east-side stations, by street number, were 14, 18, 23, 28, 33, and 42.14 Thus, by making the series selective through eliding stops 18 and 28, Oppen’s epigram disrupts even the projection of the Manhattan street grid always faintly legible in the pattern of roughly equidistant stations and ensures that his series is truly discrete. That discrepancy between Oppen’s ostensibly clear and direct factual statement and its actual referents might be taken as a cautionary lesson for readers of the poems that were in fact printed in Discrete Series. At first glance, their status as “discrete” seems obvious: in the original edition, the poems were printed one to a page. They are thus typographically “separate; detached from others; individually distinct,” as the dictionary defines “discrete.”15 Moreover, the poems seem to form a discrete series of discrete series of discrete series: They contain recurrent images of emphatically separated, distinct and individual assemblages of parts in broken, paratactic lines. For just one example, consider the fourteenth poem, which ends with a modern-day blazon, conceiving of its scrutinized body as a constellation of discrete corporeal parts: She lies, hip high, On a flat bed While the afterSun passes.

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Plant, I breathe— — O Clearly, Eyes legs arms hands fingers, Simple legs in silk.16 Despite the exclamation of clarity, these stanzas have their share of salient, inscrutable cruxes. In the first, the jagged lineation emphasizing the hyphenated “after-” elicits expectations other than “sun.” The compound “noon” is most probable, with a shading of “after-glow” in the specific sense of “a warm or pleasant feeling experienced after sexual intercourse” as the term was currently used (the first record in the Oxford English Dictionary dates, contemporaneous with Discrete Series, to 1928).17 The grammatical ambiguity of the second stanza’s ellipses present a different sort of difficulty. If nothing else, the image of a breathing or breathable plant is decidedly odd. A complaint about pollution would be out of place in the poem’s mise-en-scène, although the sense of an industrial plant’s exhaust, in contrast to “clearly” circulating air, might recall the contrast in other poems between the wind-flattened sails of a cat-boat, juxtaposed to the “three wide / Funnels, raked aft” of a steamship, easily imagined as exhaling smoke from the coal-fired power plant below deck (and echoing the aft in after-).18 More plausibly, taking “plant” in its sense of an organism like grass or trees, the lines might suggest the biological processes by which photosynthesis converts carbon dioxide into oxygen, and to identify that oxygen with the plants that produce it might allow one, with a long stretch of poetic thinking, to imagine that we breathe plants. However, Oppen himself reads “plant” as standing in apposition to the speaker: (like a) plant(,) I breathe. Understood in this way, the line sounds paradoxical, or inverted. Strictly speaking, plants respire, releasing the byproducts of cellular aerobics through stomata, but they certainly do not breathe. Then again, they don’t speak of themselves in poems either, for that matter; one has to suspend some disbelief for this stanza, regardless. Although it vaguely fits with the decidedly odd compliment of a later poem—“It is you who truly / Excel the vegetable”—Oppen’s own explication of these lines is not entirely convincing; he vacillates while explaining that they establish his passive, humble presence in relation to the poem’s vaunted female subject: My own presence is like a plant, just breathing, just being, just seeing this. Well, no, I was talking about eroticism, just internal sensations, like a plant. I don’t exist. It’s the closure of eroticism within oneself. It’s two things, the tremendously sharp vision of erotic desire, together with a kind of closing of one’s self.19

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Nor does the original version of the poem provide much illumination; in that text, the double dash is followed by the lines: “as in a closed dark room a plant / In darkness growing. Nightcloud.”20 As I will argue later in this chapter, the references to the closed self, both in the manuscript and the interview, are telling. For now, however, I want to note that even the seemingly straightforward lines of the stanza, in the guise of more familiar conventions of erotic verse, are not as simple as they seem. One wonders, on reflection, why the legs are repeated in the anatomical catalogue. And how are they “simple” if clad in sumptuous silk? “Simple,” in the sense of indivisible, further underscores the discreteness of the parts, but the words themselves invite elision rather than separation. To begin with, the lack of punctuation in the penultimate line runs the words together grammatically, blurring the noun-sequence’s segmentation of the body. Additionally, at the level of the poem, as a unit within the book’s series of lyrics, further associations suggest themselves when the end of the first quatrain repeats the word “passes” from the previous poem: Tug against the river— — Motor turning, lights In the fast water off the bow-wave: Passes slowly.21 With a nice indeterminacy, “tug” initially tugs between the senses of straining pull and stout, powerful steamer, though it resolves to the latter. As a precursor of the later “tug with two barges,” the tugboat here recalls the many nautical subjects in Discrete Series.22 A slowly gliding ship in the eighth poem, for instance, passes over the sea bed: “Sun / Slants dry light on the deck. / Beneath us glide / Rocks . . .”; in contrast, a later “ship / Grounds / Her immense keel” against those rocks and “chips / A stone / Under fifteen feet / Of harbor.”23 With that feminine pronoun and the concern with clearance and running aground, as well as the explicit rhyme of “ship” and “chips,” one might begin to hear the ship behind “hip” in “she lies, hip high.” The initial Sh phoneme of ship has been displaced to the beginning of the line in “She,” priming the phonemic anagram, at the same time that the visual form of the word is teased forth by the terminal grapheme of “lies”: -s, hip. The usage conforms to Oppen’s later employment of the nautical feminine (“her” and “she”) in the poem “Squall.”24 At the same time, one might compare this scene of “looser pleasure” with the tightly held limbs in an early, unpublished poem: “Close hips, close legs straightening down the sheets,” where “close,” as an antonym to open, in the context of Oppen imagining that he has the body

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described here, is an especially significant term, as we will see later in this chapter.25 For now, those sheets might remind us that when the “Sun / Slants” poem flirts with a nautical theme, its “flat bed” possibly refers to the seabed—a referent licensed by the explicit use of “bed” in that sense just a few poems earlier, in the “Party on Shipboard”: “The sea is a constant weight / In its bed.”26 Furthermore, the geometric angle of the strangely phrased “after-sun” on that flat bed rhymes with the slant of sun on the horizontal deck of the ship gliding over the sandy sea bed: “Sun / Slants dry light on the deck.”27 The play with ambiguity, the repetition of words within the severely restricted vocabulary of the sparse poems, and the ghosting rhymes of words within words and across word boundaries are all typical of Oppen’s poetics. Far from neatly divided and discrete, the poetic effects depend on permeability and interconnection. The poem immediately following the blazon, for instance, repeats “silk” in the mode of a “silk hat,” and the erotic cata logue itself offers a whisper of sin behind the sequence: “legs in silk.” The suggestion of censorable silk lingerie then returns, in a complex weave of theme and sound that laces between several of the book’s poems. Consider the scene sketched by the following verses: This land: The hills, round under straw; A house With rigid trees And flaunts A family laundry And the glass of windows28 Rhyme and register work in tandem to connect this poem to other in the Series. In contrast with the concealment of hidden parts and private acts which one of the opening poems identifies as “the prudery / Of Frigidaire,” the erect trees here are “rigid” in the drying air.29 Like the glassed windows of the house, offering a glimpse of private interiors, the aired laundry also on display—perhaps, in fact, drying underwear—makes an ostentatious and conspicuous show, defiantly putting the private on public view. It flaunts, quite precisely, in the original sense of the word: “to wave gaily or proudly”; “to move about so as to display one’s finery.” But “flaunt” also sets up the sonic and visual rhyme with “laundry,” and the two triangulate the lawn appropriate to the opening landscape of this suburban domestic vignette. Indeed, the word appears two poems later, in the phrase “somebody’s lawn,” and the rhyme echoes, along with the sense

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of ownership, in the later couplet, where the expected body part notably absent from the blason gets full attention: “Your breasts / Pertain to lingerie.”30 Oppen elsewhere in the book evokes the antiquated garment sense of weeds (“clothing, raiment, dress, apparel”), with the phrase “the fitting of grasses—more bare than that,” and we might recall here that in addition to uncultivated grassland, “lawn” refers to fine gauzy garment fabric, such as silk. In the poem’s context of gendered, bodily possession (an earlier line reads: “Your hips [are] a possession”), “pertain” is as precise as “flaunt”: “to belong to (or †till) a person, God, etc., as a possession, legal right, or privilege.” But for the reader alert to the sound of lawn in “lingerie,” the pert in “pertain” is just as relevant. Though now antiquated, the first definition in the Oxford English Dictionary pertains to the themes of disclosure and concealment at play in these sections of Discrete Series: “open, unconcealed; evident, manifest; public.” Furthermore, the word has long been idiomatically stereotyped with “breasts”: “of a part of the body: attractive . . . (of the breasts or buttocks) firm, shapely.” The firmness of the body beneath the lingerie is reinforced by lines from another poem in the series: “You? A solid, this that the dress insisted.”31 Under the topic of ownership, the pert breasts round under lingerie, the hills round under the lawn, and both signifiers and signifieds work along alternate routes to entwine the book’s supposedly discrete poems. Oppen also draws a connection between lawns and breasts in one of the roughly contemporaneous poems from the period, prepared for the unrealized manuscript of 21 Poems by George Oppen. One of those lyrics locates “the hollow between breasts and shoulder,” precisely where a later poem in the sequence finds a “(Pool-like) silent chest” harboring an audible absence: “In fields the silence hard between your breasts.”32 If the fields suggest a lawn, the gauzy weave around the chest suggests lingerie: “Your hands are caught in webs / And quick. They stitch . . . they draw a gossamer round belly of air to me.”33 The hands and fingers of that poem point to the proximity of “feel” and “field,” which the penultimate poem in the sequence brings to the fore, along with the swell of a grassy hill under fabric: We . . . Will feel minutely, adequately heavy as a curving kite-string from a hill. Fields, the porches of houses, the cornered ways of cities— We will walk everywhere as at each step our toes spread on grass.34 The circuit is reinforced by the similar proximity of “grass” and “grasp,” which Oppen leverages through the word “grope”—balanced finely

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between the literal and figurative senses of the word—in “The Forms of Love” from the 1965 volume This in Which, a poem about the difficulty of grasping a situation. “Beginning to wonder / whether” he is seeing fog (weather) or water, the protagonist remembers “standing in the white grass. . . . We groped.”35 Oppen tends to use these familiar idioms of haptic understanding in metapoetic moments that call into question the nature of art and commerce. In “The Gesture,” another poem from the same collection, for instance, the speaker raises the question of how one is to “ handle” distasteful material, and then asks: “How does one hold something / In the mind which he intends / To grasp and how does the salesman / Hold a bauble he intends to sell?”36 The same themes return in the poem “Technologies,” also from This in Which, where the art nested inside heart is figured as a “hawk”—both the raptor and the exclamatory offering for sale—that overlooks “the business / of the days” in the streets below its window-sill perch.37 Business, it seems, is grasping, in the sense of being rapacious. But so is the art of poetry, in the sense of its etymological origins in ποεῖν, poein, to make with the hands. With articulated hands (“the knuckles of my hand / so jointed”), the poet crafts and articulates in turn.38 In Discrete Series, the gesture of handling a machine brings back together the breast and feeling, in the senses of the haptic and the emotional, linking them to both the literal and figurative sense of “heart” and recalling the firm, lingerie-clad breast: Who comes is occupied Toward the chest (in the crowd moving opposite Grasp of me) In firm overalls The middle-aged man sliding Levers in the steam-shovel cab,— Lift (running cable) and swung, back Remotely respond to the gesture before last Of his arms fingers continually— Turned with the cab. . . . 39 With a parallel series from pert to “firm” to “hard,” the “arms hands fingers” of the lovers who “slide in separate hard grooves / Bowstrings to bent loins” are transformed here into arms and fingers of the worker, with running cables bending the arms of the excavator with displaced gestures enacted by the mimetic operations of the poem’s jerky syntax of abrupt swings and pivots and reorientations across hinged lines.40

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To align the operation of the verse with the operation of construction equipment is precisely the ser vice William Carlos Williams saw Discrete Series contributing to modernism and the literature of its moment: “such ser vice would be timely today,” he wrote in 1932, “since people are beginning to forget that poems are constructions.” 41 If the mechanisms of Oppen’s poem are assembled so that the “cab” visible in “cable” invites us to hear an echo of a bronchial rasp in the thoracic “grasp” “toward the chest,” we might also catch a glimpse, in the jostling crowd of words, of Oppen in “opposite,” suggesting a conflation of speaker and poet. In any case, the figures in this poem are employed, in the sense of having an occupation, but they are also occupied in the sense of being absorbed, perhaps with a gaze fixed and unfocused. The words, absorbed in one another, emerge when read with a similar focus. In the world of Discrete Series, in short, things are neither so simple, nor separate, as they seem. But if the poems and their language are less discrete than they have been taken to be, the work nonetheless insists on the operation of the word “discrete”—the denotations of which it elaborates with an exhaustive thoroughness. “Separate,” to begin with, is a word that repeats within the austerely restricted vocabulary of the text, as is “abstracted,” itself one of the very definitions of “discrete,” as the word is used as a terme de métier in metaphysics, meaning something opposed to the concrete: “conceptual rather than material, abstract.” I have quoted enough already to demonstrate that the pun in the book’s title is serious, and exact: one of the work’s obvious themes is the tact of discretion. From indiscrete etymological origins, the homophonic doublets “discreet” and “discrete” were long spelled interchangeably (and they are often confused or conflated still today); indeed, they initially “may have been perceived as a single, polysemous word,” with more deliberate attempts to differentiate their forms beginning with eighteenth-century lexicography and orthographic reforms. In any case, the words had already begun to be distinguished in the sixteenth century, as scholastic uses of “discrete” reflected a closer tie to the Latin discrētus. Exploiting this confusion, many of the poems in Discrete Series explicitly thematize discreet and contrastingly indiscreet arrangements. Certain subjects are “prudent” or “circumspect”—confidential to the point, almost, of secrecy; one of the book’s best known lines, as we have seen, notes a discreet concealment in diametric contrast to the openly flaunted lingerie and to various scenes of “looser pleasure”: “Thus / Hides the / Parts—the prudery / Of Frigidaire.” 42 Both of the homophonic doublets, in their popular English and technical Latin senses, share a common antonym in promiscuous. But the discretion of Oppen’s work is more

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thorough still, encompassing the senses of “discreet” as “judicious,” “well discerned,” and “linguistically spare.” In contrast to the variously “quiet” and “inaudible” settings of certain poems, and to the final poem’s abbreviated aposiopetic speech, the luxury of an automobile is figured as an “overstatement.” 43 Indeed, all three of those denotations of “discrete” describing modes of reserved discrimination play out in the single sentence—itself judiciously stated with linguistic sparsity—that closes the seventh poem: “He has chosen a place / With the usual considerations, / Without stating them.” 44 The text, further, continues to state its titular word’s twin with unusually thorough consideration. What may be the book’s most incongruous poem begins with an unexpected and unexplained “Civil war photo.” As the dictionary notes, with nuance, “discreet” also denotes “civil, courteous.” The word here points as well toward the social signification of the silk haberdashery style depicted in the poem; Richard Swigg smartly notes that the hat signifies “nonmilitary headgear,” which is to say: a civilian in contrast to the military setting.45 Oppen juxtaposes the antique photograph’s image with the speaker’s modern moment: “the cannon of that day [i.e., the 1860s] / In our parks.” 46 The stanza thus parallels the theme of a later poem, which apostrophizes Jean-Honoré Fragonard, proclaiming: “Your picture lasts thru us.” 47 The two poems, moreover, are linked at the lexical level when Oppen echoes “civil” in “civilization”; the Rococo painting builds up an impasto of accumulated cultural history, “its air / Thick with succession of civilization.” 48 With nods to even the most technical denotations of “discrete” and “discreet,” the inclusive coverage of the words’ registers begins to suggest the way in which Oppen’s book undertakes a far more subtle—that is, a far more discreet—investigation of what it would mean to think of language, and specifically the language of the poem itself, as a discrete series. Which is precisely how the dictionary structures it: differentiating between the varied definitions of a given lemma in a series of entries that are each empirically verifiable in the written record but that do not necessarily derive from one another. In a retrospective interview about his early poems, Oppen divulges: “one imagines New York City dwellers involved most of the time with artificial concepts, the game, the definitions. So did I remember the root of my own Objectivism.” 49 The roots of Oppen’s own objectivism, in Discrete Series, continues to play that “game of definitions” beyond its title. Consider, for example, how Oppen’s text elaborates the various dictionary definitions of the word “rim” with the same meticulous patience with which it pursued “discrete.” At a glance, the poems are replete with rimmed objects, from spheres and

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glasses and fountains and portholes (things with a “more or less continuous outer edge or border, esp where this has a more or less circular form”) to wheels and spectacles and windows, each of which counts a rim as one of its constituent parts.50 Additionally, Oppen details numerous margins and borders: a car “at the curb”; an “asphalt edge”; a “frame”; “road-sides”; “the edge of the ocean” and several shores.51 One of those shores describes “Somebody’s lawn, / By the water,” a scene that will reappear in one of Oppen’s poems in This in Which: “Grass / Grows to the water’s edge.”52 Indeed, as Steve Shoemaker has argued, Oppen’s imagination of nautical harbor locales as “edges” is integral to his poetics of “disclosure and revelation.”53 Finally, perhaps straining for a pun on carriage, one poem pointedly emphasizes the implicitly rounded brim of an automobile with the unidiomatic and strangely specified edge of a car: “Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge.”54 What makes rims a poetic device (a textual mechanism, as William Carlos Williams might have put it), and not merely a theme, however, is the degree to which Discrete Series accounts for the dictionary’s more specialized and obsolete senses of the word as well. For instance, the second definition of “rim” in the Oxford English Dictionary specifies: “Nautical. The surface of the water.” As with the “caredge,” Oppen’s language distorts to accommodate this denotation with awkward enumerations; the poem “Party on Shipboard” singles out “the shallow surface of the sea,” and a later poem conveys the sense of a tensile supporting layer that would float barges on, rather than in the water: “on the water, solid.”55 With equal particularity, “rim” also denotes the now “chiefly poetic” “verge of the horizon, sea, hills, etc,” which—as we have seen—reappears as Oppen’s unabashedly poetic lines “the hills, round under straw” and in the vatic assertion that “the world too short for trend is land.”56 (Given the recurrent maritime theme of Discrete Series, the nautical denotations of “trend” may be relevant here as well: “the angle between the direction of the anchor-cable and that of the ship’s keel,” or also “that part of the shank of an anchor where it thickens toward the crown”). In all events, a related sense of “rim” indicates “a verge or margin of land, sea, etc.; a narrow strip,” as the dictionary has it, or the “shores” and “lawns” that Oppen specifies at the edge of the oceans and roads, recalling the stereotype “grass-verge”: “a strip of grass at the side of a garden path or road.”57 Even the two explicit mentions of rims in Discrete Series occur in passages that encode the word’s most specialist and recherché denotations. The contrasting scenes of maritime hazard and easy clearance—the keel grounding “stone under fifteen feet of harbor” and the “rocks sands and unrimmed holes” over which the cat-boat passes—each highlight the

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“rocky bottom in the sea” which stands as one of the denotations of rim, from Scottish regional and Orkney dialect usage to describe “a strip of rocks or rocky grounds in the sense of an elevated ridge in the sea.”58 With similar precision, the penultimate poem in the book shifts abruptly from the rim of the shore or horizon to an oral “Rims” that prefigures “geraniums” as if it were all that a dying mouth could pronounce in the place of the Latin name of the flowers on the rim of the window (with “craniums” perhaps lurking just beneath the surface of “geraniums,” as a sort of memento mori symbol of the ubiquitous deaths): Deaths everywhere— — The world too short for trend is land— — In the mouth, Rims In this place, two geraniums In your window-box Are his life’s eyes.59 The rim around a mouth might be the lips, in proximity to twin floral eyes—“eyes and mouth making three” as an earlier poem describes the geometry of “a white powdered face”—but what of rims “in the mouth”?60 If the exact import of the word here is unclear, an earlier parenthetical aside “(Your eyes like snail-tracks)” helps to explain how the mouth could have rims inside it.61 The second appearance of “rim” as a lemma in the Oxford English Dictionary designates anatomical senses: “a membrane, pellicle, caul,” and specifically, “a scale or film upon the eyes.” With this dispersal and deployment of definitions, Oppen, as Williams suggests, seems to be “following what he believes to be a profitable lead along some one line of possible investigation.” 62 In tracing that line of flight we can start to see the importance of the dictionary for a certain mode of avant-garde poetics, and how Oppen’s Objectivist practice takes a cue from the dictionary in order to align the structure of his poetry with its theme. The dictionary works in Oppen’s book as a hidden mechanism of the poem itself, and so it parallels the hidden parts of the machinery described in the poem (“Thus / hides the / parts”).63 The dictionary, in brief, provides Oppen with a model of ordered language and semantic diversity. With an organization based on the arbitrary sequence of the alphabet, it displays structured juxtapositions of discrete definitions and the ideal aim of an exhaustive elaboration of the various registers, inflections, and connotations within the scope of a single word. Furthermore, the dictionary also provides Oppen with a textual source—suggesting not

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only how a poetic series might encompass the conjunction of filmy eyes and rocky seabeds with the edge of an automobile and its wheels—but also the particular vocabulary he might employ in doing so. Oppen, like the other poets I consider here, is not turning to the dictionary for le mot juste, but rather crafting the poem to accommodate the dictionary’s linguistic surplus. As Lyn Hejinian encapsulates the difference: “where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies.” 64 Or as Ron Silliman wrote, in a 1971 letter to Bruce Andrews: the Word is no longer guided in advance by the general intention of a socialized discourse; the consumer of poetry [. . .] receives it as an absolute quantity [. . .]. It therefore achieves a state which is possible only in the dictionary.65 Without a reconstruction of the scaffold provided by the dictionary, Discrete Series “remains enigmatic,” with “relations that often vex.” 66 For critics, the work’s chief difficulties have arisen from the abrupt disjunctions between its paratactic terms, whether from word to word, phrase to phrase, or poem to poem.67 Michael Heller, writing about Oppen’s early poetry, singles out those vexing relations that appear to substitute arbitrary juxtapositions for necessary structures: “When Williams remarked that imagism failed because it lost all ‘structural necessity,’ he may very well have been referring to the kind of difficulty which Oppen confronted [in Discrete Series]. Pure imagism, a poetry of the strictly visible, cannot establish a set of relations between its parts.” 68 Without an obvious set of relation between its parts, the book appears to lack an overriding structural logic. Rocco Marinaccio maps that lack of ostensible order onto the genre of the road trip, and the itinerant wanderings of automobile narratives in the 1930s: “Thus, as in the road narrative, the individual ‘statements’ in Discrete Series are not ordered by any overarching narrative design or ‘rule’; their order is instead determined by the unavoidable imposition of time and space on the material text and on the act of reading.” 69 Monique Vescia goes further, interpreting the absence of an overarching design as evidence of an ethical imperative: “By structuring his poems as a discrete series, Oppen purposely avoided superimposing a larger, a priori structure of meaning on his materials. The discipline of poetic sincerity that informs these poems required that Oppen reject such a structure.”70 “The very gesture of putting fragments of language into a series invites us to connect them in some way,” as Alan Golding notes in a consideration of Oppen’s early poetry, recognizing that the separation of parts in Oppen’s little lexical machines leaves the task of finding some way of

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“forging or finding relationships” up to the reader.71 In the case of Discrete Series, the reader who turns to the dictionary to find connections discovers that those relationships—as well as the distances between the terms themselves—were already present in the source of Oppen’s composition and constitute the very mode of his poetics. In the conclusion to his preface to the first edition of Discrete Series, Ezra Pound saluted Oppen’s poetic sensibility, which he praised because it “has not been got out of any other man’s books.”72 Oppen’s literary sensibility may not have been derived from imitating anyone else’s style, but the structuring scaffolding of his poetics was gotten directly from James Murray’s Oxford English Dictionary. Given the circumstances of Oppen’s peripatetic life in the early decades of the century, the archival record of his compositional practice is lacking; my recourse to the Oxford English Dictionary in this chapter therefore follows an inductive reasoning. The nautical denotation of rim, so central to the narrative of Discrete Series, appears only there, out of all of the contemporaneous dictionaries I have surveyed. Publishing history corroborates this conclusion; a great deal of publicity trumpeted the OED at precisely the moment Oppen was working on the poems that would become Discrete Series. Following years of revision, the dictionary came out in a new edition, and the announcement of its completion was in fact the front-page story of the New York Times on January 1, 1928, heralding the publication as “one of the great romances of English literature.” Within the year, the Bodleian Library predictably took part in the University’s fanfare and hosted an extensive exhibition of dictionary-related materials, publishing a catalogue to celebrate the completion of the new edition, as well as a supplement to that corrected reissue, which was also published, to sustained publicity, just a year or so before Oppen published his book in 1934. But the New York Public Library was also featuring “an exhibit of English dictionaries and of materials relating to Noah Webster, to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the first edition of his ‘American Dictionary of the English Language,’ and the completion of the great ‘Oxford English Dictionary,’ ” which was displayed, with a witty reference to the dictionary’s illustration of “the first use of each word” and “the last use of the word (if obsolete).”73 As the Bulletin opened its article on the subject, quoting Charles Talbut Onions, joint editor of the OED: “this year [1928], whatever else it may be, is the year of the Dictionary.”74 Whatever else it may be, Discrete Series folds that publishing history into its precise documentation of historical particulars. Indeed, I want to propose that part of the particularity—the “objectivism”—of Discrete Se-

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ries can be located in the degree to which it bears the imprint of the specific dictionary at hand (in the way, as we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, that the textual surface and compositional detours of “A” and Thanks to the Dictionary bear deformations from the particulars of Louis Zukofsky’s Webster’s and Funk & Wagnalls dictionaries). Garin Dowd has argued that for Oppen’s book “the discreteness of the series is ultimately the discretion of its origin, that is to say the abeyance of that origin—its withdrawal. The origin is a secret which will not be secreted by the discrete series.”75 No longer secret (pace Dowd’s prediction), the structured definitions of the dictionary that created the strange, unidiomatic disjunctions within Oppen’s discrete poetic series now provide an explanatory structure. To read Discrete Series alongside the dictionary—so that “one moves between reading and re-reading,” as one of the book’s poems puts it—reveals logic in place of the irrational, reference in place of whimsy, and connection in place of discontinuity.76 To read according to the way the avant-garde composes permits us to reconsider the strangeness of Oppen’s language, and to see the complex network of interlocking parts beneath the surface of what has otherwise been taken to evince quasi-surreal imagery, the isolated fragments of collage, or the mere ineptitude of apprentice work.77 Moreover, “rim” continues its poetic labor for Oppen, in a way that Bataille might have happily recognized, beyond its dictionary meanings. One of the limnal rims enumerated in Oppen’s poetry are window sills, the framing threshold of which is underlined by the rim inhabiting “grime,” a word Oppen repeatedly associates—perhaps via a further association with “silt”—with the architectural trim of the sill. One of his later poems, for example, focuses in on “windows and the grimed sill,” while another speaks of “the wooden sills, the grimed past.”78 In the thirty-seventh section in Of Being Numerous, he revisits a quotation from Henry James which he used in the first poem in Discrete Series, to imagine a settled dust on the window, with its sill ghosting behind “still” (indeterminately balanced between its adverbial and adjectival senses of continually and motionless): “I should have written, not the rain / Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes / In the air, the dust / Here still.”79 With a dustiness substituting that grime with its synonym, “The Image of the Engine” describes how “The machine stares out / With all its eyes / Thru the glass / With the ripple in it, past the sill, which is dusty.”80 The engine, personified, looks out as if to “imagine / some task beyond the window glass,” as another of Oppen’s poems imagines the gaze of manual labor.81 Returning in the poem “Return,” “window sills” are a reminder of where “Petra beat / A washpan out her window,” so that the window functions as a communicating structure that allows the protagonist to

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transform a contested domestic space and its most private accouterments into a public announcement (according to Mary Oppen, the scene recalls an incident in which George was present at a collective eviction resistance); the rough music of Petra’s percussed pan raises a chiavari alarm “gathering a crowd like a rescue” in the street below.82 Additionally, recall that the allegorical hawk of “Technologies” lights “on a window sill.” In all of these instances, Oppen associates the window, at only a single remove, with himself as poet. Oppen characterized himself as “a fairly passionate mechanic,” and not only does the peering engine recall the enclosed steam-shovel that he aligns with poetic construction in Discrete Series, but the deserted window sills of “Return” pointedly stand as emblems of the “remote mechanics” figured earlier in the poem as abandoned “piers of the city / In the sea.”83 “Piers” is the answer on which an earlier riddle turns, as if it were the plural of the gendered pair of harlequins who appear two stanzas earlier: “Pierrot, Pierrette chattering.”84 These verbal pirouettes continue when “piers”—together with the poem’s emphasis on the view through the aperture of a window—triangulates a pun that further reinforces Oppen’s association of vision with the figure of himself as a poet: the Oppens repeatedly referred to other artists as “peers.” Mary, for example, describes her life choice as one that sought “conversation, ideas, poetry, peers,” and she explains that they moved to New York City in 1928 “searching for those people, for a circle of peers”; for another instance, from a 1963 letter, George sums up the ultimate significance of the concept to a poet: “That matter of one’s peers—I have come to believe again, perhaps in more rather than less despair, that the only possible hope is in the conversation with one’s peers. Or in thinking as if one were in contact with one’s peers.”85 The word animates what may be Oppen’s most famous poem, “Psalm,” which praises “the small nouns” foregrounded by his signaturestyle’s focus on “the little words.”86 The poem conflates the “leaves which shade” the woodland setting of the pastoral scene and the wood-pulp paper leaves of This in Which, the book that contains it, so that the eponymous deictic “this” of the final stanza points reflexively back to the print on the page itself: “The small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle and stare out.”87 With effortless eyes, those ruminants “stare out,” which is to say—with an inverted rotation of the letter d— they peer. Moreover, the deer are described as “alien” and “strange,” which is to say—with another rotation of the letter—queer. As with the majority of allusions in Discrete Series to the keywords “discreet” and “rim,” these words do not, of course, actually appear in the text that they structure. Zukofsky, writing to Ezra Pound about

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Oppen’s early poetry, singled out the power of the absent in his poetics: “he seems to me to handle a kind of void in a way all his own—so that one excuses the posited negative,” or what he would call, in a letter sent a few months later, quoting from one of Oppen’s poems: “every thing brightly not there.”88 Zukofsky might also have mentioned the penultimate poem in the same manuscript, which figures that palpable power of such negative ontologies as “filling nothing.”89 Or, as Oppen himself observed of Discrete Series: “They are in their way sub-audible poems.”90 Similarly, Oppen described his later prosody as an attention to “those connections which can’t be dealt with outside the poem but that should take on substantial meaning within it,” and the combination of elision and paragram in “Psalm” provides a perfect illustration of that poetics, as well as a protocol for reading the ways in which the figure of the window serves as a sort of signature in Oppen’s poetry.91 In a sustained example of what Richard Swigg has called Oppen’s own “singling out of humble key words,” Susan Thackery has demonstrated the degree to which single words work to structure Oppen’s poetry across volumes (she traces the word “ditch” and its biographical and textual resonances).92 To return to that humble keyword of the window, and to Oppen’s proximity to windows in his persona of poet, recall that Oppen identified himself, quite bluntly and directly, with the hawk in “Technologies.”93 Famed for its piercing, keen-sighted vision, as the idiom “hawkeyed” attests, the raptor views and is viewed within the casement of “windows that look out.”94 The theme continues in “Product,” a poem about individual identity, which concludes: “what I’ve seen / Is all I’ve found: myself.”95 This motif proliferates in Oppen’s writing, but beyond any personal totem, the fenestral vocabulary works its way into the language of his verse itself. In “The Hills,” Oppen latches on to the details of a window’s hardware and revisits the theme of individual identity from the perspective of a sense of self. The poem opens, “Not this is I, / Not mine” and continues with a precession of first-person pronouns, framing its central epistemological subject—how “to know / Who we shall be”— in terms of “the patent / Latches on the windows.”96 The adjectival sense of “patent” in these lines might be understood as “proprietary,” in the sense of the mark of intellectual property (what is owned, as well as what is propre, or one’s own), but we might also read “patent” in its etymological sense of “open,” from the Latin patēns: “open, lying open, unobstructed, wide, broad, readily accessible, clear, obvious,” and used as an adjective of the present participle of patēre, “to be open,” as the Oxford English Dictionary observes. With this patent latch we can begin to close in on the connection repeatedly made between Oppen’s poetic persona

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and the view—whether “clear . . . past the window glass” or distorted by the dust and ripples of antique glass—through windows. Latched, hermetically sealed, or wide open, windows are marked in Oppen’s poetry by being either wide or shut, openable or fixed. “To open a window, / To shut it,” as one poem poses the essential question of individual ability.97 As with the variously indiscrete scenes discussed earlier in this chapter, the opening of windows has the potential for dis-closure. In another poem, the speaker positions himself like Petra [from the Greek πέτρα, “stone”], at an obviously open window: “I lean out a high window / My hands on the stone [of the sill].”98 In contrast, the abrupt opening to one of the poems in Discrete Series announces an aperture not only closed, but securely locked: “Bolt / In the frame / Of the building—.”99 A similar diametric establishes itself between one poem’s little eye, exposed and “naked / To the world” (it is difficult to avoid hearing the personified “eye” as I), which “will not close,” and the similarly “lonely . . . shutter closing over the glass lens” of a camera in another poem.100 These same themes recur in one of Oppen’s earliest poems, in which “the shutter is open at the window” where solitude dives “unbroken.”101 As in the phrase that parallels the “family laundry” in the scene I examined earlier, the “glass of windows” in Oppen’s poetry signals both ocular access and entrapping enclosure.102 Urban architecture in one poem is “glassed” but “impenetrable,” like the symbolic automobile in Discrete Series through which the passenger is seen “between glasses” in a “Closed car—closed in glass.”103 In the later poem “Populist,” the potential of the self to unfurl while enclosed in glass displays the concern Oppen expressed elsewhere over “the closed universe, the closed self” and “the closing of one’s self” which he tried to symbolize with the respiring plant in the erotic vignette from Discrete Series.104 “Populist” speculates on what it would take to sing a song of one’s self in terms of manual labor and craft workmanship, musing, in fractured syntax: “if I am to tell of myself splendor / of the roads secrecy / of paths for a word like a glass / sphere encloses / the word opening / and opening / myself.”105 One of the paths of the vitreous word, it should by now be clear, leads directly from the word “open” to the word “Oppen,” just a single geminated letter away. When one is named Oppen, the window offers itself as a reflective figure for one’s self. That path helps to animate the first poem proper in Discrete Series, which presents a structural, binary opposition in the form of an awaited elevator: White. From the Under arm of T

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The red globe. Up Down. Round Shiny fixed Alternatives From the quiet Stone floor . . . 106 The received reading of the poem, often repeated, originates in Oppen’s own explication in a 1963 letter to Charles Tomlinson.107 As Sharp retells the story: “on the newer elevator portals in Manhattan in the late 1920s was a decorative device shaped like a ‘T’ and under its ‘arms’ were two shiny round globes, one white and one red, which lit to signal the direction of the passage of the elevator, up or down.”108 “With this knowledge,” Tom Sharp triumphantly declares, the “the poem gains for the present reader total clarity.”109 I am less sanguine. As with Oppen’s list of subway stations, or the ostensibly clear documentary descriptions in his poems, we should not be too quick to imagine the matter settled. While many hall lanterns (the precise term for lobby directional indicator lights) used red and white lights, including globe bulbs, and while some flush plates could be mounted horizontally, I have not been to find any examples with an horizontal configuration for globe bulbs, much less any T-shaped plates. Such a counterintuitive design obviously lacks the indexical semiotics of lights that are themselves positioned up and down in relation to one another. At the very least, the design was not so ubiquitous as Oppen and his ingeminators imply.110 Like the form of the majuscule T itself, the Oppens’ description may highlight the structural tension across Discrete Series between the vertical and horizontal. One component of late 1920s elevator hardware that “the present reader” may not have readily in mind, however, is the resonant image of the Otis Elevator Company logo from the period, cast in brass plaque medallions featuring a globe and set with the prominent sweep of the “t” of Otis dominating the design and accommodating the dot of the “i” which floats “white” “beneath the under arm” of its cross-stroke. That late 1920s Otis emblem, a tondo framing a gridded globe (Figure 4), may have reminded Oppen of the similarly shaped IWW logo, which featured a rising Mercator globe, printed when possible in politicized red. Whatever its relation to interior decorating, the image of the “T” repeats in subsequent poems. Recall the vehicularization of the female figure in the fifth poem, who walks on a sphere (analogous to the “globe” beneath the arm

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Figur e 4. c. 1930 nickel-plated brass Otis Elevator Co. motor medallion, which figures in the first poem in George Oppen’s Discrete Series (1932–34).

of the “T”), qualified in the following line as “a carpet” (with a potential pun on the automotive or elevator car[pet]), in contrast to the “stone floor” of the elevator lobby, as well as the “cobbles,” “paving,” and “asphalt” of the hard roadways specified in Discrete Series. Whether perspiring or being bathed, her “arm-pits are causeways for water” in a direct analogue to the water through which the car in the previous poem “runs on a higher road.” Accordingly, one might read the “T,” with its own “under arm,” as a Ford Model T, the very symbol of the auto age, so that the y-shaped hand-lever gear shift of the iconic automobile is refigured as a T-shaped “sword-hilt”—the shaft of the fatal “dark instrument” that an intoxicated Oppen wielded in 1925. The elevator cabin, in all events, was known in the early years of the twentieth century as a “car.” Whatever the mechanism described, and whether the white or red globe is illuminated, indicating the elevator’s vertical direction, the fixed alternatives signaling the cab’s motion will flicker, or extinguish, or exchange—but the doors, regardless, will open: a mirror of the implied narrator facing them on the stone lobby floor. That implicit countersignature is then made one degree more explicit by the congruence of the initial letters of “opposite” and Oppen in “opposite / Grasp of me.” Indeed, if by the end of Discrete Series the reader is tempted to parse the ejaculated

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“O—” of the final poem not so much as an instance of aposiopesis as of the apocopic truncation of Oppen, with the dash marking the absent place of ppen, those missing letters surface two lines later, successively, and vertically positioned to pick up where the O left off, in “Happenings,” which tidily completes the proper name. The whole name then again becomes further scrambled in “telephone,” as the sounds dissolve, into the static of the silence of the open line, leaving the remnants of their disseminated graphemes between the visual marks of parenthesis: ‘O—’ ‘Tomorrow?’— Successive Happenings (the telephone)111 Signaled by the abrupt em-dash after the unanswered interrogative, and the shift in register to explanatory apposition, the telephone call may— like the terms in a discrete series, or the letters of Oppen’s name—have been disconnected. Such paragrammatic distribution, in fact, is also on display in poem “IX” from 21 Poems, which opens with a rewriting of the word “lobs” as “swings [a] load” under the influence of the lobby setting: “The revolving door swings load after load into the lobby; / There is a sound of secrets, / A scattering of feet, a crossing, recrossing.”112 The sound of secrets in “scattering of feet” is then in fact scattered with its syllabic feet crossing and recrossing in a zeugmatic “clatter of a street,” the sounds of which are further reduced in the final word of the poem’s final line’s description of displaced sound: “A wicker chair cracks suddenly in the attic.” With the same sonic play and a further onomastic signature, Oppen dreams of his father with a near paragram of their shared family name. Mary Oppen recounts the fantasy in these words: “In a file marked ‘miscellaneous’ was a paper entitled ‘How to prevent Rust in Copper.’ George thought, ‘My old man was a little frivolous perhaps, but he certainly knew copper does not rust.’ ” Oppen would come to understand the copper as symbolizing himself, but it nearly names him, with no need for recourse to Freudian symbolism, as it is: “Copper.” Oppen will later doubt the power of “the secret names / Or unexpected phrases,” but he wrote Discrete Series with an explicit sense of the necromantic power of cryptonomy.113 As I mentioned, the anomalous proem to the collection quotes from Henry James’s self-reflexive The Story in It.114 Perhaps recalling that book derives, etymologically, from the use of birch bark as an inscriptive substrate,

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Oppen confesses: “I wanted [Henry] James in the book—secretly, superstitiously, I carved his initials on that sapling book.”115 In Oppen’s proem, the character from James’ story performs a leisured ennui, isolated from the world by the closed glass windows through which she watches: “Maude Blessingbourne . . . ‘approached the window as if to see what was really going on’”; through melancholic rain she sees, at a distance, “the road clear from her past the window-glass— / Of the world.”116 Born with and bearing the blessing of the leisure class, as her name ham-fistedly hints, Maude inhabits the sheltered social world from which George and Mary Oppen fled when they declined the promise of comfort held out by George’s family if he would settle down in proper fashion. Indeed, given the privileged family wealth George disavowed with the disinheriting break from his father, the parapractic slip in the narration of Oppen’s dream, using “entitled” (“believing oneself to be inherently deserving of privileges or special treatment; spoilt and selfimportant”) for “titled,” may not be incidental, and both the mode and meaning of that substitution suggests the other secret road taken by the glazed windows in Oppen’s verse along one of the “paths for a word like . . . glass.” John Wilkinson, in an essay on the “transparency and glitter” of glazed enclosures has focused “on the fate of an impor tant ‘ little word’ in Oppen’s poetry: glass.”117 He notes “the shape-changing of glass” and speculates that in Oppen’s verse the “words themselves are in some way glassed in.”118 But one might look as well at the shape-changing of “glass” and the ways in which the word itself can transform and mutate to distort the semantic view. The “Civil war photo” poem, for example, suggests such a transformation when it pictures what was almost certainly a glass-plate print of a photograph depicting “grass near the lens.”119 Clearly, the registration of the camera’s focus on the extreme foreground provides an image for Oppen’s own focus on the minute particulars of social scenes and the “ little words” of his poetic language, as well as a nod in this particular poem to Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. But “grass” is also near “glass,” the material of the lens. Risking what Oppen described as “the falsity of ingenuity, of the posed tableau, in which the poet also, by implication, poses,” the same logic obtains in the third of Oppen’s 21 Poems, set in a “vacant lot” of “impenetrable ground” where the speaker finds “bottle-glass” in place of grass, while the lineation emphasizes the impression that his own shoes stand in as a surrogate for the cultivating, rather than accumulating, sense of growing: “My shoes grow / Dusty, not of soil.”120 With even less distortion, “glass” gives onto “class,” the topic that shadows Oppen’s entire Depression-era work, both poetic, political, and per-

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sonal.121 From the broken shards littering a vacant lot to the ostentatious luxury of the window-wrapped “closed car,” glass serves as a symbol of the economic environment of the class-infused surroundings of Oppen’s early poems. But the logic of a enclosure that can be shattered—the window that might both isolate Maude and release Petra—explains why the image of the plate pane resonated with Oppen’s sense of his self-identity. As Mary Oppen recalls, bringing together a metaphoric vocabulary of visual prospect (“outlook”), turf (“grassroots”), and Blessingbourne-like isolation: “We searched for escape from class. George’s experience in the class he came from was one of isolation, and to be a poet who knew no more than that was a bleak outlook. . . . We did search to find and to understand from the grassroots.”122 By their own accounts, the break with the stifling enclosure and confinement of Oppen’s family class is repeatedly figured as escape and flight. Accordingly, as one critic has summarized their itinerant travels away from the social web of Oppen père, at precisely the same moment Discrete Series was being composed: “George and Mary saw their departure from George’s family as an act of class traversal.”123 In poetic terms, Oppen recognized that such traversal required organizing language in new ways, according to the logic of new metonymic relationships. “If one is to move,” he wrote to Diane Meyer, “one needs a syntax, a new syntax,” and that “new syntax,” he explained, “is a new cadence of disclosure, a new cadence of logic.”124 That cadence, in turn, as he wrote in one of his daybooks, is “the pulse / Of thought, which is the use of verse,” or simply, as he put it in the form of a dictionary definition: “Prosody: the pulse of thought.”125 Peter Nicholls aligns this new cadence of prosodic logic with “poetry’s capacity to release its object from instrumentality.”126 By détourning the reference book’s ostensible instrumentality, Oppen makes good on its poetic potential. Tina Darragh, interpreting Francis Ponge, “declares that the function of the dictionary,” in its delineation of registers, “is to limit—ie: deaden—the language.”127 Reversing the dictionary’s attempt to calibrate denotations with ever-greater refinement and specialist precision, Oppen proliferates inclusively. Moreover, as the measured metamorphosis of “glass” demonstrates, the structured cadence of alphabetic organization “which allows the standard dictionary to efficiently selfindex its lemmata offers a model for syntactic arrangements based on happenstance lettristic resemblance rather than semantic affiliations. The brute, opaque materiality of the letter suggests structures independent of reference. Offering no hope of uninflected access to the world, words “provide . . . opacity,” and like glass, with its ripples and soot, its glares and reflections and streaking, “words cannot be wholly transparent,” as

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Oppen deplores in a poem extoling “clarity” and styled with feigned artlessness.128 “And this,” he continues, “is the heartlessness of words.”129 In his review of Oppen’s first book, which he regarded as a singular, surpassing peak of poetic accomplishment in literary history, William Carlos Williams ultimately suggests that a successful close reading of the discrete series of Discrete Series might also be the more sophisticated strategy for understanding the book in its literary context more broadly. If most readers have failed to recognize certain organizing terms which covertly connect the discontinuous phrases and discretely printed poems, then “as a corollary, most critics fail to connect up the apparently dissociated work of the various [poets] writing contemporaneously in a general scheme of understanding.”130 As the other chapters here hope to show, Oppen shares the general scheme of a dictionary poetics—what we might recognize as a distinct lexicographic imagination—with a number of his contemporaries—those peers, both modernist and postmodern, whom he saw as his last possible hope.

4 /

Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer Each work offered a different solution for the dislocation of space.

—Robert Smithson, “Donald Judd” (1965)

In “Smithsonian Depositions,” a long prose work published in 1980, Clark Coolidge appropriates, verbatim, but without any acknowledgment, the opening of the remarkable chapter from Jack Kerouac’s Desolation Angels, which I consider in the Introduction.1 Kerouac, as we saw, had in turn appropriated that language directly from the dictionary. In a 1991 lecture at the Naropa Institute, Coolidge sets the scene for the scene of writing, in which Kerouac is: in a fire tower in the Cascade Mountains all by himself all summer and obviously he’s bored and looking in the dictionary for inspiration or for whatever reason. I looked in the dictionary too and realized that he’d gone from the word “blade” to the word “bleed.” Every thing in that paragraph comes between those two words: blare, blame and so on. He’s working alphabetically through those definitions. I once wrote a whole book using a similar meditation on the dictionary, although I don’t think it was inspired by Kerouac. I think I found it or it was an unconscious influence anyway, a book called The Maintains which I almost dedicated to this section of Desolation Angels.2 As the dictionary reveals, Kerouac was not, contrary to Coolidge’s description of an alphabetic procedure, reading down the page, but rather straight across, like a Burroughs fold-in.3 In a late chapter in Bernadette Mayer and Clark Coolidge’s collaboration The Cave, they also recognize the importance of the particular dictionary at hand. The section takes the form of a philosophical dialogue, staged under the guises of the adopted

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personae of Melville and Hawthorne (blunt affiliations that suggest both the ambition and the goofy abandon that runs throughout the work). In an opening salvo, Hawthorne rhapsodizes about “Cocteau’s phreatic eyes,” and when asked what that means he finds himself at a loss: “ ‘Phreatic’ is not in my dictionary. Maybe he meant phrenetic or freakish.” Later in the conversation, however, he returns to the word: “I’m sure ‘phreatic’ is actually in the Oxford English Dictionary.” 4 And indeed, while not in Coolidge’s go-to desk dictionary (a Webster’s Collegiate) or Kerouac’s wilderness vade mecum, a quick check confirms that the word is right there in the OED, from the Greek ϕρέαρ, ϕρέατ- (fréar, fréat, well, cistern): “of, pertaining to, or designating water below the water-table, esp. that which is capable of movement,” or, secondarily, “of, pertaining to, or designating a volcanic explosion caused by the sudden heating and volatilization of underground water when it comes into contact with hot magma or rock.” Cocteau, it seems, was crying profusely—perhaps with a pun on the last part of his name: eau (water). Coolidge, an erstwhile geology major and speleophile, would have known the word regardless. Contrasted with “vadose,” which denotes shallow water occurring above the water table (and a word Coolidge had included in an earlier poem), “phreatic” is used to classify caves depending on whether their formation occurred above or below the water table. As a prior sentence had predicted: “Eldon’s Cave was discovered among dictionary definitions.”5 The spur from words to caverns was already part of the discovery of Eldon’s Cave, which had been found in 1875 by the fourteen-year-old Eldon French when he became intrigued by the possibility of neighborhood caves after reading a geology article about karst formations.6 When he was roughly the same age, Coolidge himself first visited the cave, perhaps the second longest cavern in New England, situated near West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.7 He would return on a weekend in early September 1972, in the company of his wife and daughter, along with Mayer and her lover Ed Bowes. The first chapter in The Cave documents the trip in a relatively straightforward, diaristic style; it opens: “Sunday afternoon. We pack up in the car. . . . Drive down thru Richmond, West Stockbridge, cross the turnpike, Williamsville.” Much of the first movement continues to recount the difficulty of finding the path the cave among shifting private properties, posted signs, trackless forest, and uncertain terrain.8 Indeed, by the time one reads, late in the “Karstarts” chapter of The Cave, “the only passage that is defined,” one cannot be certain whether it refers to some part of the route to the cave, the interior architecture of the cavern itself, or a section in a dictionary.9 And when one encounters “a duplicate passage behind the single word,” one suspects that the single word

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in question might be passage itself. “Getting lost off the main passage,” the interlocutors propose, “sounds like living in a dictionary.”10 The dialogue between the effigies of Melville and Hawthorn, aptly, is titled “Cave of Metonymy”; the book, accordingly, pursues a poetics of radical substitution. Hinging on the shared term “passage” to refer with equal ease to a cavern, a textual section, a conveyance, or a route itself, the text substitutes words in the dictionary for the dictionary itself—and vice versa— in a dizzying conflation. Caves and dictionaries (along with cars and roads) trade places in an overlapping series of surreal hallucinations as passages recount the passage to the passage: “The cave crosses the turnpike. A closed drive down through definitions. Turn right in the dictionary a little ways. . . . Dictionary definitions turn over them.”11 Like the road on an overpass above the turnpike, both car engines and book pages, idiomatically, “turn over.” Even before arriving at their destination, in fact, starting the car anticipates Eldron’s Cave via the pun of the third chapter’s title: “Karstarts.” “Part art, part limestone,” as he will elsewhere write, implicitly leveraging the same pun.12 In The Cave, the car starts, and will carry the protagonists to the art of karst: the natu ral sculptural carvings of the Berkshire Hills in the New England extension of the Piedmont Province with its geomorphic topography of readily dissolved limestone, featuring “predominantly underground drainage and marked by numerous abrupt ridges, fissures, sink-holes, and caverns.”13 The structure of The Cave, in which each chapter reworks the more conventionally descriptive reportage of the first section with ever greater deformation and incoherence, gives the sense of what Gertrude Stein, a literary touchstone for Mayer and Coolidge at the time, called “beginning again and again.”14 The doubling pun of “karstarts,” a kind of beginning again on the topic of beginning, together with the narrative sense of the engine turning over, might recall the dittographic beginning of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the typescript for which opens with the stutter of a Benzedrine-induced finger twitch that could be likened to the backfire catch of the engine engaging in a 1949 Hudson: “I first met met Neal. . . .”15 In any case, Coolidge returns to Kerouac and provides a less tenuous association between several sorts of passages—textual, automotive, and speleological—when he describes navigating a cave in terms of the speeding Beat automobile; in an interview he recalls “an amazing all-day Higgenbotham [Cave, Cumberland Caverns] trip with Roy Davis, from the Historic Entrance through to the Great Extension and beyond, with Roy driving like Neal Cassady at the wheel. Whew!”16 If Coolidge found a precedent for his dictionary poetics in one of Kerouac’s novels, and imagines caving in terms of

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another of Kerouac’s novels, he also links dictionaries and caves directly in his collaboration with Mayer: finding caves in dictionaries and—as we will see—imagining the dictionary itself as a geological formation to be excavated into a cavernous hollow of negative linguistic space. The Cave is one of a series of associated collaborations between Mayer and Coolidge which dance around the dictionary in various ways. Bowes, a key protagonist in the narratives that unfold around the trip to Eldron’s Cave, was a photographer and filmmaker who also made a series of short movies involving Mayer and Coolidge (including one, recording them reading from Gertrude Stein books they had stolen from the Lenox Public Library, which provocatively served as the surrogate for what was advertised as a poetry reading at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project).17 Another recorded Mayer reading from her Studying Hunger project with Coolidge reading from his dictionary-based book The Maintains, and a third filmed Coolidge reading from a thesaurus while Mayer read from a dictionary.18 In The Cave, that dictionary has expanded from one prop among others in a poetic performance to become the very grounds for art—or, in the terms proposed by Coolidge’s punning title, karst: the environment within which one discovers caves; a dissolvable limestone landscape; a vast antral space. Specifically, The Cave proposes a semiotics of the karst that maps it to the printed page. At the most literal level, the cave walls serve as the substrate for text. The spelunkers “notice some 1800’s dates almost ‘professionally’ carved in walls” from what must have been “hours working with chisels” as well as graffiti “smoked on walls with carbide flame.”19 Even in the earliest, most conventionally discursive section the banded cave walls might be read as figures of the printed page, with its striated lines of black type on the white page: “passage totally in marble now, banded in whorls of blue/black on white.”20 The association is confirmed later in the book, when “marble of several colors registers the alphabet,” and “an equivalent of marble to do with this page” is elsewhere described as “a code of marble registers.”21 Marbling, of course, is also one way of decorating paper, as with the edges or endpapers of antiquated books. With “register” registering the indeterminate senses of a book recording property deeds, a reference-book collection of information more generally (such as a dictionary), and the nuances of language use recorded in the dictionary (“a variety or level of usage, esp. as determined by social context and characterized by the range of vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, etc., used by a speaker or writer in particular circumstances,” as the OED has it), the term recurs when the posted sign at the entrance of The Cave—which originally reads “closed to public/no trespassing”— comes to be conflated with the partitioned space of the environment and

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the dictionary page: “big new white page closed to public registers.”22 With such transformations, The Cave both describes and enacts “the duplication of words from many fields,” where “fields” equally points both back to the registers of different disciplines and also out the pastured landscape where Eldon French followed drinking cattle to his cave. An “environment dictionary” which “floats over all” like an immersive medium, the dictionary in The Cave—and as a cave—is a space that allegorizes the proem to Coolidge’s 1970 collection Space. Part epigraph and part found poem, the text following the half-title of Coolidge’s book (and preceding the section title) quotes the dictionary definition of “space” in its entirety.23 In a version of the self-reflective structure by which the dictionary contains the definition of “dictionary,” Coolidge defines the dictionary as a space that contains the definitions of “space.” A chance antanaclasis makes the circuit of denotations even more deliciously recursive and again conflates print and geology; according to the definitions quoted by Coolidge in Space, the word serves as a terme de métier in printing to indicate “the page or part of a page of a periodical used for advertising, or the number of agate lines so used in a newspaper,” where “agate” means not a type of variegated chalcedony but a 5.5-point typeface. Accordingly, when a speaker in The Cave narrates “I push a gate that won’t shut” the space of the entry way—blank interval in the continuous fence— is separated only from its synonym by the space (“a small piece [of type] cast lower than the face of the type used to separate words”) that keeps “a gate” from being shut to “agate.” As Robert Smithson wrote, in a line quoted by Coolidge in “Smithsonian Depositions”: “the names of minerals and the minerals themselves do not differ from each other.”24 “But if,” Coolidge adds, “one identifies and examines the words one finds them beginning to separate and to act independently.”25 Passing through the gate without permission, the trespassing party in The Cave (sustaining the echo of “passage” in its pivoting senses) is “looking to hook up with the dictionary further in” because they are “looking for caves in the dictionary.”26 An earlier sentence explicitly binds the words of The Cave to those in the dictionary, where they have surfaced— in apposition to caves—on its pages like minerals; atypically discursive, the extended sentence recounts: wds. (the cave) were all over the paper, it is not necessary to say what they were, it is not a game to figure out what they were, they were composed of letters from a to z, they all apex they all appear in ————————’s Dictionary, but not in the order in which they appear on my (the opposing) page.”27

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On a casual reading, “apex,” here, might sound ungrammatical if taken in its more common nominal form, but Coolidge uses the word in its specialist sense from North American mining terminology as an intransitive verb: “of a mineral vein or lode: to reach its highest point relative to the earth’s surface (in a particular place).”28 With the dictionary proposed in The Cave in these ways as the environment for spelunking, the further equation of words as cavers begins to reveal its logic. One sentence describes “words trespassing only on the page,” taking up Coolidge’s paronomastic play on property and possession which turns on the nominal and pronominal versions of “mine,” as in the doubly punning statement “much of the strain was a fault of mine.”29 Drawing out the etymology of trespass in the Latin passus (step), one of the party making its way over private property to Eldron’s Cave ventures: “I figure on the paper going a few steps further.” Like Tina Darragh, as we will see in the next chapter, Coolidge here puns on figure as speculation, feature, and printed illustration—while the pun is itself a figure of language.30 With flickeringly altered foreground and background absences, the words appear as caves on the negative space of the page which is itself aligned with the recursive structure of the dictionary: caverns swallow caves in a mise-en-abîme that literalizes the figure’s abyss. The Cave posits the antral yawn of the dictionary as an environment for caves—a textual matrix of empty space that permits the legibility of words in the first place. If “caves are warm as words,” those words are also as dark as caves, and the pitch black of printers’ ink blurs in Coolidge’s writing to the absolute darkness of the underground: “our words are the cave, each going out like a light, into the telling black”; “all writing amounts to a mass darken”; “I empty all the very black pens of nothing.”31 Occupying the ostensibly empty space of the blank page, printed words fill it with the absence of cavernous black. Although one sentence admits that “a rock is not a word” (“but may occupy its space?” it immediately hedges, in interrogative qualification that anticipates a line from a later Coolidge poem: “a rock is the inside of a space”), rocks and words are thoroughly conflated in “Karstarts.” In its promiscuous, viscous, colloidal vocabulary one mines “rocks from dictionaries,” discovers “word orogenies” in which “pages were pushed up and over them[selves],” and learns that like the “Environment Dictionary,” with its “paper composed of the letters from a to z,” “geologists say the Taconics were composed of letters from a to z”—that is, the totality of what is in a dictionary: “nothing but an alphabet in the dictionary.”32 The formulations of totality further work to cement the association between dictionaries and caverns when one recalls

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that another line avers: “a cave is a total body of thought.”33 Ultimately, the negative space of the page and the hollow of the cave are the spaces from which signification emerges as one samples “data from drilled holes”: “from nothing an alphabet in the dictionary.”34 The conjunction a geological formation and a linguistic reference book is just one facet of the sustained set of geological metaphors elaborated by Coolidge over decades, through which rocks and language are equated and confused. Coolidge distills his signature collapse of the linguistic and the lithic in the telegraphic line: “as stone as words.”35 Or again: the double sense of deposition—both written testimony and geological sedimentation—in the title “Smithsonian Depositions” offers a prime example of his petrolexical imagination, equally suggesting both the Hall of Geology, Gems, and Minerals in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the writing of Robert Smithson, whom Coolidge quotes, without attribution, repeatedly undersigning statements like the one about the identity of minerals and the names of minerals. The context of that passage, in fact, is significant for Coolidge’s poetics of absence; Smithson goes on to elaborate that the sameness of nouns and stones arises “ because at the bottom of both the material [minerals] and the print [words] is the beginning of an abysmal number of fissures.”36 As Smithson wrote elsewhere: “one might object to ‘hollow volumes’ in favor of ‘solid materials’, but no materials are solid; they all contain caverns and fissures. Solids are particles built up around flux, they are objective illusions. . . .”37 Earlier in “Smithsonian Depositions,” as if to “widen the quotation and shift a hole in the earth,” Coolidge picks up the passage he cited from Smithson and quotes at length: Words and rocks contain a language that follows a syntax of splits and ruptures. Look at any word long enough and you will see it open up into a series of faults, into a terrain of particles each containing its own void. This discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution; the certainties of didactic discourse are hurled into the erosion of the poetic principle. Poetry being forever lost must submit to its own vacuity; it is somehow a product of exhaustion rather than creation. Poetry is always a dying language but never a dead language.38 We will see Coolidge exploit the word’s faulting fragmentation, as well as the result of a didactic discourse eroded to poetic ends in his process of textual exhaustion and erosion in The Maintains, but for the moment I want to call attention to the geolinguistics that Coolidge affirms in his appropriation from Smithson. In part, the rhetoric leverages the vague

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sense that rocks are somehow more material than other things, or at least the very epitome of brute, recalcitrant materiality itself. Recall, for just one instance, Samuel Johnson’s famous attempt to refute Bishop Berkeley’s idealism with an argumentum ad lapidum: “striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it,” declaring: “I refute it thus.”39 For a poet interested in the materiality of language, the exemplary materiality of the lithic offers a bedrock from which to foreground its concrete qualities—as opposed to abstract, or immaterial— nature. Those qualities, like the descriptive scales of petrology and crystallography used to type and classify rocks and minerals, are precisely what Coolidge, in an early statement, identified as the focus of his work. With a nod to Ferdinand de Saussure’s description of the signifier as “une image-acoustique [a sound-shape],” and acknowledging Gertrude Stein as the writer to have “most clearly & accurately indicated” such lexical facets, Coolidge contends: “words have a universe of qualities other than those of descriptive relation: Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, VectorForce, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity.” 40 Smithson had proposed a similar turn to the vocabulary of geology as a way of conceptualizing art, venturing: “oxidation, hydration, carbonization, and solution (the major processes of rock and mineral disintegration) are four methods that could be turned toward the making of art.” 41 Coolidge, accordingly, pursues a poetics of mineral disintegration specifically in terms of the dictionary. With a logic complementary to the negative space of the alphabet in the “dictionary environment” of The Cave, the dissolving osmosis of minerals and water through the karst provides the language with which the dictionary’s defining function can be figured. Part of the process of forming caves, by which a “carbonic acid solution needs softer limestone beds to pick up & deposit out anything substantial,” a solution is also the means by which the narrative of The Cave begins: “in a suspension solution, so the car starts [karst arts],” which echoes the later lines “the solution of definitions, the suspension of salt,” and “this serves the dictionary, to fix, any definitions.” 42 These sentences anticipate a line in “Smithsonian Depositions” that sounds as though it could have come directly from one of Robert Smithson’s Artforum essays, but appears to be the product of Coolidge’s own imagination: “the dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes, originations buried in the dawn of man.” 43 On the following page, Coolidge elaborates on the entangled roots of buried minerals in a playful etymological primer that recalls the a-to-z structure he posits as proper to both mountains and dictionaries. The passage begins, “As for Apatite, fraud is a matter of bones. Biotite peels from

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Biot’s sheets,” continues on alphabetically to “Zeolites are boilers. And Zircon, a silicate of jargon.” 44 With a good dictionary on hand, the excursus is easy enough to retrace, straight from the various words’ etymologies (apatite, a primary component of skeletal matter, attracts “fraud” from the word’s origin in the Greek ἀπάτη [apáte, deceit], and so on through Latin, German, Arabic, and Portuguese). As a “vastly supersaturated” mixture, the dictionary described by Coolidge contains more solutes—that is, in this instance, more languages—than one would expect possible under normal conditions. Perhaps the implication is that English, with its Germanic base, eleventh-century Latinate influx, and open borrowings, contains far more than one language encoded in the many etymological roots of its amalgamated lexicon. But Coolidge is also aware that the dictionary contains more than just the instrumental language it describes in its role as a reference work; it also contains the seeds of a poetic language—of words that can be torqued away from their referential function—as in the chapter from Desolation Angels. Full of potential, the dictionary is supersaturated with the precipitates that remain when the banausic work of denotation has been eroded. Erosion and dissolution, cavity and blackness, spaces and blanks—the petroglyphic logic that associates writing and geology in The Cave posits its terms specifically as absences. If marble figures the print that in turn paints a verbal picture of marble, that recrystallized limestone is expressly described as “the marble resultant an absence of product” and the text as “the words for what would have been where you don’t really write” when faced with “an absence of alphabet for putting words together.” 45 Accordingly, playing on the homophones “whole” and “hole,” one finds The Cave describing itself as “a whole dictionary of end spaces, but not in order.” 46 Surfaces, whether earth or books, are replaced by cavities: “so many absences for covers.”47 As one character explains the traversal of the dictionary environment toward the cave, in the language of chemical reactions: “we make our way combining its process with an absence of product.” 48 Writing in The Cave—imagined as cavernous lack—folds back on itself at points into a doubled negation; in an environment where “spaces are inconceivable,” the previously noted “very black pens of nothing” are emptied, while an “empty mountain” (that is, a cave) is denied because “you can’t get away with nothing in an empty mountain.” 49 The absent space of words and rocks, in fact, frames the entire narrative, from the passage to the cave to the cave’s passage itself. The first sign that the expedition is on the right track takes the form of “the gap in the meadow stonewall” which the speaker remembers “from lots of other times here.”50 Soon enough, the letters on the page recounting the scene become “an equivalent

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of the gaps in the meadow stonewall I remember.”51 Indeed, when the no trespassing sign returns in “Karstarts,” it has morphed again to read “Cave Gap, Public Equivalent.”52 The equivalent proposed is not a gap in just any kind of stone, but quite specific to the wall; the second stanza of the second section of The Cave, titled “Modular,” opens: “bricks are the only equivalent that belong in this meadow. Equivalent of words in a meadow on the page.”53 Other passages are equally insistent: “Dictionary definitions. Do these single letters belong on the page, only words belong on the page, an equivalent of bricks”; “equivalent of bricks, along the page”; and, “finally try a house, an equivalent of bricks” (where the “house” Coolidge might have tried, in this particular environment, could well have been the door-stopping cinderblock of the Random House dictionary).54 With these equivalencies, Coolidge makes a quite specific allusion, positioning the textual and geological absences of The Cave in relation to the sculptural practice of Carl Andre, whose most notorious work, Equivalents I–VII, was indeed an “equivalent of bricks.” The eight pieces of Andre’s sculpture were equivalent, presumably, because although they took the form of different shapes, they each consisted of 120 bricks, laid two high in unmortared solids of various permutations according to multiples factoring to 60. “Modular,” the title of the section that opens with bricks as “the only equivalent,” is thus the precise art-historical term for Andre’s sculpture. First exhibited in 1966 at Tibor de Nagy gallery in the form of sand-lime bricks, the work—remade shortly afterward in an equivalent set of refractory bricks—was purchase by the Tate Gallery in 1972, just as Coolidge and company were making their way toward Eldron’s cave. Subsequently, an article by an investigative journalist for the Sunday Times fueled the most publicized succès de scandale since Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier n° 2 and Equivalents I–VIII was the subject of heated debate at the very moment Coolidge and Mayer were composing The Cave.55 The oblique allusion to Andre, moreover, explains why the “equivalent of bricks” points to the “gap in the meadow stone wall” and the series of figures of absence and negative space transitively equated in The Cave, which descriptively illustrates and expands on Andre’s memorably pithy formulation of negative ontology: “a thing is a hole in a thing it is not.”56 “What presence isn’t sure of its negative space,” Coolidge and Mayer query, rephrasing Andre’s assertion, and they elaborate the point with a series of double negatives: “a negative presence is once more to be denied. No water in the hole. I insist on continuing what an empty drone isn’t sure of.” Evoking the dome of the recurrent “empty mountain,” the interior of which is the domed ceiling of the hall of a cave, another line que-

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ries: “what would one deny an empty drone or dome.”57 “To locate every thing leave the space things used to take place,” The Cave advises, describing “shoulders suspending a hole in its own matter” and “a book made full in faulting more than statement” (“fault,” intransitively, construed as dative: “to be wanting or absent”).58 Like the geological chasm of a fault, the cave is a phenomenologically identifiable absence. The trope occupied Coolidge. Flirting with the paradox of holes filling rather than evacuating, one sentence describes how “two potholes fill the frame,” recalling a realization from “Smithsonian Depositions”: “to spend time in a movie house is to make a ‘hole’ in one’s life.”59 Similarly, the first paragraph of a contemporaneous prose piece describes the irony of a solid cavity: “a big hole but it was iron” (the recurrent and otherwise unexplained references to dentature and toothaches in the piece may hinge on the related lexicon of “cavity” and “filling”).60 In other words, “a thing,” like a vein of iron in nonferrous rock, or a cave in a mountain, recognized as “a hole in a thing it is not.” Pitched at a recursive remove in The Cave, which writes around Andre’s quote without actually citing it, while gesturing towards its author without actually naming him, the axiom is an absent reference to absent referencing. Coolidge performs Andre’s dictum by not quite quoting it. Indeed, one might view “Karstarts” as an essay about Andre’s sculptural practice. “But,” as Coolidge warns in a notebook entry from the period, one “must remember when they write about, that ‘about’ means only ‘around,’ not on.” 61 More broadly, from the perspective of Andre’s statement, we can see The Cave in dialogue with the contemporaneous discourse around sculpture in its expanded field.62 Recalling the empty mountains, and the assertion that “two mountain ranges are not something,” for example, one might read the book’s doubled negations in terms of Michael Heizer’s 1969 earthwork Double Negative, about which Heizer explained: “There is nothing there, yet it is still a sculpture.” 63 Even without specific referents, The Cave proposes new definitions of sculpture that would accommodate its widening horizon over the 1960s to encompass earthworks; considering “an environment that defines what is sculptural,” the book proposes: “words carved in marble define what is sculptural but not transportable.” 64 The modular logic of minimalism was another direction in which the field of sculpture expanded during those years, and it took its inspiration in part from the stylistically flat permutations of les nouveaux romanciers. Coolidge also found a model for imagining sculptured empty space in a translation of Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay for Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad; in “Smithsonian Depositions” he quotes a passage about passages: “sculptured door frames, series of doorways, galleries,

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transverse corridors.” 65 When these architectural absences are mapped back onto the rooms and halls and galleries and passages of cave systems, “void hooks onto void in the caverns.” 66 “To create is to make a pact with nothingness. The void exacts its tribute,” Coolidge remarked in a darkly grandiose entry in a notebook from the period.67 If contemporary sculpture provided one model for producing art through negation, Dada had provided Coolidge with an earlier template. Remembering his college art history class, Coolidge recalls: “I think I read The Dada Painters and Poets thing too [Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology].” 68 In a different interview he reiterates: I remember some of the earliest writing I did was an attempt to do automatic writing under the influence of the surrealist concept of automatism. I had read that Motherwell collection of Dada painters and poets. But I couldn’t figure out how to proceed. I just kind of started writing and it got awful right away, real gooey and either sort of (what would you call it?) substitute-sexual or sentimental or too easy in associative pattern. What Coolidge does not seem to remember, in these conversations, is that Motherwell’s book—as a printed object—had indeed helped him “figure out how to proceed.” With a portmanteau conflation of the Dadaists’ Zürich haunt and their triumphal cry—“the cabinet has been overthrown”— Coolidge titled one of the poems in his 1968 book Ing “Cabinet Voltaire.” 69 A typical passage strews spall, as in the following: tradict theless it gether tastic for gin tion and sarily and sests With its gleeful abandonment not just of grammatical coherence, but of the integrity of words themselves, “this discomforting language of fragmentation offers no easy gestalt solution.”70 The lines might be taken as a pastiche of the lautgedichte Hugo Ball ventured at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, but they come quite literally from Ball’s “Dada Fragments,” where Coolidge found a number of words hyphenated by the justified prose: “contradict,” “nonetheless,” “together,” “phantastic,” “begin,” “disruption,” “necessarily,” “palimpsests.”71 Like Kerouac in the chapter from Desolation Angels, attending to the typographic fractures that readers are meant to cognitively suture over, Coolidge moves along the left-hand mar-

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gin of the page of The Dada Painters and Poets, fragmenting Ball’s “Fragments” in a palimpsest that inscribes his lyric over the phantastic ghost of prose, necessarily beginning a disruption of grammar and lexeme that can nonetheless be understood together as the fragments of English at the hand of the typesetter in the mind of a poet. “A language must be carefully guarded and closed in sommon [sic] usage,” as Coolidge will later write, with a return to the language of geology, “for its clastic energies to be held in check.” However cleverly Coolidge summons the spirit of Ball’s dada proposals and applies them to the discursive language of Ball’s diary entries, the productive release of verbal energy obtained by following the “syntax of splits and ruptures” as words “open up into a series of faults” was a lesson in composition he would carry to other works—such as “ ‘THE’ [Part I],” which cribs from an interview with Andy Warhol—and ultimately to the dictionary itself in his 1974 book The Maintains.72 A “meditation on the dictionary” that he considered dedicating to Desolation Angels, The Maintains not only continues the clastic poetics on display in Ing, in places, but it also literally enacts the cavernous, “karstart,” solution-passage of erosion and dissolve that The Cave discursively described. Unlike Zukofsky, who turns to the dictionary in order to choose selected vocabulary from the chance store of a given page, or Oppen, who motivates implicit structures in the range of enumerated denotations, Coolidge attends to the relationships—whether attractions or repulsions, congruencies or dissonances—between the terms that remain when most of the dictionary’s text has been abraded and dissolved into a negative space of gaping erasure. We can glimpse a version this poetics of elimination, and the signifying absence that results, in the concluding paragraph of “Smithsonian Depositions.” Erosion, as imagined in this paragraph, has the potential not only to buckle and cave but also to connect otherwise disparate parts into new architectonic structures that reveal unexpected wisdom: Between these two cliffs, which preserve the distance between my gaze and its object, time, the destroyer, has begun to pile up rubble. Sharp edges have been blunted and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places collide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by the tremors on the crust of an ageing planet. Some insignificant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared without a trace. Events without any apparent connection, and originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one or the other and suddenly

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crystallize into a sort of edifice which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history.73 The paragraph transcribes, wholesale, an unattributed passage from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques.74 The first-person scene of delirious entropic ruin and abruptly shifting temporalities and scales, replete with geological and mineralogical figures (“cliffs” and “rubble,” seismically shifted “strata” and “crust”—above all “crystallization”), might have come from the typewriter of a melancholy Robert Smithson. Regardless of its provenance, the most pertinent point, for Coolidge’s poetics, arises from the law of conservation at work in the dynamic between deterioration and assemblage: the fracture and collapse of any current network only reveals new relationships among remaining elements. In what Charles Bernstein has termed Coolidge’s “poetry of elimination,” “everything left destroys the connections” of the original source text, but the remnants invite new configurations to be tested and entertained.75 Picking up on a lead suggested by Alan Halsey from Coolidge’s own vocabulary, Dale Engass conceptualizes such a process in mineralogical terms as “colloidal,” where “words and phrases from one location are scattered throughout another,” and Jerome McGann describes the politics of a certain kind of dictionary poetics in similarly geological terms that apply perfectly to The Maintains: archaeologies of knowledge at the limits of linguistic coherence, “whereby the page of a dictionary is suddenly exposed as a field of strange and unrecognized deposits—odd bits and pieces scattered across a surface whose depths and layers and correspondence escape the notice of the dictionary’s ordinary users.”76 In direct contrast to Barrett Watten, who completely misunderstands The Maintains as an “accretive form” in which the compositional method is “additive rather than isolating” so that “there isn’t the sense of tearing apart, [or of] exposing new areas,” the book instead evinces the results of a vast, exposing subtraction. A solution of definitions, The Maintains prepares the dictionary as a homogeneous suspension in which the distinctions between lemma and entry have been dissolved and dissipated, and most of the language galled, leaving scattered evaporates to recrystallize along new axes after its desiccation.77 Consider the subsidence of precipitates remaining in the following arrangement: brill or choice dicentra chimera pile green groom card dite brig78

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The vocabulary draws attention to variable pronunciations and spellings of the grapheme c and its digraph ch in each of the end words in the first three lines. The word “choice” showcases an unvoiced postalveolar affricate at the beginning and a voiceless alveolar sibilant at the end; a voiceless velar stop in “chimera” echoes “card”; and a “choice” between all three must be made in pronouncing the central “dicentra,” which can be articulated three ways, depending on whether one pronounces the word as fully assimilated to English, as Classical Latin, or with a postclassical Latin affricate. The bookending “brig” and “brill” establish the parallel of the interior pairing “green” and “groom” to further frame the quatrain, within which the short and long vowels in “brill” and “brig,” respectively, contrast with one another while the interior vowel sounds of “pile” and “green” display the alternatives for how one might say “dite.”79 The precession of vowels models indeterminate and uncertain choice, while the two pairs of initial consonantal assonance anchor the passage. Countering the instrumentality of the dictionary as a reference book (a tool by which one can determine what “phreantic,” say, means), Coolidge tests the qualities of its words—“Hardness, Density, Sound-Shape, VectorForce, & Degrees of Transparency/Opacity”—against one another after the utility of their definitions and the documentation of their genealogies and grammatical categorizations have been thoroughly deliquesced. In the passage “rootstock shelflike mallard / shellac,” for another instance, the disarticulated phonemes of the last word are distributed through the first three, retaining the visual rhyme of the double l, but in a braided shuffle that encodes without echoing: “rootstock shelflike mallard.”80 At the same time, with a phrasing typical of Coolidge’s verse, the first two words establish a spondaic base against which the trochaic “mallard” contrasts with the iambic “shellac” to produce a rhythm with a sense of decisive closure. “Stress to speed settles, each a break to grammatical collapse forms the rest,” as Coolidge writes in another poem from the period.81 Just as Andre’s Equivalents I–VII presents bricks in and of themselves, discrete units of equal measure placed side by side but not put to constructive (construction) use, The Maintains presents words in and of themselves, juxtaposed with other words in a syntax without the subordination of grammar; each word carries as much weight as its neighbor, but all are removed from the utility of the dictionary’s semantic focus while not entirely abstracted to the “lautgedichte” of “Cabinet Voltaire.” This balance between abstraction and semantics accounts for the fundamental innovation of Coolidge’s poetry. Considering the most radically granular disintegrations of John Cage’s mesostics, which in works such as the later parts of Empty Words reduced a source to single letters, Coolidge distances

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himself from the extremes of linguistic abstraction: “I think when you do that to language you have no longer language. You have something else made from the particulate ruins of a language, which can be performed as a purely sound composition that sometimes nudges against literature, but it’s not [literature].”82 “I think I like to push as close to that edge as I can,” Coolidge clarifies, but “not quite give it all up.”83 Simulta neously risking a non-referential structure while refusing to abjure the semantic charge of words, courting nonsense without abdicating the possibility of purport, “meaning, in The Maintains, is something which is given off by the text like sparks, but which refuses to gather itself into that larger hypothetical order which subverts the direct experience of language.”84 Aiming for “the energy of word art rather than purely sound art,” and for an element “which gets it away from the limitations of ‘language about language,’ ” Coolidge balances semantic intimations against particulate recalcitrance (or the “literary” against the “linguistic,” as Paul de Man would make the distinction).85 The balancing act requires a precision alignment of terms whose valences bond and repel in balanced lattices.86 In the quatrain above, for example, semantic references counterpoise the manifest repudiation of grammatical relations. The final line is taken from the definition of “brigantine,” which hyphenates its penultimate word: “sometimes, a hermaphro-/dite brig.”87 “Hermaphrodite,” in turn, offers a synonym for “chimera” (“a mixture of tissues of different genetic constitution in the same part of an organism”), each of which stands reflexively as figures for the fanciful composition of a single poem formed from the grafting splice of words from radically different origins (what might be imagined as distinct lexical genotypes if we shift the metaphor from geology to biology).88 But the floral folds quickly back into the lithic; if “green” suggests the foliage of “dicentra,” it comes in fact from the definition of “brickkiln,” which might recall Andre’s Equivalents: “a pile of green bricks.”89 “Dicentra” itself, however, does not appear anywhere on the opening from which all of the other words (including the “card” game of bridge and the “groom” in bridegroom) are drawn.90 The pages do, however, contain the lemma “breeches,” pointed to by the entry later in the dictionary for “Dutchman’s-breeches”: “a delicate spring-flowering herb (Dicentra cucullaria).”91 “Card,” “green,” and “dite” all fall along the edge of the dictionary’s columns; as we have repeatedly seen, the typography of a particular dictionary not only promotes certain vocabulary to a poet’s attention, but it can also permit the format of the source and its subject to resonate. When Coolidge writes the line “as edge or the inside curve or turns indoors” he draws the language from the inside, gutter-curving edge of the prose block

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defining inside in a move that can only be known to insiders with access to his desk dictionary: [. . .] 2. Employed or working indoors; as, an inside man. 3. Pertaining or known to insiders; as, inside information. 4. Placed on or toward the inner side of any curve or turn; as edge of the inside ski.92 Continuing to be drawn to the left-hand edge of the column, Coolidge follows the marginal transcription with a witty inside joke that follows “a thin part having absence” with a “having only one lean as said of a roof” and concludes with the couplet “occurs/ or lets.” The usage explanation of the near synonyms for “lean” (“spare, lank, lanky, gaunt, rawboned, scrawny, skinny”—all of which “mean thin because of absence”) is followed by the definition of “lean-to” (in architecture, “having only one slope or pitch;—said of a roof”), but the last two lines draw their words from the entry for “leak”: precisely what a roof would have if its parts, however thin, had absences.93 Not evident in the poem by itself, only a reading of the source text delivers the punch line. After making a connection to an absent reference to absences, the poem then leaps ahead to the next stanza with language from the definitions of “leap” and “leapfrog”: “the other past by a jump or jump it.” In the Collegiate, the layout places “by a jump” directly above “or jump” on the lefthand margin of the column, where “the other past it” is also set: [. . .] 2. To spring or move suddenly as if by a jump; to bound or move swiftly.—v.t. 1. To pass over by a leap or jump.94 Those jumps and leaps are a good reminder that unlike Zukofsky or Tina Darragh (as we will see in the next chapter), Coolidge does not align the units of his poem directly with the dictionary page. Where Thanks to the Dictionary and On the Corner to Off the Corner tend to derive each paragraph or poem from a single dictionary page or opening, the stanzas in The Maintains move at an asynchronous rate to his dictionary reading. Moreover, one can sense those shifts and shunts, as alliterating lemmata aggregate and dissipate accordingly, contributing to the impression of the tempi that are so key to the flow of language unable to rely on the pace of plot or argument. Such movement, both rhythmic and thematic, animates the following segment: shorn gala milk mend jargon or U. S. footpath

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in a patent pounds lighted not heavy a chunk lump in comp juts number rush by junket95 Deprived by excision (“shorn”) and reassembled in a patchwork (the definition of “patch” provides “mend”), the passage suggests certain obvious (“patent”) themes of movement and impediment that draw attention to the pace of their own rhythmic units, initially discrete and congruent with the lineation but then rushing in an unimpeded final couplet.96 “Lighted,” for instance, denotes not only alighted, or dismounted and on foot, but it also hints at a burden or gait in contrast to the hindering “heavy” (perhaps weighed in measured “pounds”), as well as at the lit or illuminated path that would aid a traveler at night. That footpath (what one might colloquially “pound” as one would the pavement) and the “rush” of “jut” (a corruption of “jet,” “to shoot out or forward”) are all countered by the clunky, spurning obstacles of a “chunk” or “lump.”97 “Rush,” here, as it happens, is woven into the text as the word that refers to plants of the genus Juncus, appearing on page 458 of the Collegiate as part of the etymology of words like “junket” and “junk,” which trace their origins to the Italian giunco.98 The third definition of “junk,” in turn, supplies “chunk; lump,” while “number” comes from the definition of “junto” (“a number of men combined for some purpose”), and “comp” appears to have been shortened from “composed.”99 That deliberate abbreviation indicates Coolidge’s investment in fashioning staccato spondees, and it contributes to the rapid tattoo of monosyllabics in the line. The sound particles in the couplet are chockablock. Interwoven consonant blends -nk and -mp (with the related blend in “number”) interlace the voiced postalveolar affricate that begins the two end-words (“ juts” and “ junket”) with versions (voiceless at the beginning of “chunk”) and variations (voiceless alveolar affricate at the beginning of “juts”). The vowel in “comp,” moreover, relieves and thereby accentuates the uniformity of the other insistent repetitions of open mid-back unrounded vowels in the center of the couplet’s close-packed primary words. The structure evident here is typical of Coolidge’s compositional habit of arranging densely clustered internal rhymes within a weave of blatantly repeated sounds, and where those stark repetitions frame passages with nested pairs of marked assonance; in this signature mode of Coolidge’s melopoeia, “particles sound.”100 Listen, for instance, to the three open mid-back rounded vowels in the first syllables of the following words, as they play off the proximity of the audible difference between the final

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vowels in “opal” and “board”: “yacht audible opal / xylic mopboard.”101 At the same time, the lines entwine a paired inversion of bilabial stops (both voiced and unvoiced: “audible,” “opal,” “mopboard”), a series of alveolar lateral approximates (“audible,” “opal,” “xylic”), and the purely visual rhyme of the letter y in the first words of each line, with the final voiced alveolar stop picking up on the lingering syllabic pivot in “audible.” A similar density and framing pattern structure a stanza such as: attribute wind in tempos pile peas shoe a mild rose slang matzo copper mat beatle member theory as hoax as an ash text that light of done marge suffix outline coil pulp102 Against the regular meter of the mirrored sounds in “pile,” “mild,” “light,” and “line,” the abutting internal rhyme of “matza copper” is bracketed by “rose” and “hoax,” with a constellation of alliterative m, prominent x, and the doubled p and repeated l that balances the end of the first with their condensed return in the end of the entire stanza: “tempos pile . . . pulp.” The Maintains, significantly, offsets such phonic structures with a counterpoint of reference that keeps it from becoming the mere sound poetry of Cagean abstraction that Coolidge hoped to keep at a wary arm’s length. The line “herb mump warp hemp,” for instance, certainly exhibits the sort of formal structure that shaped “rootstock shelflike mallard / shellac.” The written form of the final word sums directly as the product of the first two, “herb mump,” while the terminal bilabial stops, first voiced and then unvoiced, of “herb” and “warp” alternate the rhyme of -mp.103 But “mump” means “to mumble”—precisely the sort of articulatory “warp” that a reading of these chewy dense clusters of nasals and approximants produces in its grammatically inarticulate utterance.104 Similarly, “herb” and “hemp,” as period slang for marijuana, frame the line with synonyms.105 The following stanza also elicits near narrative readings: flume by beverage cent linen aid of lips

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fat the cup chap for sale106 The lines arrange metonyms without sacrificing the musicality produced by alveolar approximates (“flume,” “linen,” “lips,” “sale”) and the play of sibilants (cent, lips, sale) against the voiceless velar stop (cup) and voiceless post-alveolar affricate (chap). Clustered rhymes (“beverage,” “cent,” “linen”; “aid,” “sale”; “fat,” “chap”) further structure the sonics of the verse. But the vocabulary, however unconventionally arranged in grammatical patterns, is far from incoherent. A “flume” or river (OF flum) of beverage sent [cent] while drinking might lead to the sort of spill that would require a napkin: the “linen aid of lips,” as its mock-heroic epithet might read. Those lips, in turn, attract a spectrum of idioms from dry to moisturized: “chap”; the bloodied “fat” (bruised); and the excessively sebaceous, or whatever might leave an oleaginous mark on the rim of the overflowing cup, thereby soiling it (French sale). At the same time, in another register “fat” denotes affluent, which accentuates the monetary sense of “cent” and the discounting sense of “sale” (of interest to someone counting their pennies). Like a cavern passage widening to a chamber, or a line to a stanza, “the energy of words starts to open up beyond this point.”107 The uncertain gaps in coherent reference, however, only point back to the proverb allegorized by the narrative of overflow in the first place; as Ben Johnson quotes the well-known adage, with an allusion to Erasmus’s Latin version: “Multa cadunt inter—you can ghesse the rest. / Many things fall betweene the cup, and lip: / And though they touch, you are not sure to drinke.”108 An earlier stanza exemplifies Coolidge’s balance between the material specifics of words, their suggested semantic connections with one another, and the significance of their origins in different entries from different pages of the dictionary: row or summons of being commencement with a coo or coos not classed as silk is wound the coupon courts in reply to another habitant the face of a type The snippets are the residue from pages 183, 190, and 191 of the 1961 Webster’s New Collegiate. In their appearance as sutured sections of text cut

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and restitched from the dictionary source, “silk is wound” self-reflexively suggests the thread of surgical stitching, drawing the “coup” (from the French couper, to cut) in “coupon,” a piece of paper, like Coolidge’s dictionary page, that is intended to be excised: 1. Com. A certificate of interest due, designed to be cut off and presented for payment when interest is due. 2. A section, as of a ticket or certificate, showing the holder to be entitled to some ser vice or right (as to purchase certain goods). 3. A certificate given with a purchase of goods and redeemable in merchandise or case. 4. A part of a printed advertisement designed to be cut off for use as an order blank.109 In each case, the cut paper serves as means for a particular kind of communication between parties reliant on trust and good will—all instances in which “the coupon / courts in reply to another,” in the sense of soliciting or alluring, attracting and seeking favor. In the romantic sense, courting might include the “amorous converse” of “coo or coos,” a sort of summons at the commencement of an amatory relationship.110 As it happens, in fact, the calling together sought by such courtship cooing is the source of the stanza’s first two lines, which are brought together from the definitions for “convoke” (“assemble by summons”) and “convocation” (“an assembly at which degrees are conferred; commencement”).111 At the same time, the stanza proves the range of phonemes signified by a digraph in the way that the earlier passage had tested the capacity of c and ch; the ou sound in “courts” contrasts with the rhyme between “wound” and “coupon”; in actuality, however, the “wound” here can be determined to be the past tense of “wind,” which Coolidge has snipped from the orphaned last line of the definition of “cop”: “a tube or quill upon which silk is wound.”112 Pronounced in this way, “wound” elicits the possibility of a rhyme with “row” understood in its colloquial sense as “a noisy or turbulent quarrel, a brawl; fuss”—precisely the sort of altercation that might commence the legal proceeding that would lead to a “summons” to the “courts” in reply to another’s complaint.113 In whatever way it is read, “row” occurs on the dictionary page directly across the narrow ravine-like gutter from “convocation,” hyphenated at the end of its row of words as part of the definition of “coomb” (combe, comb): “a narrow ravinelike valley.”114 Further down the page, “not classed” remains similarly exposed along the left margin of the definition for “coot” (which are “not classed as game birds”), while “habitant” (an inhabitant, from French, used to specify “one of the settlers, or their descendants, of French descent in Canada or Louisiana, of the farming class”) is found,

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as it happens, in situ as the hyphenated fragment of “the inhabitants of such a territorial division” as a country or shire.115 As we have seen throughout this book, the affordances of a particular edition of a dictionary—the typographic particulars of its textual disposition—inflect the poetry that draws on it. Returning to reference, by way of type, the phenotype of habitants could reveal “the face of a type”—a broad forehead and Gallic nose, perhaps—but the reader attentive to the proximity of “coupon” and “courts” might suspect the definition of “courier”: the face of a type designed by Howard Kettler (and revised by Adrian Frutiger) for IBM’s ubiquitous typewriter fount. In fact, however, the line comes from the entry for “counter,” as a terme de métier in typefounding: “the depression between lines in the face of a type.”116 Once again, a narrow hollow ravine is both exploited and obliquely referenced. But at the same time, “counter” also returns us, in thematic course, to the exchange rituals of the coupon through its meanings both as the scene of commerce (“a table or board . . . over which business is transacted”) and the token used in the transaction—the very definition of “coupon” itself: something that serves as a “device, as a piece of metal, ivory, etc. used in reckoning.”117 Coolidge’s erosive dissolve invites comparison with other reductive poetics in a Modernist legacy that traces back to Ezra Pound’s poetically condensed definition of poetry as concision: “Dichten = condensare.” Like so much of the work I am considering here, Pound’s famous dictum originates in a dictionary transcription. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Pound “cited with delight [Basil] Bunting’s discovery that a German– Italian dictionary rendered dichten (to write poetry) as condensare, to condense.”118 Among the residue of that condensation remained the “luminous details” of culture captured in the rhizomatic circuits of zeitgeist networks and the “gists and piths” of the written record that define poetry itself.119 Coolidge, wittily, acknowledges Pound’s model by condensing page 535 of Webster’s New Collegiate to leave nothing but the pith of “gist/pitch.” All of the minerals on that page have been eroded, leaving only two terminals, situated directly one above the other in the layout: “mineralogist . . . / mineral pitch.”120 The word “pitch,” which as we saw earlier had attracted Coolidge’s attention to the definition of “lean-to,” here reorients the appropriated language of darkness and minerality in the following stanza: limestone in hue the cookery seed of this tree

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of or pertaining to or like a pitch in size or mineral aim dark as a tent’s pip robbery or artistic theft121 Idiomatically, a tent is ‘pitched’ and darkness can be “black as pitch,” so “dark as a tent’s” solves logically to “pitch.” Moreover, the “dark” of pitch is corroborated later in The Maintains with the line “pitch drink office,” which plays on the idioms of ‘black’ or ‘dark’ coffee and the ghost of that drink behind “drink office.”122 The stanza further establishes a connection between minerals and colors by yoking language from the directly consecutive definitions for “pisolite” and “pistachio” (“a limestone composed of pisiform concretions” and “a color, yellow-green in hue, of low saturation and high brilliance,” respectively).123 At the same time, the consecutive entries for “piscine” and “pisiform” provide the undergirding structure: “of or pertaining to or like” and “in size.”124 These stylistic connectives of lexicography, or what Coolidge calls the “syntax” of the dictionary, are in fact “the maintains” of the book’s title (in the obsolete nominal sense of sustaining deportment and “support”). Maintaining the phrasal coherence of otherwise grammatically incoherent passages, such syntax relates disparate words in the ghost of a definitional frame. Within that scaffolding, the stanza loots freely from the entry for “pitch” itself and makes an artistic theft of the definitions for “piracy”: “1. Robbery of the high seas. 2. Any unauthorized appropriation and reproduction of another’s production, invention, or conception; literary or artistic theft.”125 A few stanzas earlier, “a pirate of lord howe’s island” had appeared, in a metamorphosis of “pinnate” in the definition of “umbrella palm”: “a pinnate-leaved palm (Hedyscepe canterburyana) native to Lord Howe’s Island, but common in cultivation” (the metamorphosis to “pirate” was perhaps suggested by “umpirage” at the top of the second column of the dictionary page being mined).126 Whatever the origin, the slippage between “pirate” and “pinnate” is reinforced when a later phrase joins “copy” and “pinnate” in the context of “pound”: that god with us in partition of another object next in line or state having no voice part of the copy pinnate to enter in on at rest the rest of a given period pound next127 At its heart, the passage borrows from the definition for “imitation”: not just “that which is made or produced as a copy; an artificial likeness,” or

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“properly, a literary word designed to reproduce the style or manner of another author,” but also, in music, “the repetition in a voice part of the melodic theme, phrase or motive previously found in another part.”128 The motif has indeed repeated, with “pound”—a word always evoking the proper name of the poet from whom Coolidge has plagiarized the pitched poetics of gists—remaining as the pithy residuum of piracy in The Maintains. Questions of intellectual property repeat the theme with the phrase “patent pounds” and the parasitic absorption of “stitch sponge pound” (with its rhyming echo of “pitch” and the reminder that the definition of “pith” is “spongy tissue”), so that by the time the reader encounters “crab pounds” the suspicion of the metagrammatic “crib” (“to steal; to plagiarize”), with its near-close near-front unrounded unstressed vowel, persists.129 Ultimately, the “pitch” that substitutes for Pound’s “pith” may explain the “pinnate” that Coolidge introduces into the stanza above, which otherwise derives from the spread of pages  414–15 of the Webster’s Collegiate. “Pin,” innate in “pinnate,” is a favored term in Coolidge’s lexicon, and it comes to be equated with “pine,” one of the conifers that produces the resin known as pitch. The phrase “brooch pines,” for instance, substitutes the attaching “pin” of the ornamental clasp with its paragramme, while a line on the following page, “noun pine onset,” draws its language from the dictionary page containing definitions for “attack” (“a forcible onset”) and “atropine,” a word the dictionary emphasizes is alternately spelled “atropin.”130 Even without these associations of “pin(nate)” and “pine,” “pitch” occurs directly with “pound” and is again conflated with “pith” in an earlier stanza: silver pitches pound pitch as a heart went pitapat more obsidian than piquant this genus a public bill abounding in pith as in often circular mining a rope an open state afix ship131 Returning to the opening of pages 642 and 643, with its lemmata “pitchstone” (“more water than obsidian”), “piston” (etymologically from the Latin pistum, “to pound”), “Pithecanthropus” (“genus”), “placard” (“public,” “af[f]ix,” “bill”), “pit” (“mining”), “piton” (“often with a circular head for attaching a rope”), and “pitch” (“ship”), Coolidge renders the definition of “pitchy” (“abounding in or smeared with pitch”) as “abounding in pith,” while describing “pitch,” in turn, as the pith, or “heart” (as of

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“the center of a stem” or the “interior of a bone, a feather, etc.”).132 At the same time, that anatomical heart, with its pitter-pat beat, draws attention to the carefully calibrated rhythm of the striking opening line, where the ambiguous grammatical relations of the three words (each of which could be parsed as either noun or verb), are offset by the metrical regularity of two trochees followed by the percussive single final stress that enacts the heavy strike of a rhythmic pound. The prosody of the line, moreover, offers a formal counterpart to the thematic equilibrium of measure that might involve weighing silver, falling in the balance as its value is equated in sterling to British pounds. With a similarly unequivocal finale to the section as a whole, the internal vowel rhyme of “afix ship” underscores the bacchius that—like the percussive tap of “shellac” analyzed earlier—announces the end of a rhythmic unit. Indeed, the sharp pound of a percussive conclusion to a poetic phrase can be singled out as a signature facet of Coolidge’s poetry, and as The Maintains progresses he makes recourse, with increasing frequency, to a distinctive staccato double tap to mark stanzaic closures. This beat echoes back to the Beat prosody from which Coolidge learned. For Kerouac, blending the bifurcated page layout of his student dictionary results in a paragraph of jittery and syncopated phrases with grammatically fractured bursts. In contrast to that locally fragmented surface, however, the strict seriality of his procedural poetics, with its rote copying advancing with a dumbly linear and unthinkingly mechanical course as it crosses the page— seemingly inscient of typographic conventions, and pointedly abjuring intervention or improvisation—stands in diametric contrast to the “spontaneous bop prosody” that Coolidge acknowledged as the inspiration he found in Kerouac’s prose. The passage from Desolation Angels may have pointed Coolidge to the dictionary as a fertile source when he “wrote a whole book using a similar meditation on the dictionary,” but other passages of Kerouac’s prose would show him how to handle the language in the later edition of the Webster’s he put in the service of producing The Maintains. There, as we have seen, one finds the “improvisational quickness” and dexterous flows of “sketching” and “babbling” that Coolidge admired in Kerouac’s style and that they both associated with the quick tempi and rapid chordal changes of bop. In the forward rush of a music with long lines no longer anchored to the inherent closure of a melodic phrase the conclusion was a formal problem (and for some, like Woody Herman, a disappointment) that led to insistent, percussive, stutter stops that themselves became a signature of bop phrasing.133 To explain how Kerouac adapted those concluding phrases to his “spontaneous prose,” Coolidge returns to two familiar sites: the geology of depositions and the dictionary:

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Now Kerouac talked about something he called “alluvials,” and if you look that up in the dictionary it says “aluvium, solid material deposited by running water,” which you get in a delta at the front of a river. He said, “Add alluvials to the end of your line when all is exhausted but something has to be said for some specified irrational reason.” 134 In The Maintains, those alluvials often take the form of repeated words in isolated final lines—rapped spondees decisively aborting the rapt spontaneous flow of running verse. The poetic effect, as we know from other poets, can be powerful. One might think of Wallace Stevens’s “the the,” in the final line of “The Man on the Dump,” or Aram Saroyan’s title “Coffee Coffee” (a linguistic trick he may well have learned from Gertrude Stein), or Robert Creeley’s “ here here,” and any number of other instances including Coolidge’s own “they they” and the more grammatically charged “trilobite trilobites” and “oils oil.”135 But in the context of The Maintains, the twin pairings also read as condensed projections of the dictionary’s self-reflexive structure: a book of words about words, in which “dictionary” can be found as one entry in the dictionary. With Coolidge’s spondaic geminates, we find the suggestion of words about words as well; under the pull of grammar, the phrases suggest a combination of use and mention. To take examples from just a single spread, one might—with elliptical allowances—read “as as” to mean “like a mode of comparison,” “one one” to specify “a single individual,” “which which” to ask “what alternative among others,” and “so so” not as a measure of middling indifference but as emphasizing “intensely homosexual,” and so on.136 The bluntly distilled grammar of such pairings offers a protocol for reading more generally within the text, and the aspect shift from use to mention explains other moments in The Maintains as well. For example, a late stanza opens: taint outlying ticks stain purling also an arid a close back on all circuit side.”137 The taboo of “suicide,” audible behind “circuit side,” might account for the words “stain” and “taint,” but the “Sound-Shape” of the signifier— part of Coolidge’s kit of lexical assessments—offers a more direct explanation: “taint” does make up the outlying sounds and letters of “ticks stain” to complete the circuit in a mirroring wherein we can see the foil of the tain that both permits and sets the limit on the mimetic reference

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of the word: a “coat to send glass” in “any old french of a glasses foil.”138 Or, as another passage puts it: “taints / lasting can’ts abates.”139 The words, regardless, refract the title of the book that contains them: The Maintains. Consider the similar material logic of the phrase “orange as the drainage from an orphanage,” which recognizes the linear sequence of the first word’s letters embedded in the last: or[ph]an[a]ge: “orphanage” does indeed pulp to “orange.”140 Such moments offer a concrete instance of Coolidge’s poetics of spatial proximity, as well as his reductive dissolution reduced itself to the level of the word. Ultimately, these delicately gauged propinquities align the text more with sculpture than with the pure signifiers of music or visual poetry. The theoretical arguments implicit in The Cave laid the groundwork for the sculptural poetics put into practice in The Maintains, and together they provide an insightful perspective on the title of his collection Space and its opening dictionary definition. In an interview from the early 1970s, Coolidge allows: the whole notion of spatial relations in language is tremendously interesting. I don’t mean just the way a thing is put on a page, that’s really the least interesting. The distances between different word groups, different types of words and how they attach together.141 We have seen how Coolidge modulates the alternately allicient and rebutting tensions of individual words, their finely adjusted rhymes and resistances—whether sounded phonetically or considered in their semantic registers—but by figuring these relationships as spatial distance he highlights the negative space first thematized in The Cave as a sculptural element and then literally charted in the vast evacuation of the dictionary page that underwrites The Maintains. Coolidge corroborates this sense of sculptural absence when he admits, quoting sculptor Donald Judd in an unattributed passage in “Smithsonian Depositions”: “quite a few of my pieces have been worn out.”142 The shift from object to spatial relation was a key turn in the sculpture of the period, and if Carl Andre, in James Meyer’s nice phrasing, was “making sculpture not objects,” we might read Coolidge—in The Maintains—as making sculpture, not poems.143 As Andre himself put it: “my sculpture is geology.”144 Coolidge’s geology—like Smithson’s, always already linguistic—in turn, is sculpture. One of the primary critics of the sculpture of Judd and Andre and Smithson and their peers described its tendency toward “difficult, hostile, awkward, and oversize art”—a charge which one can readily imagine an unsympathetic reader making against The Maintains.145 Despite long and difficult passages in each, however, readers might come to think

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of the book in the same way Clay Perry—renowned midcentury spelunker of New England—came to regard Eldron’s Cave, in which “beauty and mystery make up for the discomfort, to some extent.”146 If some readers find the hundred or so pages of agrammatical, nonnarrative text to be tedious going, even that response may return them to the work’s excavatory poetics. “As well, the boring,” as Coolidge writes in another text, reminding readers that “boring” also denotes “to make a passage by laborious effort,” and to make a round hole in the earth, as with a well, or mine shaft, or core sample.147 As even one of his advocates admits, “to read Coolidge is like being engaged in an endurance test or a stark physical challenge.”148 But Coolidge himself describes spelunking in these very terms, as passages of arduous toil: “some of these caves had thirty or forty miles of passageways. You would go in and crawl and climb and use ropes and go down shafts that were wet and were muddy and follow where it went. In a cave you can’t tell where you’re going and it’s totally dark.”149 Grammatically, The Maintains more often than not leaves its reader similarly in the dark: “see leave gloss or a dark place,” as an early line poses the alternatives.150 To give in, under pressure, or to spelunk? Coolidge entrusts the reader with the indeterminacy: “Now I’m going to tell you what you’re evidently thinking. Dictionary. Are we caving?”151

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The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the Poetry of Tina Darragh He showed me a hierarchically-structured chart like a family tree where the critic had taken various diagrams from my work and from the works of others to show how they didn’t go together. Actually, she was saying that we didn’t prove our point, that the data was bad. I looked at it and said Well, this is ridiculous that’s not what’s going on at all. We didn’t survey people we were taking things from the dictionary.

—Tina Darragh, “Mashed Lit Crit Dream”

Le dictionnaire est une machine à rêver. (The dictionary is a machine for dreaming.)

—Roland Barthes, “Présentation,” Dictionnaire Hachette

A reference librarian by profession, Tina Darragh avails herself of reference books as part of her day job, but she also makes frequent recourse to such books in her poetry.1 Her 1993 adv. fans—the 1968 series, for instance, which takes its inspiration from a public library display and includes computer-manipulated collages of dictionary pages, begins its investigation with a query of the index to The Reader’s Guide to Popular Literature and is subsequently structured by page-framing quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary, all dating to 1968. The resulting sequence reveals something like a synchronic core sample of “parole”: “shot line” and “tele-player,” the acronym “ASH” and “hostess apron,” “teletransport” and “shopper,” “side-foot” and “voir-dire,” “Red Dwarf” and “academicize,” “tie-off” and “synergistically,” “unscrambler” and “washerette,” “non-enumerably” and “hang loose.”2 In the context of the book’s initial investigation into the use of the word “survivor,” the assembled vocabulary—all of which found themselves in print, in exemplary instances, in the same socially turbulent year—invite the contemporary reader to measure which terms from the corpora have survived the vicissitudes of lexical selection.3 The opening poem from Darragh’s 1989 collection Striking Resemblance, for another instance of the pervasive surfacing of reference works, carries an epigraph from the Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, and then proceeds to parse the

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signature phonemes of P. Inman’s poetry against a phonological baseline of examples drawn from Carl Hjalmar Borgstrøm and Magne Oftedal’s three-volume Linguistic Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland.4 Inman’s sound palette, the “cliché sounds / where soft vowels appear with hard consonant blends,” had seemed reminiscent of Old English or registered as Scots to his contemporaries, but it turns out, according to Darragh’s lyric reference research, to be “specifically American” in its phonemics.5 Later sections of Darragh’s poem, accordingly, explore “specifically American” slang like “moola” and “sis boom ba” by again turning to reference books. The first syllable of “sis-boom-bah,” for instance, leads to a slender zaum-like sequence that would not sound out of place next to Inman’s Ocker, David Melnick’s Pcoet, or certain early books by Clark Coolidge: co wet era kin ley mondi iten y ter tine troid trum yphus Picking selectively—presumably for sonic and rhythmic melopoetic effect—the poem cata logues a number of entries, in sequential order, for words beginning sis- (minus those initial three letters). Moving from an oily-fleshed “variety of lake trout Salvelinus namaycush siscowet, found in the deeper waters of Lake Superior” to “the son of Aeolus and ruler of Corinth,” a noted trickster “punished in Tartarus by being compelled to roll a stone to the top of a slope, the stone always escaping him near the top and rolling down again,” the poem foregoes the juxtaposition of those references in favor of foregrounding the balanced microtonal arrangements of verbal mass that characterized one facet of Language Poetry.6 The variations on the final syllable of “sis-boom-bah,” by contrast, disrupts sound play with a visual thicket of quotation marks and punctuation in order to shift the focus to denotation. The result patiently enumerates the various meanings listed by The Random House Dictionary of the English Language under the entries of words and abbreviations between “b” and “baa” (with a single, quick capricious gambol ahead to

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“baba”).7 The paragraph opens: “A lower case ‘b’ used with a ‘,’ can stand for bar, barn or black. A capital ‘B’ use with a ‘.’ and a ‘,’ stands for bass or basso or bay of Bible or bolivar or boliviano or book or born or breadth of British or brother,” and so on for another half-dozen sentences.8 Darragh still relies on the alphabetic ordering of the dictionary’s entries for the ba section, but instead of mining a certain phonemic set and procedurally diminishing its reference, she emphasizes the range of registers encompassed by the denotations of a narrow two letter range. For yet a different example of how Darragh torques the rhetoric of the dictionary, the section on “razz-ma-tazz” explains: “razz” was first “razzia,” an Algerian expression for a quick-as-a-flash military raid. When later added to “dazzle” as a description of a football play, it took on the properties of electricity, as in “I’m going to razzle-dazzle the boys with my great lightning change act” or “There isn’t enough real downright razzle-dazzle here to run a milk cart.” During vaudeville, the dazzle was altered to “tazz” to accent the “z” in “razz,” the same buzz made by the footlights used to brighten the stage.9 In her analysis of Darragh’s book, Ann Vickery takes these lexical excavations at face value, but a comparison of the text with its dictionary sources reveals the extent of Darragh’s invention. Razzia does indeed derive from Algerian Arabic to denote “a military raid” (as the Random House defines it), but the sense of celerity seems to come from the sentence used to illustrate “razzle-dazzle” in its sports sense of “deceptive action typically consisting of a series of complex maneuvers, [such] as a double-reverse or hand-off: a team relying more on power and speed than razzle-dazzle.” Speed, then, in turn, leads to the association with electricity, which seems to arise not from any actual lexical history, but again from one of the illustrative sentences quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary; with a sly and knowing misapprehension, the alacrity of the “lightning[-fast] change act” is taken to construe electrical discharge, while the “run” in “to run a milk cart” is understood as “to power” or “to fuel.” In other words, Darragh is enacting as much as relating the definitions, making deceptive double-reverse handoffs between two different dictionaries in a complex manoeuver that confuses or misleads readers like Vickery. The paragraph is a razzle-dazzle of “razzle-dazzle.” The passage’s first deceptive move, however, points to the dictionary logic that Darragh will continue to exploit in other poems. Vickery explicates the opening by explaining that “Razz has its roots in an Algerian expression,” but while razzia derives from ghāzya, razz—a slang term for derisive

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teasing, abbreviated from raspberry—is modern American slang of a kind with sis-boom-bah and has an entirely uncertain etymology among some number of European roots. Razz is “first” not in the sense of any etymological origins, but in the sense of being the first entry on the par ticular dictionary’s page before the alphabetized lemmata “razzia,” “razzledazzle,” “razzmatazz,” and so on. The turn to reference books continues through the pieces collected in the 1989 volume Striking Resemblance. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language, for instance, plays a key role in “Raymond Chandler’s Sentences,” a work that contains the narrative of its own demise. Recounting her decision to abandon the project on Chandler’s sentences, Darragh proceeds to “look up ‘abandon’ ” in the dictionary and finds that “it comes from / ‘to place’ under ‘speak.’ ” The conclusion is true enough, but not quite so straightforward as Darragh makes it sound. Indeed, the lines evince the very kind of condensation that, as we saw in the previous chapter, defined poetry itself for Ezra Pound, and here Darragh works across languages in the same way as Pound’s own “Dichten = condensare.” According to the account of Darragh’s dictionary, the etymology of “abandon” leads from Middle English to Middle French to the Old French phrase “(mettre) a bandon (put) under ban.” Substituting “place” for its synonym “put,” Darragh then follows “ban” to bandon to the Late Latin bandum, a variant of bannum, meaning “interdict,” which derives, according to its own entry, from the “perf. s. of dīcere to speak.”10 Or, condensing: “ ‘to place’ under ‘speak.’ ” Later in the same collection, a chain of synonyms links “abandoned” to “deserted” and “at grass” in a poem that latches onto the phrase “grass widow,” which Darragh has come across in the novel Mildred Pierce, by Raymond Chandler’s rival James Cain.11 Autantonymic, “grass-widow” can mean either an unmarried woman who is not living alone, or— conversely—a married woman living solo. Attending to what Darragh choses to transcribe from the dictionary, however, confirms her interest in the latter denotation. One entire section of the poem, in fact, comprises a chronological list that tracks this sense of the phrase through the quotations used by the Oxford English Dictionary as historical illustrations, from the first recorded occurrence in an 1853 account of A Lady’s Visit to Gold Diggings in Australia to the dictionary’s final entry, from a 1930 London stage play. Supplementing these entries, Darragh updates the list to note that she finds no mention of the phrase in H. L. Mencken’s 1936 The American Language and then comes full circle by concluding with the instance that caught her attention in Mildred Pierce—although it is cited not from the novel directly but rather from a quotation in a biography of

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Cain that was published just a few years before Darragh’s poem but dated in her etymologic chronology to 1938 (presumably the composition of Cain’s novel, which is set in 1931 and was published in 1941).12 Having hit a setback in her attempt to cite the phrase from Mencken, or to find the more recent instance from Cain cited by the OED, the poem then detours, via the phrase “set-back,” through Mencken’s American Language. In his extended essay, Mencken lists “the pungent-sort” of “New Americanisms of characteristic vigor and vulgarity” that entered the language in the late nineteenth century—words like “set back, joint (a low den), and spellbind.”13 He then expands from nouns to other parts of speech: “To them [i.e., the nouns] may be added the adverbs to a frazzle . . .” (a word that may have stood out to a writer who would be captivated by razzle dazzle). Darragh, however, omits Mencken’s elaborations, breaking off her quote from him midsentence; in the process, she transforms his transition into only an aposiopetic “To.” With that truncation, Darragh recalls a key scene in Cain’s novel, which turns dramatically on the protagonist’s inability to find the right word. Frustrated at the helplessness of her socioeconomic position, Mildred lashes out at the friend attempting to offer her honest advice: “Lucy stop! I’ll go mad! I’ll—.”14 Curtailing Mencken’s prose to imitate Cain’s dialogue, and rhyming Mildred’s “I’ll—” with his abbreviated “To . . . ,” Darragh establishes a parallel between Mencken and Cain that allows her to continue to move obliquely between the two texts.15 Specifically, Darragh applies the former’s focus on linguistics to the latter’s narrative. In her clipped quotation, she breaks off Mencken’s sentence just before he catalogues examples of neologisms created by functional shifts from noun to verb (“to itemize,” “to suicide,” “to side-track,” “to injunct”).16 Such instances of predicating anthimeria offer the model for Darragh’s suggestion that the same sort of grammatical transformations could serve as a solution to Mildred’s speechlessness and her inability to find the right verb. In the novel, the two friends agree that Mildred’s problem is “pride,” which Darragh transforms in order to supply the verb that Mildred can not utter herself. Mildred, Darragh suggests, “will pride.” The substitution imagines “to pride” as a kind of “dialect” or “slang,” as the poem parses it.17 But there is one final lightning-fast costume change in these linguistic charades, because the slang Darragh has in mind is quite specific. “Part 2” of Darragh’s poem consists of a list of cryptonyms “taken from the Dictionary of Rhyming Slang” by Julian Franklyn, a reference work directly inspired by a source Darragh has transcribed earlier in the poem, Eric Partridge’s Dictionary of the Underworld.18 Fitting with the overall theme of a distinctly American dialect in Striking Resemblance, the dictionary

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Darragh used made a similar case for its own investigations; “although many people assume that rhyming slang is exclusively Cockney,” the backcover copy to the Dictionary of Rhyming Slang explains, “Franklyn illustrates how it is also common to Australian and American dialects.”19 With those cant transmutations of rhyming slang as a model, the reader is finally in a position to see the poem come full circle and explain why the occurrence of “grass widow” in Cain’s novel is of such significance. Taking Cain’s novel as “a puzzle,” Darragh “allows ‘pride’ to surface / as slang for what I pretend to be.”20 “Pride,” in other words, serves as rhyming slang for “bride,” with Mildred Pierce suggesting its own rhymingslang substitute for pride’s epithet: fierce. Although Darragh admits that her position is not quite equivalent to Mildred’s and that neither of them “strictly qualify as ‘grass widows,’ ” the novel provides the linguistic resolution that its narrative withholds; the first section of the poem concludes: “Writing with Mildred Pierce becomes a chance / for me to combine two lines of time / with rhyme in slang—my need for names to see.”21 Finally, one might recall the prefatory note (omitted from the Burning Deck edition) in which Darragh reveals a similar rhyming-slang onomastic play in her multiply punning title “Pi in the Skye,” which “is dedicated to P. Inman, a.k.a. ‘peaty pi.’ ”22 Given the punning metaphor of that title and how her poems often pivot on single words, it may not be incidental that the narrative in Mildred Pierce also turns on the protagonist’s success in baking pie—the first letters of her last name and encrypted in the keyword pride. To see a word in a certain way is the project undertaken by the remaining poems in Striking Resemblance. In the “meeting place” section of “Scale Sliding,” for example, Darragh explores the usage illustrations that she will return to for the historical excavations of adv. fans.23 The poem opens: “They moved to another locality.” seen as “wood of trees”

given to “stand”

“Not much interest is taken in the contest.” seen as “to be between” given to testify “They’re filming most of the action.” seen as “membrane”

given to “obtain by chasing”

Providing a discursive context to supplement strict denotations, such sentences allow one to see a word in its native environment. In “meeting place,” accordingly, Darragh takes the dictionary’s synonyms for place— “location, locale, locality, site”—as a spur to relocate her transcriptions

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to a series of seven example sentences. Starting, not coincidentally, at the first line on the page, the poem records the entry for “locality” before moving down the column to record the one for “locally” (“Not much interest is taken in the contest locally”) and “location” (“They’re filming most of the action on location”).24 The next line begins with the very first sentence at the top of the page’s second column, “We bought the whole company [from him lock stock and barrel],” before turning the page to find “Can you lodge us for the night?” Linked by the shared final “night,” and perhaps further motivated by the striking resemblance of “lough” and “laugh,” or the compound “laughingstock,” the poem shifts its sights to the site of page 811, where the very first line reads: “A coyote laughed in the night.” Giving herself some latitude and departing from the series of initial lines, the concluding sentence of Darragh’s poem then returns to the location of a specific place with a sentence from the previous page: “He allowed his children a fair amount of latitude [in their social life].” The poem thus treats the subject of space and plotted placement with an attention to the space of the page and the placement of the relevant words within their typographic locales. If the dictionary sentences allow a reader to see how the word is used, in a figurative sense, those sentences are themselves seen in a particular context—as printed text typeset in blocked columns on framed pages—when read in the dictionary. The sentence for lodge, significantly, is “seen as ‘leaf’ given to ‘ink,’” the very span of printed page, a pulped “wood of trees” trimmed to a “broad” “straight edge” with a “cutting off” (as the final line cuts off). To underscore this point, each of the quoted sentences in “meeting place” is followed by a line specifying that it is “seen as” one term given to another term. The sentence about the coyote, for instance, is “seen as ‘straight side’ given to ‘wash,’ ” or in other words, situated between the lemmata for latus rectum (“N.L.: lit., straight side”) and “launder.” The dictionary’s usage examples are themselves an example of what Jacques Derrida has identified as “dangereux suppléments [dangerous supplements].”25 Supposedly ancillary additions to an entry’s primary denotation, examples of usage would, however, not be necessary at all if the denotation could supply the full value of the definition. The example sentences substitute for something lacking in the communicative force of the remaining definition; they are simultaneously both less and more than the denotation, both irresolvably superfluous and necessary. By promoting such sentences in “meeting place” while deprecating the central part of the dictionary’s definitions, Darragh performs the equivalent of a visual shift of figure and ground, or what the poem’s subtitle describes as “alternating object and ground.” Other entries in the same series perform

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similar perceptual switches; the poem “projecting angle,” for example, describes itself with the subtitle: “ ‘horn’ graphed as a Necker cube, where a marked face appears sometimes to the front, other times to the back.”26 Named after the early nineteenth-century crystallographer Louis-Albert Necker, the eponymous, ambiguously bistable line drawing can be read as the perspectival model of a cube, limning only the corners of a supposed geometric solid without shading its transparent faces. Offering no indication of its depth, the imagined cube appears to project first one way and then another—either downward in one direction or upward to the other—as the mind attempts to resolve the overlaid skew of lines into a coherent three-dimensional schema. As such, it was the figure initially favored by Ludwig Wittgenstein for illustrating the dawning of different phenomenological aspects of the same physical fact.27 In the case of Darragh’s poem, two columns list fragments of entries from page 684 (and two outliers from page 685) of The Random House Dictionary: face front round dance face front spike bowsprit face front mark length face front leaves & small face front out a horizon face front mitted by such face front guard pin

back face back face back face back face back face back face back face

tortoise corns sembling flint varying cross oven-shaped mound glacial cinques out of (the) work berant part

Located on the plane of the dictionary page, the terms suggest the coordinates of the intersecting corners of the orthogonal lines of a cube or rhomboid drawn onto the page itself. The pairs “varying cross” and “berant part” form the same 45-degree angle as do “glacial cinques” and “guard pin” below them. The more obtuse line between “tortoise corns” and “out a horizon” is similarly matched by the lines that connect “out a horizon” to “guard pin” and “sembling flint” to “oven-shaped mound.” But however one connects the dots, no unambiguous outline of an ambiguous cube ever quite materializes. “Oven-shaped mound,” for an instance of the complications, is also situated level across the page from “leaves & small,” as if framing the similar stretch across three columns

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from “round dance” to “spike bowsprit,” but “leaves & small” in turn is positioned above “out a horizon”; and if “varying cross” and “guard pin” also align vertically, as do “mitted by such” and “out of (the) work,” each does so at different distances.28 Indeed, with only seven terms per face, no complete cube could be constructed from their coordinates alone in any event. Similarly suggestive, and similarly disappointing, the “hollow angle” section of “Scale Sliding,” describes itself as “elements of ‘fragment’ and ‘frame’ charted as a Ponzo/railroad track illusion.” Like the apparent three-dimensional projection of the Necker Cube, a Ponzo illusion (named after the early twentieth-century Italian psychologist, Mario Ponzo, who first demonstrated its effects), elicits an optical illusion of depth. Placing two parallel horizontal lines of equal length directly above one another, but between two vertical lines angled so that they converge toward a central vanishing point, like train tracks seen receding into the distance, the simple geometry invites perception to overrule vision (or “thinking” to trump “looking,” as Wittgenstein would phrase the distinction).29 When considered as objects in a perspectival landscape rather than spatially unrelated marks, the top line, deceptively, appears to be longer than the bottom line. Accordingly, Darragh’s poem pairs phrases from pages 563 and 563 of the Random House Dictionary, asserting that one “looks longer than” the other. Indeed, if one turns to the dictionary pages that served as her source, one finds that several of the phrases she quotes— “open border or case,” “[trans-]verse, riblike members,” “shell of each side of a hull,” “between web frames,” and “all the scanning lines”—appear directly above one another on the left-hand margin of page 563, all roughly the same length and all parts of the various definitions of “frame.” These texts, that is, work to frame the entry for “frame.” But the overall spatial distributions of the quoted texts are inconclusive; the other phrases Darragh used, from the entries for “fox grape,” “fragment,” “frailero,” and “framing chisel,” are not positioned like the comparison lines in a Ponzo drawing, nor do they graph the perspective lines that give the illusion its force. Indeed, the most direct link to the two optical illusions named in the subtitles to these poems may well be entries on the same dictionary pages but not quoted by Darragh: “horizon” and “frame of reference.”30 Or perhaps, as phrases chosen for transcription from among all the others on the page, “look longer” may merely refer to the amount of time Darragh spent viewing them rather than their apparent spatial extension. Mapped back onto the actual pages of the dictionaries from which they were drawn, the words in poems like “hollow angle” and “projecting angle” form suggestive constellations, but they do not cohere into the

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designs of actual Necker cubes or Ponzo illusions. The most striking poems in Striking Resemblance, a series of three right trapezoids with an opening on the bottom side labeled “viewing point” in imitation of the floor plan of an Ames Room, make a closer approximation to the geometric arrangement of words on the dictionary page. With divergent rather than parallel walls, the distorted architectural interior of the Ames Room skews the viewer’s optical perception of the relative sizes of persons standing in its corners. As Darragh explained, in retrospect: “to critique/expose the ‘blind spots’ in my narrative ‘Scale Sliding,’ I borrowed figures used in visual perception experiments and literally drew them on dictionary pages. One figure I used was the Ames Distorted Room.”31 Inside the shaped frames reproduced in Darragh’s book are fragments of text from pages of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language.32 For example, the poem “rent seck” (Figure 5), appearing on the dictionary page as a synonym for “dry rent” (calqued from the Anglo French rente seque to indicate a legal condition in which “the renter does not have the usual power of collection by seizure of tenant’s goods”), seems to be motivated by its own visual prosody. The poem retains the dry, uninked gap between the first and second columns from which it transcribes the language within its narrow purview, as if visually figuring the definitions hinted at by the snippets “Ceram. removal of,” “walled plain” and “Informal. to ambush,” which come, respectively, from the entries for “dryfooting” (the “removal of glaze from the rim at the bottom of a piece [of ceramics]”), “Drygalski” (“a walled plain in the third quadrant of the face of the moon”), and “dry-gulch” (“to ambush with the intent of killing or severely maiming: The riders were dry-gulched by Indians”). Iconic in its vacancy, the gutter of the page is like a dry gulch between which the truncated entries are indeed maimed (mangled, mutilated, lacerated: “to impair; make essentially defective,” as the Random House has it). As Darragh writes elsewhere: “I’ve always liked the ‘blank’ because it suggests that the inarticulate void is not a mass of random particles per se, but some sort of structure of them—a hidden narrative.”33 Darragh frequently refers to her poetry in terms of “story” and “narrative,” which we might understand vis-à-vis her commitment to plot: drawing points on the page to connect the stations in a textual progress. As Darragh describes one of her plotting procedures, with a possible pun on the title of the Random House Dictionary at her fingers, she composed by “letting my finger drop at random over and over, I make a notation of the points my finger makes and later transcribe them.”34 Accordingly, “sputter plot,” the title of one of the sections in a(gain)2st the odds, suggests both the incoherent clamor

Figur e 5. Tina Darragh, “rent seck,” from Striking Resemblance (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1989).

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of random linguistic particles and the pointilistic sense of mathematical plotting with its intimation of scattered and cast small particles. Similarly, in the poem “volcanic tuff,” the mutilated lacerations from the dictionary’s prose block appear like textual versions of the spluttered geologic material denoted by the title. That titular phrase appears on the dictionary page as a synonym for “tuff,” “fragmental rock consisting of the smaller kinds of volcanic detritus, usually more or less stratified,” and it is printed adjacent to more or less stratified entries that serve as Darragh’s source text. The apex of the Ames Room trapezoid frames the fragmental text consisting of the smaller kinds of lexical detritus: ur mit mals, re tan of an la rae mi a called deer f ley first foun mic, adj. With alliteration (“mit,” “mals,” “mi,” “mic”; “la,” “ly”; “f,” “first,” “foun”) and tight rhymes around the varying values of a (“tan,” “an”; “la,” “a”; “re,” “rae,” and possibly “ley” and “la”), the series of single-syllable words emphasizes the granular patter of patterned pointillistic sounds. Jerome McGann finds such poems “literally unreadable,” but readers need not cede to his own sense of impotency; pressed for referents, the text initially suggests German: the first word, appropriately, is the prefix meaning first, original, earliest, or most primitive (ur-), followed by mit (with), and mals (times, in the mathematical sense).35 With a macaronic pivot on times, further puns emerge: uhr (hour, clock) for “ur” and oftmals or manchmals (frequently, many times) for “mals.” Or perhaps the text has shifted by this point to a Latinate base with mal (from malus) as the morpheme signifying evils or wrongs, re as the preposition meaning “in reference to” (from res, a thing or topic) and tan (Spanish “such”). In any case, the fourth line may continue to pun on oftmals with a dialect rendition of often, but it resolves clearly into English (“of an”) and proceeds with what seems to be a vocalized snippet (“la rae mi”) alluding to Oscar Hammerstein’s 1959 “Do Re Mi” from the Sound of Music, with its punning explanation that “do[e]” is what “a female deer” is called. By the time more complete English words fit within the lengthening lines of the frame’s widening scope, a glimpse of narrative emerges as well. As if taken from some sixteenth-century lyric, the lines intimate that “called deer flee,” or “flay” (frighten or frighten away), or perhaps more darkly, recalling the

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fourth line, that having been caught and flayed their hides are tanned. As it happens, these evocative lines are culled from a single entry: Tu•la•re•mi•a (too’le re’me e), n. Pathol., Vet. Pathol., a disease of rabbits, squirrels, etc. caused by a bacterium, Pasteurella tularensis (or Bacterium tularense), transmitted to man by insects or by the handling of infected animals, resembling the plague and taking the form in man of an irregular fever lasting several weeks. Also, tu’la•rae’mi•a. Also called deer fly fever, Pahvant Valley plague, rabbit fever. [Tulare, California county where first found + EMIA]—tu’la•re’mic, tu’larae’mic, adj. While the ruled outlines of the trapezoids in Darragh’s poems may suggest rigid frames through which the reader views a strict facsimile transcription of the dictionary page, a comparison with the source pages, as above, reveals that the shapes served merely as rough guides for Darragh’s inexact and improvisatory copying. One finds the terms of this tension in doubled display in “ludicrous stick” (Figure 6) the third in the sequence of Ames Room poems, which mines the dictionary’s entries from “lick” to “licorice.” With references to both the “formal” and the “perfunctory,” each of which is “a reversal or disappoint[ent]” of the other, the poem’s own language might be read as pointing toward the way in which the “clean . . . space” of the ruled print page seems “to bring [the quoted language] to completion or perfection through discipline,” even when Darragh’s selection of that material is more like “an improvisational figure in swing music”—each of which, the dictionary entries disclose, could be denoted with “lick.” Unlike Oppen’s thorough accounting, however, the impulse here is not exhaustive; Darragh skips over the entries for “lickerish,” “lickety-split,” and “lickspittle,” and she transcribes the synonym note “also called taker-in” as “also called taken-in”—a slyly rebuking warning to the gullible reader who takes the poem’s appearance of neutral and exact transcription at its word.36 As we can see in all of these instances, Striking Resemblance repeatedly invites its reader to imagine the words of the poem as spatial configurations, but the dictionary page confirms that the reader is not meant to take those words’ relation to the optical illusions named in the poems as a literal illustration. Instead, they are figural substitutes for the literal (optical) figures that Darragh sees in turn as (rhetorical) figures. Relating geometric figures to the figural language of rhetoric, a page in a(gain)2st the odds conflates “hyperbola” and “hyperbole” above a line drawing captioned “figure of speech,” while the book itself is prefaced with a quotation

Figur e 6. Tina Darragh, “ludicrous stick,” from Striking Resemblance (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1989).

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from Francis Ponge that reads, in part: “As for the old rhetoric, what were its figures? . . . Hyperbole, ellipse, etc. Now it happens that these figures bear the same names as the figures of a certain geometry.”37 In Striking Resemblance, the figures illustrating the optical illusions named by the poems are metaphoric figures for the figure of the pun, Darragh’s “favorite way / to think of words.”38 Ranging across or collapsing the text on a dictionary page, the poems in Striking Resemblance give the illusion that two words are closer together than they actually are. As she explains in “Scale Sliding,” the pun itself could be punned on in this way: “I decided to put some puns in an Ames Room (by transcribing their dictionary location in that form).”39 Where the calembour leverages chance proximities between signifiers in order to wrench two concepts into a closer connection than they would other wise be seen to have, Darragh’s dictionary schema leverage the chance typographic proximities of words on the page in order to yoke different sections of the dictionary text together. Both are thus like the illusion of equivalent size in the Ames Room. These poems can be seen as the intensification, in visual and rhetorical terms, of the latent logic of the dictionary’s organization, in which language from every register and realm are intermingled under the rule of alphabetization. If Zukofsky’s poetics, the “rays of the object brought to a focus,” derive from a visual disorder, Darragh’s poetics similarly derives from the miscognition of converging perspectival lines and the divergence of optometric pathology. The narrator in “Scale Sliding” explains: “I was diagnosed as having eyes which don’t work together—‘wide divergence at near and far,’ ” confessing: “I became convinced that I was a physiological distorter.” The pun on a visual disorder, in Darragh’s text, is a pun on the figure of the pun. Throughout her collection, Darragh repeatedly figures paronomasia in terms of visual distortion and trompes l’oeils, and so the optical illusions enacted by her poems are thus a sort of formal allegory as well; they serve as puns of puns.40 Understood in this way, Darragh’s dictionary definition of the pun itself as a flattened line of communication between two points makes double poetic sense: “I turn to find something / inside ‘pun’ / that will point a way / for me to go / & looking up its definition / I find a special technical one— / ‘to pound down / as in making a road.’ ”41 “Point a way” puns on the possible etymology of “pun” that would have been found while “looking up its definition” (from the Italian punctilio, the diminutive of “point”), this special technical sense also explains the pun about puns in the title of Darragh’s collection: the pun exploits the resemblance of one word to another, but as something that delivers a blow it is a Striking Resemblance.

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The punning on a pun further accounts for the book’s recurrent theme of angulation. Darragh begins “by breaking down ‘corner’ into its various parts & constructing sample ambiguous figures with the words that surround them,” as one of the poems itself announces.42 The illusion of the Ames Room depends on what Darragh terms its “ ‘false’ corners,” and in an earlier poem she figures the visual depth of reading as a problem of angulation: “how two lines / could be a corner / without crossing them over.” 43 The question is provoked by a cata logue of how often the word “corner” recurs in her notebooks. Exalting “the fullness of a corner” and struck by these resemblances, she announces an investigation into the “ ‘corner’ itself: / the meeting place / of two surfaces and / or the space created there.” 44 To take “corner” as the figure of a figure, a doubling punning about punning, would—like the Giscombe poem I looked at in Chapter 1, risk naming the very risk of the pun itself: the corny. Pointing both to the rhetorical and geometrical, the corners in Striking Resemblance offer a clue to interpreting the title of Darragh’s 1981 book On the Corner to Off the Corner, which might other wise be taken as nodding only to the eponymous Miles Davis album.45 At first glance, the book’s short prose paragraphs look quite different than the lineated and diagrammatic forms in Striking Resemblance. In the tradition of the riddle poem, from the Exeter Book all the way to Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, the relation between the poems and their titles is obscure. The first opens in elementary primer mode: “ ‘A’ was for ‘ox,’ ” telegraphically indicating the acrophonic by which the initial letter of the alphabet was mnemonically named for one of the words with which it began, in this case ‫( א‬Aleph), Hebrew for “ox,” with a conjectural pictographic development from the Phoenician abstraction of an Egyptian hieroglyphic depicting a horned bovine head.46 Here, though, the “ox” emerges directly from converting “oxygen” in the first line of the poem: “the first oxygen conversion occurred as an incline.” Connections between title and body are even less clear in subsequent poems, which take the header spreads from pages in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language and assign them to one letter of the alphabet: “ ‘vetchling’ to ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for ‘B,’ ” “ ‘oilfish’ to ‘old chap’ for ‘C,’ ” and so on, even though the poems that follow are typically sourced from pages other than the ones indicated by the title, or even from different dictionaries altogether. Indeed, the sequencing letters themselves can be misleading. The third poem, for instance, opens: “performing military ser vice for the king and bearing a child have a common medieval root.” With “for ‘C’ ” as a lead, Marjorie Perloff ingeniously makes the connection between “conscrip-

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tion” and “confinement,” a poetic conceit that exemplifies how readers might best accept Darragh’s invitation to imagine the ways in which her language is linked even as the dictionary page that served as Darragh’s actual source reveals the connection in the etymology of thane: “ME theyn, fr. OE thegn; akin to OHG thegan thane, Gk tiktein to bear, beget.” 47 “It is there that we find ‘thane,’ ” as the poem nods to the dictionary page discursively, adding, as Zukofsky had with his obliging title: “followed by all manner of ‘thanks.’ ” Likewise, it may be pure coincidence that the letter in the title of the poem “ ‘fumerole’ to ‘fungo’ for ‘P’ ” seems to be the clue for the absent words displaced by the text that follows, a quatrain that opens “stay—————until I call” (the quote is taken from the Webster’s example of the idiomatic usage of the adjectival form of “put,” describing a fixed or set “being in place”). The poem, in any case, thematizes the serendipitous dispositions of the dictionary page on which it draws with the line “teetotum or with dice” (the instruments used in a game of put-andtake). As we saw with Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary and its own play with the mention of “dice,” Darragh takes the chance occurrence of an aleatory instrument to allegorize the poetics that would juxtapose its placement next to unpredictable language motivated only by the alphabetic ordering of its entries. As she explained: “what interests me is the coincidence and juxtaposition of the words on the page in their natural formation (alphabetical order). In reference to each other, they have a story of their own.” 48 Furthermore, a specific sense of randomness—again with a possible pun on the title of the dictionary used—plays a key role in Darragh’s poetics, producing measurable difference rather than sheer meaningless. “I am consoled,” she writes, “by the existence of the random function as an ordering principle. We think of random as ‘helter skelter,’ but as a programming concept it is used to define parameters within which the direction of diversity is productive.” 49 Here the difference produced marks the distance between the authoritative structures of the dictionary and the lyrical uses to which its language can be put. A “put,” the dictionary reminds us, is also a kind of throw, and if Stéphane Mallarmé’s “un coup de dés jamais abolira le hasard [a throw of the dice will never abolish chance]” where “toute pensée emét un coup de dés [every thought puts forth a throw of the dice],” Darragh also follows her dice with “thought”: “thought as in ‘pavement’ / overstreet grief.”50 In the poetical logic of Darragh’s lyric, “pavement” putatively leads to “[over]street,” but the line itself comes from a paraphrase of the etymology of “putative” (“ME fr. LL putativus, fr. L putatus pp. of putare to think—more at pave”), while

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“overstreet” puts in as the residual textual memory of an entry’s appeal to authority and authorship, which has been otherwise discarded in Darragh’s transcription. Harry Allen Overstreet provides the quotation illustrating “put away”: “to put grief away is disloyal to the memory of the departed.”51 Both retaining some memory of the departed Overstreet and also putting away his “grief,” Darragh—as with the chance coincidence of an entry about chance—theatricalizes the linguistic material that she collages. The following poem, “ ‘telegraph buoy’ to ‘tell’ for ‘Q,’ ” stages a similar dynamic between theme and material: “Fog” and “pus” first link in the relationship of “down” to “off,” as in “laying the book on the table.” Then, with a little push, “plug” and “stuff” find themselves to be classical yet vulgar kin moving warily toward herbs having large silky aments. Continuing to mine the same spread of pages that defined “put,” the poem links “fog” and “pus” via the etymology of “pustule” and then pushes from the “vulgar” euphemistic sense of “lay” (in other usage, a synonym for “put”) to the unwritten, vulgar matrix “pussy,” treading warily and stealthily around the word it refrains from committing to print: from the paragram “push” to the etymology in the “classical” Greek “byein to stuff, plug,” to language from the entries for “pussyfoot,” “pussytoes,” and “pussy willow.” The poem, in brief, pussyfoots around “pussyfoot.” Compared with the techniques we have seen used by Zukofsky and Oppen, the dictionary poetics undertaken by Darragh distinguishes itself through the way in which she treats the dictionary page not merely as a repository of linguistic material or a structure of arbitrary terms, but as a visual, indeed palpably material and tactile object. Like Coolidge, she understands the dictionary as a three-dimensional space of geometric strata. Her sense of the printed page carries over to her own texts in turn; as Hank Lazer recognizes, referring to poems like “ludicrous stick,” Darragh “makes the page itself (rather than the line, stanza, or paragraph) a unit of composition.”52 In the case of On the Corner to Off the Corner, in particular, the poetic line absent from the prose-poem format of most of the book is transferred to the geometric line. These are essentially lineated poems, in some sense, even when set as prose. The eighth poem, for instance, echoes the book’s opening “incline” when it maps the following route: “recline” taken as a straight line, ends as “a low spreading, freely branching Chinese tree with lanceolate leaves, sessile usually pink flowers borne on the naked twigs in early spring, and a fruit which is

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a single-seeded drupe of hard endocarp, pulpy white or yellow mesocarp and a think downy epicarp.” Despite the scientific vocabulary, the verbose definition of “peach” employed by Webster’s sounds particularly poetic in its spreading sweep and freely branching syntax. But how does “recline,” which derives from the Latin clinare, to bend, become a straight line rather than a bent one, ending in peach? The answer lies at the top corner of page 209 of the Webster’s Collegiate, where “clingstone,” “a fruit (as a peach),” is set directly above “clinic,” which comes from “klinein to lean, recline.” The two terms are further triangulated when the poem asserts that “ ‘peace’ and some sort of stretching action combine to release precision.” It takes “some sort of stretching action,” if not an outright overreach, to release the precision that delineates peace from peach, but the poem is titled “ ‘match point’ to ‘matrix’ for ‘H,’ ” after all, and so the easy substitution of the graphemes e for h is perhaps not much of a stretch. But the book has taught us to be wary of such false leads and the logic does not rest there, since “rest” in the Collegiate denotes both “repose” and “peace,” while “repose” denotes both “peace” and “recline”—the straight line that brings us, with ironic circuitousness, back to the paragram for peace in “peach.” The logic of letter substitution continues in the following poem, “ ‘Tancred’ to ‘tantalite’ for ‘I.’ ” Moving from the etymology of “stipe” (from the neo-Latin “stipes, from L, tree trunk; akin to L stipare to press together”) to the subject of “stipend” (“a fixed sum of money”), which derives in part from the Latin verb “pendere, to weigh,” the poem quotes from the definitions of stipple, introducing a parenthetical: “A tree trunk is something ‘pressed together’ and so is money, weighed. Both produce graded shadows by repeated small touches (resembling freckles).” “Resembling” is drawn from the following entry for “stipular” (“of, resembling, or provided with stipules”), and if “freckles” makes sense as a kind of dermal stipple, its appearance seems to in fact arise from the “small touch” that replaces an i with an e to move in the definition from “flicks” to the cognate cross-references “speckle, fleck.” The poem continues with a witty hinge between the addendum of a stipulation to a contract and the adjunct to a larger trunk: “use ‘for’ to become appendages capable of passing implements through substances with circular movements.” One definition for “stipulate” stipulates: “used with for . . . to demand an express term in an agreement,” while two entries down the definition of stipule explains: “either of a pair of appendages borne at the base of a leaf.” With a paraphrase of the fourth definition of the second sense of “stir”—“to pass an implement through a substance with a circular movement”—the poem

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concludes its series of allusions to its own poetics: The language of the dictionary in this passages has been stirred, pressed together, and appended part to part. An examination of all the dictionaries used to generate vocabulary for On the Corner to Off the Corner reveals that the location of clingstone on the corner of the dictionary page is far from incidental. Consider, to begin with, a section of the series that returns to the dictionary collage of the fans in adv. fans by bringing the word itself back to its locus in the dictionary. Darragh composes a fantasia built on the fan of entries that spreads down page 415 of the Webster’s Collegiate: often with 30 or 40 feathers sequence upon sevens whose plates there appear cassava meal form of a flat band53 The final line of the lyric connects this tissue of quotations to fascia, which, in addition to the architectural band described here, also denotes the connective tissue binding together other structures, but the initial quatrain stretches neatly from corner to corner on a single page, starting with “fantail” (“a domestic pigeon having a broad rounded tail often with 30 or 40 feathers”) and—via the very next entry for “fantan” (“a card game in which players must build in sequence upon sevens and attempt to be the first one out of cards”) and the entry directly across the column at “farad” (“the unit of capacitance equal to the capacitance of a capacitor between whose plates there appears a potential of one volt when it is charged by one coulomb of electricity”)—and then the very last entry on the bottom of the page for “farinha.” An awareness of how Darragh moves language from off the corner of the dictionary page and onto the four-cornered blocks of her own poems also reveals how she allegorizes geometric lineation as a poetic principle. The same path from top left corner to bottom right corner of a dictionary page is traced with an even stricter orthogonal in the fourth poem, which returns to the converted “ox” of the book’s opening; the poem “ ‘elaborative’ to ‘Eleatic’ for ‘D’ ” begins: “ ‘Egg’ and ‘oxygen’ both contain ‘edge,’ with egg’s edge located at ‘share’ and oxygen’s at ‘shear.’ ” The circuit loops in a tidy circle: “oxygen” has its origin in a Greek adjective “akin to L acer sharp—more at edge,” a word that in turn is hatched from the Middle English egge. Not only do both share and shear derive, via the Old English scieran, from the same shared source in the Greek keirein, but both appear on the corners of page 1066 of the Collegiate, as the indexing

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headers indicating the lemmata that the page will span. The facing page runs from “shear” to “sheet,” and the physical sheet of the page, in fact, is literally sheared by the line drawn at a 60° angle between the entries for the two words at each corner of the page. Cutting and clipping the words in its path, the bisection leaves only shards: “shar et vb farme atim domin nuer is cti porta acio torti him sho shag low me l dou sha tio he min ears cou ock metim seb dj.”54 Darragh, in short, both records and enacts the cutting apportionment of a sheared and shared sheet. The bisecting transcription of the line in this poem corroborates Darragh’s description of her “dictionary transcriptions”; as she explains in the introduction to a 1994 reading at SUNY Buffalo: “I would draw on the dictionary page or actually cut up [a page]: take a photo, photocopy the dictionary page and actually build the poem with it and then transcribe it.”55 Darragh attends not only to the page as an image—something to be photographed and graphically manipulated—but to pages that themselves contain images. To begin with, the annotated captions to partitioned illustrations provide language for several passages in On the Corner to Off the Corner, where their enumeration—divorced from the relevant illustration—produces the impression of an orderly irrationality. In the fifth poem, for instance, the parts of a violin bow pictured in the dictionary yields “1 stick 2 head 3 hair 4 frog 5 screw.” A classical column similarly serves as the backbone for the twelfth poem, which moves down the architectural elements from “cornice” to “frieze” to “architrave” to “capital” to “shaft” to “base” to “pedestal.”56 The illustration pictures a rebus for the signature page layout utilized by Darragh in her poetic investigations of typographic space: the column. A numbered list detailing the detachable parts of a suit of late-medieval plate mail structures the section “ ‘Armenian’ to ‘arose’ for ‘M,’ ” which takes the form of a sonnet. The nomenclature, originally, designating the constituents of the armor, are given designations in turn, but rather than the expected definitions, they are glossed with language from later pages in a sort of cubist deformation: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

helmet—isometric pentrose gorget—distal row of tarsal bones shoulder piece—erect spathe spandex pallette—conical sac breastplate—refuse coal screenings brassard—points of attachment for the spat elbow piece—perigee stele skirt of tasses—teleost sea breams

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

tuilee—olivine stimuli gauntlet—cage birds with lime and salts cuisse—rugose nutlets knee piece—perche apolune jambeau—concentric shelly sabaton—flagella dogbone57

These redefinitions all take place under the subtitle description of the “relationship of ‘hip’ to ‘cube’”—a word that indeed has an etymological relationship, as the Collegiate charts it, “fr. L cubus, fr. Gk kybos cube, vertebra—more at hip.” Anticipating the Necker Cube in Striking Resemblance, the cube here continues the geometric theme that—as we shall see—underwrites much of On the Corner. Although the following poem, “ ‘townsman’ to ‘trachle’ for ‘N,’ ” does not quote from the captions to illustrations, a comparison with its dictionary source in Webster’s Third New International reveals an equal interest in the image. The poem opens: “To ‘tr’ oblong leaves, berry globular; to ‘tr’ yielding broadtail, white shaped-bell.” The language comes from the descriptions of persimmon (“a medium-sized tree [D. virginiana] of the southern and eastern U.S. with hard fine-grained wood, oblong leaves, and greenish yellow or greenish white bell-shaped flowers”) and persian lamb (“a pelt obtained from karakul lambs older than those yielding broadtail”). To account for the rest of the poem, however, requires several changes of perspective. The poem continues: to ‘tr’ stock comic, hauberk bib; to ‘tr’ lignified walls, rickettsia by; to ‘tr’ plunger scores, rootstock waves; to ‘tr’ meld of queen, midrib cleft; to ‘tr’ harquebus pipe, train epicyclic. The view has shifted to a figure illustrating a harlequin, the “stock character in commedia dell’arte,” before flipping forward to find a figure in a strikingly similar stance, with a broad sword replacing the lath-sword baton of slapstick, a medieval nasal helmet replacing the wide, upturned, cuff-like brim of the zany’s hat, and a patterned chainmail tunic replacing checkered tights in order to illustrate a hauberk, which enters modern usage from the Old English healsbeorg, or neck armor (a kind of protective “bib”). In between the two illustrations, Darragh would have found “harquebus” in the very top left corner of page 1036. The barrel of that gun might, from a certain vantage, look like a pipe, perhaps with a wink at Rene Magritte’s La trahison des images; but in any event, the word itself, appropriately for its placement on the page and for Darragh’s transcription of it for her book, comes etymologically from “corner” (“MF har-

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quebuse, arquebuse, modif. of MD hakebusse, fr. hake hook + busse box, tube gun fr. LL buxis box; akin to MD hoec corner”). From on the corner to off the corner, the middle of the poem then shifts its sights to the middle column of page 2420, “to ‘tr,’ ” as the text repeats, with the denotations of “tracheid,” a tubular cell with “strongly lignified walls,” and “trachoma,” a chronic conjunctivitis “caused by a rickettsia.” The concluding “train epicyclic” performatively rotates the parts of “epicyclic train,” the name for a series of “gear wheels or belt pulleys . . . designed to have one or more parts travel around the circumference of another revolving part.” As with the other terms we have traced back to the dictionary, the definition in Webster’s appears directly above the illustration to the geometric figure of an epicycloid, showing the curves “traced by a point on a circle that rolls on the outside of a fixed circle.” Indeed, a consultation of the dictionaries used by Darragh reveals the particular attraction not just of geometric terms but also of their linedrawing illustrations set within the dictionary pages’ columns. If the Necker-like drawing of a tetrahedron appears by sheer coincidence on the page plumbed to generate the language of the third poem in On the Corner to Off the Corner, the book’s cover makes an unmistakable association between geometry and language itself: a calligraphy guide to drawing letterforms in gridded planes. Insisting on the spatial containment of language, from the letterform to the placement of words within the textblock confinement of the page, Darragh underscores the etymology of dictionary itself with its locative suffix: a physically containing architectural place for words, as one would locate species of plants or animals or saints’ remains in a granary, an aviary, or a reliquary. The +tr vocabulary foregrounded in “ ‘townsman’ to ‘trachle’ for ‘N’ ” continues to structure “ ‘lamp’ to ‘landgrave’ for ‘O’ ”: “openwork in the head” is flanked by “arrow + loving” on the left and “track team runner” on the right. Both lines suggest xylem, igneous rocks, horse latitudes, planted islands, buff occelli, airfoils and tuft ambles as they transmit and receive delicate endings consisting chiefly of potash feldspar. Here one can trace Darragh’s tracings from “tracery” (“[architectural ornamental work with branching lines; esp: decorative] openwork in the head [of a Gothic window]” and its directly adjacent lemmata from the neighboring columns, running straight from “toxophilite” (“arrow + loving”) to the one side and track-man (“track team runner”) to the other. The poem proceeds to travel over the opening, but the conjunction of trace

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and window seems motivated by Darragh’s procedure, which traces the constellations revealed by particular viewing points and the scope of their windows onto the source page. Darragh’s series “Exposed Faces,” a later poem published in the Potes & Poets newsletter, explicitly employs the same metaphor. Proposing that the late sixteenth-century mathematician “John Napier thought in terms of ‘window,’” the proem to the series frames the portmanteau etymology of window itself (Icelandic windr, wind + auga, eye) as if it were the factors of a logarithmic combination of numerals, aligning the morphemes and “finding the face each pair then shared.”58 In a self-referential fashion familiar to Darragh’s poetry, a lancet window over the Random House entry for “wind” then reveals a lyric series of lines reminiscent of Susan Howe’s similarly collaged reading: ment of one ety or decen by a narr flate; ever degree quently ivy winds state of great conclude: pitcher) wind(an) The predicate sense of “wind” as “to escape . . . by a narrow margin; take a risk” reduces, merely on account of the unmotivated score of the geometric line, to “by a narr” in the narrow window of Darragh’s reading as it descends down the margin of the column. Conflating the language from different denotations to disrupt what is meant, or “ment,” by one entry, the poem concludes by transforming a “pitcher)/ wind(an)” into a picture window onto the prospect of typography’s narrative of chance. Straitening to mere peepholes, the windows that frame the following series of “exposed faces” permit only blinkered glimpses of the dictionary page. As Darragh’s poem is printed, each page displays eight squat stanzas—mainly triplets and quatrains, with the occasional couplet— spaced across its field. The prefatory note explains that these “ ‘exposed faces’ are transcribed by placing a transparent multiplication chart down on a(ny) dictionary page and recording what falls within the face for randomly chosen pairs of numbers (2 × 4, 7 × 5, etc.).”59 A more recent model than Napier’s might have been found in the stenciled pages of Armand Schwerner’s (If Personal), which are die-cut to open onto the text of subsequent pages (the book was issued with a cardstock insert that could be

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used to obstruct the views and multiply the aleatory arrangements).60 But framing the project in terms of the mathematician adds to the resonance of the mathematical entries sampled by the poem. Once again, moreover, those entries evince an attention to the dictionary’s visual illustration of geometric concepts, such as “a paral / point / a prin-” and “concave / pla no - / taining / onvex on.” 61 The vaulted space of concavity rhymes with a later stanza, “s conve / aking a / ace. b / or span,” which quotes from the visually illustrated definition for “arch”: [. . .] 5. a dam construction having the form of a barrel vault running vertically with its convex face to-ward the impounded water. 6. Glassmaking, a. a chamber or opening in a glassmaking furnace. b. see pot arch.—v.t. 7. to cover with a vault or span with an arch [. . .] Whether mischievously sly, mysteriously obscure, or mere coincidental, the opening for “arch” also records the entries for “arcane” and “arbitrary,” both concepts at the core of the work’s poetics. Geometric references recur throughout the cycle. The stanza “l’kel), / a recu / events / der an,” for instance, samples from “cycle” and its pronunciation guide, denoting “a recurring period of time, esp. one in which certain events or phenomena repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals.” Another page plots the definition of “cycloid”; both “cycloid / semblin / the sc / more o” and “ing a cir / ale of a / or less c” each generate their fragments from the left-hand side of a paragraph: cy•cloid (si’kloid), adj. 1 resembling a circle; circular. 2 (of the scale of a fish) smooth edged, more or less circular in form and having concentric striations. 3. The margins of this paragraph are narrowed at this point to accommodate the inset illustration of the equation for “a curve generated by a point on the circumference of a circle which rolls, without slipping, on a straight line,” and in the section “ ‘octodecilliont’ to ‘odontogeny for ‘L,’ ” in On the Corner to Off the Corner, a similar attention to the text framing an inset illustration can be discovered. The poem’s transcription from the dictionary—in this case the 1973 Webster’s New Collegiate—works its way across the top corners of the page, between columns, to draw language from the entries for “odd,” “od,” “odd-pinnate,” “octant,” and “OD” as an abbreviation for “outside dimension,” leading to the decidedly odd and cryptic line: “i oo n oi n nie bg t. i- E] a- v-.” The “outside dimension” of the justified prose adjacent to the illustration for “octagon” (itself directly

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Figur e 7. Excerpt from Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Co., 1973), the source for Tina Darragh’s “ ‘octodecillionth’ to ‘odontogeny’ for ‘L’ .”

above the three-dimensional rendering of an octahedron) account for the line’s ending (Figure  7): “hav- . . . MEASURE . . . metri- . . . feet.” Delineating the geometry of the text block bordering the delineated geometry of the illustrated shapes and solids, the textual specifics of Darragh’s poem depend on the typographic happenstance of the particular edition of the dictionary she consulted and the geometry of its justified text (which requires greater hyphenation to maintain its visual consistency).62 As with those poems in Striking Resemblance that revealed Darragh working from the first lines of columns or their marginal frame, poems like “‘octodecillionth’ to ‘odontogeny for ‘L’” again embody a dictionary poetics in the most material sense: not merely a given lexicon or the ordered array of language under the regime of alphabetization, but the typeset page itself. Mathematical figures sketch ideal relationships which nonetheless describe very real, palpable physical relations, just as the illustrations of mathematical figures on the dictionary page guide and structure Darragh’s book even as they remain untranscribed and invisible to the reader of her poem on its own. Consider, for another instance, “‘periodic system’ to ‘perlite’ for ‘G,’” which in a rare parallel between the title of the poem

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and dictionary page from which it samples takes its language mainly from the titular heading of the Random House Dictionary page 1072.63 The poem opens with a trio of wonderfully surreal expressions: The expressions “investment of bone”, “urn of mosses” and “nuet of round” take their positions as observers by encircling a mound. Walking about, they possess an access to the elements occurring there in much the same way permafrost prefigures falling by passing large stones through the entire thickness of walls. The opening triplet of quotations from periosteum (the anatomical term for “the normal investment of bone”) to peristome (the botanical term for the “small, pointed, toothlike appendages around the orifice of a capsule or urn of mosses”) to a sic erat scriptum transcription of the etymology of the colonnaded courtyard denoted by peristyle (which derives from the “neut. of peristylos columned round”). The conclusion of the poem, however— “passing large stones through the entire thickness of walls”—paraphrases the definition of “perpend” on the facing page, directly above the geometric illustration for the right-angle meeting of perpendicular lines. The dictionary illustration of a geometric figure even explains Darragh’s own explanation of her poetics. The poem “ ‘legion’ to ‘Lent’ for ‘R’ ” includes an account of its own formation: “Lem” cuts a figure eight around “le ma” and “le me,” generating the kind of fiber bands associated with “brain” and “ribbon.” The lower oval of the eight is uniformly southern in including a Greek island, 14 variations of lemon, money from Honduras and Roman exorcisms. The upper oval far from the north has a gloss heading, lemming barks, and a young hero sometimes helped by his mother. Describing the poem, Darragh explains her compositional procedure this way: the sound “lem” reoccurs at various points on the page. By graphing these points, I find that they produce a figure eight. I tell the reader about the graph and list the words contained within the figure. Many of the “lem” words are “fiber” words, so I also mention the various fibers that can make up the figure.64 On the dictionary page, however, relations are both more complicated and direct. To begin with, in a deviation from the other titles in the book, which name the header on a single page, “ ‘legion’ to ‘Lent’ ” indicates two

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pages of the Random House Dictionary: the recto and verso of the leaf that runs “legion” to “lemming” and “Lemminkäinen” to “Lent.” 65 In the dead center of this spread (the last complete entry on page before “lemming,” which continues to the next page) one finds the self-reflexive lemma for “lemma”: “the heading of a gloss, annotation, etc.” Moreover, the points on the pages where “lem” occurs—from lemniscus (from the Greek word for “ribbon,” denoting “a band of fibers, esp. white nerve fibers in the brain”) to the isle of Lemnos through various lemons to lempira (“a paper money and monetary unit of Honduras”) and Lemuralia (“the annual festival in ancient Rome in which lemures were exorcised from houses”) are in a single-column line. While they are not arranged in a figure eight on the page, the figure eight does appear, quite literally, between Lemminkäinen (“[in the Kalevala] a young jovial hero who has many adventures in which he is sometimes helped by his mother”) and “lemniscus” as an illustration to “lemniscate” (Figure 8): the geometric “plane curve generated by the locus of the point at which a variable tangent to a rectangular hyperbola intersects a perpendicular from the center to the tangent.” From the visual depictions of armor and arches, harlequins and hauberks, polyhedrons and curves and equations, the dictionaries’ illustrations thus organize Darragh’s transcriptions, even though they do not

Figur e 8. Excerpt from The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1967), the source for Tina Darragh’s “ ‘legion’ to ‘Lent’ for ‘R’.”

The R and om House Dictionary / Tina Darragh / 157

make a visual appearance in her poems; like the typographic layout of the dictionary’s text, they are felt but invisible structures. The geometric imagination in On the Corner to Off the Corner grows increasingly vivid over the course of the book, as the final set of poems deploy an ever more insistent mathematical vocabulary. Moreover, the poems imagine the dictionary page itself as a plane on which printed words can be related as points plotting geometric figures. “ ‘sull’ to ‘summer camp’ for ‘V,’” for instance, describes the development of its terms in terms of “arcs,” while “ ‘almost everywhere’ to ‘alpine fir’ for ‘T’ ” begins not everywhere but on a single page that begins with the almost periodic function (in mathematics, “a function that repeats its values approximately at almost equally spaced intervals of its domain”), asserting that “mathematical terms start out with ‘almost’ repeating itself at intervals that are multiples of three,” counting down the lemmata in ternary units. “Then,” the poem concludes, “there is a circle parallel to the horizon located between [the adjacent entries] ‘alpenglow’ and ‘alphorn.’ Within the circle, 1/2 of ‘alone’ borders on the set of ‘along.’ ” In the context of these geometric shapes, the last poem starts out punningly with the figural sense of “square” as slang for a conservative conventionalist rather than an equilateral rectangle: “ ‘Dog’ starts out very square and stern with ‘doctrine,’ ‘document’ and ‘dodecanese.’” The piece then builds on language from page 422 of the Random House dictionary, which features the illustration for both rhombic and pentagonal dodecahedrons, just as the previous poem had gone out of its way to indicate the page containing illustrations for various types of triangles and the process of triangulation, which appear at the beginning of the range over which it spans: “‘three’ skips around for seven pages” (i.e., 1511– 17), a spread reiterated by the extended title, “ ‘trellis through to ‘trompe’ for ‘Y.’ ” In actuality, the poem’s source is more methodical and focused, keeping to the single spread that compasses “tridarn cupboard” and “triceratops” and various instances of “trick,” from the popular medical sense of a knee in which “the joint suddenly stiffens” to the heraldic sense of “a preliminary sketch of a coat of arms” to the onomatopoeic name for a kind of backgammon (trick-tack) and the nautical terme de métier for a “spare wheel” “independently actuating the steering mechanism of a ship, for use in case the steering engine fails.” Tricks, of course are another way to describe the trompe l’oeil illusions that fascinated Darragh in Striking Resemblance. Read against her geometric terms and her predilection for he dictionary’s visual illustration of those terms—together with her use of dictionary’s pages as geometric planes on which points of type could be plotted—those illusions help us to better see

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Darragh’s focus on the cubic (that is, three-dimensional) geometry of the book itself. We have seen that focus announced by the subtitles of the poems “projecting angle” (“graphed as a Necker cube”) and “‘Armenian’ to ‘arose’ for ‘M’” (“relationship of ‘hip’ to ‘cube’”). In Striking Resemblance, Darragh asks: “how can I keep a corner moving / so I can see / my eyes converge the surfaces / into depth,” and one might note that the illusions she names all exploit cognitive (mis)perceptions of depth.66 The Ponzo figure, for instance, effects its illusion because the page is understood as a threedimensional model, with the lines as abstracted objects in a perspectival schema. Although the top line appears to be longer, “we do not regard it as ‘higher up’ but as ‘farther away’: we do not see the drawing as a flat piece of paper but as a perspectival representation of three-dimensional space with depth.”67 With a different conceptual model, the Ames Room poems imagine the two-dimensional page as the floor plan for a three-dimensional room—or, etymologically, stanza. Jerome McGann, in the description quoted in the previous chapter, singles out precisely the three-dimensional depth of the page recognized by Darragh’s work where by the page of a dictionary is suddenly exposed as a field of strange and unrecognized deposits—odd buts and pieces scattered across a surface whose depths and layers and correspondences escape the notice of the dictionary’s ordinary users.68 With a recognition of the dictionary page as a geometric solid with threedimensional volume, Darragh moves from illusions of depth to the actual depth of the paper itself. The dictionary page serves not only as the substrate for the geometric terms it defines and illustrates, but as a geometric form itself. Continuing the figuration of the page as a geometric space in and of itself, “ ‘-lent’ to ‘leptorrhine’ for ‘X’ ” opens, gnomically, with paraphrases of the definitions of “gnomon”: “removing a parallelogram from a similar parallelogram (by taking on one of the corners) results in a shadow seen as a cylinder by squinting.” The word denotes both the stylus of a sundial, as well as “the remainder of a parallelogram after the removal of a similar parallelogram containing one of its corners,” a figure illustrated with a lettered line drawing on page 970 of Webster’s Third. But in this case the poem goes on to suggest that the page itself might be curled into a cylinder; the poem continues: “cylinders are also obtained by twisting grain on a tree.” The language comes from the definition of “gnarl” (“to twist or contort,” and “a hard protuberance with twisted grain on a tree”), which appears like so many of the words we have seen at the very lower left corner of the page, but that page itself is made of wood pulp that al-

The R and om House Dictionary / Tina Darragh / 159

lows it to be flexibly turned. With the description of “taking one of the corners” to create the kind of depth that can cast a shadow, and the shifts in visual perception underscored by “squinting,” we can again see the alignment of the book’s titular corners with the corners of the book and those words—including the header ranges taken as the titles for the poem in On the Corner to Off the Corner—that the reference-book browser not only reads but handles with the haptic recognition of the page as a material object in three dimensional space. This sense of the page as a plane that both contains printed illustrations of geometric forms and also constitutes a geometric form itself comes to be fully realized in “‘mobilizer’ to ‘modern language’ for ‘U,’” which reads: The mobius strip is part of the “writing as carving” tradition. First, the rectangle is held steady at one end and given a sudden half-twist at the other. The ends are then taped or glued together resulting in a one-sided figure where before there were two. This 180 degree turn is much like the suffix “mo” which— after numerals or their names—indicates the number of leaves made by folding a sheet of paper. Beginning on the top left corner of page 920 of the Random House Dictionary, with “Möbius strip,” the first entry on the first column, the poem ends on the previous page, at the top right corner, where the first entry on the top of the last column finds “-mo,” the suffix used in bookbinding, abstracted from “duodecimo,” to indicate trim sizes. By making the two entries contiguous, rather than separated recto and verso, the poem performs a möbius operation with the fore-edge strip, as if the outermost of the page were in fact twisted and collated to join itself into “a continuous one-sided surface.” The poem, in short, both talks about folding a sheet of paper in a book and imaginatively enacts the folding of the sheet of paper that contains the description. “The definition,” as “‘yea’ to ‘yill’ for ‘W’” remarks, “is surrounded by trees”: the conifer pulp paper on which it is printed, still “seen as ‘wood of trees” even after those forested fibers have been “moved to another locality” and the words printed on them moved yet again, from the dictionary’s page to the page of Darragh’s poem.69 From one direction, it hardly needs mentioning, a dictionary projects authority, heightened in most cases by the density of its print, the armature of its apparatuses, and the imposing heft of lectern formats like those used by the Webster’s International and Random House dictionaries favored by Darragh alongside the more modest workaday Collegiate edition.70 The particular authority of the dictionary rests on its suggestion

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of factual accuracy and objectivity—the very attributes that elevate it to a reference work. From the other direction, however, every choice of entry, attempt of definition, and usage illustration offer ample opportunities for placing ideology on display. As self-conscious records of national languages and discursive communities, the dictionary is a book charged with cultural politics. In the case of Webster’s, the provocative editorial stance taken by the lexicographers under Philip Gove for the third edition speaks to Darragh’s own practice of appropriating language from its copyrighted pages. The most immediately apparent revisions in the third edition had to do with the status of proper names (the subject of the following chapter). Gazetteer entries and biographical names were eliminated, and trademarks were demoted to common nouns. As Darragh summarizes the issue: The inclusion of colloquial language in the 3rd edition of Webster’s dictionary caused quite a stir. But it wasn’t entries such as “ain’t” that prompted a number of hostile takeover bids of Merriam Webster by rival publishers. Corporations were distressed that trademarked names, such as kleenex, had made their way into everyday speech uncapitalized. Reprints of the 3rd edition recapitalized all trademarks, except for those that had become verbs.71 The policy continues; the Eleventh Edition of the Collegiate (2006) defines “google” as “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (someone or something) on the World Wide Web.” One could find the definition of google in print, or—with the help of a search engine—easily online. While googling has profoundly changed the nature of literary scholarship, readily revealing sources long hidden by their appropriating texts, one should note that dictionaries have not been well served by Google’s own book digitization project. Frequently omitted from the scanned corpus altogether, or removed due to copyright claims by the corporations who own them, when dictionaries are included their form and format—the very bulk of the physical dimensions recognized by Coolidge and Darragh—pose challenges to OCR software with disrupting pronunciation articulations and phonetic codes, italicized abbreviations, and sequencing confusions from close-set columns printed on tabbed and easily torn pages that curve in their collective heft with distorting gutters. None of the dictionaries that served as keys to the works discussed in this book were available online. So like Darragh herself in the concluding lines of Pi in the Skye, the reader who positions the dictionary source text next to her poem can “feel extremely lucky / to have been looking there / from the right angle / to that place / at that time.”

6 /

Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge Sweet gum bark and mullen cooked down with lard. Make a salve.

—Zora Neale Hurston, “Prescriptions of Root Doctors”

I’m not the first to associate the poet with the conjurer or the root worker.

—Harryette Mullen

In January 1993, Maya Angelou offered a poem on the occasion of the inauguration of Bill Clinton as President of the United States. Titled “On the Pulse of Morning,” the verse aspires to a Whitmanesque grandeur that its verbal energies seem unable to sustain. Following a surprising opening reference to coprolite, or fossilized excrement, the anthropomorphized as a “wise rock” makes a direct address to a catalogue—simultaneously too comprehensive and incomplete, too specific and too generalized—listing all those who desire a conversation with the hoary stone: the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher And yet—to bear down on the artistic value of this epideictic oration with a modernist or postmodernist aesthetic seems not only churlish, but to miss the point. “On the Pulse of Morning” reads like something closer to nineteenth-century periodical verse than avant-garde experiment, and as an occasional poem it invites other criteria; to read all poems in the same way is to succumb to what Ludwig Wittgenstein would call a “grammatical illusion”: What lures us into error because verbal categories are not commensurate with the ontological categories we confuse them for. That incompatibility, to be clear, is not the spurious and ahistorical separation

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of politics and form, or equally specious collapse of whiteness and avantgarde. To put the relation in positive terms: part of the meaning of an utterance (including the complicated utterance of a poem) derives from its context, and to transfer Angelou’s poem from its civic occasion is a first step in starting stopping making sense. Making just such a grammatical error, and with a mean-spiritedness to match Angelou’s generosity, Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin published a pastiche of the inaugural poem, as “The Unaugural Poem,” hard on the delivery of her panegyric.1 If part of the context of “On the Pulse of Morning” was the moment of its political rhetoric, part of the context of their retort, “On the Pumice of Morons,” was the moment of its institutional rhetoric: a time when a broad coalition of soi-disant “experimental” poets were fighting for a place in anthologies, on syllabi, and among the various institutional venues proliferating in a burgeoning culture of academic “creative writing” programs. “On the Pumice of Morons” thus replaces the civic expanse of Angelou’s “Pulse” with a more narrow self-interest in the very breath which it belittles special interests. In their attempt to counter Angelou’s sociable statement, Fagin and Coolidge enlist the Ouvoir de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a group of primarily French mathematicians and writers founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and soon joined by writers such as Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, and Jacques Roubaud as a club convened to propose and test techniques for producing literature based on rule-governed procedures and constraints. Specifically, Coolidge and Fagin take up Jean Lescure’s “S + 7” technique, in which each substantive (noun) in a poem is replaced by the noun seven entries later in the dictionary.2 “On the Pumice,” for example, deprecates Angelou’s singing “River” to a “Roach” (if not the reviled insect then the stoner cigarette butt in line with a poetic goof that might have seemed funnier to its authors than to anyone else). The title itself, in all events, not only adds a geological element familiar from Coolidge’s own lexicon, but also selfreflexively suggests the act of poetic erasure that the pastiche undertakes (“to pumice”: “erase by rubbing”).3 Where Angelou’s first stanza, for instance, concludes with a memory “lost in the gloom of dust and ages,” its reworking erases her nouns and replaces them with a series of terms that make less evident sense but do produce the dense phonemic clustering that is typical, as we saw in Chapter 3, of Coolidge’s own poetics: “lost in the gloss of duress and agglomeration.” On the one hand, the substitutions of the S + 7 method emphasize the grammatical scaffolding that the new poem retains from its model, casting a spotlight on the structure of the original; in this case, it highlights the enumerations of cata logues,

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similarly repeating modes of anaphora and parallel constructions, and the related biblical phrasing that evokes a vatic stance. But some sense of reference, on the other hand, still remains in the “passed/-on travesty” of “Pumice.” Where Angelou emphasizes categories of cultural diversity, Coolidge and Fagin retort with fragile petulance, substituting “the Greek,” the “Irish,” and “the Rabbi” with “the Great White Way,” the “Ipso Facto” and “the Quota.” Bob Perelman does his best to give them a way out after this uncomfortable display, proffering an exoneration of the politically incorrect tone by shifting authority to the chance substitution of the source: “it is the dictionary’s random speech.” 4 But a closer reading reveals that the absolving shrug and shunt of authorial responsibility is not quite so easy. Contrary to Amy Robbins’s claim that the pastiche “substitutes every noun in Angelou’s poem with a noun occurring exactly seven words apart in their dictionary,” its method is far from exact, and its text is the product of too much tampering to be the result of a strict procedure.5 As readers will have noticed simply from the logic of alphabetizing, if Rock Crystal conveniently follows Rock by seven entries, to suit Coolidge’s geologic imagination, no dictionary has “quota” follow “rabbi” by any number of lemmata. Had it kept to a strict S + 7 procedure, the poem might have retained a playfulness that its cheating spoils, but the leeway laces its potential goofiness with a bitterness more personally acrimonious than acerbic. Personal authority, ironically, is the very topic of Angelou’s title; “on the pulse” denotes “through one’s own experience,” with an allusion to John Keats’s use of the phrase: “axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses. We read fine things, but never feel them to the full until we have gone the same steps as the Author.” 6 Coolidge and Fagin have indeed gone the same steps of the author, retracing Angelou’s text word-for-word, but they seem nevertheless, pace Keats, to not have felt the same. So there is no small irony when Coolidge, of all people, is name-checked by the jacket copy to Harryette Mullen’s 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary—a book replete with both trenchant critiques of racism and enthusiastic celebrations of diversity. The text on the French-flap reports, with feigned innocence, that “Clark Coolidge [has] also published poems using the S + 7 technique,” casting a silently raised eyebrow at his anomalous collaboration with Fagin.7 At the same time, Mullen’s own S + 7 poems in the collection do indeed follow Coolidge and Fagin, formally, in taking the oulippean rule as a very rough guide rather than a strict imperative.8 Two poems in her book, for example, transform William Shakespeare’s famous sonnet CXXX: “Dim Lady” opens “My honeybunch’s

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peepers are nothing like neon. Today’s special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige,” while “Variations on a Theme Park” begins: “My Mickey Mouse ears are nothing like sonar. Colorado is far less rusty than Walt’s lyric riddles. If sorrow is wintergreen, well then Walt’s breakdancers are dunderheads.”9 If the first translation focuses on the denotative function of the dictionary—its thesaurus role as a storehouse or treasury (Greek θησαυρός) of equivalent definitions—the second places more weight on the dictionary’s alphabetized structure: the sequencing of words, regardless of their meaning, on which the incongruous, madlib results of the S + 7 poem relies. In addition to the models provided by the OuLiPo, Mullen could have also found a precedent in the sixth chapter of Fran Ross’s novel Oreo (which Mullen helped return to print, and on which she has written), where the protagonist similarly rephrases a source while retaining the basic contours of its grammatical and phonetic structure, paying special attention to syllabic and alphabetic patterning. For an assignment in her class on economic agronomy, the novel’s eponymous hero models her term paper on the assigned reading Lying Fallow, or What You Should Know About Federal Subsidies, in which “the first word was snow and the last word was potatoes.”10 Following an initial draft that strays too far from the form and register of her source text’s lexicon, she spends “an evening with Roget.” After sleeping with the thesaurus, so to speak, it provides just the poetic help Oreo needs: she quickly filled in the middle section of her essay using the same technique [of substitution]. What she sacrificed in cogency, she gained in mechanicality (her serendipitous assembly-line gobbledygook against Fallow’s numbing agroeconomic clarity). Thus a typical sentence in Fallow: “Wheat farm B showed a declining profit-loss ration during the harvest season,” became in Oreo’s manuscript: “Oat ranch wasp played the drooping excess-death proportion while a crop pepper.”11 With a stamina that would put Perec to shame, the resulting manuscript “ran to more than six hundred pages, single-spaced.”12 Like Oreo, the oulippeans, and Tina Darragh (as we saw in the previous chapter), Mullen also often turns to reference books, which she collects.13 At just a glance, the titles of two of her books—Sleeping with the Dictionary and Recyclopedia—offer an index of the interest in reference works that led to poems built from the lexica of particular dictionaries.14 The slang synonyms that animate “Dim Lady,” for instance, were derived in large part from Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American

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Slang, the same book that underwrites Mullen’s 1995 Muse & Drudge. In the latter work, however, the dictionary serves not as a template for aleatory play, as in the S + 7 technique, nor as the spatial, material object sculpted by Coolidge and Darragh, but rather as a store of cultural practices and a repertoire of linguistic tropes ready to be appropriated to poetic ends. The poetic utility of the culturally focused dictionary arises both from the degree to which its language signals the idioms of a distinct discursive community as well as from the extent to which it generates vocabulary with a vibrantly rewarding facture—words that are “juicy,” as Mullen describes them: the poem [Muse & Drudge] was a process for me, you know, I was throwing in black vernacular from Clarence Major’s dictionary Juba to Jive. You know I would find something really juicy and say, “Oh, I’ve got to put this in. . . . I’ve got to use this somehow.”15 The dictionary contains the lexical seeds that Mullen will elaborate into suggestive semantic phrases as she “seeks ideas for vocabularies,” in Lyn Hejinian’s nice turn of phrase.16 But with its particular cultural focus, the slang dictionary, as we will see, further provides a reserve of vocabulary with registers specific enough to collide with material form other discursive realms and effect a “gesture at multiplicity and . . . heteroglossia.”17 Muse & Drudge carries an epigraph from Callimachus of Cyrene: “Fatten your animal for sacrifice, poet, but keep your muse slender.”18 The line comes from the prologue to his Aetia, in which he unleashes a tirade against his literary competitors (figured as the Telchines, a race of evil tadpole minions). Callimachus shores up his position with a bid for the divine authority of his lyric verses in contrast to the bloated length and bombast of his rivals’ cyclical epics. Unlike their popular, vulgarly appealing adventures, which stretch to thousands of lines, his lyrics are subtle, in both sense of the word (in English, from the Latin subtilis): rhetorically refined and formally slender. With her title, Mullen contrasts the figure of Callimachus’s “mοῦσαν . . . λεπταλέην [mousan leptaleen, slender muse]” with the sturdy corporeality of the “drudge,” along with all of the word’s associations of debased labor and servitude. However thin the Muse, the body implied by Drudge is bulked for heavy-duty toil, if not slaughter. The opening movements of the poem then summon the alliterating “Sappho” and “Sapphire” as prosopopoeia of the title’s twin terms, launching eighty pages of short-lined quatrains in a form that seems to counter Callimachus’s contrast between “sustained poetry on a single subject and short segments on different topics”; Muse & Drudge

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offers up proof that a poet need not choose between the slender and extended, the learnedly allusive and the colloquially vulgar.19 Indeed, even the terms “muse” and “drudge” are not neatly diametrical, since synonym and metagram work in tandem to propose the ghost of a third term: “mule”—the sturdy beast of burden, or drudgery—trading only a single letter with “muse.” Not coincidentally, Callimachus himself employs the mule as a symbol for uncouth and excessive popular song; Apollo’s advice to the poet continues: “better be the cicada than the braying mule.”20 In Muse & Drudge, the mule appears forthrightly in phrases quoted from Sappho (“men harnessed mules”), adapted from House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s folksy adage (“though any mule can / knock down the barn / what we do best requires finesse”), and as an ambiguous figure for improvement (“we pulled a mule out of the mud”).21 Moreover, the text conspicuously substitutes “muse” for “mule,” and vice versa. Zora Neale Hurston’s “mule uh de world” becomes the “muse of the world,” while the title’s “muse” metamorphoses into “mules and drugs.”22 These exchanges rhyme conceptually with the sense of exploited bodily labor in the earlier lines: mule for hire or worse beast of burden down when I lay The couplet establishes a series of parallels. First, “mule” stands in apposition to “beast of burden,” and “hire” offers the homophone “higher” in opposition to “down,” (as well as the hint of Sapphire). Finally, two senses of “union” harmonize in chorus at an allusive remove. In the first line, we find an echo of the matrimonial ceremony with a transformation of the troth plighted in the Book of Common Prayer (“for better or worse”), while the second line evokes the political Union impassioned by the rousing “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which shares its refrain of “Glory, glory, hallelujah” with the spiritual “Lay My Burden Down,” transformed in the couplet’s end and reprised in the final line of the quatrain from which these lines come: “lawdy lawdy hallelujah when I lay.”23 “Lay,” here, bears a heavy semantic burden. It hints at Sappho’s seductive “lyre” (and its homophone: lyric poetry as a rhetorical liar) as a lier behind the intransitive “lie” that should appear when the transitive “lay” loses its object in Mullen’s inversion. That recumbency, in turn, anticipates the reworking of the adage “you’ve made your bed, now lie in it” on the following page, with the lines: you have the girl you paid for now lie on her rocky garden

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The rhyme between “paid” and “made” survives as a vestige of the source, and the following line’s “rocky garden” corroborates that reading with the idiomatic phrase “garden bed.” At the same time, the three lines together elicit the classical trope of figuring male sexual intercourse with an infertile woman as plowing stony fields.24 That misogynistic allusion is corroborated by the final line in a later stanza cata loguing the “aborted,” “miscarried,” and generally “flunked pregnancy test”: “scorched and salted earth, she’s barren.”25 Sexual references are frequent and varied in Muse & Drudge, but this particular allusion reflects specifically on the matrix of the title itself: mules, of course—as the product of horses and donkeys with incongruous numbers of chromosomes—are infertile. With these gestures to copulation and fecundity, the lines “mule for hire or worse / beast of burden down when I lay” activate the parturitive senses of bear and labor behind “burden,” and they play on the slang connotations of sexual activity in “lay”—here, in the context of “hire” and “paid,” a prostituted one. With a further layering, “lay” is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an exclamatory substitute for Lord!” (as in the “lawdy lawdy” that ends the quatrain) as well as a verb that means to mix or alloy—the topic that, as I will argue, underwrites this entire passage. Finally, with a self-reflexive turn, “lay” is also the term “for a short lyric or narrative poem intended to be sung,” specifically the sort of popular historical ballad alluded to by Mullen in her “staggerly” reference to the folk song “Stagger Lee,” with its origins as a African American work song, in the following stanza, where the bed—made, or lain on—turns out to be the abject scene of a stained mattress: tragic yellow mattress belatedly beladied blues shines staggerly avid diva ruses of the lunatic muse26 At every level, Muse & Drudge articulates its structures in multiple, modular, often independent and indeterminate ways: at the level of the word (replete with anagrams and grammatically ambiguous syntax), the phrase (largely unpunctuated), line (frequently enjambed for ambiguity), stanza (unmeasured quatrains), and page (each with four quatrains)—all with the explicit understanding that the order of stanzas and the sequence of the pages themselves could be rearranged.27 Despite this mobile structure, however, patterns emerge across pages to establish reinforcing networks of signification; at times, these networks take the form of transitive chains that establish relationships between words not otherwise accessible when the separated stanzas are read in isolation. In the lines above,

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for instance, the poem’s repeated exchange between l and s, as “mule” and “muse” trade places in turn, invite the attentive reader to hear the rules of the “lunatic muse”: the generative formal constraints of the palindrome, say, which derive “avid” from “diva”—a procedure senseless in its demotion of words’ semantic value but obsessive in its attention to the signifier. That random summoning, in any case, belatedly recalls the earlier “random diva nation of bedlam,” in which “lunatic asylum,” as the precise synonym of “bedlam” (abstracted from the eponymous London Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, in extended use), provides the parallel to the later line’s “lunatic muse.”28 The reader seeking to divine whether the recurrence of the concept of madness in proximity to “diva” is merely random chance might suspect further ruses of the signifier, and note that the bed of “bedlam” and the “mattress” of the “avid diva” set up a parallel frame that suggests the low bed of a divan. Whether stained from micturition or ejaculation, the “yellow” coloration of the dismal bedding heightens the campy contrast between a divan and a naked, unmade mattress. The phrasing, however, is further fraught. In contrast to the “blue-black skin” connoted by “shines,” and with “yellow” specifically denoting “light skin; describes a mulatto” (as Major defines both words in Juba to Jive), the first line of the quatrain also indicates the contraction of “mulattress” into “m[ul]attress.”29 Here, then, the mule that animates the dynamic of the poem’s title returns in another guise— perhaps, one might even say, attempting to pass. “Mulatto” descends, with a mixed etymological heritage, directly from a mingling of the Spanish mulo (mule) and the Portuguese mulato (young mule; the transferred sense of the color of its coat). If such lexical minutiae strike readers as tedious, or burdensome, they might mull over the resonance of “drudge” in Mullen’s title and recall Samuel Johnson’s amusingly ironic, self-deprecating, and recursively performative definition of lexicographer, as it appears in the Dictionary of the English Language (for which he served, famously, as lexicographer): “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original, and detailing the signification of words.”30 Detailing the signification of the mule leads inexorably to the fraught cultural politics of the mulatto. In the brief “Preface” to Recyclopedia, the collection that reprints Muse & Drudge, Mullen explicitly mentions the stock character of the “tragic mulatto” and one line of the poem mentions “mulatos [chili peppers] en el mole,” but the stereotype is named more obliquely throughout the poem itself.31 For instance, in contrast to someone considered to be unattractive (“frimpted frone she’s stand alone”), certain characters in the poem “pass” because they are “mixed” and sport “fair / complex ions”—their complexions perhaps transformed by syn-

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thetic cosmetics and “hechizando con crema dermoblanqueadora” (entrancing with skin whitening cream).32 With an evocation of the “passing [for white]” permitted by “light-skinned . . . African-Americans,” two earlier stanzas map the theme of the mulatto onto the motif of the slender muse and her antithesis: sugar shack full of fat sweaty ladies women of size with men who love too much what is inward wanting to get out prey to the lard trying to pass for butter.33 Literalizing the calories implied by the metaphoric “sugar” shack (1960s Los Angeles slang for a “space for putting someone up, usually temporarily”), the women here exchange sighs (“size”) with men who are either excessively amorous or fond of corpulence (depending on whether one takes the final phrase of the first quatrain as adverbial or objective).34 But rendered lard turns slightly yellow, like butter, offering a chromatic link to the racial “passing” that haunts the line’s characterization of a surfacing and escaping inner essence (“what is inward/wanting to get out”), even as it nods toward idiomatic phrases about a skinny person trapped in a fat person’s body. Some might pray to the Lord to let them pass for better (recalling the “better or worse” behind the lines about the “mule for hire”), but elsewhere in the poem “better” is linked with body size and “butter” with skin color. Formally, the bind between the words is chiasmic, like the logic that relates “muse” and “mule.” Following the lighter shades of brown on the spectrum “sepia bronze mahogany” the subject is “buttered up” at one point, and the color of butter in turn is later linked directly to dermal pigmentation and the “color” given by “melanin.”35 At the same time, the racial allegiance and valuation of the racist phrase troped by Mullen into “debit to your race” is followed immediately by “no better for you”—the title of a soulful blues singles belted by Big Maybelle, whose name implies she would not likely be described as slender.36 In the rapid play of wit in Muse & Drudge, a reader might easily be encouraged to “lose the facts just keep the hustle” (or lose the fat, just keep the muscle), but attention to patterning reveals coherent logics behind even the most innocuous seeming words.37 Once again, the dictionary at hand— Juba to Jive—reveals other wise camouflaged aspects of the poem and the

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networks of signification that they trace through a text that would otherwise seem to flaunt its postmodernist discontinuities, parataxes, and evasions of coherence. Continuing the theme, for example, the line “lemon melon melange” both enacts the anagrammatic remix of the first two words (and their near recurrence in “melange” itself, which shares its initial letters with “melanin”) and at the same time signals the mixture, or mélange, of antiquated racial categories in the “lemon” (“light-skinned Afro-American; mulatto”)—perhaps with the echo of “melon” and “yellow” blending in mellow: “a light-skinned African-American woman or girl,” as Major again has it.38 The technique is prevalent throughout Mullen’s poem, where the ghosts of words, in precisely this way, haunt corners of text in which they do not explicitly appear. In the lines “swell hot plate / women’s shelter under a sweater / friends don’t recognize my face,” for example, the vocabulary of heat (“hot,” “sweater”) and contusion (“swell,” in the context of a domestic-violence shelter) come together—semantically and phonetically (swell + sweater + shelter)—to produce the ghosts of “welt” and “swelter.” As in Mullen’s earlier books, the dissonance between the ebulliently playful, sonic pleasures of texts “hooked on phonemes imbued with exuberance” and the recurrent intimations of domestic violence can be jarring.39 Mélange, in any event, with its specific culinary sense, explicitly denotes a mix of black and white: “coffee served with whipped cream or milk.” 40 Underscoring the social valences of “lemon melon melange,” its preceding line matches those three paragrammatically related words with three semantically related terms, as if proposing a series of appositional synonyms: “placage conquer bind.” Each word denotes an unequal power relationship, including the semi-legitimate social custom among some white men in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Louisiana known as plaçage, in which an extramarital ménage was established by a man for the “black or mixed-race woman” who was his mistress.41 Vocabulary developed in Louisiana and the Francophone Atlantic to specify cultural mixtures appears elsewhere in the poem, among “historic old haunts where / creole servants get the door,” a jumble of “creole and “gumbo,” and even the substrate of “gumbo clay.” 42 As with a line like “ ‘taint nobody’s pidgin,” with its hint of a cultural taint behind its colloquial negation, the linguistic denotations of these terms suggest an analogue for the mixture of sources and dialects in the poem itself, as Muse & Drudge both mentions and undertakes not only the counterCallimachean blend of genres but a mélange of languages. One denotation of “gumbo,” in par ticu lar, identifies the “patois spoken by black people and Creoles in the French West Indies, Louisiana, Bourbon, and

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Mauritius.” The Oxford English Dictionary quotes James Platt’s etymology: “from the Angolan kingombo, the ki- being the usual Bantu prefix, and -ngombo the real word.” 43 As “a colloquial name for the okra plant or its pods,” the mixtures associated with gumbo, whether lexical or culinary, further corroborate the connotations of yellow in the book. Punning on the “pale brownish yellow” color of “ochre,” one line proposes an interbreeding: “cross color ochre with stalk of okra.” 44 A few pages later, the specification of yellow skin is again the theme of several lines that evince what Clark Coolidge would recognize as the “syntax in the dictionary”: pale light or moderate smooth as if by rubbing thick downward curving bare skin imitative military coat made of this45 The quatrain collages definitions for “buffalo” (some species of which are distinguished by their “massive, downward curving horns”) and “buff,” as extrapolated from the characteristics of its hide, with both the verbal sense of “polish” (to “smooth as if by rubbing”) and the nominal sense, including “a military coat made of this [leather]” and the idiom “in the buff”: informally or colloquially, “bare skin.” That skin, in fact, is all to the point; the lines here are circling around the definition that remains uncited, but lies at the heart of hypogram signaled by the chromatic gradations of the previous stanza’s final line; like “ochre,” “buff” primarily denotes a “dull brownish yellow.” The quatrain continues to make the mixture of racial lineages clear, with “ochre” and “okra” ghosting behind “smoker” and “Okie”: “she tastes like an Okie / yet lacks the rich aroma of a smoker.” With a return to the theme of the slender muse, these lines harken back to an earlier quatrain: “some fat on that rack / might make her more tasty.” 46 Additionally, one might note that “gumbo” is deployed in its metaphoric sense in Mullen’s “Afterword” to the biracial story of Oreo, where it indicates a particular kind of mixture in the context of the title character’s heritage; Mullen argues that a broad examination of the collective diversity of African Americans (in contrast to the “unified, almost monolithic” construction of an essentializing Black Arts program) “helped to redefine the culture of the United States as a hybrid multicultural gumbo rather than a white monocultural melting pot.” 47 Anchored again in “yellow,” another stanza in Muse & Drudge moves from the more or less discursively explicit designation of mixing to the encrypted performance of mixing the basic elements of language itself:

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massa had a yeller macaroon a fetter in his claptrap of couth that shrub rat48 With language about language, the stanza contrasts the low vaudeville talk of “claptrap” (“language designed to catch applause; cheap showy sentiment. In modern use passing into sense ‘nonsense, rubbish,’ ” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it) with “couth,” a back-formation of “uncouth” to which it forms a deliberate antonym to signify cultured and well-mannered. In a sense not recorded by the OED, but defined in Juba to Jive, “claptrap” also denotes a “derogatory term for the human mouth,” derived from a type of “rhyming slang . . . especially popular among black speakers.” That rhyming slang puts pressure on the divergent pronunciations of the similarly spelled “couth” and the signified “mouth.” The site of feeding and yelling (“fetter” and “yeller”), as well as pronouncing, the claptrap also shuts like the manacle of a shackle: a sharp biting articulation in contrast to the slackened softening of consonants amplified by the quatrain’s dialect. With pronunciation scrutinized in this way, the dialect transcriptions of “master” (the slave theme that animates “fetter”) suggests a reading of “yeller” as “Yaller” or “Yellow”—the mixed race figure that tips “macaroon” (with no etymological connection) toward the racist percentiles calibrated by terms like “quadroon” and “octoroon” (and spoofed in the earlier “skinned squadroon cotillion”).49 At the same time, “macaroon” does indeed share a direct etymological kinship with “macaroni,” the unwritten Yankee (Doodle) naming that the folksong “feather in his cap” behind “fetter / in his claptrap” points to. Folksong, in fact, seems to be the source of the first line as well. The verse implicitly teases out Yankee Doodle’s coiffure (the eighteenth-century dandies labeled “macaroni” were known above all for their extravagant hairstyles) as an analogue to the protagonist of the social song “Massa Had a Yellow Gal”: “her hair was wropped so close an’ tight, / She couldn’t shet her mouf.”50 “Macaroni,” moreover, keeps the mixture of poetic languages signaled by “creole” and “gumbo” and “pidgin” in play, since it also denotes “a mixture of languages used in macaronic verse.”51 As if taking a cue from the unspoken speaking of the distinctive pronunciation of “mouth” by the dialect of the folksong source, occlusion and obscurity increase exponentially; only the most ingenious reader would recognize “of couth that shrub rat” as an anagram and partial palindrome of the idiom signifying suspicion of a light-skinned person with African ancestry: “touch of that tar brush.”52 The anagrammatic procedure used to generate the line,

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moreover, poses a challenge to the one-drop ideology and the rhetoric of taint behind the aphorism: to what extent does “of couth that shrub rat” carry any trace of the phrase that is its ancestor? To what extent does ancestry depend on resemblance? Or, as one couplet puts it early on: “my skin but not my kin / my race but not my taste.”53 The theme, in all events, is picked up later in the poem in a quatrain that deploys the vocabularies of music recording and science fiction to describe an Afrofuturist mix that ends with the muted remix of the book’s title: spin the mix fast forward mutant taint of blood mongrel cyborg mute and dubbed54 In these contexts, even the pratfall prop of the slapstick banana peel takes on a chromatic resonance in the lines “halfstep in the grave / on banana peels of love.” The couplet ostensibly rewrites the cliché of someone “dying of a broken heart” with a death that comes “on the heels of love.” Those heels are literalized as the foot that coincides with the slippery banana peels, or what would send the other foot into the grave and complete what the half(hearted)step promised but failed to deliver on. But the amorous object “of love” adds a further twist. Juba to Jive records the idiom of “peeling a fine green banana” to refer to “making love to a very pretty light skinned girl,” explaining: “as black slang, ‘banana’ came to mean a light-complexioned and attractive Afro-American female, a mulatto.” Similarly, the hue of “buttermilk,” in the following stanza, shades the meaning of what initially seems to be merely a kind of mapping. The locative “buttermilk bottom,” which—like “black bottom”— designates one district within “darktown” as “the area where the ‘nitty-gritty’ black population of any town or city resides, contrasts with a neighborhood like Sugar Hill” (“in Harlem, a very popular middle-class neighborhood,” as Major delimits all of these terms): buttermilk haystack woodpile inkwell darktown brierpatch buckwheat bottom sugarhill55 “Buckwheat,” as Major notes, figured as such a prominent staple of plantation and rural southern life that it serves “as a metaphor for many things” in the vernacular imagination, but the contrasting chromatic context of “dark” and “ink” (a word that Mullen repeatedly links with its anagrammatic equivalent kin and its own echo of skin) suggests its onomastic

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use: “ because of its light brown color, black people sometimes called light-skinned friends and relatives ‘buckwheats.’ ”56 With this in mind, the proximity of “buttermilk” and “haystack” highlight the yellow cast of the other wise incongruous pairing and returns, via Creole, to approach the phonetic maquette at the heart of this network, a word inevitably caught in the web of the signifier spun from “melon” to “mule and”: milon (haystack).57 Here we can begin to see the power of the signature that undersigns Muse & Drudge and motivates the text’s animated play of “mule” and its descendants: Mullen. When one quatrain rings the changes on the phonemes of the author’s name, the conjunction of “yell” and “melon” above “fellow” reiterates the chromatic logic and the social categorization of “yellow” that we saw at work in “lemon melon melange,” overdetermining the routes to “mulatto”: marry at a hotel annul ’em nary hep male rose sullen let alley roam yell melon dull normal fellow hammers omelette58 Mullen explains: I borrowed Shakespeare’s device of writing his name into his sonnets. Some scholars argue that, in addition to punning on “Will” in his poetry, he’s subliminally woven his surname into the sonnet that begins “The expense of spirit.” There’s also a tradition of poets referring to themselves in ghazals. I took this idea of a poetic signature when I wrote a quatrain using echoes of my own name. The reference, presumably, is to Roman Jakobson’s literal reading of Shakespeare’s boast that “every word doth almost tell my name,” but Mullen is also interested in Michael Riffaterre, who proposed a mode of reading attentive to catachreses that reveal the deformative force of an unwritten word around which the poetic text detours as it approaches but never names its absent, generative key.59 For the reader able to “decode the cryptic notes” left by such deviations, the phonemes of the proper name simultaneously emulate a multitude of other words, as in the mutating series “muted amused mulish” (the last word signifying not just intractable or stubborn, but also, in its original sense, hybrid).60 If Mullen, “in spite of all reminders / misremembered who I am,” the line patently displays the cogs of alphabetic gears enmeshing as the signs precess— setting in motion an inevitable slide toward remembering Mullen’s own family name, which throughout the book is at once both encrypted—

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“incog,” as the poem repeats—and flaunted: “a name determined by other names/ prescribed mediation/ unblushingly on display.” 61 Henri Morier defines such cryptonomy as annominatio: an “allusion qui consiste à évoquer un nom au moyen d’un autre aux sonorités analogue [allusion that consists of evoking a name (which is not fully pronounced) through another word with analogous sounds]” or as the “interpretation qui tire d’un nom proper la valeur exprimée par un nom commun de même sonorité [interpretation that draws from a proper name the meaning expressed by its common noun homophone].” 62 The most famous example, perhaps, is known from the Bible, when Jesus announces: “And I say also unto you, That you are Peter [πέτρος] and upon this rock [πέτρα] I will build my church.” 63 Mullen, in fact, alludes to this pun in the continuation of a line we considered earlier: “on her rocky garden / I build her church.” 64 Elsewhere, she recognizes the value of writing that possesses a “cryptographic incomprehensibility and uniqueness” rather than an easy legibility, and to writing that “calls the reader’s attention to the artifice of language as a cultural construct, demonstrating the materiality as opposed to the transparency of the spoken and written word”; in the “scratched out hieroglyphs” of Muse & Drudge, accordingly, she taunts the reader with the incomprehensibility (“all Greek to me”) of the annominatic encryption of a proper name in lines that refer—not coincidentally—to racial heritage: “black cat in the family tree / hairy man’s Greek to me.” 65 The poem explicitly challenges its reader to venture at deciphering its figural riddles: “think you’re able to solve / a figure, go ahead and risk it.” 66 In an interview, Mullen explains that the reference is to George Herriman (“hairy man”), author of the Krazy Kat comics, and a model of the melting-pot logic of passing and its attendant silences, denials, amnesias and apostasies.67 Herriman moved from Louisiana to California and “became white,” although his physiognomy led acquaintances to speculate about his background and suspect “that he was Greek, or that he was French because of his Louisiana Creole heritage.” 68 “Hairy man,” as a “figure / carries the vote / over dead signatures.” 69 The quatrain in which Mullen emulates Shakespeare takes advantage of the full name Harryette Romell Mullen, with “roam,” “rose,” and “normal fellow” betraying the trace of the middle name, and readers might be attuned to ways in which Mullen’s “poetic signature” extends beyond her last name. In a discussion about imagery in Muse & Drudge, Elisabeth Frost observes that “there is also a lot about hairdos [in the book].” Presumably, she has in mind piline lines such as the punning “she dreads her hair,” the inherited genetic heirloom weaves of a “hair loom,” “a nest

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of her hair,” braids and extensions, various cosmetic products, the instrumental “pluck” and “fret” of single strands, as well as references to waves and perms, irons and combs, kinks and crinkles, covering hats, and so on (including the macaroni lines we saw earlier). Mullen replies: Yes. Well, if two black women are together long enough, they will talk about hair. I think human beings are obsessed with hair. Hair is so meaningful. We think of it as this stuff that is on our heads, but we spend a lot of time working it. It is such a cultural signifier. All the things we do to our hair, and our feelings about it, are part of who we are.70 Shifting the focus to a specific culture (African American women) and then outward to humanity itself (human beings), Mullen casts hair, in symbolic terms, as an essential part of identity (“part of who we are”). “The references to hair,” she explains elsewhere, “have to do with consciousness, and also have to do with one’s notion of self.”71 Indeed, as we saw with George Herriman, hair—as a sheer signifier—is already an integral part of the very marker of identity for a punning writer with the first name Harryette. At the same time, the theme of hair is woven back into the texture of the poem itself when Mullen describes the form of Muse & Drudge as taking “quirky, irregular, and sensuously kinky” quatrains. “Kinky,” to be sure, suggests unconventional sexual appeal, or “pleasing in an unusual way,” but it points equally to the “frizzy hair” of a “frizzly head.”72 In the preponderance of language relating to hair—“a lot about hairdos”—we can see the operation of the signature generating thematic motifs, so that when read poetically the motivated name has a fully explanatory force. At the same time, the references to hair, as “tresses,” echoes the feminized form of mulatto that ghosts behind the “tragic yellow mattress” (Mullen may pun on this term for hair with the two uses of “distressed” in the poem).73 If, from one direction, Muse & Drudge proposes a personal identity constructed at the intersection of various cultural planes—a consciousness produced by the condensed agglomeration of disparate textual materials—it also demonstrates, from the other direction, how the most concentrated marker of the self—the linguistic singularity of the proper name—dissipates outward into the lexical field, galvanizing otherwise unrelated elements in uncontrollable and unavoidable patterns of resonance and interference. Accordingly, Muse & Drudge provides a perfect example of the signature defined by Jacques Derrida in his essay on Francis Ponge. As a “sigle énigmatique [enigmatic sigil],” the authorial name (what might be auto-

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graphed at the end of a manuscript in our usual sense of “signature”) is twice countersigned in Derrida’s account: first in the sense of a “signature style” and then as the naming of that style by words related to the author’s name as a sign among others. In the case of Ponge, for example, his poetics involve the absorption of dictionary definitions and their repeated purifying and refinement; his poems thus act as the sponge (éponge) that literally embodies the name Ponge. If one of Ferdinand de Saussure’s primary interventions into linguistics was to insist that words are not the names for things, one of Derrida’s provocations was to remind us that names—as material signifiers—are themselves things. Ostensibly, the proper name would seem to be a perfect sign, a special case of pure signification in which the name points uniquely to an individual as its single unambiguous referent. But in order for the name to operate as part of a comprehensible language it has to take its place in the system of differences—the chain of signifiers—that structure language and permit its legibility. As Derrida writes: Le nom proper, en son aléatoire, devrait n’avoir aucun sens, et s’épuiser en reference immediate. Or le chance ou le Malheur de son arbitraire (toujours autre dans chaque cas), c’es que son inscription dans la langue l’affecte toujours d’une potentialité de sens; et de n’être plus proper dès lors qu’il signifie. The proper name, in its aleatoriness, should have no meaning and should spend itself in immediate reference. But the chance or the misery of its arbitrary character (always other in each case), is that its inscription in language always affects it with a potential for meaning, and for no longer being proper once it has meaning.74 In Mullen’s case, Muse & Drudge doubles down on this game of chance, performing the signature of a signature. Annominatically bound to the authorial autograph, the “mule” in “Mullen” is in turn an identifiable motif of the poem (a signature theme), and the paragrammatics by which the word “mule” morphs through the text are themselves a distinctive trope of Mullen’s style (a signature technique). But furthermore: the puns and metagrams of those transformations (unlike metaphor, say) call attention to the endless enmeshment of the signifier in its network of substitutions and differences. The paragrammatic play in Mullen’s poetry is thus both a signature move and an example of how the signature, in the Derridean sense, moves in its disseminating, disarticulatory, and recombinatory spread. Moreover, that trope’s alphabetic and phonemic remixing, and the play of the signature’s recombinations into all those affinities dependent on the

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asemantic materiality of the articulated signifier are analogues to the theme of the mulatto with which the mule is inextricably entwined. The poem mixes its material form, at the level of the letter, in order to deploy the language of admixture. Accordingly, the linguistic signifier and the literary signified work independently, but in parallel—all under the name of an author that could not be otherwise—so that Muse & Drudge exhibits “toutes les manières de faire ça, toutes les operations par lesquelles on peut faire de sa signature un texte, de son texte une chose et de la chose sa signature [all the operations by which one can make of one’s signature a text, of one’s text a thing, and, of the thing, one’s signature].”75 The logic of the signature, moreover, reiterates the logic of identity proposed by Mullen. For Derrida, the signature records the impossibility of a singular, unique, homogeneous identity. “Corrupting its identity and its singularity,” the signature is underwritten, as it were, by an irreducible plurality.76 Necessarily bringing an other person into a call-and-response dialogue of affirmation, it promises not only that the signator has made the mark but will make the mark again, if asked, as some future date: “yes, this is my name, I certify it and, yes, yes, I could certify it again.”77 Like the multiplicity made visible by the category of the mulatto, the signature insists on irreversible relational increase of a “supplemental calculus.”78 The transformation of the proper name into a common thing forms part of the structuring frame of Muse & Drudge as a whole. The first stanza of the poem’s many “songs of allusion” ends by quoting the last line of Billy Strayhorn’s “Lush Life” (“whose lives are lonely too”), and the last line of the book’s final stanza, in parallel, ends with an echo of his name (the companion morpheme -horn not entirely abandoned, but displaced to the jazz instrument being played, indulgently, for the audience in question): proceed with abandon finding yourself where you are and who you’re playing for what stray companion79 Other parallels continue to contribute to the sense of mirroring bookends to the otherwise nonnarrative and discursively discontinuous poem. Harkening back to the opening figure of the muse, the penultimate stanza picks up on the earlier themes of grooming and trying to “pass for better”: so beautiful it was presumptuous to alter

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the shape of my pleasure in doing or making The poesis of an aesthetic shaping and “making,” together with the homophone “altar” of “alter,” recalls the antithesis of thin lyric verse forms and fattened animal sacrifice in the epigraph from Callimachus. And in fact, the muse behind this quote is indeed slender, weighing only thirtyeight pounds. The language of the entire quatrain has been appropriated from the first page of How I Became Hettie Jones, which opens: “I started leaving home when I was six and weighed thirty-eight pounds.”80 Away for the first time at summer camp, Jones (then Cohen) recalls learning basket-weaving: “The night before at the lake I’d been shown the reed, soaking, beautiful as it was, presumptuous to alter. But in the morning the damp, pliant skein and the texture had thrilled me. For two years, I’d played piano and tap-danced, but the basket seemed the very shape of my pleasure in doing, or making.”81 The passage might have resonated with Mullen’s own recollections of a childhood “with piano and ballet lessons.”82 When woven into Mullen’s poem, the cut and reshaped lines provide an overt example of the textile figured by Roland Barthes’s description of the text as “un tissu de citations, issues des milles foyers de la culture [a tissue of quotations from innumerable cultural centers].”83 Or, as Riffaterre defines the specific system of reference set in motion by poems, in a line quoted in the jacket copy to Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary: “poetic discourse is the equivalence established between a word and a text, or a text and another text.”84 In a poetic text that tends to dart frenetically from source to source, often within a single line, this stanza stands out for the extent and coherence of its quotation, as well as for the specificity of the first-person pronoun, which Mullen most often includes as a mode of obliquity rather than direct expression. She explains: “Any time ‘I’ is used in this poem [sc. Muse & Drudge], it’s practically always quotation: it comes from a blues song, or it comes from a line of Sappho; it comes from—wherever it comes from.”85 With an aposiopetic hesitation, Mullen stops short of naming Jones, or another key source, as if recalling her own lines: “I’ve tried in vain / never no more to call your name.”86 But the origin is significant for this central, structuring stanza that speaks directly to the poetic concerns set forth in the book’s epigraph, even down to the plucking of reeds in rhyme with the hair and lyre “plucked” in the poem’s first couplet. If Jones’s “pliant skein” suggests the adaptable skin that affords racial passing, the ease with which Jones’s autobiographical account of weaving can be woven into Mullen’s choral epic alerts the reader to the

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significance of the theme of racial mixing for a heteroglossic collage text. Furthermore, in a work that both builds and meditates on proper names, the social politics of Jones’s name, retained from her marriage to LeRoi Jones—even as he changed his name to Imamu Amear Baraka (and then Amiri Baraka)—is darkly resonant. The onomastic loss and rechristening involved in conventions of marriage and slavery paint a dark backdrop to the playful anagrams that animate the surface of Mullen’s text. To recap, schematically: Muse & Drudge addresses the language of combination (mule, mulatto, and their synonyms) through a collage that itself combines unacknowledged quotations from diverse sources (Booker  T. Washington to Hettie Jones and everyone in between) in a hybrid form (lyric quatrains in epic concatenation) through a poetic mode that foregrounds the recombination of an alphabetic language’s constituent parts (anagram, palindrome, pun, and so on). The figure of the mulatto thus performs a double intellectual labor in (and for) the text. On the one hand, it allegorizes all of the formal admixtures and multiplicities on such exuberantly ostentatious display. On the other hand, moreover, it stands as a cautionary warning to the reader who may be too quick to hypostasize the categories and relations that lay the groundwork for recognizing admixture to begin with. From one end of the spectrum, when imagined too capaciously, as all equal parts of some overly broad category, the sources are not recognizably diverse: “Muse & Drudge is a poetic remix of references to African-American literature, folklore and popu lar culture,” say.87 Moving toward the other end of the spectrum, proliferating categories permit the reader to distinguish between Mullen’s borrowings from gospel and her borrowings from spirituals, say, or—as Meta DuEwa Jones perceptively points out—her quotations from blues lyrics and her quotations from jazz standards.88 At issue, as one of the lines in Muse & Drudge puts it, is “how a border orders disorder.” That ordering is why one must be cautious in allegorizing the formal recombinations of Mullen’s poetics; the figure of the mulatto, paradoxically, has the potential to reinforce the very categories it might seem to “disorder” by destabilizing or dissolving the boundaries between racial categories. In her scholarship on “the literature of passing,” Mullen has elaborated on the ways in which the subterfuge of racial passing works as a mechanism “for the cultural production of whiteness,” when its amnesiac requirements of denying or forgetting kinship reify—as stark opposites—the two comingled terms that were never as distinct as their diametric opposition would suggest. Passing, accordingly, reinforces a hierarchical binary in favor of more complicated genealogies, as it becomes

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a “national mechanism for forgetting a history that links AfricanAmericans with other Americans in kinship” (or what Muse & Drudge might term a “mnemonic plague”).89 Concurrently, the exclusionary logics of essentialist notions of African American identity work, antithetically, to produce and reinforce the very “whiteness” they might at first seem to oppose. Furthermore, the legacy of a “one-drop” ideology often persists even in the ways a complicated genealogy is typically construed (the “touch” is of the “tar brush,” not the betraying hint of some distant “white” ancestry). Assigning exceptional or exemplary hybridity to the figure of the mulatto occludes or evacuates the hybridity of the other figures—“black,” “white,” and so forth—that it sublates. The category of mulatto, accordingly, runs the risk of imagining mixture as a state of exception, rather than a ubiquitous condition. As Mullen argues in her essay on Oreo: “most native-born Americans, regardless of skin color, are products of racial hybridity, just as American culture and language are products of cultural and linguistic hybridity.”90 Like Ross’s novel, Muse & Drudge “calls attention to the hybridity rather than the racial or cultural purity of African Americans,” to “the multiplicity and dissonance—the flipside of unity or homogeneity—of African American cultures and identities”: a blackness, in other words, not coextensive with race.91 Muse & Drudge is not an “African American poem” because it quotes from black vernacular, or Bessie Smith, or Gwendolyn Brooks, but because it showcases the disparate range of sources—including African American poetry as well as a white Jewish memoir—that construct complicated identities. If a reader wants to think of the poem as the collective voice of “black female subjectivity” or framed by narrator who “embodies the lived experience of black female bodies,” it would be so because of a reference to a work like How I Became Hettie Jones, not despite it.92 Mullen explains: “Most of what I’m using doesn’t really belong to any one person or any one group. Some material I think of as African American, and I will go somewhere else and find out it is Irish, or German, or Italian! I think that it’s mine. And I realize that I have to share it.”93 As Matthew Hart summarizes: “miscegenation, here, is not the antithesis of American blackness, but its condition.”94 These considerations are especially urgent for readers of African American literature, given that texts themselves, with an anthropomorphizing turn, have been frequently racialized. Writing about Oreo, for instance, Mullen transfers the social sense of crossbreeding to the formal aspects of the text itself, which she reads as “a hybrid, a product of racial and cultural miscegenation.”95 Elsewhere, Mullen makes a similar comparison with her own writing:

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A lot has been said of how American culture is a miscegenated culture, how it is a product of a mixing and mingling of diverse races and cultures and languages, and I would agree with that. I would say that, yes, my text is deliberately a multi-voiced text, a text that tries to express the actual diversity of my own experience living here, exposed to different cultures. “Mongrel” comes from “among.” Among others. We are among; we are not alone. We are all mongrels.96 The dialectical gambit is exhilarating and risky: to leverage an antiracist, anti–white supremacist agenda on the pivot of terms and categories that are themselves the result of racist thinking; to do so without allowing those middle terms to reify the falsely imagined purity of the categories they hope to undermine; and to continue to apply a clear-headed, unwavering intellectual pressure until racist social systems can no longer triangulate those middle terms within its hierarchies. The sweep of Mullen’s first-person plural must be absolutely wide. To be a drudge about it: as “the offspring or result of cross-breeding, miscegenation, mixed marriage, etc.,” the heritage of mongrel traces back, via “mung” (a mixture), to “ymong” (prepositionally, “among, in the midst of”), and Mullen shrewdly takes that historical trace as a reminder that we are not isolated individuals, but always subjects among others: that “we are all mongrels.” The net of allusions in Muse & Drudge is cast so broadly (from slang to regional idioms, popular culture to subcultures, common clichés to academic specialties—and all stretching from the newest fad on back to the nineteenth century) that it carries “the expectation that no single reader will comprehend every line or will catch every allusion,” and so Mullen thus becomes the only person presumed to know all of the references.97 As such, she places herself precisely in the “mongrel” position, as person “in the midst” of otherwise culturally isolated readers on either side of the “chasm” between her stylistic genres; she seeks, as she says, to “work in the interstices, where I occupy the gap that separates one from the other.”98 It should come as no surprise, then, that we have already encountered the figure of the mongrel, assessing an audience at a certain remove, as the character uniquely isolated even among others “whose lives are lonely too”; the “stray companion” of the poem’s very final line triangulates “mongrel” through two terms that also point to canines, whether fugitive (“stray”) or domestic (“companion”). Furthermore, from the sense of friendlessness and abandonment in Strayhorn’s song, the phrase suggests its idiomatic synonym “waifs and strays”: things open to appropriation; things so thin as to be blown by the wind; things as slen-

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der as Callimachus’s muse. Following its own muse, Mullen’s poem may flaunt the exceptional range of its appropriations and allusions, but just as “hybrid” racial classifications risk producing the illusion of falsely pure terms from which they ostensibly deviate, to regard Mullen’s poem as a “hybrid” text should not promote it as unique, or distract readers from the fact that all texts, as Barthes put it, map “un espace à dimensions multiples, où se marient et se contestent des écritures variées, dont aucune n’est originelle [a multidimensional space where varied writings, none of them original, marry one another and challenge one another in turn].”99 In Muse & Drudge, “Harryette Mullen could be said to engage in what is perceived to be a discourse on blackness, inherited from the ‘dictionary,’ ” as one critic has proposed.100 But Mullen could also be said to engage in a discourse on the dictionary—let us call it the American heritage—inherited from a sophisticated understanding of Blackness. From the perspective of her emphasis on the “dissonance” of cultural identities, we can appreciate the appropriateness of her preferred reference book, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. As the jacket copy for Sleeping with the Dictionary notes, the American Heritage invited “black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem” to its advisory usage panel. Moreover, despite the lingering bias of its own prescriptivist heritage, the American Heritage Dictionary also lays bare the disagreements of its usage panel on disputed locutions—at times tallying their ballots with the percentage polls of a representative democracy—rather than apodictically presenting its strictures under the veneer of homogeneous authority.101 In some cases, those usage notes also record changes in the panel’s consensus over time, reminding readers that language is dynamic and constantly mutating, and that every utterance not only draws on multiple thesauri— whether formally recorded or fleetingly colloquial, culturally collective or uniquely individual—but also itself takes part in assembling a personal lexicon that holds out the promise of the future dictionaries its usage may generate, transform, and qualify, and to which it might someday contribute. Conversely, looking backward, from the future, we might recognize that all works of literature—and not just the most striking, like those I have been reading here—are merely dictionaries in disarray.102

Acknowl edgments

This book is for Miles, who encouraged me every day. Thanks most to Marjorie Perloff, always my first reader. Aaron Beasley, Jacob Edmund, Michael Golston, Anne Jamison, Philip Leventhal, and Anahid Nersessian were all generous and supportive. Amanda Hurtado read the entire manuscript and sent encouragement when I most needed it; at critical moments, Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, Keegan Finberg, Spenser Goar, Maeera Shreiber, and Steve Zultanski all generously looked at individual chapters. Laurence Aëgerter and Tina Darragh were prompt and kind in answering ridiculously detailed questions from out of the blue, as were Patrick Carrajat and Eric J. Nordstrom, who both generously lent their expertise in Depression-era elevator history. Haun Saussy (one of my intellectual heroes), Lazar Fleishman, and Tom Lay all had enough faith to make this happen—I am humbled and grateful. Gregory McNamee and Eric Newman made the book a reality. Barry Weller and the College of Humanities at the University of Utah supported my research assignment at a crucial juncture. At every stage, the teams at Interlibrary Loan (Marriott Library, University of Utah) and Café Noir (Salt Lake City) deserved more credit than they will ever know.

Notes

Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography 1. William Carlos Williams, “The New Poetical Economy,” in Something to Say: William Carlos Williams on Younger Poets, ed. James Breslin (New York: New Directions, 1985), 57. 2. See, for a recent survey, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, ed. Leah Dickerman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012). My use of the term “abstract” is admittedly reductive; for a more nuanced consideration, see Phillip Brian Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 3. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (New York: New Directions, 2011), 292. 4. Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels (New York: Penguin, 1993), 54–55; cf. Webster’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (Chicago: Laird & Lee, 1903), 61. 5. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights, 1956): [3]. 6. Edward Foster, “An Interview with Clark Coolidge,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 3 (Fall 1989): 21. 7. Clark Coolidge, “Furniture Music,” The Ear in a Wheatfield 12 (1975): 154. 8. “In 1954 [Kerouac] had a vision in a Catholic church in Lowell, Massachusetts, that told him that the real meaning of ‘Beat’ was Beatify.” Robert Hipkiss, Jack Kerouac, Prophet of the New Romanticism: A Critical Study of the Published Works of Kerouac and a Comparison of Them to Those of J. D. Salinger, James Purdy, John Knowles, and Ken Kesey (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1976), 33. 9. Following the loss of the exclusive right to the Webster’s name by G. & C. Merriam Company after the expiration of a copyright in 1889 and a series of intellectual property lawsuits in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the name proliferated on the covers of various dictionaries; despite the Webster’s title, the Laird and Lee New Standard Dictionary, “Based on the Original Webster and Other Eminent Authorities,” leaned heavi ly on the Chambers family of etymological dictionaries.

188 / Notes to pages 4–6 10. Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, ed. Alex Haley (New York: Random House, 1964), 198. 11. Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs, The Third Mind (New York: Viking Press, 1978). 12. Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks (New York: Grove Press, 2008); Ann Douglas, “Punching a Hole in the Big Lie: The Achievement of William S. Burroughs,” in Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader (New York: Grove Press, 1998), xxvi. 13. Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics,” Boundary2 1, no. 3 (Spring 1973): 605–42. 14. Marjorie Perloff, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” New Literary History 13, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 485–514. 15. See, for corroboration, Charles Altieri, “The Transformation of Objectivism,” and Burton Hatlan, “Objectivist Poets in Context,” both in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999); Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 14, 272–77; and “‘Objectivists’ to ‘Projective Verse,’” in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945, ed. Jennifer Ashton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 26; Burt Kimmelman, “Objectivist Poetics Since 1970,” Talisman 23–26 (2001), 161ff.; Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 147–70; David W. Huntsperger, Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry: Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 133ff.; Steven Gould Axelrod, “Poetry and Cultural Change,” Global Migration, Social Change, and Cultural Transformation, ed. Emory Elliott, Jasmine Payne, and Patricia Ploesch (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 125ff. 16. Lauro Maia Amorim, “The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen’s Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen,” Revista de Letras 52, no. 1 (January–June 2012): 109; Joel Bettridge, “Review,” Chicago Review 49, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 163; Elisabeth Frost, “An Interview with Harryette Mullen,” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 402; Elisabeth Frost, “ ‘Ruses of the lunatic muse’: Harryette Mullen and Lyric Hybridity,” Women’s Studies 27 (1998): 397; Mitchum Huehls, “Spun Puns (and Anagrams): Exchange Economies, Subjectivity, and History in Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge,” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 1 (2003): 27; Rosamond S. King, “ ‘Word Plays Well with Others’: Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary,” Callaloo 26, no. 2 (Spring 2003): 536, 537; Andrea Witzke Slot, “Dialogic Poetry as Emancipatory Technology: Ventriloquy and Voiceovers in the Rhythmic Junctures of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge,” Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over, ed. Mara Scanlon and Chad Engbers (London: Palgrave, 2014), 163; Lorenzo Thomas, “Review,” African American Review 36, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 697, 698; Robin Tremblay-McGaw, “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recyclopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing,” Melus 35, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 71–72; Tyrone Williams, “Review,” Callaloo 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 1125. The relation is a central topic throughout several articles: Allison Cummings, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005): 3–36; Jessica Lewis Luck, “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s Dictionary,” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 3 (Fall 2008): 357–82; Amy Moorman Robbins,

Notes to pages 6–11 / 189 “Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary and Race in Language/Writing,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 341–70. 17. Rocco Marinaccio, “George Oppen’s ‘I’ve Seen America’ Book: Discrete Series and the Thirties Road Narrative,” American Literature 74, no. 3 (September 2002): 552; Garin Dowd, “ ‘CONNECT-I-CUT’: George Oppen’s Discrete Series and a Parenthesis by Jacques Derrida,” Angelika 5, no. 1 (2000): 124. 18. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction,” Representations 108, no. 1 (Fall 2009): 1–21. 19. Ibid., 4. 20. See Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 21. Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 11. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 4. 24. Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” Le bruissment de la langue: Essais critiques IV (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984), 66. 25. Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013), 48; for a provocative account of the fate of the phrase, see Andrew Goldstone, “The Doxa of Reading,” PMLA 132, no. 3 (May 2017): 636–42. 26. Julia Kristeva, La révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde a la fin du xixe siècle—Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1974), 343. 27. Julia Kristeva, Σημειωτική: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 146, 181. 28. Ibid., 146; cf. Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur,” 65. 29. Kristeva, Σημειωτική, 181. 30. Published serially from 1881 to 1906, Bierce’s dictionary was collected as The Cynic’s Word Book (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1906); Flaubert’s aperçus were published posthumously in Étienne-Louis Ferrère, Gustave Flaubert, Le Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Paris: Conrad, 1913), based on notes from the 1870s; Evans’s and Moxely’s Dictionary was published as Impercipient Lecture Series 1:100 (1997); Bataille’s critical dictionary was published serially in Documents (1929–1930) and collected in Dictionnaire Critique (Paris: Prairial, 2016), with translations in Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts (London: Atlas Press, 1996). 31. Ibid., xv. 32. Lohren Green, Poetical Dictionary (Abridged) (Berkeley: Atelos, 2003): xv. 33. Victor Controski, Broken Treaties (New York: New Rivers Press, 1973), 14. 34. Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2007), ii. 35. Rosmarie Waldrop, A Key into the Language of America (New York: New Directions, 1994). 36. Suárez’s project anticipates Jez Burrows’s more conventional Dictionary Stories (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), which collages the illustrative sentences from various dictionaries into very short fictions and poems. Where the alphabetic sequencing of the former foregrounds chance, the latter intervenes to emphasize thematic coherence and narrative logic. 37. On the significance of the chapter divisions with respect to pronunciation, see Caleb Beckwith, “Angelo Suárez’s ‘Philippine English’ and the Language of

190 / Notes to pages 11–15 Conceptual Writing,” Jacket2 (2016), http://jacket2.org /article/angelo-suarezs -philippine-english (accessed February 16, 2018). 38. Angelo V. Suárez, Philippine English: A Novel (Oakland, CA: Gauss-PDF, 2015), 210–11. 39. Ibid., 259. 40. Ibid., 196. 41. Maria Lourdes Bautista and Susan Butler, eds., Anvil Macquarie Dictionary of Philippine English for High School (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 2000). 42. Beckwith, “Angelo Suárez’s’ Philippine English.’ ” 43. Louis Althusser, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’état (notes pour une recherche),” La Pensée 151 (June 1970): 3–38; Gilles Deleuze, “Post-scriptum sur les sociétés de contrôle,” Pourparlers 1972–1990 (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1990), 240–47. Compare with the foundational notion of the panoptique [panoptic] as a “discipline-mécanisme: un dispositif fonctionnel qui doit améliorer l’exercice du pouvoir en le rendant plus rapide, plus léger, plus efficace, un dessin des coercitions subtiles pour une société à venir [discipline-mechanism: a functional device that must benefit the exercise of power by making it fleeter, lighter, more effective, a blueprint of subtle coercions in the ser vice of a future society].” Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 211. 44. For one index of this ideology, English is pointedly not included among the “foreign” languages in the following sentence: “We have books in many foreign languages, e.g. Japanese, French, Arabic and Vietnamese.” In the transition to political independence from the mid-1930s onward, the question of national language in the Philippines became a freighted topic. In 1937, the National Language Institute nominated Tagalog, although it went unnamed (referred to merely as “wikang pambansa [national language]”) until 1959, when the Secretary of Education christened it “Philipino” in order to lend it a national (i.e., less ethnic) character. It was renamed “Filipino” in 1987 after decades of “National Language Wars.” See Isabel Pefianco Martin, “Beyond Nativization? Philippine English in Schneider’s Dynamic Model,” The Evolution of Englishes: The Dynamic Model and Beyond, ed. Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffman, Magnus Huber, and Alexander Kautzsch (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2014), 75; A. Gonzalez, “The Language Planning Situation in the Philippines,” Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 19, nos. 5–6 (1998). 45. Suárez, Philippine English, 93. 46. The force of colonizing standardization was so strong that the local varieties of English in the Anvil proved an impediment to its classroom adoption, “as teachers in the Philippines were primarily concerned with examination success, and local forms of English were considered deviant in that context.” Andy Kirkpatrick, English as a Lingua Franca in ASEAN: A Multilingual Model (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 89. 47. Ibid., 288. 48. Ibid., 9. 49. Ibid., 155. 50. Ibid., 39, 42. 51. Ibid., 267. 52. Ibid., 78, 3. 53. Substantially revised editions were published in 1817, 1884, 1925, 1992, and 2001. 54. Felipe Cussen, Letras (Montevideo: Gegen, 2017), 17.

Notes to pages 15–18 / 191 55. Ibid., 5. 56. Ibid., 5; 15–16; “Antiguamente representó también un sonido simple, palatal, fricativo y sordo, semejante al de la sh inglesa o al de la ch francesa, el cual hoy conserva en algunos dialectos, como el bable” (15). 57. Bök explains: “The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire (although a few words do go unused, despite efforts to include them: parallax, belvedere, gingivitis, monochord and tumulus).” Christian Bök, Eunoia (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2001), 104. 58. Centre Pompidou, AM 1997–96 (13). 59. Marcel Duchamp, Duchamp du signe: Écrits, ed. Michel Santouillet (Paris: Flammarion, 1994), 115. Compare Walter Arensberg’s similar proposal: “For a poem on . . . take twenty pages / of Webster’s Dictionary dividing the words according to the penultimate consonant.” Molly Nesbit and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “Concept of Nothing: New Notes by Marcel Duchamp and Walter Arensberg,” The Duchamp Effect: Essays, Interviews, Round Table, ed. Marth Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 155. 60. Ibid., 115. 61. Ibid., 114. 62. Ibid. 63. Quoted in Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Holt, 1996), 430. The Larousse was the dictionary of Dada. Legend has it that the name of the movement itself “emerged by chance from a French dictionary.” Jed Rasula, Destruction Was My Beatrice: Dada the Unmaking of the Twentieth Century (New York: Basic Books, 2105), x, 12. Tristan Tzara claimed to have discovered the movement’s very name “by holding the spine of the French-German Petit Larousse and letting it fall open. The word at the top of that page was then chosen. It was dada, which means hobby horse.” Quoted in Dawn Ades, Dada and Surrealism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1974), 3. The absence of the word at the top of the page in any Larousse I have examined might suggest that Tzara was imagining the affordance of a dictionary in his fabricated reminiscence. “Rien de précis ne peut être établi sur l’existence de ce mot dans un dictionnaire français-allemand [nothing definitive about the existence of this word in a French-German dictionary can be established]” as Willy Verkauf has prudently noted. Verfauf, Dada: Monograph of a Movement (Teufen: Arthur Niggli, 1957), 148. One can, however, verify that Francis Picabia also favored the Petit Larousse, drawing on its pages roses—a section of colored sheets that listed “Locutions Latines et Étrangères [Latin and foreign phrases]”—for titles and inscriptions. In 1921, “the Dadaists led a small group of sodden spectators to the modest chapel of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, where [Georges] Ribemont-Dessaignes provided commentary for various architectural features by reading entries at random from a Larousse dictionary.” Rasula, Destruction, 179–80. 64. By or of Marcel Duchamp or Rrose Sélavy: A Retrospective Exhibition (Pasadena Art Museum, October 9–November 3, 1963). 65. Geraldine Price, “The Found Word,” Southwest Art 3, no. 8 (1973): 50. 66. Ibid. 67. Stephen Parks, “Doris Cross: The Painted Word,” ARTlines 2, no. 2 (February 1981). 68. R. Chenevix Trench, F. J. Furnivall, and Herbert Coleridge, “Proposal” (London: Philological Society, 1857); James Murray, “An Appeal to the English-Speaking and

192 / Notes to pages 18–21 English-Reading Public to Read Books and Make Extracts for The Philological Society’s New English Dictionary” (privately printed, 1879). Balderdash and Piffle ran for over a dozen episodes between 2006 and 2007 on BBC Two; see https://public.oed .com/appeals. 69. C. S. Giscombe, Prairie Style (McLean, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2008), 65. 70. The New World Dictionary was first published in 1951, with regular editions over the following decades. The drawing reproduced by Giscombe is by Joseph Guerry, who also worked for other clients, including the Exhibition Department of the American Museum of Natural History, where he assisted with diorama backgrounds and created the understated designs for the Jurassic Hall, as well as more dramatic murals such as “one depicting a battle between a sperm whale and a giant squid” and one “a sulphur-bottom whale feeding on hosts of shrimps.” Seventy-Second Annual Report for the Year 1940 (New York: Natural History Museum, 1941), 11; see “Squid and the Whale, painting by Joseph Guerry [1940], for the Hall of Ocean Life,” Research Library | Digital Special Collections, http://lbry-web -007.amnh.org /digital/index.php/items/show/60767 (accessed February 21, 2018). The source of the illustration may conceal a vulgar pun, given that the speech inflections of varied pronunciations are explicitly thematized by Giscombe (and further seem to explain the book’s central motivating pun between fox and fucks); with the dictionary readers are reminded of both Giscomb’s line “White men say cock and black men say dick” (17) and an extended “dick” joke (27–28). 71. Giscombe, Prairie Style, 4. 72. Ibid. 73. See also Mary Ellen Snodgrass, Encyclopedia of Kitchen History (New York: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2004), 290–91; John Wesley Monette, History of the Discovery and Settlement of the Valley of the Mississippi by the Three Great European Powers: Spain, France, and Great Britain, and the Subsequent Occupation, Settlement, and Extension of the Civil Government by The United States Until the Year 1846 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1846), 2:8; Federal Writers Project, Arkansas Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Arkansas Slaves (Washington, DC: Work Projects Administration, 1938), 240–41. 74. Giscombe, Prairie Style, ix. 75. Ibid., 3; at “equivocate,” the dictionary traces the word’s root to the late Latin aequivocatus, past participle of aequivocari, “to have the same sound, be called by the same name.” 76. David Attwooll, quoted in Israel Shenker, “Annals of Lexicography: The Dictionary Factory,” The New Yorker (April 3, 1989), 100. 77. Anatole France, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1926), 6:583. 78. Steven Wright, I Have a Pony (Warner Brothers 1-25335, 1985). 79. Sam Winston, A Dictionary Story (London: Arc Artist Editions, 2013). For a consideration of Winston’s work in the context of similar fictions, see Bernhard Metz, “Non-linear Readings: The Dictionary Novel as a Visual Genre,” Literary Visualities: Visual Descriptions, Readerly Visualisations, Textual Visibilities, ed. Ronja Bodola and Guido Isekenmeier (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 222–60. 80. Ibid. 81. Ibid. 82. Felix R. Hodgson, Op. Cit. (np: In Medias Press, 2016). The works are listed as “informatic writing.” A related book, published slightly later and designated as the

Notes to pages 2 1–2 4 / 193 “Aorist Edition,” collects all of the material, apparently in random rearrangement, in a single volume. Compared with the Oxford, each volume of which is 24 × 31 cm, Op. Cit. is 10.5 × 17.5 cm. 83. See Malcolm Beckwith Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book,” in Scribes, Scripts, and Readers: Studies in the Communication and Presentation, and Dissemination of Medieval Texts (London: Hambledon Press, 1991), 35–70. See also Janine Rogers, “Compiling Creation: Medieval Codicology and Images of Early Modern Collections,” in Visualizing the Text: From Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature, ed. Lauren Beck and Christina Ionescu (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2017), 8–9; Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor, “Introduction: Architectures, Ideologies, and Materials of the Page,” in The Future of the Page, ed. Peter Stoicheff and Andrew Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 11–12. 84. Lyn Hejinian, “If Written Is Writing,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1, no. 3 (June 1978). 85. Alastair Johnston, Cafe/Charivari, Charlatan/Chrom (Berkeley: Poltroon Press, 1975). 86. OED at “bunk.” 87. Ibid. at “burst” and “outburst.” 88. Heath’s German Dictionary, Compiled from the Best Authorities in Both Languages, ed. Karl Breul (London: Belding, 1906). 89. The book also contains a proper colophon: “200 copies made by Alastair Johnston, alien & printer of books, April, 1975. Composition at the Arif Press. No Signe of the Pide Bull.” 90. Laurence Aëgerter, Meeting on Paper (Amsterdam: Kassel-Kramer, 2005). See also Moderne Nederlandse Encyclopedie (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1978). 91. North American jurisprudence retains the “verbal process” in Louisiana law, where the term refers to the requirements that legal operations be signed by the officer tasked with performing the duty and attested to by witnesses. In French law, the procès verbal is similar to a statement of fact. 92. The alphabetical arrangement of the dictionary strikes us today as selfevident, although this was not always the case. A Key into the Language of America grouped its vocabulary by topic, and the title of the first English dictionary, compiled by Robert Cawdrey, indicates the novelty: A Table Alphabeticall contayning and teaching the true writing and understanding of hard usuall English words, borrowed from the Greeke, Latine, or French, &c. With the Interpretation thereof by plaine English words (London: Edmund Weaver, 1604). Cawdrey’s title is also a good reminder that earlier dictionaries did not attempt to define “usuall” or common words, but instead followed the designs of classical lexicons and glossaries, which were intended to instruct on the meanings of antiquated words, dialect locutions, or esoteric termes de métier. See Eleanor Dickey, Ancient Greek Scholarship: A Guide to Finding, Reading, and Understanding Scholia, Commentaries, Lexica, and Grammatical Treatises, from Their Beginnings to the Byzantine Period (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 87ff. 93. On Pound’s visual prosody as evidence of his typewriting habits, see Hugh Kenner, The Mechanical Muse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 37ff.; Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Selected Writings, ed. Robert Creeley (New York: New Directions, 1966), 16. Donald Allen hailed “composition by field” as “the dominant

194 / Notes to pages 2 4–27 new concept” in postwar poetics; “Preface,” The New American Poetry: 1945–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1960), xiii–xix. 94. Lyn Hejinian, Writing Is an Aid to Memory (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1978). 95. Ibid. 96. Lyn Hejinian, The Cell (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1992), 208. 97. The 1844 edition consists of sheets that had been printed for the 1841 revised edition of the dictionary, bound together with a new addendum. When Webster’s family liquidated his estate following his death, the J. S. & C. Adams Company of Amherst, Massachusetts, acquired the 1841 stock for their new edition. See Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel, A Bibliography of the Writings of Noah Webster (New York: New York Public Library, 1958), 239. 98. Richard Benvenuto, “Words Within Words: Dickinson’s Use of the Dictionary,” ESQ 29 (1983): 53; emphasis added. 99. Ibid. 100. The poem appears in facsimile as 564 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), and as 525 in The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, edited by R. W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1998). 101. Sally Bushell, Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 207; Bushell elaborates: “the ‘dictionary’ is a kind of free flow of word alternatives in which the poet does not focus on the meaning of the word to be replaced but on the loose associative connection in the mind between one word and another” (208). We agree to a degree, but I would locate the connection on the dictionary page rather than subjectively in the poet’s mind. 102. See Jan Mukařovský, Aesthetic Function: Norm and Value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970), esp. 9–10. 103. Marcel Bénabou, Presbytère et prolétaires: Le dossier P.A. L. F. (Paris: Éditions du limon, 1989), 9. 104. Ibid., 32. Vito Acconci pursues these reference-book imperatives in the elaborately titled “CONTACTS/CONTEXTS (FRAME OF REFERENCE): Ten Pages of Reading Roget’s Thesaurus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965),” transcribing entries—beginning, metaphysically, with Existence—and continuing until the book refers him to another lemma. See Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, ed. Craig Dworkin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 229–38. For more on the significance of the reference book, with special relevance to Robert Smithson and the arts of the period, see Emily Furhman’s astute “Spatial Denotation” (MA thesis, Columbia University, 2016). 105. Lyn Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” Poetics Journal 4 (May 1984): 140. 106. Bierce, Cynic’s Word Book, 75. 107. Gustave Flaubert, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), 307. 108. Joseph Kosuth undertakes a variation of these moments in certain photographs from his series Art as Idea as Idea, an investigation into referentiality that presents enlarged (four foot square), negatively printed photostats of the dictionary definitions of various words, including the definition of definition in Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition” (1966, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and the meaning of meaning in Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word “Definition” (1967,

Notes to pages 27–29 / 195 Menil Collection, Houston). Both of his images are taken from one of the prerevision editions of Webster’s New World Dictionary, ed. Joseph H. Friend and David B. Guralnik (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1953–69). The New World was the standard in-house reference for journalism in the period. On the materiality of Kosuth’s dictionary definition prints, see John J. Curley, “Fuzzy Language: Joseph’s [sic] Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea), 1967,” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin (2005): 125–29. 109. OED at “wordbook.” 110. For one such book, see Chrisophe Lamiot, Eau sur eau: Les dictionnaires de Mallarmé, Flaubert, Bataille, Michaux, Leiris et Ponge (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997). For the clearest examples of Ponge’s dictionary poetics, see Le carnet du bois de pins (Lausanne: Mermod, 1947); La fabrique du pré (Paris: Albert Skira, 1971); and La table, ed. Jean Thibaudeau (Paris: Gallimard, 1991). 111. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1945), 68. The earlier version of the poem has “sur les consoles, en le noir Salon: nul ptyx, / Insolite vaisseau d’inanité sonore.” Mallarmé, Oeuvres, 1488. 112. Letter of May 3, 1868. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance, vol. 1: 1862–1871, ed. Henri Mondor and Jean-Pierre Richard (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 274. 113. Michael Riffaterre, “The Poem’s Significance,” in The Lyric Theory Reader, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 260; see Paul Allen Miller, “Black and White Myths: Etymology and Dialectics in Mallarmé’s ‘Sonnet en yx,’ ” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 36, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 188. 114. To be meticulous: following its generation by the Lexicon, “ptyx” does indeed occur in a poem by Victor Hugo; in “Le Satyre,” the words seems to name a hill or mountain: “on entendait Chrysis, / Sylvain du Ptyx que l’homme appelle Janicule.” Victor Marie Hugo, La légende des siècles (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1859), 2:74. Although Mallarmé would not have found ptyx as a lemma in any of his French dictionaries, he could have found its trace in polyptyque with an etymology directly from the many folds denoted by the ancient Greek πολύπτυχος (polyptychos), a word that denotes not only ancient writing tablets but also the kind of domestic book that would list the precious domestic items, such as an amphora, cata logued by Mallarmé’s sonnet: “an inventory or record of the . . . possessions . . . of a medieval estate or religious house,” as the OED defines the English version of the word. Polyptyque, as it happens, is only an entry away from polyptote, which describes the very process by which ptyx itself appeared in the Greek lexicon: “Figure de diction qui consiste à employer dans une période un même mot sous plusieurs des formes grammaticales dont il est susceptible [Figure of speech which consists of using, in the same sentence, the same word in several of the grammatical forms to which it is capable of declining].” 115. Edward, Earl of Derby, The Iliad of Homer, Rendered into English Blank Verse (London: John Murray, 1865), 1:192. 116. Gretchen Kromer, “The Redoubtable ptyx,” MLN 86, no. 4 (May 1971): 571. 117. Ibid.; Stéphane Mallarmé, “Variations sur un sujet,” La Revue Blanche (July 1, 1895), 33. 118. Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). 119. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 1:131.

196 / Notes to pages 29–32 120. In the July 18, 1868, letter to Henri Cazalis, Mallarmé writes: “en se laissant aller à le [i.e., ce sonnet] murmurer plusieurs fois on éprouve une sensation assez cabalistique [by allowing yourself to murmur it (i.e., the sonnet) several times you produce a rather cabalistic sense].” Correspondance, 278. Many commentators have understood “ptyx” to denote a conch shell on display on the sideboard as a natural curiosity and conversation piece. Following Émilie Noulet’s interpretation of “ptyx” as a synonym for conque, based on an entry in the Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, ed. Henrico Stephano (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1831), some critics have taken the tenuous connection as an obvious given; Henry Charpentier, for example, writes: “c’est tout simplement la transcription littérale du mot grec ayant le même sens. Il signifie coquille, la conque creuse [it’s simply the literal transcription of the Greek word having the same meaning. It denotes shell, the hollow conch].” “De Stéphane Mallarmé,’ ” Nouvelle revue française 158 (1926): 543. Given the ancient Greek uses of related words, the more likely shell would be a hinged bivalve, such as an oyster (see Kromer, “Redoubtable,” 564–65). For a reading of the word as a coquille—though not as shell, but as a terme de métier in printing, denoting a paragram or printing error: “toute faute consistant dans la substitution d’une lettre à une autre [any mistake consisting of the substitution of one letter for another]”—see Jean-Louis Debauve, who explicates the word in relation to ptynx, a species of owl, perhaps the bird referred to by Aristotle as a hybris (the eagle-owl or Bubo bubo), although ornithologists are uncertain of the species indicated by the phi losopher. Jean-Louis Debauve, “Quelques lettres inédites de Mallarmé,” Histoires Littéraires 5 (January– March 2001): 69–74. See W. Geoffrey Arnott, Birds in the Ancient World from A to Z (Oxford: Routledge, 2007), 204, 25, 70. This interpretation suits the gothic nocturnal mise-en-scène described by Mallarmé, and it would summon the ptynx as a cousin of Edgar Allan Poe’s corbeau. 121. Natalie Snoeren and Juan Segui, “Voiceless: Voice Assimilation in French,” Proceedings of the 15th International Congress of the Phonetics Sciences, ed. MariaJosep Solé (Barcelona, 2003), 2326; see André Rigault, “L’assimilation consonantique de sonorité en français: Étude acoustique et perceptuelle,” Proceedings of the 6th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, ed. B. Hala, M. Romportel, and P. Janota (1967): 763–66. 122. July 18, 1868, letter to Cazalis. Correspondance, 278. May 3, 1868, letter to Lefébure; ibid., 274. 123. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 366. 124. One might, of course, oxymoronically compile a dictionary of neologisms; see, for examples, Gelett Burgess, Burgess Unabridged: A New Dictionary of Words You Have Always Needed (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1914), and Mikhail Epstein, PreDictionary: An Exploration of Blank Spaces in Language (Berkeley: Atelos, 2011). 125. Ezra Pound, “Canto CV,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 770. 126. Larissa L. Shestakova, “Modern Scene of Russian Author Lexicography,” in New Trends in Lexicography: Ways of Registering and Describing Lexis, ed. Olga Karpova and Faina Kartashkova (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 151. 127. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books,” in The Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson Comprising His Essays, Lectures, Poems, and Orations (London: George Bell and Sons, 1886), 3:87.

Notes to pages 33–4 1 / 197

1 / Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary 1. Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 284. 2. Abridged by Frank H. Vizettely, the subtitle of the Funk & Wagnalls volume explains that it was “Designed to Give the Orthography, Pronunciation, Meaning, and Etymology of Over 140,00 Words and Phrases in the Speech and Literature of the English-Speaking Peoples, with Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions” (a word Zukofsky would take as the title of his collected critical essays), and “containing also an appendix of foreign phrases used in English speech and literature.” Several consecutive sections in the chapter “Thru the Eyes of Jonathan” work in a similar fashion, drawing on the 1925 Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, the third edition of the Merriam Series abridged from the New International Dictionary of the English Language. See, specifically, the paragraphs beginning “Deadal” and ending “El Dorado”; Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 272–74. 3. Peter Quartermain, Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 74, 85 n. 27, 72. See also Margot Peters, Lorine Niedecker: A Poet’s Life (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), 41. Quartermain speculates that the page containing “dictionary” and “Dickson City” ranges entries from “Dib” through “Dictionary”; for the record, page 327 spans “Diaz de la Peña, Narcisse Virgile” to “dictograph.” 4. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 284. 5. Ibid., 269. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 275. 9. Letter from Ezra Pound to Louis Zukofsky, December 6, 1932. See Pound/ Zukofsky: Selected Letters of Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987), 137–38. 10. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 281. 11. Ibid., 274. 12. Ibid., 284. 13. Ibid., 285. 14. See William Davenant, “The Phi losopher and the Lover; to a Mistress Dying,” “Wake all the Dead! what hoa! what hoa (The Law against Lovers): Viola sings the Song,” “To The Queene, entertain’d at night by the Countesse of Anglesey,” in The Shorter Poems, and Songs from the Plays and Masques, ed. A. M. Gibbs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 175, 260, 28. 15. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 292. 16. Ibid., 293. 17. Ibid., 292. 18. Ibid., 278–79. 19. Ibid., 270. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 279. 23. Zukofsky would repurpose these lines again in Arise, Arise (New York: Grossman, 1973), 15, as well as in “A”-24 (650, 719). The more standard early

198 / Notes to pages 4 1–4 4 translation of Marx’s “großen Entwicklungen” (Briefwechsel, 3:127) as “great developments” indicates that Zukofsky is likely quoting not from Marx directly, but rather from Lenin, whom he admired. See “Constellation,” retitled “Memory of V. I. Ulinov,” in All: The Collected Short Poems (New York: Norton, 1965); Sandra Kumamoto Stanley, Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 26ff.; Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas, “ ‘For the delectation of the file and rank’: Louis Zukofsky in the Later 1930’s,” http://www.z-site.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Notes-on-LZ-in-the-1930s-and -Modern-Times-10OCT13.pdf (accessed July 9, 2017). Lenin’s Teachings of Marx was one of the half-dozen books named by Zukofsky in 1936 as essential readings on Communism. See Barry Ahearn, “Marxism and American Handicraft,” in Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 92 n. 5. The language may also come thirdhand; see, for examples, Lee Ping, “Lenin on Marxism,” Chinese Students’ Monthly 25, no. 1 (1929): 45; Arnold Petersen, Proletarian Democracy vs. Dictatorships and Despotism: An Address Delivered at the Annual De Leon Birthday Celebration, New York City, December 13, 1931 (New York: New York Labor News Company, 1934), 7. Petersen’s discussion of dictatorship has further affinities with Zukofsky’s own text, which announces that “as against any dictator, there is [the dictionary].” 24. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Chicago: Charles Kerr, 1926), 83. 25. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 281–82. 26. Ibid, 273. 27. “Mantis,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse XLV, VI (March 1935): 320; “ ‘Mantis’: An Interpretation,” in New Directions in Prose and Poetry, ed. James Laughlin (New York: New Directions, 1936). 28. Mark Vernon Slingerland, The Common European Praying Mantis: A New Beneficial Insect in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1900), 39. 29. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle provides representative instances: “Hordes of ‘Praying Mantes,’ Fearsome-Looking but Quite Harmless Bugs, Invade City” (August 29, 1929), 7; Alan Devoe, “His Praying Is Preying” (September 2, 1929); see also Devoe, “Lacks Facial Expression” (October 11, 1929); “Newly-Hatched Praying Mantis Appears in Brooklyn Back Yard” (June 17, 1930). The insect and its summer 1929 swarming was a still a sensation through the mid-1930s; see, for instance, George Hiram Mann’s letter to the editors (September 2, 1931), the editorial “By the Way” columns of the paper (September 6 and 21 and October 1, 1935), and the untitled September 3, 1935, article on page 17. In the context of his narrative of King David, Zukofsky would have surely noted the emphatic claim in a 1935 article ostensibly penned by Mannie the Mantis herself: “We’re no psalm singers, buddy!” “Ah, Life—’Tis Sweet! Ah, Fame! But Drying—That’s the Game!” August 25, 1935). For the cultural symbolism of the mantis for Zukofsky and its relation to surrealism, see Michael Golston, Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, Postmodern Poetic Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 30. For a reading of Thanks to the Dictionary as “ludic,” see Nicholas Sloboda, “Introducing the Ludic: The Poetics of Play in Louis Zukofsky’s Fiction,” English Studies in Canada 23, no. 2 (June 1997): 201–15. 31. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 284. 32. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 11.

Notes to pages 4 4–50 / 199 33. The Oxford English Dictionary dates the derogatory slang sense of “pansy” as “a homosexual man; an effeminate man; a weakling” to 1926, exactly contemporaneous with Zukofsky’s writing. “A”-2 describes Chambers and his well-known brother Whittaker as “beautiful / almost asexual” (10). In 80 Flowers, Zukofsky demonstrates his awareness that the garden pansy is known as Heart’s Ease; see Michelle Leggott, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 203; see also the working drafts for 80 Flowers loose-leaf #17 (Harry Ransom Center TXRC98-A11 Box 12 Folder 3). 34. Zukofsky, “A”, 10, 9, 26, 87. 35. Funk & Wagnalls at “breeches.” 36. Louis Zukofsky, Complete Short Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 11–12. 37. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 265. 38. Leggott, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, 312. Goldenrod is sixth in Zukofsky’s “Order of Weeds” (Harry Ransom Center TXRC98-A11 Box 12 Folder 3). 39. OED at “Aaron’s rod.” 40. Leggott, Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers, 311. 41. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 291–92. 42. See the lines in the previous chapter in Thanks to the Dictionary: “The last words of David,—As the light of the morning when the sun riseth, even a morning without clouds, as the tender grass springing out of the earth by clear shining after rain.” 43. Peters, Lorine Niedecker, 41; Correspondence 25, 22, 24. 44. Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 278.

2 / Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 1. Louis Zukofsky, Collected Fiction (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1990), 265. “Thanks to the Dictionary” was first published as the final section of It Was (Kyoto: Origin, 1961), 99–132. The epigraph, “And what will the writers do then, poor things,” adapts a refrain from “The North Wind Doth Blow,” a nursery song that cycled through various creatures’ defenses against winter. With its source in a Mother Goose rhyme, the line may be private nod to Lorine Niedecker, who was working on her “Mother Geese” poems at the time, and whose poem about the south wind was described by Zukofsky as “essential” and “quintessential Niedecker.” Quoted in Niedecker and the Correspondence with Zukofsky 1931–1970, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 41; also quoted in Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works, ed. Jenny Penberthy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 374. See “My man says the wind blows from the south,” in New Goose (Prairie City, IL: Decker, 1946). 2. Louis Zukofsky, “A” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 37–38. 3. Louis Zukofsky, “Thanks to the Dictionary,” in Collected Fiction. 4. “Program: ‘Objectivists’ 1931,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 37, no. 5 (February 1931), 268. 5. Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 65; John Beck, Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 123; Andrew Crozier, “Zukofsky’s List,” in The

200 / Notes to pages 50–52 Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 282. The entry has also been read as an “image pertaining to photography” and the “photographic process”: Monique Claire Vescia, Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams (London: Routledge, 2006), 18. 6. Etel Adnan, Of Cities and Women (Letters to Fawwaz) (Sausalito: Post-Apollo, 1993), 22. 7. “A”-6, page 24; the lines are repeated in the “Coronal” of “A”-17 (378). Remembering that Zukofsky was attentive enough to the grammatical category to title and structure his essay collection “Prepositions,” we might note the exchange of from for of in the wording on the definition in “A”-6, moving the phrase away from the standard scientific idioms. 8. Ruth Jennison, The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 19. Jennison, significantly, reads the “textual impress of [Karl] Marx’ well-known analysis of the ‘fetishism’ that attends the era of commodity production” in Zukofsky’s definition (135–36). 9. For one reading of the significance of the prepositions, see Ming-Qian Ma, “Be Aware of ‘the Medusa’s Glance’: The Objectivist Lens of Carl Rakosi’s Poetics of Strabismal Seeing,” in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 57–58. We probably tend to hear “of” in Zukofsky’s phrase as genitive, although the original locative sense of an English equivalent to the Latin ex or de may be intended. 10. See Peter Quartermain, Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the AvantGarde (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 74, quoting a letter to Quinn, December 1, 1934, at the University of Illinois Urbana collections. 11. “A”, 106. 12. Ibid., 94. 13. William Carlos Williams, Selected Essays (New York: Random House, 1954), 256. 14. “A”, 136. 15. Ibid., 13. See 1 Chronicles 17:1, “Lo, I dwell in a house of cedars, but the ark of the covenant of the lord remains under curtains.” 16. Ibid., 22. 17. Ibid., 518; 516. For the importance of Roger Caillois to Zukofsky, see Golston, Poetic Machinations, 48ff. 18. Ibid., 12. Zhargon was the most common term for Yiddish in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when it did not always carry the derogatory sense of its original use as an epithet borrowed from French by German Jewish intellectuals of the Haskalah, although it did not always retain the pejorative sense as it disseminated under diaspora before being superseded by Yiddish in the early twentieth century. See Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America, ed. Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 34; see also Max Weinreich, History of the Yiddish Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:322. For the link between early twentieth-century socialism and Yiddish, see Tom Michels, “The Lower East Side Meets Greenwich Village: Immigrant Jews, Yiddish, and the New York Intellectual

Notes to pages 52–53 / 201 Scene,” in Choosing Yiddish: New Frontiers of Language and Culture, ed. Lara Rabinovitch, Shiri Goren, and Hannah S. Pressman (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013). A January 25, 1923, dispatch from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency provides a quick sense of the cultural politics involved in contest between Yiddish and Hebrew: “In New York there is the largest jargon-speaking population in the world”, he [Rabbi Jonah B. Wise] said. “That this language is legitimately Jewish in America I deny, and shall deny though a million voices be raised in raucous denunciation of that denial.” “In Palestine, where the Jews already have an opportunity of establishing themselves along the lines of their language, cultural tradition and outlook, they chose Hebrew as their national language; and not the jargon which practically all of them have brought from their native lands. The jargon is a sign of the exile, and as such does not belong and will not thrive here. While its literature is extensive, and its drama is tremendously suggestive, the same genius which is cramped by the limitations of the language spoken by a few millions of persons certainly can be expanded into mighty powers of suggestion when released in the tongue of the majority of men and women of this country.” For an account of the gendered implications of the languages, see Naomi Seidman, A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 19. Ibid., 13. 20. “A”, 15; 18. Compare to “And then went down to the ship, / Set keel to breakers,” in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 3. 21. See Norman Finkelstein, Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity (42); and Stephen Fredman, A Menorah for Athena (125–6). Both take the kvetching elders to be the editorial board of the journal Menorah. For a detailed explanation of Zukofsky’s translations, see Harold Schimmel, “Zuk. Yehoash David Rex,” in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 238–45. 22. “A”, 18. 23. Zukofsky leaves no room for doubting the referent; see April 8, 1935, letter to Ezra Pound in Pound/Zukofsky: Selected Letters, ed. Barry Ahearn (New York: New Directions, 1987), 167. 24. “Jews of World, Aroused by Arab Outrage at Jerusalem Wailing Wall; Seek to Buy Sacred Institution from Moslem Owners,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (October 14, 1928). 25. Ibid. 26. See “25,000 Expected at Mass Meeting of Jews Tonight,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (August 29, 1929). 27. Michael J. Cohen, Britain’s Moment in Palestine: Retrospect and Perspectives, 1917–1948 (London: Routledge, 2014), 216. For a broadly theoretical analysis of Jerusalem architecture and rhetoric, see Daniel Bertrand Monk, An Aesthetic Occupation: The Immediacy of Architecture and the Palestine Conflict (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), esp. 73–80. 28. See Cohen, Britain’s Moment in Palestine, 215; see also International Commission for the Wailing Wall, The Rights and Claims of Moslems and Jews in

202 / Notes to pages 53–56 Connection with the Wailing Wall at Jerusalem (Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1931), 87–88. 29. Louis Zukofsky, ““A”—Second Movement,” Poetry 40, no. 1 (April 1932): 27. Compare with“A”, 7. 30. Ibid. 31. Zukofsky would have found the following sense of the word in the addendum to his 1917 dictionary, which included an updated denotation for switch: “a series of communicating trenches, enabling an army to shift speedily from one line of defense to another without the exposure and delay involved in building a new line” (switch). For a brilliant analysis of the intersection of the word’s various meanings, see Kate Marshall, Corridor: Media Architecture in American Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). 32. “A”, 510. One might also recall the architectural vocabulary and use of “table” in the opening of Thanks to the Dictionary, which derives from the entries for abacus: “David, then, on his page, not like a slab forming the top of a capital, but not unlike an abacus, a reckoning table telling its sums will embrace all the words of this novel” (Zukofsky, Collected Fiction, 265). 33. OED at “pan” n. 2. 34. “A”, 509. 35. Pebble, in fact, is a terme de métier in the art history of mosaic composition: “the earliest Greek mosaics of any significance are pebble mosaics.” Jerome Jordan Pollitt, Art in the Hellenistic Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 210. 36. “A”, 102. 37. Ibid., 185. 38. See Exodus 32:19. 39. Jennison, Zukofsky Era, 38; compare her earlier argument, following from Leon Trotsky’s formulation of “combined and uneven development,” that “in Zukofsky’s modernism we find particulars that at first appear unrelated, assembled in such a way that they encode the fraught unity of capitalism’s vexing asymmetries” (21). 40. Quoted in Quartermain, Stubborn Poetries, 89. 41. OED. 42. “A”, 802, 131, 156. Zukofsky quotes here from Carl Becker’s review “The Education of Henry Adams,” American Historical Review 24, no. 3 (April 1919): 434, as he does in his own essay, “Henry Adams,” in Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 130. The Index to “A” reveals “Old Tacit” to be the sobriquet for Ezra Pound (394). 43. Ibid., 24. A similar pun obtains when Zukofsky writes: “We let the two melodies run counter / The tacit always present” (276); to measure is to count, and if “tacit” is earlier defined as “measure,” then it is a kind of “counter.” For a reading of “counter” in this passage as both apposite and opposite, see Woods, Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 181–82. 44. Ibid., 276. 45. Quoted in Charles Norman, Ezra Pound (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1969), 319; Zukofsky, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 13, 14. 46. OED.

Notes to pages 56–58 / 203 47. Agenda 3, no. 6 (December 1964): 29. 48. “A”, 775. Zukofsky might well have read Joseph O’Connor’s poem “New York Day at the Fair”: “not a lettered stone to tell her fate.” Poems (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), 57. 49. Ibid., 550. 50. Ibid., 21. 51. William Hansen, Classical Mythology: A Guide to the Mythical World of the Greeks and Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 52. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 13.8.16. 53. “A”, 194, 526, 529. 54. Louis Zukofsky, Bottom: On Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 182; see also 184. 55. Pound, of course, is the guiding spirit of “A” more generally, and guests in the poem with cryptographic inscriptions. “A”-6, for instance, concludes with his dubious aporetic query: “Can / The design / Of the fugue / Be transferred / To poetry?” (38). Later, in “A”-12, Zukofsky notes the signature of the Bach motif encrypted “as the countersubject of the fourfold 19th fugue” (130). Susan Stewart points out that “signature” is both a manuscript and musical term, a key (as one might have for a score as well as a code). “The Signature and the Initial in Zukofsky’s “A”, in Reading for Form, ed. Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 155. Because B-flat and B-natural are designated respectively as B and H in German, a “coded surplus” in which the same signifiers can operate in both harmonic and linguistic sign systems, Johann Sebastian Bach was able to use the eponymous melodic sequence B-A-C-H to transfer the design of his name as the subject of the final, unfinished “Contrapunctus XIV” of Der Kunst der Fuge. Zukofsky works the letters acrostically through “A”-12 (e.g., at 261), but taking the hint, we can see that his earlier question also encodes its own answer in the form of an acrostic: Canto (or: “Can / T . . . / O . . .”). Zukofsky references a similar play of intersecting, “crossways opposite” (533), vertical and horizontal riddles when he records (352): old Ez, 1962 1/29 in The Times crossword puzzle ‘Across/4 Pound, poet And indeed, as a glance at the January 29 New York Times crossword puzzle confirms, the answer for 56 across, clued as “Poet Pound,” is “Ezra” (intersecting, perhaps coincidentally, with 48 down’s answer for “National Socialist”: “Nazi”). 56. “A”, 138. Zukofsky, in a 1937 letter to Lorine Niedecker, makes an historical connection: “Newton was discovering the calculus at the same time Bach was writing mathematical counterpoint.” Quartermain, “Writing and Authority in Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary,” Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofsky, ed. Mark Scroggins (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 155;

204 / Notes to pages 58–62 Niedecker, according, refers to Zukofsky’s “calculus of thought.” “The Poetry of Louis Zukofsky,” Quarterly Review of Literature 8 (April 1956): 199. 57. “A”, 258. 58. The German reads: “ In den Zwischenstunden, da man nicht immer schreiben kann, treibe ich Differentialrechnungen dx/dy. Ich habe keine Geduld, sonst irgend etwas zu lessen.” See Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx: 1844–1883, ed. A. Bebel and Eduard Bernstein (Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz, 1913), 3:259. 59. Ibid. 60. “A”, 60, 43. 61. Ibid., 152. 62. Joe McCarthy, “He Has a Spartan Lunch and a Few Bilious Thoughts About the New Art,” Life 27, no. 1 (July 4, 1949), 69. 63. Zukofsky, Prepositions, 63. Celia Zukofsky later signaled this statement (with a slight revision) as the best summation of Louis’ own life; see Celia Zukofsky, “1927–1972,” Paideuma 7, no. 3 (Winter 1978): 371. Picking up on the horse as “a popu lar figure for the downtrodden Jew,” Zukofsky may have specifically adapted and adopted the horse from Yehoash, who uses it as an image of “sorrowful displacement.” Maeera Shreiber, Singing in a Strange Land: A Jewish American Poetics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 123, 122. 64. “A”, 181, 511, 73. The martial wisdom is quoted from Henry Adams’s The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma: “The wage is fixed according to capacity of the feeblest workman, precisely as the pace of the regiment is fixed by the walk of the slowest horse” (New York: Macmillan, 1920), 121; Louis Zukofsky, Anew: Complete Shorter Poetry (New York: New Directions, 2011), 325; see also 327. Horsethyme, or wild basil, is a colloquial name for Satureja vulgaris. Zukofsky may be sounding a further etymological echo. As we will see, both “horse” and “current” share the same root, bringing in the sense of “tide” as both fluid flow and time. 65. “A”, 405; see 104, 15. 66. OED. 67. Zukofsky, “Poem Beginning ‘The,’ ” in Anew, 17. 68. “A”, 128. 69. Ibid., 410, 285. 70. See Michel Leiris, Règle du jeu (Paris: Gallimard, 2003). 71. “A”, 184. 72. Ibid., 282. 73. Ibid., 104. 74. Ibid., 421. 75. Ibid., 18; see also 36–37. 76. Ibid. The structure is now known as the Brown Building, which has been incorporated into the New York University campus. 77. Ibid. 78. “Ibid., 281. 79. Ibid., 282; see “fire / Triangle,” ibid., 419. 80. Ibid., 18. 81. Cantos, 655, 714, 11. Alec Marsh, for instance, reads Zukofsky’s line as a “corrective allusion to Pound’s echoes of the Neoplatonist phi losopher Scotus Eriginas.” “Poetry and the Age: Pound, Zukofsky, and the Labor Theory of Value,” in Upper Limit Music, 105.

Notes to pages 62–66 / 205 82. “A”, 40. 83. Ibid., 49. 84. Ibid., 393. 85. Richard Schickel, The World of Carnegie Hall (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973), 258. Zukofsky’s stilted use of “render,” revised from the original “repeated” (cf. Pagany, 10), may provide a gruesome foreshadowing of the fatal fire imagery, as well as a link to horses and to walls; “to render” is also “to cover (stonework, brickwork, etc.) with a first coating of plaster” (OED). 86. Olin Downes, “Bach’s St. Matthew Passion,” New York Times, April 6, 1928. 87. Gabrilowitsch’s piano had been tuned to sound more like a harpsichord, and was referred to in promotional literature and reviews at the time as a “clavicembalo,” the Italian name for the harpsichord which Zukofsky repeats throughout “A”: 13, 18, 41, 42, 768; see also 105. For contemporaneous references, see The Lutheran Witness 47 (1928): 193; The New Outlook 149 (1928): 21; Clara Clemens, My Husband, Gabrilowitsch (New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 222. 88. “A”, 3. 89. Downes, “Bach’s St. Michael’s Passion”; Schickel, Carnegie, 258. 90. Zukofsky, “Objective,” Prepositions 16; Downes, “Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.” 91. “A”, 5; see also 42, 782. Tim Wood draws out the specifically Dantean allusion behind the smoke in this scene. Timothy Clayton Wood, “No American Miltons: Melville, Zukofsky, and America’s Lost Epic Tradition” (PhD diss., University of California at Berkeley, 2010), 134ff. 92. “A”, 3. 93. New York Times, April 13, 1927. 94. In addition to his other attempts to micromanage the audience, Gabrilowitsch had “requested that ladies refrain from wearing brightly colored dresses” (Schickel, Carnegie, 258). 95. New York Times, April 13, 1927. 96. Louis Zukofsky, “ ‘A’: First Movement: ‘Come Ye Daughters,’ ” Pagany: A Native Quarterly 3, no. 3 (July–September 1932): 10. 97. Adolph Neubauer, The Book of Tobit, a Chaldee Text from a Unique MSS in the Bodleian Library, with Other Rabbinical Texts, English Translations, and the Itala (Oxford: Clarendon, 1878), Chapter VI, page xxxvi. 98. George Oppen, 21 Poems by George Oppen, ed. David B. Hobbs (New York: New Directions, 2017). 99. “A”, 8, 19, 21, 621. 100. Charles Altieri, “The Objectivist Tradition,” Chicago Review 30, no. 3 (Winter 1979): 13. 101. Jean Toomer, “Gum,” The Chapbook 36 (April 1923): 22; “A”, 8. 102. “A”, 17. 103. Ezra Pound, ed., Active Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1933), 124. 104. Though see also the line from Ezra Pound’s “Envoi”: “Such treasure in the air.” Personae: The Shorter Poems of Ezra Pound, rev. ed., ed. Lea Beachler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), 195. 105. “A”, 299. 106. See, for example, the copy on a 1930 Camel advertisement: “Precious! Watch those Camels, Peg. They’re nine-tenths of the vacation.” Through the late 1910s and 1920s Camel touted its lack of coupons and premiums as point of pride; the back of

206 / Notes to pages 66–69 packages, for example, explained that “the cost of the tobacco blended in CAMEL Cigarettes prohibits the use of them.” Lorine Niedecker seems to have made the same association with the ashtray; see Jenny Penberthy, “ ‘The Revolutionary Word’: Lorine Niedecker’s Early Writings, 1928–1946,” West Coast Line 26, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 96 n. 14. 107. “A”, 6. 108. Ibid., 39, 41. The frisson of pygal views recurs in “A”-18: “we can see the belly fanny dancing / of the tights over the buttocks of ‘our’ / women the slim erectile trousers of ‘their’ men” (392). 109. I doubt the denotation is intended, but “to spit” (the action of the camel and the Camel smoker in “A”-1), also means to “string (needles) together by passing a wire through the eyes” (OED). 110. “A”, 5; see also 25. 111. Ibid., 25. 112. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), 128. For the record, the articles are not on facing pages. The implications of Silliman’s observations have been soundly refuted; see Robert Thomas Arle Parker, “ ‘A’ and the A’s: Louis Zuko‘v’sky goes West,” Textual Practice 26, no. 6 (2012): 1065–1080. As I suggested earlier, a more likely source for Zukofsky’s title is the “A”, always in quotation marks, like his poem’s title, of the local coffee from Brooklyn roaster Albert Ehler. 113. Bob Perelman, The Trouble with Genius (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 191–92. 114. “Baby Camel in Zoo Debut,” New York Times, April 6, 1928. See “not calling you names, says Kay, / Poetry is not made of such things” (“A”, 6). 115. Given the figure in “A”-1, the issue of mendicancy in the Western Wall disputes may not be coincidental; see, for instance, “Jerusalem to End Begging at the Famous Wailing Wall,” New York Times, August 29, 1928. 116. “Now by a camel He means not the animal of that name, but a thick cable rather; for it is the custom of those well versed in navigation to call the thicker cables ‘camels.’ ” R. Payne Smith, A Commentary upon the Gospel according Ao St. Luke, by S. Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, Now First Translated into English from an Ancient Syriac Version (Oxford: Clarendon, 1859), 571–72. 117. Ibid. 118. William S. Walsh, Handy-Book of Curious Information (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1912), 138. 119. Brian Cummings, Mortal Thoughts: Religion, Secularity, and Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 191–95; Lazarus Ercker, Fleta minor: The Laws of Art and Nature, in Knowing, Judging, Assaying, Refining and Inlarging the Bodies of Confin’d Metals (London: Dawkes, 1683), 93, quoted in Cummings, Mortal Thoughts, 193 n. 59. Note the reinforcement of needle by kneeling. 120. “A”, 430. 121. Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, Canto X, line 16. La Divina Commedia di Dante Alighieri, con il Commento di Tommaso Casini, quinta edizione accresciuta e corretta (Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1907), 346; trans. Henry Longfellow, The Divine Comedy: Purgatorio (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1904), 51. 122. “A”, 431; the phrase is used metaphorically in Bottom, 85.

Notes to pages 69–7 1 / 207 123. Ibid., 17. See “leaf lighting stem,” 125. 124. In the earlier, more verbose and hypotactic draft of “A”, which names a Dunhill lighter (presumably the new model innovating one-handed operation, which had been introduced in 1927), the “thread” seems to refer to the primary midrib vein of a leaf, associating it—unexpectedly—with the plight of the dead laborers “veining the earth” (“A”, 48); later, following the equation of human labor to industrial machines in terms of horsepower, Zukofsky proposes: “And the veins of the earth, and the veins of a leaf / And the ribs of the human body are like each other” (“A”, 60). 125. “A”, 122. 126. Ibid., 17, 124, 539. 127. Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 78; Rudolph Fisher, “The Promised Land,” Atlantic Monthly, January 1927. Stephen Stroff describes one of the many compositions under the name, recorded in New York in November 1925 by The Hottentots (a band of white musicians impersonating African American players): an angular, quickly-moving New York Dixieland tune with shifting tonalities and asymmetrical phrase-shapes. There is a standard four-bar intro; an opening ensemble, then alto sax with the bass drum cutting through cleanly. . . . An ensemble break is followed by a Nichols-led ensemble with Mole counterpoint; then a syncopated passage alternating between B and Eb. There is a trombone break and solo then a final ensemble. Stephen M. Stroff, Red Head: A Chronological Survey of “Red” Nichols and His Five Pennies (New Brunswick, NJ: Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, 1996), 31–32. 128. J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro (Survey Graphic VI, March 1925), 666. 129. “A”, 37; 38. 130. Ibid., 38; 37. 131. Lady Nicotine (Geraldyn Dismond), Inter-State Tattler (June 28, 1929), 12. For a full synopsis and cast list, see Bernard L. Peterson Jr., A Century of Musicals in Black and White: An Encyclopedia of Musical Stage Works by, about, or Involving African Americans (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 173–74. 132. Andy Razaf, “Off-Time,” 1928 (b2, f.6, v. 1 NYPL Andy Razaf Papers). 133. An “Objectivists” Anthology (Le Beausset: To, 1932). 134. Frederick Vallette McNair, Handbook for Naval Officers: An Aid to Examinations for Promotion (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1920), 13. 135. Camel piers are almost certainly what Zukofsky would have had in mind; as one professional assessment documents, the “shores of the United States may be termed the nursery of the floating dock, and even to this day we find that there are twenty-three floating docks in the port of New York and only five graving docks.” Sydney F. Staples, “Floating Docks,” Cassier’s Magazine 13 (November 1897–April 1898), 25. 136. “A”, 124, 125, 543, 374. 137. The etymology combines the Old English ǽfen (even: the latter part or close of the day) and tíd (tide: a portion, extent or space of time; a while), from the “At eventide, cool hour” renders “Am Abend, da es kühle war.” The translation appears to be by John S. Dwight; see Passion Music, According to the Gospel of St. Matthew

208 / Notes to pages 7 1–75 [by] John Sebastian Bach: the English Translation and Adaptation by John S. Dwight: Full Vocal Score, with Piano-Forte Accompaniment mainly by Julius Stern (Boston: Ditson, 1869), 196. The opening phrase seems have been a familiar tag-line from the late nineteenth-century; see, for instance, The History of the Handel and Hayden Society (Boston: Alfred Mudge and Son, 1893), 344, 363, 365, 406, 427, 490. It had become a customary period translation in the 1920s; see, for instance, George P. Upton, The Standard Concert Guide: A Collection and Analysis of Standard Instrumental and Vocal Works in the Concert-Room Repertory (Chicago: A. C. McClurg & Co., 1917), 5; or uncredited review of Warren D. Allen baccalaureate recital, The Pacific Coast Music Review 42, no. 12 (June 17, 1922): 11. 138. “A”, 224; see 364 for the equestrian sense of mount, which “can suggest upward movement by a single leap or by an increasing in the volume of something: mounting his horse; tide-water slowly mounting the sloping beach.” Penguin Modern Guide to Synonyms and Related Words, ed. Samuel Hayakawa (New York: Penguin, 1987), 91. 139. “A”, 147. 140. Ibid., 530, 62, 296; see The Century Dictionary 4:4841. Turn, Hugh Kenner reminds us, thanks to his dictionary, is a musical term. “Too Full for Talk: “A”-11,” in Louis Zukofsky: Man and Poet, ed. Carroll F. Terrell (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1979), 200–201. 141. Zukofsky, “A”, pp. 190; 509; 271; 538; 4, repeated 532; Sir Walter Scott Lady of the Lake (iii, 8); quoted in the Century Dictionary at “life-blood.” 142. New Universal Dictionary. Cf. The Plays of William Shakespeare, Vol. VIII (London: Bathurst, 1773), 3:59 n. 3. 143. “A”, 440. 144. Algernon Swinburne, “A Song in Time of Order,” in The Poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne, ed. Richard Henry Stoddard (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1884), 478; “A”, 215. 145. “A”, 396; 21. 146. Ibid., 530–31. 147. Prepositions, 16. 148. OED at “pulse.” 149. “A”, 137. 150. Century Dictionary (New York: Century, 1911). The explanatory dilation at “blood” confirms: “the word is often used of the pedigree of horses.” The Webster’s entry on “camel” uses a similar lexicon to make a comparison with the horse: “The dromedary is . . . a ‘blooded’ or thoroughbred camel of great speed and bottom, used as a saddle-animal and comparing with the heavier and slower varieties as a race-horse does with a cart-horse” (776). 151. Scroggins, Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007), 197. 152. “A”, 138; see also 226. 153. Prepositions, 12. 154. Ibid., 16. 155. “A”, 184. 156. Ibid., 7, 6, 71. 157. Ibid., 301; see also the roll of “ancient thunder at the mill / Millstones grinding” in “A”-12 (260); Zukofsky’s “gambol” seems to pun on “gamble” and “risk”

Notes to pages 75–7 8 / 209 (507); a similar play follows the evocation of Mallarmé’s hasard and the English “ hazard” with the lines “chances staked / from the / same root” (422). 158. “A”, 226. 159. Ibid., 132. 160. Ibid., 40. 161. William Carlos Williams, Kora in Hell, in Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), 49. 162. “A”, 474, 544. 163. One likely location of the carousel scene Zukofsky depicts may provide a further tie to the surf. “A”-4 was written during the heyday of carousels in Coney Island; “during the twenties a string of [Marcus] Illions’ merry-go-rounds spun off along Surf Avenue like eddies from an oar.” Roland Summit, “The Carousels of Coney Island” (1970), page 4, Columbia University Special Collections, Frederick Fried Coney Island collection (1847–2001), Series III, Box 12, Folder 5. 164. “A”, 15; OED. 165. The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare (London: Baldwin, 1790), 7:367 n. 5. 166. The OED records the obsolete sense of “course” or “corse”: “To exchange, to interchange; to barter; to deal in (a thing) by buying and selling again. In later use only in to corse horses.” 167. “A”, 174; Bottom, 23. 168. “A”, 633–64. 169. For a contrary account of the difficulties posed by the long poem and discontinuities of “A”, see Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59ff. For a consideration of repetition in “A”, see Edward Schelb, “Through Rupture to Destiny: Repetition in Zukofsky,” Sagetrieb 9, nos. 1–2 (Spring/Fall 1990): 25–42, esp. 34. 170. “A”, 175. 171. Morris U. Schappes, “Historic and Contemporary Particulars,” Poetry Magazine 41, no. 6 (March 1933): 342. 172. “A”, 517. 173. The Century Dictionary 2:1311; “A”, 24, 18; see also “print / Must not overlap, but the notes of the voices would” (52–53). There may also be a punning play to “courses tide”, if read “courses” as those parts “of a meal served at one time” and “tide” as “tide over” hunger (Webster’s). Zukofsky seems to relish the pun, which returns in the zeugmatic line in “A”-13: “the flocks of / Grandsons and granddaughters who take courses eat—and learn” (283). 174. Louis Zukofsky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley, 1994), 22. For a very different reading of the “erasure of representation” threatened by fragmentation, with specific reference to the mosaic passages with which I began this chapter, see Woods, Poetics, 65–66. 175. William Carlos Williams, “The Clouds,” in Collected Poems: 1909–1939 (New York: New Directions, 1938).

3 / The Oxford English Dictionary and George Oppen’s Discrete Series 1. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 1:217. 2. William Carlos Williams, “Introduction” to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1969), 221.

210 / Notes to pages 7 8–79 3. Ibid., 256. For a broader consideration of Williams’s machine aesthetic, with special attention to Objectivism, see Henry Sayer, “American Vernacular: Objectivism, Precisionism, and the Aesthetics of the Machine,” Twentieth Century Literature 35, no. 3 (1989): 310–42. I discuss the rhetorical history of textual engines and literary machines in greater depth elsewhere; see “The Potential Energy of Texts [∆U = −P∆V],” Iowa Review 44, no. 3 (Winter 2014–15): 133–48. 4. Ibid. 5. William Carlos Williams, “The New Poetical Economy: George Oppen’s Discrete Series,” Poetry 44 (July 1934): 221. 6. Ibid. 7. Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof Books, 1989), 136. 8. Louis Zukofsky, Prepositions: The Collected Critical Essays of Louis Zukofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 20. 9. Ibid., 12; Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Pavannes and Divisions (New York: Knopf, 1918), 95. 10. Interview with L. S. Dembo (May 1968), in Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968–1987, ed. Richard Swigg (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012), 9. 11. Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 122. 12. See Oppen’s interview with L. S. Dembo, Contemporary Literature 10, no. 2 (Spring 1969): 161; for an assessment of Oppen’s poetics in relation to Imagism, see Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), esp. 126. 13. Oppen explains in his October 4 letter to DuPlessis, “Discrete Series—a series in which each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term. Which is what the expression means to a mathematician” (Selected Letters, 122); in his interview with Dembo a few years later he reiterates: “A pure mathematical series would be one in which each term is derived from the preceding term by a rule. A discrete series is a series of terms each of which is empirically derived, each of which is empirically true.” Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 10. 14. See “Our Subway Open,” front page of The New York Times (October 28, 1904). The Forty-Second Street station extension was completed in 1918; see “Lexington Av. Line to be Opened Today,” New York Times, July 17, 1918. In fairness to Oppen’s memory, the Eighteenth Street station was closed in 1948, but the book’s claims to historical particulars—as evinced by Oppen’s explication of elevator hardware designs (discussed later herein)—would seem to call for strict accuracy. 15. All definitions in this chapter, unless other wise stated, come from the Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). The first poem in the book, interestingly, is printed on the recto, following a blank left-hand page. For a reading of the interval of the white page as “a deliberate chronotropic textual strategy whereby formal decisions are made, intra-textually, to accrue socio-economic and historical significance,” so that “formal intractability” can register the “disruption of the spatio-temporal and rhythmic organization of a community.” See Oliver Southall, “ ‘Thus/Hides the,’ ” Textual Practice 29, no. 6 (2015): 1083, 1092.

Notes to pages 80–86 / 211 16. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions, 2002), 20. Hereafter cited as NCP. 17. Marjorie Perloff adds a play on “after-birth” or the “twilight” that follows sunset as possible readings of “after-sun.” Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 124. 18. NCP, 12, 10. 19. Ibid., 28; Dembo, Interview, 27. 20. Cited in Richard Swigg, George Oppen: The Words in Action (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2016), 16. 21. NCP, 19. 22. Ibid., 32. 23. Ibid., 12, 23. 24. Ibid., 61. 25. “VII,” 21 Poems by George Oppen (New York: New Directions, 2017), 24. 26. NCP, 15. 27. Ibid., 12. 28. Ibid., 16. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 18, 29. 31. Ibid., 28. 32. “VII”; “XVIII,” 21 Poems, 24, 36. 33. Ibid., 19. 34. Ibid., 20. 35. NCP, 106. 36. Ibid., 101. 37. Ibid., 93–94. 38. Ibid., 55. 39. Ibid., 14. 40. Ibid., 26. 41. Williams, “New Poetical Economy,” 224–25. 42. NCP, 35, 7. 43. Ibid., 6; 12; 13. 44. Ibid., 11. 45. Swigg, George Oppen, 15. 46. NCP, 21. 47. Ibid., 27. The poem quotes with precision the date of Fragonard’s birth, 1732, presumably a fragment that Oppen has transcribed from a gallery label or caption (the suggestive first syllable of “Fragonard” may not be incidental to this fragmented text). In contrast, the par ticu lar painting depicting “spiral women / By a fountain” is not immediately obvious. The allegorical La Fontaine d’amour (c. 1785, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; compare with the version in the Wallace Collection, London) shows only one woman; the famous drawing of the fountain of Pomona in the Villa d’Este (1760, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon) is notably deserted; the tableaux of La poursuite (from the series Le progrès de l’amour) features three women in front of a stream, rather than a fountain; and so on. The most likely candidates come from the later series of drawings Fragonard made of the Tivoli gardens, such as the Parc romain avec Tête colassale Crachant de l’eau (1774, now Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe) or the Parc romain avec fontaine (1774, now Graphische Sammlung

212 / Notes to pages 86–89 Albertina, Vienna), in which the female figures might be imagined as promenading in spiral paths. Though only by a very vague association can the turns of the garden pathways transform the strollers themselves into “spiral women.” Earlier canvases by Jean-François de Troy may come more easily to mind, but the compositions of the women he depicts are less obviously helicoid. 48. NCP, 27. 49. Ironwood 5 (1975): 24. 50. From the Oxford English Dictionary: “The peripheral portion or outer ring of a wheel. . . . Generally used of the outermost part of the main body of the wheel, and not including the tyre which may surround this”; and “ That part of the frame of a pair of spectacles which surrounds the lenses.” 51. NCP, 13, 14, 23, 29, 18, 32. 52. Ibid., 97. 53. Steve Shoemaker, “Discrete Series and the Posthuman City,” in Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, ed. Steve Shoemaker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 80. 54. NCP, 28. 55. Ibid., 15, 32. 56. Ibid., 16, 34. 57. OED. 58. NCP, 23, 12. The slang sense of rim to denote anilingus seems to postdate Discrete Series by about a decade. Given the social circles from which the sexual meaning emerged, it seems unlikely that Oppen’s use is the first coded instance in print. 59. NCP, 34. 60. Ibid., 25. 61. Ibid., 26. 62. Williams, “New Poetical Economy,” 222. 63. The structure of formal allegory I am suggesting here carries a complicated politics. Peter Nicholls reads the “syntactical opacities” of Discrete Series in “accord with Oppen’s sense of the habitual tendency of modern capitalism to conceal its own processes,” so that his poems about the camouflaging mechanisms of Capitalism replicates its very modus operandi. Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 15. Note that one might read “thus” as the subject of Oppen’s line, rather than as an adverb; the sense would then be that an overarching sense of consequence and the imperative procedure of a following manner can obscure the more diverse and divergent operation of the parts. Thus, in this sense, would be the antithesis of the underivable terms of a discrete series. 64. Lyn Hejinian, “If Written Is Writing,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1, no. 3 (June 1978): np. 65. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Letters, ed. Michael Golston and Matt Hofer (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2018), 45. 66. David B. Hobbs, “A Brief Introduction to 21 Poems by George Oppen,” Journal of Modern Literature 40, no. 1 (2105): 3; Ruth Jennison, The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 69. 67. Joseph Conte sees metonymy—the relation of parts—as the hallmark of Objectivism and of Oppen’s poetry in par ticu lar. Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 126ff.

Notes to pages 89–93 / 213 68. Michael Heller, “Objectivists in the Thirties: Utopocalyptic Moments,” in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 151. 69. Rocco Marinaccio, “George Oppen’s ‘I’ve Seen America’ Book: Discrete Series and the Thirties Road Narrative,” American Literature 74, no. 3 (2002): 552. 70. Monique Vescia, Depression Glass (London: Routledge, 2006), 92. 71. Alan Golding, “Oppen’s Serial Poems,” in The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 91. 72. Ezra Pound, “Preface,” in George Oppen, Discrete Series (New York: The Objectivists Press, 1934), vi. 73. Report of the New York Public Library for the Year Ending December 31, 1928 (New York: NYPL, 1928), 55; Bulletin of the New York Public Library: Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 32, no. 7 (July 1928): 520. 74. Ibid. 75. Garin Dowd, “ ‘CONNECT-I-CUT’: George Oppen’s Discrete Series and a Parenthesis by Jacques Derrida,” Angelika 5, no. 1 (2000): 124. 76. NCP, 25. 77. For “inflections of surrealism” in Discrete Series, see, for examples, Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 208–9, and Michael Heller, Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen (Cambridge: Salt, 2008), 7; for Discrete Series as collage, see for example Deshae E. Lott, “George Oppen,” in Encyclopedia of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, ed. Eric L. Haralson (New York: Routledge, 2012), 538; for references to the book “as juvenilia or a failure,” see Marinaccio, “George Oppen’s ‘I’ve Seen America’ Book,” 541, and Southall, “ ‘Thus/ Hides the,’ ” 1079; I learned of some critics’ sense of Discrete Series as apprentice work from David B. Hobbs’s superb scholarship: “Approaching This Early Yet New Oppen: Reading Discrete Series as Product, not Preparation,” unpublished MS. 78. NCP, 94; see the repeated image at 326, 294. 79. Ibid., 186–87. 80. Ibid., 41. 81. Ibid., 63. 82. Ibid., 48–49; Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1990), 153–54. 83. NCP, 47, 48. 84. Ibid. 85. Oppen, Meaning a Life, 65, 83; Selected Letters, 83. 86. NCP, 99; Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 231. 87. NCP, 99. 88. Hobbs, “Brief Introduction,” 2; the actual lines, from poem “XV,” read: “Every thing very brightly / Not there.” 21 Poems, 33. 89. “XX,” 21 Poems, 39. 90. Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 58. 91. Kevin Power, “Interview with George Oppen,” Montemora 4 (1978): 198. 92. Swigg, George Oppen, 7; Susan Thackery, George Oppen: A Radical Practice (Oakland: O Books, 2001). 93. NCP, 371.

214 / Notes to pages 93–94 94. Dembo interview, 209. 95. NCP, 61. 96. Ibid., 75. 97. Ibid., 108. 98. “XVI,” 21 Poems, 34. 99. NCP, 23. 100. Ibid., 101, 102, 243. Corroborating the pun on eye and I, “naked eyes” and a “hollow ego” occur in “Some San Francisco Poems,” NCP, e.g., 223, 225. 101. “XIII,” 21 Poems, 31. 102. NCP, 16. 103. Ibid., 163–64, 13. The “closed car” (one might recall Eliot’s “closed car at four” in The Waste Land) was a luxury innovation in automobile manufacturing and marketing in the 1920s, and its success was directly related to glass engineering. In an inversion of our contemporary market, where convertible tops are an indulgent extra option, hard-roofed automobiles were not initially standard. In the mid-1920s, “closed cars” were marketed directly to women, emphasizing their ease (a word Oppen uses in relation to the automobile in Discrete Series) and the protection they offered from the elements (see, for example, the print ad now in the Smithsonian Collection at http:// amhistory.si.edu/onthemove/collection/ object_502.html). Shielding passengers from wind, dust and precipitation, the closed car “means that she [the driver] travels rapidly and comfortable without the slightest havoc to the daintiest grooming,” as an earlier Chandler Motor Car Company advertisement put it. Under the headline “Woman, Appearance and the Closed Car,” that ad touted the closed car as a contribution to women’s happiness because “in safeguarding her personal appearance, it performs a ser vice whose importance cannot be overstated.” Harper’s Bazaar 57 (October 22, 1922), 139. Oppen may have had this final statement in mind when he called the closed car “an overstatement.” The closed car in Discrete Series, one might note, is indeed driving through inclement weather: “The evening, water in a glass / Thru which our car runs.” In all events, the gendered rhetoric around the closed design might help explain the proximity of the subsequent poem in the Discrete Series, in which the female character undertakes the daintiest grooming: “Brushing her hair / . . . Declares this morning a woman’s / ‘My hair, scalp’—” (NCP, 9). Oppen underscores the fact that the “closed car” is “closed in glass.” Earlier windshields and plate panels compounded the danger from accidents, and the success of the closed car depended on the concomitant development of safety glass, which layered resins and vinyls laminated “between glasses” (as Oppen would write in the poem). In 1928, Ford Motor Company prominently advertised that “the new Ford is equipped with a windshield of Triplex—the glass that will not shatter.” In torts, the locus classicus for the strict products liability doctrine of misrepresentation involves precisely this campaign (Baxter v. Ford Motor Co., 168 Wash. 456, 12 P.2d 409, 1932 Wash [Lexis 853, 88 A.L.R. 521].) Auto safety is a fraught topic in Oppen’s poetry; in 1925, the teenage Oppen was the driver in a car accident that killed his classmate, leading to his expulsion from school for drinking. Nicholls, Fate, 5; Joseph G. Kronick, “George Oppen,” in American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 744. 104. Selected Letters, 223; Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 27. 105. Quoted in Nicholls, Fate, 16; NCP, 276. Compare “Now pray the walled world / Heavi ly to open its low doors,” “XVIII,” 21 Poems 36.

Notes to pages 95–100 / 215 106. NCP, 276. 107. Selected Letters, 90; see also the November 10, 1978, interview with Mary Oppen and Tom Sharp in Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 215. 108. Swigg, Speaking with George Oppen, 281. 109. Ibid. 110. For another skeptical response, more theoretically grounded, see Joseph Conte, Unending Design: The Forms of Postmodern Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), 297. For an especially smart reading of the early twentiethcentury skyscraper as a machine, with the elevator as one of its components, see Shoemaker, “Discrete Series and the Posthuman City,” 68ff. 111. NCP, 35. 112. 21 Poems, 27. 113. NCP, 123. 114. Ibid., 5. Oppen inverts the verb and adverb from James’s original sentence: “She got up and stood by the fire, into which she looked a minute; then came round and approached the window as if to see what was really going on.” Henry James, The Better Sort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 169. 115. Selected Letters, 241. 116. NCP, 5. Oppen adds an e to the end of the name of James’s character. As Daniel Jütte has demonstrated, the symbolic import of the window gazer—gendered and theologically inflected—has vacillated over time, but idleness would be one readily available connotation. For a history of attitudes toward looking out of windows, see Daniel Jütte, “Window Gazes and World Views: A Chapter in the Cultural History of Vision,” Critical Inquiry 42 (Spring 2016): 611–46. Lyn Hejinian offers a more nuanced reading of the paradoxical philosophical state Oppen depicts. See “Preliminary to a Close Reading,” in Thinking Poetics: Essays on George Oppen, ed. Steve Shoemaker (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2009), 49ff. 117. John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 2 (Winter 2010): 223. For an earlier consideration of the temporality of reflective surfaces in Oppen’s verse, see QianMing Ma, “A ‘Seeing’ Through Refraction: The Rearview Mirror Image in George Oppen’s Collected Poems,” Sagetrieb 10, nos. 1–2 (Spring–Fall 1991): 83–97. 118. Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure,” 224, 230. 119. NCP, 21. 120. Selected Letters, 146; “III,” 21 Poems, 20. 121. Consider Oppen’s emphatic statement “from discrete series to the marxism not a ‘break’—by any means.” Selected Letters, 255. For another consideration of “the felicitous proximity of two phonemes that divide ‘class’ from ‘glass,’ ” see Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), chap. 4. 122. Oppen, Meaning a Life, 151; cf. 76 for the sense of class as an enclosing “trap.” 123. Marinaccio, “George Oppen’s ‘I’ve Seen America’ Book,” 539ff. 124. Selected Letters, 97. 125. George Oppen, Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 175; quoted in Nicholls, Fate, 72. 126. Ibid. 127. Tina Darragh, “Procedure,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 7 (March 1979). 128. Oppen, Selected Prose, 201; NCP, 194.

216 / Notes to pages 100–2 129. Ibid. 130. Williams, “New Poetical Economy,” 222.

4 / Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer 1. Clark Coolidge, Smithsonian Depositions and Subject to a Film (New York: Vehicle Editions, 1980), 33–34. Coolidge quotes most but not all of Kerouac’s paragraph, which continues, to conclude with a series that may have sounded too much like Coolidge’s own writing to be included: “white beat cry as a sheep, blanket woolen cor-cry of a sheep, bleatering for beds, covering for horses bleed, bleeding beld bled broad wrapping or covering or draw blood from shed.” Desolation Angels (New York: Penguin, 1993), 54–55. Primarily a collage work, “Smithsonian Depositions” does not mark its borrowings, but it does include a bibliography of works cited. 2. Clark Coolidge, “Kerouac,” American Poetry Review 24, no. 1 (January– February 1995): 43. 3. The aesthetic result might have appealed even if Kerouac’s exact technique was unknown; Coolidge was sufficiently attentive of Burroughs’s cut-up method to track variations between the first and second editions of The Soft Machine. Edward Foster, “An Interview with Clark Coolidge,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 3 (Fall 1989): 19. 4. Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer, The Cave (New York: Adventures in Poetry, 2009), 54. 5. Ibid., 29. Coolidge writes, “Vadose left his tan to be tipped under the water table.” Untitled prose poem, This 6 (Spring 1975): np; subsequently cited as “This 6.” 6. Clay Perry, “Operation Underground,” Boy’s Life 38, no. 1 (January 1948), 27. 7. In her “Introduction” to The Cave, Marcella Durand dates Coolidge’s first descent to the age of twelve (vii); trying to remember the first “wild cave” he had ever explored, following a visit to Luray Caverns in 1948, sparked by his childhood fascination with minerals, Coolidge himself recalls being in his “early teens.” “The Northeastern Caver interviews Clark Coolidge, NSS 1294,” The Northeastern Caver 31, no. 4 (December 2000): 136. The politics of caving, for someone of Coolidge’s generation, might be more fraught than expected. In an earlier article featuring Eldon’s Cave, Clay Perry encourages boys to take up spelunking as part of “the most serious and significant hunt of all history”: “the search for suitable sites underground for military installations and shelters in case atomic war should threaten us.” Perry, “Operation Underground,” 27. 8. The difficulty in finding the entrance to the cavern recounted in The Cave might be judged against the set of directions provided by Speleo Digest (1959): Directions: From Great Barrington go north on Route 41. Three miles, turn left just beyond Esso Station on Long Pond Road. Coming from the Massachusetts Pike, go south two miles on Route 41, turn right. French house is third on right, at end of road. Go straight across the pasture to the second stone wall. Turn left on the far side of it in a grove of trees, and follow well-defined trail through woods to wash. Turn right on far side of the wash and follow it 300 feet. Cave is on opposite side with name carved on entrance.

Notes to pages 102–5 / 217 9. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 29. 10. Ibid., 65–66. 11. Ibid., 13. A sentence near the end of The Cave evokes the musical sense of “passage”: “time thru the only passage in simple measures” (29). The textual transformations (“transition from one condition to another”) and intimate teasing dialogue (“a flirtatious conversation”) in Mayer and Coolidge’s collaboration suggest yet other denotations of “passage,” which also seems to serve as the fulcrum between cave and text in a sentence from a contemporaneous Coolidge work, where the famed spelunker Floyd [Collins] blacks out in a cavern’s “hall,” foreshadowing “the hall we came to, one large asbestos-like word” (This 6). The coincidence of “passage” as text to be traversed and space to be ranged can be seen in the title of Carla Harryman’s performance “Walking Backwards with the Maintains, or Other Pleasures,” in which retrograde treading and reading from Coolidge’s work were simulta neously performed; the event took place on April 28, 1977, as part of Bob Perelman’s Talks series in San Francisco. See We Who Love to be Astonished: Experimental Women’s Writing and Per formance Poetics, ed. Laura Hinton and Cynthia Hogue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001), 118, and The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Mode A, 2006), 6:36. 12. This 6. 13. OED at “Karst.” 14. See Gertrude Stein, Composition as Explanation (London: Hogarth Press, 1926), 18ff. One of the films Ed Bowes made of Mayer and Coolidge captured them reading from Stein’s work. See Durand, “Introduction,” viii. 15. Jack Kerouac, On the Road: The Original Scroll (New York: Penguin, 2007), 109. The published version will correct and revise the opening to “I first met Dean. . . .” (New York: Viking, 1957), 1. 16. Northeastern Caver, “Interviews,” 137. 17. See Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 189; “Lives of the Poets: Bernadette Mayer,” Poetry Foundation (April 4, 2011): https://www.poetryfoundation .org /features/articles/detail+/69658 (accessed December 15, 2017). 18. Durand, “Introduction,” viii. 19. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 5. Coolidge confesses, “I’m ashamed to admit that I too smoked my name and NSS [National Speleological Society] number on some cave walls” (Northeastern Caver, 136). 20. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 5. 21. Ibid., 31, 15, 13. 22. Ibid., 13. The Cave emphasizes the legal status of real estate, or what might be recorded in a “public register,” in terms of vacation tenants, trespass, and posted property lines; similarly, the central concern of Coolidge’s interview on spelunking concerns changes in “landowner relations” and “the increasingly limited access to caves” (Northeastern Caver, “Interviews,” 136). 23. Clark Coolidge, Space (New York: Harper & Row, 1970). See Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1961), 810. 24. Robert Smithson, The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 107. 25. Coolidge, Smithsonian, 35, 26. 26. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 17.

218 / Notes to pages 105–8 27. Ibid., 8. 28. OED at “apex.” 29. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 50; “fault” and “mine” recur together in an earlier sentence as well (42). In a contemporaneous prose piece, Coolidge writes of “a big hole . . . in a word mine,” as well as asserting “call it mine,” bringing the two senses together with the assertion “Coolidge was a cave” (This 6); compare with Charles Bernstein’s description of The Maintains as “the ‘word mine’ of language.” Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986), 264. 30. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 17. 31. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 19; Clark Coolidge, “Cave Remain,” Own Face (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 2000), 48; This 6; Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 29. The statement about “all writing” is followed by a sentence which might be read as continuing the figuration of language as cavernous absence, with a stanza of quoted text likened to diminishing ruin: “Quotes room like as the earths decay.” In The Cave, Coolidge and Mayer underscore the darkness of the underground space: “no light, not a photon” (5, emphasis in original). 32. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 30; 49; 30; 27; 35; 17; 30; Coolidge, Own Face, 54. Orogeny (from the Greek ὄρος, oros, mountain) is the process of mountain making by a folding of the crust. Herman Rapaport imagines that Coolidge’s title could be taken “as a hideous typographical screw-up which when corrected will read “The Mountains.” Herman Rapaport, “Poetic Rests,” Poetics Journal 10 (June 1998): 158. See Coolidge, Mine, 23. 33. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 29. 34. Coolidge, Smithsonian, 37; Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 41. The theme picks up later on the page: “Nothing to do with it here but emerge from its domes, its examples for instance it means.” 35. This 6. Dale Engass insightfully links the music and geology foregrounded by Coolidge’s poetics in the conflation of “tone” in “stone.” “Geopoetry” (PhD diss., University of Utah, 2019). 36. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” Artforum 7, no. 1 (September 1968): 87. 37. Smithson, Collected Writings, 107. 38. Coolidge, This 6; Coolidge, Smithsonian, 26. Compare Smithson: “like a room is an abstraction, but a cave is a physical material manifestation.” Collected Writings, 204–5. 39. See entry for Saturday, August 6, 1763, James Boswell, Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 333. 40. See Emil Constantin, cahier VII, as Saussure’s Third Course of Lectures on General Linguistics (1910–1911), ed. and trans. Eisuke Komatsu and Roy Harris (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1993), esp. 4, 8; Coolidge quoted by Paul Carroll, biographical note in The Young American Poets (Chicago: Big Table, 1969), 149. “Hardness,” “density,” and “transparency” are precisely the terms traditionally used to characterize the physical properties of minerals; see Johann Gottlob von Kurr, The Mineral Kingdom (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1859), 12. One can only speculate on whether Coolidge would have recognized Stein’s name as signifying, in German, stone. 41. Smithson, Collected Writings, 106. 42. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 5, 31, 36. Given that the text proposes “a photograph’s silent as a definition’s closed” (13), the fixative suspension might be read

Notes to pages 108–11 / 219 as a part of the process of photographic developing, perhaps recalling the photolithographic process by which modern dictionaries are printed. The reading would corroborate Michael Golston’s ingenious allegorical reading of photography in Coolidge’s work. Michael Golston, Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), chap. 2. 43. Coolidge, Smithsonian Depositions, 26; see Coolidge, Mine, 46. 44. Coolidge, Smithsonian Depositions, 27. 45. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 15, 16, 20. 46. Ibid., 17. 47. Ibid., 10, 24; compare with “a cave has no thought of cover” (47); cf. “I try to look it up, but the page always covers the page.” Coolidge, Mine, 113. 48. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 16. 49. Ibid., 19, 20. Compare with “whole windows fenestration balustrade empty mountain underground” and “an empty mountain deep underground” (9, 19). 50. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 3. Compare the later “gaps in feldspace,” presumably the space of feldspar minerals (23). 51. Ibid., 13. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 7, 13, 29, 14. Compare with the corroborating “single letters belong in dictionary definitions” (15) and the continued association in contemporaneous work: “Bricks of a story particles play, and a hollow to follow.” Coolidge, “Furniture Music,” 153. 55. Colin Simpson, “The Tate Drops a Costly Brick,” Sunday Times (London), February 15, 1976). Coolidge and Andre were both included in the Language & Structure in North America cata logue (Toronto: Kensington Arts, 1975). 56. Andre’s line originates in a Windham College Symposium (April 30, 1969) and was quoted in Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) (New York: Praeger, 1973), 40; see Carl Andre, CUTS: Texts 1959–2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 84. Andre’s formulation recalls Smithson’s corollary deconstruction of the binary “hollow volumes” and “solid materials.” Collected Writings, 106–7. 57. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 9. Breasts, a recurrent motif in The Cave, which once carried the working titles “Clark’s Nipples” and “Conclave, Echos, Breasts” (Durand, “Introduction,” ix), at first seem to be incongruous eruptions of surreal absurdism but assume the positive volumetric shape that contrasts to the evacuated cavern, with ceilings and blouses conflated accordingly; compare the line from a poem in Space: “dome milks” (69). The proximity of “drone” and “dome” suggest a corroborating circuit through the combinatory “drome,” evoking “dromedary,” with its protuberant organ and homophonic “-dairy.” 58. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 40, 23, 69. OED at “fault.” 59. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 28; Coolidge, Smithsonian, 32. See “Bound to miss the holes that pictures make” (This 6) and “film as an emptying mechanism” (Mine, 120).

220 / Notes to pages 111–14 60. This 6. 61. Clark Coolidge, “From Notebooks (1976–1982),” in Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics, ed. Michael Palmer (Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1983), 173. 62. See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 63. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 23; Julia Brown and Michael Heizer, “Interview,” Sculpture in Reverse (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 16. For Coolidge’s engagement with contemporary sculpture other than Andre’s, see Lytle Shaw, Fieldworks: From Place to Site in Postwar Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2013), 210–29. 64. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 30, 16. 65. Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 20; Coolidge, Smithsonian, 11. 66. Smithson, Collected Writings, 324; compare with the vocabulary of interior architecture used by Coolidge “Recalling Knox Cave in the 50s,” Northeastern Caver 5 (1974): 63. As Coolidge writes in Mine: The One That Enters the Stories (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2004), “Familiar were / the words from home for caves,” quoted in Rachael M. Wilson, “Clark Coolidge’s Cave Art,” Jacket2 (2015), https://jacket2.org /article/clark-coolidges-cave-art, accessed December 20, 2017; the sentence comes from Clark Coolidge, A Book Beginning What and Ending Away (Hudson, NY: Fence Books, 2013), 16–17. 67. Coolidge, “Notebooks,” 173. See “We have allowed ourselves the elegance of voided pages.” Coolidge, Mine, 66. 68. “Conversation with Clark Coolidge,” This 4 (Spring, 1973): np. 69. Robert Motherwell, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology (New York: Wittenborn, 1951), 183. The original phrase, “Le Ministère est renversé,” exclaimed to coincide with the Dadaists’ disruptive appearance at Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s lecture on “Tactilism” at the Théâtre de l’Oeuvre in 1921, leaves less room for misinterpreting the referent as furniture rather than government (or merely the officious, high-priest clergyman of Futurism). See the broadside Dada Soulève Tout (Paris: au Sans Pareil, January 12, 1921). 70. Smithson, Collected, 107. 71. See Motherwell, Dada Painters, 51–54. 72. Compare “ ‘THE’ [Part I],” The World 15, no. 2 (March 1969), with Gretchen Berg’s “Nothing to Lose: An Interview with Andy Warhol,” Cahiers du Cinéma (English) 10 (May 1967): 38–43. 73. Coolidge, Smithsonian, 43. 74. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques: An Anthropological Study of Primitive Societies in Brazil, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Atheneum, 1974), 44. 75. Charles Bernstein, “Coolidge,” Stations 3 (Winter 1978): 5; Bernstein uses the phrase to signal the radical minimalism of Coolidge’s focus (“stripping away any thing that distances, a reducing to bare form, aesthetic, way of seeing, pure judgement”); Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 19. 76. Engass, Geopoetry; see Alan Halsey, “From a Diary of Reading Clark Coolidge,” Jacket 13 (2001), http://jacketmagazine.com/13/coolidge-halsey.html (accessed December 21, 2017); Jerome J. McGann, Social Value and Poetic Acts: The Historical Judgment of Literary Work (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 209. McGann is referring to the work of Tina Darragh, to which I will turn in the next

Notes to pages 114–18 / 221 chapter. For a consideration of the dictionary’s significance for both Coolidge and Darragh, see Giles Goodland, “Long Poems about Every thing: Dictionary as Subject and Model for Poem, 1974–2016,” in Poetry and the Dictionary, ed. Andre Blades and Piers Pennington (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019). For a reading of the cave in Coolidge’s work as “an archetypal site of epistemological crisis,” and “a site where agency, particularly masculine agency, is placed in doubt,” see Paul Stephens, “Coolidgean Ex-Cavations: Landscape, Memory, and Masculinity in the Late 1970s Poetry of Clark Coolidge,” Mesh (National Poetry Foundation), vectors.usc.edu /throughtmesh/publish/128php (accessed December 17, 2017). 77. Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 135; Barrett Watten, Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 20. 78. Coolidge, The Maintains (Oakland: This Press, 1974), 63. 79. Elsewhere in The Maintains, Coolidge puts the vowel through all its paces in the couplet “of while let / a lit yield” (67), with the additional mirroring of l-t and the play of the voiceless labialized velar approximant at the beginning of “while” and the palatal approximant at the beginning of “yield” each followed by the liquid consonant l. 80. Coolidge, The Maintains, 69. 81. Coolidge, “Furniture Music,” 153. 82. See John Cage, “Empty Words,” Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 11–78; Foster, “Interview,” 19. 83. Foster, “Interview,” 19. 84. Ron Silliman, “Ubeity,” Stations 5 (Winter 1978): 21. 85. Paul de Man, “Return to Philology,” The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 21–26. 86. Foster, “Interview,” 19; 35. 87. New Collegiate, 105. 88. Ibid., 144. 89. Ibid., 104. 90. Ibid., 104–5. 91. Ibid., 256. 92. Coolidge, The Maintains, 10; New Collegiate, 435. Compare other lines in The Maintains such as “dropped / edge of other like” (5), “unite on the end or edge of flense” (15), “a true jut / some pure edge” (29), and “edge the after keeps well” (41). 93. New Collegiate, 478. 94. Ibid.; compare: “2. Mil. To advance (two units) by keeping one in action and moving / the other past it to a more advanced position. . . .” 95. Coolidge, The Maintains, 26. 96. See New Collegiate at “patch,” both noun and verb (616). On the same page one finds “patois” (“jargon”), “pathway” (“footpath”), and “patent.” Immediately following “gala” in the New Collegiate one finds the entry for “galactic,” etymologically from the Greek “galaktikos milky, fr. gala, -aktos, milk,” the final word of which is typeset to the left margin of the column (339). 97. Ibid., 458. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid.; see the definition of “Junior League”: “composed of young women of leisure,” New Collegiate 458.

222 / Notes to pages 118–23 100. Coolidge, The Maintains, 77. 101. Ibid., 85. 102. Ibid., 71. 103. Ibid., 49. 104. New Collegiate, 554. 105. Ibid., 385. 106. Coolidge, The Maintains, 37. 107. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 24. 108. Ben Johnson, “Tale of a Tub,” The Workes of Benjamin Johnson (London: Richard Meighem, 1640), 2:87. See Robert Blackley Drummond, Erasmus: His Life and Character as Shown in His Correspondence and Works (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1873), 281; Drummond traces the saying to a translation of the Greek “Πολλὰ μεταξὺ πέλει κύλικος καὶ χείλεος ἄκρου” (Pollá metaxy pélei kylikos kai cheíleos ákrou). 109. New Collegiate, 191. 110. Ibid., 183. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid., 738. 114. Ibid., 183. Compare the line “a gap or under coverture,” which spans the gap of the binding gutter to connect language from the entries for “discontinuity” (“a gap”) and “discovert” (“Law. Not covert or under coverture”). New Collegiate, 236–37. 115. Ibid., 183, 379. 116. Ibid., 190. 117. Ibid. 118. Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988), 510. Bunting might have consulted F. A. Weber, Nuovo dizionario italiano-tedesco e tedesco-italiano composito sui migliori vocabolarii delle due lingue (Turin: Lipsia, 1874), 2:129, or F. E. Feller, Handwörterbuch der italienischen und deutschen sprache (Leipzig: Teubner, 1855), 2:107. 119. Pound describes the inalterable and furtive “luminous details” as part of a poetic methodology: A few dozen facts of this nature give us intelligence of the period—a kind of intelligence not to be gathered from a great array of facts of the other sort. These facts are hard to find. They are swift and easy of transmission. They govern knowledge as the switchboard governs an electric circuit. Ezra Pound, “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris,” The New Age: A Weekly Review of Politics, Literature and Art 10 (December 7, 1911): 130. Perhaps intimating the haiku’s model of oblique poetic compression, Pound recounts, “A Japanese student in America, on being asked the difference between prose and poetry, said: Poetry consists of gists and piths.” Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions, 1957), 92. 120. New Collegiate, 535. 121. Coolidge, The Maintains, 13. 122. Ibid., 90. 123. New Collegiate, 642. 124. Ibid.

Notes to pages 123–27 / 223 125. Ibid. 126. See New Collegiate, 924. 127. Ibid., 19. The stanza additionally borrows (again finding its words along the left margin of the column) from the etymology of Immanuel (“god with us”) and the definitions for “immanence” (an “imminent state”) and “immediate” (“next in line,” “without the intervention of another object”), “immigration” (“given period”), and impartible (“not subject to partition”); “pound,” in this instance, is part of the compound “compound” hyphenated in the entry for “imide.” 128. Ibid., 414. 129. Coolidge, The Maintains, 26, 65; New Collegiate, 642; Coolidge, The Maintains, 82; New Collegiate, 197. 130. Coolidge, The Maintains, 29, 30; New Collegiate, 57. 131. Ibid., 7. Through something like the transitive property of lexicon, “silver pitches” and “pitch drink” lead in a late line to “silver drinking” (79); “words are beings who absent themselves, as why should they not have puzzles of their own to trace,” Coolidge writes elsewhere (Mine, 110). 132. Such misprisions and parapraxes are often tellingly suggestive: “nest” ghosts behind “guest” under the gravitational pull of “inquest” (“see coroner”) when the definition of “inquiline” (from the Latin inquilinus, a synonym of hospes, guest, signifying a tenant or lodger), “an animal, esp. a hymenopteran, that lives habitually in the nest or abode of some other species” is adapted to the line “a coroner or guest of some other species”; “guest,” in short, takes up residence as a guest in the natural abode of another word. New Collegiate, 434; Coolidge, The Maintains, 10. Similarly, with a turn to Coolidge’s geological obsession, “rooky” (the rare adjective denoting someplace “full of, or abounding in rooks”) is petrified into a “light house abounding in rocks” (where “light house” appears to pun on “beam” and “house” in the neighboring entry for “roof”) New Collegiate, 735; Coolidge, The Maintains, 11. 133. In reference to Dave Tough’s signature four-beat bass-drum finale to otherwise completed numbers, Coolidge quotes Woody Herman as saying, “Yeah, well, we never could stand to end a number.” Coolidge, “Kerouac,” 43. Dexter Morrill has likened that finale to “a runaway truck coming to a halt.” Woody Herman: A Guide to the Big Band Recordings 1936–1987 (Greenwood Press, 1990), 5. For the connection between musicality and caves in Coolidge’s work, see Wilson, “ Cave Art.” 134. Coolidge, “Kerouac,” 43. Coolidge’s dictionary reads “soil, sand, gravel or similar detrital material deposited by running water.” New Collegiate at “alluvium.” 135. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems (New York: Vintage, 1990), 203; Aram Saroyan, Coffee Coffee (New York: 0–9, 1967); Robert Creeley, Pieces (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 14; Clark Coolidge, Ing; Space, 68; The So (New York: Adventures in Poetry, 1971). 136. Coolidge, The Maintains, 90, 91; for “so” denoting “homosexual,” see The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, ed. Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor (London: Routledge, 2013), 2083. 137. Coolidge, The Maintains, 83. 138. Ibid., 3, 80; on the material foil of the mirror as the grounds and horizon of figural reflection, see Rudolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 6. 139. Coolidge, The Maintains, 56. Compare with the earlier play of “tail” against “train” (7).

224 / Notes to pages 127–30 140. This 6. 141. “Conversation with Clark Coolidge,” This 4. 142. Coolidge, Smithsonian, 39. Judd’s complaint reads, in context: “Quite a few of my pieces have been worn out in shows, leaving me and the Castelli Gallery with the construction cost. Mostly it’s been accumulated damage. A few have been destroyed.” Donald Judd, “Complaints, Part II,” Complete Writings 1959–1975: Gallery Reviews Book Reviews Articles Letters to the Editor Reports Statements Complaints (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005), 209. 143. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 198. 144. Andre, CUTS, 84. 145. Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, 5 (October–November, 1965). 146. Clay Perry, New England’s Buried Trea sure (New York: Stephen Daye Press, 1946), 150. 147. This 6; Collegiate at “bore.” 148. Jed Rasula, Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 105. 149. Clark Coolidge, “Arrangement,” in Talking Poetics from Naropa Institute: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, ed. Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg (Boulder: Shambala, 1978), 1:152. With a title that recalls the caverns in Luray, Virginia, to which his parents took him when he was ten, Coolidge’s poem “In Virginia” (Boston Eagle, November 1974), explores the “special use of vocabulary & syntax” that he hears among cavers. Coolidge explains, in a letter to Paul Metcalf: “The material for In Virginia came from an incredibly thorough 761 pp. volume, The Caves of Virginia. A twenty year project by the Virginia Cave Survey, they checked out all 1790 caves in the state known by the year 1964.” From each entry, Coolidge “selected the sentence he most liked of those containing the cave’s name.” Stations, 29, 4. 150. Coolidge, The Maintains, 9. 151. Coolidge and Mayer, The Cave, 17.

5 / The Random House Dictionary of the English Language and the Poetry of Tina Darragh 1. Darragh is currently employed as Deputy Director for Research at the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University. As Darragh herself says, “my proofreading job set me up for a life of dictionary work.” “Author’s Statement,” Action Yes Online Quarterly 1, no. 12 (Winter 2010), http://actionyes.org /issue9/darragh _inman/darragh1.html. 2. Tina Darragh, adv. fans—the 1968 series (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1993). 3. For a consideration of quotation, textual interface, and “survive,” see Jacques Derrida, “Living On,” trans. James Hulbert, in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Seabury, 1979), 75–176. 4. Carl Hjalmar Borgstrøm and Magne Oftedal, eds., Linguistic Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1940–56). 5. Tina Darragh, Striking Resemblance: Work 1980–1986 (Providence: Burning Deck, 1989), 15; Ann Vickery, Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 194.

Notes to pages 130–33 / 225 6. The second poem in Darragh’s On the Corner to Off the Corner, titled “ ‘vetchling’ to ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for ‘B,’ ” performs the reverse operation; rather than remove three prefixing letters to leave a series of abstract sounds, it indicates what sounds to add to fen- in order to arrive at the correct definitions. Starting with fen (“low land covered wholly or partly with water”) the poem moves to fence: “Add ‘(t)s’ to ‘lowland’ and prevent escape or intrusion.” Further agglutinations produce the sounds for fend, fenestra, Fenian, fennec, fennel, and fenugreek—none of which appears in the poem, but all of which have snippets of their definitions reproduced. See Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield: G. & C. Merriam, 1972), 422. “Fen” here might recall the poetic pré of Francis Ponge, a reference made explicit in the title of Darragh’s collaboration with Marcella Durand, Deep Eco Pré (Houston: Little Red Leaves, 2009). On the Corner to Off the Corner is dedicated “in appreciation of Francis Ponge,” and in a(gain)2st the odds (Elmwood, IL: Potes and Poets, 1989), Darragh’s tellingly titled “Preface” begins with a long passage from Ponge. As Darragh explains the methodology of her dictionary poetic in “Procedure,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 7 (March 1979): Francis Ponge’s SOAP introduced me to “procedural” writing. He had: taken what was at hand, let it refer to itself and then tracked the process as it would go. So I: take what is at hand (the dictionary), pick a page at random, use the key words heading the page as “directions,” find a pattern and/or flow of the words and write it down, trying to retain as much of the procedure as possible in the prose. Furthermore, Darragh recalls, “One of my college professors, the poet Michael Lally, had given me Ponge’s Soap as an example of a poet renewing words in the world while continuing to be politically active” (Action Yes). For more on Ponge and the dictionary, see Christophe Lamiot, Eau sur eau (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 42–61. 7. Darragh’s transcription is generally straightforward, though one might note that in place of the military designation of “B-” for bomber (as in B-29), she has it “stand for Boeing.” 8. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 19. 9. Ibid., 18. 10. The Random House Dictionary of the English Language (New York: Random House, 1967). 11. James M. Cain, Mildred Pierce (New York: Knopf, 1941); the phrase recurs some half-dozen times in the first two chapters. 12. OED at “grass widow.” See Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53 (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853); Harold Marsh Harwood and Robert Gore Browne, Cynara: A Play in a Prologue, Three Acts and an Epilogue, Adapted from “An Imperfect Lover” (London: Samuel French, 1930); Roy Hoopes, Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982). Alternately, the date of Darragh’s entry may have come from the opening of Hoopes’s biography: “In 1938, forty-six-year-old James M. Cain . . . went to considerable effort to learn as much he could about his roots” (3). 13. Henry Louis Mencken, The American Language, 4th rev. ed. (New York: Knopf, 1936), 167. 14. Cain, Mildred Pierce, 78. 15. Ibid.

226 / Notes to pages 133–38 16. Mencken, American Language, 167. 17. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 58. 18. See ibid., 57–58; see also Eric Partridge, Dictionary of the Underworld, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). 19. Julian Franklyn, Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1975). 20. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 58. 21. Ibid., 55, 58. 22. Tina Darragh, Pi in the Skye (New York: Direct Press/Modern Litho, 1980), opp. 1. 23. Darrah, Striking Resemblance, 42. 24. Random House Dictionary, 841. 25. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1967), chap. 1. 26. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 40. 27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C.K. Ogden (London: Routledge, 1922), §5.5423. Wittgenstein would later return to the problem of perceiving a complex of facts with the similarly ambiguous “duck-rabbit” drawing from Joseph Jastrow’s Fact and Fable in Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 295, borrowed from a humorous item in Harper’s Weekly (November 19, 1892), 1,114, which was copied in turn from the Fliegende Blätter (October 23, 1892), 147; see Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 194. 28. For those without the dictionary at hand, the front face features “round dance” (hora), “spike bowsprit” (horn bowsprit), “mark length” (from the phonology of horde), “leaves & small” (from the “downy leaves and small whitish flowers” of the hore-hound), “[with-]out a horizon” (horizonless), “[sub-]mitted by such” (work offered hors concours, from page 685) and “guard pin” (from the horological sense of horn in a lever escarpment). The back face, accordingly, connects horn in the sense of “tortoise [shell, hoofs, nails,] corns,” “[re-]sembling flint” (hornstone), “varying cross” (from the radio sense of horn as “a tube of varying cross section used in some loudspeakers to couple the diaphragm to the sound transmitting space”), “ovenshaped mound” (hornito), “glacial cinques” (the geological sense of horn), “out of (the) work” (the translation of hors d’oeuvre, from page 685), and “[protu-]berant part” (in the sense of horn denoting the pommel of a saddle). 29. Wittgenstein, Investigations, esp. 66; later instances contrast “seeing” with “interpreting” (e.g., at 194ff.). 30. Similar suspicions arise in the case of several poems explicated below: “perspective,” for instance, may have led to the opening (pages 1686–87) “perserverer” to “persuasibility” of the Webster’s Third New International used for “ ‘townsman’ to ‘trachle’ for ‘N’ ” in On the Corner to Off the Corner, and “cut out” on the page from “Exposed Faces” that samples from the language for “cycloid.” 31. An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art, ed. Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 411. 32. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 46–48; see Random House Dictionary, 439, 1523, and 827 respectively. The coincidence that the unusual specialist word “libration” appears in both the first poem and an entry facing the page used to source the third poem suggests that they may be related by Darragh’s own librarian use of the dictionary.

Notes to pages 138–146 / 227 33. Tina Darragh, “Error Message,” Poetics Journal 5 (May 1985): 120. Compare the motivation of the gulch in “rent seck” to the traversal of the gutter strips in “ ‘luteous’ to ‘lymph’ for ‘F’ ” in On the Corner to Off the Corner, which features an epigraph from the second entry for lynch: a “strip of unplowed land marking the boundary between two fields.” Centered primarily in the middle column of the Random House, page 856, the trace of the dictionary’s language makes deliberate trespass to adjacent entries in the first and second columns (from the “long lim[bs]” of the “canaden[sis]” “lynx” to “lymphatic” for “[for]merly,” and from the etymology of lysine [“Gk lýsis, as loosening, equiv. to lý(ein)”], to the constellation Lyra, which includes the star “Vega”). 34. Darragh, “Procedure.” 35. Jerome J. McGann, “Contemporary Poetry, Alternate Routes,” in Politics and Poetic Value, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 264. 36. In “volcanic tuff,” for another instance, “a town in NW Texas” (Tulia) becomes “a town in North Ame”; “man of an” becomes “tan of an”; “called deer f[ly]” occurs well outside the viewing angle; “a flower bulb” is truncated to “a bu”; schwa symbols are rendered as the letter a, and so on. 37. See Francis Ponge, “Braque, or the Meditation of the Work,” in G. Braque (New York: Abrams, 1971), 65. The other citations in the quartet of collaged quotations that makes up the “Author’s Preface” further relate geometric figures to the Lacanian unconscious, hierarchical structures, and the deprecation of “the private, subjective realm.” 38. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 36. 39. Ibid., 45. 40. Ibid., 37. 41. Ibid., 38. Compare with the second definition in the OED: “spec. (in technical use). To consolidate by pounding or ramming down (as earth or rubble, in setting poles, etc., or making a roadway).” 42. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 39. 43. Ibid., 36. 44. Ibid., 45. 45. Miles Davis, On the Corner (Columbia KC 31906, 1972). 46. See Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish, Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (New York: Prentice Hall, 2009), 22. For the political valence of A’s mnemonics, see Patricia Crain, The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). 47. Marjorie Perloff, “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” American Poetry Review 13, no. 3 (May–June 1984): 15; Webster’s New Collegiate, 1207. The poem progresses through language from the definitions for thalassemia, thalassic, Thalia, thallium, the prefixes thall- or thallo, and Thanatos. 48. Darragh, “Procedure.” 49. Darragh, a(gainst)2. 50. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 1:387. 51. See H. A. Overstreet, About Ourselves: Psychology for Normal People (New York: Norton, 1927), 241. 52. Hank Lazer, Opposing Poetries, Part I: Issues and Institutions (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 45.

228 / Notes to pages 148–158 53. Tina Darragh, “ ‘A’ is for ‘ox,’ ” Là-bas 11 (March–April 1978): 12; the poem is not included in the Sun & Moon Press book. 54. The words shorn are the pronunciation guides shar- and ət (from “sharability”), the grammatical abbreviation vb defining “sharecrop,” the “tenant farmer” that defines “sharecropper,” and on through “Fatima” (ancestor of sharif ), “predominantly,” “numerous,” “size,” “active,” “importance,” “rapacious,” “extortion,” “his” (for “him”), “sho” (as the pronunciation guide for “shaw”), “shag” (the lemma where more of the etymology of “shaw” can be found), “follows,” “ME”: and “L” (for Middle English and Latin), “double,” “sha” (in the pronunciation of “Shawnee”), “formation,” “HE,” “feminine,” “person” (for “ears”), “cousin,” “forelock,” “sometimes,” “resembling,” and adj. 55. February 16, 1994, audio recording archived at Pennsound, http://writing .upenn.edu/pennsound/x /Darragh.php (accessed November 18, 2017). 56. See Collegiate Dictionary 131, 223. 57. In the Sun & Moon Press edition, “pentrose” replaces “pentose” from the earlier Roof publication, perhaps under the influence of the other kind of hip: “the ripened accessory fruit of a rose” (as the Collegiate defines it). Moreover, the final entry in the Roof version reads “solleret,” the term used in the Webster’s family of dictionaries. The Sun & Moon Press version appears to have been corrected against the similar illustration in the Random House family of dictionaries. For the record, the lines quote from the definitions for cubic, cuboid, cuckoopint, pericardium, culm, cultch, perigean and pericycle, perch and percoid, peridotite and per for mance, cuttle bone, perilla, percheron and perilune, perlite, peritrichous and periwinkle—all pericope cuttings from the Collegiate Dictionary. 58. Tina Darragh, “Exposed Faces,” A•Bacus 4 (July 1984). 59. Ibid. 60. See Armand Schwerner, (If Personal) (Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1968). 61. The difficulty of identifying Darragh’s source is compounded by frequent discrepancies between the dictionary text and her poem; “Nineveh,” for one instance, from the entry for Ninus, becomes “Ninevel” in “Exposed Faces,” while “calls names” becomes “a manes,” and so on (cf. Random House pages 967 and 949, respectively). 62. The technique here recalls certain poems by Vito Acconci. One describes its own typewritten parameters, beginning “Margins on this paper are set, on the left, one inch from the edge, at e, t, i,, o, i, n, a, v,, -, a, o, b, [. . .]” and so on. See Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci, ed. Craig Dworkin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 120. In Acconci’s Transference, for another example, a series of “installations” singled out the letters framing the margins of various pages of Roget’s Thesaurus (241ff.). 63. The only other poems to keep to the page indicated by their titles are “ ‘luteous’ to ‘lymph’ for ‘F,’ ” “ ‘almost everywhere’ to ‘alpine fir’ for ‘T,’ ” and “ ‘Doctor of Philosophy’ to ‘doge’ for ‘Z.’ ” Uniquely, “ ‘townsman’ to ‘trachle’ for ‘N’ ” works from the corresponding page in Webster’s. 64. Tina Darragh, “Procedure.” 65. See Random House Dictionary, 819–20. The run is continued in the antepenultimate poem “ ‘-lent’ to ‘lepthorrhine’ for ‘X.’ ” The title “ ‘yea’ to ‘yill’ for ‘W’ ” also describes an opening. 66. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 36.

Notes to pages 158–163 / 229 67. Jan Westerhoff, Twelve Examples of Illusion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 38. 68. McGann, “Contemporary,” 266. 69. Darragh, Striking Resemblance, 42. 70. For a reading of Darragh’s work against the standard use of the dictionary “as source of mastery and security,” which is meant to “function as regulator of social and linguistic order,” see Nathan Austin, “Lost in the Maze of Words: Reading and Re-Reading Noah Webster’s Dictionaries” (PhD diss., SUNY Buffalo, 2004), esp. 247. 71. Tina Darragh, Opposable Dumbs, expanded edition as ZimZalla Object 001, https://zimzalla.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/tina-darragh-opposable-dumbs.pdf (accessed November 11, 2017).

6 / Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge 1. Clark Coolidge and Larry Fagin, On the Pumice of Morons (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1993). The pamphlet, with wrappers printed in decorative gold on presidential blue stock, is set in 12-point Bembo type to imitate the look of Angelou’s commemorative publication by Random House (New York, 1993). 2. Anthologie de l’OuLiPo (Paris: Gallimard, 2009), 517–18. The dictionary also serves as the key instrument in the practice of “littérature définitionnelle [definitional literature]” defined by Queneau and practiced even earlier by Stefan Themerson, Bayamus and Cardinal Pölätüo (Cambridge: Exact Change, 1997). Marcel Bénabou explains the rule as follows: dans un énoncé donné, on remplace chaque vocable signifiant (substantif, adjectif, verbe, adverbe) par une de ses définitions dans un dictionnaire donné; on réitère l’opération sur le nouvel énoncé obtenu, et ainsi de suite in a given statement, one replaces each significant word (noun, adjective, verb, adverb) by one of its definitions from a given dictionary; the operation is repeated on the new sentence thus obtained, and so on. (417) The poetic potential of the procedure became immediately apparent: “remplacé par la définition qu’en donnerait un dietionnaire ingénu, chaque mot de prose vulgaire devient semence poétique [replaced by the definition given by an ingenious dictionary, every word of vulgar prose becomes the seed of poetry].” René Etiemble, review of St. John Perse’s Exil, Valeurs: Revue de critique et de littérature 2 (July 1945): 61; reprinted in Hygiène des lettres (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), 4:147. The most extensive investigation into definitional literature by the OuLiPo was conducted by Georges Perec and Marcel Bénabou in a collaboration that I discuss elsewhere. “The Potential Energy of Texts [∆U = −P∆V],” Iowa Review 44, no. 2 (Winter 2014). 3. http://www.oed.com. 4. Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 103. 5. Amy Robbins, “Harryette Mullen’s ‘Sleeping with the Dictionary’ and Race in Language/Writing,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 349. 6. John Keats, letter to J. H. Reynolds, May 3, 1818, in Selected Letters of John Keats, ed. Grant F. Scott, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 122–23.

230 / Notes to pages 163–164 7. The copy also invokes Bernadette Mayer, who may well have written such poems but is hardly known for them; however, her widely circulated list of writing “experiments” came to include a version of the technique: Take a traditional text like the pledge of allegiance to the flag. For every noun, replace it with one that is seventh or ninth down from the original one in the dictionary. For instance, the word “honesty” would be replaced by “honey dew melon.” Investigate what happens; different dictionaries will produce different results See http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mayer-Bernadette _ Experiments.html. Earlier versions simply exhorted, “use dictionary constantly, plain & etymological (rhyming, etc.).” Bernadette Mayer, “Experiments,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 3 (June 1978). 8. On Mullen’s interest in the OuLiPo, see Barbara Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen: Interviews on Sleeping with the Dictionary and Other Works (New York: Belladonna, 2011), 25–27, 40. 9. Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 20, 75. 10. Fran Ross, Oreo (New York: New Directions, 2015), 84. Mullen contributes the “Afterword” to this edition. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, 91. 14. See also the frequent references to dictionaries in a 1997 interview, Farah Griffin and Michael Magee, “A Conversation with Harryette Mullen,” Combo 1 (Summer 1998): 40, 42, 49 (multiple occurrences), as well as the turn to Juan Eduardo Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, trans. Jack Sage (New York: Philosophical Library, 1971), in “Imagining the Unimagined Reader,” in American Women Poets in the 20th Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, ed. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 403. Mullen discusses the dictionary source of “Dim Lady,” the origin of her book title, and her interest in dictionaries in Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, 63, 42–43, 89–92. Mullen’s book shares its title with a 1976 arts and crafts compendium for children, Robin Simons, Recyclopedia: Games, Science Equipment, and Crafts from Recycled Materials (New York: Penguin, 1976). Compare Mullen’s similar statements here: It is literally true that I sometimes fall asleep with books I’ve taken to bed, including the big dictionary. It’s significant to me that my American Heritage Dictionary was compiled with the aid of African American writers Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps as well as feminist author Gloria Steinem. Thanks to my mother, an elementary school teacher, I have loved encyclopedias and dictionaries since childhood. Along with other volumes, my shelf includes A Feminist Dictionary, compiled by Paula Treichier [Treichler] and Cheris Kramarae, and Clarence Major’s Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African American Slang, an impor tant source for the lexicon of Muse & Drudge. See Harryette Mullen, The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be: Essays and Interviews (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 209. One critic goes so far as to read the book not just as an abecedary, but as a dictionary

Notes to pages 165–166 / 231 itself: Nadia Nurhussein, “The Puzzle of Dialect in Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary,” Modern Language Studies 42, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 36. 15. Griffin and Magee, “Conversation,” 40. 16. Lyn Hejinian, “If Written Is Writing,” L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E 1, no. 3 (June 1978): np. 17. Griffin and Magee, “Conversation,” 40. 18. The translation is drawn from Diane Raynor and William Batsone, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry: An Anthology of New Translations (London: Routledge, 1994), 341. Compare: “Indeed, when I for the first time placed a tablet on my / knees, Apollo, the Lycian, said this to me: ‘poet, feed your thyos as fat as possible, but keep, my dear friend, your Muse slender.’ ” Egil Kraggerud, Vergiliana: Critical Studies on the Texts of Publius Vergilius Maro (New York: Routledge, 2017). 19. James J. Clauss, The Best of the Argonauts: Redefinition of the Epic Hero in Book One of Apollonius’ Argonautica (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 15. Clarence Major defines Sapphire as a “derogatory term for a disagreeable woman; in the sixties, an unpopu lar black female.” Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of AfricanAmerican Slang (New York: Viking, 1994). On binaries in Muse & Drudge, see Marjorie Perloff, “Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 169. On the poem’s relation to epic, see Evie Schockley, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2011), 82–118. 20. The Oxford Dictionary of the Classical World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 126–27. In Diane Raynor’s translation, the relevant lines read: “follow trails unrutted by wagons, / don’t drive your chariot down public highways, / but keep to the backroads though the going is narrow. / We are the poets for those who love / the cricket’s high chirping, not the noise of the jackass.” Raynor and Batsone, Latin Lyric and Elegiac Poetry, 342. The mule is a crux in Callimachus’s oeuvre, see Callimachus, Aetia: Introduction, Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. Annette Harder (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1:481–82. For a reading of the relation between Callimachus’s text and Catullus’s “Sabinus ille,” a poem about the “mule trade,” as staging in microcosm the cultural tensions between discrepant social hierarchies and specialist access to culture esoterica, as mediated by slavery, see Elizabeth Marie Young, Translation as Muse: Poetic Translation in Catullus’s Rome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 103–4. 21. Harryette Mullen, Muse & Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1995), 25, 49, 33. The Sappho quote, in context, reads, “At once Trojan men harnessed mules / to the smooth-running carriages, a whole throng / of women and slender-ankled maidens stepped in” Mullen also quotes from an earlier line describing “ships on the brine / sea.” Diane Raynor, Sappho’s Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 76. Rayburn’s favored saying was, “Any mule can kick a barn door down, but it takes a carpenter to build it”; quoted in Lyndon Johnson, “Remarks at a Reception for the Presidential Scholars of 1968,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1968–1969 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1969), 703. The mule pulled from the mud “dragging backwoods along / in our strong blackward progress” may echo the prompting slogan of broken Reconstruction promises and unachieved reparations for slavery: “40 acres and a mule.”

232 / Notes to pages 166–168 22. Cf. “De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see.” Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 19–20; the lines “standing in my tracks / stepping back on my abstract,” signifying to stand one’s ground, come from Hurston as well: “Ah’m standin’ in my tracks and steppin’ back on my abstract.” Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men, in Folklore, Memoirs, and Other Writing (New York: Library of America, 1995), 82. 23. The Book of Common Prayer, 1559: The Elizabethan Prayer Book, ed. John E. Booty (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1976), 292. 24. See, for example, “But those people deserve to be reproached who are ploughing a hard and stony soil. And who can these be but they who have connected themselves with barren women?” Philo, “On Special Laws,” in Works of Philo Judaeus, The Contemporary of Josephus, trans. C. D. Yonge (London: Henry Bohn, 1885), 3:312; for an alternate (though not incompatible) explication of these lines see Shockley, Renegade, 95–96. 25. The previous stanza, in contrast, suggests the conception signified by amenorrhea: “arrives early for the date / to tell him she’s late / he watches her bio clock balk on seepy time” (39). Note that the “seep” of menstrual discharge, here, phonetically encodes the acronymic “c.p. time,” for “colored people’s time”: “one to two hours later than the appointed time.” Major, Juba to Jive. 26. For an overview of the history of “Stagger Lee,” see Richard E. Buehler, “Stacker Lee: A Partial Investigation into the Historicity of a Negro Murder Ballad,” Keystone Folklore Quarterly 12, no. 3 (Fall 1967): 187–91. Major provides entries for both “Stagger Lee” and “Stagolee” in Juba to Jive. 27. Calvin Bedient, “The Solo Mysterioso Blues: An Interview with Harryette Mullen,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 668; Meta DuEwa Jones, insightfully, sees the blues as a model for this rearrangeability, linking theme to form. The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 158; see Shockley for the performance aspect of this modularity: Renegade, 89. 28. OED at “bedlam.” 29. Major, Juba to Jive, at “shine.” Sterling Brown first identifies the literary trope of the “tragic mulatto” and the “melodrama of the octoroon,” The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937), 108–13, 118, 141. For a consideration of the mulatto figure as “a narrative device of mediation” which “allows for a fictional exploration of the relationship between the races while being at the same time an imaginary expression of the relationship between the races,” see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 171; for an overview of the stereotype, including “the possibility of reading the Tragic Mulatto as a vehicle for the criticism of ‘race,’ ” see Werner Sollors, Neither White Not Black Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), esp. chap. 8. See Judith Berzon, Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978). On the gendered valence of the figure, see Eva Allegra Raimon, The “Tragic Mulatta” Revisited: Race and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Antislavery Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004); on the figure of the mulatto in the post-Reconstruction period, see Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per formances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

Notes to pages 168–169 / 233 2006), 49ff. Mullen herself addresses the literary trope, with special attention to the racial status of readership, in her dissertation “Gender and the Subjugated Body: Readings of Race, Subjectivity, and Difference in the Construction of Slave Narratives” (University of California, Santa Cruz, 1990), 252–55; of par ticu lar relevance to Muse & Drudge are her arguments about the collision of ideologies of gender and race, where “in literature of the nineteenth century, white females and mulatto (quadroon, octoroon, etc.) females are feminized to the degree that they embody those bourgeois ideals which are designated as inappropriate to the public sphere” (238). 30. Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words Are Deduced from Their Originals, Explained in Their Different Meanings, and Authorized by the Name of Writers in Whose Works They are Found (Edinburgh: Brown, Ross & Symington, 1797). 31. Harryette Mullen, “Preface: Recycle This Book,” Recyclopedia (St. Paul: Graywolf, 2006), x; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 67. 32. In 1940s slang, Major informs, “frimpted” is an adjective signifying “unattractive,” while “frone” denotes “an unattractive woman.” Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 34. The theme of cosmetic witchcraft recurs in the “skin and nail conjuration” of a “racy make-up artist” (21) and a skin “elixir” (34). 33. Major, Juba to Jive, at “passing”; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 23. 34. The language of value (“slander”) and the pursuit of a thinner body come together in the pun “sue for slender” (Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 8), a theme that Mullen identifies as “the body image of black women” in cultures where the model of kin has a stronger pull than that of advertising, and in which anorexia is less prevalent; on the continuum between “the super-skinny black model versus Aunt Jemima,” as Mullen schematizes it, she sees Muse & Drudge as an attempt to trouble “those kinds of oppositional constructions of black women.” Bedient, “The Solo Mysterioso Blues,” 660. See Elizabeth Frost, “An Interview with Harryette Mullen,” Contemporary Literature 42, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 412, where fat aligns with “mule” and slender with the “muse” of Josephine Baker; elsewhere, Mullen relates her book S*PeRM**K*T (Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1992) to issues of body image and eating disorders in the gendered, commercial world of the domestic consumer culture. Emily Allen Williams, “Harryette Mullen, ‘The Queen of Hip Hyperbole’: An Interview,” African American Review 34, no. 4 (Winter 2000): 705. 35. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 4, 34. 36. Big Maybelle (Mabel Louise Smith), “No Better For You” (Port Records 45-3002/P4094, 1965). A different blues-inflected jazz song by the same title had been recorded a dozen years earlier by a performer with an equally descriptive epithet, Lloyd “Fatman” Smith. See Peacock 1611 (1953). 37. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 33. Schockley, who makes the case for the significance of the literary tradition behind the folk stylings of Muse & Drudge, offers a subtle reading of this line against the intertext of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “Sadie and Maude,” Renegade, 109–11; cf. 105ff. The sense of celerity in Muse & Drudge has been widely noted. In a description of Oreo that hones in on the briskness of its language, Mullen also identifies the salient facets of Muse & Drudge: an extreme range of registers and allusions succeeding one another with a restless rapidity in an ambitious work that does not abjure comedic punning in its pursuit of gravely serious social issues; she describes the novel as “a high-culture pedigree as an innovative literary work” which

234 / Notes to pages 170–172 “also appropriates the low-brow shtick practiced by performers of stand-up comedy, along with the brisk hucksterism brought to you by advertising.” “Afterword,” 221. Following the lead of Mullen herself, who says “if you stand still too long, they will put chains on you, so you want to keep moving,” Robin Tremblay-McGaw reads the rapid shifts in grammar, tone, and reference as models of a fugitivity analogous to the strategies of evasive cuts and continued flight by an escaped slave. “Enclosure and Run: The Fugitive Recylopedia of Harryette Mullen’s Writing,” Melus 35, no. 2 (Summer 2010): 75. See Mullen’s torque of the figuratively oral and literally pedal senses of “run too far.” Harryette Mullen, “Runaway Tongue: Resistant Orality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Our Nig, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and Beloved,” in Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in 19th-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 244–64. Andrea Witzke Slot, less convincingly, reads the restless form as indicative of a contemporary social world, which it emulates. “Dialogic Poetry as Emancipatory Technology: Ventriloquy and Voiceovers in the Rhythmic Junctures of Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge,” in Poetry and Dialogism: Hearing Over, ed. Mara Scanlon and Chad Engbers (London: Palgrave, 2014), 160; Anthony Reed, alternately, offers a sophisticated understanding of these formal characteristics as central to the logic of what he terms “blues irony”: “the interruption of one discourse with a abrupt shift of register or unmotivated repetition” or citation. Freedom Time: The Poetics and Politics of Black Experimental Writing (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 136. “Constant escape is an ode to impurity,” as this chapter will work to corroborate. Fred Moten, Black and Blur: Consent Not to Be a Single Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 1. 38. Major, Juba to Jive. 39. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 49. 40. OED at “mélange.” 41. Ibid. at “plaçage.” 42. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 56, 64, 50. In the geology of North America, “gumbo” denotes types of prairie mud and “the stratified portion of the lower till of the Mississippi valley” (OED; Funk’s Standard Dictionary); colloquially, it names a type of argillaceous sediment, predominantly sodium montmorillonite, found in the southern gulf states. Johannes Fink, Petroleum Engineer’s Guide to Oil Field Chemicals and Fluids, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2015), 3.1.1. 43. See James Platt, “The Negro Element in English,” Athenaeum 3801 (September 1, 1900): 283. 44. OED at “ochre”; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 68. 45. Edward Foster, “An Interview with Clark Coolidge,” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 3 (Fall 1989): 19; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 71. 46. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 41. 47. Ross, Oreo, 214. 48. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 58. 49. Ibid., 53. 50. Newman Ivey White, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1928), 153. For the minstrel tradition of this ballad, see Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 51. OED at “macaroni.” 52. Mullen reveals the anagram in an interview with Calvin Bedient, “Solo Mysterioso,” 665. See Slang and Its Analogues Past and Present: A Dictionary

Notes to pages 173–175 / 235 Historical and Comparative of the Heterodox Speech of All Classes of Society for More Than Three Hundred Years, Vol. VII, Part I, ed. John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley (London: Harrison & Sons, 1903), 76. For further valences of this “folkloric aphorism,” see Houston A. Baker, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 45–46. For a smart reading of the form and theme of the anagram, following Frederick Ahl, see Mitchum Huehls, “Spun Puns (And Anagrams): Exchange, Economies, Subjectivity, and History in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Muse & Drudge,’ ” Contemporary Literature 44, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 43. 53. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 10. 54. Ibid., 23. 55. Ibid., 66. Major defines Darktown as “a black section of a city; a word often used in entertainment and in headlines in black newspapers.” Juba to Jive. 56. See, for example, “she is ink,” Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (Philadelphia: Singing Horse, 1991), 15, and in Muse & Drudge, “my kin but not my skin” (10); “kin split” (32); and for a version of the general procedure, “put the ink in think” (50). 57. Albert Valdman, Thomas A. Klinger, Margaret M. Marshall, and Kevin J. Rottet, Dictionary of Louisiana Creole (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 311. 58. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 64. Frost notes the anagram (“Interview,” 398), but does not account for the full name. 59. Roman Jakobson and Lawrence G. Jones, Shakespeare’s Verbal Art in Th’ Expence of Spirit (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 30. Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 19–22; Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, 41. Both Jakobson and Riffaterre were influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure’s work on the paragrammatic distribution of proper names in poetry; see Jean Starobinski, Les mots sur les mots: Les anagrammes de Ferdinand de Saussure (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). The jacket copy to Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary invokes Riffaterre. 60. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 167, 14; OED at “mulish.” 61. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 67, 15, 48, 2. On the racial signification of the blush see Mullen, Gender, 102–3, 131, 136, 238–39, 247–54. 62. Henri Morier, Dictionnaire de poétique et de rhétorique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961). 63. Matthew 16:18. 64. The passage also features in Ross’s Oreo: “Do you know in what New Testament verse Jesus makes a pun? the little smart-asses would say. “I’ll give you a clue—the name Peter means ‘rock.’ Give up? Nyah-nyah, Matthew 16:18!” (18). 65. Harryette Mullen, “African Signs and Spirit Writing,” Callaloo 19, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 625; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 12, 148; Mullen, “Afterward,” 224. 66. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 70. 67. Mullen, Cracks Between, 220–21. In one of the few passages in Muse & Drudge to sport quotation marks, Mullen quotes from a “Krazy Kat” panel: “[Go on you] fool weed, tumble your / head off—that dern wind / can move you, but / it can’t budge me [, on your way grass—]” (Muse & Drudge, 75; George Herriman, “Krazy Kat,” New York Journal, June 18, 1922. The source presumably explains the spellings in the follow stanza, “krazy kongograms,” and its scene of misinterpreted brickbats (the most consistently repeated conceit of the cartoon series involves one character hurling a brick at another, who takes the gesture as a sign of affection).

236 / Notes to pages 175–179 68. Frost, “Interview,” 406. 69. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 54. 70. Frost, “Interview,” 414. 71. Bedient, “Solo Mysterioso,” 666. 72. Juba to Jive at “kinky”; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 50. 73. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 47, 49, 37, 39. 74. Jacques Derrida, Signéponge/Signsponge, trans. Richard Rand (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 119/118. See the similar summary: Mais il n’y a pas de nom propre. Ce qu’on appelle du nom commun générique ‘nom propre’ doit bien fonctionner, lui aussi, dans un système de différences: tel ou tel nom propre plutôt qu’un autre se désigne tel ou tel individu plutôt qu’un autre et donc se trouve marqué par la trace de ces autres, dans une classification, ne fût-ce qu’à deux termes But there is no proper name. What is called by the generic common noun “proper name” must function, it too, in a system of differences: this or that proper name rather than another designates this or that individual rather than another and thus is marked by the trace of these others, in a classification, if only a two-term classification Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 101–2; Jacques Derrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 105. 75. Ibid., 21/20. 76. Jacques Derrida, Limited, Inc. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 20, 1. 77. Jacques Derrida, “Ulysses Gramophone: Hear Say Yes in Joyce,” trans. François Raffoul, Derrida and Joyce: Texts/Contexts, ed. Andrew James Mitchell and Sam Slots (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2013), 58, 66, 70–71. 78. Ibid., 68. 79. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 12, 80. The first line of this balancing quatrain stealthily quotes Patti Smith’s optative blessing: “In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. / In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.” “To the Reader,” Early Work: 1970–1979 (New York: Norton, 1994), x; the middle lines ventriloquize Arthur Vinson, describing to a folklorist the difference between church music and blues (the “devil’s music”), a topic directly relevant to Mullen’s own musical education and her sense of mixed audiences: “It’s not that much difference between the types of music. It’s just where you are and who you’re playing for, your audience.” Quoted in William Ferris, Blues from the Delta (New York: Da Capo Press, 1984), 83; as Mullen reveals: “the blues is something that I can identify with even though I didn’t grow up with it. We were one of those religious families who thought, ‘Oooh, this is the devil’s music’!” (Frost, “Interview,” 409). On Mullen’s acute sense of audience, see Griffin, “Conversation,” 47; Bedient, “Solo Mysterioso,” 664. See Jessica Lewis Luck, “Entries on a Post-Language Poetics in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Dictionary,’” Contemporary Literature 49, no. 3 (Fall 2008). On race and readership more generally, see Allison Cummings, “Public Subjects: Race and the Critical Reception of Gwendolyn Brooks, Erica Hunt, and Harryette Mullen,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26, no. 2 (2005): 3–46. 80. Hettie Jones, How I Became Hettie Jones (New York: Dutton, 1990), 5.

Notes to pages 179–183 / 237 81. Ibid. 82. Mullen, Cracks Between, 49. 83. Roland Barthes, Le bruissement du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1984), 63. 84. Riffaterre, Semiotics, 19. 85. Mullen, Cracks Between, 188. 86. Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 67. 87. Kyle Dargan, “Every thing We Can Imagine: An Interview with Harryette Mullen,” Callaloo 30, no. 4 (Fall 2007): 1015. 88. Jones, The Muse Is Music, 158. 89. Mullen, “Optic White,” 72; 87; Mullen, Muse & Drudge, 28. 90. Mullen, “Afterword,” 229. 91. Ibid., 214–15; Mullen, Cracks Between 75; see also 68. 92. Shockley, Renegade, 93, 106; Jennifer Ryan, Post-Jazz Poetics: A Social History (London: Palgrave, 2010), 159. 93. Frost, “Interview,” 408. 94. Matthew Hart, Nations of Nothing But Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 155. 95. Ibid., 221. Elsewhere Mullen also describes slave narratives, in generic terms, as “miscegenated texts” (“Optic White,” 80; cf. 83, 88). Amy Moorman Robbins narrativizes Mullen’s career as one in which earlier work, reflecting narrow “notions of black culture and black selfhood . . . gives way to hybridized and remixed notions of black female identity.” Robbins, “Race in Language,” 353. Elizabeth Frost describes Mullen’s works as exploring “the diverse influences and languages of a miscegenated culture.” The Feminist Avant-Garde in American Poetry (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2003), 155. Lauro Maia Amorim similarly employs the trope of miscegenation to read Mullen’s oeuvre. “The Invisible Blackness of Harryette Mullen’s Poetry: Writing, Miscegenation, and What Remains to Be Seen,” Revista de Letras 52, no. 1 (January–June 2012): 101–20. Shockley is notably less sanguine about the ability to recuperate or reclaim vocabulary that originated in the discourses of scientific racism; on “the limitations of terms like ‘mongrel,’ ‘hybrid,’ and ‘miscegenated’ as descriptions of the eclecticism of this text [i.e., Muse & Drudge],” see Shockley, Renegade, 113ff. One distressing correlate to the racialization of texts is the transfer of openly racist language to literary works, as when critics such as Cal Bedient and Fred Chappell refer to Mullen’s work as “uppity,” “sassy,” and displaying “a lot of attitude.” Bedient, “Solo Mysterioso,” 658; Fred Chappell, “Piecework: The Longer Poem Returns,” The Georgia Review 50, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 589. 96. Bedient, “Solo Mysterioso,” 652. 97. Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, 9. On the pedagogic implications of Mullen’s cultural knowledge, see Bob Perelman, Modernism the Morning After (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 106–19. 98. Mullen, Cracks Between, xv; Henning, Looking Up Harryette Mullen, 9. 99. Barthes, Le bruissement, 63. 100. Amorim, “ Invisible Blackness,” 111. 101. Some caution regarding the democratic power of the usage panel may be in order; one statistical study determined that “no correlation or interrelation can be found between Usage Panel Opinions and the treatment of the locutions in question within entries to which the usage notes are appended. The Usage Panel in AHD2 is a

238 / Note to page 183 marketing gimmick, not a source of serious information about usage.” Thomas J. Creswell & Virginia McDavid, “The Usage Panel in The American Heritage Dictionary, Second College Edition,” Research on Language and Social Interaction 19, no. 1 (1986): 83; see also 95. 102. See Jean Cocteau, “Le plus grand chef-d’oeuvre de la littérature n’est jamais qu’un alphabet en désordre.” “Préface,” Les mariés de la Tour Eiffel (Paris: Editions Hoëbeke, 1994).

Index

absence, 8, 21–22, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 34, 36, 41–42, 51, 53–56, 57, 63, 67, 69, 72, 74, 83, 89, 92–93, 97, 102–13, 116, 117, 127, 138, 145, 146, 174, 191n63, 218n31, 220n67, 223n131, 225n6, 227n33 Acconci, Vito, 194n104, 228n62 acrophonics, 144 Adams, Henry, 204n64 Aëgerter, Laurence, 23–24 Aeschylus, 28–29, 30 Afrofuturism, 173 Ahl, Frederick, 235n52 Alighieri, Dante, 68, 205n91 allegory (formal), 19, 29, 34, 36, 37, 39, 41–42, 47, 51, 55–56, 63, 69, 71, 84, 92, 105, 106, 113, 120, 125, 131–32, 143–45, 146, 148, 149, 159, 170, 173, 180 Allen, Fred, 59, 66 alluvials, 126, 223n134 alphabet, 11, 15–16, 20–26, 27, 28, 29–30, 34, 40, 43, 48, 57, 60, 61, 67, 81, 92, 95–97, 99, 101, 104, 105–10, 115–16, 119, 131–32, 143–45, 147, 151, 153–54, 163–64, 170, 172–75, 177, 178, 180, 189n36, 193n92, 196n120, 203n55, 219n54, 227nn36,46, 228n62, 238n102 Althusser, Louis, 13 Altieri, Charles, 6, 65 American Dictionary of the English Language, 24, 90 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 183, 230n14, 237–38n101

Ames Room, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 158 anagram. See paragram Andre, Carl, 110–11, 115, 116, 127, 219nn55,56, 220n63 Andrews, Bruce, 89 Angelou, Maya, 161–63, 229n1 annominatio, 175, 177 Anvil-Macquarie Dictionary of Philippine English for High School, 13–15, 190n46 apocope, 97 aposiopesis, 86, 97, 133, 179 Arensberg, Walter, 191n59 Aristotle, 196n120 Armstrong, Louis, 70 ash, 42, 66, 119, 129, 204n76 Asmodeus, 42, 65, 66 Austin, Nathan, 229n70 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 48, 57–61, 63–64, 67, 70–72, 74, 203nn55,56, 205n87, 207–8n137 Baker, Houston, 235n52 Ball, Hugo 112–13 Baraka, Amiri, 180 Barthes, Roland, 8, 9, 129, 179, 183 Bataille, Georges, 10, 27, 77 Beckwith, Caleb, 13, 189n37 Bedient, Cal, 237n95 Bénabou, Marcel, 26, 229n2 Benvenuto, Richard, 24–25 Bernstein, Charles, 114, 218n28, 220n75 Berzon, Judith, 232n29

240 / Index Best, Stephen, 7–8 bibliography, 21–22, 25, 28–29, 39, 104, 109, 116–17, 121, 138, 157–58, 159, 160, 193n89, 195n114, 219n47, 222n114, 227n33. See also paper; typography Bierce, Ambrose, 10, 26 blood, 10, 12–13, 59, 71–76, 120, 173, 208n150, 216n1 Bloomgarden, Solomon, 48, 52, 65, 204n63 Bök, Christian, 16, 191n57 Book of Common Prayer, 166 Bowes, Ed, 102, 104, 217n14 bricks, 54, 76, 110, 115, 116, 205n85, 219n54, 235n67 Brooks, Daphne, 232–33n29 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 181, 233n37 Brooks, Harry, 70 Brown, Sterling, 232n29 Bunting, Basil, 33, 122, 222n118 Burgess, Gelett, 196n124 Burroughs, William, 5, 13, 101, 216n3 Burrows, Jez, 189n36 Bushell, Sally, 194n101 Cage, John, 115, 119 Cain, James, 132–34, 225n12 calculus, 57–59, 73, 178, 203–4n56. See also pebble Callimachus of Cyrene, 165–66, 170, 179, 182–83, 231nn18,20 Calloway, Cab, 70 Calvino, Italo, 162 camels, 65–71, 73, 205–6n106, 206nn109,116, 207nn127,135, 208n150 Carby, Hazel, 232n29 Carlos Williams. See Williams, William Carlos Carpenter, Humphrey, 122 Caves of Virginia, 224n149 Cawdrey, Robert, 193n92 Century Dictionary, 62, 208nn141,150 Chambers, Richard, 44–46, 66–67, 199n33 Chambers Cyclopaedia, 54, 62, 187n9 chance, 3, 16–17, 22, 33–37, 43, 54–55, 57, 61, 74, 105, 113, 138–40, 143–46, 152–53, 163, 168, 177, 189n36, 191n63, 208–9n157, 225n6 Chandler, Raymond, 132 Chaplin, Charlie, 59 Chappell, Fred, 237n95 Charpentier, Henry, 196n120 cigarettes, 63, 65–67, 69, 73, 162, 205–6n106. See also camels

clavicembalo, 205n87 closures, 26, 29, 51, 62, 65, 81–82, 92, 94, 98–99, 103, 104–5, 113, 210n14, 214n103, 218–19n42. See also openings Cocteau, Jean, 102, 238n102 codex. See bibliography coffee, 48–49, 70, 123, 126, 170, 206n112. See also Ehlers Coffee Collins, Floyd, 217n11 columns, 3, 5, 17–18, 19, 20, 22, 34, 35, 42, 44, 116, 117, 123, 135, 136–37, 148, 149, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 159, 160, 198n29, 221n96, 223n127, 227n33 Conceptual Writing, 5, 11–16 Conte, Joseph, 212n67, 215n110 Contoski, Victor, 10 Coolidge, Clark, 3, 6–7, 39–40, 101–28, 130, 146, 160, 162–65, 171, 216nn1,3,7, 217nn11,14,19,22, 218nn29,31,32, 218–19n42, 219nn47,57,59, 220nn66,66,67, 220–21n76, 221nn79,92, 223nn131,132, 224n149 coprolite, 161. See also stone corners, 11, 22, 36, 83, 136, 138, 144, 147, 148–49, 150–51, 153, 158–59 course, 54, 60, 71, 72–73, 75–76, 209nn165,173 Crain, Patricia, 227n46 Creeley, Robert, 126 creole, 170–71, 172, 174, 175 critical description, 8 Cross, Doris, 17–18 Cummings, Allison, 236n79 Cummings, Brian, 68 Curley, John J., 195n108 Cussen, Felipe, 15–16 Dada, 112–13, 191n63, 220n69 Darragh, Tina, 6–7, 39, 99, 106, 117, 129–60, 164, 165, 220–21n76, 225nn6,7,12, 226n32, 227n33, 228n61, 229n70 D’Avenant, William, 21, 38 Davidson, Michael, 215n121 de Man, Paul, 8, 116 de Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchault, 42–43 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 18, 108, 115, 126, 177, 235n59 de Troy, Jean-François, 212n47 Debauve, Jean-Louis, 196n120 deer, 92, 140–41, 227n36 Deleuze, Gilles, 13 Demosthenes, 56

Index / 241 Derrida, Jacques, 135, 176–77, 178, 224n3, 236n74 Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 15–16 dice, 33–34, 145. See also chance Dicentra, 44–47, 114–15, 116 Dickinson, Emily, 21, 24–25, 27, 194n101 Dictionary of Rhyming Slang, 133–34 Dictionary of Symbols, 230n14 Dictionary of the English Language, 168 Dictionary of the Underworld, 133 dictionary poetics, 8, 19, 23–24, 27, 73, 100, 103, 114, 143, 146, 154, 195n110, et passim discretion, 79–86 distant reading, 8–9 Dowd, Garin, 91 Drummond, Robert Blackley, 222n108 Duchamp, Marcel, 16–17, 19, 21, 110 Durand, Marcella, 216n7 edge, 24, 66, 69, 87, 89, 104, 107, 113, 116–17, 121, 135, 137, 148, 152, 153–54, 157, 159, 180, 221nn92,96, 223n127, 228n62 Ehlers Coffee, 48–49, 206n112 Eldon’s Cave, 102, 105, 216n7 elevators, 94–96, 210n14, 215n110 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 32 Encyclopédie da Costa, 77 Engass, Dale, 114, 218n35 Epstein, Mikhail, 196n124 Equivalents I–VII, 110, 115, 116. See also bricks Étiemble, René, 229n2 etymology, 5, 20, 22, 25, 28, 29, 36, 39, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 60, 62, 69, 74, 75, 76, 84, 85, 86, 93, 94, 97–98, 102, 106, 108–9, 118, 124–25, 131–33, 143, 145–46, 147, 148, 150–51, 152, 155, 156, 158, 164, 165, 168, 171, 172, 173, 182, 187n9, 192n75, 195n114, 196n120, 200n9, 204n64, 207n137, 218n32, 221n96, 222n108, 223nn127,132, 227n33, 228n54, 230n7 Evans, Steve, 10 Fagin, Larry, 162–63, 229n1 feldspace, 40, 151, 219n50 Feminist Dictionary, 230n14 figure, 18, 19, 23, 36, 56, 95, 106, 109, 138, 141–44, 149–59, 192n70, 227n37, 228n57 Finkelstein, Norman, 201n21 Flaubert, Gustave, 10, 26 Foucault, Michel, 190n43 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 86, 211–12n47 France, Anatole, 20

Fredman, Stephen, 201n21 Frost, Elisabeth, 175, 235n58, 237n95 Frutiger, Adrian, 122 Fuhrman, Emily, 194n104 Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the English Language, 33–47, 49, 50, 91, 197n2, 234n42 Gabrilowitsch, Ossip, 63–64, 205nn87,94 Gasché, Rodolphe, 223n138 geometry, 25, 39, 42, 53, 61, 82, 88, 136–38, 141, 143, 144, 146, 148, 150–59, 204n79, 227n37. See also figure Giscombe, Cecil, 19–20, 21, 144, 192n70 glass, 30–31, 50, 56, 82, 87, 91, 94, 98–99, 127, 153, 214n103, 215nn117,121 Golding, Alan, 89 Goldston, Andrew, 182n25 Golston, Michael, 198n29, 219n42 Goodland, Giles, 221n76 Google, 18–19, 160 Gove, Philip, 160 Greek dictionaries, 28 Green, Lohren, 10 Guerry, Joseph, 19, 192n70 gum, 59, 65–66, 161 gumbo, 170–71, 172, 234n42 hair, 60, 149, 172, 175–76, 179, 214n103 Halsey, Alan, 114 Hammerstein, Oscar, 140 Harder, Annette, 231n20 harlequins, 92, 150, 156 Harper, Phillip Brian, 187n2 Harryman, Carla, 217n11 Hart, Matthew, 181 Heath’s German Dictionary, 22–23, 27 Heizer, Michael, 111 Hejinian, Lyn, 22, 23–24, 25, 26, 89, 165, 215n116 Heller, Michael, 89 Herman, Woody, 125, 223n133 Herriman, George, 175, 176, 235n67 Hesiod, 56–57 Heyes, Felix, 18 Hobbs, David, 213n77 Hodgson, Felix R., 21–22 horse, 6, 39, 43, 48, 58–61, 62, 63, 71–76, 151, 167, 191n63, 204nn63,64, 205n85, 207n124, 208nn138,150, 209n166, 216n1 Huehls, Mitchum, 235n52 Hugo, Victor, 195n114 Hurston, Zora Neale, 161, 166, 232n22

242 / Index Iliad, 28 illusions, 1, 10, 37, 40–41, 107, 137–38, 141, 143, 144, 157–58, 161, 183 Imagism, 78, 79, 89, 210n12 Immerman, Conrad (“Connie”), 70 Inman, P., 130, 134 IWW (Industrial Workers of the World), 62, 67, 95 Jakobson, Roman, 174, 235n59 James, Henry, 91, 97–98, 215nn114,116 Jennison, Ruth, 55, 200n8, 202n39 Johnson, Ben, 120 Johnson, Samuel, 75, 108, 168 Johnston, Alastair, 22–24, 27, 193n89 Jones, Hettie, 179–81 Jones, Meta DuEwa, 180, 232n27 Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of AfricanAmerican Slang, 161–83, 230n13, 231n19, 232nn25,26, 233n32, 235n55 Judd, Donald, 101, 127, 224n142 Jütte, Daniel, 215n116 Keats, John, 163 Kerouac, Jack, 2–5, 31, 101, 102, 103–4, 112–13, 125–26, 187n8, 216n1 Kettler, Howard, 122 Key Into the Language of America, 11, 13 Kosuth, Joseph, 194–95n108 Krazy Kat. See Herriman, George Kristeva, Julia, 9, 55 Kromer, Gretchen, 29, 196n120 Lally, Michael, 225n6 Lamiot, Christophe, 195n110, 225n6 Language Poetry, 6, 130 Larousse Dictionnaire Français, 16–17, 191n63 law, 14, 37, 51–52, 54–55, 57, 69, 114, 187n9, 193n91, 222n114. See also Moses; walls Lazer, Hank, 146 Le Lionnais, François, 162 Leggott, Michelle, 46, 199n33 Leiris, Michel, 27, 60 Lenin, Vladimir, 198n23 Lenox Public Library, 104 Lescure, Jean, 162–65 letter, see alphabet Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 113–14 Liddell & Scott Greek-English Lexikon, 29 lingerie, 80, 82–85 Linguistic Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland, 130

London Hospital of Saint Mary of Bethlehem, 168 London Philological Society, 18 Ma, Qian-Ming, 200n9, 215n117 machines, 6, 18, 22, 50, 51, 59, 67, 74, 75, 78, 84–93, 96, 103, 125, 129, 151, 157, 160, 164, 174, 180–81, 190n43, 193n93, 207n124, 210n3, 212n63, 214n103, 215n110 Major, Clarence, 164–65, 168, 170, 173, 230n14, 231n19, 232nn25,26, 233n32, 235n55 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 27–30, 31, 145, 195nn111,114, 196n120, 208–9n157 mantids, 6, 42–43, 198n29 Marcus, Sharon, 7–8 Marinaccio, Rocco, 89 Marsh, Alec, 204n81 Marshall, Kate, 202n31 Marx, Karl, 40–42, 43, 45, 58, 59, 61, 197–98n23, 200n8 Marxist, 8, 58, 215n121 Mayer, Bernadette, 1, 101–28, 217n11, 218nn29,31, 218–19n42, 219n57, 230n7 McCaffery, Steve, 33 McGann, Jerome, 114, 158, 220n76 Mencken, Henry Louis, 132–33 metonymy, 8, 34, 44, 71, 76, 99, 103, 120, 212n67 Metz, Bernhard, 192n79 Meyer, Diane, 99 Meyer, James, 127 Moderne Nederlandse Encyclopedie, 23, 193n90 Monk, Daniel, 201n21 Montefiore, Sir Moses, 55 Moretti, Franco, 8–9, 189n25 Morier, Henri, 175 Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 129 mosaic, 9, 51, 54–59, 63, 67, 68, 71, 76, 202n35, 209n174 Moses, 54–55, 58–59, 61, 66, 68. See also Montefiore, Sir Moses Moten, Fred, 234n37 Motherwell, Robert, 112 Moxley, Jennifer, 10 Mukařovský, Jan, 26 mulatto, 168–81, 232–33n29 mules, 166, 167, 168, 169, 174, 177–78, 180, 231nn20,21, 232n22, 233n34, 235n60. See also mulatto; muse

Index / 243 Mullen, Harryette, 6–7, 31, 161–83, 230n14, 231n21, 232–33 n29, 233nn32,34, 233–34n37, 235nn56,61,67, 236n79, 237n95 Murray, James, 18, 90 muse, 54, 57, 165, 166, 167–68, 169, 171, 178, 179, 182–83, 231n18, 233n34 music, 1–2, 19, 39, 42, 51–61, 70–76, 92, 120, 124, 125, 127, 140, 141, 173, 203n55, 207n127, 208n140, 217n11, 218n35, 223n132, 232n27, 236n79. See also Bach, Johann Sebastian myopia, 50–51, 55 names, 6, 18, 20, 21, 36, 38, 44, 48, 54–55, 56–57, 61, 65, 67, 70, 87, 94, 97, 98, 102, 105, 107, 112, 120, 124, 134, 138, 145, 160, 165, 169, 173–80, 187n9, 191n63, 200n18, 203n55, 206nn112,114, 217n19, 218n40, 233n36, 235nn58,59,64, 236n74 Napier, John, 152 Necker, Louis-Albert, 136–38, 150, 151, 158 New English Dictionary, 18 New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 223n136 New York Public Library, 90 New York Times, 64, 67, 90, 203n55, 206n112 Nicholls, Peter, 99, 212n63, 214nn103,105, 215n125 Niedecker, Lorine, 47, 199n1, 203–4n56, 205–6n106 nonsense, 2, 21, 27, 30, 31, 172, 22, 23, 116, 145 Noulet, Émilie, 196n120 O’Connor, Joseph, 203n48 Objectivism, 6, 41–42, 49–50, 52, 56, 58, 63–64, 67, 71, 73, 78, 86, 88, 90–91, 199–200n5, 200n9, 210n3, 212n67 Onions, Charles Talbut, 90 openings, 16, 29, 33, 40, 53, 64, 81–82, 83, 85, 93–97, 107, 113, 120, 124, 137, 138, 151–53, 191n63, 210n14, 214n105. See also closures Oppen, George, 6, 24, 65, 73–74, 77–100, 113, 141, 146, 210nn12,13,14, 211n47, 212nn63,67, 214n103, 215nn114,116,117,121,122 Oppen, Mary, 92, 97, 98, 99, 215n107 Orkney dialect, 87–88 Otis Elevator Company, 95–96. See also elevators OuLiPo [Ouvroir de littérature potentielle], 5, 16, 26, 27, 162, 164, 168, 229n2, 230n8 Overstreet, Harry Allen, 145–46

Oxford English Dictionary, 18, 20–22, 24, 54, 72, 77–100, 102, 104, 133, 172, 193n82, 199n33, 212n50, 227n41 Oxford Pocket Dictionary, 18 palms, 21, 38, 66, 123 paper, 5, 8, 15, 21–22, 23, 28, 33, 38, 39–40, 67, 92, 103, 104–6, 121, 135, 146, 148–49, 152–53, 157–59, 160, 191n63, 194n97, 206n112, 210n15, 219n47, 228n62 paragram, 7, 25, 38, 42, 43, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 65, 66, 67, 68–69, 74, 75, 81, 85, 87, 88, 92, 93, 94, 96–97, 102, 103, 104, 106, 115, 124, 126, 127, 130, 133, 134, 140, 143–44, 146, 147, 166–67, 170, 171–77, 180, 192n70, 196n120, 203n55, 208n157, 218n32, 223n132, 225n6, 233n34, 235nn52,59,64 Parker, Robert Thomas, 206n112 pebble. See stone; walls peer, 51, 68–69, 92, 100, 127 Perec, George, 162, 164, 229n2 Perelman, Bob, 67, 163, 217n11, 237n97 Perloff, Marjorie, 6, 144–45, 210n12, 211n17, 231n19 Perry, Clay, 128, 216n7 Petersen, Arnold, 198n23 Philo Judaeus, 167, 232n24 Picabia, Francis, 191n63 pitch, 69, 72, 106, 117, 122–25, 223n131 Platt, James, 171 plinth, 54, 55, 61, 75 Poe, Edgar Allan, 196n120 Pollitt, Jerome Jordan, 202n35 polyptote, 195n114 Ponge, Francis, 27, 99, 142–43, 176–77, 195n110, 225n6 Ponzo, Mario, 137–38, 158 Pound, Ezra, 31, 36, 79, 90, 92–93, 118, 122–25, 132, 193n93, 201n20, 202n42, 203n55, 204n81, 205n104, 222n119, 223n127 psalms, 36, 38, 92, 93, 198n29 ptyx, 27–31, 195nn111,114, 196n120 Quartermain, Peter, 33–34, 197n3, 209n169 Queneau, Raymond, 162, 229n2 radical formalism, 8 Raimon, Eva, 232n29 Random House Dictionary of the English Language, 110, 129–60, 226n28, 227n33, 228nn57,61

244 / Index Rappaport, Herman, 218n32 Rayburn, Sam, 166, 231n21 recursivity, 23, 26–27, 29, 35, 39, 46, 48, 60–61, 72, 92, 97, 105, 106, 111, 116, 120–21, 126, 148, 156, 162, 167, 168 Reed, Anthony, 234n37 Resnais, Alain, 111 Ribemont-Dessaignes, Georges, 191n63 Riffaterre, Michael, 28, 174, 179, 235n59 rims, 77, 86–88, 90, 91, 92, 120, 138, 212n58 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 111 Robbins, Amy, 163, 237n95 Roget, Peter Mark. See thesauri Ross, Fran, 164, 171, 181, 233n37, 235n64 Roubaud, Jacques, 162 Sapphire, 165, 166, 231n19 Sappho, 165–66, 179, 231n21 Saroyan, Aram, 126 Sayer, Henry, 210n3 Schimmel, Harold, 201n21 Schwerner, Armand, 152–53 sculpture, 7, 25, 103, 110–12, 127, 165, 220n63 Seidman, Naomi, 201n18 Shakespeare, William, 56, 57, 68, 75–76, 174, 175 Sharif, Solmaz, 10–11 Sharp, Tom, 95 Shaw, Lytle, 220n63 Shockley, Evie, 232nn24,27, 233n37, 237n95 Shoemaker, Steve, 87, 215n110 Shreiber, Maeera, 204n63 signature, 92, 93, 96, 97, 174–78, 203n55, 223n133. See also names silk, 60, 80–82, 83, 86, 120–21, 146 Silliman, Ron, 67, 78, 89, 206n112 Simons, Robin, 230n14 Slot, Andrea Witzke, 234n37 Smith, Bessie, 181 Smith, Patti, 236n79 Smithson, Robert, 101, 105, 107, 108, 114, 194n104, 218n38, 219n56 Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, 107, 214n103 Sollors, Werner, 232n29 Southall, Oliver, 210n15 Spinoza, Baruch, 58 St. Mark’s Poetry Project, 104 Stanley, Sandra 76 Stein, Gertrude, 103, 104, 108, 126, 144, 217n14, 218n40 Stephens, Paul, 221n76 Stevens, Wallace, 6, 126

Stewart, Susan, 203n55 stone, 40, 42, 44, 51–58, 59, 67, 69, 75, 76, 81, 87–88, 89, 94, 95–96, 102, 103–10, 111, 113, 114, 116, 122–23, 124, 125–26, 127, 130, 136, 140, 147, 148, 151, 155, 161, 162, 163, 166–67, 175, 202n35, 203n48, 205n85, 208n157, 216nn7,8, 218nn35,40, 218–19n42, 219n50, 223n132, 226n28, 234n42, 235n64 Strayhorn, Billy, 178, 182 Stroff, Stephen, 207n127 Suárez, Angelo V., 11–15, 16, 189n36 surface reading, 7–8 Swigg, Richard, 86, 93 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 72 syntax, 2–3, 8, 11, 23, 28, 29, 34, 39, 49, 50–51, 55, 66, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 79, 80, 81, 84, 89, 94, 99, 104, 106, 107, 112–13, 115, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 126, 128, 133, 147, 162, 164, 167, 169–70, 171, 195n114, 200n7, 207n124, 224n149 Table Alphabeticall (1604), 193n92 tacet, 55, 63, 202nn42,43 tacit. See tacet Tagalog, 190n44 Tate Gallery, 110 Telchines, 165 Thackery, Susan, 93 Themerson, Stefan, 229n2 thesauri, 104, 164, 183, 194n104, 196n120, 228n62 Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, 196n120 Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 110 Toomer, Jean, 65 transitive property of language, 44–45, 73–74, 79, 110, 167–68, 170, 223n131 Tremblay-McGaw, Robin, 234n37 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, 61–65, 204n79 Trotsky, Leon, 69, 202n39 turns, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 59–60, 66, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 81, 84, 92, 97, 103, 116–17, 135, 143, 151, 158–59, 208n140, 212n47, 216n8 typography, 3–5, 8–9, 11, 20, 21–24, 79, 112–13, 116–17, 122, 125, 135, 143, 149, 152–54, 156–57, 221n96, 223n127, 227n33, 229n1 Tzara, Tristan, 191n63 usage, 11, 14, 21, 29, 36–37, 49, 72–73, 90, 104, 113, 117, 131, 132, 134, 135, 146, 160, 183, 189n36, 237–38n101

Index / 245 veins, 72–73, 207n124 Vescia, Monique, 89 Vickery, Ann, 131 Vinson, Arthur, 236n79 violins, 58, 60, 72, 75, 149 volt, 38, 39, 148 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 11 Waller, Thomas (“Fats”), 70 walls, 51–55, 57, 62, 68, 75, 76, 104, 109–10, 138, 150, 151, 155, 205n85, 206n115, 214n105, 216n8, 217n19. See also law Warhol, Andy, 113, 220n72 Washington, Booker T., 180 Watten, Barrett, 114 Webster, Noah, 24, 90, 124, 187n9, 194n97 Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, 24–25 Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 37, 48–76, 101–28, 153, 154, 159, 160, 197n2, 202n31, 221n96, 223n132, 225n6, 228n57 Webster’s New Standard Dictionary of the English Language (“Student’s Graded School Edition”), 3–5 Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, 19, 192n70, 194–95n108 Webster’s Secondary School Edition Dictionary, 17 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, 16, 147, 150, 158, 159, 197n2, 226n30

West, Ben, 18 Whitman, Walt, 98 Wilkinson, John, 98 Williams, Roger, 11, 13 Williams, William Carlos, 1, 63, 75, 76, 77–78, 85, 87, 88, 89, 100, 210n3 Wilson, Edith, 70 windows, 29, 38, 62, 64, 82–84, 87, 88, 91–94, 98–99, 151–52, 215nn114,116, 219n49 Winston, Sam, 20–21, 192n79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 57, 136, 137, 161, 226nn27,29 Wood, Tim, 205n91 Woods, Tim, 202n43, 209n174 Wright, Steven, 20 Wrigley’s. See gum X, Malcom, 3–4 Yehoash. See Bloomgarden, Solomon Young, Elizabeth Marie, 231n20 zaum [Russian зáумь], 30–31, 130 Zhargon, 11, 52, 109, 117, 200–1n18, 221n96 Zukofsky, Celia, 204n63 Zukofsky, Louis, 2, 6, 33–76, 78, 91, 92–93, 113, 117, 143, 145, 146, 197n2, 197–198n23, 198n29, 199n33, 199n1, 200nn7,8, 202nn31,39,43,48, 203nn55,56, 204n64, 205nn85,87, 206n112, 207nn124,135, 208–9n157, 209nn163,173

Craig Dworkin is Professor of English at the University of Utah. He is the author of Reading the Illegible (2003) and No Medium (2013) and is the editor or co-editor of six volumes of literary criticism and avant-garde poetry.

Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace Jacob Edmond, A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature Christophe Wall-Romana, Cinepoetry: Imaginary Cinemas in French Poetry Marc Shell, Talking the Walk & Walking the Talk: A Rhetoric of Rhythm Ryan Netzley, Lyric Apocalypse: Milton, Marvell, and the Nature of Events Ilya Kliger and Boris Maslov (eds.), Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics. Foreword by Eric Hayot Ross Chambers, An Atmospherics of the City: Baudelaire and the Poetics of Noise Haun Saussy, The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its Technologies. Foreword by Olga Solovieva Andrew Hui, The Poetics of Ruins in Renaissance Literature Peter Szendy, Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience. Translated by Jan Plug Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (eds.), Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form Craig Dworkin, Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography