Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry 2009015686, 0415801222, 9780415801225

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory WILLIAM E. CAIN, General Editor

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Contested Masculinities Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray Nalin Jayasena Unsettled Narratives The Pacific Writings of Stevenson, Ellis, Melville and London David Farrier The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction Sharon DeGraw Parsing the City Jonson, Middleton, Dekker, and City Comedy’s London as Language Heather C. Easterling The Economy of the Short Story in British Periodicals of the 1890s Winnie Chan Negotiating the Modern Orientalism and Indianness in the Anglophone World Amit Ray Novels, Maps, Modernity The Spatial Imagination, 1850–2000 Eric Bulson Novel Notions Medical Discourse and the Mapping of the Imagination in Eighteenth-Century English Fiction Katherine E. Kickel

Masculinity and the English Working Class Studies in Victorian Autobiography and Fiction Ying S. Lee Aesthetic Hysteria The Great Neurosis in Victorian Melodrama and Contemporary Fiction Ankhi Mukherjee The Rise of Corporate Publishing and Its Effects on Authorship in Early Twentieth-Century America Kim Becnel Conspiracy, Revolution, and Terrorism from Victorian Fiction to the Modern Novel Adrian S. Wisnicki City/Stage/Globe Performance and Space in Shakespeare’s London D.J. Hopkins Transatlantic Engagements with the British Eighteenth Century Pamela J. Albert Race, Immigration, and American Identity in the Fiction of Salman Rushdie, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner Randy Boyagoda

Cosmopolitan Culture and Consumerism in Chick Lit Caroline J. Smith Asian Diaspora Poetry in North America Benzi Zhang William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings Andrea Elizabeth Donovan Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature Laurel Plapp Shakespeare and the Cultural Colonization of Ireland Robin E. Bates Spaces of the Sacred and Profane Dickens, Trollope, and the Victorian Cathedral Town Elizabeth A. Bridgham The Contemporary Anglophone Travel Novel The Aesthetics of Self-Fashioning in the Era of Globalization Stephen M. Levin Literature and Development in North Africa The Modernizing Mission Perri Giovannucci The Tower of London in English Renaissance Drama Icon of Opposition Kristen Deiter Victorian Narrative Technologies in the Middle East Cara Murray

Ruined by Design Shaping Novels and Gardens in the Culture of Sensibility Inger Sigrun Brodey Modernism and the Marketplace Literary Culture and Consumer Capitalism in Rhys, Woolf, Stein, and Nella Larsen Alissa G. Karl The Genesis of the Chicago Renaissance Theodore Dreiser, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James T. Farrell Mary Hricko Haunting and Displacement in African American Literature and Culture Marisa Parham Misery’s Mathematics Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum American Literature Peter Balaam The Politics of Identity in Irish Drama W.B. Yeats, Augusta Gregory and J.M. Synge George Cusack Female Embodiment and Subjectivity in the Modernist Novel The Corporeum of Virginia Woolf and Olive Moore Renée Dickinson Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry John Wrighton

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

John Wrighton

New York

London

First published 2010 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2010 Taylor & Francis Typeset in Sabon by IBT Global. Printed and bound in the United States of America on acid-free paper by IBT Global. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wrighton, John, 1981– Ethics and politics in modern American poetry / by John Wrighton. p. cm.—(Literary criticism and cultural theory) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Ethics in literature. 3. Politics in literature. I. Title. PS323.5.W73 2009 811'.509—dc22 2009015686

ISBN10: 0-415-80122-2 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-80122-5 (hbk)

Contents

List of Figures Permissions Acknowledgments 1

Introduction: The Poethical Trajectory

ix xi xiii 1

2. Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems

23

3. Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder

50

4. Sub-cultural Self-othering and the Beat Poetics of Allen Ginsberg

77

5. The Welcome of the Other: Jerome Rothenberg’s Ethnopoetics

112

6. Traumatised Semiotics: The Turn to Language and Bruce Andrews’ Poethical Praxis

147

7.

180

Conclusion: The Performative Dialogics of Poethical Praxis

Notes Bibliography Index

205 209 219

Figures

2.1

Charles Olson, “Letter 10”.

39

2.2

Charles Olson, “Note on type-setting”.

40

2.3 & 2.4

Charles Olson, “I was bold, I had courage . . .”

40

2.5

Charles Olson, “My shore, my sounds, my earth . . .”

41

2.6

Charles Olson, “My shore, my sounds, my earth . . .”

42

2.7

Charles Olson, “Migration in fact . . .”

43

2.8

Charles Olson, “I looked up and saw its form through everything”.

45

2.9

Charles Olson, “I have been an ability—a machine . . .”

47

3.1

Asher B. Durand, View toward the Hudson Valley.

51

4.1

Allen Ginsberg, Extract from ‘AETHER’.

98

5.1

Toltec: From The Blue House of Tlaloc.

120

5.2

Jackson Mac Low, ‘5th Gatha’.

122

5.3

Mayan Glyphs: ‘A Frame from the Dresden Codex’.

123

6.1

Bruce Andrews, ‘Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened’.

161

6.2

Robert Longo, Arena Brains II (1985).

166

6.3

Extract from Bruce Andrews, The Millennium Project (screenshot).

175

Permissions

Grateful acknowledgement is made to publishers and individuals for permission to use the following materials: Andrews, Bruce. Excerpts from “Holybark”, “Ovaltine”, “Pressure”, “Tall Man Riding” and “Ostensible” by Bruce Andrews, from Bruce Andrews, SONNETS (MEMENTO MORI), This Press, 1980, reprinted by permission of the author. Andrews, Bruce. Excerpt from “Mistaken Identity” by Bruce Andrews, published online by The East Village ed. Jack Kimball, 2002, used by permission of the author. Andrews, Bruce. Excerpts from “Mercury” and “Earth 3” by Bruce Andrews, from Bruce Andrews, LIP SERVICE, Coach House Books, 2001, used by permission of the author. Andrews, Bruce. Excerpts from THE MILLENIUM PROJECT by Bruce Andrews, Eclipse Archive, 2002, used by permission of the author. Andrews, Bruce. Excerpt from interview with Bruce Andrews, 12th May, 2004 (University of Southampton). Used by permission of Bruce Andrews. Durand, Asher B. “View Toward the Hudson Valley, 1851” by Asher B. Durand. Reprinted by permission of Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. Ginsberg, Allen. Quotations from Allen Ginsberg’s verse taken from COLLECTED POEMS 1947–1997 by Allen Ginsberg. Copyright © 2006, the Allen Ginsberg Trust. All rights reserved. Longo, Robert. “Arena Brains II”, 1985, Mixed Media, 96 x 36 inches. Reprinted by permission of the artist. Mac Low, Jackson. “5th Gatha” grid poem by Jackson Mac Low. With kind permission of the Estate of Jackson Mac Low. Olson, Charles. Excerpts from THE MAXIMUS POEMS by Charles Olson, copyright © 1983 by University of California Press. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

xii Permissions Olson, Charles. Works by Charles Olson are copyright © The Estate of Charles Olson and © The University of Connecticut Libraries. Used by permission. Oppen, George. Excerpt from “A Language of New York” by George Oppen, from George Oppen, NEW COLLECTED POEMS, copyright © 1965 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Rothenberg, Jerome. Excerpt from “Cokboy Part One” and “Old Beaver’s Blessing Song” by Jerome Rothenberg, from NEW SELECTED POEMS 1970–1985, copyright © 1983 by Jerome Rothenberg. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Rothenberg, Jerome. Excerpts from Jerome Rothenberg, POEMS FOR THE GAME OF SILENCE, New Directions, 1971, and Jerome Rothenberg, BETWEEN, published by Fulcrum Press, 1967, by permission of the author. Snyder, Gary. Excerpt from “Each dawn is clear (Logging 8)”, “Lodgepole Pine . . . (Logging 3)” and “Second Shaman Song (Burning 1)” by Gary Snyder, from MYTHS AND TEXTS, copyright © 1978 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Snyder, Gary. Excerpt from “After Work”, “North Beach Alba” and “Sixth-Month Song in the Foothills” by Gary Snyder, from THE BACK COUNTRY, copyright © 1968 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Snyder, Gary. Excerpt from “Anasazi”, “Mother Earth: Her Whales” and “Bedrock” by Gary Snyder, from TURTLE ISLAND, copyright © 1974 by Gary Snyder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Snyder, Gary. “Painting the North San Juan School” by Gary Snyder. Copyright © 2005 by Gary Snyder from AXE HANDLES: POEMS. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. Tate, Allen. Excerpt from “The Maimed Man” by Allen Tate, from COLLECTED POEMS 1919–1976 by Allen Tate. Copyright © 1977 by Allen Tate. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Acknowledgments

The research for this book was undertaken as part of my doctoral studies at Aberystwyth University from 2003 to 2007. I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Tim Woods, for his guidance and intellectual direction throughout this period. Further thanks must go to Professor Peter Barry for his wise counsel and continued encouragement, and to my second supervisor, Dr Will Slocombe, under whose cognitive apprenticeship I have been both intellectually and professionally inspired. As recipient of the Rose and Sigmund Strochlitz Travel Grant, I was able to undertake archive research at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut. I would like to thank Melissa Watterworth, Curator of Literary Collections at the Dodd Center for her assistance during my visit. For continued inspiration and the warm welcome on my occasional return to the University of Southampton (where I studied as an undergraduate student), especially at events organised by the Centre for Contemporary Writing, I would like to thank Dr Nicky Marsh and Professor Peter Middleton. I am also indebted to Bruce Andrews and Gary Snyder for their interest in my work. My fi nal thanks go to my family and friends for their unwavering support and encouragement.

1

Introduction The Poethical Trajectory

The question of ethics, of what constitutes “good” behaviour and on what philosophical grounds we justify such predications, has always troubled human thought. Since the publication of New Literary History’s pioneering special issue “Literature and/as Moral Philosophy” (1983), however, there has been an increased engagement with this debate across the academic disciplines. Whilst a range of motivating factors has been suggested, this “turn to ethics,” most evident in philosophy, political science and literary studies marks, according to Lawrence Buell, ‘a groundswell of still uncertain magnitude’ (Buell 2000, 1). Indeed, Michael Eskin has proposed that these renewed engagements have ‘unquestionably consolidated into a burgeoning subdiscipline’ (Eskin 2004, 557). Responding initially to Martha Nussbaum’s article entitled “Flawed Crystals: James’s The Golden Bowl and Literature as Moral Philosophy” (1983), contributions from J. Hillis Miller (1987), Wayne C. Booth (1988) and Tobin Siebers (1988) have mapped out an alternative ethics of reading for literary studies. More recent contributions from Richard Rorty (1989), Simon Critchley (1992), Robert Eaglestone (1997), Jill Robbins (1999) and Derek Attridge (2004), to name but a few, have built on these academic ventures. However, it is in the field of modern American poetry where this turn has been both most acutely felt and actively directed. Tim Woods’ seminal work The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2002) has demonstrated how the Objectivist poets and in particular, Louis Zukofsky, developed ‘an ethics of form in representation [that] has acted as a benchmark of a radical poetics for a whole group of writers in the current generation’ (Woods 2002, 14). Similarly, Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000 (2005) traces the development of an ethical politics in modern British poetry. This book explores the intersection between poetics and ethics in certain strands of twentieth-century American poetry which I will call henceforth, the “poethical trajectory”. Whilst Woods’ book focuses primarily on a fi rst phase poethical praxis, I examine a constellation of poets across the twentieth century, whose experimental work, I propose, has been motivated by an

2

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

ethical concern for others as a social responsibility. The ethical philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas illuminates this impulse and enables my reading of these poetries as fundamentally preoccupied with an emancipatory social activism: a welcoming of the other by way of a participatory and nontotalising poethics. Extending Woods’ thesis, my focus is primarily on a second and third phase of poethical praxis. I deduce from this “poethical trajectory” a performative dialogics in order to stake out an ethical practice for reading and writing, thus contributing to the most recent development, and critical debates, in literary studies. Each of the poets I read offer a significant contribution to the development of this poethical praxis as well as engaging in a specific politics. My trajectory is thus presented by way of a thematic as well as chronological chapter structure, demarcating the various political concerns: capitalist de-humanisation, environmental consciousness, ethnic minorities and language. The political agenda does not take the form of a didactic presentation of an alternative social order or modality of being, but the democratising self-reflexivity of an ethical saying. Indeed, the kind of poetry I examine is not, as Michael Palmer suggests, a ‘consumer item’; rather, it requires ‘an effort of attention that is as active as that which goes into the writing’ (Bartlett 1987, 126–127). My reading of modern American poetry also proposes a critique of language in contemporary society, for poethical praxis is fundamentally a struggle over language itself. I take ‘the total system that is developing in world history’ (Levinas 1994, 15), intimated by John Wild in his introduction to Levinas’ Totality and Infinity, to be founded on a language driven against its ethical grain. To understand this “traumatised semiotics” is to recognise the phenomenological implications of Levinas’ thesis. As will become clear, our being is not a construct of self-identity, but is realised as we welcome the presence of another. Thus, if language, whether written or spoken, is employed as constructive of a self-identity, it in fact violates our being. The result of this irresponsibility, an ontological self-orientation, is both traumatising and traumatic; it is a violation both of the self and the other, in language. ‘The development of this system,’ Wild writes, ‘will coincide with the interests of the self. All otherness will be absorbed in this total system of harmony and order’ (15). For Levinas, such language used in the strained maintenance of a “free” ego and its socio-political totalitarian state (that is, language as a totalising stasis) is a language, ‘whose harshness and universal power is revealed in war’ (24). The poetry readings of this book are at once from within and a response to this “traumatised semiotics”: the prognosis for semiotics given a self-oriented use of language; and the diagnosis of a social condition, where individuals are bereft of a language sufficiently responsive in the face of suffering. In proposing that an ethical orientation secures our social responsibilities, this book is not, however, prescribing the doctrines of an absolutist morality. Whilst, as Peter Singer has observed, the etymology of the terms

Introduction 3 “ethics” and “morality” lead us to the word “customs”, their respective usage is often distinct (Singer 1994, 5). Morality is commonly understood as referring to a set of rules that determine how we ought to behave, whilst ethics has been taken by philosophers to describe the systematic study of the reasoning framework informing morality. Exceptions to this rule, that see ethics and morality as synonymous, will refer to the following terms: normative ethics (the prescription or origin of a set of moral laws); applied ethics (an examination of their application, of morality); and meta-ethics (the philosophy, or reasoning framework informing morality). Irrespective of our understanding of these terms, any notion that we determine within this field of inquiry will necessarily invoke the question of Truth, of what is “good” behaviour, of whether such an absolute Truth or collective truth can be justified. As we shall see, “truth” and “goodness” are intimately related, for as Levinas suggests, ‘isn’t what we really call the truth determined by the “for-the-other”, which means goodness? And not in the first place by the “in-itself” and “for-itself” of the truth’ (Robbins 2001, 263). Indeed, for our notion of truth to change, this has to take place linguistically, that is, it has to be expressed in language. Such an argument raises important questions concerning the nature of reality and its relationship with language. Is language the origin of our consciousness and thus constitutive of our reality? Or is language merely a veneer over the reality that we know in some psycho-sensory process? Does our existence in fact precede the mediation of language and the system of representation codified in the signifier and the signified? Answering such questions will be formative in my thesis that collapses the division between ethics and language. In the twentieth century there has been a shift in the origin of ethics in Western civilisations, as acted out in the behavioural tendencies, or morality, of the majority. Before the industrial revolution and the advent of modernity, western societies were predominantly organised according to religious laws, a series of moral doctrines, or customs, built into the fabric of society through a self-regulation of socially acceptable behaviour. For most Western civilisations, it was the religious laws of an institutionalised Christian church that provided the dominant discourses of such morality. These discourses, rather than revealing the ethic of service in the relationship at the heart of the Bible, instead detailed the doctrines and dogma that developed through the history of the church and its interdependence with the political establishment and monarchical rule. The evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, however, offered a scientific explanation for the origin of ethics, enabling a break from the moral doctrines of an institutionalised religion. As Peter Singer explains: The attempt to draw ethical implications from evolution led to “Social Darwinism,” which in turn was seen as justifying the free-market competition of nineteenth-century capitalism, and was used as an ideological weapon against government regulation of the market. (Singer 1994, 5)

4

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

With this shift from a religious to an evolutionary origin for ethics, combined with the progress of capitalism, there emerged our modern notion of “autonomy”, or post-modern relativism: a free choice of moral behaviour within the economic power relations of late capitalism and, interdependent with this, the law and order of the democratic majority. Whilst a religious society seeks to maintain the behavioural customs that provide a meaningful framework, or telos for the individual, neither the doctrines of an institutionalised Christianity, nor the evolutionary theory of social Darwinism, can give any convincing answer to the question of truth, of what constitutes “good” behaviour. Correspondingly, the history of ethics, as a philosophical pursuit, is both long and complex. In his study of moral theory entitled After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that ‘we are not simply in a state of moral plurality but the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder’ (MacIntyre 1985, 2). His explanation for this rests specifically on an historical and anthropological analysis of moral philosophy. For MacIntyre, the contemporary language of morality constitutes ‘fragments of old moral philosophies used outside of the “larger totalities”, simulacra of morality’ (2). MacIntyre’s account does indeed explain why specific terms, such as “ought”, are ultimately unanchored, that is, they have followed a tortuous etymology, having been uprooted from the telos within which they were once situated and found their meaning. However, MacIntyre’s account fails to explain why these words should remain so prolific. A primary challenge in the development of a poethical praxis is the fact that our contemporary shared language is not simply “disordered” but traumatised. The discourse of the capitalist and political entrepreneur is loaded with moral rhetoric as the most effective and coercive medium of advertisement; in a society where morality is predicated on the self, these discourses operate on the same level, and they are driven by self-orientation and appeal to this self-orientation. They market a product or a political project that is presented as necessary for the support of the infrastructure of the self. Yet these discourses are so loaded, not simply because the entrepreneurs have observed the power of such rhetoric, but rather because there is no apparent alternative. Furthermore, within the post-modern relativism of a late capitalist society, the individual secures an identity, or ethos, by gaining purchase on a range of commodified positions within the socio-political totality. Our purchase on these clothes of signification, enables us to construct our identity within the relations of exchange that they signify. Language has thus become the medium of a market-oriented self-identification, and it is in this ontological abuse that we can identify the transmogrification of language as a “traumatised semiotics”. Despite this self-orientation of our postmodern condition, in entering into language one is inescapably assigned moral responsibility, even if one fails to assume this responsibility and is unaware of the ethical imperative of one’s position. Language is dependent upon relationships and as such,

Introduction 5 immediately inscribes ethical terms. As we shall see, the purpose of language is as an act of love, a medium of expiation for the other, a questioning of the self. Its central terms, the verb “to be” and the pronoun “I”, for example, are thus revealed as in fact moral terms. It is by way of revelation of this truth as to the purpose of language that one is able to perceive its current condition. Discourse motivated by a self-orientated morality, abuses the very nature of language, driving it, by a force of self-will, against its ethical grain. We do not need to “repair” language by learning the etymology of its terms within various stages of historical contextualisation, nor reconstruct society with the classical telos restored so as to anchor the terms of moral rhetoric; rather it is by way of a reorientation, from ontology to ethics, that language may be the means of our responsibility for each other. Nevertheless, MacIntyre’s emphasis on history and sociology is not entirely unwarranted, for it is only by way of this methodology that he comes to warn us against a presumption that one can study ‘the concepts of morality merely by reflecting, Oxford armchair style’ (MacIntyre 1985, vii). Indeed when we come later to consider the application of the ethical orientation that this book presents, to the various concerns of our poets, whether in the realm of ecology or ethnology, it will be important to consider the historical and sociological contexts. It is a lesson that MacIntyre suggests we must learn from an analysis of the heroic societies and the moral philosophies of classical theism. He concludes that moral philosophies are always contextual and hence, that ‘the aspirations of the morality of modernity to a universality freed from all particularity, is an illusion’ (119). It is MacIntyre’s contention that within the disorder of the contemporary language of morality, ‘we are unable to perceive the fact that the very language we use to assert our morality deceives us’ (4). This sociological observation delimits the evidence for our contention that the “traumatised semiotics” of our shared language constitutes a central problematic for the ethical orientation of this thesis, or rather for the very articulation of the thesis. For MacIntyre, when it comes to a specific issue ‘there seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture’ (MacIntyre 1985, 6). Yet despite this post-modern relativism, morality nevertheless remains a central concern in society. Bernard Williams’ Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (1976) justifies the study of moral philosophy whilst outlining some of the reasons why morality remains a key concern in contemporary society. The relativity attending to post-modernism is often posited as a justification for devoting oneself to science as opposed to moral philosophy. Yet, as Williams argues, ‘science is as much a practical activity as any other, and there is no more reason why that one should be objectively justified rather than any other. Justifications for doing objective subjects are not objective justifications for doing those subjects’ (Williams 1976, 43). Furthermore, Williams writes, ‘if we grant a man with even a minimal concern for others, then we do not have to ascribe to him any fundamentally

6

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

new kind of thought or experience to include him in the world of morality, but only what is recognisably an extension of what he already has’ (26). In other words, if a man shows some concern for others, then by extending his sympathies to the needs of people beyond his immediate involvement, he may enter the world of morality. However, Williams’ lengthy justification for ethics is in fact redundant; as Woods has explained, ‘like ideology, one cannot “step outside” ethics’ (Woods 2002, 6). As an introduction to ethics, Williams readily admits in his preface that the narrative and logical argument of his essay ‘follows a torturous path’ (Williams 1976, 13). Indeed he unwittingly encircles himself on all sides as he struggles to articulate with a fraught and over-loaded language, with moral terms fragmented and disordered, the various positions of the key moral philosophies. If one is left somewhat dissatisfied by the end of his essay, this is precisely because all we have learned is the impossible and complex nature of morality. There remains a vague utopian hope; one detects Williams gesturing towards a morality from within, as he writes of ‘the notion that there is something that is one’s deepest impulse, that there is a discovery to be made here, rather than a decision; and the notion that one trusts what is so discovered, although unclear where it will lead’ (93). Yet he is the fi rst to admit that this could not possibly be sufficient to constitute, a ‘complete morality, because it has nothing, or not enough, to say about society, and hence not enough to say about even one man’s life as a whole’ (93). Williams does, however, come surprisingly close to identifying the key problem with conventional moral philosophy. He observes how ‘a philosophy of morality has been built upon the concept of the standards of assessment of “man”’ and these he explains can generally be divided into two sorts—those that do and those that do not make a transcendental appeal (Williams 1976, 68). Crucially, Williams is later led to question this ‘reference to human well-being as a mark of a moral position’ (88). Yet fi nding no alternative to this conventional moral philosophy predicated on the self, Williams resorts to his vague utopian hope. Faced with the contemporary predicament in their sphere of study, that is, the fraught state of language and a history of moral philosophy predicated on the self, both MacIntyre and Williams fail to offer any convincing resolution. MacIntyre mourns the loss of a classical telos as the structuring of society and its concordant virtues, whilst Williams posits some vague hope of a morality from within. It has been the contribution of the philosophical writings of Emmanuel Levinas, to unearth the specific fallacy of ontology as a basis for morality. Whilst MacIntyre and Williams, amongst a plethora of other writers, have effectively outlined the inherent flaws of the key moral philosophies—Williams’ debunking of utilitarianism and its Greatest Happiness Principle, or MacIntyre’s account of the failure of the Enlightenment project, for example—none of these writers have identified the dominant ontological premise

Introduction 7 throughout Western culture. Indeed, the self-orientation of society and its belief in the rights of the individual, the freedom of the individual as the most fundamental ethic, is essentially the totalising agency of an ontological presupposition. It is the phenomenological prioritisation of the self as the basis for morality that, in fact, forms one of the greatest restraints on civilisation. Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (1961) outlines this dominating ontological perspective primarily as it features in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and goes further to radically present an alternative thesis that reorientates this perspective towards ethics. Indeed, Levinas’ philosophy redefi nes ethics as constitutive of our being, and thus prior to ontology. Ethics is not a set of rules by which we govern our behaviour, nor a branch of philosophy in which we investigate the premises on which such rules are based, but the necessary condition of our existence. As Dominic Rainsford and Tim Woods have suggested, ‘For Levinas, ethics is the sphere of transactions between the “self” and the “Other”, and is not to be construed as a naming of conduct within a branch of philosophy’ (Rainsford and Woods 1999, 3). Totality and Infinity may be usefully conceived of as the presentation of moral philosophy according to two confl icting axes. The fi rst axis, that is a totalising philosophy, is predicated on the self, on the ontic. This forms the dominating phenomenological presupposition that has founded moral philosophy for the most part, thus far. Levinas’ alternative axis beckons the Infi nite. As his thesis unfolds, a series of dichotomies between these two axes is revealed. It is the opposition between revelation and disclosure, transcendence and objectivity, discourse and comprehension, temporalisation and intentionality, that reveals how these confl icting axes become respectively totalising and infi nitising philosophies. Morality, predicated on ontology, a prioritisation of the self as an independent being, is revealed by Levinas to be the totalitarian thinking of traditional philosophy. It asserts a fundamentally humanist approach, justifying its morality from the centrality and hegemony of the Neuter, the Hegelian Geist or Heideggerian Dasein. As a totalising schema, such philosophies dictate the disclosure of a panoramic existence, utilising language as a power to effect the collocation and configuration of entities that are refractory to this panorama, somewhat like a hegemonising machine. They may be seen in this light, to use Levinas’ terminology, as the ‘constitutive, egological nature of the transcendental thought of idealism’ (Levinas 1994, 204). It is by way of representation, thematisation or categorisation and conceptualisation that this totalitarian philosophy operates in a violent act of emprise; through cognition and synoptic thought it becomes (often commodifying) appropriation and exploitation, imperialism and war. In a determinate objectivity, it synchronises the objects of its perception to a numerical multiplicity within the State, asserting an impersonal universality, an act that Levinas deems to be yet another inhumanity.

8

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

The totalitarian axis of moral philosophy may be seen then as a desperate egoism; predicated on the ontological, it is a philosophy that manifests society as separated egos, individuals in competition asserting their own power, by an act of self-will, in an attempt to secure “the fundamental ethic”, their “right” to “freedom”. Hence, it is that Levinas writes, ‘from Spinoza to Hegel, the will is identified with reason, in an attempt to justify freedom’ (Levinas 1994, 87). The totalitarian being prioritises objectivity; even those moral philosophers who have accounted for subjectivity, such as Søren Kierkegaard, for example, tend to isolate it and so negate its true purpose. The prioritisation of objectivity and its reductive, totalising exploitation may be seen in Husserl’s formulation of the “noetic-noematic”. In Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931), Husserl suggests that within consciousness a subject is always aware of something (the “noematic”) and he or she is aware of this something in some way (that is, the “noetic”). Husserl designates the term “noema” to indicate the meaning of an object that is formed in this domain of consciousness. He writes, ‘perception, for instance, has its noema, and at the base of this is its perceptual meaning, that is, the perceived as such’ (Husserl 1931, 258). Husserl’s theory posits two forms of reduction that the conceiving subject has to perform. Eidetic reduction constitutes the erasure of the contingent characters of outer objects, whilst the subsequent transcendental reduction constitutes the study of an object without it being present. Here ‘the conceiving subject, which is ego, becomes a transcendental ego’ (Lang n.d.). These reductions, Husserl suggests, enable the ‘conceiving subject to form an ideal (or pure) object of his study within the domain of consciousness’. The “noesis”, then, is the meaning-giving act, whereby the transcendental ego ‘directs his consciousness onto this pure and ideal object rather than what is really out there’. In this way the meaning of the object, the “noema”, is obtained. This meaning is ‘the eidetic fact in the modifi ed sense of that which it is merely presumed to be; in the sense of the judged content as such; and this may or may not prove reliable’ (Husserl 1931, 60). The “noetic-noematic” formulation may be seen as the very mechanics of the homogenising machine driving the totalitarian philosophy. It is a formulation that supports objective disclosure and abrogates the role of subjectivity, an ideological erasure of the sensory perceptions that might interrupt the “noetic-noematic” narrative construction of a panoramic existence. As Alphonso Lingis has suggested, Levinas interpreted ‘the apparently empiricist residue of sensation in the Husserlian theory of consciousness to in fact reflect the ontological process’ (Lingis 1999, xxx). With his most mature philosophical work, fi rst published in 1974 and entitled Otherwise than Being: or beyond essence, Levinas observes in this “noetic-noematic” formulation ‘the consequently ontological structure of signification’ across the totalitarian axis (Levinas 1999, 64). We resist suggesting a synonymy between the ontological and the solus ipse, however,

Introduction 9 because this term denoting “only Selfhood”, from which we derive solipsism, the exclusivity of the self, allows for a modality of self and the centricity of collective subjects as that which structures consciousness. The totalitarian axis, however, is always demarcated by the limits of the self, as a being causa sui (self-caused). Ontology is not annihilated by the Levinisian axis; rather the solipsist being stripped of any centric relations is paradoxically confi rmed in the exteriority of being. This exteriority of being is crucial to a Levinasian ethics. It marks a revision of ontology (of the self as independent being) in a phenomenology where the self finds its being in relation with the other. Levinas writes: ‘the exteriority of being does not, in fact, mean that multiplicity is without relation. However, the relation that binds this multiplicity does not fill the abyss of separation; it confi rms it’ (Levinas 1994, 295). Nevertheless, Levinas is clear in his condemnation of ontology as a fi rst philosophy. For Levinas, ethics precedes ontology. He writes: Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than my being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun. Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth of my life. When reduced to pure and naked existence [ . . . ] life dissolves into a shadow. Life is an existence that does not precede its essence. Its essence makes up its worth; and her value constitutes being. The reality of life is already on the level of happiness, and in this sense beyond ontology. (Levinas 1994, 112) The totalitarian, on the contrary, remains at the limits of the self and hence works to assert being over existents, in this way subordinating justice to “freedom”. The civilisation of the western world, where power and injustice are so often co-joined, has been oriented according to this totalitarian axis and is suffering the consequences. It is, as Levinas suggests, an orientation that provides the basis for war, but what Levinas fails to note is that the issuing violence is not directed only towards the other; in fact the perpetrator is also a victim. The perpetrator is a victim of self-harm, for he or she goes against the very grain of their being—the exteriority of being. The Infi nite axis marks Levinas’ reconfiguration of conventional moral philosophy; the ethical subject demanded by this axis is other-orientated. As Simon Critchley has argued in The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, Levinas’ is a philosophy of non-violent transitivity, whereby a self-abnegation is evoked by assignation rather than volition (Critchley 1999, 1–4). The ethical subject has a social responsibility (that inaugurates its being otherwise) in the face of alterity, the radical heterogeneity, of the other. It is from this non-humanist position that the ethical subject, by way of a transcendent intentionality—a desire or goodness Levinas derived from the philosophies of Aristotle and Plato—welcomes the other

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

as hospitality and so consummates the idea of infi nity. For Levinas, the face, in its immediate proximity before the ethical subject, arrests totalisation. It is precisely in this face-to-face experience that the ethical subject is called into question by an other that is refractory to categorisation. The presumed freedom and corresponding spontaneous acts of the ethical subject are hence brought to account. The face-to-face is the prerequisite of ethics and responsibility, the origin of truth and justice. Levinas posits this questioning of the subject, the separation of the same inherent in the facing of an other, as a way of being, a resistance to totality. The interiority of the ethical subject ‘must be at the same time closed and open’, that is separate, as in exile, yet open to the inescapable assignation of the radical alterity of the other (Levinas 1994, 149). The ethical subject is thus an autochthonous entity, formed or originating in the place where found, consummated by way of a dialectical relationship between the solus ipse and the other. This dramaturgy performed by the ethical subject has a diachronic function, distinguishing it from the totalitarian being’s relative cessation that functions on a purely synchronic level. The dialectical movement essential to the Infi nitising axis is motivated by love rather than violence. In the face-to-face, the other ‘reveals himself in his alterity not in a shock negating the I, but as the primordial phenomenon of gentleness’ (Levinas 1994, 150). Levinas invests this locus of the face-to-face, as the site of true metaphysics. The epiphany of the face is found in the expression of the ethical subject. It is not a disclosure of the totalitarian being in a moment of object-cognition—what might be signified semantically—but the avidity of the gaze in the naked destitution of the face that is an assignation of responsibility and, simultaneously, an offering of the self. In this absolute experience, there is a paralysis of possession, as the division between form and content collapses into a revelation of truth. The metaphysical dramaturgy that takes place in the face-to-face experience is fundamental to the Infi nite axis. In the immediacy of this experience, Levinas frames the epiphany as ‘the signifier arising at the thrust of his sign, as eyes that look at you’ (Levinas 1994, 178). Hence, the ‘manifestation of the face is already discourse’ (66). It is by way of the relationship of discourse that the face transcends its objectification and withstands the possibility of violent emprise. In its nudity the face stands outside any system of reference. ‘To “let him be,”’ Levinas writes, ‘the relationship of discourse is required’ (71); furthermore, justice is designated as this face-toface approach in conversation. The presentation of the expression of the face as a signifier is a crucial moment in Levinas’ philosophy for my thesis. For if the ethical subject is inchoate in the thrust of the sign manifested in the expression of the face, then language may be assumed as the site of ethics. Levinas writes, ‘the calling in to question of the I, coextensive with the manifestation of the Other in the face, we call language’ (Levinas 1994, 171). As the moment

Introduction 11 of true metaphysics, the epiphany of the face is transcendent, it is not ‘a vision of the Other, but a primordial donation’; ‘transcendence is not an optics, but the fi rst ethical gesture’ (174). In the immediacy of the epiphanic questioning by the face of the Other, the ethical subject assumes an urgency in response. The face engenders me for responsibility, and ‘as responsible,’ Levinas claims, ‘I am brought to my fi nal reality [ . . . ] the presence in me of the idea of Infi nity’ (179). It is thus that Levinas understands ethics to precede ontology. The Infinite axis presents the primordial face-to-face of language as the existent expressing himself, whilst the totalitarian axis negates such a sensuous experience by way of a reductive objectivity that erases any experience contingent to the disclosure of being as the origin of meaning. The central locus of the Infinite axis is an experience that by its nature, because of the nudity of the face, is authentic and sincere. The totalitarian locus, that is the disclosure of being, is, on the contrary, always mediated by rhetoric. As Levinas’ philosophy unfolds, the polar axes are revealed as the antithetical juxtaposition of subjectivity and objectivity, the oscillation between the prioritisation of the saying and the said, that is, between the explicit integrity of the primordial act of the signifier and the dissimulation of the signified. Hence, ‘expression does not manifest the presence of being by referring from the sign to the signified; it presents the signifier. The signifier, he who gives a sign, is not signified. [ . . . ] the signifier must present himself before every sign, by himself—present a face’ (Levinas 1994, 182). Language operates in discourse as the accomplishment of a relation between ethical subjects, thereby fracturing the independent unity of the self as an ontological construct. For this reason Levinas defi nes language as ‘the very power to break the continuity of being or of history’ (Levinas 1994, 195). Thus what the totalising agency of ontology eclipses, the formal structure of language announces, that is, ‘the ethical inviolability of the other’ (195). Levinas writes: ‘better than comprehension, discourse relates with what remains essentially transcendent’ (195). The epiphany of the face is the expression, the signification of the other’s alterity, what cannot be contained by the ethical subject who approaches. The resistance of the ethical subject to the macro-logic of the totalitarian being, Levinas suggests, ‘is maintained without violence, in peace with this absolute alterity’ (Levinas 1994, 197). The relation between existents in the discourse of the face-to-face is thus presented by Levinas as having ‘a positive structure: ethical’ (197). The nudity of the face signifies the destitution of the stranger in the public locus of the face-to-face. It relates us to the third party assigning us responsibility for what may be beyond our control so that, ‘the metaphysical relation of the I with the Other moves into the form of the We, aspires to a State, institutions, laws, which are the source of universality’ (Levinas 1999, 300). However, as Levinas was personally aware, ‘politics left to itself bears a tyranny within itself; it deforms the I and the other who have

12

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

given rise to it, for it judges them according to universal rules, and thus as in absentia’ (300). This is precisely the violating totalitarian force that can be identified as running through the dominant discourses of modernity, where the author assumes a self-oriented humanism. The political imperative of the Levinasian philosophy is made evident in his account of true metaphysics wherein we are led to ‘the accomplishment of the I as unicity by relation to which the work of the State must be situated, and which it must take as model’ (300). In the locus of the face-to-face, the possibility for an ethical subject that is “otherwise than being, or beyond essence” emerges. The revelation achieved in such proximity is the apperception of responsibility as the determinative structure of subjectivity. Levinas’ understanding of responsibility clearly aligns it with his notion of Infi nity or God. For Levinas, responsibility is an-archic, that is, it functions prior to all initiatives and their principles. It is not so much a determined choice that the subject makes by an act of self-will but rather the ethical subject is absolutely passive in the face of the assignation of responsibility. Furthermore, responsibility is clearly a phenomenon of the Infinite, for it goes beyond what the ethical subject wills or could affect. Yet the Infi nite quality of responsibility runs even deeper than this. Levinas writes: ‘in the absolute assignation of the subject the Infi nite is enigmatically heard: before and beyond’ (Levinas 1999, 140). Levinas directs us to the ‘pre-originary susceptiveness’ (122) of the ethical subject wherein one has already been assigned responsibility by God. This assignation is less explicit in Levinas’ philosophical writings than the assignation by the other—although, of course, these two are closely linked, for the other, in his absolute alterity, contains the idea of the Infinite. However, the specific assignation by God is revealed in Levinas’ Otherwise than Being through a series of biblical references, contained in the footnotes if not in the body of the text itself. Indeed Levinas layers his writing with these references as a medium of support for, and confirmation of, his philosophy. This layering is, however, cautiously balanced; Levinas’ self-reflexivity acknowledges the dangers of a purely religious, rather than philosophical account. The hallmark of his writing is the intensity of thought and thorough explication of his logical and rhetorical movements. Yet paradoxically, this very hallmark can make his writing appear as but an endless regression. With careful reading, however, Levinas’ relentless questioning and attention to the propinquity of his assertions marks the very unfolding by which his philosophy is so rich, and by way of which its implications become explicit and extensive. The biblical story that is embedded in Levinas’ philosophy is that of the Old Testament prophets. It is David’s response to the assignation of the other in the face of the Philistine, from 1 Samuel 17:45, ‘I come to you in the name of the LORD of hosts’; Isaiah’s response to the call of God, from Isaiah 6:8, ‘Here I am! send me’; the Hebraic translation from which the

Introduction 13 ancient Jewish tradition determined, and the medieval rabbi Maimonides taught, that Moses gave up his soul by way of a kiss on the mouth of God, from Deuteronomy 34:5, as expiation for the other; and the pre-originary assignation confi rmed in the words of the prophet Isaiah, from Isaiah 65:24, ‘Before they call, I will answer’ (Levinas 1999, 149–150, 182). In this way, Levinas’ philosophy is inextricably linked with the biblical story; the ontological premise of conventional philosophy is replaced with a preoriginary assignation of responsibility apperceived in the very creation of the world: Glory is glorified by the subject’s coming out of the dark corners of the “as-for-me,” which, like the thickets of Paradise in which Adam hid himself upon hearing the voice of the eternal God traversing the garden [ . . . ], offered a hiding-place from the assignation, in which the position of the ego at the beginning, and the very possibility of origin, is shaken. (Levinas 1999, 144) Thus, Levinas’ philosophy is invested in the subjectivity of the reader, who is directed to the pre-originary assignation found in the face of his acquaintances, past and present. Otherwise than Being is an ethical treatise before an ontological exposition, containing both the signifier in its discourse of love—the biblical story that is both before and beyond, resisting total appropriation—and the signified, in its objective disquisition. The Infi nite axis asserts the ethical subject as in debt by ordination, whilst the Totalitarian axis deems the ontological being as having the right to freedom, simply from being. Thus, for Levinas, responsibility is antecedent to freedom. He writes: ‘if ethical terms arise in our discourse, before the terms freedom and nonfreedom, it is because before the bipolarity of good and evil presented to choice, the subject finds himself committed to the Good in the very passivity of supporting’ (Levinas 1999, 122). This passivity of supporting is the ethical subject’s role in having been assigned responsibility. For the destitution of the naked face demands more than benevolence from the ethical subject, rather his substitution as a kind of metaphysical empathy. ‘This assignation of myself,’ Levinas writes, ‘to support the other constitutes the uniqueness of the subject’ [my italics]. In other words, only I can assume this responsibility for it is a personal assignation. In this way, ‘the oneself is hypostasized [ . . . ], bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others’ (105). In this substitution, the ‘“extraditing” of the self to the neighbor,’ responsibility as the determinative structure of subjectivity is realised (Levinas 1999, 149). It is a reconfiguration that marks Levinas’ attempt to free subjectivity from any ontological account. Through subjection to the Good by way of sensibility and expression, vulnerability in face of the other, the meaning of humanity is reconstituted in the diachrony of the subject.

14 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry The ethical exorbitance of Levinas’ philosophy is embedded in this substitution—an expiation for the other, or suffering, that is inherent in signification. The formidable import of this revelation, of responsibility as the determinative structure of subjectivity, is that, as Lingis comments, ‘the self “exists” in signification rather than in being’ (Lingis 1999, xxxvii). Hence, language is not reducible to a system of signs, but is rather ‘an excrescence of the verb’ (Levinas 1999, 35). More than a system of communication, language is the site of ethics, a being for the other. Responsibility assumed by way of a giving of the sign, as witness and expiation for the destitute other, constitutes the consciousness or subjectivity of the ethical subject. For Levinas, ‘it is the signifyingness of saying going beyond essence that can justify the exposedness of being, ontology’ (Levinas 1999, 38). Furthermore, it is ‘the ethical interruption of essence that energizes the reduction’ (44) from the said to the saying. It follows that the giving of the sign as the ethical behaviour in the face-to-face relation should be distinguished from the conventional use of language—the system exposed in the writings of Ferdinand de Saussure. For ‘saying approaches the other by breaking through the noema involved in intentionality’ (48); it is ‘the very indifference of a noema to a noesis’ (61), the indifference of the sign to its signification. The abuse of language affected by the totalitarian being is thus revealed. Levinas explains how ‘being is play or détente, without responsibility, where everything is permitted. But is play free of interest? Right of a stakes, money or honor, is attached to it’ (Levinas 1999, 6). In this way, Levinas prophesied the play that was to become manifest in the postmodernist narrative and foresaw the capitalist project of ideologically loaded dominant discourses. For Levinas, ‘nothing is more grave, more august, than responsibility for the other, and saying, in which there is no play, has a gravity more grave than its own being and not being’ (46). There is, of course, a paradoxical impossibility here that marks the limit of Levinas’ philosophy of ethics, indeed the limit of the Infi nite axis. Whilst signifyingness is antecedent to ontology, nevertheless the signifier cannot resist its signification. In the very process of unsaying the said, the signifier that is utilised achieves its signification. Thus for Levinas, ‘Logos is the ambiguousness of being and entities, the primordial amphibology’ (Levinas 1999, 42). The problem with this position is that it is not only a negative philosophy, one that keeps us necessarily in exile from each other, but that it is also an untenable position. The responsibility and witness that Levinas demands from the ethical subject is beyond our capability; according to his philosophy, my ‘debt [to the other] increases in the measures that it is paid’ (12). By the same token, we cannot, as Levinas demands, pay the debt of humanity, what we did not will. This paradoxical impossibility is acutely felt in Levinas’ narratology. As Stephen H. Webb has argued, ‘he is trying to perform an instance of that which cannot be conceptualized because it is prior to every act of reception and response’ (Webb 1999, 4). Indeed, according to this paradoxical

Introduction 15 impossibility, the extent to which we understand Levinas’ philosophical writings is the extent to which we have misunderstood them. In my reading of his work, this would show the degree to which we are aligned with the Totalising axis of ontology. Indeed, Webb concludes that, ‘Levinas’s position forces him into a continuous mode of exaggeration, acceleration, and intensification.’ The paradoxical impossibility of saying the ‘singularity and uniqueness of the other [ . . . ] necessitates a kind of exaggerated repetition that keeps postponing any conclusion in order to keep the saying of otherness from becoming a having been said’ (5). Levinas’ philosophy remains faithful to the Judaic tradition and thus cannot recognise that Christ’s sacrifice, as Webb explains, ‘does not relent or release the ethical pressure of the other but instead solicits and enables my response’ (Webb 1999, 10). This is to understand the incarnation not as a reduction of the Other, or the Infi nite, to the same, for the face-to-face encounter with God remains a mystery. Indeed, we are not called to see God, but to follow him, as Webb suggests, in ‘the solidarity that shared suffering makes possible’ (11). Levinas’ rejection of the radical implications of Christology to his philosophy of ethics is perhaps understandable for the Church has tended to promote the experiential, the harmony and closure of a direct face-to-face encounter with God. Yet this religious fanaticism negates the biblical truth that, as Webb writes, ‘we live in the interim between Eden and Heaven and that hope should not obscure our confrontation with injustice in the meantime’ (13). In fact, to follow Christ is to be assigned responsibility, as Levinas also concludes, when faced with the destitution of another. This is made explicit in the gospels of the New Testament; quoting Jesus, for example, the apostle Matthew writes: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me’ (Matthew 25:40). Thus, Christianity should not be seen as an onto-theology, but rather as a theology that confi rms and enables an ethics of responsibility. ‘To imagine God as already as well as not yet present,’ Webb writes, ‘would be to imagine in the ethical sphere an otherness that not only persecutes us with impossible demands but also forgives us even before we fail to meet those demands’ (14). This tension at the limit of the Infi nite axis, the limit of ethics, may thus be alternately perceived. From a Levinasian perspective, it is the paradoxical impossibility of the ethical saying as always already said and hence a debt that ‘increases in the measures that it is paid’ (Levinas 1999, 12). From a Christian perspective the ethical subject remains, as Levinas suggests, ‘hypostasized [ . . . ] bound in a knot that cannot be undone in a responsibility for others’ (105), for we are always in debt to Christ, but this debt has also, always already, been paid. Webb writes: Christianity teaches that Jesus has paid the debt we owe to others, but that does not mean that the debt no longer exists. Levinas is right to demand an ethical accounting of the crucifi xion: “Properly speaking, the world was not changed by the Christian sacrifice.” A Christian can

16

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry only try to show how the sacrifice of Christ frees us to spend profl igately and prodigiously, so that we can meet the demands of others. [ . . . ] We are most in debt to Jesus, not to others, but that supreme debt frees us to treat others as our equals, and to give to others without fear of loss or strife. (Webb 1999, 13)

Indeed, it is in the biblical layering of Levinas’ logical philosophical movements that we might identify his attempt to provide a methodological resolution to the formal, linguistic problematic inherent to his project. With a view to resisting object-cognition, it is the biblical allusions and citations, the voice of God, the discourse of love—in contradistinction to a purely totalitarian narrative—that inscribes the signifier into his text and resists the closure of a narrative signified. According to this reading the ethical relation may be understood either as an impossible responsibility that necessarily exiles us from each other or, as a responsibility that enables us to follow Christ and to share in His suffering. This is the ethical relation at the heart of the New Testament; it inaugurates a unity, as of the Trinity, or Perichoresis, that binds together individuality and mutuality. Jesus, for instance, characterises His relation to the Father in terms of a mutual indwelling: ‘Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me’ (John 14:11). Furthermore, he claims that we can participate in this ethical relation, or in such perichoretic realities, both socially and spiritually, both with the human and the divine: ‘Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me’ (John 17:20–21). Our debt to the other as well as our debt for what we did not will, has been paid in Christ’s sacrifice. Through this sacrifice we are both called to and welcomed in to an ethical relation with the other. Whether we understand the ethical relation as a negative philosophy— where our debt can never be paid—or as the hope of a unity that supports alterity, we remain, however, at the limit of the Infi nite axis, for the question returns to a problem of language. The ethical relation within both the Judaic and Christian traditions calls for our witness in face of an other as the meaning of language, before language ‘scatters into words, into themes’ (Levinas 1999, 151). The primordial face-to-face of language—whether or not it is sustainable—thus marks the inauguration of consciousness, responsibility and ethics. By extension it seems that the phenomenological opening of the said to its saying becomes the moral duty of the ethical reader faced with a totalitarian narrative. Similarly, this book will argue that the writer is ordained with a new goal and becomes the hostage of a new predicament. Can the writer maintain the diastasis of the subject’s identity, hold open the proximity and immediacy of their discourse and perpetuate the excrescence of alterity? Or, perhaps this is only possible by degree, rarefaction being the limit of the logos.

Introduction 17 A further problem is introduced, however, as we attempt to draw out the implications of Levinas’ ethical philosophy for literary studies. Levinas writes: ‘to approach someone from works is to enter into his interiority as though by burglary’ (Levinas 1994, 66). Furthermore, art, he proposes, ‘endows things with something like a façade—that by which objects are not only seen, but are as objects on exhibition’ (193). Levinas does not hesitate to argue that the beauty of art ‘introduces a new fi nality, an internal fi nality, into this naked world [ . . . ] to clothe the elements with signification’; but, for Levinas, art operates in such a way as ‘to place its subject in the whole by apperceiving its function or its beauty’ (74). Hence, he concludes that ‘all art is plastic’ (140) and that its ‘production attests the author of the work in his absence’ (227). For Levinas, ‘this inexpressive character of the product is reflected in its market value’ (227). Yet if the meaning and purpose of language is found in the face-to-face to be love for the other, and language as the offering of the signifier is the locus of ethics, then the writer, whose fi rst and foremost concern is with language, may work towards an art that perpetuates the Infi nite rather than totalitarian axis of life. It is precisely at the limit of Levinas’ philosophy, the limit of the Infi nite axis, where a sphere has opened up in the field of contemporary American poetics. Indeed, the “poethical trajectory” demarcates a radical lineage in twentieth-century American poetic experimentation, a lineage wherein the relationship between ethics and language has become fundamental to aesthetic practice. Poethical praxis is the sphere of a radical poetic experimentation; its practitioners are pioneers at the frontier, at the limit of the Infi nite axis. In such work, there persists a tension between a “traumatised semiotics” and an ethical perfection. The challenge for such work is to maintain the diastasis of identity in poetic form, whilst resisting the totalising abrogation of alterity inherent to ontological thinking. Poethical praxis thus seeks to prise apart the signifier from its signified. In attempting to perform an ethical saying that secures mutuality, whilst maintaining alterity, it is thus often marked by an oscillation in and out of referential focus. In one respect, poethical praxis may appear as a conceptual locus—the frontier at the horizon, as the limit of the Infi nite. This is the ethical relation as mapped by Levinas. He writes: perfection exceeds conception, overflows the concept; it designates distance: the idealization that makes it possible is a passage to the limit, that is, a transcendence, a passage to the other absolutely other. The idea of the perfect is an idea of infi nity. (Levinas 1994, 41) This impossible vision of an ethical relation with alterity is described in the closing sections of Levinas’ Totality and Infinity. The ethical subject found at the frontier, at the limit of the Infi nite axis, achieves the synchrony of being and peace in responsibility. Here the ethical subject has reached his

18 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry or her ‘fi nal reality’ (Levinas 1994, 179). The vision at the frontier marks the point at which the ego is led to sincerity, is in the epiphany of exteriority and at the limit of interiority. Furthermore, the ethical subject is under the Judgment of God that exists in its infi nite time. Through sensibility, he or she achieves substitution as witness for the destitute, experiences the suffering of physical pain that realises the proximity of death as the limit of consciousness, and is fi nally shaken from hiding. For Levinas, at the frontier the ethical subject is the apparition of the object, the absolute other whose spontaneity and freedom is revealed as the diastasis of their identity. Indeed, Levinas explains that, ‘the truth of the will lies in its coming under judgment; but its coming under judgment lies in a new orientation of the inner life, called to infi nite responsibilities’ (Levinas 1994, 246). These infi nite responsibilities are felt in the poetry of those who demarcate the “poethical trajectory”. A ‘new orientation of the inner life,’ for instance, motivated the work of the early Beat writers and constituted their faith, in what we now know to have been, the futurity of reaching the frontier. Nevertheless theirs was a faith in which, ‘every moment is holy and precious’ (Kerouac 1972, 56), another opportunity to realise the limit of the Infi nite axis. The renewed concern for an ethical responsibility in American poetry was not, however, the product of philosophical, theological or critical discoveries. In fact, it emerged as a reaction to specific socio-political realities. Throughout the twentieth century, America’s foreign and domestic policies, as well as the economic programmes of its capitalist entrepreneurs have, on the whole, sought a military-industrial and media-technocracy as a means of political coercion and social control. Within this political and economic context, a totalising social order has been promoted through an ontological abuse of our shared language. Indeed, the pervasive language in media discourse and social dialogue today is one of a “traumatised semiotics”, a language driven against its ethical grain. The individual faced with the suffering of another has only this shared language with which to respond, but it is a language fraught under the aegis of the ontological. Furthermore, in thinking through the problems of contemporary society, language at the same time delimits the totality of potential understanding, and so leaves us traumatised in the face of the complex and violent relations of our modern world. The “poethical trajectory” demarcates these political themes in its presentation of specific ethical engagements. In Chapter 2, for example, I give a detailed analysis of Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems (1983), locating the ethical imperative in his challenge to the dehumanising effects of industrialisation, as fundamental to his poetic practice. Furthermore, by examining Olson’s unpublished papers—the notes, extensive drafts and revised manuscripts archived at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center (University of Connecticut)—I present, for the first time, evidence of an emergent

Introduction 19 poetics where the original unit, as beyond cognitive reduction, must yet be distilled from the overarching form, in order to preserve its alterity. These early beginnings of a second phase poethical praxis are shown to have been promoted at the Black Mountain School; a ‘small place,’ Olson claimed in 1951, that ‘offer[ed] this sort of chance, this sort of experimental locus’ (Olson 1974b, 11). Indeed, in a letter to W. H. Ferry, Olson wrote: ‘human density is a density we have to face’ (Olson 1974c, 21). Whilst he believed that ‘you can never lose to the City Council if your case is love,’ by 1969 he realised that he was having to go ‘every day a further distance to fi nd what [he] believe[d] in’ (Olson 1974a, 10, 31). Similarly, in the late 1940s and early 1950s the Beat writers became disillusioned with the crippling agency of mass-consumerism, the idealisation of American sovereignty and a politics of infidelity, all of which infested America at that time as the product of totalitarian thinking. The journey of the early Beats was essentialised by Jack Kerouac in the search for “IT” narrated in On the Road (1957). Indeed, Kerouac’s method of spontaneous prose distinguishes his position as a progenitor of this journey, exploring the possibilities of language in the written word to achieve ethical perfection. Whilst Kerouac sought to materialise the ethical subject’s experience of “IT” at the limit of the frontier, his work was appropriated by mass-culture. Faced with the radical alterity of characters like Dean Moriarty, the press resorted to a formularised framework—through a concerted romantic mythopoiea they constructed the “Beat Generation”. On the Road became thematised as an epitaph for the road-trip genre and reduced to the category of escapism. Indeed, it was the rejection and reification of his work within a totalitarian discourse that was pivotal in Kerouac’s increasing dependence on alcohol and became the central theme of his later novel, Desolation Angels (1965). Kerouac’s close friend, Allen Ginsberg, also took up the challenge of an ethical response to the consumer culture and capitalist technocracy of 1950’s America. In my chapter on Ginsberg’s work, I examine materials from the Alternative Press Collection at the Dodd Center, as evidence of the sub-cultural self-othering now widely recognised as a Beat Generation phenomenon. This process, however, is shown to be problematised in Ginsberg’s poetry as he negotiates the ethics and politics of a renewed individualism (see Chapter 5). The work of the Beat writers and the Black Mountain Poets marked a fundamental shift that brought a diverse range of writers into this sphere of work, at the limit of the Infi nite axis. Chapter 3 introduces Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics as instructive of an ethical responsibility in the representation and social production of space. I draw a parallel between Levinas’ otheroriented approach and Snyder’s vision of the natural world as an intersubjective, non-hierarchical field of sentient and spiritual beings. Indeed, following on from Olson’s challenge to industrialisation, this chapter

20

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

brings environmental awareness to the “poethical trajectory” and presents Snyder’s bio-centric politics of ecological advocacy as sustaining the nonpredatory mode of representation in his poetry. As the “turn to ethics” has been formative in the development of postcolonial politics, I also examine Jerome Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics—a direct challenge to cultural imperialism. In Chapter 4, I show how his work as editor of several influential “anthologies” offers a protean defi nition of poesis, whilst his own poetic practices maintain a processual dynamic of welcoming the other through “total” translations. From this point, the “poethical trajectory” enters a third phase as it is increasingly concerned with the formal problematic of language, the seeming impossibility of opening the said to its saying or materialising the signifier in the text. Indeed, corresponding with the “turn to ethics”, Chapter 6 deals with the “turn to language” informed by new critical and linguistic theories in poetry of the post-Vietnam era. Focusing on the work of Bruce Andrews, I propose three stages of development in his poetic practice: micro-syntactical works of a semantic milieu; oppositional re-workings of larger organisational units (with particular attention to typographical arrangements); and fi nally, positively valued re-writings of the social body in a participatory poetics or emancipatory constructivism. Informed by my own interview with Andrews in 2004, these three stages are worked out alongside a close reading of works from SONNETS (Memento Mori) (1980), Give Em Enough Rope (1987), Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened (1988), Lip Service (2001) and The Millennium Project (2001). In particular, with the “turn to language” of the “poethical trajectory” various critics have accused these practices of a purely formal technicality, of eclectic abstraction, and of constructing a poetry of estrangement accessible only to the academic intelligentsia. Yet critical discourse has been largely blind to this radical sphere of work as operating at the limit of the Infi nite axis, and has thus failed to address it as an ethical trajectory, precisely because it too is experiencing a crisis at its epicentre. It has been the singular achievement of Tim Woods to understand that ‘contemporary poetics, through the critique of reference and normative syntax by way of linguistic games and the play of the signifier, are concerned with ethics and the relationship between language and ethics’ (Woods 2002, 4). Indeed, having mapped the relationship of modernist poetics with an ethical perspective that is illuminated by Levinas’ work, Woods explains the ‘poetic crisis in critical discourse’ thus: Critics and historians, in the wake of the vehement antihumanist outburst by the early twentieth-century modernists, swayed too heavily by poststructuralist edicts, and subsequently disillusioned, have tended to focus on these things as purely ontological. (Woods 2002, 4)

Introduction

21

In Woods’ The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (2002), Levinas’ ethical philosophy combined with Drucilla Cornell’s Philosophy of the Limit (1992) are formative in his contention that the poetry of Louis Zukofsky is a ‘poetics of the limit.’ Woods defi nes the ‘poetics of the limit’ as a non-predatory mode of representation. For him, Zukofsky’s “A” (1978) constitutes, ‘an art of love as the ethical answer to the alienating world of modern capitalism’ (Woods 2002, 139). Whilst Levinas deemed all art to be plastic, Woods’ analysis of Zukofsky’s poetry reveals the ‘poetics of the limit’ as ‘the arena of resolving the public, embattled state of the state through an intervention of personal ethical practice’ (142). Yet the tension is not absolved, for as Woods later acknowledges, ‘modern art constantly alludes to the aporia, namely, the conditions of its own impossibility’ (85). However, what becomes clear in Woods’ text is that ‘the work of modern art embodies the very conditions of its own commodified status, but also holds out the redemptive possibility in its aesthetic activity’ (129). In Zukofsky’s poem, this is perhaps achieved through what Woods describes as its ‘blessedness [ . . . ] the “moment” of immanent critique in the “poetics of the limit,” enabling one to perceive the structurality of structure’ (125). Woods’ thesis proves to be an invaluable interruption to the totalitarian axis running through the epicentre of contemporary critical discourse. However, whilst Woods gives only passing reference to the Beats and the Black Mountain writers before proceeding to address the Language Poets, the “poethical trajectory” broadens our understanding of ethical praxis beyond the use of sound materials as a ‘poetics of the limit.’ It also admits new political themes and schools of experimentation, whilst revisiting the “turn to Language” by bringing contemporary developments to account. Indeed, the fi nal chapter of the “poethical trajectory” seeks a revision of our practices of critical writing and reading in the light of these ethical experimentations. The poem, conventionally perceived as a unique entity of copyright, is redefi ned as the composite of a plurality of engagements, performed in multi-foliate versions across distances of reception. Similarly, criticism is envisioned as an ongoing process rather than a specific task, regenerative of an ethical saying in its interruption to earlier interpretations. This fi nal chapter concludes with the proposition that the reception hosted in the performative dialogics of poethical praxis might be regenerative of our “traumatised semiotics”.1 This process is located at the juncture of the saying and the said, where participation in the constitution of the poem’s meaning regenerates the text’s ethical saying and so commits us to a co-operative responsibility. Critics of modern American poetry have, until recently, largely neglected the radical reorientation proposed by Levinas in his ethical philosophy. There are several reasons for this: partly, no doubt, the especial difficulty in reading Levinas is to blame; his ethical exorbitance and extreme hyperbole

22

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

may also arouse scepticism in the reader; but ultimately, it is no doubt the stranglehold of the post-modern relativist climate, the ontological self-orientation and synthesis in our epistemological thought, that cannot comprehend the ethical. But the ethical cannot be silenced, for it resounds in the very language which one uses to erase it. Indeed, for Woods, ‘the poetics of the limit’ is a ‘poetics of interruption’ (Woods 2002, 255). It is, he writes, ‘the possibility for alternatives, for the otherness beyond the limit, a prolepsis in poesis, that the text holds open and presents as the potential of language use’ (186).

2

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems It takes a moral nature to walk these silken ropes without breaking them or falling through. Charles Olson1

Charles Olson began his studies in literature as an English major at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, in 1928. However, it was during his time at Harvard University from 1936 to 1939—in the company of such eminent academics as Professors F. O. Matthiessen, Ellery Sedgwick, Jr., Kenneth Murdock and Perry Miller—that he specialised in the historical transformations of American civilisation. Although Olson failed to submit a dissertation for his PhD, the work he undertook as part of the emergent American Studies program and as a Guggenheim Fellow for studies on Herman Melville, proved to be of significant import for his later poetic thinking. It was not until several years later, however, that Olson turned his full attention to poetry, and to the poetic implications of this academic work. First he took the position in September 1942, of assistant chief in the Foreign Language Division of the Office of War Information. 2 According to Tom Clark’s biography Charles Olson: The Allegory of a Poet’s Life, the Division was initially ‘a creative, freewheeling company’ (Clark 1991, 82). Here, Olson ‘threw himself with a passion into the task of interpreting and “promoting” the war for the benefit of millions of immigrant citizens who were being counted on to populate the trenches and assembly lines’ (78). Following bureaucratic expansion, however, the Division soon became ‘a sprawling administrative monolith’ (82). According to Clark: Throughout 1943, new executive personnel continued to flock on board, no longer from literary and artistic fields but now from business, sales and advertising. A new agency publications policy dictated tighter internal controls, allowing staffers less freedom of individual expression in both text and design. Content and tone would henceforth come from higher up, with new middle-echelon bureaucrats checking everything twice [ . . . ] The image-conscious incoming salesmen and admen wanted to market the war like Coca-Cola. (Clark 1991, 82–83)

24

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Olson distrusted these ‘bureaucrats and businessmen’ (Clark 1991, 85). According to Clark, he looked out on the changed world of that spring in 1944, and was ‘depressed to fi nd prospective opportunities for postwar global advancement evaporating on every front’ (84). The Division, in his view, was ‘tragically mortgaging the future to petty businessmen’s ideas of empire building’ (84). After a short interval as director of the Foreign Nationalities Division of the Democratic National Committee, Olson fi nally quit politics for good, and so rejected his position as (to use Clark’s words) ‘another cog in the bureaucratic machine’ (94). Following his frustration with the Roosevelt administration, Olson revisited his Melville project and secured its publication in March 1947 in the form of a monograph entitled Call Me Ishmael. Whilst the significance of this work—one of the most important critical essays on Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), together with his academic studies of American Civilisation—should not be underestimated, his short career in politics critically informed the concerns of his later poetry. As an employee of the Roosevelt administration, Olson gained a unique insight into the socio-economic conditions of contemporary society. Indeed, in an early unpublished essay from 1947, entitled “Poetry and Criticism,” Olson writes: ‘What bores me, and angers me, as much in writing as in foreign policy, are those who clutch old answers in a new, terrifying world’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #19). From 1945 until his death in 1970, Olson was to become a prolific writer of prose and poetry. Two further factors influenced the intensity of his literary endeavours. In 1948 Olson was invited to lecture at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. This small but radical liberal arts college, founded in 1933, was established according to John Dewey’s principles of progressive education. When Olson succeeded Josef Albers as Rector in 1951, he wrote to his friend W. H. Ferry, describing how ‘the place offers lessons in how American education generally can make another heave, make an advance by the locking arms of active professionals and regular faculties, anywhere’ (Olson 1974b, 8). What excited Olson about Black Mountain College—and it must have been quite a refreshing change to the ‘desperate Harvard intellectual “rat race”’ (Clark 1991, 39)—was the fact that it brought in ‘the active professional man, in the arts and in the fields of knowledge, who is not an historian (as, basically, all “professors” are) but is himself actively a maker of “history”’ (Olson 1974b, 8). Furthermore, as the Black Mountain catalogue of 1949 explains, the emphasis was on ‘what happens between things, not on the things in themselves’ (quoted in Olson 1974b, 9). This kind of thinking, as underpinning the emphasis on an interdisciplinary education, particularly suited Olson. He continued in his letter to Ferry: What happens between things—what happens between men—what happens between guest faculty, students, regular faculty—and what happens among each as the result of each: for I do not think one can

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 25 overstate—at this point of time, America, 1951—the importance of workers in different fields of the arts and of knowledge working so closely together some of the time of the year that they fi nd out, from each other, the ideas, forms, energies, and the whole series of kinetics and emotions now opening up, out of the quantitative world [ . . . ] a small place now offers this sort of chance, this sort of experimental locus. (Olson 1974b, 11) The dynamic interchange of ideas and artistic productions, combined with the pedagogic work of developing a modern educational program, proved a stimulating and challenging environment for Olson to work as a poet. Owned and operated by the faculty, all members of the College community participated in its farm work, construction projects and kitchen duty. The College soon became a legendary place, attracting and creating a plethora of maverick spirits from whom Olson would draw further inspiration. It was at Black Mountain College in March 1954, for example, that Olson fi rst met the poet Robert Creeley. They had begun corresponding four years previously and, as George Butterick has suggested, theirs was to become ‘one of the closest and most productive of recent literary friendships’ (Butterick, Creeley et al. 1978, 129). With the establishment of Origin, a small-press poetry magazine that Olson and Creeley helped to found and edit in 1950 with the poet Cid Corman, together with the Black Mountain Review, the College’s own journal fi rst published in 1954, a burgeoning poetics discourse emerged. Indeed, Edward Halsey Foster has suggested that the Review became ‘a platform for the theories of writing the two men had developed in their correspondence’ (Foster 1995, 9). Together with Robert Duncan, Edward Dorn, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, John Wieners, Denise Levertov, Joel Oppenheimer, Olson and Creeley have—through their various associations with the College or its publications—often been described as “Black Mountain Poets”. As with most categorisations, to appropriate the diverse range of poetries that these writers produced, under a single collective title, is useful yet largely reductive. Nevertheless, there were common sympathies between the poets: Creeley, in particular, shared Olson’s concerns about the emerging bureaucratic technocracy: ‘I am angered’, he wrote, ‘contemptuous, impatient, and possibly even cynical concerning the situation of our lives in this “national” place. Language has, publicly, become such an instrument of coercion, persuasion, and deceit. The power thus collected is ugly beyond description—it is truly evil’ (quoted in Conners and Tursi 2003). Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Olson produced a series of critical essays and prose pieces of a discursive philosophising, in an attempt to expound his understanding of American society. As is made clear in his “Biographical statement for ‘Twentieth-Century Authors’” written in November 1952, he perceived a transition ‘into the post-modern, the post-humanist,

26

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

the post-historic, the going live present, the “Beautiful Thing”’, a notion that pervades his unpublished essays (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1499). Indeed, as Charles Altieri has suggested, Olson is often viewed as ‘the one thinker [who was] capable of suggesting poetic and philosophic strategies for breaking beyond modernism to a post-modern vision of reality and a redeemed human consciousness sustained by that reality’ (Altieri 1973–1974, 173). To claim that Olson was the progenitor of postmodernism, as it is variously understood today, however, is to over-simplify his work. Throughout his critical and philosophical writings, it was earlier figures like Melville, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Arthur Rimbaud and D. H. Lawrence, to whom Olson would refer as having ‘projected what we are and what we are in, who broke the spell’; as he concluded in “The Present is Prologue,” ‘They put men forward into the post-modern’ (Olson 1997a, 205–207). Whilst Olson’s understanding of our post-modern condition was undoubtedly influenced by these literary predecessors, it was also informed by contemporary advances in non-Euclidean geometry, socialist economics, psychoanalysis, anthropology, and geography. Across these diverse fields, Olson identified in a series of unpublished lecture notes from 1948, ‘a common direction to all,’ that is, ‘an approach to man as thing of mass and energy disposed in space-time, acted on and motivated by no such verbalisms as “spirit” and “destiny” but by something common to nature in other parts of the universe—force’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 35: Prose #27). With this in mind, one might sympathise with William McPheron’s argument that Olson’s aim was ‘to dislodge the soul from its traditional role as the principle of man’s subjectivity’ (McPheron 1973– 1974, 190). Indeed, Olson felt that the knowledge from these fields had advanced to such an extent that the humanisms of the past were no longer valid and that the soul remained only as a false interposition between Man and Nature. For Olson, the transition to post-modernity not only heralded the end of religious humanism, but all humanisms that promoted a universal morality dictated according to a subjectivity attributable to all individuals. It was against such traditional humanisms, that Olson began his initial experimentations in poetry: to generate the linguistic equivalent of the philosophical and phenomenological prioritisation of kinetics. Edward Foster has suggested that ‘The Kingfishers’, written in 1949, is Olson’s ‘fi rst fully realised instance of what he would soon call projective verse’ (Foster 1995, 45). The poem is divided into three sections, the fi rst of which is the longest and has four subsections. Overall, this structure constitutes an energy field within which the details of specific objects, historical references, and contemporary events react against and with each other, in juxtaposition or oscillation rather than collage. The poem opens with a quotation from the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, Heraclitus of Ephesus: ‘What does not change / is the will to change’ (Olson 1997b, 86). Within this opening line, the diagonal dash supports the oppositional reactivity of competing ideas, shifting from the relative cessation of the fi rst four

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 27 words, to the movement and “becoming” of the last five. With the ensuing details—of a discussion at a party, the mating, migration habits and colours of the kingfisher bird, and Mao Zedong’s revolution—Olson’s aim is ‘not accumulation but change’ (89). In detailing archaeological references to Delphi (a Mycenaean village from 1500 to 1100 BCE), or the weight of a ‘large wheel, gold, with figures of unknown four-foots, and worked with tufts of leaves, weight / 3800 ounces’ (88), Olson hopes to show, what ‘the feed-back proves’ (89), that ‘the past,’ in Foster’s words, ‘is not neutralized but repeatedly re-emerges to affect the present’ (Foster 1995, 47). ‘The Kingfishers’ was an important early poem in which Olson attempted to put into practice some of the methodological principles he outlined in his essay, “Projective Verse” (1950). Yet it is not clear, in the poem ‘The Kingfishers,’ despite Olson’s claims for the ‘feed-back’, that the historical particulars make any significant impact on the present moment of the reading or the attention of the reader (Olson 1997b, 89). Nevertheless, in the fi nal section, Olson announces, ‘I commit myself,’ and with this line we might bookmark the beginning of his adventures in poethical praxis (Olson 1997b, 89). Indeed, whilst the poem ends, without having fully realised the kinetics of form that it proposes, it nevertheless presents a challenge to the reader: ‘I pose you your question: shall you uncover honey / where maggots are? / I hunt among stones’ (Olson 1997b, 89). ‘The Kingfishers’ fails as a fully realised completion of his poetic practice, but then the “Projective Verse” manifesto, is not, as Foster implies, the totality of Olson’s poetic ideology. In fact, his attempt to ‘redeem human consciousness,’ or re-found our understanding of history within a postmodern phenomenology, follows an evolutionary route, as his thinking developed (Altieri 1973–1974, 173). This thinking is not always consistent and, as one might expect, not every avenue Olson pursued led to an advance in his work. Indeed, surveying such texts as his essays Human Universe (1967), The Special View of History (1970), and the poetic manifesto “Projective Verse”, as well as his many unpublished essays, the reader may well fi nd his philosophical thinking to be impenetrable in its complexity, contradictory in its assertions, clouded with pseudo-profundities and littered with concepts either borrowed or stolen from leading intellectual experts, subsequently confused by Olson’s idiosyncratic style. These charges are not wholly inaccurate; nevertheless Olson’s work became a catalyst for the development of poethical praxis, significantly influencing many of the writers addressed in my “poethical trajectory”. It was only with his magnum opus The Maximus Poems (1983), however, that Olson began to realise the ethical imperative of kinetics as determinative of poetic form, that, as he noted in October 1951, ‘it takes a moral nature to walk these silken ropes without breaking them or falling through’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 37: Prose #41). The ‘moral nature,’ to which Olson refers, is not determined by the application of a set of rules, but is rather an epistemological and ontological re-working of intersubjectivity,

28 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry and is thus more accurately described as an ethics, an ethics that underpins all subsequent consciousness. The Maximus Poems is also, however, a part of the modernist tradition of the long poem, a tradition that in fact began before the advent of modernism, has continued through, and continues beyond the post-modern. The long poem, often written throughout the better part of a poet’s lifetime, enables the kind of sustained intensity and breadth of engagement demanded of the most ambitious of poetics in American literary history. In this tradition, The Maximus Poems might be seen to build on Walt Whitman’s drama of identity between the individual, the state and the nation, in his long poem ‘Song of Myself’ (1855); to re-envision the city of T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (1922) and William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (1958); to take seriously the sound structure of words as in Louis Zukofsky’s long poem, “A” (1978); to continue the central voyaging consciousness of Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1915-); and to prefigure Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ (1956) beneath the towering super blocks of New York City, Gary Snyder’s place as event in Mountains and Rivers Without End (1997), even perhaps the social materials of Bruce Andrews’ more recent The Millennium Project (2002). This chapter, however, will demonstrate how Olson’s re-founding of humanity in The Maximus Poems contributes to the development of the “poethical trajectory”. I shall argue that an ethics of form emerges from his attention to the particular (or content), and the kinetic, the active engagement with the form of those particulars. Indeed, The Maximus Poems collectively articulate Olson’s vision of a new humanism and, much like Tony Davies’ description of Levinas’ ‘humanisme de l’autre homme,’3 it is of a humanity that ‘is neither an essence nor an end’ (Davies 1997, 132). The commitment to it is found in that opening line of ‘The Kingfishers,’ where ‘What does not change / is the will to change’ (Olson 1997b, 86), for it is ‘a continuous and precarious process of becoming human, a process that entails the inescapable recognition that our humanity is on loan from others, to precisely the extent that we acknowledge it in them’ (Davies 1997, 132). Olson’s vision is both woven throughout the poetic narrative of The Maximus Poems and is inscribed in the poetic methodology itself. The individual poems work by accumulation towards the total vision, overlapping with each other and reiterating certain elements in a compound mosaic. Indeed, the poetics of The Maximus Poems was developed in an ongoing dialectic with Olson’s philosophical and societal preoccupations, and the work thus posits a socio-political critique as well as celebrating the renewed potential of mankind, asserting a new direction, outwards, as ‘the cry of a coat of wonder’, ‘the initiation of another kind of nation’ (Olson 1983, 139, 633). Beginning in the early 1950s, Olson worked on The Maximus Poems until his death in 1970. During this twenty year period, the poem grew to over six hundred pages, with a fi nal volume published posthumously in

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 29 1975, and a complete edition in 1983. The poem tells the story of the origins of America and of mankind, from the Ice Age and the cave, to Mesopotamia, Pleistocene and early agricultural man. It is divided into three volumes, the fi rst of which focuses on Cape Ann and the fishing industry of the Plymouth Bay Colony. In this volume, Olson describes how the fishing community was bought out and sold by international investors, how Gloucester became part of Massachusetts and fell under capitalist and state-corporate control. The second volume introduces a range of documented historical particulars that are set in opposition to each other, but collectively outline the contours of the town of Gloucester and the transmogrification of American culture. The fi nal volume, compiled posthumously by George F. Butterick and Charles Boer, extends a poetics in which the micro- and macro- cosmology of Maximus’ vision are drawn together. The poems, often entitled “letters,” written from the speaker Maximus to the townspeople, make explicit in their form the poethical praxis towards which Olson was committed. Whilst, as he had written for volume one, ‘It is undone business / I speak of, this morning, / with the sea / stretching out / from my feet,’ and for volume two, ‘the poetics of such a situation / are yet to be found out,’ he nevertheless re-opens an attention to the ethics of form in modern American poetry (Olson 1983, 57, 259). The speaker of the poems, Maximus, is based on an historical figure, Maximus of Tyre, a second-century dialectician. The ‘figure of speech, figure of the speech’—as Olson explained to a friend Herbert Kenny—Maximus, provided a link from the Phoenician coast during the fourth century AD to his present location in the coastal area of Gloucester, Massachusetts, a geographical parallel in North America (quoted in Butterick 1978, 7). For Olson, the migratory act of man was a movement between these two points, with Tyre as the originary centre and Gloucester as the last city. However, as Olson noted in 1961, more important than the historical reference is Maximus’ role as ‘the person who addresses himself to the City, is to measure: the advantage of a single human figure’ (8). As the speaking persona of the poem, Maximus carries with him the weight of history and of our human endeavours, while at the same time, he is the central figure, the voice with which society (or Gloucester) and the individual reader must contend. It is through Maximus that both Olson’s exposition of intersubjectivity and the possibilities for ethics thus emerge. Indeed, it is through the voice of Maximus and the form of his speech, that Olson presents the ethical attention that is critical to his re-founding of humanism. For Olson, as he suggested in his unpublished notes from 1949, ‘the test is the intensity of the position, which is the man. But it will be marked by the substance of stuff to which he gives his attention—and the worked quality of his language’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1487). The figure of Maximus, as a paradigm for human consciousness from the fi rst man to the present reader, embodying in the form of his speech a ‘care taken across the full content of creation’ (29: 1509), enables

30

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

what Olson describes, as ‘the root of your sense of life as wider, more objective than it is allowed to be within the morality and the subjectivism of the West’ (29: 1487). Olson’s attention to the particular, to the ‘substance of stuff,’ is made perfect in Maximus, who states in ‘Letter Five’, ‘I can’t get away from the old measure of care’ (Olson 1983, 26). This ideal of care as a respect for the object is a central dynamic of Olson’s ethical poetic practice, for ‘a methodology,’ as Olson wrote in 1952, ‘is the result of a change in the disposition of attention’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 32: 1625). The closer an object is to ‘the Monogene / the original unit,’ the greater is Maximus’ respect for it (Olson 1983, 242). As ‘Monogene’, the single cell from which the world was created, it reveals our essential quality and equality, not just of mankind but of all things in creation. It is for this reason that Olson is determined to ‘brang that thing out’, that which he suggests, ‘survives in the salt’ (242). Indeed, in the fishing industry of Plymouth Bay, salt would have been used to preserve the catch from becoming putrid, so too, without care the object loses its value in society. Olson thus seeks to tease out the original unit in his Maximus Poems. As a dynamic of attention it forms one part of the homeward trajectory towards his new humanism that is, as Maximus proclaims, ‘homestead’: ‘the love I learned / from my father has stood me in good stead /—home stead—I maintained this “strand” to / this very day’ (495). In this sense, the post-modern enables a recovery for Olson; his post-modern historiographical approach enables a re-envisioning of the present and recovers the humanity that capitalism has obscured from us. In contradistinction to the crisis of legitimacy that Jean-François Lyotard presents in The Postmodern Condition (1984), for Olson, post-modernism enabled him to fi nd value in the object, not according to the grand narratives of ‘Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth,’ but rather in and of itself (Lyotard 1984, xxiii). For Olson, the dawning of post-modernity promised to return value, or to re-envision the value, that is inherently bound in an object. His determination to bring out the original unit, to distil the original unit from the over-arching forms, is thus a return to the root. Furthermore, this ability to perceive our origins is revealed as a necessary prerequisite if we are to achieve a new humanism. He writes: ‘one loves only form, / and form only comes / into existence when / the thing is born’ (Olson 1983, 5). Olson thus extends the implications of Levinas’ ‘humanisme de l’autre homme’ to a special care for the object, not just the other person. Whilst Levinas recognises that the ‘inward sphere of intimacy appears to me as foreign or hostile,’ that ‘usage-objects, foods, the very world we inhabit are other in relation to us,’ these objects remain ‘under my powers’, for their relation to us is a formal one not dependent on the metaphysical assignation of responsibility in face of another person (Levinas 1994, 38). Whilst Olson’s new humanism, as he noted in 1968, demands an ethics of attention

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 31 to the ‘full content of creation’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1509), it is nevertheless for him, ‘love which is important not the object’ (29: 1507). Indeed, both in Levinas’ description of the saying, as our ethical responsibility in the face of another, and in Olson’s description of an ethics of attention to the particular, it is the relation of love that is most important, not the substantive quality or content of the object or the person. However, as with Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, where the poet announces, ‘I contradict myself’ (Whitman 1959, 76), so too Maximus’ competing ideas remain unresolved. Whilst love is the essential relation, the particulars of that relation must not be compromised, for Olson believed that, ‘Love is form and cannot be without / important substance [ . . . ] these, in the end, are the sum’ (Olson 1983, 5). Thus Maximus also celebrates the beauty of creation, ‘the shape of light / the lay, / of flowers’ (351), ‘these things / which don’t carry their end any further than / their reality in / themselves’ (46). Indeed, it is before these particulars that Maximus proclaims: ‘I looked up and saw / its form / through everything /—it is sewn in all parts, under / and over’ (343). The Maximus Poems thus extends the realm of ethics beyond the immediacy of a face, to the surrounding environment of the place in which it is situated. This expansion is made possible as a consequence of Olson’s understanding of the post-modern. Under these conditions, he wrote in 1953, ‘facts as particulars make only one thing possible: new events, not history’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). Indeed, history, for Olson, ‘is a form of attention,’ and any particular to which we attend will carry with it a history that feeds back to alter the present. It is in this sense that Olson’s claim for form, as ‘never more than an extension of content,’ enables a responsibility for what we did not will—the carelessness of history (30: 1565). His poetics demands of content that we ‘not only let it in, but welcome it, say, what would I do without you’ (30: 1565). Here, the object or historical particular is shown to be interdependent with the perception of and care for that object by a human being. Thus, as Levinas described a passivity of support in the welcoming of alterity, so too, Olson envisions a history of other people and other things that is brought to bear on our present and from which our humanity is on loan. Indeed this, for Olson, ‘is not freedom, it is my life’ (29: 1507); ‘it is a crucial matter of obedience to the way things are [ . . . ] knowing how far to go, exactly what the proportion of the material in hand is. It is exactitude’ (34: Prose #115). The Maximus Poems, however, demand more than a simple recognition of the original unit. In fact, Olson’s poetics draw us as much as to the ‘monogene’, as to an awareness of the ‘totipalmate’ (Olson 1983, 242, 41). This latter image is from botany, where the totality of palmate describes the five lobes spread out from a common point, shaped like an open hand. In the dialectical tension between a microscopic intensity of care for the ‘monogene’, and a macroscopic wonder at the ‘totipalmate’, is an ethics of attention where the reader is perceptive of the overall form without severing

32

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

its connection from the original unit. Thus Maximus oscillates between the apogean (the micro) and the propinquity (the macro), from ‘the unit the smallest there is’ (623), ‘from the sunsets / to the rubbish on the Harbor bottom’ (297). Indeed, he addresses the world as, ‘the form / that which you make, what holds, which is / the law of object’ (8). This law is a part of Olson’s re-founding of humanism, a welcoming, through an ethical attention to physical alterity, both of the other person and the objects of our social world. The attention to both the ‘monogene’ and the ‘totipalmate’ realises a humanity on loan from our historical present, the essential connection and equality as the origin of our diversity and difference (Olson 1983, 242, 41). Throughout The Maximus Poems, this dialectical formulation is posited as a socio-political founding of the ‘polis’, an ideal community or settlement, and thus ‘the initiation of another kind of nation’ (Olson 1983, 15, 633). For Olson, the industrialisation of the nineteenth century, coupled with the aggressive capitalism and consumer addiction of the post-war era, was ruining American culture, particularly in the transmogrification of the object into a unit of production and consumption. Indeed, the corresponding devaluation of any ethics of attention motivates his description of the ‘Polis’ (15) in direct opposition to ‘pejorocracy’ (7), the ‘post-2nd World War American ad- / ult, the gross individual of presumed progress’ (433). The ‘pejorocracy’ (7) is the sickness in society, it is the ‘mu-sick’, ‘that song,’ Maximus says, ‘I’d void my ear of’ (18). Its sound permeates the poetry like ‘the dirty whine of an automatic saw’ (355), ‘the musickracket / of all ownership’ (18), ‘the trick / of corporations, newspapers, slick magazines, movies houses, / the ships, even the wharves, absentee-owned’ (14). ‘They whine to my people,’ Maximus cries, ‘these entertainers, sellers / they play upon their bigotries (upon their fears’ (15). ‘Pejorocracy’ is the disease of society, a virus of erasure that numbs the senses, writing out the ‘wondership stolen by, / ownership’ (Olson 1983, 7, 13). It uses words cheaply, repressing and enslaving us so that we can no longer go anywhere, ‘even cross-town’ (17), ensuring that ‘the race / does not advance, it is only / better preserved’ (59). In an interview with Herbert Kenny in 1969, Olson explained the predicament: ‘I have to go everyday a further distance to fi nd what I believe in. [ . . . ] And literally, practically every day by inches I have to go further in order to be in touch with those things which I consider necessary’ (Olson 1974a, 31). In the transition of Gloucester from a small fishing community to a city run by the Junior Chamber of Commerce, Olson felt that ‘the nature of attention [ . . . ] you could put it, intensity’ that is essential to our humanity, was lost. If there is a motivating force propelling the kinetics of his poetry, it is drawn from the fact that Olson knew men, ‘for whom everything matters. Still! Who see, feel, and know that everything that they run into does matter.’ ‘Hah!’ he exclaimed to Kenny, ‘And then they have it! And then they have it forever!’ (25)

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 33 The loss of intensity in man, or attention to the particulars of his surroundings, leaves Maximus crying over Gloucester (much like Christ cried over Jerusalem), ‘O my people, where shall you fi nd it, how, where shall you listen / when all is become billboards, when all, even silence, is spraygunned? [ . . . ] when sound itself is neoned in?’ (Olson 1983, 6) In an attempt to recover this attention to the particular, Olson seeks a form in his poetry that relies on intensity rather than depth. For him, as Charles Altieri has explained, ‘intensity is a measure of tension and depends on the power to gather or fold together the multiple aspects of the real’ (Altieri 1973–1974, 179). In a poem entitled ‘The Song and Dance of’, from Maximus volume one, Olson writes: Hear him! The Mediterranean man As another such had it, a writer, love was Or ought to be, like an orange tree! (The way they do grow in that ex-sea soil, in that pumice dust only a fowl can scratch a living from. Yet when they do come out they are sweet not at all like what the refrigerator trains debouch into our cities, those pictures of they taste sweet sweet sweet (Olson 1983, 60)

This is symptomatic of Olson’s multi-layered poetics, the various elements of his vision operating simultaneously in an intensity of attention, rather than a depth of vision. The poetry is at once asserting the necessary love of the object, of its form, from an ethical position of equality—the orange tree stands autonomous, beautiful in its own rugged ability to survive in the ex-sea soil—whilst maintaining an anti-capitalist drive—‘the refrigerator trains / debouch into our cities’—and parodying the dominant discourses of the pejorocratic superstructure—the ideologically loaded supermarket adverts, ‘those pictures’ and the consumer narrative, ‘they taste sweet sweet sweet’. Indeed, we might apply Altieri’s description of a ‘unified multiplicity’

34

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

to Olson’s poetry here, as he draws into kinetic reactivity a series of different ideas and particulars, subjective responses and objective descriptions (Altieri 1973–1974, 185). Olson’s aim is that, with the call from Maximus for us to ‘Hear him! The Mediterranean / man’, and to attend to the place of the orange tree, we might realise our humanity (Olson 1983, 60). This is not a recognition of the conventional imperial subject, but a realisation, an existential moment in which we reorient our intersubjectivity towards ethics. Indeed, extending the realm of ethics to place as an event of becoming human, the poem seeks to enact what Olson believed was now possible for poetics. In “A Short Guide to Present Advantages” he wrote: Topos Tropos

(place [ . . . ] (to turn, change in response to something (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 35: Prose: # 125)

As a “Principle of Measure in Composition by Field” the poem thus has three dimensions: ACTUAL OCCASIONS:

SYSTEMATIC GEOMETRY:

SUBSTANTIAL FORM:

all that “happens”—events, but persons, creatures, things, as well [...] management of the materials [as kinetic] [ . . . ] the nature of the construction of the real what the poem is [ . . . ] brings into being.

(TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #115)

Within this schema, Olson’s aim is to present an ethics of form with a view to ‘the restoration of attention to the implicated character of the physical in everything’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #115). Hence the object, or actual occasion of perception, is described without resort to the ornate lyricism of the traditional poetic ego. It is simply ‘an orange tree’, but its ‘systematic geometry’ as grounded in ‘that ex-sea soil,’ is uniquely exact, ‘that pumice dust only a fowl / can scratch a living from.’ The ‘substantial form’ that the poem ‘brings into being’ is a sweetness more nourishing than the mass-processed produce of our ‘refrigerator trains’, for it is dependent on a humanity that is on loan through our ethical relation with the historical present. The dialectical formulation of attention between the ‘monogene’ and the ‘totipalmate’ (here, the orange tree, and our perception of that object within

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 35 the present) is posited as critical to the ‘initiation of another kind of nation’, to the re-birth of a ‘polis’ (Olson 1983, 242, 41, 633, 15). Indeed, such instances are always located within a dichotomy of the ‘polis’ versus the ‘pejorocracy’ (7). Similarly, the historical characters of the poem, as Steve Ballew has commented, fall ‘into one of two image clusters which defi ne either the ideal life-style of Maximus’ “polis” or the degraded lifestyle opposing Maximus—the lifestyle of “mu-sick” society’ (Ballew 1974, 52). In an unpublished essay entitled “Culture and Revolution, 1952”, Olson recognises that we are all part and participants of the totality of our social condition and that it is only and necessarily from within this culture that it may be revolutionised, that we may ‘bust open the shell of politics and economics’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1522). However, the poetic formulation that Olson utilises does not match this thinking, for the dichotomy of ‘polis’ versus ‘pejorocracy’ implies a division of society into an “us” versus “them” (Olson 1983, 15, 7). Indeed, the essay is at times similarly reductive, particularly in its division of the ‘fine’ and the ‘superfi ne,’ the ‘Traffic Manager’ (fi ne) from the ‘poet’ (superfi ne). (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1522). In The Maximus Poems there are instances where Olson qualifies the division, for instance, when Maximus himself admits that he too is ‘covered with the gurry of it’ and suggests that ‘Polis now / is a few, is a coherence not even yet new (the island of this city / is a mainland now of who? Who can say who are citizens?’ (Olson 1983, 17, 15) However, these qualifications only add to the confusion, and mark Olson’s inability to realise in his poetics the full complexity of his socio-political thought. Consequently, The Maximus Poems often degenerate into a straightforward anti-capitalist tirade, with little awareness—despite the protracted detailing of the fishing trade—of how political relations are determined according to the economic powers of society. The poetry has a particularly bitter edge as Maximus condemns the ‘merchandise men, / who get to be President / after winning, age 12, / cereal ad / prizes,’ and chastises the appetite for ‘refrigerators, for An-yan / steel’, ‘things paid on / 33 year schedule / credit out ahead’ (Olson 1983, 58, 117). Ultimately, Olson’s frustration is that, ‘we don’t even earn / our labor [ . . . ] we do it all / by quantity and machine’ (129). For him, ‘in a society like America energy if it is not moral is only / material. Which cannot be destroyed is never destroyed is only / left all over the place. Junk’ (461). The unqualified ‘pejorocracy’ (7), as a loose description of those opposed to Maximus, are charged with having deemed every ‘single thing [ . . . ] an opportunity / for some “alert” person, [ . . . ] by the “greed”, that, they are “alive”, therefore’ (330) to make profit. It is because of these people, Olson argues, that ‘cheapness shit is / upon the world’ (138). The reductive generalisation, loose qualification, and failure to acknowledge political and economic relations within the opposition of ‘polis’ versus ‘pejorocracy’ is the principal shortcoming of Olson’s The Maximus Poems

36

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

(Olson 1983, 15, 7). Nevertheless, Olson’s poetic form, as corresponding to an ethics of attention, marks a significant contribution to my poethical trajectory. Indeed, the radical poetic experimentation of The Maximus Poems originates in Olson’s sense that ‘the forms we have are conventions which must be broken’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1487). This emphasis on form matches Olson’s preoccupations with post-modernity for within these conditions, as he explains in an unpublished essay “As Aimed as His Poem Is, 1956,” ‘reality itself contains language as a means of itself, as the means of itself’ (29: 1492). The challenge then is to find the ‘words, or factors of words [ . . . ] powers of language which can affect reality direct, because they are such a means of it’ (29: 1492). In opposition to the dominant discourses of capitalism—the ‘song’ of the politician, ad-man or media agent, that ‘dirty whine’ in the ‘musickracket / of all ownership’—Olson seeks a language that might counteract such a “traumatised semiotics” through an ethical attention in the poetic form (Olson 1983, 18, 355, 18). In the unpublished essay, “As Aimed As His Poem Is”, Olson declares: ‘The poet is ready to take it [language] on, to make himself the legislator’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1492). In mid-century America, Olson was not, of course, the only poet to challenge capitalism, but it was his determination that the poem should constitute ‘the total bearing of a man [ . . . ] and takes a lot more—than mere mastery of self-expression,’ that establishes his poethical credentials (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1492). In working towards an alternative to self-expression within the “traumatised semiotics” of a shared social language, Olson saw that he needed ‘a syntax [ . . . ] dependent upon the authority of a completed man’ (29: 1520). This syntax, Olson argues, as described in his unpublished essay “The Crisis of the Third Foot” from 1954, ‘is of the man’s own making, not something accepted as a canon of the language in its history and the society’ (29: 1520). On occasions, the ethics of form and its correspondent ideation appears as a fairly straightforward rejection of standard poetic devices. This is particularly clear in ‘Maximus to Gloucester, Letter 27,’ the fi nal section of which I will quote in full: This, is no bare incoming of novel abstract form, this is no welter or the forms of those events, this, Greeks, is the stopping of the battle It is the imposing of all those antecedent predecessions, the precissions

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 37 of me, the generation of those facts which are my words, it is coming from all that I no longer am, yet am, the slow westward motion of more than I am There is no strict personal order for my inheritance. [ . . . ] An american is a complex occasions, themselves a geometry of spatial nature. I have this sense, that I am one with my skin Plus this—plus this: that forever the geography which leans in on me I compel backward I compel Gloucester to yield, to change Polis is this (Olson 1983, 184–185)

In this poem there are no ornate poetic sounds, complex rhyme schemes, literary or classical allusions, metaphors or similes. Through a simplicity of sound and imagery—rejecting the play of the homophone, clever arrangements of the digraph, fancy possibilities of alliteration, assonance or sibilance, exclamation marks or aesthetic epiphanies—Olson allows the kinetics of form to enact the re-inheritance of our human phenomenology in the present of the reading. The syntax and line-break together with the precision or exactness of the content are critical to this process. The weight of each line, for example, maintains its precision and balance through a rejection of ellipsis. The exact measurement of the material content is also managed according to the syntax and the line break which control the kinetic forces of the poem’s semantic content. The line breaks (and commas) each demand

38 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry a kinetic shift as an enactment of the process of becoming human: a ‘stopping of the battle’ against capitalism (for its legislative terms are rescinded), a rediscovery of our spatial nature, and the migration of what has been said by generations into the voice of Maximus. This weight of history ‘leans in / on’ the poetic form, compelling us to re-envision our community, ‘Gloucester to yield, to / change’, for ‘Polis / is this,’ the historical, or in Olson’s words from an unpublished essay on “The Present State of Knowledge” (1953), ‘the mythological present’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). Olson’s precision in attending to the weight and balance of the content as constitutive of the poetic form, is made evident in his notes on the various handwritten manuscripts, typescripts, and carbon copies of his poems. Figure 2.1, an early typescript of ‘Letter 10,’ is an illustrative example. Similarly, a note on type-setting that Olson sent to his publishers (see Figure 2.2), provides further evidence of his concern for an exactness of form. For Olson, the geographical location, or place of writing, of inspiration, is just as important as the content of the material itself. The place where the poem is written, as much as the history of that place, informs the ‘mythological present’ that Olson seeks to render immediate via an ethics of form (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). It is thus that several of his poems fi rst appear scrawled out on whatever was nearest to hand suggesting an urgency of composition or pressing-in of the words. In one example (see Figures 2.3 & 2.4), Olson tore open the seams of an envelope and used this material in the place of writing, rather than returning fi rst to his desk. Similarly, in another short poem (see Figure 2.5), Olson arranges the two lines—‘my shore, my sounds, my Earth, my place / afterwards, in between, and since’—according to the position in which he was sitting at the time of writing and respective to the bar of the Tavern Pub in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His note on the reverse side of this poem, with the exact date and positioning recorded (see Figure 2.6), reveals again the importance of place; even as he sits there, day-dreaming of ‘Frances,’ as well as of the history of that place, he remains acutely aware of the possibilities for an ethics of form and the dynamics of typographical arrangement. Olson’s experimentations with typography, syntax, and the line-break, as demarcating the parameters of the material content, also provide for a performative dialogics that is central to his poetic practice. Indeed, as he proposed in his essay entitled “Human Universe,” ‘form is before ideas’, in the sense that the form determines the structural relations of intersubjectivity between the reader and the voice of Maximus (Olson 1967b, 65). This relation is realised through the ‘mythological present’ of the poem; it requires an active engagement on the part of the reader, a participation that is generative, beyond a mere analysis of the ideas or semantic suggestions (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). Indeed, for Olson,

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 39 ‘there is only one thing you can do about kinetic, re-enact it [ . . . ] Art does not seek to describe but to enact’ (Olson 1967b, 10). The intensity of form increases throughout the poems of volume three, as Olson seeks to draw together the micro- and macro- cosmology of Maximus’ vision. Each poem adds weight to the next, leaning in on the

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Figure 2.1 Charles Olson, ‘Letter 10.’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, “The Maximus Poems 1–10, ca. 1953,” 1: 8).

40 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry -. .- --. .-

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Each poem naPds t o be s e t i n d i v i d u a l l y f o r i t s e l f on each page, irr8egulafZy ttb.owh t h a t may seen, and going a g a i n s t normal j u s t ify h g I have in a s many i n s t a n c e s as. p o s s i b l e includee o r had x e r o x f d my o r i g i n a l mss. s o t h a t a l l s w e s b o t h between words as w e l l as b e t y e e n l i n e s as V I a s ~ 1Fcation on t h e page Gaybe- f

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Figure 2.2 Charles Olson, “Note on type-setting.” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, “Maximus IV, V, VI: notes and poems,” 12: 369).

Figures 2.3 & 2.4 Charles Olson, “I was bold, I had courage . . .” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 7: 335).

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 41 - . .-

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Figure 2.5 Charles Olson, “My shore, my sounds, my earth . . .” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 5: 234).

language and demanding a greater level of attention from the reader. In a poem entitled ‘Migration in fact’ (see Figure 2.7), this intensity of form appears to spiral out of control, as Olson seeks to press upon his language the migration of mankind, his history ‘in the pursuit [ . . . ] of a superior or preferable environment’ (Olson 1983, 479). Yet the performative dialogics in the typography of this poem rather refocuses our attention, drawing us

42

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Figure 2.6 Charles Olson, “My shore, my sounds, my earth . . .” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 5: 234).

from the linear progression of serial lines into the ‘mythological present’ of our collective history (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). In this present moment, with Olson ‘pressed to explain this further,’ we learn that the ‘Consciousness Mind / always invades / & opposes successfully / the Previous—the other / location’ (Olson 1983, 479). Whilst this might appear to detract from the possibility of re-enactment, it in fact sustains the trajectory of attention. Indeed, Olson’s explanation reflects the proposition in his short essay, “The Attack Now, in Painting and Writing, 1952,” of ‘the need of men who write to take up from—and keep in—the resistance implicit in language itself’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1493). This resistance in language is essential, for to reach that ‘location’ would be to re-present rather than to re-enact, to represent the ‘other’ as no more than a refraction of the same. Ultimately, a poethical praxis emerges in which, as participants of the intersubjective relations that the form enables, we are drawn into an ethics of attention opening outwards

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 43

to &-lain t h i s Arrthe?'.

[Text reads]: Migration in fact (which is probably / as constant in history / as any one thing: / migration is the pursuit / by animals plants and men / —and God as well—of a superior / or preferable environment / [Covet not they neighbours / wife property goods] / and leads always to new centers. / If I were pressed / to explain this further / —or add the dipole to it, / the Aesir-Vanirs are the completed picture: / Consciousness Mind / always invades / & opposes successfully / the previous— / the other / location. / This is the Rose / of the World. Figure 2.7 Charles Olson, ‘Migration in fact . . . ’ (typescript) (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 5: 260).

44

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

to break from the centre point of the poem ‘This is the Rose / of the / World’ (Olson 1983, 47). The ‘resistance implicit in language itself’ was to become a central concern of Olson’s philosophical essays, and critically informs the poetic experimentation of The Maximus Poems (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1493). As he explained in his essay “Quantity in Verse, 1958,” the resistance is in ‘Language itself—before any rational organization of the words’ (34: Prose #112). Indeed, this resistance in language may be usefully paralleled with Levinas’ exposition of the saying and the said, for the saying is in many ways a resistance to the said and persists in language, as Olson suggests, ‘like power in water.’ For Olson, it is ‘the vector character of anything—vehere, to carry’ that becomes paramount to a poetics of reenactment rather than re-presentation (34: Prose #115). Yet this resistance, the ethical saying as a responsibility of the ‘mythological present,’ is largely suppressed in the dominant discourses of the pejorocratic superstructure (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64). In response to this, the voice of Maximus seeks to expose the resistance, that which is carried even within the “traumatised semiotics” of our shared language. Form is critical, as it may re-orient the intersubjective relations of the reader and the text. Indeed, the content arranged in multiple parenthesis and parataxis so as to shield alterity from the synthesising imagination of the traditional poetic ego, is of equal importance to that which is not said by Maximus. As Susan Howe has suggested, ‘the fractured syntax, the gaps, the silences are equal to the sounds in Maximus’ (Howe 1993, 180). The stutter she describes as ‘a sounding of uncertainty’ (181) challenges the political authoritarianism of any closed reading, a reading that would otherwise violate the ethical form or structure of the intersubjective relation. Olson thus insists that the layout of the silences, of “blank” space or materially absent content, must be as precise as the layout of the materially present content. The materially absent content, for example, is critical to Olson’s short poem in which Maximus announces his ethics of attention, that he has seen the ‘mythological present’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 34: Prose #64), ‘its form / through everything [ . . . ] sewn in all parts, under / and over’ (Olson 1983, 343). The blank space that Olson positions around these words provides a resistance, or counter-friction, to their totalising agency (see Figure 2.8). The problem of form, however, to which Olson continually refers in his essays and suggests in his “Theatre Institute Lecture on language, 1952,” is of how to ‘make motion itself a solid? By what stance do you turn it into something human attention can focus on?’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 36: Prose #54) In performing the kinetics of resistance in his poetry, Olson seeks to write the primordial act of the signifier within the dissimulation of the signified. As an interruption to the dominant discourses of the pejorocratic superstructure, the performative dialogics of his poetic form is thus a process of unsaying the said. In this

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 45 process, however, the problem of form remains, for the signifier that Olson uses—‘monogene’ or ‘polis,’ for example—ultimately achieves its signification, and the kinetics of his form is thus discharged. In his essay entitled “A Reversal-of-Field Theory, 1955”, Olson formulates this problem according to a reading of Werner Heisenberg’s law of modern physics, the Uncertainty Principle: ‘one cannot know the mass without loss of the measure of its motion, and vice versa, you know the motion at the cost of a certain ignorance of its mass’ (37: Prose #93). Nevertheless, the ‘beautiful-thing’ (29: 1499) that Olson envisioned in post-modernity, was ‘to go on, by art alone [ . . . ] as capable of any character of reality [ . . . ] putting the fi ngers on the leaf, of grass, to blow the tune. Hear, the squeak. A certain rustyness perhaps, as against the later master’ (36: 1608). The apparent contradiction, and there are many in Olson’s work, is that, at the same time, ‘his language is prior, even to himself!’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1492) The performative dialogics, or ethics of form, to which Olson directed his experimentation is thus described as pre-originary to the shared language of history and society. This direction

Figure 2.8 Charles Olson, “I looked up and saw its form through everything.” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 4: 169).

46

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

was, for Olson, an obedience: ‘it is not a quality, rhythm, it isn’t an achievement on the part of the poet. It is an obedience. An act of obedience, like an act of recognition, is a part of the evident: you can’t do otherwise’ (30: 1565). The necessary rhythm constitutes a poetic form like the ethical saying, pre-originary to that which might otherwise be said in the semantics of self-expression. Transcending Levinas’ description of the plasticity of the artistic object, Olson’s poetic ‘form is the face a man forces what he knows to yield so that another man may look it in the eye [ . . . ] it may be a measure for you of the duress the man who does it goes through in order to do it’ (30: 1565). Indeed, the problematic form of his poem entitled ‘I have been an ability, a machine’ (see Figure 2.9), reflects Olson’s duress under the constraints of a “traumatised semiotics”. Ironically, it is with the duress of living under the regime of discourse, where our shared language has been driven against its ethical grain, that Olson can achieve the necessary intensity of poetic form. Even with ‘the dirty restlessness of fear and shame,’ in the knowledge that we so often use words cheaply, we can nonetheless approach this poem, and recognise that, ‘in the face of a phrase or sound or image on a piece of paper,’ is ‘the purchase a man makes with his life’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 30: 1565). Indeed, the ‘Secular Praise’ of this poem, is an attempt to make ‘a paradise upon this earth’ (Olson 1983, 499) materialise in language. Faced with the “traumatised semiotics” of our shared language, Olson attempts to perform ‘a density of suffering itself’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 36: 1608). ‘As plain as the life in your face,’ he concludes in an essay on form, ‘its sense, is suffering [ . . . ] the unlimited poem’ (30: 1565). Indeed, throughout The Maximus Poems, we witness ‘the presence of a man putting his hands directly and responsibly to experience’ (33: 1676). This was Olson’s ultimate judgement of poetry, that ‘it is his presence that matters, for it rids us of artifice as such; it is human phenomenology which is reinherited [ . . . ] not parts extricated for show or representation but the total bearing’ (30: 1565). In the fi nal reckoning, such poems as ‘I have been an ability, a machine,’ have failed ‘to create Paradise upon this Earth’ (Olson 1983, 499). Whilst Olson was undoubtedly right in deliberating ‘I think form is moral,’ it is perhaps not ‘so powerful that it can euchre the world’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 30: 1565). One might do well, however, to admire Olson even for his contradictions. In the early poem of Maximus, ‘Letter 5,’ for instance, he writes, ‘Limits / are what any of us / are inside of’ (Olson 1983, 21). Furthermore, despite the socio-political reduction in the opposition of ‘polis’ versus ‘pejorocracy,’ The Maximus Poems remain critical to my “poethical trajectory”. Olson’s experimentation with form offers one model of a possible re-founding of moral humanism, a humanity on loan from others. To this end, Olson suggests in his unpublished essay “Language is a thumb, 1958,” ‘one craves the discipline of difference’ (TJD Research

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 47

[Text reads:] What is the heart, turning / beating itself out leftward / in hell to know heaven / in this filthy land / in this foul country where / human lives are so much trash / It is the dirty restlessness / of fear and shame [ . . . ] My beloved Father turning this page to Right to write this poem in Your Praise in counter clockwise Circle rest Beloved Father as Your Son goes forth to create Paradise Upon this Earth Secular Praise of You and the Creator And an end to Hell—end even to Heaven a life America shall yield or we will leave her and ask Gloucester to sail away from this Rising Shore Forever Amen Figure 2.9 Charles Olson, “I have been an ability—a machine . . .” (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 5: 273).

48

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Center, Olson Papers, 36: 1608), and ‘by that form we give every citizen the radical of his own nature’ (30: 1565). For the “poethical trajectory”, Olson thus inaugurated a series of poetic experiments that inspired future writers, ‘not to begin with an emotion, an idea, a moral, BUT, with THE WORD’ (37: Prose #41). *** This chapter has argued that Olson is crucial to my “poethical trajectory”, re-committing avant-garde poetics to an ethical prioritisation of the other. Dissatisfied with traditional humanism—particularly in its epistemological avowal of the individual’s autonomous soul—Olson developed an ethics of form that dramatises our interdependence with the historical present. As a corrective to the critical reception of his work to-date, my analysis of his working notes and unpublished essays revealed this interdependence as a synergetic relation of responsibility for an other and thereby demonstrated how a specifically ethical imperative informs his poetic practice. In concluding my reading of The Maximus Poems (1983), I suggested that the typographical arrangements (within the page-space as an energy field) enable a unique performative dialogics in the intersubjectivity of reading and writing. With such radical experimentation, Olson continued the efforts of the early modernist writers such as T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky. A retrospective reading of those earlier poets initiating the first phrase of my “poethical trajectory”, must take into account the competing ideologies of Marxism, prevalent during the 1910s and 1920s, and the socialist labour activities of the old Left, from the 1930s. Indeed, Woods’ account of this period in The Poetics of the Limit (2002) recognises the significance of such contextual complexities. Poethical praxis, as an ethical work, necessarily engages in the politics of its sphere of attention and so, in introducing the second phase of my trajectory, I have presented Olson’s poetics as informed by his early career in politics. The intersubjective participation required by his performative dialogics, for instance, may be seen as a democratising ethical practice. In this respect, his poetry was a direct response to the “traumatised semiotics” that pervaded the public arena in the 1950s, particularly in the ‘pejorocratic’ meta-narratives of bureaucracy that Olson saw as protecting industrialisation (Olson 1983, 7). Having begun with Olson, the second phase of my trajectory corresponds with a renewed political engagement where writers—including Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg and Jerome Rothenberg—awakened to the “call of the other” even against the backdrop of post-Second World War conformity. As counter-cultural artists in opposition to a military-industrial technocracy, where totalising violence was seen to be endemic to corporate capitalism and state propaganda, these second-phase poets reintroduced ethics as a principal focus for poetic experimentation. Collectively, their work challenges the political oppression of minority groups, re-imagining the social landscape and welcoming difference as a positive value at the heart of a healthy democracy. Indeed, with the dawning of the Civil Rights Era, such

Charles Olson’s Ethics of Form in The Maximus Poems 49 poets would gain prominence alongside the various emancipatory projects demanding social justice, regardless of race, sexuality, gender and class, throughout the 1960s. This second phase, however, is not exclusively concerned with civil liberties and human emancipation. Whilst most readers of Levinas have taken this to be the sine qua non of his ethical imperative—the presence of the human face being the sole recourse to ethics—the “call of the other” has in fact had a much broader reference for the poets of my trajectory. Indeed, whilst the formal stylistics of Olson’s poetic experimentation followed in the tradition of the modernist movement, his inspiration was grounded in a celebration of the American continent and its civilised peoples, both native and modern. The cultural forbears of this geographical inheritance—Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1975), Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1959), or William Carlos Williams’ Paterson (1995), for example—are felt across the second phase poetries. Olson, as the progenitor of this ethical focus, writes in Call Me Ishmael (1967): I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning. That made the fi rst American story (Parkman’s): exploration. (Olson 1967a, 15) Olson’s cartographical anxiety is perhaps indicative of the obsession running throughout modern American poetries with the overwhelming vastness of that continent. ‘In America,’ as Matthew Cooperman has identified, ‘the thing seen and restlessly remade is of nature [ . . . ] the world we create through the dialectic of reading and writing, reception and production, provides a necessary shape to experience which gives us location, breathing room’ (Cooperman 2001, 183). In transposing the soul with the other, as the epistemic grounding of our humanity, Olson utilises the energy transfers of our social habitat to determine the relational dynamics mapped within the typography of his open-form arrangement. In so doing, The Maximus Poems, as I have argued, extends the realm of ethics beyond the immediacy of a face to the surrounding environment of the place in which it is situated. However, despite the ‘care taken across the full content of creation’ (TJD Research Center, Olson Papers, 29: 1509) that is thus found in his respect for alterity—both of the ‘monogene’ and the ‘totipalmate’—Olson’s ethics of form remains tied to the dominating presence of ‘Maximus’ (Olson 1983, 242, 41). Whilst his intention was for a naturalised kinetics of form that might enact the re-inheritance of our human phenomenology, the Ego of the poem’s speaking voice, through which this process is structured, stifles such an ethical saying. In the fi nal analysis, Olson’s ethical project successfully renounces traditional humanism, but it nevertheless remains fundamentally andro-centric.

3

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder

The historic andro-centric or at least anthropocentric domination of the poetic horizon in America has its origins in the “conquest” of the “New World” when, as geographer David Harvey explains, the landscapes of the frontier were ‘deterritorialized, stripped of their preceding significations, and then reterritorialized according to the convenience of colonial and imperial administration’ (quoted in Davidson 2003, 64). Indeed, these landscapes have been repeatedly written-over, culturally encoded to such an extent that, as Frederick Jackson Turner proposed in 1976, it is ‘to the frontier that the American intellect owes its striking characteristics’ (Turner 1976, 38). Throughout its cultural reproduction, to quote Martin Friedman, ‘the artist-observer who surveyed the terrain [ . . . ] was the invisible, controlling, but distanced presence’ (Friedman 1994, 26). Perhaps most representative of this trend is the traditional Western landscape paintings of the Hudson River School. In Shifting Ground: Reinventing Landscape in Modern American Poetry, Bonnie Costello, drawing on the work of Leo Marx, suggests that these paintings are illustrative of ‘the nineteenth century’s effort to reconcile industrial progress with the pastoral ideals of the early Republic’ (Costello 2003, 197). Asher B. Durand’s View toward the Hudson Valley from 1851 (Figure 3.1) is a prime example. Whilst Durand’s painting superficially celebrates America’s natural beauty, the figures in the foreground survey the pastoral idyll and hence the framed landscape is encoded with the Manifest Destiny of the American empire: an androcentric vision in which the “wild” is “civilised” in the name of progress. In contradistinction to such cultural artefacts that manipulate landscape according to andro-centric preoccupations, this chapter will demonstrate how a poethical praxis can be environmentally responsible. Overturning the pastoral ideal from Europe, where the picaresque was sentimentalised as a rhetorical trope or plaything for the decadent court, a poethical praxis that re-works the landscape is responsive to an ethical obligation that is now pressing upon us all. Indeed, in a recent piece for the on-line poetics magazine Jacket, Joan Retallack argued that the ‘critique of the appropriative we’—an interrogation fundamental to a Levinasian ethics—‘makes way for an inclusive we of human responsibility acknowledging the shared

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 51

Figure 3.1 Asher B. Durand, View toward the Hudson Valley (Kornhauser, Ellis et al. 2003, 107).

origin and destiny of every form of life on the planet.’ For her, working at the critical edge of such practice, ‘a planetary pronoun is inherently experimental’ (Retallack 2007). My challenge to both andro-centrism and anthropocentrism is in fact supported by Levinas’ philosophy in that his reorientation of ethics before ontology awakens the self to the space around him or her. The self, according to Levinas, is not the centre of being, but identity is in fact consummated in our ethical relation to the other, to a radical alterity that is external to the self. However, the space in which the face bears a presence is not, as Levinas implies, an empty container, a pure abstract space in which events unfold. On the contrary, as Derek Gregory argues in The Dictionary of Human Geography, this space should be understood as ‘folded into social relations through practical activities’ (Johnston, Gregory et al. 2000, 769). The metaphysical presence of the face before all signification that Levinas describes, writes out the history of space as a biological condition—the evolution of our animate habitus—and as always already placed in the human consciousness. In other words, the assignation of responsibility takes place in a ‘space to which meaning has been ascribed’ (Carter, Donald et al. 1993, xii). This modern understanding of the places of our social interaction must also recognise the impact of the industrial revolution. As Henri Lefebvre explains in The Production of Space, ‘forces of production and technology

52 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry now permit of intervention at every level of space: local, regional, national, worldwide’ (Lefebvre 1991, 90). If the phenomenological intersubjectivity is located in our ethical relation with alterity, then this intersubjectivity should today be understood as mediated in complex ways by the forces of production and technology. However, if we take the poem to be a space for the interrogation of our epistemological and ontological presuppositions— a positing of the proleptic wager, such as Retallack’s vision of a ‘planetary pronoun’ (Retallack 2007) for instance—then the production of space remains open to future revisions. Lefebvre’s theoretical framework again provides a useful approach. His model is of an analysis ‘not of the things in space but space itself, with a view to uncovering the social relationships embedded in it’ (Lefebvre 1991, 92). Lefebvre concludes: It will help us grasp how societies generate their (social) space and time—their representational spaces and their representations of space. It should also allow us, not to foresee the future, but to bring relevant factors to bear on the future in prospect—on the project, in other words, of another space and another time in another (possible or impossible) society. (Lefebvre 1991, 92) This project in many ways defi nes the radical nature of poethical praxis, for each of the poets of my trajectory works with his or her medium as a site of social experimentation. Whilst there are distinct variations of subject matter and style across the poetries I have chosen to analyse, there are also recurrent poetic devices that provide for a collective re-imagining of our social environment. For example, a formal play with the materials of our shared language tends to be directed against the imperialism of linguistic legislation.1 Similarly, a democratising self-reflexivity is often employed as an acknowledgment of the limits of language and the constraints of the ego. Finally, as became clear in my reading of Olson’s work, the participatory relations of intersubjective engagement negate the closure of a totalising meta-narrative, and thus help to re-conceptualise the poem, as Cooperman has argued, ‘as a phenomenological horizon’ (Cooperman 2001, 187). In this way, radical poethical praxis provides for an inhabitory poetics in which ‘the poetic horizon is therefore not merely the images or objects,’ but is ‘rather a complex of associations, a way of thinking in and about the poem’ (Cooperman 2001, 188). For Cooperman, ‘it is in this conceptual sophistication that the utility of the horizon acquires its value’ (188). Furthermore, we might think especially of eco-poethics, to use the words of Lawrence Buell, as the work of ‘reconstructive place imagination on a global scale’ (Buell 2005, 95). The critical perspective I am emphasising thus challenges mainstream poetry where an introspective personal emotivism within one’s immediate locale is the qualitative hallmark. The poetic event, on the contrary, can stake out the limits of language as a proleptic space for the re-modelling of our global realities. In such poethical praxis,

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 53 the poet re-works language as the material that under-writes our experience of space. This experiential locus, however, should be duly recognised as the ethical realm of our social interdependence—our natural habitat— and thus to play with the materiality of language entails a moral responsibility. Terry Gifford makes this imperative explicit when he writes of the poem as a field in which to imagine new configurations of our existence (particularly in our relation to the nonhuman), of ‘how to live on the earth’ (Gifford 1996, 34). It is with this alternative conceptualisation of the poetic horizon that I introduce Gary Snyder as a key poet working within my “poethical trajectory”. Indeed, this chapter will explore Snyder’s eco-poetics as a key development in modern American poetry, instructive of an ethical responsibility in the representation and social production of space. The poetic analysis that follows might thus be viewed as an act of “ecocriticism”, what Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm have defi ned most broadly as ‘the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment’ (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996, xix). Whilst the term dates back to the late 1970s, “ecocriticism” only emerged as a self-conscious movement in the early 1990s. The fi rst conference of The Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) at Colorado State University in June 1995, formally introduced this burgeoning field. Indeed, given that the central concern of ecocriticism is with environmental justice, the field might well be seen as a sub-discipline of the “turn to ethics”. The American ecocritical journal Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment together with its British counterpart Green Letters and the more recent Ethics and the Environment, have each served to establish the sophistication of an “earthcentred” approach to literature. The history of the discipline to which this chapter belongs is thus relatively short. Nevertheless, as the work of Laurence Buell and Greg Garrard attests, there have been significant shifts in the adopted critical approach. Buell, in particular, has charted the development of ecocriticism, distinguishing between a fi rst- and a second- wave. According to Buell’s reading, fi rst-wave ecocritics adopted an ‘earthcare’ (Buell 2005, 21) approach. Furthermore, their work, as Garrard has noted, is ‘characterised by an exclusive interest in Romantic poetry, wilderness narrative and nature writing’ (Garrard 2004, 4). The second-wave of ecocriticism, however, has tended to question organicist models, ‘toward increasing acknowledgement of ecocultural complexity’ (Buell 2005, 11). This second perspective draws on the notion of “deep ecology” as defi ned by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess and was brought to wider critical attention in George Session’s important anthology Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (1995). Where fi rst-wave ecocritics were relatively “shallow”, prescribing sustainable development within the parameters of the social status quo, deep ecology requires a fundamental shifting of our priorities. For Naess, this social ecology is mapped out with regards to a ‘relational,

54

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

total field-image’ in which organisms are shown to be bound within an interdependence as ‘knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relations’ (Naess 1973, 95). Garrard’s defi nition of deep ecology recognises this reorientation of thought. He proposes a broad and critically sophisticated disciplinary approach: ‘a study of the relationship of the human and the non-human, throughout human cultural history and entailing critical analysis of the term “human” itself’ (Garrard 2004, 5). With Garrard’s defi nition, an important distinction begins to emerge between the two approaches, for whilst shallow or fi rst-wave ecocriticism prioritises human needs and the preservation of our natural habitat solely within this purview, deep ecology, by contrast places a primary value in nature, in and of itself. As Garrard explains, ‘the shift from a human-centred to a nature-centred system of values is the core of the radicalism attributed to deep ecology, bringing it into opposition with almost the entirety of Western philosophy and religion’ (Garrard 2004, 21). For second-wave ecocritics, environmental justice has required a turn to ethics that opposes the ontological humanisms of the past. Indeed, for Buell, deep ecologists are the ‘vanguard’ of a ‘new wave’ of ecocritics that have sought to revise, in the words of Joni Adamson, Mei Evans, and Rachel Stein, the ‘traditional commitment to the nature protection ethic’ according to ‘the claims of environmental justice’ (Buell 2005, 113, 22). As editors of the 1998 collection Writing the Environment: Ecocriticism & Literature, Richard Kerridge and Neil Sammells noted that the environment tends to be ‘pushed out’ at election time ‘by what seem to be more immediate bread-and-butter concerns’ (Kerridge and Sammells 1998, 2). By 2005, however, Buell observed that environmental concerns had become ‘front-page news’ (Buell 2005, 4). Correspondingly, as the perceived threat of nuclear apocalypse in the West has been replaced by an ecological crisis, political parties have undergone a series of re-branding exercises in order to most emphasise their environmental credentials. Whilst, as I suggest in Chapter 4, cold war politics re-fashioned our national identities, so too, as Slavoj Žižek warns us, ‘the ecological crisis is not to be underestimated’ (Žižek 1991, 34). For him, ‘the crisis is radical not only because of its effective danger, i.e., it is not just that what is at stake is the very survival of humankind. What is at stake is our most unquestionable presuppositions, the very horizon of our meaning’ (34). The ecological crisis is thus a key political concern demanding urgent attention, but it also evokes fundamentally ethical questions. As Christopher J. Preston has observed, grounding knowledge as interdependent or external, as my reading of Levinas confi rms, ‘nudges us towards new epistemic responsibilities,’ not least, for the physical well-being of our social environment (Preston 2005, 3). Gary Snyder, to whom Garrard confers the accolade, ‘the “poet laureate” of deep ecology’, was born in San Francisco, California in 1930 (Garrard 2004, 21). Two years later his family made its home at Puget Sound,

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 55 Washington State on the Pacific North West, where they lived until 1942. In these early years, Snyder formed ‘a great attachment to nature’ that has both guided and inspired his life’s work (quoted in Kherdian 1967, 47). In his collection of essays entitled The Practice of the Wild (1990), he suggests that ‘the childhood landscape is learned on foot, and a map is inscribed in the mind—trails and pathways and groves [ . . . ] All of us carry within us a picture of the terrain that was learned roughly between the ages of six and nine’ (Snyder 1990, 26–27). This terrain, for Snyder, expanded outwards from the two acres of land cleared and fenced by his father for three Guernsey cows, the two-story barn and planted fruit trees, the woods behind the back fence—‘a second-growth jungle of alder and cascara trees’ (116)—‘the [ . . . ] Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, and cedar forest,’ ranging ‘beyond the cow pasture, across the swamp, up a long slope, and into a droughty stand of pines’ (117). Whilst it is perhaps true that for every human being the childhood landscape retains a special place in the memory, for Snyder it took a formative role beyond this common experience. In At the Field’s End, Nicholas O’Connell quotes Snyder as saying: I grew up in close contact with the fabric of nature, rather than removed from it [ . . . ] Growing up in that fabric gave me a powerful moral perspective of respect and regard for all sentient beings and gave me a powerful sense of membership in a real world. (O’Connell 1987, 309) These early recollections demonstrate Snyder’s personal commitment to an ethical relation with the non-human world, a bio-centric awareness that is parallel to the scientific approach of the deep ecologist. As Dorothy Nielsen explains, ‘ecological thinking leads one to question the assumption that the human being is the moral and ontological apex of the cosmos’ (Nielsen 1993, 691). Yet for Snyder, anthropocentrism or andro-centrism was not an a priori assumption to be challenged, for such hierarchical thinking was alien to the experiences of his upbringing. Indeed, there is a familial comfort as he recalls the terrain of his youth—when revisualised ‘with its smells and textures,’ when walked through again in the mind, it ‘has a grounding and settling effect’ on him (Snyder 1990, 26). Nevertheless, the correlative of this bio-centric awareness is that, as Kerridge and Sammells explain, one ‘strives to see how all things are interdependent, even those apparently most separate’ (Kerridge and Sammells 1998, 7). In place of scientific or philosophical theories, it is the familial relation to the different environments in which Snyder has lived that provides the initial groundwork for each of his expository essays in The Practice of the Wild (1990). In his early teens hiking the ‘old-growth stands of the foothill valleys of the Cascades and the Olympics’, for example, Snyder recounts how he learned that a ‘place on earth is a mosaic within larger

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mosaics,’ that ‘the land is all small places, all precise tiny realms replicating larger and smaller patterns’ (Snyder 1990, 117, 27). Such autobiographical observations, however, may be readily aligned with the scientific thesis of deep ecology. In this instance, Snyder’s awakening beyond the trails, pathways and groves of the childhood topography reflects a realisation of the earth as a matrix of interconnected “bioregions”. Indeed, as Peter Berg and Raymond Dasmann originally defi ned the “bioregion”, it ‘refers both to geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness’ (Berg and Dasmann 1977, 399). For Snyder, this broadened consciousness was soon coupled with its cultural imbrications. ‘Somewhere between the ages of nine and eleven’, Snyder recounts in an interview with Barry Chowka, ‘I went into the Seattle Art museum and saw a room full of Chinese landscape paintings’ (Snyder 1980, 94). At that moment he is reported to have felt a deep shock of recognition because they looked to him exactly like the Cascades, the Washington Mountains with which he was already familiar. In the interview he describes how ‘the Chinese had an eye for the world that I saw as real.’ This experience was intensified in 1942 when his family moved to Portland, Oregon and he had the opportunity to climb Mount St. Helens. Snyder writes: To be immersed in ice and rock and cold and upper space is to undergo an eery, rigorous initiation and transformation. Being above all the clouds with only a few other high mountains also in the sunshine, the human world still asleep under its gray dawn cloud blanket, is one of the fi rst small steps toward Aldo Leopold’s “think like a mountain.” (Snyder 1990, 117–118) Snyder’s personal conviction from childhood of an essential familial relation to the natural world is expanded in this essay with the beginnings of an ethical treatise for how such a relation may work in practice. To ‘think like the mountain’ as Leopold proposes, is to realign the parameters of our identity thinking, ‘to include soils, waters, plants, and animals’ as all part of a ‘biotic community’ (Leopold 1949, 20). Snyder’s experience on Mount St. Helens consummated his passion for hiking so that soon he would make his ‘way to most of the summits of the Northwest—Mt. Hood, Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, Mt. Stuart, and more—in subsequent years’ (Snyder 1990, 118). Yet crucially Snyder has noted how it was at the same time that he became ‘more aware of the lowlands.’ The lowlands are where civilisation has its dwellings and Snyder’s sense of space realised in his experiences of place never seek to negate the human. That is, whilst Snyder’s position is clearly biocentric, he does not write out the human from his poetry or prose. As Buell has commented, ‘natural and built environments [ . . . ] are long since all mixed up’ (Buell 2005, 22).

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 57 Snyder’s numerous essays—of the earlier collections Earth House Hold (1969), The Old Ways (1977) and The Real Work (1980), as well as in the more recent The Practice of the Wild (1990) and A Place in Space (1995)—provide a useful companion to his poetry. In particular, The Practice of the Wild, to which I will continue to refer, offers a clear explanation of his political views. The autobiographical narrative that runs throughout is a conscious demonstration of how his personal experiences, in combination with the places where he has lived, inform his understanding of society, and in particular of mankind’s relation to the natural world. Furthermore, the resulting bio-centric politics of ecological advocacy is incorporated into a sophisticated engagement with contemporary philosophical and scientific thesis. However, the ethical implications of his political priorities are only briefly considered in these essays; his reference to Leopold’s ‘land ethic’, for example, where non-human species are entitled to existence ‘as a matter of biotic right,’ is hardly sufficient to support the weight of his argument (Leopold 1949, 211). Indeed, The Practice of the Wild says very little about his poetics too, with only brief references to a methodological practice in writing creatively. It is with his poetry, however, that Snyder fuses the political, philosophical, scientific, social, economic, phenomenological and religious aspects of his thought into a linguistic form that provides the essential ethical framework. Snyder fi rst became interested in poetry whilst studying anthropology and literature at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, between 1947 and 1951. In particular, he began to read Chinese poetry; these poems, as he explained to Dan McLeod in 1983, freed him ‘from excessive attachment to wild mountains, with their almost subliminal way of presenting even the wildest hills as a place where people, also, live’ (quoted in Charters 1983, 495). Climbing the hills near Lake City during the semester breaks, where ‘trucks ceaselessly rolled down the river valleys out of the Cascades loaded with great logs,’ Snyder realised that he had ‘grown up in the aftermath of a clearcut’ (Snyder 1990, 118). In the Practice of the Wild he writes: Our place is part of what we are. Yet even a “place” has a kind of fluidity: it passes through space and time. [ . . . ] A place will have been grasslands, then conifers, then beech and elm. It will have been half riverbed, it will have been scratched and plowed by ice. And then it will be cultivated, paved, sprayed, dammed, graded, built up. But each is only for a while, and that will be just another set of lines of the palimpsest. (Snyder 1990, 27) Whilst, as the Professor of Western History, Dan Flores has argued, ‘from the time humans located regularly-visited hunting camps and early river farming settlements, human places have been superimposed on environmental settings,’ for Snyder, ‘each place [remains] its own place, forever (eventually) wild’ (Flores 1999, 44; Snyder 1990, 17).

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Along with Philip Whalen, a fellow student and room mate at Reed College, Snyder gained notoriety as a key figure of the San Francisco Renaissance, a period of poetic revival facilitated across the city by Kenneth Rexroth and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Written during this period, his earliest published poems were later collected under the title The Back Country (1967). For most of the 1960s, however, Snyder lived in Japan studying Zen Buddhism, the practice of which has continued to have a powerful influence on his writing. In our recent correspondence of 24th November 2008, Snyder wrote to me: On the matter of ethics, of course my primary ethical position comes from the fi rst precept of Buddhism, ahimsa, which is usually translated “non-violence” but more accurately is “non-harming” and it does allow, in the commentaries for degrees and possibilities. It is a much studied precept in the Zen school, which treats of it in a number of koans, and is understood as a deep ethical challenge more than as an absolute rule. There is a koan, “How do you not harm a chair?” Indeed, Snyder draws inspiration for his writing both from a breadth of literary sources as well as from his diverse life experiences. As a young adult, he straddled an academic career—studying literature, anthropology and oriental culture and languages—with hiking and labouring—as seaman and wiper on board the Sappa Creek, as timber scaler and mountain forest lookout, as trail crew worker at Yosemite National Park and excavator for the Park Service at Old Fort Vancouver. In 1970 he settled in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California and presented the Earth Day speech at Colorado State College. Indeed, since then he has become, to quote from his short biography on the University of California website, ‘a leading spokesperson for “reinhabitation” [ . . . ] for the possibilities and necessities of recreating an organic relationship with a natural bioregion’ (University of California n.d.). In this role, he attended the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, was appointed to the California Arts Council in 1974 and was inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1987. With ten books of poetry and the recent publication of a Gary Snyder Reader (1999)—the defi nitive volume, according to the jacket blurb, of ‘one of the most influential voices of the twentieth century’—Snyder’s work is not easily summarised. However, I want to suggest that in terms of his poethical praxis, the work may be divided into two stages of development. Although a rough chronology is followed in my analysis, there remains some cross-over rather than a strict transition between the two modes. Nevertheless, the fi rst mode is most evident in his early collections, beginning with The Back Country (1967), and including Myths and Texts (1960) and Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969). The second mode takes precedence in his later collections entitled Turtle Island (1974) and Axe Handles (1983), the more recent No Nature (1992), and Mountains

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 59 and Rivers Without End (1996). For the purposes of my argument, I shall focus primarily on The Back Country and Myths and Texts followed by Turtle Island and Axe Handles, for it is in these collections that the two modes are fi rst and perhaps most effectively presented. Myths and Texts is divided into three sections: ‘logging,’ ‘hunting’ and ‘burning.’ The individual poems, written between 1952 and 1956, are untitled but follow a numerical sequence with fi fteen poems in the ‘logging’ section, sixteen in ‘hunting,’ and seventeen in ‘burning.’ In contrast to the complex arrangement of The Maximus Poems, Snyder’s work is presented here in a straight-forward and easily accessible manner. Several of the poems in the fi nal two sections are introduced with short instructional tags, separated from the poem with an italicised font. There is the ‘first shaman song’ that opens the ‘hunting’ section, and later a ‘second shaman song’ for the ‘burning’ section (Snyder 1978, 19, 37). Elsewhere we are instructed that ‘this poem is for birds,’ ‘this poem is for bear,’ or that ‘this poem is for deer’ (Snyder 1978, 20, 23, 26). In the ‘logging’ section as a whole, Snyder seeks to recreate his experiences, or more precisely, to evoke the combined mental and physical experience of working as a labourer for the Warm Springs Lumber Company through his own personal sense-impressions. In poem ‘4’ of the fi rst section, he writes: Stood straight holding the choker high As the Cat swung back the arch piss-firs falling, Limbs snapping on the tin hat bright D caught on Swinging butt-hooks ringing against cold steel. (Snyder 1978, 5)

This short extract demonstrates the principal technique of form that Snyder employs throughout Myths and Texts. The linebreak, and particularly the indented linebreak, is used to re-create the physical movement or bodily labour that is involved, in this instance, in setting chokers—‘looping cables on logs and hooking them to D8 caterpillars’ (Snyder 1978, vii). From the capitalised ‘Stood’, equally weighted and balanced to the second word ‘straight’—sounding out via a repetition of “st” and closing in with the “aight”—the ‘choker’ is held up high into the next line before swinging back to the lefthand margin, creating an arch where the ‘piss-firs’ fall. In combination with the line-spacing, Snyder’s compact descriptions and tight control of repeated sounds, evokes the discipline and skill of the manual labour.

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Indeed, many of the poems of ‘logging’ trace the daily routine, moving from the cold breath of early dawn, to the noise of the engines heated up by mid-day, and often closing with the tired retrospection of the walk home. Poem ‘8’ is exemplary of this cycle: 8 Each dawn is clear Cold air bites the throat. Thick frost on the pine bough Leaps from the tree snapped by the diesel Drifts and glitters in the horizontal sun. In the frozen grass smoking boulders ground by steel tracks. In the frozen grass wild horses stand beyond a row of pines. The D8 tears through piss-fir, Scrapes the seed-pine chipmunks flee, A black ant carries an egg Aimlessly from the battered ground. Yellowjackets swarm and circle Above the crushed dead log, their home. Pitch oozes from barked trees still standing, Mashed bushes make strange smell. Lodgepole pines are brittle. Camprobbers flutter to watch. A few stumps, drying piles of brush; Under the thin duff, a toe-scrape down Black lava of a late flow. Leaves stripped from thornapple Taurus by nightfall. (Snyder 1978, 10)

The narrative of this poem follows the arc of the sun from the clear dawn to nightfall and Taurus—the second sign of the zodiac—denoting the fi xed earth. Indeed, as with many of the poems from Myths and Texts,

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 61 the cyclical patterns of nature inform the rhythmic structure. In poem ‘8’, the strong rhythm, disciplined according to the recurring pattern of four stresses per line, runs throughout. It lends a fluidity and effortlessness to the existence of a biotic community—the ‘black ant [that] carries an egg’ and ‘the wild horses [that] stand / beyond a row of pines.’ It also adds to the sadness, for the rhythm remains, as ‘the D8 tears through’, the ‘chipmunks flee,’ and ‘Yellowjackets swarm and circle / Above the crushed dead log, their home.’ With the poems of the ‘hunting’ and ‘burning’ sections, there is a switch from the more literal description of Snyder’s labour, to a mythological vision that gives voice to the organisms of the forest. From the song of the ‘snared bear’—the ‘old man in the fur coat’—to the ‘marmot whistles across huge rocks’ and the dear who ‘dances on all the mountains,’ the landscape becomes animated until ‘the cloud mutters’ and ‘the mountains are your mind’ (Snyder 1978, 25, 24, 21, 26, 53). Indeed, in contradistinction to the destructive force of the ‘San Francisco 2x4s’—described in the fi rst section, where ‘All America [is] hung on a hook / & burned by men, in their own praise’—the shaman’s song is heard at the opening both of ‘hunting’ and ‘burning’ (4). Pitched against the ‘Abstractions of the educated mind [ . . . ] a mouthful of useless words’ (7), the Shaman is not interested in ‘those guys with Ph.D.s’ who are ‘up to the part on Ethics now,’ rather he is described as sitting ‘without thoughts by the log-road / Hatching a new myth’ (19). Here is the ‘second shaman song’ in full: 1 second shaman song Squat in swamp shadows. mosquitoes sting; high light in cedar above. Crouched in a dry vain frame —thirst for cold snow —green slime of bone marrow Seawater fills each eye Quivering in nerve and muscle Hung in the pelvic cradle Bones propped against roots A blind flicker of nerve Still hand moves out alone Flowering and leafing turning to quartz Streaked rock congestion of karma

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry The long body of the swamp. A mud-streaked thigh. Dying carp biting air in the damp grass, River recedes. No matter. Limp fish sleep in the weeds The sun dries me as I dance (Snyder 1978, 37)

Through the voice of the shaman, Snyder idealises an ethical relation with our natural and social habitat; we are drawn back to the earth, to ‘squat’ in the shadows of the swamp. The tight stanza form with short lines, compacted (or perhaps composted) descriptions, and gritty, sinuous sounds, brings the physicality of the body—the ‘bone marrow’, ‘pelvic cradle’, and ‘nerve and muscle’—into a close proximity with the natural environment. The connection in this proximity is sharply realised as interdependent, such that ‘Seawater fills each eye’ and the ‘bones [are] propped against roots’. Furthermore, the emphasis is on the conditioning effects of the natural environment as they are experienced by the shaman. He describes the ‘mosquitoes sting’, the ‘high light in cedar above’, the ‘cold snow’ and the ‘biting air’, all of which make the body alternately ‘quiver’, ‘fl icker’, or ‘thirst.’ In the same way, the idealised naturalisation of the human body, or reinhabitation of the natural environment, is concluded in the fi nal line where the shaman sings, ‘The sun dries me as I dance’. Despite the apparently elemental form of the poems of Myths and Texts—drawn, as Snyder suggests in the introductory preface, from the ‘two sources of human knowledge—symbols and sense-impressions’— they were written from the belief that ‘we have [ . . . ] the chance to fi ll out the whole picture now, for the fi rst time in human experience’ (Snyder 1978, vii-viii). In the same way that Olson became convinced of a new understanding of our mythological present through contemporary advances in scientific and social theory, so too Snyder believed that ‘it is beginning to be possible to look in one wide gaze at all that human beings have been and done on the whole planet’ (viii). Thus the elemental form and perhaps child-like innocence of the instructional tags belies the complex ‘questions of history and philosophy’ with which Snyder is concerned (vii). Nevertheless, the kind of idealised ontological condition for the human being as presented in the shaman’s song, or the representation of the non-human organisms through the anthropomorphic mythological voice of the bear or bird, fails to recognise the complex social, economic, and political factors that impact our relation to, and production of, our environmental social habitat.

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 63 The fi rst mode of Snyder’s poethical praxis is more sharply realised in his next collection of poems entitled The Back Country. In attempting to establish a re-connection between the reader and the natural world—what Snyder has called the ‘real work’—the poems, however, are often forced, as in the ‘Sixth-Month Song In The Foothills’: SIXTH-MONTH SONG IN THE FOOTHILLS In the cold shed sharpening saws. a swallow’s nest hangs by the door setting rakers in sunlight falling from meadow through doorframe swallows flit under the eaves. Grinding the falling axe sharp for the summer a swallow shooting out over. over the river, snow on low hills sharpening wedges for splitting. Beyond the low hills, white mountains and now snow is melting. sharpening tools; pack horses grazing new grass bright axes—and swallows fly into my shed. (Snyder 1967a, 17)

There is an approximate pattern in this poem whereby the indented lines describe the swallow’s activities, whilst those left-aligned describe the work of the speaking voice sharpening tools for the summer. The rhythm and recurring sounds that run throughout the poem lend it fluidity, but on the whole, this forging together of the human and the non-human is somewhat contrived. Indeed, the inter-linking of “natural” and “human” phenomenon through the line-break grid is forced and sterile, negating the sound-pattern where ‘swallow shooting’ is supposed to blend with the ‘sharpening’ of the wedges. Despite the somewhat forced technique, Snyder’s challenge to androcentrism and hierarchical thinking marks the ethical significance of his first stage poethical praxis. Indeed, perhaps the most refreshing aspect of this poem is that the conventional lyric “I” is rejected—for such a mode tends to operate as a totalising optic—in favour of an ethical presentation of the sounds and rhythms of naturalised sense-impressions. The problem of a contrived interconnection of the human and the non-human in this early poetry, however, is also compounded by the fact that Snyder divides society according

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to the dyad of identity and difference. Indeed, throughout The Back Country Snyder incorporates a series of shorter poems that imagine a positively valued alternative life-style, valorising a sub-cultural identity that is constructed in opposition to the environmental irresponsibility of a mainstream humanism. It appears, in the first instance, in his poem entitled ‘After Work’: AFTER WORK The shack and a few trees float in the blowing fog I pull out your blouse, warm my cold hands on your breasts. you laugh and shudder peeling garlic by the hot iron stove. bring in the axe, the rake, the wood we’ll lean on the wall against each other stew simmering on the fire as it grows dark drinking wine. (Snyder 1967a, 27)

The ambitious poetics of an impersonal register is here relinquished as Snyder resorts to the lyric “I”. A fi ne poem in and of itself, ‘After Work’ has significance, however, only within the ontological parameters of its subject positioning. Indeed, the idealised fantasy of a subsistence romance becomes somewhat nauseating when Snyder resorts to evoking the inebriation of ‘drinking wine’ for his effect. Nevertheless, with the excitement of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat generation, Snyder appears to have genuinely believed in an emergent sub-cultural identity construction or mythology as the ‘surfacing (in a specifically “American” incarnation) of the Great Subculture which goes back as far perhaps as the late Palaeolithic’ (Snyder 1970, 104). This identity construction appears throughout The Back Country where the speaking voice is accredited with the cultural cache of such lines as ‘I sit in the open window / & roll a smoke’ or drink a ‘cup of green tea / by the Bay’ (Snyder 1967a, 16, 22). The opposition of a ‘Great Subculture’ in natural harmony with “the way of things,” against a mainstream conformity where a humanistic self-interest poisons our spiritual and natural habitat, is both too generalised and reductive to allow for an ethical respect for alterity. Furthermore, in romanticising the subcultural it becomes a fashion, as in

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 65 the poem ‘North Beach Alba,’ and Snyder’s work thus becomes complicit with a self-orientation, rather than an ethical response. NORTH BEACH ALBA waking half-drunk in a strange pad making it out to the cool gray san francisco dawn— white gulls over white houses, fog down the bay, tamalpais a fresh green hill in the new sun, driving across the bridge in a beat old car to work. (Snyder 1967a, 69)

Through the evocative tone and references to ‘waking half-drunk’ in the ‘cool’ grey of the ‘san francisco dawn,’ ‘making it’ in a ‘beat old car’, Snyder asserts a sensibility or perspective that is supposedly unique and subversive of mainstream conformity. As a poethical praxis, however, the construction and juxtaposition of two opposing cultural identities is problematic. As Charles Altieri has commented, Snyder ‘runs the risk of proposing a moral purity that is narrow and possibly self-righteous’ (Altieri 1976, 771). Furthermore, he argues that the ‘self-confidence of his autobiographical counter-images cannot avoid leaving [ . . . ] this impression of self-righteousness that is completely absent in Snyder as a person’ (775). From this perspective, the shorter poems of The Back Country detail the ontological conditions of a specific kind of subject-identity which is then held up as a moral exemplar. Such a mode of poethical praxis—whereby the reader aligns his or her subjectivity with the ontological conditions prescribed by the poem— invokes a moral totalising, rather than an ethical welcoming of difference. Several critics have tried to work around this problem in Snyder’s poetry. Robert Kern, for example, has argued that the experience of these poems, ‘both is and is not his, and the result of this is an intersubjectivity, the creation of an intimate community of experience between writer and reader’ (Kern 1977, 193). Yet within the confi nes of the two opposing identities, the closed dyad of the “mainstream” and the “subcultural”, it is difficult to see how the ‘liberating anonymity’ that Kern describes, can possibly allow for ‘a transpersonal sense of life that carries with it a greatly expanded defi nition of human possibility’ (197). With the poems of Snyder’s later collection entitled Axe Handles, there is a more nuanced representation of the natural world as an interrelation of the human and the non-human, including the imbrications of modern technology and cultural knowledge. As with the earlier poems of Myths and Texts, many of the poems in this collection describe the physical activities of manual labouring. Indeed, the technology of industrialisation and

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cultural production persists as a despoiling of the natural landscape and as an interruption to traditional patterns of localised and native communities. However, in Axe Handles the noticeable difference is that such processes are shown to be complexly interwoven and transformative of our perception of the natural world itself. Snyder’s poem entitled ‘Painting the North San Juan School’ acknowledges these dynamics: PAINTING THE NORTH SAN JUAN SCHOOL White paint splotches on blue head bandanas Dusty transistor with wired-on antenna plays sixties rock and roll; Little kids came with us are on teeter-totters tilting under shade of oak This building good for ten years more. The shingled bell-cupola trembles at every log truck rolling by— The radio speaks: today it will be one hundred degrees in the valley. —Franquette walnuts grafted on the local native rootstock do o.k. nursery stock of cherry all has fungus; Lucky if a bare-foot planting lives, This paint thins with water. This year the buses will run only on paved roads, Somehow the children will be taught: How to record their mother tongue with written signs, Names to call the landscape of the continent they live on Assigned it by the ruling people of the last three hundred years, The games of numbers, What went before, as told by those who think they know it, A drunken man with chestnut mustache Stumbles off the road to ask if he can help. Children drinking chocolate milk Ladders resting on the shaky porch. (Snyder 2005, 21–22)

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 67 The ‘blue head bandanas’ and ‘sixties rock and roll’, weather forecasts from the transistor radio—that ‘today it will be one hundred degrees in the valley’—and the ‘written signs’ by which we have ‘names to call the landscape’, all influence the way in which the children understand ‘the continent / they live on’. In comparison to the D8 caterpillars of Myths and Texts that rip through the biocommunities represented in those earlier poems, here Snyder acknowledges the fluidity of place by articulating the fragility, impermanence and interpenetration of the natural environment, technology and culture. In terms of a value judgment on this interpenetration, Snyder allows for an ambiguity that underscores the more sophisticated awareness of the tensions and complications. Nonetheless, a sense of loss and endangerment persists such that ‘the shingled bell-cupola trembles / at every log truck rolling by’. Ultimately, for Snyder, the physical environment can accommodate and rejuvenate beyond human intervention, for the manmade chemical ‘paint thins with water.’ On the whole, Axe Handles marks a transitional stage in Snyder’s poetic development. Resisting the oppositional dynamics of his earlier poetry, the poems mark the beginnings of a poetic practice sufficiently nuanced to accommodate his understanding of the natural world. Indeed, as with ‘Painting the North San Juan School’, the poems may be properly considered as post-pastoral and thus of particular interest to a second-wave ecocriticism. Whilst in pastoral poetry, as Terry Gifford has observed, ‘metaphors can remain aesthetic rather than conceptually challenging, endorsing complacency,’ Snyder’s poetry here ‘transcends the closed circle of the pastoral and anti-pastoral modes,’ avoiding the traps ‘both of idealization of the pastoral and of the simple corrective of the anti-pastoral’ (Gifford 2002, 78). The second mode of Snyder’s poethical praxis is only fully realised with the publication of Turtle Island (1974), a collection of poems that are not only post-pastoral, but ethically innovative. Indeed, my account of Levinas’ philosophy may be usefully brought to bear in reading this work. Whilst there are fundamental differences that need to be acknowledged across such a wide bridge, both Levinas and Snyder are essentially concerned with ethics, their vision being of an ethical relation with the other. In general terms—but nonetheless significant—a parallel may be drawn between Levinas’ philosophy as other-oriented and Snyder’s project as bio-centric. In this respect, both Snyder and Levinas determine anthropocentrism and humanism as totalising violence, antithetical to the ethical imperative of their work. In breaking from the confi nes of identity-thinking, Snyder’s unique contribution to my “poethical trajectory” is thus located in his understanding of alterity to include the radical difference of all phenomenological existence. This concern for the environment is rooted in The Practice of the Wild when we learn that the term ‘nature’, for Snyder, denotes ‘the physical universe and all its properties’ (Snyder 1990, 9). According to this defi nition, inclusive both of human and non-human attributes, ‘nature is not a place to visit, it is home’ (7). Our perception of the natural world then, as alien to human civilisation, is for Snyder a recent phenomenon that has its

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roots in the humanist anthropocentrism of Western philosophical thinking. His project, as outlined in The Practice of the Wild, seeks to challenge this misconception by addressing the ‘nature-illiterate’ of contemporary society (12). Indeed, the ultimate challenge posed by Snyder’s Turtle Island, where the poems work to resolve the false ‘dichotomy of the civilized and the wild’ (15), is to reactivate our ‘membership in the Assembly of All Beings’ (12). Snyder’s vision of the human and the non-human in an apparently naturalised harmony appears at fi rst to be irreconcilable with a Levinasian ethics. The problem is that whilst Levinas gives ethics primacy over ontology in order that the self might be in relationship with the other, this relationship fundamentally confirms the alterity, or irreducible distance, of that other. Yet Levinas writes, ‘in a world which is from the first other the I is nonetheless autochthonous’, meaning, at home, as in the fi rst native inhabitant of a country (Levinas 1994, 37). This pre-originary experience is the welcoming of the other, ‘an event in the oecumenia of being’ (150). Indeed, Snyder attributes a similar quality to the radical alterity of nature, that of a ‘forming and firming’ quality (Snyder 1990, 10). With an ethics as first philosophy, as is the case for both Snyder and Levinas, the self is originally consummated by way of a relation with external alterity. For Levinas’ exposition of an ethics exclusive to human beings, the welcoming of the other is the coming together of the household (the constitution of a society) in the “oikos” of the home (the natural environment). The opposite is thus true in Snyder’s ethical treatise that includes the non-human, ‘“Homeless,”’ he writes, ‘is here coming to mean “being at home in the whole universe”’ (104). The self then is in fact a part of nature, a constituent of the whole fabric or palimpsest, but crucially the self now perceives this space as external, as other, and the skin—the ‘skin is border-guard’ writes Snyder in his poem ‘Toward Climax’—to quote Claudia Benthien, forms ‘the cultural border between self and the world’ (see Benthien 2002). It is for this reason that Snyder writes, ‘philosophy is thus a place-based exercise’ (Snyder 1990, 64). The fundamental difference, however, between Levinas and Snyder’s respective philosophical ideation, should now be clear. For Levinas, ethics is dependent upon the presence of the human face, a radical alterity that calls the self into question. This radical alterity is the sole preserve of the human being—the a priori condition of human being—and thus cannot be extended to include the natural world. Snyder’s philosophy, on the contrary, sees no hierarchy between human beings and nature; in fact, for him it is precisely the quality of radical alterity intrinsic to nature that calls the self into question and demands an ethical response. For both Levinas’ selfother dualism, and Snyder’s culture-nature dualism, the distance within those relations is essential; without such difference, the other would not be radically other but the same. To bridge the gap between Levinas’ and Snyder’s work, is to view alterity—whether in the wilderness of a natural biocommunity, or in the face of another human being—as calling the self into question and opening the

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 69 possibility for an ethical relationship. From this perspective, both the call of the other and the call of the wild demand an ethical response that transcends the competitive and predatory.2 The poems of Turtle Island, introducing Snyder’s second mode of poethical praxis, are ethically innovative in their attempt to register the call of the wild. Here is the fi rst poem of the collection entitled ‘Anasazi’: ANASAZI Anasazi, Anasazi, tucked up in clefts in the cliffs growing strict fields of corn and beans sinking deeper and deeper in earth up to your hips in Gods your head all turned to eagle-down & lightening for knees and elbows your eyes full of pollen the smell of bats the flavor of sandstone grit on the tongue. women birthing at the foot of ladders in the dark. trickling streams in hidden canyons under the cold rolling desert corn-basket wide-eyed red baby rock lip home, Anasazi (Snyder 1974, 3)

In this ambitious poem, Snyder attempts to immediately transcend the plasticity of art that Levinas identifies, by performing the metaphysical dramaturgy in the face-to-face experience, that is, by presenting the ‘exteriority of being’ (Levinas 1994, 295). The biocentric perspective of ‘Anasazi’ is not restricted to opening a space for nature but rather the face of nature is itself present, even if Snyder is the spokesperson for it. With the line ‘your eyes

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full of pollen’—rather than “I looked at the pollen”—the speaking subject is to a certain extent eclipsed by the landscape. In this way, the speaker’s vision does not figure as a gaze that captures nature through a conceptualising perception—the potentially totalitarian optic of the lyric “I”—but is naturalised into the landscape as a synaesthetically aware being. Snyder thus places emphasis on the smells and flavours of the sentient beings of nature and our concrete experience of them within an intersubjective field—the ‘grit on the tongue’. The accretion of the verbs ‘tucked up’, ‘growing’ and ‘sinking deeper and deeper in earth’ draw us in to a naturalised co-habitation, a wilderness that is both within and without. Indeed, for Snyder, the wild ‘is not to be made subject or object’ but ‘to be approached it must be admitted from within, as a quality intrinsic to who we are’ (Snyder 1990, 181). Thus, he writes, ‘our eyes full of pollen’, ‘hips in Gods’ and ‘lightening for knees and elbow.’ For the general reader unfamiliar with archaeological terminology, the title word ‘Anasazi,’ repeated twice at the opening and again as the envoi, is effective for its rich assonance, rather than for any literal or alluded meaning. Within this limited reading, the semantic ambiguity of the term is suggestive rather than prescriptive, preserving the radical alterity or non-totalisable difference of the more literal descriptions that follow. Indeed, in contradistinction to Olson’s exhaustive detailing of historical particulars, Snyder provides almost generic natural images. The description of ‘cliffs’, ‘fields of corn and beans’, ‘trickling streams in hidden canyons’, or the ‘cold rolling desert’, requires an imaginative investment on the part of the reader. “Anasazi”, however, in fact refers to the ancient Pueblo people of the American Southwest, a detail that necessarily changes our reading of the poem. In this light, it emerges as a more sophisticated eco-cultural art form, addressing the nature-illiterate of contemporary western society, through the description of the way of life of the ancient Pueblos. Yet the etymology of the term “Anasazi”, exposes the perilous danger of imperialism. As the archaeologist Linda Cordell has explained, ‘the name “Anasazi” has come to mean “ancient people,” although the word itself is Navajo, meaning “enemy ancestors.” It is unfortunate that a non-Pueblo word has come to stand for a tradition that is certainly ancestral Pueblo’ (Cordell 1997, 164). Thus it appears that Snyder has adopted a term sanctioned in archaeology but offensive to many modern Pueblos. Where Snyder assumes the role of a spokesperson not just for nature, but for indigenous cultures as well, his work borders on the imperialist. Indeed, Native American commentators such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Hobson Greary have identified ‘the rise of the white shaman as a new version of cultural imperialism,’ where the adoption by poets from a white Euro-Christian American tradition of the personae of an Indian medicine-maker, shaman, or coyote only adds to the plight of the indigenous cultures (Hobson 1979, 100). The problem is, as Dorothy Nielsen explains in her essay “Prosopopoeia and the Ethics of Ecological Advocacy”, that whilst ‘Snyder’s weaving of

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 71 Native American traditions into his own voice,’ albeit ‘reinforces the ecological authority claimed by his poetry,’ it is ‘unproblematized’ (Nielsen 1993, 713). Thus Nielsen argues that whilst ‘ecological poetry teaches respect for biological diversity. If we extend this concern for diversity to the cultural sphere, then a text like Turtle Island encodes its own critique’ (713). Despite this ethical contradiction in Snyder’s imperialist appropriation of Native American cultures, his poetry, from an ecocritical perspective, is nevertheless progressive. Across the poems of Turtle Island, the ethical excellence emerges from the fact that we are directed to what David Abram has described in The Spell of the Sensuous (1996) as an animate, ‘morethan-human’ world (cited in Tallmadge 2000, 34). In a poem like ‘Anasazi’, Snyder hopes to show how the wilderness of this ‘more-than-human’ world can teach us the ‘etiquette of freedom’ (Snyder 1990, 24). Indeed, for Snyder, the call of the wild is an invitation to ‘a place of archetypal power, teaching, and challenge’ (11). In the same way, for Levinas, the other approaches me from a ‘dimension of height’ and inasmuch as he or she is ‘welcomed, this conversation is a teaching’ (Levinas 1994, 214, 52). According to Snyder, the ‘lessons of the wild’ are as follows: 1. ‘appreciate the elegance of the forces that shape life and the world, that have shaped every line of our bodies’ 2. ‘live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow beings but to all beings’ 3. ‘try not to be stingy, or to exploit others’ (Snyder 1990, 4) ‘Of all moral failings and flaws of character,’ Snyder writes, ‘the worst is stinginess of thought, which includes meanness in all its forms. Rudeness in thought or deed toward others, toward nature, reduces the chances of conviviality and interspecies communication, which are essential to physical and spiritual survival’ (Snyder 1990, 21). In his poem entitled ‘Bedrock’, Snyder presents this universal earth ethic more vividly: BEDROCK for Masa Snowmelt pond warm granite we make camp, no thought of finding more. and nap and leave our minds to the wind. on the bedrock, gently tilting, sky and stone, teach me to be tender.

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry the touch that nearly misses— brush of glances— tiny steps— that finally cover worlds of hard terrain. cloud wisps and mists gathered into slate blue bolts of summer rain. tea together in the purple starry eve; new moon soon to set, why does it take so long to learn to love, we laugh and grieve. (Snyder 1974, 64)

In the wilderness we learn to ‘leave our minds to the wind’ and recognise the material contours of our existence, ‘the bedrock, gently tilting’, the ‘sky and stone,’ that teach us ‘to be tender.’ As Levinas describes the ‘caresses in the contact of saying’ in the ‘immediacy of a skin and a face’ in the ethical relation, Snyder captures it here as ‘the touch that nearly misses’, ‘brushes of glances’, and the ‘tiny steps’ of the animals, ‘that fi nally cover worlds / of hard terrain’ (Levinas 1999, 85). The pun on ‘hard’ alludes to a hardness of heart, to what Snyder describes in the Practice of the Wild as a ‘wastefulness and carelessness caused by stinginess of spirit, an ungracious unwillingness to complete the gift-exchange transaction’ (Snyder 1990, 21). Whilst this transaction literally refers to the biological interdependence of natural organisms, to the consumption and reproduction that maintains the foodchain, the transaction may also be aligned with Levinas’ description of the ‘primordial donation’, the ‘first ethical gesture’ (Levinas 1994, 174). In this sense, the ‘touch that nearly misses’ is a self-less bearing of our presence by which we support each other or are in interdependence with nature. The encounter with the radical alterity of wilderness, an encounter that begins with a going out from the comfort of the autochthonous self towards an ‘exteriority of being’, is achieved by grace (Levinas 1994, 295). The very quality of the alterity of wilderness—the ‘slate blue / bolts of summer rain’—teaches us humility as we learn both how we are dependent upon the other and are infi nitesimal in the face-to-face. It approaches us from a height that impresses upon us a certain awe at its wondrous alterity. It also questions the humanist, ‘why does it take so / long to learn to / love,’ drawing us back so that we might ‘laugh / and grieve.’ Snyder describes this process in The Practice of the Wild as follows:

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 73 One departs the home to embark on a quest into an archetypal wilderness that is dangerous, threatening, and full of beasts and hostile aliens. This sort of encounter with the other—both the inner and the outer— requires giving up comfort and safety, accepting cold and hunger, and being willing to eat anything. [ . . . ] It grants freedom, expansion, and release. Untied. Unstuck. Crazy for a while. It breaks taboo, it verges on transgression, it teaches humility. Going out—fasting—singing along—talking across the species boundaries—praying—giving thanks—coming back. On the mythical plane this is the source of the worldwide hero narratives. On the spiritual plane it requires embracing the other as oneself and stepping across the line—not ‘becoming one’ or mixing things up but holding the sameness and difference delicately in mind. It can mean seeing the houses, roads, and people of your old place as for the fi rst time. It can mean every word heard is heard to its deepest echo. It can mean mysterious tears of gratitude. Our ‘soul’ is our dream of the other. (Snyder 1990, 179–180) Key to Snyder’s description of the encounter with the radical alterity of wilderness is the spiritual dimension by which ‘sameness and difference’ are held ‘delicately in mind.’ Indeed, the paradox of a relationship that maintains alterity is resolved only by way of a metaphysical transcendence. At the poetic horizon, Snyder’s vision of a naturalised harmony of the human and non-human is informed by his practice of Zen Buddhism. Simon James’ account of the pratīya-samutpāda, or conditioned arising, in Buddhism, illuminates the metaphysical transcendence to which Snyder ascribes: For Buddhism to understand the world correctly is to see that there is no such thing as an abiding self [ . . . ] the Buddha contended that there is no essential “you” that persists, unchanged, throughout “your” life. Instead, there is only a collection of constantly changing elements (skandhas). [ . . . ] Moreover, this truth of “not-self” (anātman) is taken to apply to all beings, not just to humans. The Buddha maintained that nothing has a self-like essence which determines that it is one thing rather than another. All things are said to be empty (śūnya) of such a self. This does not mean that no things exist. But it does mean that no things enjoy the kind of independent existence they would have if they were imbued with a soul or self. For Buddhism, the world is said to be marked by “conditioned arising” (pratīya-samutpāda), which is to say that things are what they are, not because of some self-like essence inhering in them, but because of the presence of various conditions seemingly outside themselves. They arise when these conditions cohere, they persist as long as they obtain, and they disappear when the conditions disappear. And so as well as being empty of an abiding self, all things (bar Nirvāna) are said to be impermanent (anitya). (James 2004, 6)

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This kind of experience, specifically as it teaches us humility, registers across the poems in Snyder’s Turtle Island collection. It is in the shifts from the eternal to the quotidian of ‘The Bath’—from ‘The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. / the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow’ to the ‘fire inside and boiling water on the stove’ and back to the ‘black night & all the stars’—in the mystery and wonder of ‘Pine Tree Tops’—where ‘the creek of boots’, the ‘rabbit tracks’ and ‘deer tracks’ teach us ‘what do we know’— and in the vastness of the ‘Coyote Valley Spring’—where we see how small we are, ‘far out in the tamal / a lost people / float // in tiny tule boats’ (Snyder 1974, 12, 33, 15). These are the lessons of the wild, ‘the laws of waves’ as they are described in ‘On San Gabriel Ridges’ (40). Yet these poetic turns are far from simple achievements. On fi rst reading, Snyder’s poetry may seem to exploit none of the radical manipulations of language and paper-space seen in the multi-layered poetics of other writings in my “poethical trajectory”. Yet in capturing in his poetry ‘the very real condition of energy and richness that is so often found in wild systems,’ impelling us towards a metaphysical transcendence at the poetic horizon, Snyder pushes language to its limits whilst appearing to return to elemental literary forms (Snyder 1990, 11). He describes the richness of a sacred alterity in the fertile resonance of the alliterative ‘red dry-rot’, in the warmth of the colours, visualised as ‘amber beads of ancient sap’, and in the complex whorls of the ‘winding grain / of twisting outer spiral shell’ (Snyder 2005, 105–106). Indeed, this kind of description is a mark of Snyder’s attempt to develop a non-predatory (or non-harming) mode of representation in his poetic praxis. By focusing on the subjective experience in the immediate proximity of the other, the stimuli of alterity itself is presented rather than represented; a crafting of word sounds, as in ‘fluffi ng tail in chilly wind’, thus seeks to transcend the plasticity and violence of naming and forming, allowing the reader access to a linguistic performance of the original experience (Snyder 1974, 52). The call of the other, as requiring a metaphysical transcendence, may be paralleled with Levinas’ description of ‘the concretization of the idea of infi nity’ (Levinas 1994, 52). This, according to Levinas, may be achieved in the following terms: The infi nite in the fi nite, the more in the less, which is accomplished by the idea of Infi nity, is produced as Desire [ . . . ] the Desire for the Infinite which the desirable arouses rather than satisfies. A Desire perfectly disinterested—goodness. But Desire and goodness concretely presuppose a relationship in which the Desirable arrests the “negativity” of the I that holds sway in the Same—puts an end to power and emprise. This is positively produced as the possession of a world I can bestow as a gift on the Other—that is, as a presence before a face. (Levinas 1994, 52)

Environmental Ethics in the Poetry of Gary Snyder 75 This performance of the ‘exteriority of being’ (Levinas 1994, 295) operates in antithesis to the totalitarian axis of objectivity, whereby an anthropocentrism that conceptualises nature and damages our semiology of nature might codify and project the sentient beings of the natural world as ‘a smiling disney cow on the sign’ seen at ‘the steak houses / called “The Embers”—called / “Fireside”’ as is revealed in Snyder’s poem ‘STEAK’ (Snyder 1974, 10). Indeed throughout Snyder’s poetry there is an opposition set up between ‘the robot[s]’ and ‘The People’, as it is described in the poem ‘Mother Earth: Her Wales’ (Snyder 1974, 47–49). This opposition can be theorised as another trope of the difference between the totalitarian and Infi nite axis and, as with several poets working within my “poethical trajectory”, registers the anti-capitalist imperative, or at least, the anti-bureaucracy of Snyder’s vision for the ‘New World’ (Snyder 1990, 6). In this poem, Snyder describes how ‘the robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth’ and this could be read as alluding to the way in which the ‘robots’ construct a rhetoric for nature, to objectify and atomise nature into constituent parts, to ‘parcel out’ and package its goods as fossil fuels, to make ‘the dry hard ground’, ‘parking space for fifty thousand trucks’ (Snyder 1974, 48). In the same poem, Snyder later parodies the layout of a governmental paragraph with the easy dualisms by which the ‘head-heavy’ leaders of the superpowers exploit the earth. The accumulation of these dualisms amass and the pace accelerates, so that the stanza is increasingly galvanic right up to its discharge in the fi nal line: How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist Government two-world Capitalist-Imperialist Third-world Communist paper-shuffling male non-farmer jet-set bureaucrats Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil? (Snyder 1974, 48)

In a moment of outrage against the superpowers who claim to be making ‘“sovereign use of Natural Resources”’, Snyder looks to the ‘Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants’ and, loading the speaker’s tone with bitterness and irony, questions how the ‘robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil” can speak for them?’ (Snyder 1974, 47) Snyder’s reverence for the radical alterity of the wilderness is thus equalled by his anger towards the ‘robot nations’ that despoil the land: ‘Japan quibbles for words on / what kinds of whales they can kill’ (47). Turtle Island, as well as being the most ethically innovative of Snyder’s poetry collections, is also the most political, directly challenging corporate capitalism’s exploitation of the natural world as a resource to be plundered.

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‘The release of Demonic Energies in the name of / the People / must cease’ Snyder writes in ‘Spell Against Demons’ (Snyder 1974, 16). Throughout his poetry the ‘People’ are always referred to with a capital letter whilst the ‘robots’ are given less significance in comparison. Yet, Snyder writes, ‘People fear the small society and the critique of the State. It is difficult to see, when one has been raised under it, that it is the State itself which is inherently greedy, destabilizing, entropic, disorderly, and illegitimate.’ ‘Our philosophies, world religions, and histories are biased toward uniformity, universality, and centralization—in a word, the ideology of monotheism’ (Snyder 1990, 41). Snyder’s earlier poem entitled ‘Talking Late with the Governor about the Budget’ from Axe Handles assumes a form that is dramatically different to the nature poems that dominate the collection. Here the poem assumes a more conventional form with the words forced into strict lines and blocks of uniform shape. The choice of words sound harder to the ear, as in the lines: ‘Halls of the capitol / iron carts full of printed bills / filling life with rules’ (Snyder 2005, 81–82). The flat sound of ‘rules’ with which the reader is left at the end of the fi rst stanza helps to articulate the monotony of ‘Scanning the hills of laws—budgets—codes—’ (81). For Snyder, the State propounds hegemony and monotheism, against the rich diversity of the wilderness that it fears. As Matthew Cooperman has suggested, ‘if a poem is indeed a horizon it must help us literally, metaphorically, and ethically to see’ (Cooperman 2001, 182). In contradistinction to a postmodern poetics of textuality where the poem focuses in on the interstices of language and examines the self within this level of spatial play, the dynamic flow of Snyder’s poetics, a movement energised by horizontal shifts across the paper-space and a crafting of word sounds and rhythms, visualises metonymic vectors as a layering of radii moving out from the ontos to the exteriority of being. His biocentric politics demands an environmental justice in response to the call of the wild and at the same time challenges—particularly in the global marketing of consumer products and the U.S. government’s news management of environmental issues—the ‘sign pollution’ (Slocombe 2005) of our “traumatised semiotics”. This chapter has argued that a poethical praxis is evident in Gary Snyder’s work whereby the phenomenological horizon of the poem provides a proleptic space of social experimentation. Furthermore, I suggested that the architectonics of his later work enables a re-modelling of our global realities specifically according to a biocentric politics of ecological advocacy. In this respect, Snyder’s poetry thus contributes to the radical experimentation of avant-garde poetics, in particular, to work that has been increasingly concerned with alternative modes of representation that live up to (or face) our ethical responsibilities. Indeed, such a commitment to poetry as an essential tool in the face of social injustice, demarcates those writers comprising the second phase of my “poethical trajectory”.

4

Sub-cultural Self-othering and the Beat Poetics of Allen Ginsberg

This chapter focuses in detail on the historical context of the second phase of my “poethical trajectory”, arguing that the post-war years in America, from around 1945 to 1970, set the conditions for a renewed commitment to poethical praxis with the revival of a counter-cultural politics, a challenge to conventional poetic form, and the recrudescence of the public poetry reading. Foremost in this transition, I consider the famous Beat writer Allen Ginsberg as important, not only for his dissension from societal conformity on ethical grounds, but also for his poetic practice—drawing largely on Jack Kerouac’s unique prosody—that deterritorialised the boundaries of Cold-war identity-thinking. Whilst the so-called Beats have been historicised as delinquent rebels, this chapter will focus not only on the sociopolitical context, but on Ginsberg’s Beat aesthetic, demonstrating how his poetry maintains the ethical openness and responsibility at the core of Levinas’ philosophy. In my reading of Ginsberg’s poetry, I will argue that the Beat aesthetic is inextricably linked to a Beat sensibility, an essential humility that enables the parallel with Levinas’ ethical philosophy. Indeed, as we shall see, the Beat aesthetic sensibility seeks to fulfil Levinas’ demand that ‘in order for the alterity that upsets the order not to become at once participation in the order, in order for the horizon of the beyond to remain open, the humility of the manifestation must already be a distancing’ (Levinas 1998, 57).

AMERICA AT MID-CENTURY I: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY Following the attack on Pearl Harbor of December 7th 1941, President Roosevelt brought America out of isolation and neutrality into the theatre of war, a move that irrevocably transformed the social, political and economic make-up of the country. In contradistinction to her allies who incurred severe fi nancial costs and the loss of valuable assets, America’s gross national product rose by 35 per cent between 1941 and 1948 (Brogan 2001, 584). Furthermore, in the post-war years, under the presidencies of Harry S. Truman and Dwight D. Eisenhower, increased industrial

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productivity inaugurated an unprecedented level of economic growth. Fuelled by an ever-expanding defence budget that maintained the wartime factories and funded new high-technology industries, American prosperity matched the escalation of the arms race. The Montgomery G.I. Bill of 1944 also increased government spending—granting fi nancial aid to returning war veterans—and the Federal Highway Act of 1956 provided for the investment of vast sums of money in America’s transportation infrastructure. With the mass-production of affordable automobiles from the Big Three oligarchy—General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler—a Cadillac, Thunderbird, or Corvette became the premier status symbol of the late 1950s. Indeed, an automobile was perceived to be an essential companion to the new suburban homes that were transforming the American lifestyle. The tranquillity and affluence of leafy suburban towns—with their shopping malls and supermarkets, flyovers and freeways—ushered in the American “goodlife.” Between 1947 and 1960, personal disposable income went up, in real terms, by 17 per cent, encouraging a rising consumer culture and a demand for the latest household electrical appliances (Brogan 2001, 589). Reviving the American Dream once more, an expanding, increasingly privileged, and exclusive middle-class, redefi ned the mainstream according to material prosperity. John Tytell recounts: ‘in the late forties and early fi fties Americans conceived of themselves as innocent democratic warriors, protectors of a holy chalice that contained the magic elixir of progress in technology, cleanliness and order’ (Tytell 1976, 6). At the same time, emergent as the leading super-power in the reconstruction of the post-war world, America forged new allies and made new enemies, most significantly perhaps, the longstanding disagreements with the Soviet Union consolidated along the axis of the Cold War. Whether this was the dawn of the American global empire or a necessary response to Soviet Union aggression and its expansion into Eastern Europe, communist containment became the focus of the Truman Doctrine, a policy that extended increasingly into domestic affairs under the influence of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, J. Edgar Hoover. Indeed, as David Caute argues in The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War, ‘“Communism” became a synonym for even the mildest version of reformist socialism’ (Caute 2003, 2). The Truman-Eisenhower Loyalty-Security Program, whilst purporting to defend civil liberties, worked up the “Great Fear of Communism” into a mechanism of social control. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government adopted a policy of domestic surveillance, orchestrating and sanctioning an ideological manipulation of the American people. Through such organisations as the Voice of America, the State Department, the Subversive Activities Control Board, the House Un-American Activities Committee and, not least, the Central Intelligence Agency, the government effectively suppressed voices of dissent and prohibited alternative lifestyles.

Sub-cultural Self-othering and the Beat Poetics of Allen Ginsberg

79

In a recent BBC documentary on the “Beat Generation”, a leading scholar on the counterculture, Ann Charters, explained: ‘the pervading political ideology strove to assert America as the fattest civilization around, the best ever. And in reality, there was an incredible provincialism and a very strong sense of conformity [ . . . ] a stultifying feeling that you had to get along with Life Magazine’ (Workman 2001). The Cold War rapidly took hold as an ideological warfare for the hearts and minds of the American people. By the late 1960s, Hoover demanded that ‘every citizen [ . . . ] immediately report any information regarding espionage, sabotage or un-American activities’ (quoted in Workman 2001). More clandestinely, the CIA funded magazines such as Encounter that worked, in the words of Jona Raskin, ‘to combat radicalism, subvert dissent, and make America seem like the only friend to freedom’ (Raskin 2004, xiii).1 For the left-wing cultural critic C. Wright Mills, as Tytell has suggested, it was ‘a time of false securities and mistrust,’ with ‘the emergence of a “mass society” composed of isolated units, encouraged only to consume, never to decide’ (Tytell 1976, 7–8). Indeed, as the critic Jonathan Eburne has noted, the cultural environment was one in which ‘individual identity had become inexorably bound up with stifl ing artistic, societal, and existential norms’ (Eburne 1997, 55). Yet for the generation that remembered the Great Depression of the 1930s when twelve million Americans were out of work, to quote Oliver Harris, the ‘rising material prosperity meant that the majority of citizens readily consented to the status quo’ (Harris 2000, 217). Indeed, such a blind faith in the Federal government would persist until President Nixon, faced with impeachment for his collusion in the Watergate scandal, resigned from the presidency on 9th August, 1974. Within this broad picture of the United States at mid-century, however, there has been a tendency amongst historians and cultural critics to describe two distinct eras: a “harmonious 1950s,” when happy citizens—enjoying the privileges of the “good life”—conformed to the prescribed norms of the American Dream, and a “turbulent 1960s,” when a widespread dissatisfaction with social inequality, restricted individual liberty, and the Vietnam War, gave birth to the Civil Rights movements. Indeed, in Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines’ “Takin’ it to the streets”: A Sixties Reader, such a reductive periodisation is shown to be a product of our ‘collective memory,’ with each decade ‘reduced to recollections distilled from media imagery and popular stereotypes’ (Bloom and Breines 2003, 1). Notwithstanding this revisionist and reductive tendency, the historian Arthur Marwick has suggested that the post-war era was a period of ‘outstanding historical significance’ that ‘transformed social and cultural developments for the rest of the century’ (quoted in Charters 2003, xiii). Similarly, Ginsberg would go so far as to claim that ‘there was an international breakthrough of cultural insight in the ‘60s that amounted to a world revelation’ (Ginsberg 2001, 31). Experimental aesthetics and leftwing politics were consciously conflated, as the poet and activist Amiri Baraka explains:

80 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry I was always interested in Surrealism and Expressionism, and I think the reason was to really try to get below the surface of things [ . . . ] The Civil Rights Movement, it’s the same thing essentially, trying to get below the surface of things, trying to get below the norm, the everyday, the status quo, which was fi nally unacceptable, just unacceptable. (Quoted in Kane 2003, 13) Whether or not one agrees with such eulogistic sentiments, this chapter seeks to recognise the sixties as both distinctive and located in a process of long-term change. However, it is against the paradigm of “harmony” and “turbulence,” or “submission” and “subversion,” that the original Beat progenitors—Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs—have been popularly mythologised as iconic counter-cultural renegades. The hagiographic approach to their literature has failed to recognise that, as Arthur Marwick has explained, ‘no period is hermetically sealed’ (quoted in Charters 2003, xiii), and nor, as the historian of the sixties M. J. Heale states, is a society ‘ever held in suspended animation’ (Heale 2001, 7). With a more nuanced appraisal of the historical context, combined with a detailed analysis of aesthetic practices, this chapter intends to break through the simulacra of the “Beat movement” manufactured by our culture industry, and to circumvent the pop-biography that cultivates, for example, Kerouac as a ‘King of the Beats.’2

THE BEAT AESTHETIC SENSIBILITY Oliver Harris has suggested of the term “Beat” that: the problematic of defi nition persists beyond the disputed term and its alternately sociological, literary, and cultural extensions, because these in turn depend on whether or not Beat is understood historically; that is whether it is or is not essentially a period term. Beat pedagogy, in short, is problematic for want of a coherent and consistently defi ned Beat ontology. (Harris 2000, 214) It was Herbert Huncke who originally introduced the term “Beat” to Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. ‘In that context’, Ginsberg has explained, ‘the word “beat” is a carnival “subterranean” (subcultural) term, a term much used in Times Square in the ‘40s. “Man, I’m beat . . .” meaning without money and without a place to stay’ (Ginsberg 2001, 237). According to Ginsberg, ‘the original street usage meant exhausted, at the bottom of the world, looking up or out, sleepless, wide-eyed, perceptive, rejected by society, on your own, streetwise.’ In a letter dated January 1948, Kerouac described Huncke as:

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never so great as when he’s beat down and brooding and bitter. I really believe this cruel fact. I see him all the time. For a while when he got out of jail, he was happy, glowing, something was “swinging in him,” [ . . . ] but now things have caught up with him [ . . . ] a real Huncke figure again in the world, [ . . . ] and broke all the time. (Kerouac 1996, 147) As early as April 1943, Kerouac quoted from Ernest Hemingway in a letter to his friend John MacDonald, that ‘the defeated are the strongest’ (Kerouac 1996, 57). The Beat sensibility, as embodied in Kerouac’s prosody and developed through the characters of his novels, originates from the root of the word “beat”, as in beatitude or beatific. His vision of a Beat sensibility or spirituality is drawn primarily from his Catholic upbringing, particularly his reverence for the teachings of Jesus Christ; as a religious vision its roots may be found in the Gospel according to St. Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 3–10: Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God. Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

The beatitudes are significant not only as influential to Kerouac’s vision of a Beat spirituality—‘Everything belongs to me because I am poor’ (Kerouac 1995b, 33), he writes in Visions of Cody—but also as indicative of the poetic practice of the long-line and anaphora that Ginsberg would later develop beginning with his famous poem ‘Howl’ (1956). Kerouac’s 1959 essay “The Origins of the Beat Generation” for Playboy magazine emphasises the humility of the beatitudes as an essential dynamic of the Beat sensibility, whilst his 1955 poem ‘ENLIGHTENMENT’ makes the link explicit: ‘Humility / is / Beatitude / THE BEATIFIC GENERATION’ (Kerouac 1992, 69).

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Humility as beatitude incorporates the early idea that Kerouac and Ginsberg formulated that their writing should be in some way ‘sacramental’ (see Miles 1998, 66). When Kerouac declared ‘I am [ . . . ] sacrificing myself on the altar of Art’ (Kerouac 1996, 69) and Ginsberg dedicated his life to ‘the American Church of Poetry’ (Ginsberg 2001, 249), they were committing their literary experimentation to a Beat sensibility. Indeed, humility as beatitude enables a Beat poethics, a compositional exploration of poetic form that maintains an ethos of openness and a self-less humility. For Kerouac, the perfect embodiment of this Beat sensibility would be experienced in the crucifi xion of Christ: an image (of a lived experience rather than a performance) of sacrificial self-denial in the moment of uttermost dejection and pain. Indeed, Kerouac identified this aspect of the Beat sensibility with his own split psyche—on the one hand, disillusioned, a ragged consciousness, his ‘bones and deadman heart’, yet equally and simultaneously on the other hand, his deep reverence for the idea of life, a humility and egoless self-sacrificial responsibility driven by the awareness that ‘life is holy and every moment is precious’ (Kerouac 1972, 50, 56). As Ann Charters explains: ‘Kerouac heard a “melancholy sneer” in the sound of Huncke’s voice that Kerouac later insisted “never meant juvenile delinquents” despite its use by drug addicts, but rather “meant characters of a special spirituality”’ (Charters 1993, xviii). Ginsberg, on the other hand, locates the root of the Beat spirituality, a humility or ethical self-lessness, in the Buddhist enlightenment. Learning from the teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, a Buddhist meditation master, Ginsberg’s poetry registers the tender sadness of a Beat sensibility. Indeed, the Beat ethos of openness can be usefully related to the process of enlightenment as explained by Trungpa in Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior (1984). Trungpa writes: ‘if you open your eyes to the rest of the world, you feel tremendous sadness [. . . . ] this experience of sadness is unconditioned. It occurs because your heart is completely exposed’ (Trungpa 1984, 45). For Ginsberg and Trungpa, we are born with this tenderness of heart, but allow our egos to veil it, to harden it sometimes even from ourselves. Enlightenment, according to Trungpa, is thus found in being ‘willing to open up, without resistance [ . . . ] and face the world’ (46). The essential dynamic of the Beat sensibility is thus located in the presupposition of an ethical orientation, a humility that redefi nes our subjectivity according to a preoriginary dependence on and self-sacrificial responsibility for the other. As Levinas’ philosophy describes an other-oriented responsibility, so too the Beat vision is of a self-less humility; indeed, rather than being an idea or a concept, the Beat vision is a revelation of an ethical consciousness. The vision has to reside therefore in the poetics of their work; it is embodied in the signifier rather than interpreted from the signified: it is an ethics rather than a morality.

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AMERICA AT MID-CENTURY II: A CULTURAL NARRATIVE As early as 1940, Kerouac had been part of a literary circle: through his friend Sebastian Sampas, he met together with John MacDonald and George J. Apostolos under their group name The Young Prometheans, a collective ‘based on the Brotherhood of Man, and on the mass energies of several participants’ (Kerouac 1996, 48). At just twenty-one, Kerouac was already frustrated with the constraints of the literary orthodoxy. In April 1943, he wrote to MacDonald: ‘I have grown to hate rhetoric—or attempts at it—why don’t men devise new ways of communicating?’ (57) Furthermore, he was already conscious of the schizoid nature of his own personality. That same month he wrote in a letter to Apostolos: ‘all persons wear a mask’ and went on to describe his own ‘complex condition’ of mind, ‘split up, as it were, in two parts, one normal, the other schizoid’ (59): My schizoid side is the Raskolnikov-Dedalus-George Webber Dulouz side, the bent and brooding figure sneering at a world of mediocrities, complacent ignorance, and bigotry exercised by ersatz Ben Franklins; the introverted, scholarly side; the alien side. My normal counterpart, the one you’re familiar with, is that halfback-whoremaster-alemate-scullion-jitterbug-jazz critic side, the side in me which recommends a broad, rugged America; which requires the nourishment of gutsy, red-blooded associates; and which lofts whatever guileless laughter I’ve left in me rather than that schizoid’s cackle I have of late. (Kerouac 1996, 60) The fact that Kerouac understood this side of his personality as his ‘normal counterpart’ rather than a deviancy that, as the US Army and Columbia University felt, should be purged from his character, is perhaps the fi rst sign of the Beats’ counter-cultural leaning. Yet this was not merely a performance of some bohemian-literary attitude; Kerouac had a serious view of the artist: ‘The poet is not a fool’, he wrote to Sampas in March 1943, ‘unless it be in the minds of the unresponsive “Philistines”’ and he urged Sampas to ‘get more serious about your poet’s station, more diligent, searching, and scholarly—forget the romantic “outcast” notions and continue observing the phenomena of living’ (Kerouac 1996, 51). The historical transformation with which the Beat writers dealt was of no small scale. Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), for instance—widely recognised as the quintessential road-trip manual—is one of thirteen novels that comprise what he called the ‘Duluoz Legend’, that is, Kerouac’s account, as ‘the jolly story-teller’ of his experience of growing up in the America of 1922 to 1965 (Ellis 1996, 37). ‘The Duluoz Legend’—an idea based on John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga (1922) that Kerouac understood as a series of ‘novels connecting into one grand tale’—marks the

84 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry pathogenesis of his native land (Kerouac 1996, 71). At the substratum of his sensibility is an awareness of America’s vast geography and the history of its people: the arrival and settling of his French ancestors in the alien ‘New World’ of America; the great American Indians of old; and, the transition, as described in Visions of Gerard (1963), from that early culture of ‘potato paternity’ to ‘independent businessman with a shop, his waxing and puffi ng on cigars’ (Kerouac 1991, 78–79). Furthermore, the spectre of the Second World War stands in between the mass-production of the Fordist era—where ‘all night the industries hum and shuttle’ in The Town and the City (1950)—and Visions of Cody (1959), a narratological Atom bomb, ‘presaging the ghostly day when industrial America shall be abandoned and left to rust in one long Sunday Afternoon of oblivion’ (Kerouac 2000, 3; 1995a, 58). Reading Kerouac’s novels chronologically as ‘connecting into one grand tale’ (rather than focusing exclusively on his most popular works) reveals a complex critique of social change. Indeed, to understand the radicalism of the 1960s necessitates a long-view of the decade; so too, the development of a Beat aesthetic may be re-envisioned within the broader epistemological shifts of modernism and postmodernism. From this perspective, the Beats, as Rona Johnson has suggested, clarify ‘the postmodern cusp’ (Johnson 2000, 23). Indeed, Johnson argues that Kerouac is ‘a seminal figure in postwar literary advances, a pre-postmodernist whose work evinces the turn from the modes and ideologies of late high modernism to those of the nascent postmodern’ (23). In part, these modes and ideologies arose as conditions of the political and economic shift towards the post-industrial. As demarcating ‘a widely unremarked transitional moment in US arts and culture,’ this surfaces as one of the reasons why the radical aesthetics of the Beat literature have been largely ignored (22). In a similar fashion, Ginsberg’s life as lived in public and recorded in his poetry, performances, journals and essays, reveals an exploration of reality and its changing conditions as locked into the fabric of a rapidly post-industrial society. The strains on society that Ginsberg perceived were in part related to the shift that Heale describes in the economic and political systems that emerged post-World War Two. ‘The old economy’, Heale writes, ‘based primarily on the production of goods was giving way to an economy in which the provision of services took precedence, and advances in electronics and communications presaged the information age of the late twentieth century’ (Heale 2001, 7). As with Charles Olson, it was the encroaching bureaucratic technocracy—although now embedded in the modern technology of an information age—that was Ginsberg’s primary horror. Reflecting on those pressures, Ginsberg explained in an interview in August 1972 that there was ‘a defi nite shrinkage of sensitisation, of sensory experience, and a defi nite mechanical disorder of mentality,’ a ‘robotization of mentality’ (Ginsberg 1980, 70). In 1966, he had described in an essay entitled ‘Public Solitude’, a ‘technological Tower of Babel,’ a ‘stupendous

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machinery surrounding us [that] conditions our “thoughts feelings and apparent sensory impressions,” and reinforces our mental slavery to the material universe we’ve invested in’ (Ginsberg 2001, 126). Ginsberg’s acute awareness of a rising technocratic reorganisation of the social system reflects the counter-cultural politics of the second phase of my “poethical trajectory”. Indeed, the suppression of sensory experience and the conditioning of public thought might be aligned with a totalising and prescriptive ideology. The resultant ‘mental slavery’ that Ginsberg describes is antithetical to that which is promoted by a self-reflexive, radical intersubjectivity, or by the participatory re-imagining of our social, historical and environmental relations. Indeed, during the 1950s, the pressure to conform to the moralising prescription of an exclusive and particular American “way of life” was widely felt amongst avant-garde poets. Michael McClure, for example, wrote that the whole country ‘had the feeling of martial law’ and by 1959, Ginsberg was to conclude that it was ‘an America gone mad with materialism, a police-state America, a sexless and soulless America prepared to battle with the world in defence of a false image of its authority’ (McClure 1994, 12; Ginsberg 2001, 5). Ginsberg’s horror at an information age, as evident in his 1966 essay, was rooted in the fear of a mass hypnosis. By the late 1960s, he felt that ‘a hallucinatory public consciousness was being constructed in the air waves and television and radio and newspapers’ (Ginsberg 1980, 72). What this elucidation of his fear makes explicit, is that Ginsberg perceived this technocratic development as an essential infrastructure through which the American government could continue the conformity of the 1950s and extend its capitalist-imperialist projects both at home and abroad. Technocracy protected what Joan Retallack has described as the ‘culturally congealed values and practices carried largely unconsciously from one generation to the next’ (Retallack 2003, 9). It was a technocracy, Ginsberg explained, that ‘could lead Harvard and Columbia intellectuals like Kissinger and Schlesinger, all those supposedly realistic, mature, ripeminded academics to pursue a 1984-style cybernetic warfare with all the moral rationalizations of self-righteous self-interest’ (Ginsberg 1980, 70). With control of the dominant media networks, the government promoted its conformist agenda and aggressive policy in Vietnam, manipulating linguistic and visual representations according to a self-oriented moral rationalisation. The resultant “traumatised semiotics”, as a language driven against its ethical grain, appalled Ginsberg. Indeed, the neuro-linguistic trauma affected by such totalising narratives, became a point of investigation in William Burroughs’ work. His most famous novel Naked Lunch (1959) together with the “Nova Trilogy”—The Soft Machine (1961), Nova Express (1964), and The Ticket that Exploded (1962)—develop his idea of language as a biologic mutation or virus—a thesis that he explores in detail in his essay The Electronic Revolution (1970). Burroughs’ experimental prosody, particularly his aleatorical technique of cutting-up a linear

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text and rearranging the fragments at random, works against the shrinkage of sensory experience and the ideological coding of signifying units, that which represses or bypasses intersubjectivity in favour of an emotional contagion between ontological host beings. For Ginsberg, whose father Louis, a relatively well-known poet, had instilled in him a sense that ‘in words begin responsibilities’, the neuro-linguistic trauma was acutely felt (quoted in Miles 1989, 261). At the Vancouver Poetry Conference in August, 1963, Ginsberg recounted: I adopted Burroughs’s message to cut my way out of holy anxiety and paranoia and counter-paranoia that was going on. I took Kennedy’s statement and I took Khrushchev’s statement, and I put them together and cut them up with a razor and then mixed them up like confetti. When I retyped the whole thing up I had a real clear picture of what the Cuban situation was. (Quoted in Kane 2003, 224–225) The social and political consensus of the post-war era was propagated and normalised perhaps most effectively through the new medium of television. With the centralisation of production at the Hollywood fi lm studios in the mid-1950s, what were known as “situation” or “domestic” comedies proliferated. They presented and sought to normalise the “typical” white middle-class suburban nuclear family. Bloom and Breines describe the three major shows The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, The Donna Reed Show and Father Knows Best: The men served as breadwinners, women stayed at home, and children’s problems emerged as the major concern of the modern family. Fathers monopolized the earning power of the family as well as the rationalist to settle family issues. They would return home from work to fi nd slightly hysterical mothers unable to cope with the latest domestic crisis and calmly settle the matter. (Bloom and Breines 2003, 5) As Bloom and Breines go on to explain, it was a time when ‘the only socially acceptable path available to a young middle-class white woman was to become a wife and mother. For teenage girls, the eventual goal was to fi nd a husband. Girls were not encouraged to think of their futures in terms of work or careers’ (Bloom and Breines 2003, 6). There was, however, a distinct contradiction between these mass-media representations that were supposedly indicative of family life right across America and the reality of a social fabric cut through with class, race and gender inequalities and tensions. Bloom and Breines point out that contrary to these representations, for many women in America ‘accepting or rejecting traditional feminine roles was not a choice’ (7). In fact, ‘economic necessity made it much more difficult to conform to the much celebrated life of full-time mom.’ Statistical analysis underlines this contradiction: ‘the

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number of working wives grew steadily during the 1950s, from 25 percent in 1950 to 32 percent in 1960’ (5). The racial exclusivity of these shows similarly contradicts the multiracial make-up and ethnic diversity of America at mid-century. Written out of these situation narratives was the frequent civil disobedience that was challenging segregation laws. Both the Legal Defence Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) organised by Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged in the 1950s and were active in coordinating campaigns to end racial discrimination in the southern cities. Nancy Grace’s article “A White Man in Love” points out that there were anti-miscegenation laws in more than fifteen states (Grace 2000, 50). As a revelation of legislative racism, her observation may be posited alongside Lynn Spigel’s research in order to show how political attitudes were reinforced through these media representations. According to Spigel, the comedies very rarely depicted Black, Hispanic or Asian family life. ‘When they were they were the butt of the joke such as the Cuban Ricky Ricardo with his Latin temper or the African American Beula with her job as the happy maid/mammy in a white household’ (Spigel n.d.). Bloom and Breines summarise the irony: ‘Class and race perpetuated exclusions while cultural images offered a steady diet of the beneficence of the “good life”’ (Bloom and Breines 2003, 7). It was an American Dream Factory and Ginsberg looked on in horror. In 1959 he noted, ‘mad movie manufacturers from Hollywood are at this moment preparing bestial stereotypes of the scene’ (Ginsberg 2001, 3). Yet despite the increasing post-1945 conformity, there was also increasing evidence of cracks in the meta-narrative of the American “good-life.” Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) with shocking realism examined the suffering and search for meaning of platoon members on a Pacific Island in the midst of World War Two. In J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), the protagonist Holden Caulfield examines his own sense of isolation, paranoia and emptiness. He sees himself as if ‘standing on the edge of a crazy cliff’ and rails against the ‘phoniness’ of authority figures (Salinger 1994, 155–156). Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) presents a scathing attack on American corporate culture through the eyes of Tom Rath, a World War Two veteran who quits his job with an arts foundation to join the United Broadcasting Corporation as a well-paid public relations executive. On the stage, two major plays were produced in 1955: Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge shifted from the psychological realism and standard three acts, presenting a continuous action that undercut American values with an explosive representation of immigrant experience; and in Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Big Daddy’s insecurities and his fear of a disintegrating family life were played out before the American public. There were similar sounds of discontent and youthful angst in several major Hollywood films. Not only, as Raskin notes, was it the darkly

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pessimistic ‘era of the noir fi lm and fi lm noir’ (Raskin 2004, 4) but in the technicolor blockbusters James Dean played Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Marlon Brando was seen as the leader of a motorcycle gang in The Wild One (1954). Dean and Brando became figures of the loneliness, frustration and anger of postwar teens and such films made explicit on screen the generational divide. Despite these sounds of social unrest the media industry was, on the whole, in perfect synchronicity with the State. Raskin writes: ‘the mass media and the White House promulgated the idea that America was a nearperfect society—the apogee of historical progress’ (Raskin 2004, 4). The mass hypnosis that Ginsberg feared, might be understood as a product of the kind of panopticon surveillance that Michel Foucault describes in Discipline and Punishment (1977). Johnson has explained this process as a technique of coercion, as ‘panopticism inculcates in the individual himself the surveillance that impels his conformity’ (Johnson 2000, 30). It is a mode of surveillance that Foucault determines as ‘an apparatus for transforming individuals’ into ‘docile and useful’ bodies by employing a ‘permanent gaze to control them’ (Foucault 1977, 211–216). As Johnson concludes: ‘there’s nowhere to hide from the coercive social if the subject has been transformed by his capture into the agent of his own captivity’ (Johnson 2000, 32). The result of such an internalised surveillance Ginsberg perceived as ‘a schizophrenic distinction’ between the private and the public worlds maintained by what Tytell articulates as ‘an atmosphere of coercion and conspiracy’ (quoted in Workman 2001; Tytell 1976, 7). The public world denied the existence of homosexual relations, drug use, extra-marital promiscuity, madness, race or religious minorities through a politico-cultural narrative that censored such “deviations” from the “normalcy” of a “healthy” American public. The totalising prescription of a particular societal telos delimited according to the boundaries of an internalised surveillance finally led Ginsberg to conclude that America was suffering a collective ‘nervous breakdown’ in 1959 (Ginsberg 2001, 3). Paul Eburne’s article “Trafficking in the Void: Burroughs, Kerouac and the Consumption of Otherness”, examines the rhetorical mechanics of this state-propagated internalised surveillance. Eburne explains how ‘a remarkable hegemonic cultural and political body [ . . . ] fashioned a narrative of opposing internal and external forces, positioning “us” verses “them”’ (Eburne 1997, 60). Whilst the other was a fashioned categorisation of Cold War identity politics, the fear of these others may nevertheless be understood in Levinasian terms. Eburne explains how ‘the most damning aspect of the “Other” [ . . . ] was its seemingly ineluctable difference [ . . . ] the danger of usurpation, the systematic transformation of “us” into “them”’ (61). This fear of alterity emerges when a society is organised according to an ontological framework, where identity is fashioned within the boundaries of the self and according to the telos of an upward progress through the societal structures of corporate and family life. However, Levinas’

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prioritisation of the ethical as preoriginary to the ontological, undercuts the totalitarian mechanism fundamental to this internalised surveillance. If we understand the self as a subjectivity determined by our responsibility towards an other, then that other cannot be configured as a pollutant to be rejected without indeed rejecting our own very nature. Ironically, ‘the national fi xation upon internal security,’ Eburne explains, ‘implemented an alarmingly pervasive political consensus which would defi ne the affairs of the state in “human” terms’ (Eburne 1997, 60). He writes: Under this consensus, a mass of “anxieties” drawn from foreign and domestic policy alike—the fear of communism, the Bomb, homosexuality, sexual chaos and moral decrepitude, aliens (foreigners and extraterrestrials)—became condensed with a nightmarish lucidity upon a unifying rhetorical figure: a festering and highly contagious disease which threatened the national “body” with pollution. (Eburne 1997, 60) The mechanics of an internalised surveillance are thus revealed to rest on a linguistic turn that manipulates the human body through the rhetoric of purity and pollution. In Levinasian terms, Cold War identity politics can thus be understood as a totalitarian product of ontological conditioning, where the ethical presence of the body is reduced to a site of domination and subservience initiated through a political and cultural narration of an “us” and “them” dichotomy with the ever present fear of viral infection. The identity configuration produced by this totalitarian panopticism ironically maintains the division between self and other fundamental to a Levinasian philosophy of ethics. However, it does so according to an opposition of being rather than an ethical relation of co-operative responsibility. The “situation” comedies of the 1950s were political not only as representations that sought to legitimise gender roles, normalise middle-class values and privilege those conforming to the status-quo but also in determining the nuclear family as a protective structure essential to national security. The ideological false consciousness ‘lured the US population into a state of conformity which could drain individuals of the will to resistance necessary to free democracy’ (Eburne 1997, 65). Eburne’s analysis is true too of the literary community. Lionel Trilling, a leading literary critic of the 1950s claimed that ‘when a man does begin to court the liberal-democratic ideal, it is either a sign or the beginning of spiritual collapse in his work’ (quoted in Raskin 2004, 49). Even those who were conscious of the conformist apparatus felt pressured into a conservative orthodoxy. As Tennessee Williams wrote in November 1948, ‘any artist who speaks out against the current of prescribed ideas’ is ‘trembling before the spectre of investigating committees’ (Williams 1948, 5). W. H. Auden, who had moved to the United States in 1939, would write just twelve years later that ‘it was

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not the time for revolutionary artists’ or ‘significant novelty in artistic style’ (quoted in Raskin 2004, 5–6). Indeed, the bio-political rhetoric of pollution is even evident in Robert Graves’ claim that men who had male muses had a ‘morbid pathology’ (Graves 1994, 446). For Graves, the main theme of poetry was ‘properly, the relations of man and woman, rather than those of man and man’ (447). According to Raskin, both in academia and in the leading literary magazines of the day, ‘teachers and critics warned against innovation and radicalism’ (Raskin 2004, 5). Indeed Ginsberg described the poetry celebrated in the fifties as ‘mere picturesque dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation and flattery’ (Ginsberg 2001, 262). Allen Tate’s poetry provides a fi ne example of such sentimental expressionism and nauseating rhyme schemes. The asphyxiation of poetic sound-meaning through a regimental form may have been his greatest achievement in these lines from ‘The Maimed Man’ (1952): Didactic Laurel, loose your reasoning leaf Into my trembling hand; assert your blade Against the Morning Star, enlightening Thief Of that first Mother who returned the Maid. Beguiling myrtle, shake no more my ear With your green leaf: because I am afraid Of him who says I have no need to fear Return, Laurel! Dying sense has cast Shadow on shadow of a metal tear Around my rim of being. (Tate 1977, 128)

When Ginsberg wrote that he heard ‘ghostly academies in limbo screeching about form’, he might well have been referring to the critic Karl Shapiro who argued against ‘vision or madness’ and demanded the ‘knowledge of form’ in a 1948 collection of essays Poets at Work (Ginsberg 2001, 230; Shapiro 1948, 92). Raskin concludes: ‘In the midst of unprecedented prosperity, American culture turned increasingly commercial, and writers turned increasingly to conformity’ (Raskin 2004, 5). Yet Adrienne Rich has argued that American poetry often emerges from the ‘point of stress in our society [ . . . ] the stress in itself creates a search for language in which to probe and unravel what is going on’ (quoted in Raskin 2004, xxi). Ginsberg’s poetic experimentations in the 1940s and 1950s mark an avant-garde response to these stresses; his work defended

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the traditionally heterogeneous American social fabric through a radically new aesthetic practice. It was an aesthetics with the power to haemorrhage the totalitarian control mechanisms endemic to the manipulation of a public for political gain. Whilst the New Critics of the 1940s and 1950s would reject the Beat artists as lacking an awareness of traditional poetic form, Ginsberg’s work was in fact informed by the great classics. Furthermore, he continued a tradition of poetic experimentation that T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams had been cultivating since the turn of the century. In 1957, Ginsberg argued that Williams ‘supplies the line with the democratic experimental tradition of the poet’ (Ginsberg 2001, 241). Furthermore, Ginsberg’s poetry embraces the sound of what he called the ‘Hebraic-Melvillean bardic breath’ (229). What began with the Beats’ (to borrow from Bloom and Breines) ‘subterranean rumbles’ in the late 1940s and early 1950s, emerged towards the end of the decade as an alternative tradition and a new trajectory within the American literary landscape (Bloom and Breines 2003, 8). The legendary 1955 San Francisco Six Gallery poetry reading brought on to the public stage underground poets and writers from the East Coast (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti) and the West Coast (Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamentia) in what Snyder called a ‘subterranean celebration’ and Raskin describes as ‘a festival of crosscontinental and cross-cultural pollination’ (see Raskin 2004, 9). Media coverage of that event, together with the proliferation of public poetry readings and the emergence of a range of rexograph, mimeo, and smallpress poetry magazines across the cities of America, made public this new trajectory. For the Literary Academy it became known with what Ginsberg described as ‘the Battle of Anthologies between Open Form and Closed Form poets’ (Ginsberg 2001, 232). As Daniel Kane explains in All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene: ‘New Critical values of impersonality, irony, and “distantiation,”’ on the conservative side, positioned the poem ‘as an object to be identified and studied in order to determine a conclusive meaning for the static text’ (Kane 2003, 11–12). In contradistinction, ‘the developing oral tradition initiated in part by Beat poets and the Lower East Side coffeehouse scene’—at venues including Le Metro, Les Deux Megots and St. Mark’s Church—together with magazines—including The Black Mountain Review, Ed Sander’s Fuck You / a magazine of the arts, Lorenzo Thomas, Tom Dent and David Henderson’s Umbra, Jerome Rothenberg’s Poems From the Floating World, and George Economou and Robert Kelly’s Trobar—welcomed an “Open form” of production and reception, ‘a site for the ongoing fulfi lment of a poem actualized in its aural/oral form as it was performed and received in communal territory’ (Kane 2003, xvi, 30). Donald Allen’s seminal

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anthology entitled The New American Poetry (1960) presented 44 of these open form poets; ‘published during a time of cultural transition,’ as Ann Charters has suggested, it ‘signalled what would become a sea of change in our literature’ (Charters 2003, 396). According to Raskin, ‘fomenting a literary and a cultural revolution’ was at the top of Ginsberg’s agenda (Raskin 2004, 213). Ginsberg believed that these artists experimenting with a new open form were ‘continuing the venerable tradition of compositional self-exploration’ towards the discovery of ‘natural structures’ (Ginsberg 2001, 250). Similarly the poet Robert Duncan, whose work was included in Allen’s anthology, described the importance of ‘a kind of continuity moving through poetry [ . . . ] a relationship both of a fellowship of poets and, through time, of an inheritance of spirit’ (quoted in Ball 1974, 131). Ginsberg devoted an enormous amount of energy to arranging publication of the Beats’ work and promoting the poetry of open form avatars. According to Barry Miles’ biography, his eagerness to align with the West Coast poets of San Francisco was motivated by a sense that ‘we basically had the same politics—which was like philosophical anarchism’ (Miles 1989, 212). Ginsberg felt that it was ‘urgent for the poets to make a united phalanx: Black Mountain, North West, San Francisco, Renaissance, Beat, and New York School [ . . . ] because to me, Williams’ “open form” meant “open mind” . . . I wasn’t just plugging and promoting my friends, I had a much larger agenda’ (212). The “open form” of a poem, however, does not inherently bequeath it with a poethics, nor does “open form” always mean “open mind.” Indeed, just as one can have a moral code but an unethical practice, so too a poem can be set in an open form without an ethical content. Poethics involves not just typographical arrangement but is achieved only in interdependence with the words too (their sound meaning). Nevertheless, Allen’s anthology introduced a constellation of avant-garde American poets—many of whom adopted the ideas outlined in Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ manifesto—as an alternative to New Critical values. Ginsberg’s early poetic experimentations focus upon an exploration of reality and often deal with New York City, particularly the area around Times Square during the 1950s, as a site so expansive and diverse as to offer a microcosm of American life. These poems were later collected under the titles Empty Mirror (1961) and Reality Sandwiches (1981). In a poem entitled ‘Over Kansas’ from the latter book, Ginsberg described amongst his Beat friends, an ‘appetite for the real,’ a search for authentic, genuine experience—‘nakedness’ (Ginsberg 1981, 44). The collection opens with his poem ‘My Alba’. In this poem, Ginsberg compounds the two confl icting identities of poet and office worker, his schizophrenic identity an amalgam of the mundane routine and economic necessity of social conformity—a nine-to-five desk job—and the life of the poet—weeping over the keys of his typewriter and talking late into the night with Kerouac:

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five years in Manhattan life decaying talent a blank talking disconnected patient and mental slide rule and number machine on a desk [ . . . ] youth of my twenties fainted in offices wept on typewriters (Ginsberg 1981, 7)

The titles of these fi rst two collections are indicative of Ginsberg’s exploration into reality. For Ginsberg the phenomenon of the cosmos is both terrifying and exhilarating. He felt a ‘universal joy at creation’ and a foreboding fear of the destructive force inherent in a technocracy, as well as an unnerving sense of life being an essential emptiness (quoted in Raskin 2004, 178). The title Reality Sandwiches reflects the form of this phenomenon: reality is as a billion grains of sand forming a shifting yet consolidated mass; it is a construction of a myriad of choices that can be questioned, contested, explored and re-configured but nevertheless remains pre-existent to our musings and slips from our grasp. The title Empty Mirror similarly provides a comment on the form of reality and a self-reflexive critique of writing: poetry is a situated construction of reality according to the poet’s musings and an open space in which the reader is collaborative if not formative in such a construction. The mirror has a fi xed frame, denoting the condition of a pre-existent reality, but an empty reflection. Ginsberg’s poetry seeks to avoid, what Joan Retallack calls ‘mirror-image representational symmetries’, the kind of “Closed form” poetry admired by the New Critics (Retallack 2003, 15). Indeed, such a complicated view of consciousness, of the contemporary as conditional to history, memory, and perspective, together with a distrust of language and the rhetorics of discourse, corrodes the possibility of literature as a reflection critiquing society. As defi nitive of the cusp of postmodernism, or as constitutive of the late modernist movement, Ginsberg’s poetry resists a pastiche of simulacra as the condition of narrative form, yet still evinces a turn away from the parody and epiphanies that denote the modernist artwork. His poetry rather carves a space between the two aesthetics or phenomenological positions; within a pre-existent reality, the individual presides as a figure of emptiness but with all the desires of human emotion and the physical attributes of a human body, embracing reality and negating it as a construct simultaneously. Poetics and poesis become central to

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his work, as the purpose of literature is understood as exploratory and compositional, not bound to reflect life. Nevertheless, there is a sense of entrapment that pervades Reality Sandwiches. ‘My Alba’ concludes: dawn breaks it’s only the sun the East smokes O my bedroom I am damned to Hell what alarmclock is ringing (Ginsberg 1981, 8)

The entrapment is not merely that of the mundane routine of conformity in the office but also the complex and seeming impossibility of language as a medium for writing reality. ‘Siesta in Xbalba and Return to the States’ performs the bindings of a poet given the epistemological breakdown of language. Gordon Ball has observed that the poem ‘represents for Ginsberg an extreme example of synthetic composition, of drawing from blocks of epiphanous moments spread throughout a fairly lengthy notebook to arrive at a single unified poem’ (Ginsberg 1993, xix). Indeed, synthesis is the essence of his compositional poetics, yet the poem resists a predictable crescendo through the romantic ignition of imagination and moment of transcendence in epiphany. Rather, just as the mighty stoneworks of Xbalba, works of art that for centuries stood as religious truth carved literally into the fabric of reality, now lay in ruins, so too language in art is here left bereft of the fundamental truth-potential: Late sun opening the book, blank page like night, invisible words unscrawled, impossible syntax of apocalypse— Uxmal: Noble Ruins No construction— let the mind fall down (Ginsberg 1981, 21)

The ‘blank page [is] like night’ just as in Genesis 1: 2 we learn that before creation ‘darkness was over the surface of the deep’ and the earth was ‘formless and empty’; it is a line that makes explicit the act of writing as an impossible process of reality construction. Similarly in ‘Sather Gate Illumination’, the problematic is explained linguistically through Saussure’s theory of the arbitrary relationship of the signifier to the signified:

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A cripple lady explains French grammar with a loud sweet voice: Regarder is to look— the whole French language looks on the tree on the campus. (Ginsberg 1981, 54)

The system of signs in language is crippled for the semantic distinction between the word and the thing it represents is always only conventional. Moreover, for Ginsberg, language has been denaturalised and emptied of its truth-bearing potential, that is, as an ethical saying rather than a direct reflection or authentic description of “reality”, as it is layered with ideological allusions. In ‘Back on Times Square, Dreaming of Times Square’ he writes, ‘the movies took our language, the / great red signs’ (Ginsberg 1981, 70). In ‘American Change’ he considers the images codified on American coins, the irony that this ‘dead money’ is ‘legal tender’ (my italics) and concludes: ‘I might as well write poems to you—dear American money’ (69). The search, in these early poems, for an authentic experience and the nakedness of reality is a concern for a genuine and responsive relation between citizens. It was not so much a rebellion against the conformity of 1950s America—‘it wasn’t a political or social rebellion’ Ginsberg has clarified—rather it was a personal exploration (quoted in Miles 1989, 73). Indeed Ginsberg argued that ‘everybody had some form of break in their consciousness or satori’ (73). His commitment to this endeavour is motivated by an attempt to recover what Miles describes as a ‘sense of supraconsciousness.’ Indeed, Ginsberg sensed ‘a great unconsciousness’ in American society (102). He felt that ‘everybody was completely conscious, but that the fi xed expressions people have, the habitual expressions, the manners, the mode of talk, are all masks hiding this consciousness’: almost at that moment it seemed that it would be too terrible if we communicated to each other on a level of total consciousness and awareness each of the other. The complete death awareness that everybody has continuously with them all the time [was] all of a sudden revealed to me at once in the faces of the people [ . . . ] Having a habitual conduct and forms to prescribe, forms to fulfil. Roles to play. But the main insight I had at that time was that everybody knew. (Quoted in Miles 1989, 102) Ginsberg’s basic insight is that societal roles constitute the teleological framework (within which there was a moral code based on Kantian principles) that masked the ethical relation of responsibility for the other, otherwise recognised in the presence of the face. Ginsberg’s alignment of

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this awareness as a ‘supraconsciousness’, however, posits the ethical as a metaphysical phenomenon rather than a reality found in the naked presence of the face. Throughout Ginsberg’s early poems there are moments of optimism towards the recovery of a metaphysical ‘supraconsciousness’ that break down into memories of, and yearning for, the tender moments of face to face love: ‘one moment of pure / bodily tenderness—/ I could dismiss Allen with grim pleasure’, he wrote in ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ (Ginsberg 1981, 36). The exhaustive search persists into a sense of isolation and loneliness combined with a vision of New York as a terrible, apocalyptic hell of destruction (much like Dante’s inferno): I thought, five years ago sitting in my apartment, my eyes were opened for an hour seeing in dreadful ecstacy the motionless buildings of New York rotting under the tides of Heaven. (Ginsberg 1981, 32–33)

The search for the metaphysical is recognised in ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ as a search for the face of the eternal God. As a spiritual search, Ginsberg is careful to differentiate his exploration, however, from the palpable easily consumed God of Religion (that providing a telos, but empty of naked Truth) in America: There is a god dying in America already created in the imagination of men made palpable for adoration: there is an inner anterior image of divinity beckoning me out to pilgrimage. O future, unimaginable God. (Ginsberg 1981, 33)

The poems of Reality Sandwiches negate solipsism for an existential condition in which the physical topography of place is intimately related to

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personal and social experience. Such a reading makes explicit the compositional poetics emergent in Ginsberg’s work. As Retallack has suggested, ‘it is the business of the writer to live one’s contemporariness in the composition of one’s writing’ (Retallack 2003, 15). As we shall see, this attitude is fundamental to a Beat poetics; a product of their ‘dedicated intensity,’ to borrow from Retallack again, the compositional poetics of a Beat sensibility reinforced the “poethical trajectory” of modern American poetry (19). In ‘My Mad Self’, Ginsberg describes the ‘paths crossing in these hidden streets, / my history summed up, my absences / and ecstasies in Harlem’ (Ginsberg 1981, 72). ‘Afternoon Seattle’ recounts when, ‘entered my head the seagull, a shriek [ . . . ] the seagull’s small cry—inhuman not of the city, lone / sentinels of God [ . . . ] their bleak / lone cries representing our souls’ (60). As a hybrid of place and the social body, this constitution of reality is made most explicit in ‘Sather Gate Illumination’: we all look up, silence moves, huge changes upon the ground, and in the air thoughts fly all over filling space. (Ginsberg 1981, 58)

The remarkable sense of place found in Ginsberg’s poetry rather undercuts his desire for a metaphysical ‘supraconsciousness’ in which he claims, concluding ‘My Mad Self’, that ‘matter is water’ (Ginsberg 1981, 72). Furthermore, where he attempts a revelation of reality as a hallucination, he cannot escape the body: ‘what hallucinations / of the nerves?—/ indecipherable-sexed’ he writes in ‘Siesta in Xbalba’ (35). Reality Sandwiches concludes with the poem ‘AETHER’. Here there is a distinct trepidation, an unnerving sense of the end of consciousness or the discovery of naked reality: the instant before unconsciousness before,— the teardrop in the eye to come,— the fear of the Unknown— (Ginsberg 1981, 83)

Again the constraint of language pervades the poem. It undercuts both the endeavour to explore reality and the self or poetic voice through which the project is articulated. The naked realities discovered are all ‘enlaced with iron / or porcelain embroidery’ (Ginsberg 1981, 84). There is even a pretentious quality to the graphic presentation of the binding of language, the impossibility of stepping outside the box, of moving beyond the layering of multiple interpretations, or of forcing together the signifier and the signified (Figure 4.1).

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This is the view of the Created bv all the Drs. nurses, etc of

I U ~I~UUUCU L

nega -

1

ut-cause of the secondarv

ne unspemable passea over my head for

the sec Figure 4.1

Extract from ‘AETHER’ (Ginsberg 1981, 85).

Indeed, the falsity of the endeavour is doubled with the recognition that the supposed ‘supraconsciousness’ of reality’s supreme metaphysics is merely a by-product of the aether, ‘(Cotton & N2O)’ (Ginsberg 1981, 86): (my) Madness is intelligible reactions to Unintelligible phenomena. Boy—what a marvellous bottle, a clear glass sphere of transparent liquid ether— (Chloraethyl Merz) (Ginsberg 1981, 88)

Ginsberg has always been his greatest critic and here he is acutely aware of his ego and the failure of the poem: ‘I am condemned to write statements. // “Ignorant Judgements Create Mistaken Worlds” [ . . . ] with my fucking suave manners & knowitall / eyes, and mind full of fantasy—the Me! That horror that keeps me conscious / in this Hell of Birth and Death’ (Ginsberg 1981, 91). The search for a metaphysical reality fi nally collapses—‘of the murky old forgotten / fabulous whatever’ (86)—and he is forced to conclude, ‘I’m scribbling nothings’ (94). Effectively bound up with the problematic of language is the realisation that ‘you struggle to understand / One consciousness / & be confronted with Myriads’ (Ginsberg 1981, 86). Towards the end, Ginsberg divides the poem typographically into two columns suggestive of a split in consciousness or of the world. As the poetic line splinters the reader has to choose which path or column to follow. It is like a worm cut in two; the worlds created in the mind wriggle apart and die. In the fi nal few stanzas, that desire for the face to face moments of tender love re-emerges: ‘It’s a horrible, lonely experience. And / Gregory’s letter,

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and Peter’s . . . ’ (Ginsberg 1981, 87). Significantly the poem ends with ‘’34 coming up—I suddenly felt old—sitting with Walter & Raquel in Chinese Restaurant—they kissed—I alone /—age of Burroughs when we fi rst met’ (98). The failure of this exploration into reality, as instigated or at least directed by Burroughs, is acutely felt. Nevertheless, what is critical to our reading of these collections is the revelation of an emerging poetics: the surfacing of experimentation with open form and sound-meaning. Crucial too, as is shown in the poem ‘Sakyamuni Coming Out From The Mountain’, is the fact that this poetics is intimately linked with a sense that, ‘humility is beatness / before the absolute world’ (Ginsberg 1981, 10).

SPONTANEOUS PROSE I: KEROUAC’S ON THE ROAD On May 18th 1952, Kerouac wrote to Ginsberg, ‘how you just have to purify your mind and let it pour with words [ . . . ] and write with 100% personal honesty both psychic and social etc. and slap it all down shameless, willynilly, rapidly until sometimes I got so inspired I lost consciousness I was writing’ (Kerouac 1996, 356). His literary technique would come to be known as “spontaneous prose,” for he had realised that ‘what a man most wishes to hide, revise, and un-say, is precisely what Literature is waiting and bleeding for [ . . . ] get said what is only irrecoverably said once in time the way it comes, for time is of the essence—’ (515). Through a spontaneous prosody Kerouac sought to break from the “distantiation” of the New Critical approach. As a compositional methodology it offered new possibilities for an ethical saying that came directly from the immediate consciousness of the writer. Indeed, Kerouac explained to his editor at Viking Press, Malcolm Cowley that, paradoxically, ‘it’s taken me all my life to learn to write what I actually think—by not thinking’ (515).3 His method was based on a technique called drip-painting exemplified in the work of Jackson Pollock; similarly, Ginsberg looked to modern art as a source of inspiration for his poetics. As Barry Miles explains, Ginsberg ‘would smoke a joint, then go to the Museum of Modern Art and look at Cezanne’s watercolours’ (Miles 1989, 97). What interested Ginsberg was the compositional methodology whereby you get a ‘sudden shift, a flashing that you see in Cezanne canvases’ (97). Ginsberg describes the effect as ‘a strange shuddering impression [ . . . ] partly the effect when someone pulls a Venetian blind, reverses the Venetian’ (97). As Miles explains, ‘a major element of Ginsberg’s compositional technique was to be an attempt to find the equivalent in words of Cezanne’s gaps, a choice of words that would create a gap between them’ (97). The flash of the reversed blind in the gap between words might be seen as that atemporal moment between the ethical saying and its said. The truth or authentic experience of Ginsberg’s poetry is located, not so much in the literal or metaphorical semantics, but

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in these word combinations, as in the famous ‘hydrogen jukebox’ juxtaposed in his poem ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg 1956, 11). From the avant-garde art world of New York City, both Kerouac and Ginsberg translated compositional techniques that allowed them to push towards the immediacy of an ethical saying in their work, that which would otherwise be precluded by the formulaic conventions of a traditional literary form. However, it was what John Swenson has described as ‘the revolution in black American music’, that would most influence the development of a Beat poethics (Swenson 1999, 27). As Miles explains, Kerouac was introduced to jazz ‘at a crucial period in its history: the point of transition between the big bands, with their tight arrangements and powerful rhythm sections, and the small experimental groups where the emphasis was on improvisation’ (Miles 1998, 24). This new era of jazz became known as bebop; Mike Janssen describes it as ‘an innovative style of jazz [ . . . ] characterized by smaller combos [ . . . ] and a larger focus on virtuosity’ (Janssen n.d.). It was heralded by the likes of Charlie Parker, an alto saxophonist; Lester Young on tenor sax; the pianists Lenny Tristano and Thelonius Monk; and the trumpeters, Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis. In his essay “Jazz Criticism: Its Development and Ideologies,” John Genarri argues that the essential role of the jazz musician is as ‘a progenitor of new forms, an inventor of new languages, a creator of new ways to express meaning’ (Genarri 1991, 449). Kerouac, as self-acclaimed ‘jitterbug-jazz critic’ (Kerouac 1996, 60) observed the shift from the big band Dixieland style and found in the new bebop a compositional process, or poetics, and a radical new form, a poesis, that might articulate the ‘pit and prunejuice of poor beat life itself in the god-awful streets of man’ (Kerouac 1972, 187). Indeed, it was what Genarri posits as the ‘subversion of traditional cultural categories’ and ‘reshaping of aesthetic and social boundaries’ (Genarri 1991, 450) in bebop that Kerouac admired. Furthermore, bebop radically reconfigured the relationship between musician and audience, ‘shunning formal behavioural codes and audience passivity (what Richard Sennet has called “silence in the face of Art”) in favour of active, spontaneous response through vocal and bodily participation’ (450). Kerouac’s essay entitled ‘The Beginning of Bop’ in which he describes the scene at these jazz clubs, elucidates the participatory quality: the audience was, he writes, ‘exteriorizing the tune’s harmony’ (Kerouac 1987, 9). The primary influence of bebop on the Beat poetic is found in scat singing, what Genarri describes as a ‘dissent from the logocentric of standard English’ (Genarri 1991, 450). The vocalisation in bebop ‘eshews referential lyrics in favor of vocalized sounds (e.g. “geef-gaf gee-bap-beda-dedo d-dado”) whose meaning is their own sound’ (450). Again, Kerouac translated this jazz aesthetic into a compositional poetics. Renouncing his publisher’s insistence ‘on “narrative” and “narrative styles”’, his theory of ‘Modern Prose’ was ‘jazzlike breathlessly swift spontaneous and unrevised floods’ (Kerouac 1996, 449). This method necessarily abrogated the orthodox rules

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and regulations of expository prose governing the formation of an orderly arrangement of argument. In this mode, rhetorical and metaphorical calculations are superseded by an ebullition energised and enabled through a poetics of the jazz line. The ethical capacity of these vocalised sounds in jazz bebop was transferred by Kerouac to Modern Prose. His instrument was not the saxophone, but he had the particular word-notes of an American dialect “othered” by the lingering presence of his native “joual” tongue. ‘The reason I handle English words so easily’, Kerouac explains ‘is because it is not my own language’ (quoted in Douglass 2000, 16). Indeed as Douglass has observed, ‘his writing is less a translation of his native tongue into English than a relexification of English; he de-anglicizes it, undoing the routinization process that created Standard English and condemned all its variants as the idiom of the illiterate’ (16). Furthermore, that native “joual” tongue is charged with the trauma of an othered and colonised people. As Douglas goes on to explain, the French-Canadians, ‘a people defeated in war’ and ‘left behind by modernization [ . . . ] claim their identity not on the strength of the battles they have won or the land they rule but solely on the strength of the language they speak’ (17). This compositional poetics is evident in all the novels that Kerouac later intended to publish together as his “Duluoz Legend”, although it is most consistent in On the Road, Visions of Cody and The Subterraneans. As Marco Abel has explained of On the Road: Exceeding the level of content—its four trips across the country—the novel also begins to invent a style of literary writing that rejects what Kerouac elsewhere describes as “the conventional English sentence . . . so ironbound in its rules, so inadmissible with references to the actual format of my mind . . . that I couldn’t express myself through that form any more”. (Abel 2002, 230) In a letter to Malcolm Cowley, Kerouac explained that ‘the requirements for prose & verse are the same, i.e. blow’ (Kerouac 1996, 515). Through a spontaneous ebullition sustained according to the breath-length of a long saxophone-like prose line or cadenza, Kerouac injected the ‘radical instability’ (Eburne 1997, 88) that Eburne credits Parker as bringing to the jazz form. ‘Parker’s bebop,’ Eburne writes, ‘not only expressed the traumatic but strove quite literally to put the listener on edge’ (88). In this way, Eburne concludes, ‘bebop restlessly courted the unexpected’ (88). This courting of the unexpected is an ethical presence of welcome to the alterity of the other; the othering of language persists in this presence of sound-meaning. In his descriptions in On the Road of ‘a wild tenorman bawling [his] horn,’ for example, Kerouac describes how the jazz artist blows from right down low, to high pitches, screeches and howls—‘from “EE-YAH!” to a crazier “EE-de-lee-yah!”’—his ‘hands clapping to the

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beat and folks yelling, “Go, go go!”’ (Kerouac 1972, 185) As the bebop artist puts the listener on edge, so Kerouac’s reader must exteriorise his or her own presence, for to engage in Kerouac’s poetics is to blow the saxophone’s vocables. The exteriorised harmony or othering of the self, resists the totalitarian stasis of language; it abrogates ‘mirror-image representational symmetries’ (Retallack 2003, 15) by enduring constant motion, restlessly courting the unexpected of alterity. The vocalisation inherent to bebop, like the othered poesis of Kerouac’s prose line, resists the ethical collapse of the signifier into an ontologically conditioned signified. The sound-topography of the page-space like the communal performative arena of the jazz club, brings the reader and listener into an ethical relation with alterity. Within this space, as Eburn claims, ‘the medium [of bebop] certainly contained within it the abject’s disruption of rules and borders’ (Eburne 1997, 88). The narrative form of On the Road demands this endurance of constant motion; it disrupts the conventional reading patterns of narratology, having no teleological trajectory towards closure. The exteriorisation of being or poethical presence can have no goal in mind but restlessly courts the unexpected. Within the fi rst few chapters of On the Road, a ‘tall, lanky fellow in a gallon hat [who] looked like a sheriff’ questions Sal and Dean: ‘“You boys going to get somewhere, or just going?” We didn’t understand his question, and it was a damned good question’ (Kerouac 1972, 24). The question is left hanging for the reader, but what becomes clear as one reads on is that they were not merely ‘just’ going, but that theirs is a unique and countercultural insistence on the very process in going. Dean’s trunk is ‘always sticking out from under the bed’ (237), ‘bitterness, recriminations, advice, morality, sadness—everything’ that might order his presence according to a societal teleology, ‘was behind him’ (184). The ‘surface-movement’ of On the Road, as Abel has argued, presents ‘a whole new cartography of the American landscape’ (Abel 2002, 241). Kerouac ‘reconfigures the American map as rhizomatic rather than arborescent’ (239) and ‘disavows an America dominated by its cultural centers in the East (New York) and West (Los Angeles)’ (241). Crucially, however, the narrative performance not only enters a ‘zone of proximity with the rhizomatic structure of the American earth itself’ but indeed with the reader (236). If there is meaning in On the Road it is certainly not achieved diacritically, through the distinction of one sign from another, but in the vocables and narratological fabric of a compositional Beat poethics.

SPONTANEOUS PROSE II: GINSBERG’S ‘HOWL’ In August 1955, Ginsberg ‘accidentally’ began his epic jeremiadic poem ‘Howl’ (Ginsberg 2001, 231). ‘The whole fi rst section’, he has explained, was ‘typed out madly in one afternoon [ . . . ] long saxophone-like chorus

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lines I knew Kerouac would hear the sound of—taking off from his own inspired prose line really a new poetry’ (229). Kerouac had given Ginsberg his aesthetic manifesto, “Belief & Technique For Modern Prose” the previous year and Ginsberg had this “List of Essentials” tacked to his apartment wall. Like Kerouac, he was frustrated with the rhetorical limits of language and the dependence on irony, symbolism and formalism in poetry. The ‘trouble with conventional form (fi xed line count and stanza form) is,’ he explained, that ‘it’s too symmetrical, geometrical, numbered and pre-fi xed—unlike to my own mind which has no beginning and end, nor fi xed measure of thought (or speech—or writing) other than its own cornerless mystery’ (Ginsberg 2001, 247). As Raskin has argued, ‘Ginsberg conceived of Howl as a call to arms and a cultural weapon in the war against academic poetry, the literary criticism of the day, and the American poetry establishment’ (Raskin 2004, 44). Furthermore, he suggests that this poem ‘expanded the possibilities not only for himself but for American poetry, as he pushed against the limits of literary caution and conservatism that characterized the times’ (26). After the intense search for a recovery of the metaphysical supraconsciousness in his poems of the Empty Mirror and Reality Sandwiches collections, Ginsberg realised that he had to ‘learn how to talk naturally in verse again; fi nd out how to say great things or beautiful things naturally’ (quoted in Miles 1989, 145). ‘Using the kind of weaving original rhythms that Jack does in his prose, and the lush imagery’, he has described the process of writing ‘Howl’ as ‘all old forms of Empty Mirror poems now falled together and synthesized in such a manner that the casual fragments of thought utilized for short poems before are now linked together in a natural train of thought or images’ (164). As his journal entries make clear, he began to examine in 1952, ‘the sequence & structure of thoughts— actual occurrences—and not synthetic thoughts pieced together from fragments—but the relation of fragments’ (Ginsberg 1993, 12). As Barry Miles has explained: ‘he began to write about his life, again using William Carlos Williams’ triadic verse form, only with the lines extended out to his own long breath length—each line a single breath, like blowing an extended cadenza on a saxophone’ (Miles 1989, 187). Primarily ‘Howl’ was an experimentation in form, the development of a poesis for the compositional Beat poethics. ‘Poetry is what poets write,’ Ginsberg claimed, ‘and not what other people think they should write. [ . . . ] I am sick of preconceived literature and only interested in writing the actual process and technique, wherever it leads’ (quoted in Raskin 2004, 206). Throughout Ginsberg’s poetry there is an emerging philosophical insight, both evident in the changing poetics and at the level of content, that what is crucial to a poethical presence is a re-inhabitation of the body. In part inspired by the focus on breath in Kerouac’s jazz prose-poetry, as well as from his experimentations with Buddhist mantra chanting and meditation, Ginsberg began to realise that poetry, ‘when you’re really into it can

104 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry become an expression of the whole body’ (Ginsberg 1980, 106). It was a poetics of the body that Ginsberg saw as continuing the prophetic-bardic poetic tradition. In a short note written in March 1980, he explains: One Thursday in 1919 William Carlos Williams stood in his shoes and remembered the breath coming in and out at his nose, right at the end of World War I. It’s almost World War III and we’re still breathing. (Ginsberg 2001, 310)

Similarly he traced this poetic tradition back to Walt Whitman. In writing ‘Howl’, Ginsberg realised ‘that Whitman’s form had rarely been further explored [ . . . ] No attempt’s been made to use it in the light of early twentieth-century organization of new speech-rhythm prosody to build up large organic structures’ (Ginsberg 2001, 230). Developing this Whitmanic form of speech-rhythm, Ginsberg concluded that: ‘Spiritus means breath, etymologically and breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song’ (152). This ‘breath spirit’, Ginsberg felt, was crucial to the re-inhabitation of the body. The mantra chanting and Zen belly-breathing, he explains in an essay entitled ‘Poet’s “Voice”’, delivered his ‘accustomed voice (and center of self) from upper chest and throat to solar plexus and lower abdomen. The timbre, range and feeling-quality of the physical voice was thus physiologically deepened’ (Ginsberg 2001, 258). The feeling and rhythm of the breath spirit thus ‘take place in the whole body, not just the larynx. The voice cometh from the whole body, when the voice is full, when feeling is full’ (58). As the breath spirit of the voice is of the whole body, so too Ginsberg attempts to bring the face—as the physiological-skin site of its exhalation and ethical presence—into the spontaneous immediacy of his prose-poetry. Ginsberg later reflected that this was ‘exactly what Olson has been talking about all along as projective verse, involving the complete physiology of the poet’ (Ginsberg 1980, 39). Similarly, he might have drawn a parallel with the work of the ethnopoets. Indeed in 1968, he discussed the ‘superhuman onomatopoeia’ of Sanskrit prosody with Michael Aldrich, Edward Kissam and Nancy Blecker (33). In their discussion, Ginsberg described it as an ‘extremely sophisticated and physiologically-based system, that’s as complicated as the nature of the human body, practically, or is fitted to the nature of the human body’ (35). He felt that it was a system that ‘we don’t begin to have in our alphabet and in our combinations of the alphabet into word-sounds’ (33). The insistence on a re-inhabitation of the body was in part a response to the dehumanisation inherent to the technocracy of a rapidly post-industrial society. Of course, this was especially felt in the confi nes of the megalopolis of New York City. Ginsberg described how ‘the air was filled with pompous personages orating and not saying anything spontaneous or real from their

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own minds, they were only talking stereotypes’ (Ginsberg 1980, 71). For Ginsberg, it was a ‘theoretical nation, the actual nation was not there’ (71). Lives that are acted role plays according to the telos of societal and corporate ladders are oblivious to the promise and potential of ethical responsibility; they are plastic stereotypes, closed narratives without the means of a critical self-reflexivity that might resist political coercion. The problem, as Ginsberg saw it, was that ‘the only immediate historical data that we can know and act on are those fed to our senses through systems of mass communication’ (Ginsberg 2001, 3). Yet, as governed largely by the military-industrial managers, state propaganda executives and serving too the Hollywood industry, such ‘historical data’ was administered through these media channels as a means to coerce the public into a conformity with the status quo. Literally channelled into the technologically-connected public, was the totalitarian rhetoric of a Cold War identity politics. As such, Ginsberg understood that ‘these media are exactly the places where the deepest and most personal sensitivities and confessions of reality are most prohibited, mocked, suppressed.’ ‘Suppression of sensory awareness,’ he concluded, ‘alteration of ratio senses, stereotyping of conscious awareness in language formulae, homogenizing of communal imagery via mass-media, creation of mass hallucinations (headlines) are present condition of megalopolis’ (49). This dehumanisation, or the ‘lack of recognition of Person’ Ginsberg later reflected, ‘made it possible for [ . . . ] the Americans to produce a whole generation of people who can watch US wars’ mass murder on television and not recognize it as personal to them’ (Ginsberg 1980, 86). A year before he began writing ‘Howl’, Ginsberg noted in his journal: How waste is the language and broken the thought—shadow flesh, [ . . . ] I curse the ignominy of my being. Time to cut the throat of this fat rhetoric. (Ginsberg 1993, 77)

There is a sense here of the desire to break out of the ontological conditioning of being, to return to one’s flesh, and to rupture the totalitarian stasis and violence of contemporary language. As Tom Hayden, author of “The Port Huron Statement” and leader of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) later wrote in his record of “The Trial”: The language of the Establishment is mutilated by hypocrisy. When “love” is used in advertising, “peace” in foreign policy, “freedom” in private enterprise, then these words have been stolen from their humanist origins, and new words become vital for the identity of people seeking to remake themselves and society. (Bloom and Breines 2003, 378)

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Ginsberg similarly felt the strains of a “traumatised semiotics” in the language available to him. In April 1952, he noted in his journal that ‘Language is very worn out [ . . . ] How terrible & agonizing it would be for all this motion & change in creating to be fi xed, nothing moving. (All forms still & staring like flowers & fish in transparent plastic paperweight)’ (Ginsberg 1993, 10). Similarly, Kerouac wrote in his novel Desolation Angels of ‘words that we have to use to describe words’ (Kerouac 1995a, 330). Nevertheless there was a very real risk involved in embarking upon such a poem as ‘Howl’. Ginsberg was nervous of the outcome: ‘I was afraid to try, afraid to throw myself out into the sea of language, afraid to swim’ he later reflected (Ginsberg 1980, 80). Yet who can doubt that the other feels? Indeed, it was with this poem that Ginsberg found faith in Kerouac’s “Belief for Modern Prose”; he trusted his own individual genius, as a human being inherently creative, trusted in the craft of poetry he had learnt, and so could allow the complexity and poethical presence to come naturally from the spirit-breath in spontaneous composition. Beginning with his belief that ‘in words begin responsibilities’ (rather than ‘in dreams’ as W B Yeats had suggested), Ginsberg envisioned a poem that would stir a ‘responsibility of a new order, to the community of the heart’ (quoted in Miles 1989, 261; Ginsberg 2001, 130). ‘The purpose of art’ he claimed, ‘is to provide relief from your own paranoia and the paranoia of others. You write to relieve the pain of others, to free them from the self-doubt generated by a society in which everyone is conniving and manipulating’ (quoted in Raskin 2004, xvi). Just as Kerouac wrote for ‘companionship’ or what he saw once in the ‘face of the person who opened the door’ out of compassion for ‘someone going beyond the streetlamp into the dark’ (quoted in Douglass 2000, 9), so too Ginsberg’s ‘greatness as a writer’, to borrow Miles’ compliment, ‘is partly the result of the enlargement of sympathy that he demands for society’s victims’ (Miles 1989, 533). ‘Howl’ was written in three sections. Part I begins: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked’ (Ginsberg 1956, 9). This was no poetic lunacy, but genuine confessional truth. In his journal he had compiled a list of friends who had gone mad or taken their own lives: David Kammerer, Phil White, William Cannastra, Joan Burroughs, Ruth Goldenberg, John Hoffman and Natalie Jackson. The best minds of his generation that Ginsberg addresses in ‘Howl’ are those beautiful geniuses who had succumbed to the terror of the modern world—who hung themselves in prison, leapt from the high-rise apartment, were tragically shot in a game of William Tell, overdosed on heroin, or disappeared into the subways of the city. As Walt Whitman painted a vision of a new democratic American landscape, so Ginsberg fractured the definitive axioms of white heterosexual masculinity. ‘Howl’ celebrates the “actual nation”, negating the conceptual socio-political boundaries of the city’s populace. The deviancy of America’s “others”—the schizophrenic, homosexual, Negro and drug addict—those written out of the public consciousness, are fi nally faced

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in the poem’s poethical presence; they are drawn into the poem’s centre of attention, ‘angelheaded hipsters’, ‘dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fi x’ (Ginsberg 1956, 9). For Kerouac, the Beat spirituality meant to be ‘submissive to everything, open, listening’ (quoted in Skerl 2000, 6) and so Ginsberg realised that ‘if I actually confessed the secret tendencies of my soul, he would understand nakedly who I was’ (quoted in Douglass 2000, 8). Such a relationship provides a model for reading Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, his ‘lament for the Lamb in America’ (Ginsberg 2001, 230). Indeed, there is a nakedness essential to the confessional poetics of the poem. This nakedness means both, what Eburne describes as ‘a radical divestment of the moral and rhetorical “dressing” of the National Security State’, as well as (what Douglass has called) an ‘ethos of openness’, an insistence ‘that he comes before us totally unarmed, unprepared, and unguarded, ready to keep absolutely nothing back’ (Eburne 1997, 72; Douglass 2000, 13). Indeed, as Douglass goes on to explain of Kerouac’s naked poetics: it ‘makes the most sense when we realise that he was writing at a time when national preparedness, particularly military preparedness, took on proportions unprecedented in Western history’ (13). The spontaneous overflowing of the line, disrupting the abject rules and borders of conventional poetic form, provided Ginsberg with the freedom to embrace the alterity of those marginalised others in American society. Moreover, the poem’s spatial interstices—the dynamic arena of the poethic that is unwritten sound-meaning and polymorphous visualmeaning—break from the traditional imagery of the metaphor and the ornate embroidery of onomatopoeia, sibilance, alliteration and so forth. ‘How sustain a long line in poetry (lest it lapse into prosaic)?’ writes Ginsberg. ‘It’s natural inspiration of the moment that keeps it moving, disparate thinks put down together, shorthand notations of visual imagery’—the visionary-sound juxtaposition of ‘hydrogen jukebox’ in ‘Howl’—‘abstract haikus sustain the mystery and put iron poetry back into the line’ (Ginsberg 2001, 230). Furthermore, the spontaneous exhalation of these long lines, as spirit-breath, resists the plasticity and violence of literal and intended meaning in calculated language construction. Any revision of the resulting poem is simply a ‘cutting out’ of any words produced from a lack of focus on the ‘emotional feeling-center’ (Ginsberg 1980, 26). Such revision, Ginsberg has explained, is purely for ‘syntactical condensation toward director presentation—[that’s Pound’s phrase—‘direct presentation’]—of the original spontaneous imagery’ (23). Eburne argues that, ‘moving “reality” from the University to the city, and from the mind to the body, as the sites of culture’s essential conflict, the Beats developed a much more radical idea of what this reality—and the plural possibility it promised—meant’ (Eburne 1997, 69). In Part II of ‘Howl’, Ginsberg focuses on the city itself, encapturing a sense of the technocratic in his anaphoric ‘Moloch’, a derivative of Molech, the Canaanite fi re god, as the anchoring root for each of his poetic exhalations:

108

Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! (Ginsberg 1956, 21)

This was a New York City radically different from the community neighbourhoods of the 1930s when kids played in the streets and well-known characters passed by with a greeting. The faces (whose luminous presence lingers in the photographs of Helen Levitt from that era) had subsequently been concretised, bulldozed and re-located into angular superblocks as if, with the centralisation of power, town planning had shifted from the ethical eye-level to the birds-eye perspective of motorway planning. Ginsberg explains the three-part structure of ‘Howl’ thus: ‘Part I, a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamblike youths; Part II names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb; Part III a litany of affi rmation of the Lamb in its glory: “O starry spangled shock of Mercy”’ (Ginsberg 2001, 230). In Part III, attention reverts back to the poem’s ethical centre, the faces of the ‘madman bum and angel’, to Carl Solomon whose plight had inspired the poem as Ginsberg’s ethical response to his destitute presence (Ginsberg 1956, 20). It begins: Carl Solomon! I’m with you in Rockland where you’re madder than I am I’m with you in Rockland [ . . . ] where you’ve murdered your twelve secretaries I’m with you in Rockland [ . . . ] where you scream in a straightjacket. (Ginsberg 1956, 24)

Raskin argues that Ginsberg’s ‘compassion and empathy’ are apparent in this refrain, ‘I’m with you in Rockland.’ ‘From the beginning to the end of the poem,’ he writes, ‘the “I” who tells the story of madness moves from an observer to a participant. The narrator becomes less detached, more involved, more implicated in the tale he tells. The he evolves into a we’ (Raskin 2004, 156). The shift from observation to participation is not a reduction of the other to the same, but a welcoming of alterity and cooperative responsibility. The poem concludes:

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I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night (Ginsberg 1956, 26)

With ‘Howl’ as well as in a subsequent poem entitled ‘Kaddish’, written in the late 1950s, Ginsberg had perfected the long-line poem. Throughout the 1960s he continued to use this poetic form, although less frequently. Of the approximately one hundred (or more) poems that Ginsberg assembled for the collections Planet News: 1961–1967 (1971) and The Fall of America: poems of these states, 1965–1971 (1972), just fifteen or so—predominantly found in the fi rst collection—are written in the long-line format. ‘Television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber’ and ‘Stotras to Kali Destroyer of Illusions’ most clearly illustrate the long-line technique, with ‘Kraj Majales’ and ‘Who Be Kind To’ also employing anaphora. Reflecting the increased domestic surveillance of the 1960s, the long-line poems of Planet News continue the themes of the military-industrial complex and the use of advanced technologies to repress public awareness. In ‘Television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber’, the paranoia reaches a new level of intensity: Human dragons trained to fly the air with bomb-claws clutched to breast & wires entering their brains thru muffled ears— connected to what control tower—jacked to what secret Lab where the macrocosm-machine picks up vibrations of my thought in this poem—the attendant is afraid—Is the President listening? is Evil Eye, the invisible police-cop-secrecy masters Controlling Central Intelligence—do they know I took Methedrine, heroin, magic mushrooms, & lambchops & guess toward a Prophesy tonight? (Ginsberg 1971, 21)

Ginsberg’s recurrent concern with material consumerism—as a phenomenon that had gripped the middle-class majority and that Ginsberg understood to be sustaining the nation’s economic and military power—provides another focus for the poem. He describes those: [ . . . ] who spend fifty billion things a year— things things!—to make the things-machinery that’s

110 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry turned the worlds of human consciousness into a thing of War. (Ginsberg 1971, 21–22)

Most emphatic, however, is his condemnation of the dominant media networks and the culture industry, as they created the conditions for a homogenous and pacified society: It was a big electrocution in every paper and mass media, [ . . . ] Six thousand movietheatres, 100,000,000 television sets, a billion radios, wires and wireless crisscrossing hemispheres, semaphore lights and morse, all telephones ringing at once connect every mind by its ears to one vast consciousness This Time Apocalypse [ . . . ] there is a mutation of the race, we are no longer human beings, we are one being, we are being connected to itself, it makes me crosseyed to think how, the mass media assemble themselves like Congolese Ants for a purpose [ . . . ] Eye in every forehead sleeping waxy & the light gone inward— (Ginsberg 1971, 24)

Whilst there is much in these long-line poems that continues the damning social critique Ginsberg had begun in ‘Howl’, Planet News and The Fall of America also introduce new linguistic experimentations, in particular, towards a poetic form that would adhere to the maxim, ‘humility is beatness / before the absolute world’ (Ginsberg 1981, 10). In general, whilst Ginsberg retains the emphasis on sound and breath, the images tend to be condensed into compact lines that run as a fluid stream-of-consciousness down the centre of the page. More than the social critique and condemnation of ‘Howl’, there is a sense in these later poems that Ginsberg wishes to push, or be pushed, towards the limits of language, to break through the constraints of a Cold War identity-thinking and into a new ethical relation. In ‘Television was a baby crawling toward that deathchamber’, for example, Ginsberg writes: ‘I dreamed a new Stranger touched / my heart with his eye’ (Ginsberg 1971, 29). I would argue that this line, whilst seemingly insignificant perhaps, is in fact indicative of the Beat sensibility, that is, openness to and humility before ‘a new Stranger.’ The capitalised ‘S’ for the stranger is a sign of respect that also emphasises the alterity of the other. Furthermore, the references to touch, heart and eye, might be interpreted as those senses most engaged in an ethical relation before the presence of another’s face. Indeed, many of the poems in these collections frequently gesture towards the face. For example, leaving aside the gender-argument

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in ‘This form of life needs sex,’ Ginsberg’s description of how the ‘Look in questioning womanly eyes / answer soft cheeks’ points towards that passivity of support Levinas confers on the presence of the face (33). The question in the woman’s eyes, or the ethical saying of the unsaid, is answered by the presence of ‘soft cheeks’, a passivity of support or ethical saying that is alternately formulated throughout Planet News. Indeed, such otherness is alluded to in ‘Galilee Shore’ as ‘the silence between Hebrew and Arabic’ (39), or in ‘Death News’ as ‘a life moving out of his pages’ (48). Most simply though, it is recognised in love, the fi nal ethical relation, as described in ‘Morning’—‘O Love, my mouth against / a black policeman’s breast’ (68)—or in ‘Who Be Kind To’: For this is the joy to be born, the kindness received thru strange eyeglasses on a bus thru Kensington, the finger touch of the Londoner on your thumb, that borrows light from your cigarette, the morning smile at Newcastle Central station, when longhair Tom blond husband greets the bearded stranger of telephones— [...] nameless voices crying for kindness (Ginsberg 1971, 96–97)

The mainstream socio-cultural conformity and political surveillance of the late 1940s and 1950s restricted individual freedoms and civil liberties, suppressing and oppressing minority groups that might “contaminate” the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant make-up of an idealised homogenous American identity. Reading Ginsberg’s work, I have demonstrated how the renewed individualism at the heart of his poetry both challenges and problematises this idealised view. In opposition to the ‘magic elixir of progress in technology, cleanliness and order,’ to quote the cultural critic John Tytell, Ginsberg maintained an ethical responsibility towards the marginalised— those “others” of a race, sexuality, religious or political affiliation, outside the officially sanctioned parameters of the “national identity”—developing an aesthetic practice that directly engaged with the politics of emancipatory socio-political change (Tytell 1976, 6). Indeed, whilst the literary climate of the postwar era—under the patronage of establishment New Critics such as René Wellek and Austin Warren—was distinctly conservative, it was the radical experimentation of poets like Charles Olson, Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg, that revived an avant-garde poetry, introducing new possibilities of poetic form and imagining new social relations.

5

The Welcome of the Other Jerome Rothenberg’s Ethnopoetics

Jerome Rothenberg, a second-generation Polish immigrant, born in New York in 1931, has explained that he ‘became a poet in response to the war at mid-century’ (Rothenberg 2006). Like Allen Ginsberg, Rothenberg was of Jewish descent and felt that the ‘designation of poet [ . . . ] marked some separation, the assumption of a calling that would separate us from the way things were or from another series of expectations that we weren’t willing to assume’ (Rothenberg 2006). Indeed, underlying Rothenberg’s poetry is an anti-authoritarian strain. It emerges in his ‘Poem For The Weather’ where he writes, ‘Over the moon we could hear / the voice of the president, / clear as a church bell, / simple as ether’ (Rothenberg 1975, 8). For Rothenberg, both the State and organised, institutionalised religion operate as ether, anaesthetising society. Similarly, in his poem entitled ‘Women & Thieves’, Rothenberg critiques the suburban domesticated life of a consumer society where people live in ‘the terror / of sleep’, where ‘the women dream of / houses & thieves’ as if directly from a daytime soap opera (16). With the closed line, ‘Then it’s Sunday’, he rejects religion as opposed to faith, that ritualistic religiosity wherein one can contain one’s ‘spiritual life’ to a Sunday service (16). The exploratory and satirical aspects of this calling to poetry enabled a distancing from pervasive ontological presuppositions, from the moral code and behavioural expectations of the conventional social and familial telos. Whilst Ginsberg’s fame led to his iconic counter-cultural status, Rothenberg has remained relatively obscure. Nevertheless, he too felt the need to break from a “traumatised semiotics”, ‘from the language of war and privilege [ . . . ] from official language, from authorized language—as we get it in politics, in advertising, in standardized religion’ (Rothenberg 2002). Specifically, for Rothenberg, as he recently explained in an interview for the magazine Jacket, the role of the poet enabled a distancing from the ideological repression inculcated through the shared language of the post-war years: Poetry became for me, as for many others, an act of defiance, as if all of our languages had been destroyed or lost their meaning. And we thought, rightly or wrongly, that we were in a position to make a new

The Welcome of the Other 113 language, an other language, using English as the vehicle for that. It allowed us to say things, to use logic—or illogic—as a way of thinking, a way of talking which was otherwise unacceptable and sometimes disturbing to the society at large. (Rothenberg 2002) Moreover, as this chapter will demonstrate, Rothenberg’s commitment to a radical intersubjectivity and to alternative forms of expression and representation by way of an “othering” of language, or ethnopoetics, marks a unique contribution to my second-phase and, in its critical self-reflexivity, introduces a third-phase of poethical praxis. Following in the trajectory staked out by Olson, Snyder, and Ginsberg, Rothenberg continued the search for ‘a new language, another language, over against the language that was taught to us, force-fed to us, in which the values of the society that we would come to question were expressed’ (Rothenberg 2002). Rothenberg’s explanation for his initial interest in poetry is revealing, for in the first instance he describes a reaction to this “traumatised semiotics”, whilst a questioning of the values expressed was secondary. Indeed, the writers I have considered as contributing to a second-phase of poethical praxis are united in their recognition of this point of stress, where the official, authorised language of the dominant political and media narratives was perceived to be all-over and coercive. In the post-war years, against a backdrop of radical difference, faced with the totalising representations of ideologically over-loaded discourse, Olson, Snyder, Ginsberg and Rothenberg all experienced a communicative trauma that motivated the ethical imperative at the centre of their work. In opposition to a contemporary shared language that repressed the alterity essential to human society, these poets worked towards alternative poetic forms that might realise ‘a new orientation of the inner life,’ in Levinas’ words, ‘called to infi nite responsibilities’ (Levinas 1994, 246). For Rothenberg, the communicative trauma had a more literal dimension as well. Until the age of three, he lived in Brooklyn and spoke only Yiddish. However, when his family moved to the Bronx, he attended the New York public schools from kindergarten through to college and had to learn to speak and write in English, a language alien to his native tongue. Recounting this experience, Rothenberg has explained: There was an obvious push toward suppression in school, but there was another push—different and maybe stronger—toward suppression in the street. So from very early on, for most of us who were immigrants—the children of immigrants—there was a movement from the place of the family into the place of the street, and the street took the part, played the part, of the larger society. (Rothenberg 2002) Whilst the suppression of his Yiddish language is somewhat different to the totalising aggression of a “traumatised semiotics”, at the same time,

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Rothenberg has suggested that it ‘related to many other losses that were a central part of what we took to be the human condition in the middle of the century’ (Rothenberg 2002). Indeed, this childhood experience fed into his later dissatisfaction with the political oppression and socio-cultural conformity of the post-war era. Whilst Rothenberg felt that Western religions had become legalistic and authoritarian in their institutionalisation, his Jewish beliefs nevertheless instilled a concern for the marginalised “others” of contemporary society. Indeed, concern for the other is an important tenet in Judaism, visible in the Jewish concept of charity, tzedaka. Tzedaka, literally translated as “righteousness”, is designated in Deuteronomy as an obligation (or mitzvah) to society, rather than a choice. Chapter 16, verse 20 states: ‘Justice, Justice shall you pursue . . . ’. The double emphasis on ‘justice’ indicates its importance, and the term ‘pursue’ implies effort and keenness, not simply legal adherence (The Rabbinical Assembly: the United States Synagogue of Conservative Judaism 2001, 1088). The Jewish concept of tzedaka, particularly as it is elaborated in Moses Maimonides’ eight degrees of righteousness, informs Levinas’ ethics as fi rst-philosophy. Whilst the highest degree of righteousness or tzedaka, is taking someone out of poverty, the second highest is not knowing to whom one is giving, and not knowing from whom one is receiving (Mishneh Torah 10: 7–15). The highest levels of tzedaka thus illustrate the importance of others, those whom one does not know yet to whom one has an obligation. Crucially, this obligation of responsibility towards others, as it underwrites Levinas’ philosophy, has also guided Rothenberg’s poetic experimentations. Despite the retrenchment of the 1940s and 1950s, Rothenberg, like Ginsberg, was committed to social change and poetic experimentation as a site of linguistic investigation and innovation. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Rothenberg undertook formal training, fi rst at New York City College, where he completed a BA in English, and later at the University of Michigan, ‘for a year of graduate study and draft evasion,’ where he completed the masters program in literature (Rothenberg 1996). Notwithstanding the conservatism of the New Critics and the political repression of the McCarthyite era, there was for Rothenberg, as for his fellow students David Antin and Robert Kelly, ‘the sense of a renaissance, the rebirth or reawakening of a radical modernism’ in poetry (Rothenberg 1996). When Ginsberg moved from New York to meet with the West Coast poets of San Francisco, he too identified this broader renaissance in American poetry. Indeed, for Ginsberg, the various poets later collected in Donald Allen’s seminal anthology The New American Poetry 1945–1960 (1960), ‘basically had the same politics which was philosophical anarchism’ (Miles 1989, 212). However, whilst Ginsberg felt that it was ‘urgent for the poets to make a united phalanx: Black Mountain, North West, San Francisco, Renaissance, Beat, and New York School,’ his literary points of reference

The Welcome of the Other 115 were exclusive to the United States. Rothenberg, on the contrary, took a much wider view of this poetic renaissance: I see the “new American poetry” that so much defi ned us as itself a part (a key part, sure, but still a part) of a worldwide series of moves & movements that took the political, visionary, & formal remnants of an earlier modernism & reshaped & reinvented (extended) them. (Rothenberg 1996) Rothenberg’s broader sense of a global late modernist poetics corresponded with the changing social climate, for whilst the Beats had been writing throughout the 1940s and early 1950s, Rothenberg’s poetics would begin to take shape during the 1960s and 1970s, a period of significant social upheaval and political awareness with the rise and demise of the Civil Rights movement. For students across the university campuses and campaigners throughout the Civil Rights groups, the work of New Left theorists and philosophers such as C. Wright Mills, Daniel Bell, John Galbraith and Herbert Marcuse, had provided a more sophisticated cultural criticism. Marcuse, for example, drawing on Marxian and French social theory and the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger, had provided a damning critique of the contemporary capitalist technocracy in his book One-Dimensional Man (1964). As Daniel Kellner has explained, ‘[Marcuse] showed that the problems confronting the emerging radical movement were not simply the Vietnam war, racism or inequality, but the system itself, and that solving a wide range of social problems required fundamental social restructuring’ (Marcuse 1994, xxxv). Furthermore, Marcuse argued: [Whilst] there is a great deal of “Worship together this week,” “Why not try God,” Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life, etc. [ . . . ] such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviourism, its harmless negation, and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet. (Marcuse 1994, 14) The ‘beat ways of life’ to which Marcuse refers, points towards the alternative lifestyles of the “beatniks” or “hippies” that became popular in the 1960s. Indeed, as I suggested in Chapter 4, the cultural caché of this increasingly fashionable ‘practical behaviourism’ was more a commercial product than a combination of Kerouac’s patriotism, Ginsberg’s revolutionary politics or Burroughs’ cynicism. For writers like Rothenberg, however, as well as the later “Language” poets (see Chapter 6), a reactionary politics within the identity thinking of the Cold War era was rejected in favour of a more critical and self-reflexive examination of language and society. Furthermore, the escalation of the Vietnam War, broadcast to the nation via

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the major television news corporations throughout the 1960s, contributed to a new international awareness for the American public. For Rothenberg, it was a time of a ‘global awakening’: If Charles Olson spoke of a “new localism” that would feed our historic & poetic senses, it seems to me now that it is increasingly possible—& necessary—to speak of a new globalism [ . . . ] to consider the decade of the postwar & the burgeoning cold war—as the time also of a global awakening, & to view (or re-view) the New American Poetry as part of a greater, still more electrifying symposium of the whole. (Rothenberg 1996) Within this ‘global awakening,’ my second-phase of poethical praxis attests to Tobin Siebers’ contention that at ‘the heart of ethics is the desire for community’ (Siebers 1988, 202). Indeed, as Snyder extended the realm of ethics, welcoming all sentient beings according to a biocentric politics of ecological advocacy, and as Ginsberg had re-imagined America in his long-poem ‘Howl’ (1956), subverting the officially sanctioned parameters of the “national identity” by bearing witness to the marginalised others of contemporary society, so too Rothenberg refers to a ‘symposium of the whole,’ wherein ‘all animal and vegetative; the unconscious and the unknown; the criminal and failure—all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be admitted in the creation of what we consider we are’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). In his poem ‘The Seven Hells of the Jigoku Zoshi’, a lament for humanity in the cruel existence of our Western cities, for example, Rothenberg assumes an apocalyptic, religio-visionary tone that puts the reader in a kind of trance (Rothenberg 1975, 23–39). With the mournful melancholy of the lines that begin, ‘Pity the . . . ’, ‘the sorrow . . . ’, and ‘Oh the . . . ’, we are reminded of the Beat sensibility in Kerouac’s ‘go moan, go groan for man’ (Kerouac 1972, 291). Indeed, Rothenberg’s descriptions in ‘Jigoku Zoshi’ follow the same pattern of anaphora as Ginsberg’s long-lines: I see them [ . . . ] The doors of hotels in the darkest quarter of the city stand open I see the men passing through with black satchels spreading the sheets for the night, covering their moist backs with white towels (Rothenberg 1975, 28)

Rothenberg’s first book entitled New Young German Poets (1959) followed in the same City Lights Pocket Poets Series as Ginsberg’s Howl. It was a collection of English translations of German poets, including Günter Grass, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and perhaps most significantly, Paul Celan. In this early translation work, Rothenberg

The Welcome of the Other 117 was not only dealing with poetry of a foreign language, but with a linguistic “othering” of language, the dislocation of the ideology of the oppressor (of Nazism, in this instance) that had been “naturally” embedded in the German language. Of Celan’s poetry, for example, Rothenberg suggests: His language develops . . . he builds it up of course out of German, but it’s a German that’s post-Holocaust, the German of a post-Holocaust writer and a witness. It’s fair to say that it becomes a kind of counterGerman, a German that contradicts, and yet it’s all the more German for being that, the way the actual features of the parent language become exaggerated and distorted in the writing. (Rothenberg 2002) On October 22nd, 1960, as part of his acceptance speech for the George Buechner prize, Celan explained that, ‘the poem has always hoped [ . . . ] to speak also on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other. [ . . . ] Perhaps, I am led to speculate, perhaps an encounter is conceivable between this “altogether other”—I am using a familiar auxiliary—and a not so very distant, a quite close “other”’ (Celan 2003, 48). Rothenberg was thus confronted with the task of carrying over into the English language this vulnerable poetic encounter between a quite close ‘other’ and an ‘altogether other.’ Here is Rothenberg’s translation of Celan’s famous poem on the Shoah, ‘Todesfuge’: A DEATH FUGUE Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at night we drink and drink we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta he writes it and walks from the house and the stars all start flashing he whistles his dogs to draw near whistles his Jews to appear starts us scooping a grave out of sand he commands us to play for the dance Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at dawntime and noontime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink There’s a man in this house who cultivates snakes and who writes who writes when it’s nightfall nach Deutschland your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite we scoop out a grave in the sky where it’s roomy to lie

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry He calls jab it deep in the soil you men you other men sing and play he tugs at the sword in his belt he swings it his eyes are blue jab your spades deeper you men you other men play up again for the dance Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime and dawntime we drink you at dusktime we drink and drink there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite he cultivates snakes He calls play that death thing more sweetly Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland he calls scrape that fiddle more darkly then hover like smoke in the air then scoop out a grave in the clouds where it’s roomy to lie Black milk of morning we drink you at night we drink you at noontime Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland we drink you at dusktime and dawntime we drink and drink Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland his eye is blue he hits you with leaden bullets his aim is true there’s a man in this house your golden hair Margareta he sets his dogs on our trail he gives us a grave in the sky he cultivates snakes and he dreams Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland your golden hair Margareta your ashen hair Shulamite (Rothenberg 1959, 16)

In this poem, the paradoxical opposition of ‘black milk,’ brings the violence, loss and trauma of the Shoah into an immediate linguistic and visual tension. Rothenberg’s translation carries over the signification of an ineffable trauma posited within and before the invective language of the oppressor, where ‘Death is a gang-boss aus Deutschland.’ The aural repetition of ‘Black milk of morning we drink you at dusktime,’ creates a rhythm and a collective presence where otherwise there would be silence, rescuing the shadowed figures of Margareta and Shulamite from the fascist language and violence of the most traumatised of semiotics. Alongside his translation of contemporary German poetries, Rothenberg researched further afield, beyond the confines of the western canon to the traditions of oral and tribal poetries. In so doing, Rothenberg discovered that ‘extreme contemporary forms had their counterparts in traditional cultures [ . . . ] not as a matter of avant-garde experimentation, but

The Welcome of the Other 119 as a matter of trying to understand what were taken to be powerful forces and presences in the world’ (Rothenberg 2002). Of this initial enquiry into alternative poetic traditions, Rothenberg explains: The area I set out to explore was poetry: an idea of poetry—of language and reality both—that had haunted me since my own fi rst beginnings as a poet. The inherited view—no longer bearable—was that one such idea of poetry, as developed in the West, was sufficient for the total telling. Against this—as the facts, the poems themselves, revealed—was the realization that poetry, like language itself, existed everywhere: as powerful, even complex, in its presumed beginnings as in many of its later works. In the light of that approach, poetry appeared not as a luxury but as a true necessity: not a small corner of the world for those who lived it but equal to the world itself. (Rothenberg 1985, xxv) Found in the painted palace of Tepantila at Teotihua-can (Mexico), for example, the mural of Tlalocan (Figure 5.1) involves a range of complex moods and activities. The ancient hieroglyphs—here depicting a ‘Toltec paradise of the so-called Rain God’—are just one example of the complex beginnings of poetry (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 405). Whilst they may be popularly understood in the modern world as simple, rudimentary sketches depicting the basic facts of subsistence living, Rothenberg and Quasha argue that the mural of Tlalocan in fact demonstrates a complex understanding of form, movement and spiritual being. Indeed, just as Olson and Ginsberg have experimented with the line-space provided by the typewriter, the mural freezes in form the complex and fluid movements of life and reproduction, both natural and human. At ground-level, a man reaches out inquisitively to the exotic flowers of the trees, perhaps searching for food or a healing remedy. Above him, the insects and small creatures commingle with the quotidian activities of man in sport, dance and battle. Overarching this collage of activity, four men interlink hands and mouth (as in the third and fourth figures of the top right corner), an image perhaps of the collective spiritual quest and the relation of speech to touch, movement and form. Furthermore, Rothenberg observes: The sexual motif appears to inform the imagery of ritual, reminding us of the Tibetan Tantric link between sexuality and higher consciousness. Sacred speech, or poetry, is represented by a “torsion-form” similar to that in Tantric art, say, or in Wilhelm Reich’s description of the “basic form” of the “sexual embrace”. (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 406) In their complexity of form and content, the ritual traditions of tribal communities offered an expansive poesis through which Rothenberg sought to legitimate and recover the oral (as a literature in motion, ‘truly inseparable

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Figure 5.1 Toltec: From The Blue House of Tlaloc (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 405).

from its realisation in performance’); the body (in song, speech—understood as the main instrument of thought—emotions and action, breath and presence); primal writing (Derrida’s archécriture—pictographs, hieroglyphs, sand paintings & earth mappings, gestural and sign languages, counting systems and numerologies, the divinational signs of animal tracks and stars etc.); the visual and the vocal (concrete poetry & drum-language); and the unconscious (dreams & visions) (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 291). Indeed, in the combination of these forms, Rothenberg envisioned

The Welcome of the Other 121 an expansion of the poetic beyond the rigidity of the western logos with its standardised rules and conventions—among them, the confi nes of binary logic and identity thinking—towards a dynamic welcoming of the other, or another national face, with renewed communal and ethical relations. A further instance of the complex dynamics of the beginnings of poetry may be seen in Rothenberg’s transcription of the Native American Seneca Eagle Dance. This poetic performance, as the transcription attests, involves a complex symphony of physical movement and action, music, dance, rap, oration, exclamations and laughter. For example, Rothenberg writes: ‘Whoop. Music. Dance. (Each dance ends with a sound: hmmmmmmmm or whheeeeee.) New speaker. Raps with the stick before speaking. More crackers. Deposit or mouthing of crackers. Whoop. Music. Dance. Rap. Speaker. Etc. This is the over-all pattern, never rigid—toward an actual openness, prescribed as well? Was of handling stick vary’ (Rothenberg 1985, 377). The fact that Rothenberg provides a floor-plan to assist his narrative explanation is further indicative of the poetic complexity. The Women enter through one door and the Men through another, each member of the tribe collectively performing in the symphony of actions and events—with various roles including the ‘announcer’, ‘dancers’, ‘sponsors’, and ‘whooper’—moving between and around the ‘kitchen area’, to the ‘stove’, ‘bench’, ‘water-drum’ and ‘horn-rattle.’ With this sense of the possibilities available to poetry, when Rothenberg began writing poetry in the late 1950s, what he ‘found most thrilling— needed—at the start was the work, the language of those poets who could lead me into acts of othering’ (Rothenberg 1996). With this in mind, he founded Hawk’s Well Press in 1958, publishing early works by Robert Kelly, Rochelle Owens, Armand Schwerner and Diane Wakoski, as well as a book of his own poems entitled White Sun Black Sun (1960). In particular, Rothenberg was drawn to these writers for their experimentation with “deep images,” or symbolic correspondences that resonated with a spiritual subjectivity or “primal” unconscious similar to that which he had observed in ethnic poetries. Alongside his work at the Press, Rothenberg edited a new magazine called Poems for the Floating World, bringing these ‘acts of othering,’ including new works by Paul Blackburn, Robert Bly and Jackson Mac Low, out of isolation and into dialogue and collaboration. As an example of an ‘extreme contemporary form’ and a ‘counterpart in traditional cultures,’ we might compare for instance, Jackson Mac Low’s ‘5th Gatha’ (Figure 5.2) with one of the three surviving codices of the preColumbian Maya civilisation, the ‘Dresden Codex’ (Figure 5.3). Both poems are arranged in a grid with a central axis and running columns. They may be read in any direction, yet require a multi-directional focus as well as attention to the detail of individual segments. Indeed, the reading methodology that Rothenberg proposes for Mac Low’s poem, might well be used to decipher the Mayan codex: ‘generally performed as “simultaneities” by a group of readers using the same or different realisations of a

122 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Figure 5.2

Jackson Mac Low, ‘5th Gatha’ (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 114).

single prayer. In working from the notation, the reader begins at any square (empty spaces are silences). He moves to any adjacent square horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, and continues this process until the end of the piece’ (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 114). As with the detailed rectangular patterns of the codex, the letters in ‘5th Gatha’ may be ‘read as any sound they can stand for alone or grouped [ . . . ] in any language’ (114). Of course, my juxtaposition is doubly complicated by the fact that Mac Low’s poem is a translation or notation (using the Hindu seed-syllable AUM) for the performance of the Sanskrit Great Prajnaparamita Mantram, Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha, “gone, gone over to the other shore—awakening svaha!” Yet as ‘an extreme contemporary form,’ ‘5th Gatha’ not only provides the score for a sounding of this mantra (whilst “othering” Mac Low’s own idiolect), but indicates a similar multi-dimensional, interlinked and interdependent reality as represented in the Dresden Codex. Indeed, Mac Low’s grid of letters reflects the complex web of language by which we construct a multi-modal reality; similarly the

The Welcome of the Other 123

Figure 5.3 Mayan Glyphs: A Frame from the Dresden Codex (Rothenberg and Quasha 1974, 404).

fantastical glyphs of the Codex reflect a state-of-myth or a mode of perception that follows a synchronicity similar to C. G. Jung’s shift of causality away from a situated view down a single line. For several post-war American poets, in particular Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Nathaniel Tarn, Clayton Eshleman, George Quasha, David Antin and Nathaniel Mackey, the shared interest in ‘acts of othering’— indicative of the communal “we” to which Rothenberg continually refers— would come to be known as “ethnopoetics”, a collective re-defi nition of

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poetry, an opening to the other. As Rothenberg explained during a talk for the Modern Language Association in December 1994: The time of the awakening—in & after World War II—brought a convergence of the need for poetry as a truth-bearing (deconstructing) language [ . . . ] & the need [ . . . ] to do away with racism & a culture of ethnic rankings, while preserving the values embedded in historic ethnicities & cultures. (Rothenberg 1994a) In general terms, for ethnopoetics, welcoming the other means admitting, or opening up to, the cultural specifics or alternative traditions of ethnic, oral and tribal “poetries” situated outside a widely understood western hegemony and canon. In practice, this has involved translation works, such as Nathaniel Tarn’s mytho-historical rendering of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu (1966), or Dennis Tedlock’s Finding the Center: Narrative Poetry of the Zuni Indians (1972). For the promotion and dissemination of these ethnopoetries, Clayton Eshleman’s literary review entitled Caterpillar (1967–73), together with his publication of contemporary poetry translations in Sulfur magazine (1981–2000), proved instrumental. However, in mapping the ethnopoetic, Rothenberg has been the clear protagonist, not least in his organisation of the First International Symposium on Ethnopoetics, held at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee on April 10–12th, 1975. Furthermore, in his pathbreaking anthologies of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Technicians of the Sacred (1967) and Shaking the Pumpkin (1972), together with his work as co-editor of the ethnopoetics magazine Alcheringa, Rothenberg has not only expanded the poetic field but also renegotiated the process of canonisation. In compiling these anthologies Rothenberg sought not merely to preserve or respect marginalised ethnic and tribal poetries, but to expand our (Western) understanding of the possibilities of language through a renegotiation of the poetic past and poetic other. Indeed, the ethnopoetic not only demands emancipatory socio-political change through the self-defi nition and cultural liberation of ethnic minorities, but the universal expansion of the poetic, the ‘freedom to be human to the full extent of our powers and yearnings’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xiv). Rothenberg refers to these poetry collections not as anthologies but as assemblages or collages; he presents the work in such a way that it mirrors the discovery of the ethnopoetic that he has enjoyed, for the reader. Such a methodology fits with his thinking in A Book of the Book (2000) where he argues books are about memory. As Peter Middleton explains, the anthologies present a new way to read poetry—not chronologically or through intercontextualisations but as ‘contributors to collective enquiry, political change, and the subscription of sacred powers’ (Middleton 2001, 1). Rothenberg’s assemblages present work that has elsewhere been written out of our western consciousness in the process of erasure inherent to

The Welcome of the Other 125 the closed narratives of elitist criticism. His assemblages thus enable us to explore outwards, to read something we have not heard of before rather than burrowing in to an anthology to gain the power-knowledge of “experts”. Therefore, these assemblages share a generative quality, inviting the reader to actively participate in an interrogation of the what, how, who, when and if/was/is of ethnopoetics; they welcome the other into an insistently protean defi nition of poesis through a rhizomatic mapping that warps the vertical, hierarchised boundaries of the arborescent structure of totalitarian thought found in traditional anthologies. Rothenberg’s methodology here approximates what Heriberto Yépez has described as the ethnopoetic denaturalisation of language, where ‘the thinking of our categories’ is considered ‘as something we inherited and so, something we always need to put into quotation marks’ (Yépez n.d.). Furthermore, Eric Mottram has suggested, in discussing another of Rothenberg’s ground-breaking assemblages (with George Quasha) America: A Prophecy (1974) that he has thus extended ‘the correction of defi nition’ to the re-establishment of an American continuity, revealing the country as, to use Snyder’s phrase, ‘a meeting place of nations [ . . . ] without bondage to a single form’ (Mottram 1986, 235). Mottram concludes that Rothenberg’s work ‘politically anticipates a “new communalism” which absorbs and replaces both the tribal “communal kinship organization” and capitalist imperialism’ (235). Nevertheless the anthologies remain bound by certain confl icts inherent to an ethnopoetics. In the paradox of putting oral poetries, poetry without writing, into a book, Rothenberg must resist appropriating and commodifying the poetic other (indeed capitalising on its consumer potential as a novel product) whilst enabling an expansion of the poetic (and renegotiation of the poetic past). However, as the assemblages are so conditioned that the reader must participate in this process, it follows that by cautioning the reader of this inherent problematic, the potential for an ethical reading is achieved through the transition of agency from assembler to reader. Rothenberg is thus implicitly self-reflexive in his terminology, referring to the poets he presents as technicians and to the machine of the book in order to vocalise/emphasise the power-play that is bound in the codex form of the book. By making the reader aware of the different agencies at play in the production of the text, Rothenberg empowers the reader, and in turn designates a shared responsibility for the ethical quality of the assemblage. As readers of the assemblage we have the freedom of choice: to neglect our responsibility as agents of construction within a capitalist society and in a moment of selfishness perform a totalitarian reading that violates the other; or to accept this responsibility, to be self-less and so perform a reading that is at once ethical in its openness to or welcoming of the other. As Rothenberg’s anthologies attest, the ‘acts of othering’ by a plethora of “new” or late modernist American poets has involved a vast array of forms and subjects (Rothenberg 1996). Indeed, ethnopoetics is too broad to be referred to as a project or to have clearly demarcated boundaries; it is rather

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a dialectical concept or ethical orientation that resists coalescing around a particular defi nition or according to the work of a set group of members or practitioners. The ethical orientation of ethnopoetics may be found, for instance, in the idea fi rst introduced by Robert Duncan—a poet of the San Francisco Renaissance in Berkeley during the 1940s, and later of the Black Mountain movement (with Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov and Charles Olson) in the 1950s—of a ‘symposium of the whole’ (Duncan 1971, 23). As Duncan explained in The Truth and Life of Myth: ‘The poetic imagination faces the challenge of fi nding a structure that will be the complex story of all the stories felt to be true, a myth in which something like the variety of man’s experience of what is real may be contained’ (Duncan 1968, 11–12). Indeed, for ethnopoetics, Duncan envisioned a unity within diversity, drawing an eclectic array of sources into a poetics-of-the-spirit in his collections entitled The Opening of the Field (1960), Roots and Branches (1964), and Bending the Bow (1968). The protean definition of ethnopoetics, however, disclaims the possibility of a sole progenitor; Duncan’s expansive poetics of a multicultural unity should rather be considered as offering one instance or possibility of an ethnopoetics. Despite differences of form, subject and intention, ethnopoetics may nevertheless be used as a distinction that highlights an ethical orientation, where poetry works towards an otherness beyond the parameters of an individual subjectivity. Robert Kelly, for instance, with more than fifty collections of poems, a novel, and four volumes of prose, ‘has had the patience to know that what the writing is saying is more important, always, than what you want to say,’ as well as ‘the moral discipline not to use the words to sell yourself’ (Kelly n.d.). For example, in Kelly’s poem ‘Ode to Language’ from his collection Under Words (1983), we get a sense of the speaking persona attempting to break from a ‘practical behaviourism’ (Marcuse 1994, 14), to find alternative clothes of signification, outside the ‘synaesthesias of weary language’. Indeed, as Nathaniel Mackey suggests in his book Discrepant Engagement: Dissonance, Cross-culturality, and Experimental Writing: When we speak of otherness we are not positing static, intrinsic attributes or characteristics [ . . . ] Artistic othering has to do with innovation, invention, and change, upon which cultural health and diversity depend and thrive. Social othering has to do with power, exclusion, and privilege, the centralizing of a norm against which otherness is measured, meted out, and marginalized. (Mackey 1993, 265) In this spirit, Rothenberg himself, like the multi-media performance poet George Quasha and the “talk”-poet David Antin, has worked with a diverse range of poetic forms, including rule-generated with procedural constraints, verbo-visual (for the translation of American Indian works), collage and manipulated photo images, collaborative and performance (musical and theatrical works), and sound poetry.

The Welcome of the Other 127 Whilst ethnopoetics is concerned with the cultural traditions of historic tribal and ethnic groupings, as a late modernist poetry, it also refers back (again, crossing boundaries) to a radical poetics inherited from the Imagists and Objectivists in America, and to the Futurist, Dada, and Surrealist movements in Europe. For poetry as a ‘truth-bearing (deconstructing) language’ (Rothenberg 1994a), for instance, ethnopoets might refer to Tristan Tzara’s Dada poetry or to Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and Its Double (1938), with Artaud’s promotion of a ‘kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid’ (Artaud 1997, 66). One model for a possible ethnopoetics, Rothenberg has suggested, may even be found in Pound’s conceptualisation of culture and mind as ‘vortex’—‘opening the poem to a range of historical and cultural particulars: Chinese and Japanese, Egyptian, Provencal, Gnostic and subterranean, contemporary US and European’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 41). Whilst Pound’s work was riddled with hierarchical ethnic distinctions, he nevertheless suggested as early as 1914 that ‘All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. All MOMENTUM, which is the past bearing upon us’ (Pound 1915, 153). Ethnopoetics—drawing on ancient tribal poetries from Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania, and from American and European avant-garde work— redefi nes poetry as intentionally “processual” or in continuous development and renegotiation. Indeed, if the “poetic” is to be open to the other, as an ethnopoetics demands, then we may view the work of ethnopoets as generative and partial, for alterity, as Levinas has shown, cannot be apprehended. Thus Duncan’s vision of a ‘symposium of the whole’ is not concretely mapped within the ethnopoetic discourse, for the ethical orientation resists a new totality or fi nal closure with the simple admittance of certain previously exiled minorities (Duncan 1971, 23). On the contrary, the processual dynamic is maintained by a focus on the particularity of cultural specifics and the exhibition of diversity, crossing disciplinary boundaries and engaging with the confl icts within and across, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, poetics and cultural studies. As Rothenberg suggests, there is nothing ‘fi nal or tidy about such an ethnopoetics, which works instead to churn up a whole range of issues about “art and life”’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xv). In this processual redefi nition of poetry—continually welcoming the other—ethnopoetics remains committed to the ‘exploration of creativity over the fullest human range’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xi). As the maverick anthropologist Stanley Diamond has explained, it began with ‘the search for the primitive,’ or more precisely, the ‘attempt to defi ne a primary human potential’ (71). Diamond’s qualification, as it is laid out in his seminal work The Search for the Primitive: A Critique of Civilization (1974), is emblematic of the ethnopoetic resistance to decontextualised nostalgia or charges of “primitivist” activism. Indeed, the problem with the word “primitive” is that it is associated not just with naïve nostalgia

128 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry but also with the unsophisticated or crude, that is something less effective or accomplished. Yet for Rothenberg, ‘Poetry, wherever you fi nd it among the “primitives” (literally everywhere), involves an extremely complicated sense of materials & structures. Everywhere it involves the manipulation (fi ne or gross) of multiple elements’ (100). It is for this reason that Rothenberg refers to the poets of these “other” cultures, as he has presented them in his anthologies, as ‘technicians of the sacred’ (Rothenberg 1985). Moreover, Diamond’s introduction of a dialectical anthropology and his criticisms of Western industrialisation informs the ethnopoetic as envisioned by Rothenberg: ‘to preserve and enhance primary human values against a mindless mechanization that has run past any uses it may once have had’ and that has furthermore put us in ‘abstract relation’ to the living universe (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). This dialectical or processual anthropology, carried forward by William Bright, Dell Hymes, W. E. H. Stanner and Dennis Tedlock, incorporated the sociological work of Gregory Bateson and Erving Goffman, understanding society ‘as a process punctuated by performances of various kinds’ (Turner 1978, 584). Their work demonstrated how the sacred is central to the poetries of these “other” cultures and, as the Native American poet Paula Gunn Allen suggests, ‘has a very different significance to tribes people than to members of the “civilized” world’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 186). For Allen: It does not mean something that is of religious significance and therefore believed in with deep emotional fervor, [ . . . ] rather that it is filled with an intangible but very real power or force, for good or bad. (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 186) One instance of this sacred force is evident in the Australian Aboriginal concept of The Dreaming. Stanner has explained that ‘a central meaning of The Dreaming is that of a sacred, heroic time long long ago when man and nature came to be as they are; but neither “time” nor “history” as we understand them is involved in this meaning’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 201). The Dreaming is simultaneously a ‘sacred, heroic time of the indefi nitely remote past’ and a part of the present—‘One cannot “fi x” The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen’ (202). Stanner concludes: Clearly, The Dreaming is many things in one. Among them, a kind of narrative of things that once happened; a kind of charter of things that still happen; and a kind of logos or principle of order transcending everything significant for aboriginal man. (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 202) According to Stanner, The Dreaming is a philosophy lived by the Aboriginal cultures that creates a unitary system of ‘stability and permanence,’ harmonising man, society and nature, and past, present and future

The Welcome of the Other 129 (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 203). It is performed in their way of life through mythology, ritual and intuitive, visionary art. Stanner’s interpretation of The Dreaming suggests an era of wholeness that has since been broken apart—an ontological crisis echoed in the “traumatised semiotics” and ‘synathesias of weary language’ in the post-war era (Kelly 1995, 137). Indeed, The Dreaming operates along infi nite rather than totalitarian systems of perception, demarcating a phenomenology that is ‘in some way difficult for a European to grasp because of the force of our analytic abstractions’ as ‘minds too much under the influence of humanism, rationalism, and science’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 203). Similarly, Dennis Tedlock identifies the sacred power of these “other” cultures in the inoote, which he translates as long ago. For Tedlock grasping the inoote means to be ‘continuously and every day and in this moment always connected up with the whole past’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 373). The sacred, whether we describe it as the force of The Dreaming or the inoote is achieved only through a phenomenology that orientates the ethical prior to being, for the sacred is realised only when one assumes a communal interdependence over and above reason and objectivity. As the reorientation of ethics before ontology assigns responsibility to the subject, so too Tedlock identifies the inoote, or the mytho-historical present, as an assignation and acceptance of responsibility. With a realisation of the sacred force of the inoote in our quotidian reality, he writes, ‘we are responsible for being conscious of the whole history of mankind’ (375). For Tedlock, ‘It’s a responsibility that we trick ourselves out of with history books, with archives, with museums, thinking we can file away the past and appoint certain experts to worry about it’ (375). For the ethnopoet this sacred force is not exclusive to one particular culture or ethnic minority. In fact it may be seen, as the Native American poet Simon Ortiz has argued, as the quality of language itself: ‘Language is more than just a functional mechanism. It is a spiritual energy that is available to all. It includes all of us and is not exclusively in the power of human beings’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 403). Ortiz concludes: ‘When you regard the sacred nature of language, then you realise that you are part of it and it is part of you, and you are not necessarily in control of it, and that if you do control some of it, it is not in your exclusive control [ . . . ] Language is not defi nition; language is all-expansive’ (405). We can see here a Levinasian understanding of language where the signifier is the immediate and necessary response to the face of the other. For an ethnopoetics, this response, over which we have no control, is the spiritual response of humanity to the infi nite call of responsibility. Where the ethnopoetic discourse considers the sacred, in any form, it is located only within some concept of the “alcheringa” or that Aboriginal Dreaming, described by Stanner as, ‘the coexistence of multiple times and realities [ . . . ] that works through language and imagination to show the repercussions of what it means to be living, genuinely and significantly, in a state-of-myth’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 201). It is for this reason

130 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry that Charles Olson, whose work engaged the present and, in the words of Paul Christensen, ‘informed it by means of ancient cultural paradigms: myths, cultural morphologies, and the archetypal events underlying the civilizations of the Western descent,’ is an important precursor for the ethnopoets (Christensen 2000). The sacred is also inscribed in Gary Snyder’s biocentric vision as an ethical orientation, or ‘knowledge of connection and responsibility which amounts to a spiritual ascesis for the whole community’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 93). Indeed, as Snyder explains, the sacred both informs and provides the ethical justification for his environmental politics: To live in the “mythological present” in close relation to nature and in basic but disciplined body/mind states suggests a wider-ranging imagination and a closer subjective knowledge of one’s own physical properties than is usually available to men living (as they themselves describe it) impotently and inadequately in “history”—their mind-content programmed, and their caressing of nature complicated by the extensions and abstractions which elaborate tools are. (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 91) Rothenberg has situated this ethnopoetic model, ‘a re-viewing of “primitive” ideas of the “sacred” [that] represents an attempt—by poets and others—to preserve and enhance primary human values’ within ‘a long subterranean tradition of resistance to the twin authorities of state and organized religion’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). From the position of exile, this reinterpretation of the poetic past seeks to undercut the agency of cultural imperialism and monoculture, assuming a politics that is anti-authoritarian (here meaning anti-State and anti-institutionalised religion). For Rothenberg, ethnopoetics breaks with the false dichotomy of the civilised and the barbaric; resisting a politics of assimilation, it seeks to decolonise the mind and society from the conflicts and alienations of capitalism. It follows in the modernist tradition of challenging limits and changing ways of speaking, thinking and doing, of interrupting the dominant modes of discourse towards ‘the “reinvention of human liberty” (S. Diamond) in the shadow of the total state’ (Rothenberg 1981, 120). Within this expansion of the poetic, Rothenberg has importantly argued that ‘poetry is not simply what is called “poetry”’, that which currently refers to ‘a semi-professional literary activity’, but should be recognised as that which creates meaning through language, ultimately in an attempt ‘to discover the otherwise unknowable’ (Rothenberg 1981, 222). As part of the processual dynamic within ethnopoetics, Rothenberg advocates ‘a move away from the idea of “masterpiece” to one of the transient and self-obsolescence of the art-work’ (168). In this way, as Hank Lazer has explained, ‘Creation leads to further creation; reading inspires writing’ (Lazer 1995, 107). For Rothenberg, the art-work then, must ‘deny itself the last word’, whilst we must no longer think in terms of ‘a single “great tradition” but can open to the possibility of getting at the widest range of human experience’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 4).

The Welcome of the Other 131 The description of an idealised past—a wholeness in subsistence-living and harmony with nature—may appear to be a somewhat fanciful ideation, and the (albeit qualified) use of the “primitive” is troubling. Indeed, where anthropologists adopt a Freudian analysis in their projection of The Dreaming, the so-called reinterpretation of the poetic past comes perilously close to an ethnographic colonialism. Nevertheless, Rothenberg’s rejection of a single “great tradition,” and in particular, his redefi nition of poetry as denying itself the last word, echoes Levinas’ conception of art. As Robert Eaglestone has suggested, ‘any reading which interrupts the said and proposes that the art work is a site of fracture makes us aware of the constant force of our responsibilities’ (Eaglestone 1997, 166). Indeed, with ethics as fi rst philosophy, the literary critic and the poet abandon the notion of a fi nal interpretation, working instead towards the continual regeneration of a text’s ethical saying. This democratising metamorphosis of our concept of an artwork (as I outline in Chapter 7), provides for a poethical praxis where the poem is defi ned as a plurality of engagements—as multifoliate versions across distances of reception, rather than as a unique entity of copyright. Rothenberg’s concern for a processual poetics thus attests to the promise of an ethical reading as described by Jill Robbins: ‘[ethical] reading alters—or interrupts—the very economy of the same that the other interrupts’ (Robbins 1999, xxiv). In Rothenberg’s collecting and editing of his Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics (1983; with Diane Rothenberg), the expansion of the poetic is achieved across multiple intersecting discourses from poets and social thinkers of the past and present. With influences from Vico, Blake, Thoreau and Tzara to the recent essays and manifestos of Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner and Baraka, the collection cumulatively performs the transformation of poetics—‘a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, see cover). The Rothenbergs’ careful selection and presentation from the rich tapestry of ethnopoetic thought, illuminates a shift in poesis away from the formalist and exclusively “literary” close reading of New Criticism. As William Cain explained in his preface to The Crisis in Criticism: Focusing on the text gave teachers a well-defi ned area of expertise, trained students in useful skills, and thus made English seem important yet marginal, necessary for the attainment of certain social goals—a literate public, for instance—but not likely to interfere with the workings of the social order. (Cain 1984, 5) In place of this conceptualisation that prioritises the logos (the act of the thought about the instant), ethnopoetics welcomes and emphasises the tongue (the act of the instant), as primary to the poetic. The close reading of formalist criticism, with an emphasis on the logos, operates primarily according to comparison; the symbology fundamental to this poetics ignores the essential quality of the subject, that which draws our attention

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to it, or its particularity. Ethnopoesis, however, emphasising the tongue, draws upon metaphor and performance as the active intellectual states, as Artaud suggests, enabling us ‘to break through language in order to touch life’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 235). The schism in poesis presented by the Rothenbergs is thus between poetry as an intentional product of man—somehow separable from his inner nature—and a poetry of the social body. New Criticism invited a classicising admiration of the static art object and is manifest in the false, sentimental voice of the personal lyric associated with certain semi-professional literary activity. A poesis of the tongue, on the contrary, presupposes the human over the aesthetic, enactment over explanation, demanding an art that is in motion—dynamic and performative (becoming at once participatory, collective and individual). Indeed, the performance dynamic is fundamental to the ethnopoetic for it achieves creation rather than reproduction, emphasising a composition process of continuous development and flux in contradistinction to the fi xed text. It is a poesis (incorporating the dynamics of dance, music, spirit etc.) that the Dada poet Tristan Tzara praises as an ‘art in motion’ and Rothenberg envisions as the ‘dream of a total art— and of a life made whole’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). The emphasis on the tongue and the breath is central to my secondphase of poethical praxis and an aspect that became popular in the revival of the public poetry reading and performance art during the late 1950s and 1960s. In New York City, for example, The Living Theatre, founded by Julian Beck and Judith Malina, offered an alternative to commercial theatre, pioneering the unconventional staging of poetic drama and introducing method-acting as a compositional process essential to their performance space. As Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines explain: ‘Putting on plays in their living room and later in very small performance spaces [ . . . ] their notion of a radical theatre and of pushing the boundaries of art meshed with the emerging cultural vision of the new era’ (Bloom and Breines 2003, 8). Within the Symposium as a tapestry of ethnopoetic thought, Leo Frobenius, described by Rothenberg as the fi rst Westerner ‘to recognize the actual achievement of traditional African art,’ theorises the schism in poesis as a dichotomy of the mechanistic-objective and the intuitive-subjective (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 36). The mechanistic-objective mode, Frobenius argues, effects ‘an atomisation of phenomena’ so that everything is ‘duly classified and reduced to dry formula’ (36). In this respect, the mechanisticobjective modality of apprehending reality parallels Levinas’ description of the predatory mode of representation authorised from the ontological presupposition of being. Similarly, Frobenius’ intuitive-subjective model, wherein the subject enters ‘with his whole being into the lawless profusion of spiritual activity,’ pushes towards Levinas’ ethical reorientation of being. In this mode, Frobenius suggests, the intuitive-subjective observer ‘surrenders to the inner logic of growth, evolution and maturity’ and can ‘enter into all the vicissitudes of reality’ (37).

The Welcome of the Other 133 The problem, however, with Frobenius’ intuitive-subjective model is that he adopts the terms of the conventional Cartesian cogito or subjectivity, a theory that approaches phenomena and ‘factual experience’ as if they belong to the privacy of the self. Within this conventional phenomenology, subjectivity isolates contexts and meanings to the realm of private experience, negating any responsibility for the other (our ethical obligation). Whilst Frobenius provides a useful account of ethnopoetics as oppositional to a predatory mode of representation, his theory fails to recognise that the ethical rephrases subjectivity to refer not to oneself, but to the other. As Levinas explains, ‘Responsibility [is] the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe in ethical terms. Ethics [ . . . ] does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very node of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility’ (Levinas 1985, 95). As David Campbell has explained: ‘Responsibility understood in this way refigures subjectivity: the very origin of the subject is to be found in its subjection to the “other”, a subjection that precedes consciousness, identity, and freedom’ (Campbell 1998, 460). In this way, ‘subjects are constituted by their relationship with the “other”. Their being is called into question by the prior existence of the “other”, which has an unremitting and even accusative hold on the subject’ (460). The focus on the subjective and the symbol (as an instrument of knowledge) in ethnopoetic discourse, is discussed by Mircea Eliade in her book, Images and Symbols (1991) extracted in Rothenberg’s Symposium. Eliade suggests that the ethnopoetic emphasis on subjectivity may be understood as ‘a reaction against 19th century rationalism, positivism and scientism,’ a product of the increased popularity of psychoanalysis and the ‘systematic research devoted to mechanisms of “primitive mentality”’ in the 20 th century (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 231–232). In this context, Eliade suggests, the ethnopoetic is not a “discovery” of the modern world but a return to 18th century European thought and that which is connected to the non-European/Western cultures. Whether we consider the ethnopoetic as a discovery or a return, the emphasis on subjectivity marks a significant development in its tendency to disrupt the binary thinking of totalitarian logic. Indeed, the ethnopoetic discourse, with a fundamentally ethical imperative, is distinguished in its engagement with the two most troubled arenas of contemporary politics—the ecological and the ethnological—as offering a holistic rather than separatist approach, whilst maintaining difference. Whilst Frobenius’ analysis is limited to a retrogressive understanding of subjectivity, Rothenberg’s poetry pushes towards a radical (inter)subjectivity that allows for a Levinasian ethics. Indeed, perhaps even beyond a ‘poetics of the limit,’ Rothenberg envisions an ‘art in motion’ (Tzara, SW: xii) as ‘a life made whole’ (Rothenberg, SW: xii). For him, ethnopoetics may become a meta- or para- poetics, a ‘reality-shaping poetry’ or ‘reality at whiteheat’ (Paul Radin, SW: 35) where ‘there is no desire to explain— there is solely the desire to experience’ (Bronislaw Malinowski, SW: 112).

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In the light of this, Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics may be considered a rather abstract metaphysical poesis, if not an entirely fanciful and naïve ideation. However, as Rothenberg has explained elsewhere, ‘Poets are not necessarily modest in what they set out to do, nor are mystics. I’m amused by this. I think it’s absolutely wonderful and crazy that people should try to know the unknowable. (Not the unknown, by the way, which is a very different matter.) I think what happens is that you get a lot of contradictory propositions . . . and that helps to thwart the monoculture and single-minded total state. At the same time, my own approach is increasingly comic’ (Rothenberg 1981, 223). In the following commentary on Rothenberg’s poetry, we will trace its development with reference to the collected volumes of his work, Poems for the Game of Silence 1960–1970 (1975) and New Selected Poems: 1970– 1985 (1986), assembled by Rothenberg himself. In these collected volumes, as he explains in a ‘Pre-Face’, he has sought to elucidate from the work of his full texts ‘the thread of a single long poem or sequence that the individual books published in that time may have tended to obscure’ (Rothenberg 1986, vii). Indeed, these two volumes of poetry, encompassing work from around 1960 to 1985, make most explicit what ‘may be seen as the subtext [ . . . ] that exists beneath the surface’ of his work (viii). As we shall see, it is a poetic experimentation that marks ‘steps toward the recovery/discovery of a language’ for a witnessing of all that is of the world and as he suggests, ‘everything & everyone around here are welcome to come into the poem’ (Rothenberg 1986, viii). In the opening pages of Poems for the Game of Silence: 1960–1970, Rothenberg refers to the Chippewa “game of silence” wherein ‘the poet makes a deliberate assault on the minds of his audience, working his verbal communications so as to break their silence by laughter or any similarly loud response’ (Rothenberg 1975, 4). The implication is that Rothenberg wishes, as part of his ethnopoetic enterprise—to regain the joy of human experience across the broadest possible range—to shake the reader from his Western analytical abstractions, to make him or her feel and respond. Based on his assumption that language is, to use Harry Jerison’s terms, an expression of the ‘neural contribution to the construction of mental imagery, analogous to the contributions of the encephalized sensory systems and their association systems’, Rothenberg loads his poetry with imagery, presenting an accumulation of stimuli that might engage our subjectivity in reading (cited in Swanson 1983, 63–64). From the most tender of emotions, the touch that ‘with her tongue brings me bread, / to eat love in a whisper’ to hearing ‘the wide sound / of the wind against the cow’s / side, and the crickets that run down / my sleeve’, from images as when ‘The night the moon was a spider’ and as ‘an icicle broke from the sky / and entered my heart’, Rothenberg awakens us to our most human senses, the subjectivity that enables us to meet alterity on the ethical plane, to regain ‘the lost bells [that] cry in sleep’ and to release ‘the skin [that] cries under the brand / of intellect’ (Rothenberg 1975, viii, 4, 5, viii, 25). The root cause of this loss or denial of the subjective and with it the possibility of an ethical relation in the face of alterity, is found for

The Welcome of the Other 135 Rothenberg with the emergence of capitalism as the dominating force throughout the Western world. In his poem ‘Invincible Flowers’, Rothenberg renounces the artificial nature that capitalism cultivates, the plastic flowers that ‘lie in wax wrappers and fidget’ (Rothenberg 1975, 6–7). ‘Not one of them acts like a flower, or carries itself like a flower. / Not one grows red overnight in the sudden anguish of spring’ (6). With capitalism and the consumerist dream—the estrangement of the workforce from the product, in the reduction of man to units of labour within the assembly line—‘Colors die out as innocence fades in the eye of the florist’ (6). However, the poem reaches out for the full range of human emotion with concrete metaphors: Perhaps when it rains in my room, and the window is open, the sheets are thrown like sand on the floor, and my hand like a falcon is diving on quarries of paper, I hear (at first in the distance) the sound of a great Flower crying out loud in the sun. And the thought of something I would not betray grows wild in my heart. (Rothenberg 1975, 6–7)

In a later poem ‘A Side of Beef’, our repression of subjectivity—as it is subordinated to the ontological thought of Western abstraction, internalised as an exclusively selfish or private realm—is realised as our separation from perceiving the world as it is (Rothenberg 1975, 17–19). This separation is so strongly felt that he writes ‘The windows are burning’ (17). In this poem Rothenberg draws on our abstraction from the hunting, killing and preparation of the animals that are our food, utilising the ‘black meat hook’ as a recurring image that embodies the terror and fear of this cruelly objective existence (17). The ‘blood [of the animals] that covers each eye’ blinds us, diminishing our perception so that although ‘they come toward where I am [ . . . ] everytime they reach us / we are further away for being here, for watching / the black meat hooks’ (17–18). The poem ends with, ‘feeling the sun against the window, / the sea, this cry / from my birth that drowns me’ (19). This line seems to suggest that the yearning for sensations that connect us to the world through subjective perception is the primordial desire of humanity, the cry from birth. The critique here of an abstracted perception, where objectivity is valued before subjectivity in an ontological mode, is extended in his poem entitled ‘Words’ to our use of language (Rothenberg 1975, 14–15). Here the ‘terror [is] of words’ where ‘positions & dispositions’ in a use of language that is totalitarian—in logos rather than tongue, predatory rather than altruistic—circumvents ‘around a burning / center’ (14). This is posited in ‘Words’ in contradistinction to those ‘words in uncut bread’ through which in the act of the instant:

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry in curves of uncut bread I come toward you in the curve of words of uncut space (Rothenberg 1975, 14)

The pure use of words in the poetic form is located in: the sudden movement of our lips together with breath itself a language (Rothenberg 1975, 14)

This ‘pure’ language generously spaced across the page, draws on an emphasis of the tongue and speech, of a language of love in kissing—ultimately of a human interaction at the basic level of primary human value—the touch. Simon Ortiz has explained how ‘the song as language is a way of touching’ and Robert Duncan maintained that a ‘multiphasic experience sought a multiphasic form’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 405; cited in Allen 1999, 435). As Rothenberg’s poem progresses we don’t just read, but touch the words. They have tactility and a resonance as in the lines from ‘Words’: Also a language rising from the earth our footsteps speaking like a dance our words a dance of breath of images the single image of a sun burning inside us as we speak (Rothenberg 1975, 14)

In this way the words fi ll ‘with saliva & the shapes / of trees’, they ‘take shape around a / curve of light’ and for an epiphanous moment the focus becomes human rather than aesthetic, engaging the whole body, rather than exclusively the intellect (Rothenberg 1975, 15). The collection Poems for the Game of Silence is divided into three ‘programs’, each of which begins with a series of statements, manifesto-style—‘I

The Welcome of the Other 137 will change your mind’ etc. (Rothenberg 1975, 51). The statements for program one, which are marked by the action words ‘movement’, ‘through’, ‘pattern’, ‘emerging’, ‘vehicle’, seek to emphasise the dynamic nature of the poetic (2). Through the repetition of images and words, often in a cyclic fashion as in ‘The night the moon was a spider’ where the poem begins and ends with the same line, Rothenberg establishes a dreamlike consciousness to his poetry much like the alcheringa, inoote or alangö from the ethnopoetic heritage of the tribal poetries that he has translated (5). His poem ‘Sightings’ renounces the chronological time of Western history; he writes ‘the lie, beginning, persists with us’, suggesting that it is false to conceptualise time as linear, but rather that we live in a continuum (56–59). In the poem entitled ‘Words’, the lines and individual words run into each other creating a fluid movement broken only for shifts between the ideas of sound and silence, logos and tongue (14–15). This use of page space as opposed to the conventional technique of punctuated lines, qualifies the poem as suggestive rather than didactic; the tone is hushed and the technique appears subtle—there is no clear expository “meaning” to the poem—encouraging if not demanding the reader’s participation in the performance of the poetic if not in the construction of a “meaning”. Words, footsteps (the sound of footsteps), speech, dancing, breath and image are all confl ated in the poem, suggesting that each is a mode of communication of equal validity and veracity, and that together they draw us to the alterity of the other, a subjection that reinstates and enables the ethical. The presentation of this truth together with our participation in the performance of its poetics marks a movement towards (a poesis that is), to use Paul Radin’s words, ‘reality at white heat’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 35). The participatory aspect of Rothenberg’s poetry, as it is achieved largely through the use of page space, is made explicit in his poem ‘The Journey Between Summers’ found later in this collection (Rothenberg 1975, 43–45). Here he writes: I hold her close. We sleep: the movement between poems is half my life, the other half your voices. (Rothenberg 1975, 43–44)

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Reading this extract we can see how the stanza shift separating ‘movement’ and ‘between’, whilst not effecting a temporal pause in our reading, nevertheless indicates a transition, whilst the line shifts between ‘half my life’, ‘the other half’ and ‘your voices’ materialises the parts played by the poet and reader. It is a concrete instance of Rothenberg’s concept of the poetic form as ‘the pattern of that movement through space and time’ (Rothenberg 1975, 2). In presenting the collaboration between poet and reader in ‘The Journey Between Summers’, Rothenberg also performs our relation in a universal sense (43–45). The relations in this extract are between the poet and the woman in his arms with whom he sleeps, the poet and the reader, and necessarily embodied in both these, the relationship between self and other. It is for this reason that Rothenberg maintains the separation within the same space as he articulates the connection between self and other. The poem continues: Strangers we stand Unknowing in a stranger’s house. Somos desconocidos, strangers to your love. Yet the same grass holds us, where you slept we also sleep, the grass is warm with your shapes. With strangers. My body covers hers. The grass swarms with old alphabets. (Rothenberg 1975, 44–45)

In an essay entitled ‘“Je est un Autre”: Ethnopoetics and the Poet as Other,’ Rothenberg concludes that ‘For those for whom it happens’— and I take this to mean for those who assume a subjection to the other as performed in ‘The Journey Between Summers’—‘the world is open, & the mind (forever empty) is forever full’ (Rothenberg 1994b, 524). Rothenberg understands that ‘“I” is “other,” is “an other,” is “the other.”’ And that ‘(There is also “you.”)’ (523). As ‘a play between that otherness inside me & the identities imposed from outside [ . . . ] it is a process of

The Welcome of the Other 139 becoming. A collaging self’ (524). Crucially, for us, this “I” is ‘infi nite and contradictory’ (524), with the ‘somos // desconocidos’ othering the language of the speaking subject. Indeed, the radical self-reflexivity inherent to a denaturalising of our language beckons a third phase of poethical praxis. Within this play, for instance, Rothenberg questions: ‘If the mind shapes, configures the world it knows or holds, is there an imperial/ colonizing mind at work here, or is this mind as shaper & collager still pursuing its old work: to make an image of the world from what appears to it’ (523)? The self-reflexive must always remain unanswered, but it is the ‘subversive’ mission of the ethnopoet to resist ‘the identities imposed from outside’, to be always ‘questioning the imperium even while growing out of it. Transforming’ (Rothenberg 1994b, 524). For the ethnopoet, according to Rothenberg, in ‘multiplicity’, in that welcoming of the other, there is ‘the cure for that conformity of thought, of spirit, that generality’ inherent to those who prioritise the ontological over the ethical, ‘that robs us of our moments. That denies them to the world at large’ (524). His poems thus cry out for an (inter)subjective engagement with the world, an ethical relation, here figured as feminine that has somehow been lost: They have left her In the wake of autos speeding over sunless roads On anguished nights in resorts in casinos overrun by a chimera At the blind center of a sundial They have left her. [ . . . ] They have left her in the rain where her voice was sleeping They have sucked the moon & stars from her veins & have left her, to return to empty offices with windows high above the sea They have left her (Rothenberg 1975, 36)

‘If the mind is a house that has fallen’ Rothenberg concludes his poem, ‘where will the eye fi nd rest’ (Rothenberg 1975, 39)? The intellectual abstractions of Western thought and the totalitarian discourses in which they manifest themselves have perhaps fallen with the advent of modernism that has parodied and deconstructed their ideologies, revealing them as false truths. Yet although the ‘Bloomusalem,’ to use Joyce’s term for it, has fallen, there has been no recovery of the subjective or a renewed ethical engagement with the world at the primary human level of a ‘reality at white heat’ (Joyce 1992, 606; Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 35). The transparent eyeball is left to roam over the desolation of a modern Babylon.

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The fi nal poems of ‘program one’ offer the redemptive possibilities found in the poet as visionary healer, or shaman for society. In ‘A Bodhisattva undoes Hell’ and from ‘The Counter-Dances of Darkness’, we hear a voice that said, ‘The heart’s / a flower / Love / each other / Keep the old / among you’ and hear the instruction to the shaman, ‘Write poem // The image’ (Rothenberg 1975, 39–42, 47–50, 41). Rothenberg asserted in the opening statements introducing ‘program one’ that ‘the poem is the record of a movement from perception to vision’ (2), and in these poems we see the vision as holding redemptive possibilities for the reader: The silence will open—as a hand will open against your hand [ . . . ] & there will be a language also—of our own. [ . . . ] only the kiss at your throat, the warm touch of you curve of my blood through yours (Rothenberg 1975, 49)

‘Program two,’ dated 1964, presents a series of poems from his Sightings (1964) and Further Sightings (1989) collections. Typical of the ethnopoetic project, the sense of these sightings is as of a movement towards something as yet not achieved. To begin the recovery of the subjective, Rothenberg presents ‘A hand extended, or a page. / The witness’ (Rothenberg 1975, 57). The ‘Measure of a day’ is found in the description of ‘bracken, green leaves’, ‘the presence of certain minerals’ as a ‘place to fi nd / refuge, to return’ (59). Yet this recovery is always checked, ‘So careless, my eye falters; careless’ (61). Even in the desire to maintain the value of the object, the alterity of its particularity (‘no idea but in things’ advised William Carlos Williams), there persists the ‘violence of new preoccupations’: ‘A twisted wire. / Ink’ (Williams 1995, 6; Rothenberg 1975, 61). There is something tortured in the desire for this recovery, with ‘one thought, a thousand movements’ (63)—it is the persistent return of the signifier to its signification that distances ‘reality at white heat’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, 35). The recovery remains painfully in the future tense, ‘All light we will become, be gathered’ (68) and Rothenberg must ‘insist on pain’ (75), for we can only ‘walk and run in stages’ (75) towards this recovery. Identity and our relation with alterity remains as tortured as it was for Stephen Bloom peering into the mirror: ‘cleft by a crook crack, hair on end. As he and others see me. Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin. It asks me too’ (Joyce 1992, 5). Utilising a similar broken syntax, Rothenberg writes in the eponymous poem ‘Further Sightings’: ‘My love for you is senseless. / I am what you see I do not see myself in you’ (75).

The Welcome of the Other 141 Nevertheless, in the development of an ethnopoetics that is open to the other, we begin to see that play described by Rothenberg in the ‘Poet as Other’, ‘between that otherness inside me & the identities imposed from outside’ (Rothenberg 1994b, 524). After the presentation of all the ‘Sightings’ poems included in this collection, Rothenberg provides a key to their reading: ‘let the spaces between phrases (as marked by the points at the lefthand margin) represent a silence equal or proportionate to the duration of each succeeding phrase’ (Rothenberg 1975, 77). Rothenberg’s ethnopoetics seeks to operate in contradistinction to the closed-off totalitarian text. For Rothenberg, there is ‘No wisdom but beyond a narrative’ (86); the ‘Sightings’ poems mock the sentimental, meaningless platitudes and idioms of contemporary Western discourse: The goats were locked in the mirror. The more the merrier. Good morning, neighbors. His breath smells sweet to everybody. Smile for the king. (Rothenberg 1975, 83)

It is rather by fragmenting the closed narrative, by offering space for the reader to participate in the performance of this welcoming of the other that his poetics moves from the predatory process of classification and its consumption in passive reading—‘Red easy a colour. / Make & manufacture. Stamp / A color. Easy. / The return of merchandise’—to the ethical participatory mode—‘A sense of red.’ (here not authorised with a capital stamp) the recovery of ‘Her color’ which ‘Is alive & cures’ (Rothenberg 1975, 88). The closed quality of the seamless totalitarian narrative is rendered graphically in his ‘Poems to celebrate the American Revolution’ (Rothenberg 1975, 82–86). Within the four walls of a square box drawn bold in the top corner of the page, he left-aligns the words ‘How she would hurt him, a narrative’ (85). Here there is no space for the reader to negotiate within the ontological narrative; there is no democratising self-reflexivity offered by the totalitarian narrator. The Gorky Poems fi rst published in 1966, continues this project to reclaim the ‘freedom to be human to the full extent of our powers and yearnings,’ that ‘dream of a total art—and of a life made whole’ (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xiv, xii). However, in his poem entitled ‘The Orators’, Rothenberg appears to have adopted the retrogressive understanding of subjectivity as outlined by Frobenius. The ethical orientation is delimited according to an ontological mode of being that Rothenberg nevertheless hopes might revitalise freedom: ‘Be no stranger to Air [ . . . ]

142 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry Be as you see it. [ . . . ] Do Not. But Be. & be guardian’ (Rothenberg 1975, 106–108). The focus again is on the particularity of things, with equal value being placed on the apogean and the propinquity in a micro- macrovision: ‘Be tooth. [. .] Be moth. Be. Be aureole. Essence. Ardors. America’ (107). Despite the ontological delimitation in the persistent repetition of the capitalised verb to ‘Be’, that very repetition registers a problematising of this interior-subjective mode. It is as if Rothenberg hopes to draw the verb to ‘Be’ out from a reductive logos, to shift the experience of language for the reader from totality to infi nity. Indeed, explicitly the poem aims to ‘open / This surface to clouds’ (108), an othering of the terms of language that confi ne us within identity-thinking. The voice of the poem also resonates with echoes of Olson’s Maximus Poems (1983), in particular, with Rothenberg’s emphasis on the call to ‘Be orators’ (108) and the importance of the mouth and air reflecting Olson’s celebration of speech as primary to the poetic utterance. In ‘The Orators’, touch recurs as a sensory perception for the reader, as if we are not touching the page, but the poet’s face, feeling the contours of the skin: be It With touch. Oh. I touch. Your hands. That Touch My face (Rothenberg 1975, 107)

Within the final address to ‘Be orators’ the poem ends with a call to the reader, a call for a certain response that is not prescribed. Rothenberg writes, ‘Merge a particular picture / Blossom’ (Rothenberg 1975, 108). The totalitarian narrative dictates a particular, privileged construction of reality, a conditioned picture of the world according to a selectivity that is often motivated by a capitalist if not ego-driven agency. Here we are called, however, to merge this ‘particular’ and thus situated picture with the wider universal realities of life (‘open / This surface to clouds’), that it, and we, may ‘Blossom.’ The Gorky Poems also form a hardened edge towards, perhaps the greatest totalitarian narrative, that of the American Dream, what John Tytell once described as that ‘magic elixir of progress in technology, cleanliness and order’ (Tytell 1976, 6). Rothenberg deconstructs this idealised America where the inalienable rights of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness’ are supposedly self-evident truths available to all, in his poem ‘The Pirate’. He writes:

The Welcome of the Other 143 A true flag of colors. No, a paper bag. The shadows in a paperbag that no one sees. The highpitched laughter no one hears. The ice no one feels. What men! What stone in their voices! What glass in their blood! What iron! What flesh! What bright eyes! This stone, this iron in a dream still worse when no one dreams it. (Rothenberg 1975, 96–97)

Indeed for Rothenberg, this idealised America is ‘a country of robots,’ for in the totalitarian narrative ‘We called it a place [only] by subtraction’ (Rothenberg 1975, 96, 103). The ethnopoetic project, as we have seen, rather seeks to welcome what the grand totalitarian narrative has written out, towards Duncan’s ‘symposium of the whole’ (Duncan 1971, 23). Rothenberg critiques the denial and repression of this alterity in another poem of that sequence, ‘Child of an Idumean Night’ (Rothenberg 1975, 109–112). Picturing the blind faith of the American capitalist, he writes, ‘They walk, eyes / In chest / Believing their peace’ and ‘go to war gaily’, carrying ‘an American flag / to the border’ (109). However, Rothenberg’s poetry also resists constructing a false dichotomy between an undisclosed ‘us’ and ‘them’. Indeed, in breaking from such binary and over-simplified thinking, his poetry often seeks to capture movement, rather than any fi xed identities. In his poem ‘Charred Beloved’, Rothenberg consciously shifts these boundaries; the poetic line moves in a fluid blur from the singular fi rst person self, a narration of the other and the presence of the third party, sketching these conceptually spatial divisions as ‘a web’ (113–114), towards the simple recognition that beyond what a web is ‘a web is’: But elements brought under skylines not light but to measure it to measure by what beyond salt salt measures. In threes. Elements in threes. Beyond measures. This makes a web.

144 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry Beyond threes. But beyond what a web is. A web is. (Rothenberg 1975, 114)

In ‘A Note on The Gorky Poems’, Rothenberg explains how they are a response to the work of the Abstract Expressionist painter, Arshile Gorky, but that ‘they aren’t about these things, for the last thing I would have learnt from Gorky is to write poems about Gorky’ (Rothenberg 1975, 118). Rothenberg suggests, ‘there is fi nally no key to the relationship, & an attempt to construct one would only be misleading’ (118). Rothenberg’s comment is relevant not only to a reading that would look to establish his relation to Gorky but also to any reading that attempts to identify an authorial and defi nitive prescription of the self, other, three, web, or Gods that are found in these poems. For Rothenberg, it is rather ‘those things that can’t be really defi ned that are the most interesting elements in any relationship’ (118). It is, for him, ‘a matter of convergence’ (118). It is with “programme three” of Poems for the Game of Silence, dated 1968, and across the poems presented in his next collection, New Selected Poems: 1970–1985, that we begin to see his most radical aesthetic experimentation towards a ‘total art’ that might meet the requirements of an ethical praxis (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). In the opening statements for “program three,” Rothenberg writes: ‘I believe that everything is possible in poetry, & that our earlier “western” attempts at defi nition represent a failure of perception we no longer have to endure’ (Rothenberg 1975, 122). It is with this faith, and some encouragement from the ethnomusicologist David McAllester, that Rothenberg proceeded in a project of ‘total translation’ (159), the transformation of the twelve Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell, from their original Navajo to an ethnopoetics in his own English tongue. Rothenberg understands that, just as the process of anthologising is conditionally a selective activity, so too ‘under the best of circumstances translation-for-meaning is no more than partial translation’ (Rothenberg 1975, 159). This is even more the case when the ‘text’ to be translated is in the densely woven textures of Navajo oral art. Rothenberg determined that, ‘to present what’s essentially a sound-poem, a total translation must distort words in a manner analogous to the original; it must match “meaningless” syllables with equivalents in our very different English soundings’ (159). The resulting poetry, variations of the vocables ‘Zzmmmm are & are gone to my howinow baheegwing hawuNnawu N nngahn baheegwing’, begin ‘to sing in a mode suitable to the words of the translation’ (158–159). Rothenberg’s translations thus demand a complete break from the conventions of western reading and any critical commentary of these poems that attempts to elucidate an authorial and direct transference of literal meaning

The Welcome of the Other 145 becomes absurd. Indeed the terminology of a ‘reading’ is far too reductive a concept, in its conventional mode. The vocables effectively jar us from the comfort zone of known significations; we are forced to draw on our primary human capabilities, to return to the tuning of the tongue and the ear without a system of referential signs upon which we can rely. The result is an ethnopoetics that necessitates a participatory reading and welcomes the alterity of the reader into the performance of the poetic line. The vocables can be sung in any number of ways and hence the poem, across its distances of reception attains an intersubjective dimension, the collective response of individual tongues in its multiple performances. Rothenberg insists that this process of developing an ethnopoetics that recovers our oral capabilities and reinstates a radical intersubjectivity, has been ‘a very natural one of extending the poetry into new areas of sound’ (Rothenberg 1975, 159). For him, the resulting Horse Songs are not ‘poetry plus something else’, but poetry as it once was and is in the ethnic tribal communities, where ‘poetry & music haven’t suffered separation’ (159). Rothenberg concludes the note on these translations: ‘Frank Mitchell’s gift has taken me a small way towards a new “total poetry,” as well as an experiment in total translation. And that, after all, is where many of us had been heading in the fi rst place’ (159). The joy inherent to the playfulness of sound in these vocables is not restricted to his Horse Songs, but is found throughout the subsequent poems written in the 1970s and 1980s. Indeed, in his poem ‘A Glass Tube Ecstasy’ there seems to be a ‘collapse of language’ into sound, ‘tabla tokta tokta takabala / taka tak’ (Rothenberg 1986, 107–109). With the recovery of the subjective from the private realm in vocalising these sounds, there is a sense of cathartic release from the exile of the logos, a joy in the lines from ‘Cokboy’: when the Baal Shem (yuh-buh) learns to do a bundle what does the Baal Shem (buh-buh) put into the bundle? (Rothenberg 1986, 32)

Or in ‘*OLD*MAN*BEAVER’S*BLESSING*SONG*’, the stars or asterisks form part of the magical joy of sound and song, a rhythm in laughter: *all*i*want*’s*a*good*5c*seegar* *heeheeHOHOheeheeHOHOheeheeHOHO* (Rothenberg 1986, 48)

Whilst these elements of radical aesthetic play are undoubtedly part of the process of developing a ‘total art’, they are also paradigmatic of Rothenberg’s increasing insistence on a lack of closure (Rothenberg and

146 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry Rothenberg 1983, xii). In his poem ‘A song about a dead person—or was it a mole?’ what would once have been considered a malfunction at the printing press—where the words literally run off each side of the page, letters chopped in half—is a conscious aesthetic strategy to open the poetic beyond the ‘text’ and resist the narrative closure of signified meaning. In Rothenberg’s turn towards a Dadaist irrationality and disturbance of aesthetic norms in the 1980s, we can see a kind of belief in unbelief that seeks to continuously deter the violent agency of the dominating totalitarian preoccupation. Indeed, speaking earlier at the Long Island University International Writers Conference, he claimed, ‘(Modern) art is fundamentally subversive. Its thrust is toward an open-ended (continuous) revolution’ (Rothenberg 1969). With the tone of a radical anarchist he continued: The poet sees the breakdown in communication as a condition of health, as an opening-up of the closed world of the old order. He carries the revolution of language & form into the new society of political revolutionaries. (Rothenberg 1969) Nevertheless, in 1980 he explained in his introduction to Pre-Faces & Other Writings (1981), that ‘Poets shape their worlds through their poems’ and that whilst the poetry ‘must in all events resist rigidity & closure’, he has, and insists so—‘make no mistake about it’—‘attempted, like other poets so engaged, to create a new & coherent poetics for our time’ (Rothenberg 1981, 3). This fi nally marks Rothenberg’s contribution to an ethnopoetics that seeks to welcome the other into the ‘symposium of the whole’ whilst resisting the violence of closure and maintaining the alterity of the particular (Rothenberg and Rothenberg 1983, xii). ‘There is no turning back’ he writes in “Je est un Autre,” ‘Here the millennium demands it’ (Rothenberg 1994b, 524). To this end, his work maintains the diastasis of identity by recovering a radical (inter)subjectivity in a participatory poesis. Whilst the ethnopoetic project remains processual, generative and partial, in Rothenberg’s work it nevertheless envisions a possible future. To conclude with a quotation from his fi rst magazine Poems from the Floating World (quoted in Mottram 1986, 238): There is a sea of connections that floats between: a place where speech is touch and the welcoming hand restores its silence

6

Traumatised Semiotics The Turn to Language and Bruce Andrews’ Poethical Praxis How have we come to the words, to our selves, our absenting community—all flesh, all fleshed together. Bruce Andrews. 1996. Paradise & Method: Poetics & Praxis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press: 15.

The radical aesthetic activism of writers in the fi rst and second phases of my “poethical trajectory” laid the ground-work for the next generation of avant-garde poets. However, in the midst of reported transnational, domestic and intercultural crises, the problematic relationship between the text and its consumption, between the written word and its readers, its consumers, has been increasingly compounded by our total integration with the contemporary mobile technologies of a “traumatised semiotics”. Under these conditions, the words of our collective language are sedimented with ideological references, key terms of political debate are codified, their possible meanings modulated according to a history of appropriation as legitimators of irresponsible (self-oriented) policy. Dominant or institutionally authorised discourses tend to be closed narratives, refi ned with the most careful of rhetorical manipulation so as to negate active reading. Indeed, as I argue in Chapter 7, such wireless discourses shape our human landscape by modulating our social cognition. It is thus not surprising that the shift to a third phase in my “poethical trajectory” is marked by a self-reflexivity and critical examination of language itself. Third phase poethical praxis (to borrow the words of Michael Greer) works to ‘problematize “speech” and “voice” as the locus of poetic expression’ and to raise the question of ‘author(ity) and subjectivity in poetic practice’ (Greer 1989, 150). Furthermore, it seeks to move beyond identification with the subaltern, bringing together the partialities of second phase social and political movements, into a comprehensive critique of our shared language. Notwithstanding this critical self-reflexivity, third phase poethical praxis continues in my trajectory towards an ethical politics. When Bruce Andrews—a young poet from Baltimore—moved to New York City, for example, his reflections on the late 1960s and early 1970s resonated with

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the Beat attitude twenty years earlier. ‘We’re microwaved and standardized,’ Andrews wrote later in his poetics book Paradise & Method, ‘(by being made hyperindividualized and then by being virtualized) from the insides out’ (Andrews 1996, 143). It was for him, a society conditioned according to ‘a late-capitalist national order of ideology and discourse and value, with its constricted political possibilities, its economic (and sexual and racial) inequality and its hegemonies of class and tradition’ (79). Indeed, what had began as a specific manipulation of language towards a panopticised public, intensified during the later stages of the Cold War following the débâcles in Korea and Vietnam. Advanced media technologies enabled a total coverage of the social terrain; the ideological opposition integral to communist containment, extended beyond the channels of government policy acting as a general social coercive on the American body politic. This hegemonic political ideology, broadcast via a monopoly of mainstream media organisations, now constitutes what Andrews describes as ‘an elaborate technology of normalization, a policing overview’ (Andrews 1996, 27): Content barrages us with magnetic devices geared to our private personal frequencies, content packaged as a nominalism, very designed, transmitted so it comes out of every pore [ . . . ] our glorious privacy— which is under cultural remote-controlled surveillance. (Andrews 1996, 143) From this technology of normalisation, ‘the lines are drawn’ and ‘the contexts are largely prefabricated’ (Andrews 1996, 26). In a technocracy of media conditioning, ‘circuits evaporate concealment on the basis of the all-pervasive Capital’, so that ‘some thoughts are programmed in—almost a neurophysiological program—others out’. ‘The normalization is a body language,’ writes Andrews, ‘this discipline makes bodies pliable, even transparent—corrections—Panopticism. [ . . . ] It’s the control, the subtle degrees of power by which all of our actions are calibrated in the normalizing vise of a social order (which can be national & political, or global and economic)’ (28). It is no coincidence that Andrews was inspired to begin writing during the Nixon years, against a backdrop of what he has described as, ‘near-genocidal brutality abroad as well as turbulent dissent and soul-searching at home’ (Andrews 1975). The ‘harshness and universal power’ of a language made to justify the atrocities of ‘near-genocidal brutality,’ haunted Andrews, as the ‘Nightmare of Moloch’ (Ginsberg 1956, 21) haunted Ginsberg. With the turn to the political right in the 1970s, all otherness was increasingly absorbed into the parameters of this ontologically conditioned language. Just twenty-five years later, Andrews wrote, ‘the future seems bleak: cognitive dissonance reduction. We sit in the twentieth century’ (Andrews 1996, 20). With the following passage he explained the condition more fully:

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What do we fi nd more recently in our own (now “postmodern”) era? A paradoxical combo: modernity’s troubling “decline of the referentials” (to use Henri Lefebvre’s term) coupled with an exorbitation of language: an enormously enhanced role for discourse, for the spectacle of multiple intersecting edifices of signs, of illusionist systems that act as binding ideologies in the West—in societies that must depend on this seemingly insubstantial (or desubstantialized) cement if they hope (at home at least) to renounce coercion and terror as principles of order. (Andrews 1996, 84) Today, this ‘exorbitation of language’ as a political tool of social coercion pervades every defi ning moment of the body politic. The “traumatised semiotics” of a language system, where each sign is codified and preloaded, straining to support ‘binding ideologies in the West,’ occludes the possibility of a cooperative ethical responsibility, both in geo-political and individual social relations.

LANGUAGE: THE THEME AND MATERIAL OF/FOR SOCIAL CHANGE Crucially, what Andrews came to realise was that ‘the way meaning is regulated is the way the social body is written—locally, nationally, globally’ (Andrews 1996, 52). This understanding would be of central importance to his poetic practice. It was arrived at principally from his political studies in which he sought an ‘explanation of foreign policy in social terms’ (Andrews 1975, 2). As Andrews has pointed out, he ‘began the scholarly study of American imperialism’ (Andrews 1996, 96)—at John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in 1965—at exactly the point at which he began to write. His subsequent doctoral project at Harvard University, a study of American foreign and domestic policy during the Cold War, necessitated a deconstruction of perhaps the greatest ontological abuse of language in modern history. Even within the Pentagon itself, this ontological violence was known as the creation of ‘the master illusion’ (see Pilger 2001, 184). To align America’s public attitude with the official version of events—that they had mistakenly and honourably been involved in a conflict of the Vietnamese against the Vietnamese—required a genius of language control. The concurrence of both the “hawks” and “doves” to this master narrative is testament to the Pentagon’s success. With Levinas’ philosophy in mind, we can understand this policy as more than just effective propaganda. Indeed, as with the language of Jewish oppression in Nazi Germany, the language of Cold War identity politics shows the flip-side of Levinas’ ethics of responsibility. The binary opposition of language-use might be theorised as follows. If language is the site of ethics, and the relation therein with alterity may be

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founded on love, so too language is the iniquitous site of nihilism, where violence may issue from the ego. It can be misused (by the nihilist) as a tool, or accepted (in an ethical relation) as our necessary response. Its power therefore is unique and the difference between ontology and ethics is one of language between totality and infi nity. In the Pentagon, language, as the chain-link fence of foreign and domestic policy during the Cold War era, was clearly used according to the ontological interests of the self. Under such conditions the power of language is most evident. John Pilger noted, by the 1980s ‘more than a third [of the American population] could not say which side America had supported and some believed that North Vietnam had been “our allies”’ (Pilger 2001, 178). Andrews’ studies in political science from 1965 to 1975, ‘kept constantly in mind some general matters which are far from standard toolkit items for young poets—power & violence, prescriptions for law & order & deviance & reproduction within a landscape of institutions’ (Andrews 1996, 78). It was an invaluable toolkit, enabling some understanding of the shifting political climate of those times. There was no sudden shift to left-wing politics in the 1960s, and of course, that era cannot be singularly defi ned. As M. J. Heale has observed, ‘it was a decade that saw the powerful eruption of rock music and the more tranquil dissemination of marijuana, and it ended with a walk on the moon’ (Heale 2001, 1). Nevertheless, there emerged in the 1960s a defi nite increased social and political awareness. New alternative tabloids served as a catalyst, co-ordinating the civil rights movements and consolidating left-wing critiques. In particular, the Vietnam War became a unifying theme for many of these alternative publications, including The Berkeley Barb, the New Left Notes, Kaleidoscope, the Los Angeles Free Press, The Fifth Estate, Helix and the Great Speckled Bird. Collectively, such publications helped to fracture the dominant discourses of the mainstream media, offering alternative critiques of American foreign and domestic policies. At the same time, other alternative tabloids such as Women’s Liberation, The Advocate, Madness Network News, Akwesasne Notes, and La Chispa: Chicano Community News, provided forums for a variety of activist groups such as women, gays, Native Americans, Chicanos, the elderly, persons of colour, and the physically, emotionally, and mentally challenged. These publications, whilst primarily serving minority groups, were also increasingly unified by the anti-war campaign. The Advocate, a ‘newspaper of America’s homophile community,’ for example, aligned demonstrations for gay rights with the Vietnam War protests for its sixtieth issue on May 26th, 1971. Whilst the underground tabloids gave a voice to the marginalised and challenged the dominant political ideologies of the time, they were still limited in their capacity to re-write the social body. In reading the Beat poetry of Allen Ginsberg, I argued that the process of a sub-cultural self-othering limited the ethical potential of his early poetics (see Chapter 4). Unlike Ginsberg, whose later work problematised this process, the underground

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press tended to work within its limits. These publications had laudable aims. Fenwick Anderson, a reviewer writing for Kaleidoscope on 10th May 1971, for example, recognised that ‘prevailing social conditions demand[ed] criticism’ and that the established press too often ‘acted as an apologist for the status quo’ (Anderson 1971, 3). For Anderson, the underground press was not a ‘passing fad,’ but ‘the forerunner of a new journalism’. Yet the rhetoric, illustrations and photography of these publications mirrored the polarised identities propagated by the mainstream media. This mirroring inverted the valorisation of those identities, but nevertheless depended on a reductive categorisation. Kaleidoscope’s vilification of the police, for instance, was as totalising a journalistic practice as the administration’s attacks on the counter-culture. The representation of all law-officers as ‘hating poetry’ in an article from February 2nd 1958 is indicative of the resort to a binary opposition, when a more sophisticated socio-political understanding was so desperately needed. Andrews’ conclusions, however, having looked in detail at what he describes as the ‘prevalence of U.S.-supported tyranny in [the] Third World’, were clear (Andrews 1996, 27). Realising the problem of representation for alternative or subversive critiques, he wrote: ‘certainly the world political economy, also takes the shape of a correctional institution, of a disciplinary society, a social grammar’ (27). Any ethical saying would have to break the ontological hold of its ‘social grammar’ and so challenge the totalised contextual parameters, or political economy, of our shared language. Counter-cultural papers did challenge the mainstream orthodoxy, but could never over-turn its political economy. Indeed, it is through language that we represent to ourselves our society and so language became for Andrews his theme and material as he worked towards an explanation in his poetic praxis of America’s social terrain. It was in poetry, rather perhaps than in the academic discourses of political science, that he saw a potential response ‘to the condition of a “postmodern” era’ (Andrews 1996, 81). The ethical imperative for Andrews was to ‘institute a “challenge”, some trouble, in my writing’ (79), to confront a postmodernity that he felt was ‘more & more dominated by discourse and in which specific [unsituated] references dissolve into an all-over & coercive “social composition”’ (81). This, he believed, was what poetry could ‘choose to model or to challenge.’

“LANGUAGE” POETRY FROM COMMUNITY TO CANON Andrews was not the only poet to emerge in the late 1960s as critical of American domestic and foreign imperialism, but what linked his work with a certain constellation of other writers at that time was a shared focus on the politics of language. Not long after he began writing, Andrews visited the library at John Hopkins in Baltimore and there discovered, ‘from

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its pretty extensive collection,’ in his own words, ‘the small press literary world’ (Andrews 1996, 94). On the whole, the alternative press tabloids tended to publish poets of iconic counter-cultural status. The L.A. Free Press, for instance, often published poems or essays by well-known figures, such as Ishmael Reed, Sylvia Plath, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. Kaleidoscope was a rare exception, giving generous space to less known poets, including Deborah Kinder, Dennis R. Tankar, Neal Wilgus, Laurie Stupich, Morgan Gibson and C. T. Chappelear. Yet these voices were again subsumed within the paper’s political agenda and in any case their various poetics offered only a surface critique as a binary opposition to the dominant mainstream. Alongside these alternative tabloids, however, as Andrews noted, there was a ‘magazine scene, a terrain of activities around something like experimental poetry’ (Andrews 1996, 94). Andrews soon became involved in these projects, enjoying what was later described as a ‘fi rst principle’ for the poets: ‘the reciprocity of practice implied by a community of writers who read each other’s work’ (Silliman, Harryman et al. 1988, 271). Journals—including the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, HOW(ever), This, Big Deal, Tottel’s, Eel For, Hills, and La-Bas—as well as a number of small-press chap-book series—Tuumba, The Figures, Potes & Poets, Sun & Moon, Burning Deck, Roof Books and This Press—provided a forum for a practice-based, community-oriented discussion of the politics of (poetic) language.1 An important figure in this community of writers was the poet Ron Silliman. Two years Andrews’ senior, from Pasco, Washington, Silliman had a similar sense of the condition of language. ‘The words are never our own,’ Silliman wrote, ‘rather, they are our own usages of a determinate coding passed down to us like all other products of civilization’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, 167). Indeed, with Silliman’s work we might extend the critique of the transmogrification of language with reference to the emergence of a late-capitalism. In the tradition of such Marxist thinkers as Althusser, Macherey and Jameson, Silliman wrote: What happens when a language moves toward and passes into a capitalist stage of development is an anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word, with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism,” the optical illusion of reality in capitalist thought. These developments are directly tied to the function of reference in language, which under capitalism is transformed (deformed) into referentiality. (Silliman 1987, 10) In contradistinction to Walt Whitman’s famous proclamation, Silliman recognised that ‘we do not contain multitudes so much as we are the

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consequence of a multitude of confl icting and overdetermined social forces, brought to us, and acted out within us, as language’ (Silliman 1982, 65). By 1984 North American academics began to discuss this new scene, adopting Silliman’s phrase—a categorisation that inevitably became heavily contested—describing the work as the emergence of a so-called “Language” poetry. Andrews became best known for his activities in this community as co-editor of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine, fi rst published in 1979. Working with Charles Bernstein, he was thus at the centre of this debate concerning the politics of language. The history of the “Language” poets is well documented, although it is perhaps important to stress that the term should not be used as labelling a group, but denoting a particular tendency. 2 Indeed, Lee Bartlett has argued that ‘the essentially hermetic character of the project’ is in fact ‘too multifaceted and diffuse to be called a project at all’ (Bartlett 1986, 742). Furthermore, as Michael Greer has shown, ‘more than sixty writers’ have been ‘linked to the project of Language poetry’ (Greer 1991, 149), and so any attempt to indicate an exhaustive list is problematic. Nevertheless, across these publications certain names recurred frequently: Andrews, Bernstein, Silliman, Barrett Watten, Lyn Hejinian, Nick Piombino and Steve McCaffery. Through the dynamic interchange of these radical poetries, there emerged a shared desire ‘to explore language, as up close as possible, as a material & social medium for restagings of meaning & power’ (Andrews 1996, vii). However, this shared desire as defi nitive of a “Language” poetry tends to mask the diversity of the work, both in terms of its politics and poetics. Such differences were in part a product of the geocultural axis separating the east coast “Language” poets from the west that has persisted to defi ne the American literary landscape. In the fi rst instance, “Language” poetry emerged through the academic and small press publishing networks of the San Francisco Bay Area. For example, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and Robert Grenier all worked at the University of California at Berkeley during the 1970s. The New York based L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine edited by Andrews and Bernstein however, largely dismantled the coastal divide, welcoming a broader geographical input from poets such as the Canadian based Steve McCaffery. A corollary of the labelling title and sheer breadth of the poets published by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Magazine was the absorption of this shared focus on the politics of language into what Andrews described as ‘a sense of crises about the social order [ . . . ] in the Nixon era’ (Andrews 1996, 96). It is not necessarily true that the sense of “crisis” to which Andrews refers, however, was collectively felt, nor that it was understood in the same way. Whilst Andrews’ critical writing drifts, perhaps less easily than Silliman’s or Bernstein’s, into the Marxist lexicon of a late socialism, his poetry is nevertheless the most revolutionary. Lyn Hejinian’s most famous

154 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry work My Life (1987), for instance, challenges the autobiographical mode (just as Andrews rejects the lyric “I”), yet her work remains concerned with the individual experience of what it means to be a woman in society. Similarly, Susan Howe’s poetics explores the stutter in American literary history as the disenfranchised voice of the past. Furthermore, whilst Bernstein colluded with Andrews in claiming that ‘the place of alternative forms of writing and reading’ is in the ‘transformation’ of ‘the capitalist social order as a whole’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, x), his poetics is less convincing. As Geoff Ward has observed, his poetry is characterised by ‘a hyper-active wit recalling the provocations of Dada and Surrealism [ . . . ] because of an unacknowledged uncertainty about the validity of his argument’ (Ward 1993). More than any other “Language” writer, Andrews’ radical experimentation is a critically social practice in explanation of a totalising political economy. Indeed, there is an urgency and poetic ambition in this project that outstrips that of the other “Language” writers. Rather than dealing with a particular disenfranchised group, or developing alternative linguistic practices of communication and expression, Andrews’ project necessarily calls for an ethical challenge to the traumatisation of our shared language.

FIRST PHASE “LANGUAGE” POETRY In the face of others, violated by a transmogrified language according to an ontological abuse, we can begin to sympathise with the radical nature of early “Language” poetry. In the street, across the front pages of the daily papers and Life magazines, on television in the Presidential address, and in news reports from Vietnam, faces written over with ‘sign pollution’ (Slocombe 2005), contaminated verbs, and ontologically distorted signifiers; faces framed by the dominant discourses of master narratives, could only be met with a new linguistic practice. 3 For Andrews, these were ‘the crises facing poetry,’ and they crystallised his resolve to undertake ‘a drastic adventurousness of language’ in his poetic experimentation (Andrews 1996, 247). Andrews’ early collection of poems entitled SONNETS (Memento Mori) (1980) marks his initial contribution to a “Language” poetry that might, in the words of Jerome McGann, ‘set language free’ (McGann 1987, 634). The poems cannot be easily defi ned, nor do they fit comfortably with traditional poetic constructions. Indeed, despite the label of the book’s title, not one of the seventy-eight “sonnets” in this collection conforms to an iambic pentameter, octave-sestet arrangement or volta, a “turning” at the ninth line. Furthermore, the opening poem entitled ‘HOLYBARK’ challenges at the outset, any attempt at interpretation:

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Small direction. Small glass brief. They found bits of lint in this throat. It was blue. By which captions were defined dun-no—she laughs easily—erases me Some show off so all wide am unharmed contradict fingers into unarmed finish a baptist by such a procedure exemplary whiz five presidents But black’s fianchetto of his king bishop is premature. (Andrews 1980, 7)

Who is the speaking voice of this poem? What is the context? Is this a funeral, a baptism or a game of chess? How do we interpret the poem and so locate it within the ontological parameters of our social world? Andrews’ ‘HOLYBARK’ purposively disarms such questions. There is no way to frame this poem, no lyric “I” with which we can identify or locate within a socially known telos. Andrews rather presents the signifiers in abstract relation, devoid of a referential fi xing. The ‘small direction’ of signifying capacity is ‘brief,’ and the language refutes its poetic inheritance of a romantic lyrical quality: ‘They found bits of lint in this throat.’ However, the internalised conventions of reading are not so easily disabled, and thus the mind follows the associations of each word of ‘HOLYBARK.’ Meaning may be troubled according to the semantic contradictions, the push and pull of the typography and syntax, but the resonances of Andrews’ language persists. Lint, for example, is the excess verbiage in a document, as well as the bits of fluff removed from a Unix program, when closely examined for style, language-use and portability problems. Perhaps this means then, that ‘am unharmed / contradict fingers into’—with the lint removed—‘unarmed,’ as if the ideology loaded into a word in ontological abuse, can be removed so that it might signify vulnerability rather than defensiveness. Yet then the question remains, why ‘whizz five presidents’? Is this a reference to the five presidents since Nixon’s Watergate scandal?

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Yet this interpretation of the author’s meaning is quickly checked when one remembers that the poem was written in 1980. Indeed, at the moment we begin to arrive at a fi xed meaning, to interpret a line, it is immediately thrown into contention by the next: ‘But black’s fianchetto of his king bishop is premature.’ Fianchetto, pronounced in Italian with a hard “k” sound, is a move typical of the “hypermodern” school of chess theory. It is a philosophy whereby one delays direct occupation of the centre with the plan of destroying the opponent’s central outpost. With this fi nal move the sonnet performs its volta as a conclusion, as a dialectical construct, negating any conventional reading practice of interpretation or identification. The process by which we locate ourselves at the centre of a text, clothe ourselves in the signification of a subject position and align the contextual elements as constituting the circumference of the socially possible, is thus inverted. Breaking the chain-link fence of identification and interpretation thus pushes us from the comfortable centre position of an ontologically “free” ego. Where in ‘HOLYBARK’ we have traced the dialectical tension of several lines, the socio-political tensions are compounded in the subsequent sonnets at the level of the individual word. In those poems directly following ‘HOLYBARK,’ punctuation vanishes (with just occasional dashes or brackets) as the individual words explode typographically to the edges of an increasingly fragmented form. Yet in the third sonnet we read, ‘no visual significance’ (Andrews 1980, 13), and so choices of interpretation that may have been formed according to the typographical arrangement are frozen. We are pushed back to attend to the level of the individual signifier, the weight of words in a dream in ‘OVALTINE’: * snow boxcar spider deeds aplomb * (Andrews 1980, 9)

In place of a stable lyric “I”, an ego that would fi ll out the form of the poem, the materiality of the words, their physical presence and an emphasis on the

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processes of production, dominate. Choices of typographical arrangement are emphasised: even my stutter a conjunction don’t get excited

half lying

half situating no visual significance (Andrews 1980, 13)

The rules of language, of its various components, and the value we attribute to them are exposed: I’m from Paduka noun delay or just out (Andrews 1980, 18)

The body, and our tendency to locate its physical presence in narrativities, is problematised: to forsake skin simples what’s inside you here? double play here?

here (Andrews 1980, 20)

These poetic experimentations challenge the social organisation of rhetorical construction. Collectively they contribute to a poesis described in ‘READING CAPITAL’ as a ‘lens sort of / expansive [in order to] / amplify

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parts’ (Andrews 1980, 26). In drawing our attention to the broader context of language—the ontological agency of our social grammar—and by challenging the galvanisation of words into this coercive hegemony, the sonnets effectively illuminate the constituent parts of language, stripped to a bare materiality. Andrews’ poetry is constructed so that we must attend solely to the individual signifier, to accept its presence without the need for a referential framework. The individual signifiers are taken from their trauma in ideologically loaded discourse, larger syntactical structures of rhetorical design, to be present in their nudity. In ‘TALL MAN RIDING’ the individual signifiers, we might suggest then, are left to stand naked as an ethical saying: i have no procedure * veterans romance politic spinals

anomie

literature

a way of particularizing (Andrews 1980, 46–47)

In such passages Andrews allows for the free surface play of the signifiers and the resultant non-narratological determination problematises reference. From Andrews’ writing elsewhere, not least from his doctoral studies, we know that the moral imperative of his poetry is to effect political change in the light of social injustices, but what we see here in his poetic praxis is, whether consciously or not, an attempt to uncover the ethical saying of language, that is, an ethical imperative in Levinas’ sense. The attendance to the individual signifi er marks what Woods has described as, the fi rst phase of “Language” poetry, to experiment with ‘single letters, words, or signifiers [ . . . ] motivated by a desire to wipe the linguistic slate clean, refocusing attention on how words operate without the conventional clutter of grammatical apparatus’ (Woods 2002, 236–237). With this poetic praxis, ‘rather than continuity,’ Woods suggests, ‘the emphasis falls on discontinuities, interruptions, and disjunctions’ (237). These tropes can be seen across the diverse range of poetries in the early work of the “Language” writers. Bernstein, for example, describes the narratological-teleological disruption in Silliman’s work, as a specific reaction to ‘the deep slumber of chronology, causality, and false unity (totalisation)’ (quoted in McGann 1987, 639). Perelman was concerned ‘to maintain the

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objectness of an object’ (see Woods 2002, 249). For Silliman, such a poetic praxis was part of his Marxist critique. At this particular juncture of late capitalism, he thus claimed that poetry represents the ‘social function of the language arts, to carry out the struggle for consciousness to the level of consciousness’ (Silliman 1984, 131). In this fi rst phase “Language” poetry, the shared rejection of linearity, lyric subject voice and referential meaning, in each case creates a tension resulting from our conventional reading practices. For Andrews, ‘in dismantling the scaffolding, we create a literature of negative retrieval. “Unreadability”—that which requires new readers, and teaches new readings’ (Andrews 1996, 6). If there is a new way of reading to be learned from these poems, it is no longer as the ‘glazed gaze of a consumer’, but in co-operative responsibility, as a participant or co-producer of the socialsemiotic event (12). The ‘negative retrieval’ demands a meaning that is constitutive, rather than referential and consumable. Furthermore, if there is an intention behind this poetry it is to present ‘an Other or an Outside which is both a “not us” and a “not yet”’ (251). The poetic praxis is thus a ‘politicizing’—‘a radical reading embodied in writing’; ‘it orients us to keep facing this larger other’ (41). Such poetry not only attempts to repossess the sign (whilst recognising that such a process is fraught with ontological dangers), but to perform the process by which we might re-write or re-read the social. Indeed there is no “deeper” meaning in these poems, but a wider meaning—‘a Politics—at the same time—of both the Sign and the Social Context’ (54). The following poem, one of the final sonnets in Andrews’ early collection, demonstrates one of the ways in which this is achieved: OSTENSIBLE The Honeymoon Killers Night of the Living Dead site elation

flies in a deviate argot bundles ablaze

materiality banding ho’

shot that to be excited

keg nulls iron made noun

subject object object gainst head. (Andrews 1980, 74)

The typographical arrangement of this poem leaves us uncomfortable with any one reading, pulling our gaze in different directions and troubling us to ‘locate ourselves in formal terms’ (Andrews 1996, 119). The squared blocks in place of a semantic linearity are combined with a lack

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of punctuation, seemingly disabling the opening and closing required for meaning-statements. Thus Andrews, as Woods suggests is typical of fi rstphase “Language” poetry, ‘emphasizes the word against the sentence and the syllable against the word’ (Woods 2002, 239), contesting and disrupting those forms of order that McGann argues ‘are always replicated in the “realism” deployed through narrativities’ (McGann 1987, 132). Whilst there is no ostensible meaning, we may be constitutive of its production; attending to the individual signifiers as they subvert the process of meaning-construction, what emerges is a critique of precisely that which the poem resists. The formulaic realism of the horror fi lms The Honeymoon Killers (1970) and Night of the Living Dead (1968), provide a context for this meaning. In those fi lms, audience response is carefully calculated and controlled via cinematic and narratological devices. ‘OSTENSIBLE’ works against such prescriptive effects; the ‘site elation’ achieved under realist conditions is broken by a ‘deviate argot’ where the materiality of the individual signifiers, ‘keg nulls iron,’ are ‘made noun,’ and stripped of their referential capacity (Andrews 1980, 74). The process by which the director ‘shot that to / be excited’ is unveiled as the poem’s own semantic self-reflexivity, a use of words, ‘subject object object / gainst head’. The title poem of Andrews’ next collection Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened (1988), takes another approach to the ‘unveil[ing] or demystify[ing of] the creation and sharing of meaning’ (Andrews 1996, 18), as demonstrated in Figure 6.1. The switching of individual letters in this poem, from ‘accept’ to ‘except’, charges the words with ideological electricity, making explicit the rhetorical processes of cultural consensus. Similarly, the variations in punctuation from ‘it’s me’, ‘I miss’ to ‘I’m missed’ checks any identification with a stable subject, and disavows a privileged reading. The overall effect is not so much one of total excommunication, but rather, via a movement in and out of referential focus, there opens the possibility of a social participatory poetics. This oscillation in and out of referential focus is a kind of stretching out of the signifier from its said, revealing the imposition of meaning that is otherwise perceived to be naturally embodied in language. The effect is to destabilise our sense of self as a “free” ego, revealing our dependence on language and the social codings we embody in its use. The disjunctive calibration of the sign and its signification calls into question the relation between the reader and the social world. In an ontological mode of address, ‘references evacuate the sign’ and in its place, ‘intentionality fi lls it up’ (Andrews 1996, 13). Where poetry allows for the ‘polymorphous play’ (15) of its linguistic units, however, making explicit (whilst also contesting) the ontological pull, writing can become a ‘reconstitution of meaning, value, and the body’ (21). The tension between an ontological and an ethical relation in language, however, is made most explicit in the fi nal series of poems from Getting Ready, appropriately entitled ‘PLEX.’ The neologism ‘PLEX’ fl irts with

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accept except

it's me i miss I'm missed

fighting across the future meek shall inhibit the dearth futures rehearse that

Law, vain

Done with Midas knotted together & 've still not been round Not so fragile as to risk nakednesses answered his ideal Navy galore

Only structure & rough approximations of the "privileged

reading" - approximations based on cultural consensus

are available publicly Private riches are emotion with nary an effect or ignoble effort Figure 6.1 1988, 80).

- only these

Pdurahrn,

Extract from ‘Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened’ (Andrews

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

its alternate referential fi xings, at once implying “complex”, the kind of transparency of plexiglass (perhaps as the manufactured naturalisation of the imposition of meaning in words), and plexus (as the intricate network or arrangement of our socio-discursive organisation through language). It also seems to me, to resonate in association with the quality of the pliable or polymorphic, suggesting perhaps that process of imposition by which ideology is codified in words, their plasticisation. The ‘PLEX’ poems are arranged typographically on each page as a spiral “S” or, where there are overlapping layers of words, mirroring the golden section of a DNA double helix shape. The spirals of words are sometimes thick, sometimes thin, but the thicker the spiral the more confused the sense, or perhaps more precisely, the less comfortable the read. The tension between ontology and ethics is explained in the praxis of a poetic language pulling towards and away from its referential fi xing. What Andrews describes in his poetics book as the ‘stereotypes [ . . . ] fighting pitched battles over the institutions we call words’, is demonstrated in the battle of pronominals, conjunctives, indefi nite articles, prepositions and personal pronouns, to secure a stable subject position (Andrews 1996, 263). In the ‘PLEX’ poems such a construction is always fraught, denying the possibility for a ‘persona’ to serve ‘as a covert operative of “official” social Meaning’ (143). As Andrews has explained: the lacework of the social, of the social body, does beckon for an explanation, does solicit one, but this time an explanatory discourse can be embodied in the writing itself, in the words’ production of meaning—in its own lacemaking (not “force”, momentum). (Andrews 1996, 236) The momentum of these ‘PLEX’ poems, spiralling from one side of the page to the other, becomes hypnotic. Again, this poetics embodies an explanation, revealing that process whereby language, in its ontological mode, institutes a fi x. Andrews writes: “The fi x is on.” It hypnotizes us with these expectations, long before any particular content is unearthed. The format massages us with its illusions [ . . . ] you have nothing to do with this. [ . . . ] Commodities are sold, productions are forgotten. (Andrews 1996, 7) Certain phrases resonate within these ‘PLEX’ spirals as significant to the explanation: ‘contently apprehensible’ (Andrews 1988, 97), ‘dependence of discourse to relax’ (Andrews 1988, 101), ‘on an as a into’ (103), ‘a quality hostage’ (105), ‘relations public social order horizontality’ (104), ‘Language of the Ego’ (104), perhaps even, ‘volcano wool’ (102). The fi nal page of the ‘PLEX’ poems, the last page of Getting Ready, breaks the hypnosis of the spiral rhythm:

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coefficient gearboxes because surface given incomplete in heart helicopters (Andrews 1988, 116)

That this “conclusion” resolves the tension between ontology and ethics in language, is dubious, nevertheless the hypnosis is made explicit or denaturalised, aiding a regeneration of a transmogrified language. We learn that a fractal surface, incomplete, allows for the heart to helicopter; where the meaning of these poems is indistinct, there resides the possibility for new social, interpersonal (intimate) relations and social configurations.

SECOND PHASE “LANGUAGE” POETRY Woods has argued that the fi rst phase of “Language” poetry—‘an exploration through the single-unit focus’—ignored ‘the operations of ideology at work in larger organizational units’ (Woods 2002, 239). “Language” poets, he suggests, ‘appear to have recognized such limitations around the early 1980s, when they began to examine and experiment with larger forms, moving into a second phase.’ As Andrews explains in his poetics book, these larger organisational units are the basis of discourse, ‘the socially said,’ and with this recognition, the limitation of the first phase becomes clear: Power, for example, seems to dissolve within the sign—& yet power persists. Power is the surplus of the sign: what the sign cannot account for in its generic, minimum terms. [ . . . ] Signification pulses through Discourse; its flows are activating. Yet this more bulked up, socialized version of the ground for meaning will be much harder to challenge. Discourse is not as vulnerable as the Sign. The drastic Sign Trouble may be too blunt a knife for Discourse. It may require the construction of a positively valued vehicle for mediation for it (Discourse) to be open to frontal challenge. (Andrews 1996, 261) In my recent interview, Andrews, reflecting on this argument, extended further the explanation for the shift in poetic praxis:

164 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry I think what happened in this shift that Tim Woods talked about toward larger units of meaning—in my case that happened when I moved to New York City and started to give public readings. I was aware that the only kind of material that was easily graspable in performance, that was the easiest to grasp in performance, was work that worked with longer units, not necessarily speech based but at least phrased-based, and so my work started moving in that direction at that time but that did open up also the possibility of using more social material, using socially-loaded material, which is now pretty much what I love to do, exclusively in things that I chose to read.4 The shift to a second phase “Language” poetry, at least in Andrews’ work then, resulted from both a pragmatic concern, relating to the performance of his work, as well as a theoretical one, in conjunction with the critique of language. The ‘calculated drainage of the referential qualities of individual words’, typical of a fi rst-phase “Language” poem, was now deemed insufficient (Andrews 1996, 18). Whilst the linguistic demolition derby instituted a radical difference of form, facing the reader with a “traumatised semiotics”, such poetries remained bound within the ontological seizure of language. Andrews’ poetry publication entitled Give Em Enough Rope (1987) is a transitional text within this framework. It anticipates, as Bob Perelman has noted, the rhetoric of his subsequent book, I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism) (1992), particularly in regards to the poem ‘Confidence Trick’. In contradistinction to his earlier work, this poem condenses the typographical arrangement into conventional proselike and justified blocks. These blocks are made up of the larger syntactical structures of the socially said. Referentially charged lines of discourse— ‘The confusion of the language matches the confusion of the sentiment’, ‘To isolate electromagnetic relief valves so that nations can live through successive re-enactments of the birth trauma’—are interrupted by individual or coupled signifiers—‘goosebump,’ ‘Square bit front’ (Andrews 1992, 184–185). In this way, the trauma of a terrorised semiotics, the tension of a language under ontological abuse, is made more explicit and the reading experience is highly charged. The line ‘I like to mistranslate everything else we hear’, is perhaps key to the poem, suggestive of the method by which Andrews draws in the noise of language in the public domain (144). Our contemporary world is one in which we are constantly subjected to reading, not in the classical sense of canonical literature, but the billboards, tabloids, podcasts, magazines, RSS feeds, and mobile SMS advertisements that are streamed through us. ‘Confidence Trick’ re-presents these narrative streams, scrambled into an overall noise. Indeed, such an explanation makes sense of the cover illustration (Figure 6.2)—a visual representation perhaps, of the other’s face. Written over with sign pollution, the witness of the eyes combusts under the heat of a

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“traumatised semiotics”; the mouth words soundless, for they have told themselves empty of an ethical saying. In an ontological seizure, the face becomes both violent and traumatised. The poems of I Don’t Have Any Paper assume the same typographical arrangement as ‘Confidence Trick.’ Similarly, the “traumatised semiotics” of the socially said, as presented in these poems, is like ‘glycerine friction,’ a descriptive from the fi rst poem ‘ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE DEAD’ (Andrews 1992, 9). In an interview with Charles Bernstein in 1995, Andrews explained his process of composition for such poems. In the mid-1980s, when the material from I Don’t Have Any Paper was composed, he worked to: generate large amounts of material on very small pieces of paper, one two three four five words at a time, in clusters, short fragments of phrases or pre-phrases, and then compose the work, sometimes much later than when I had written the raw material, into works based on a whole series of decisions that I’ll make later; so its more like editing fi lm footage, so that the editing process becomes the composing process, or that that’s what gets focused on more than some kind of pointof-inspiration moment that I actually wrote the words in. (Andrews and Bernstein 1995) The methodological practice of editing as composition corresponds to his theoretical understanding that advocates disjunctions and generative possibilities over totality or closure. For Andrews, the speech- or breathbased inspirational practice that was important to Charles Olson and the Black Mountain Poets, together with the kind of spontaneous-confessional practice of Kerouac and the Beat writers, lacked the self-reflexivity essential to his critique of language. The poems of I Don’t Have Any Paper are re-assembled fi lm strips or lines of socially said material that form a montage riddled with continuity errors and non-diegetic sounds. As avantgarde films often contest the hyper-real gloss of Hollywood cinema, these poems challenge the ‘semantic (sewing) machine of representation’, desynchronising sound and image, the ethical saying from its socially said (Andrews 1996, 126). Through displacement, interruption, doubling and juxtaposition, Andrews’ poetics colludes with Steve McCaffrey’s suggestion that ‘a language centered writing dispossess us of language, in order that we may possess it again’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, 162). As Woods makes clear, the poetic exploration of ‘larger organizational units of form, grammar, and narrative production’ was an important part of the development of “Language” poetry (Woods 2002, 239). Indeed, he refers to ten different poetic works of the 1980s, all of which incorporated, in one way or another, this methodological focus. Whilst Andrews’ second phase of “Language” poetry was simply concerned with the larger rhetorical fragments of the socially said, other “Language” writers began to present such material according to a visual, acoustic or lexical patterning. Moving beyond

166 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry

Figure 6.2 Bruce Andrews, Give Em Enough Rope, cover illustration “Arena Brains II, 1985” by Robert Longo.

the excommunication of a poetics that systematically drained the reference of its material, “Language” writers attempted to develop a non-referential or non-hypotactic method of meaning making. In place of ‘the conduit theory of communication (“me” > “you”),’ for example, Charles Bernstein argues that second phase “Language” poetry, ‘gives way to a sounding of language from the inside’ (quoted in Perloff 1984, 16). In his introduction to a ‘Language Sampler,’ he clarified this tendency by suggesting that: There is a claim being made to a syntax [ . . . ] of absolute attention to the ordering of sound’s syllables [ . . . ] Not that this is “lyric” poetry, insofar as that term may assume a musical, or metric, accompaniment

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to the words: the music rather is built into the sequence of the words’ tones, totally saturating the text’s sound. (See Perloff 1984, 16) Similarly, Marjorie Perloff, a significant champion of the “Language” writers, proposes that, in this mode ‘the poet’s voice functions as no more than a marginal presence’ (Perloff 1984, 16). Much like Andrews’ process of composition, she suggests that the role of the poet here is to ‘splice together the given “data”’. Crucially, however, Perloff goes on to suggest that the ‘sound structure is generative’ (19). This is not necessarily true of Andrews’ work, an aspect that sets his poetry apart from the majority of secondphase “Language” writers. Across the broader spectrum of “Language” writing, as Perloff rightly argues, the ‘sound associations between words add to the possible meanings’. One might look at Ron Silliman’s Tjanting (1986) or Ray Di Palma’s more recent Metropolitan Corridor (1992), as examples of such sonic texts. Andrews, however, is more sceptical of this process, questioning its validity as an alternative to meaning (or representation) through reference.5 In Paradise and Method, for instance, Andrews questions this attempt, in Bernstein’s words, ‘to make audible the thinking field’: Some urge explorations of sound’s infi nite reach [ . . . ] but perhaps this “sound contact” is just another extension cord, or sound contract, for the social whole. IOU is due. By themselves, these “soundings” may resemble, and end up as no more troubling than, a purely “grammatical praxis” of the sentence. [ . . . ] attention “to” can also be attention “away”—here, away from the boundaries which hem in all our arts and labours of making sense, making solidarities and intensities of value. (Andrews 1996, 128) It is this intense focus and determination to develop an explanation in praxis of the social terrain that really marks out Andrews’ work. Where other “Language” writers have failed to move beyond this second phase, where works rest at ‘the poetics of the limit’ (Woods 2002), within the circumference of the ontological parameters of the socially possible, at the limit of reference, Andrews’ work presses outwards: ‘Beyond any formalism of the surface, we can therefore look to what’s expensively at stake in the messages (or sounds and placements) flying back & forth, absorbed, caught up in [ . . . ] solicitings of a social whole from deeper down in what keeps it going, what keeps it from changing’ (Andrews 1996, 218).

THIRD PHASE “LANGUAGE” POETRY In the mid-1990s, Andrews abandoned the rather ineffective montage form of I Don’t Have Any Paper—the poems describe themselves as ‘obvious algebraic suicide’—returning to a more fragmentary poetics (Andrews

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1992, 189). His concern for an explanation in praxis began to crystallise as he sought in his poetics for ‘the possibility of a socially sovereign moment,’ as a ‘counterhegemonizing’ textual activism in unison with the regeneration of a transmogrified language (Andrews 1996, 132). Here we begin to see the desire for the kind of ethical relation mapped out by Levinas’ philosophical thought. Dissatisfied with the oppositional poetics of a structuralist-semiotic approach, Andrews sought a positively valued poetics, realising that, ‘ethics, your speech—the literacy of your body—will not be freed unless your distinction is embraced: to preserve a secretiveness, a separateness, a sovereign otherness’ (129). His alternative to the non-sign based, melopoeiac reference of other “Language” writers, emerges most clearly in his recent poetic projects: Lip Service (2001), The Millennium Project (2001), and Mistaken Identity (2002). As with his earlier work, Mistaken Identity—a series of poems composed during a live performance with the guitarist Vernon Reid—offers no stable subject construction. The poems push outwards, ejecting onto the page the (socially said) discursive statements of identity construction. There is a “punk” attitude embodied in this process, a rejection of ideologically loaded, codified and consumer identities. Reading Mistaken Identity is a process not of identification with an alternative, counter-cultural renege, but a communal undressing of our shared language. In reading the extract below, for instance, we must disrobe our clothes of signification and reject the terms of our social organisation: 1. The situation has a situation Electro-convulsive opinions eat us Pig brink dollarization, the marriage of money gobble gobble money Profit margin american cream dream cultures of vultures A social predicament, the losers are self-preoccupied Jellyfish FBI—are you a vending machine? Who fights the free?—at least the exploited ones have a future Dayglo ethics, corporate global chucksteak Lose the flag, nightstick imitation value goosing me Estados Unidos, suck o loaded pistol Scale model blonde—zoloft, paxil, luvox, celexa Need money?—it’s easy, it’s simple Dot-commie foreskin arrevederci Hot mark-up johnny on the spectacle You as the human labor saving device Culture, please—all very non-missionary Massive doses of dog tranquilizer—to stop being reeducated Hostesss of the ecosystem Supoena the rocket so angsty

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Self-catapulting PFC shimmy Stiletto, spice it up—live & die for the hell of it Viva las vegans Future suture stipend stutter Only your insecurities make you jealous Nasty simulacra—you jerk, you forgot your pistol Bunny potlatch—Slam Slam Happens Integrabby glisses up You’re the cowboys, we’re the cattle And Scrooge McDuck The non-oligarchical wisecracker irritainment Listen honey, we call it passive regressive Dirt at crime scene—cineplex moonshine foxtrot White Collar Hairnet—Burn-outs for Christ Culture dead codehead down, pre-rave accessorizing the wick Wallet had icing Cops money satan So contextual it squirted A spore with a scholarship—to reconcile the pre-ops Bankroll some more pronouns bail to the chief Contras got drug cash Trustees in a world of pleat The dotted line barks back to restooge our rights PRISTINA—rub our jobs on it Red army faction—well done, Society Members The more reactionary & stupid, the more popular Guillotine volunteers—delighted Eat the free-for-all, ephemera on cruise control Immersicans We just want it easy Fat cats & middlemen, too many pills Money to bork, licky-splitty totalizing enough (Andrews 2001b, section 1)

In this fi rst section of Mistaken Identity, Andrews presents the larger organisational rhetoric of the socially said, scrambled with disjunctive individual signifiers that invert the coercive ontological agency of such lines. It is a process that we might align with his description in Paradise & Method as a ‘violating [of] codes so that each unit keeps getting reframed’ (Andrews 1996, 45). ‘Profit margin American [ . . . ] dream’ is curdled with the inclusion of ‘cream,’ revealing its hegemonising effect, and the parallel of ‘cultures’ with ‘vultures’ betrays the consumerism by which we feast on such lines. The undercutting of the socially said, through a poetics that delineates the ontological agency in our shared language of identity constructs,

170 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry has an impact more profound than a non-sign based reference. Nevertheless, an ethical saying is not present in this Mistaken Identity, rather the language is revealed as always already in a relation conditioned according to its situation. That situation, as it is articulated in these fragments of the socially said, is located within the parameters of our ontological organisation: ‘The situation has a situation / Electro-convulsive opinions eat us.’ We are given a mistaken identity, coerced and formulated according to the socially said, trapped by a “traumatised semiotics”. The social organisation in which this mistaken identity resides is permeated by the exploits of capitalism, ‘the marriage of money gobble gobble money’; naturalised through ‘massive doses of dog tranquilizer’; and valorised, through a ‘dayglo ethics,’ an ‘ephemera on cruise control.’ All this, as Andrews rightly concludes is ‘totalising enough’. In the light of Mistaken Identity, we might suggest that whilst Levinas’ philosophy of ethics usefully illuminates the homogenising and predatory dangers of categorisation and conceptualisation—in many ways similar to Andrews’ assertion that the social machinery is like a ‘factory of personhood’—it nevertheless remains problematic. In this poem it appears that the face to face experience is a space, as Andrews writes in Paradise & Method, ‘enfolded in a social discourse and cannot be so easily located as an interpersonal or “postpersonal” “treat”’ (Andrews 1996, 130–131). That is, the ethical relationship between self and other is always already politicised and commodified, precisely because we live in the regime of discourse. To read the poem in this way, is to ‘sit in the twentieth century’, our identity mistaken by the ontological parameters of the socially said (20). In this respect, one might suggest that Andrews’ poethics is intentionally, and for him, necessarily limited. It can question, undercut, subvert, and point out the limits of the ontological, pushing outwards its totalising parameters, but never attain the socially sovereign moment of an ethical relation. Responsibility, in Levinas’ sense would thus be disabled and we might refer to Erving Goffman’s microsociology as a more appropriate definition of the social terrain mapped by Andrews. The social world, in this framework, is understood as a hierarchy of individuals; the face, individually performed, is yet framed according to a particular telos. Lemert paraphrases this sociological position: ‘We strategically chart our performances and courses of action and interaction, often with an aim of being a viable member of a morally cohesive social order’ (Lemert 1997, lxxiii). Ontology thus reigns supreme and we should be understood, according to Goffman, as no more than ‘a traffic of use’ (Goffman 1997, lxxxii). This reading of Andrews’ explanation of the social terrain, as found in the poetic praxis of Mistaken Identity, throws into contention the earlier proposition that his fi rst-phase “Language” poetry presented an ethical saying in its micro-syntactical anxieties. Indeed, the shift to a second phase of “Language” poetry might be seen as indicative of the failure to attain this ethical ideal. Andrews’ poethical praxis is not limited, however, to

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the “punk” anarchy of Mistaken Identity. Nevertheless, what this poem does show—and it should be remembered that it was composed as a live spontaneous performance—is that the ‘total system’ (Levinas 1994, 15) described by Wild, continues to haunt Andrews. In a world of ‘sign pollution’ (Slocombe 2005), “traumatised semiotics”, and the ontological violence revealed in war, it often seems as if we are locked in the prison house of reference, the cage of ontological thinking. In The Millennium Project and its counterpart Lip Service, however, we see an important poetic development announcing the poethical wager of a third phase in Andrews’ “Language” poetry. Both of these projects are noticeable for their complex structural intricacy. Lip Service is not quite a direct translation of Dante’s Paradiso (2003), but follows the tercet organisation and punctuation almost line-by-line. The four hundred pages are divided according to ten concentric planetary bodies—Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Fixed Stars, and Primum Mobile— each with ten subsections. The complete poem is presented in two sections with an appendix detailing the specific cantos to which the subsections correspond. As with Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, Lip Service continues the modernist tradition of the long poem. This is true, however, only insofar as the scope of such works allow for the most fully developed, and ambitious, of poetics. The materials for Lip Service were generated in 1986. During that year, Andrews, following his usual poetic procedure, stockpiled a mass of cards on which he had recorded fragments of public discourse. From 1989 to 1992, he worked with the structure of Dante’s Paradiso, taking its ‘thematic cues [ . . . ] to rechoreograph several years’ worth of poetic raw material [ . . . ] on love, erotic intimacy, gender socialization and the body.’6 These linguistic materials of the social body constitute the polyphonic “narrative” of Lip Service, where again there is no identifiable speaking voice. As Peter Quartermain has written of the language of the poem, it reads ‘like a detritus of social, political, and commercial language in a world of “hype” [ . . . ] the “semiotic rubble,” salvaged from one sign-system after another’ (Quartermain n.d.). Where Andrews’ second phase “Language” poetry maintained the syntax, if not the semantics, of its social material, in Lip Service there is a splintering of the materials (with emphasis on the dynamic effects of the individual soundings of fragments) into the tercet arrangement. A comparison, for example, of the following extract from I Don’t Have Any Paper, with the opening section of ‘Mercury’ from Lip Service, makes this structural difference clear: Captives of melodrama—here comes your 19th nervous breakdown if you’re keeping count: network news coverage isn’t shoddy, mostly we do hair. English is a slave Language needed a nurse to wipe his face as he salivated; we are a big country with a lot of natural gas, boredom is

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry fatal, vitamins are more vinyl than fruit—you can’t organize workers who don’t have jobs. (Andrews 1992, 203)

A

FTER crystal trick contrary alibi abides skull simplicity peripheral angle that you nerves oriented hammier mime that ovum unbosoming scribbler– poovay voo prahngdr may merzewr– ahksehptay voo der sehrveer der taymwang?– unbridled plagiarizing massed proverbs on pointe the trick: wedded and false-free fount unwedded words enjoin deceit, mere symbol-albinos I eye overcathecting practical babble in the compression crystal to grind light– bright bleeds through Apparent Signal utterer doctrinaire about thoughts’ agile much-decorated complacency (Andrews 2001a)

Whilst breaking again from conventional syntax, Lip Service does not, however, attempt to ‘wipe the linguistic slate clean’ (Woods 2002, 237). In contradistinction to fi rst phase “Language” poems like ‘OVALTINE’ or ‘TALL MAN RIDING,’ where the individual signifiers are presented in isolation, this poem takes splinters of the socially said and works with the erotic charge that sparks in their syntactic cohabitation. With the recurring letters in ‘crystal trick contrary’ or ‘alibi abides skull simplicity,’ for example, an erotics of desire is embodied through a magnetising of word-to-word attractions. As with the oscillation in and out of referential focus, this erotic desire embodies the pull towards an ontological relation and the push of an ethical relation. This is to understand the erotic desire in language as an embodiment of the face to face experience, the oscillation between an ethical saying and the ontological said. Our theorisation of the binary opposition of language-use may thus be extended. In an ontological mode, the sounds of a speech act will be ideologically coded to affect the salacity of a language screw. This sounding is received as a personal gratification; wrapped in the clothes of signification, their sounds assure us of our identity construct. Alternatively, in an ethical relation, the erotic desire in language affects the devotion to another. Such self-less love maintains their alterity, in a non-totalising speech act. In this ideal relation, responsibility is born as the rosette or love-knot of language. In ‘Mercury’ the devotion of a non-totalising speech act appears increasingly impossible, as the words are screwed in to an ontological relation. By

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the sixth line, the poetic language reaches its limit. The splinters of social material are reformed into a nonsensical string of words that resemble foreign languages, fi rst French and then German. The words tell themselves empty, rendering only the structures of grammatical codes—the closed form of left-branching compounds, syntactic rules for inflected and modal verbs, prepositions split off and repositioned—and phonological standards—the fricatives, lateral and central approximants: poovay voo prahngdr may merzewr– ahksehptay voo der sehrveer der taymwang?–

These lines constitute an explanation in praxis; the super-glue of our social grammar screws the language in to the parameters of the acceptable, much as the bold type furs-up the words on our tongue. The violence and physical materiality of the words increases with each line until, with ‘muchdecorated complacency,’ the section ends, ‘antacided into silence—’. The erotic charge of the social material in Lip Service tends toward a pornographic violence, ‘magnified & magnificent’ in pitch as ‘victim / alto assumption’s voice / wound never breaks’ (Andrews 2001a, ‘Earth 5’). It is a voice, the shared voice of a social language, from which ‘you never return, I never leave’. We cannot reject this voice as in Mistaken Identity, nor can it be identified as other than our own, for it is the shared language of our body politic. As such, there resonates throughout the poem the marketing axioms of cosmetic fashion, consumer addictions, and the hyper-real gloss of simulacra. The totalising agents of capitalism are not named, but are nevertheless registered in the poem’s omissions. It is a ‘release preview of affects’ where language ‘enterprised by its, hounded by it’; ‘will the please identify itself’. There are moments where the explanation in praxis is made explicit. For instance, we might read the desire for self-validation as ‘unembodied false anchors non-rotund escapism’ (Andrews 2001a, ‘Earth 3’). But this desire always persists: shouting down synapse lies, remainder to myself makes one shudder etymologically with words—the complex rhetorical strategy wants to keep saying ‘I’ (Andrews 2001a, ‘Earth 3’)

Perhaps due to the poem’s emphasis on the body, recent critical reception of Lip Service has tended to read the poem as primarily concerned with gender identities, as a kind of post-feminist corrective to exclusively female écriture féminine. Barbara Cole, for example, critiques Lip Service as ‘productively problematising the socio-politically charged categories of “male”

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and “female” subjectivities as well as conventional lyric tropes such as “he” and “she” poetic speakers’ (Cole 2003). Yet this is a rather reductive analysis of Andrews’ poetic methodology, a misunderstanding of how the ‘immediacy of the flesh weighs heavily’ in this poem, ‘how it gets from zero / to one’ (Andrews 2001a, ‘Earth 9’). Rather than merely challenging gendered readings and subjectivities, the cacophony of unidentifiable voices creates an ‘ampitheatreall’ of our shared social language (‘Earth 4’). The resultant poetics is a sounding of that static noise, a performance of the body politic, as it is articulated in the manic energy of a “traumatised semiotics”: the writer is talking about the panic in our own head heels a bargain air condescends as consummate air vulnerably lettered. (Andrews 2001a, ‘Earth 1’)

Much like the cover illustration for Getting Ready, this is perhaps the poem’s vision of hell, the inferno of an ontological seizure in language. The inferences that might be drawn from the poem’s title, offer a spectrum of linguistic possibilities ranging from the self-less love of “paradise,” to a self-validating, violent disregard for the other in “hell.” Indeed, Andrews has translated the word “paradise” ‘as love and as language’ (Andrews 1996, 258). “Lip Service” is all at once: an ethic of service in speech-acts; expressions of agreement not supported by real conviction; and (paid-for) oral sex. The title, rather than being, as Cole argues, ‘an ironic homage to the oral beginnings of poetry’, merges the possible realisations of the erotics of desire in language (Cole 2003). Thus the “paradise” of language as an ethics of service, is shown to be traumatised in the ontological seizure of self-validation, the “inferno” of hell. For the ‘Moon’ section, part seven, Andrews writes: ‘I am but the loudspeaker / of a symptom’ (Andrews 2001a, ‘Moon 7’). In this way, Lip Service again re-inscribes the idealised ethical saying within the ontological parameters of the socially said. Nevertheless, the poethical wager of this third phase “Language” poetry is to make explicit the erotics of desire that charge our shared language, as formative of our ethical relations. As Peter Quartermain argues, ‘there is no suggestion— in Dante or in Andrews—that Paradise is an easy place or condition, either to reach or to maintain’ (Quartermain n.d.). The erotic desire is not a lusting for copulation, but the physiological charge of language as it mediates between bodies, structures identity and makes consensual our collusion with and individuation from the personal and public sociopolitical organisation. The structure of The Millennium Project is even more complex. It spans almost one thousand pages of poetry, and is divided, according to the introduction of the title page, ‘into eleven chronological volumes [ . . . ] each

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divided into eighteen smaller units’ (Andrews 2002, title page). These are presented in a series of ‘conceptually organized subsections: distance, context, suture, apparatus, and praxis’. The project is published online with the pages of poetry accessible from a grid of hypertext links (Figure 6.3). The HTML coding of this ideational structure enables the reader to navigate the poem by moving ‘sequentially through one of the eleven volumes (left or right), or from one subsection to its counterpart in each of the other ten volumes (up and down)’ (Andrews 2002, title page). These “instructions” imply that the framework enables us to navigate the material systematically in a number of set ways, yet in reality the hypertextual presentation of multiple subdivisions makes possible any number of “routes” through the poem. Given the length of the project, and the difficulty of retracing one’s movements from page to page, we fi nd ourselves lost in this complex structure. The more one tries to fi nd a “route” through the poem, the more complex the structure becomes. We are allowed access only to further levels, to another subdivision, in a continual structural mitosis. Andrews’ development of a poetic form that allows for such a multiple arrangement of its parts is testament to the conviction of an ethical imperative to challenge the ontological parameters of our daily reading. In Paradise & Method Andrews explains this process: ‘If I face a social process, a social structure, a social order, a society outside, I’m really facing up to an elaborate nest of mediations, to something that’s not facing back (except for surveillance)’ (Andrews 1996, 144). The purpose of this poetic form is to allow the reader to face our socio-discursive organisation.

Figure 6.3

Bruce Andrews, The Millennium Project (screenshot).

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As we read the poem, we are necessarily engaged in a structural oscillation. For a period we attend to the social organisation, recognising that we are bounded by certain conditions and with each movement, or navigational choice, we mediate this social context. At other times, frustrated by the complexity and the sheer breadth and depth of this social organisation, or simply lost, unable to retrace our steps, we move through the poem seemingly at random, unconscious of the choices we make in mediating the text’s HTML structure. Thus the structural oscillation brings in and out of focus our social organisation as members of a body politic. Frustrated by the inability to find a systematic, logical and retraceable route through the poem, we recognise the ontological parameters of our social condition. The distances Andrew’s writing creates through this oscillation appear as hospitality, embodying a politics rather than being about politics. In reading this poetry there is a ‘mutually enhancing facework behind two bodies—a reader’s & a language’s—with the text as referee, to discourage a fixing of positions’ (Andrews 1996, 266). The form of The Millennium Project is thus one of a ‘cat’s cradle’ rather than ‘a linear strand of unrolled string we can get through the labyrinth with’ (141). The material of The Millennium Project, as in Lip Service, is a composition of social fragments. Here Andrews mixes individual signifiers of a determinate sonic coding with those of a positional semantic agency. Again the emphasis is on the erotic charge that magnetises linguistic phrases, the coding and positional push and pull, for example, of ‘flux affix slaphatic’ (Andrews 2002, C1A1-a). On occasions, these erotics of the sonic and semantic are combined in neologisms like ‘protrux’ or ‘luridity’. The result is a: ministry of style ionosphere dirties up buzzy nomenclatura forecast fraudulundulation– ideation prehensile as hell aerobics cerebrally bestial jaggedness leveraging truth as hologram (Andrews 2002, C5A1-a)

The sonic and semantic erotics charge and discharge in the “traumatised semiotics” of our shared language. Where a ‘ministry of style’ has transmogrified the body politic here, allowing only for ‘stencils of hope’ (Andrews 2002, C3A1-a) and ‘truth as hologram,’ the erotic desire retains its ethical potential enabling ‘a socially positive crunch,’ as in C5A1-a (v4, p49):

Traumatised Semiotics Onto-riff MIXMAX hoked reality up non-corroborative repetition gussied pixel crud walkie-talkie miniatures collide perks up velcro war, flatbed mundi laser pique insected’ futuribles’ discipline punishes axis slabfest virtualized flotational alpha-impelled mindset— a distinct sardonikon breath code polyp stealth smarts mots + flattered + slaughtered image skips zion impossibly superstarring DNA choc funct boom boogie down to be the future: symph-pop biltrite specificity on overdrive ninja incoherence signatisfied hyperspace of surfaces roto-phylo camerabatics crystal provo prodent preposed sunset mannequin—or ‘animalescents’: a socially positive crunch (Andrews 2002, C5A1-a)

177

178 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry The ecstastic joy of such word-play is the erotics of language, the imperative for which always persists against a totalising order, in the face of alterity. ‘Our distinctiveness,’ Andrews writes, ‘gives us something to come together around: respect the meaning of you, charge & discharge’ (Andrews 1996, 129). Thus, the riffs of sound where ‘repetition gussied pixel crud’ works within and against the ‘signatisfied hyperspace of / surfaces,’ recognising that the ‘alpha-impelled mindset’ has the full resources of language, from ‘provo [to] prodent [to] preposed,’ we can re-write the social body from within the trauma of an ontological seizure. Even the fake consumables, ‘sunset mannequin—or “animalescents”’ can be rewritten as ‘a socially positive crunch.’ This poetics of the body emerges from the realisation that ‘the site of the body is social’ (Andrews 1996, 52). In facing up to the labyrinth of our socio-discursive organisation, we can begin to ‘rewrite the social body’ as we read the text (50). This Andrews understands as a ‘body-to-body transaction: to write into operation a “reading body” which is more & more self-avowedly social’ (50). The poetic development is thus a vulnerability of form and content (non-referential) that allows the physical (social) body to participate in the reading of the text. Rather than attempting to present an ethical saying outside of a social frame, Andrews recognises here that it is: ‘better to acknowledge the public & communal frames in which subjects come to be—& in which meaning or value or sense are—faced, touched, held’ (92). In practice this hospitality to, and participation with, the (social) body is achieved in the writing by ‘allowing desire to register as a kind of community-building’ (Andrews 1996, 46). The poetic praxis of this poethical wager is ‘not a production so much as a constitution of desires [ . . . ] not a representation, but an articulation of and on the body’ (29). As the poet Tom Beckett has suggested, ‘the writer/reader relationship is an erotic one’ and ‘the risk of a poem is the same as that of an unsolicited kiss’ (Beckett 2004). The desire that resonates in the sexually-charged erotics of Andrews’ third phase “Language” poetry is in many ways similar. It is not, as he makes clear in Paradise & Method, ‘the socialized liberalism of the body constituted by late capitalism,’ but rather ‘a [body] politics of value and meaning’ (Andrews 1996, 30). This politics is achieved in poethical praxis, ‘as refiguration & redistribution of eros with transgressive feelers out at the meta-level. To raise the possibility of a socially sovereign moment’ (132). With this poetics of the body as a third phase poethical wager, we can participate with Andrews in rewriting, rereading the text, in order to ‘test the horizons—to make an agitated totality, not a rested one’ (Andrews 1996, 56). Furthermore, as he suggests in Paradise & Method ‘we can extend the investigation into the Unsaid—a social body which carries all that is said’ (268). This is the lesson of Andrews’ third phase wager for “Language” writing:

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Ecstatic, in the root sense: to fi nd yourself standing outside yourself. The site of the body is social, set in time—socially saturated [ . . . ] So we can take out well-developed attention to signs & our desire for their dishevelment & expose it to a social dialogue, to networks of meaning understood as thoroughly socialized, to questions about the making of the subject (Reading as Writing & Writing as Reading): the making of Americans—the making of me, myself, & I—of you, yourself, & us. (Andrews 1996, 52)

7

Conclusion The Performative Dialogics of Poethical Praxis

THE TRAUMATISED SEMIOTICS OF SOCIAL DISCOURSE We are participants in a collective reality relative to our capacity for language-use. This reality is our social world, a web of discourse by which we are delineated, within which we are mutually recognisable, and for which we are responsible. Conventional philosophy would describe reality as a moral maze and identity mapped according to the corridor of our choosing. Yet the “grand narratives” or dominant discourses of our social world have a shared language. Whilst each offers a framework or modality of being as the clothes of (its) signification, these modalities are not independent. They are transitory narratives of a shared history, cultural evolutions in which we participate as agents of their development or decline. However, as I have argued throughout this book, it is within our socio-political environment that language operates as the site of ethics. For Levinas, before ontology we are called to witness the presence of an other in whose inimitable face is an alterity refractory to all categorisation. Our response to this call is made in language; by way of an ethical saying we establish our radical intersubjectivity, a subjection to and responsibility for the other. Indeed, this ethical relation breaks down the parameters of our identity-thinking, securing an accountability that exceeds and precedes the rights and obligations of the individual. Throughout the dominant discourses of the political establishment, in the mainstream media and in our social dialogue however, language appears far removed from its preoriginary capacity as the vehicle of an ethical relation. Indeed, there exists a disparity between the possibility for language (to maintain an idealised ethical relation) and the reality of language (as the site of political coercion and social conditioning). The commitment of poethical praxis is to engage in this political struggle over a language deemed to be totalising and predatory. It is registered early in my trajectory in Olson’s ‘Song 1’ of The Maximus Poems: words, words, words all over everything [ . . . ] (all invaded, appropriated, outraged (Olson 1983, 17)

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Olson describes language as a plastic veneer written over, rather than maintaining, our social diversity. As ‘invaded, appropriated, outraged’, the alterity of the particular is reduced to its numerical and commodified status. Indeed, during his tenure at Black Mountain College, Olson recognised, in an early poem entitled ‘In Cold Hell, in Thicket’, that ‘All things are made bitter, words even / are made to taste like paper’ (Olson 1967c, 35). However, in confronting a totalising language—‘The question, the fear he raises up himself against’ (37)—Olson revitalised a radical experimentation in modern American poetry. The challenge—as for the earlier writers of the Imagist and Objectivist tradition—was to establish an ethical praxis against a totalising rhetoric. As Woods suggests of the writers I have identified with the fi rst phase of my “poethical trajectory”, the commitment of the Objectivisits ‘to an ethics of form in representation has acted as the benchmark of a radical poetics’ (Woods 2002, 14). Whilst the three phases of my “poethical trajectory” and their corresponding “schools” or “movements” are too complex and interdependent to be taken as a defi nitive chronology, the general schema nevertheless indicates—amongst the constellation of writers involved—a continued commitment to and progressive experimentation towards an ethical politics. The over-lapping of the three phases is evident, for example, in the work of the Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky, who began his long poem “A” in 1927, but continued throughout his life in his resistance to an ‘expressive Romantic individualism’, adding the twenty-fourth section in 1974 (Woods 2002, 15). The work of other Objectivist poets, like Carl Rakosi, and, in particular, George Oppen, however, illustrates the shift between a fi rst and second phase more clearly. Following up his collection of poems entitled Discrete Series—published by the Objectivist Press in 1934—Oppen re-emerged in the 1960s, at the height of a second phase in poethical praxis, from a quarter of a century of poetic silence. His collections The Materials (1962) and This in Which (1965), reveal a renewed concern with the totalising prescription of offi cially sanctioned language. In his poem ‘Possible’ from the latter collection, for example, Oppen writes: Possible To use Words provided one treats them As enemies. Not enemies— Ghosts Which have run mad In the subways And of course the institutions And banks. (Oppen 2003, 116)

182 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry The radical experimentation of the writers across my trajectory may be viewed, to adopt Joan Retellack’s phrase, as a ‘poethical wager’. There is an inherent risk involved in a wager, perhaps explaining Olson’s early hesitation in the struggle over language: So shall you blame those Who give it up, those who say It isn’t worth the struggle? (Olson 1967c, 37)

However, for The Maximus Poems and for poetry in general, Olson proclaimed: Let those who use words cheap, who use us cheap take themselves out of the way Let them not talk of what is good for the city Let them free the way for me, for the men of the Fort Who are not hired, [ . . . ] Let them cease putting out words in the public print (Olson 1983, 13)

In Chapter 2, I demonstrated how Olson’s poetics functioned as a catalyst in this renewed struggle over language, describing (in subsequent chapters) how each of the poets in my trajectory developed an aesthetic practice to match their ethical politics. For Snyder, who argues that ‘the layers of history in language become a text of language itself’, that text is heavily polluted (Snyder 1990, 66). The hesitation and uncertainty of a ‘poethical wager’ is evident in Snyder’s poetry too. He writes, for example, in his poem ‘A Stone Garden’— ‘Thinking about a poem I’ll never write’—‘Grope and stutter for the words’ (Snyder 1967b, 24). As I argued in Chapter 3, Snyder’s work is committed to the call of nature; breaking from the ‘laws—budgets—codes’ of the language of the political establishment, his work seeks to welcome the alterity of the non-human through a biocentric intersubjectivity (Snyder 2005, 81). In Chapter 4, I demonstrated how Ginsberg, by contrast, focuses on the urban world, particularly New York City where ‘the movies took our language’ (Ginsberg 1981, 70). In his poem ‘Witchita Vortex Sutra’, he writes: The war is language, language abused for Advertisement, language used like magic for power on the planet: Black Magic language, formulas for reality— (Ginsberg 1971, 119)

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Like Olson and Snyder, however, it is a language that Ginsberg also seeks to reclaim, inflecting the force of direct action into his lines: I lift my voice aloud make Mantra of American language now, I here declare the end of War! (Ginsberg 1971, 127)

Extending this ‘poethical wager’ into a ‘new globalism’ (as a re-definition perhaps of “late modernism”), Chapter 5 took Rothenberg’s poetry as descriptive of the cleansing of ethnic and tribal minorities from an idealised American hegemony. For Rothenberg, this ontological violence is found in ‘the terror of words’, as a ‘blood that covers each eye’ (Rothenberg 1996; 1975, 17). With the signature self-reflexivity of a third phase poethical praxis, I demonstrated in Chapter 6, how Bruce Andrews gives the struggle over language a critical theorising: there is a ‘ministry of style’ he writes, that ‘makes one shudder etymologically / with words—the complex rhetorical strategy / wants to keep saying “I”’ (Andrews 2002, C5A1-a; 2001a, ‘Earth 3’). In each of these accounts of language as totalising and predatory, the struggle is to re-configure our socio-political environment, to disengage from the internalised rhetoric of a self-oriented language, towards an exteriority of being. Across my trajectory, the phenomenological horizon of the poem provides a proleptic space for this social experimentation. Indeed, to return to Olson’s ‘In Cold Hell, in Thicket’, this turning inside out of our shared language—dismantling the said towards an ethical saying—is envisioned as a reorientation of being: but hell now is not exterior, is not to be got out of, is the coat of your own self, the beasts emblazoned on you And who can turn this total thing, invert and let the ragged sleeves be seen by any bitch or common character? Who can endure it where it is, where the beasts are met where yourself is, your beloved is, where she who is separate from you, is not separate, is not goddess, is, as your core is, the making of one hell (Olson 1967c, 37)

Whilst, as this poem makes clear, we cannot step outside the web of language that delineates the parameters of our social world—‘it is not to be

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got out of’—the promise is nonetheless of an ethical praxis by which ‘the coat of your own self [ . . . ] this total thing, [is] inverted’; through a radical intersubjectivity or exteriority of being—‘let the ragged sleeves be seen’— the other ‘is separate from you, is not separate [ . . . ] as your core is’. Despite the poethical wager of these writers, the political struggle over language remains at the limits of radical aesthetic experimentation. In a society where self-identity is a construct of signification—a purchase on a range of politically or commercially sanctioned units—the alterity of the other has no hold on our being. That we can divest our responsibility for this other is a consequence of a shared language pared down according to that permitted by the socio-political order. Consequently, language has become the fabric with which we clothe ourselves in signification; as pre-designed guises of identity it masks the ethical demands of the other. Words are tightly woven into this social fabric, the threads bound together through grammatical and syntactic controls. As a place, an object, or a smell can become associated with a previous trauma, so too formulations of language have become not only inadequate, but seemingly repulsive to the ethical. In thinking through the contemporary problems of society, language at the same time delimits the totality of potential understanding, and so leaves us traumatised in the face of the complex and violent relations of our modern world. An observation made by the sociologist Charles Lemert usefully illuminates this language control. Lemert writes: In a 1995 speech to American war veterans, Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, who became the choice of conservatives in the 1996 American presidential campaign, bitterly denounced “intellectual elites” who advocate multiculturalism, including multilingual education. [Senator Dole declared] “We need the glue of language to help hold us together”. (Lemert 1997, xxxiv) As the medium of our understanding and the means of our civil response(ability), language is crucial. Yet we fi nd that in the service of self-interests, particularly in agendas of socio-political coercion, an ontological violence is embedded in it, preloading our shared language, and disabling its ethical potential. This ontological violence correlates with the extent to which language is oriented towards an affi rmation of the self, of a self-identity, at the expense of others. In such narratives, through strategic omissions, reductive categorisations, an indexing or ideological loading of key terms, language becomes an ontological abuse violating the very alterity of our human diversity. Indeed, the reality of language-use as a totalising and predatory tool of political coercion is evident in those events which have punctuated recent history and, as Andrews has argued, ‘damage the form’ of what Ginsberg called the ‘formulas for reality’ (Andrews 1996, 235; Ginsberg 1971, 127).

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Such events are defi nitive moments of our public consciousness, in their representations they reveal the extent to which—in ‘the interests of the self’—language is actively terrorised in the maintenance of a totality and the absorption of otherness (Levinas 1994, 15). A brief survey of recent history testifies to this abuse. The category five Hurricane Katrina of August 2005 blew off the language veneer that coated New Orleans, revealing a social fabric of race, class and gender inequalities. Yet the mainstream media, through a strategic diction, rapidly reconstructed a ‘total system of harmony and order’, restoring a language veneer that stifled the saying of any ethical response. This ontological abuse operated at the level of individual signifiers that were then fi xed within a broader ideological narrative. For instance, as Hazel Markus has pointed out, in the aftermath of the hurricane, blacks were reported as ‘looting’, whilst whites were ‘fi nding needed supplies’ (Markus 2005, 4). Furthermore, the collective plight of those who had lost their homes was wrapped in a narrative that mimicked the standard Hollywood spectacle with its villains and heroes. Within this narrative, the white “victims” became “survivors”, and the black “evacuees” were seen as “refugees.” Such categorisations, as Markus has explained, divested the middle class voyeur of any responsibility: their destiny would never be interdependent with these “foreign” people (5). In a similar fashion, an ontological abuse of language was employed following the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center. Mobilising the military, fi rst in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, the Bush administration displayed once more America’s supreme power. Yet the “War on Terror” soon emerged as ‘The Algebra of Infinite Justice’ (Roy 29th September, 2001). President Bush’s ultimatum to the people of the world—‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’—was, as Arundhati Roy explains, ‘not a choice that people want to, need to, or should have to make.’ The so-called “War on Terror,” both in its foreign and domestic realities, as well as in the discourses of its representation, has some disturbing parallels with the Vietnam era. From a Levinasian perspective, this theatre of war is indicative of the continued ontological abuse driving American foreign policy and traumatising our social relations. With the development of global media technologies—radio, newspapers, television, internet, and wireless communications—such ontological narratives of institutional authority now pervade the social field. Je Suis Partout (I am everywhere), a fascist newspaper of the 1920s, is an early and pertinent example. As Michael Davidson has pointed out, the title marked ‘recognition of the new media’s ability to penetrate all corners of social space’ (Davidson 1997, 101). Indeed, it was against the totalising and ontological conditioning effected by such new media discourses, that Oppen’s early poetry—as Marjorie Perloff suggests in Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media—‘ruptures the very sentence and phrasal units’ (Perloff 1991, 80). That we live in an information age wired in to global communication networks, is not however, the cause of suffering nor is it a war on community.

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In fact, as Peter Middleton has pointed out, contemporary technologies do not necessarily work ‘in the manner that their designers intended and their proponents expect; the evidence is that people persistently transform them into forms of communication by which new forms of intimacy, friendship, and community can be evolved’ (Middleton 2005, 143). Nevertheless, they are not truly egalitarian and it is the dominant discourses of our digitalised social web, those voices with the capital backing to afford the largest bandwidth, that most influence our shared language. Indeed, in these dominant discourses, terms of engagement are prescribed as we are locked in to the positioning of pronouns within the indices of the political terms. Streamed seamlessly as digital channels, such discourses erode and re-shape the cartography of our social reality. It is a world, as Davidson has argued, where ‘technology is capable of separating voice from speaker, conversation from community’, and if a postmodern condition exists, it is the instability brokered, in the words of N. Katherine Hayles, ‘when voices are taken out of bodies and bodies fi nd themselves out of voices’ (Davidson 1997, 103; Hayles 1997, 75). Today, the reality of suffering in the face of an other, demands emancipatory social action, a voice of witness as the act of love. Yet we have only, what I have called a “traumatised semiotics”, a language driven against its ethical grain, with which to respond. Under such conditions, we are co-opted as agents of an ontological narrative, and rules of social conduct designate what is heard from what is silenced, what is granted presence and what is made absent from our social consciousness. Difference is either marginalised or written out of the privileged narrative as speech-acts can only reinforce a totalising relation with the other. Words performed in the public arena are conditioned according to predefi ned parameters, as the said that is now permissible resonates with the coercive of its historical abuse. We are passive in the face of dominant discourses and co-opted into the maintenance of a shameful status-quo.

THE CO-OPERATIVE RESPONSIBILITY BETWEEN “READER” AND “WRITER” OR POETHICAL PRAXIS AS THE REGENERATION OF AN ETHICAL SAYING Of what use then, is poetry? Is it in any way relevant to our understanding of, and active position in the social world—to our identity politics, commitment to our local communities, and relation to the global economy? It has been the argument of this book that the value of poetry is found in its use as (one tool) enabling the work of ethics. In Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry, Peter Middleton argues that: ‘whereas most of the social world provides itself as the anonymous product of human creation so that we can at least temporarily assign it our own individual or locally collective

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significance as commodity, gift, tool, or memorial, poems are different’ (Middleton 2005, 116). Whilst ontological discourses prescriptive of modalities of being are the predominant mode of social interaction, poetry offers an ethical work that interrupts the totality of this naturalised condition. Yet in many respects the language of poetry and the language of everyday social discourse are synonymous. As Susan Stewart argues in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, ‘it is not that some speech is organized rhythmically and other speech is not’ (Stewart 2002, 76). Rhythm, according to Victor Zuckerkandl ‘is a truly universal phenomena’ and as Stewart concludes, ‘speech arrives in rhythmical form, and our experience of it cannot be separated from our knowledge of its rhythmical structure’ (Zuckerkandl 1956, 158; Stewart 2002, 76). Furthermore, the language of poetry is that same material of social discourse; it carries the same sedimented weight of references from its historical use. ‘The sound recalled in poetry is not abstract,’ Stewart writes, ‘not a succession of tones without prior referents; rather, the sound recalled is the sound of human speech’ (68). Indeed, ‘we do not “speak” from speech; rather, it is already waiting to speak us’ (89). In this respect, neither sound nor rhythm differentiate poetic language from social dialogue. However, it is in poetry that works with language as material, in the processual poetics of exploration and experimentation (informing any expressivist content) as its primary theme, that we fi nd a work regenerative of an ethical saying. Such poetry must operate within the “traumatised semiotics” of our sociality, but its ethical project is in direct opposition to the ontological basis of dominant discourses that violate language by closing it down before the other. Poetry engaged with such experimental work thus offers, what Steve McCaffery has called, ‘an experience in language rather than a representation by it’ (McCaffery 1986, 21). From this perspective, Stewart’s claim becomes credible, that ‘poetry is a force against effacement—not merely for individuals but for communities through time as well’ (Stewart 2002, 2). Poethical praxis is not only contradistinctive then, but fundamentally oppositional in its reorientation of ethics and ontology. Experimentation before expression, undercuts the subservience of our social action to preordained meaning. As Roman Jakobson has argued—implicitly valorising avant-garde experimentation—the poetic is ‘not a supplementation of discourse with rhetorical adornment but a total re-evaluation of the discourse and of all its components whatsoever’ (Jakobson 1988, 55). In positioning ethics before ontology, poethical praxis attempts what Stewart envisions as a re-enacting of ‘the conditions of its emergence from silence and wrests that silence into the intersubjective domain of made and shaped things’ (see Middleton 2005, 83). For Stewart, ‘the poet works from the received foundation of speech,’ but out of this inheritance, ‘the poet makes another self’ (Stewart 2002, 89). In this way a poet may ‘enunciate our being’ whilst enabling us ‘to

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remake and extend ourselves’. In Levinasian terms we might describe this as a poetry that performs an ethical saying thus opening the possibility for the relation that is originary to being. The reader or listener must recognise this performance in the immediacy of reception. In the same instance the performative becomes a performance, or the saying is understood and so becomes something said. The dynamic relation between the performative and the receptive opens up to a social meaning: ‘meaning only comes into being in its encounter with the third person—the listener who introduces the social realm of intersubjectivity’ (47). Poethical praxis is unique in its experimentation with language towards such reconfigurations of ‘the social realm of intersubjectivity.’ Olson’s Maximus Poems, for example, often focus on the particularity of an object in opposition to the generic and commodified products of a consumer society. His poetics, however, is not only political, but is also necessarily ethical. The intensity of attention that the Maximus Poems demand inscribes an intersubjectivity of kinetic relations, an attention to the positioning of words and their relational aspects (both semantically and sonically) as they are arranged typographically across the page-space. Where the traditional Romantic poem works with the morality of an individual subjectivity, allowing for a depth of vision in the layered metaphors of the poetic images, Olson, on the contrary, uses the page-space to perform the object’s difference—an ethics of form that relies on an intersubjective participation. Similarly, Andrews, at the other end of my “poethical trajectory”, seeks to challenge the ‘inwardness [that] disappears the otherness of its objects’ (Andrews 1998, 74). In his first-phase “Language” poetry, for example, the signifier is stripped to a bare materiality in an attempt to reclaim language from its politically coercive socialisation. Indeed, where language, in poetry as well as in other forms of social discourse, is undergirded according to an ontological modus operandi, an ‘internality’ that creates ‘a self-absorbed, tautologizing blindness’ (76), poethical praxis provides an oppositional field for renegotiating terms of social engagement. This value of poetry as an ethical work recuperative of our “traumatised semiotics” generally goes unrecognised. Yet there has, of course, always been an interest in theories of sociality. Furthermore, as Middleton has pointed out, whether such theories of ‘the socio-linguistic condition’ are approached ‘through social theory or by philosophy’ they are ‘reliant on the pre-theoretical images of sociality made widely available by the modern novel’ (Middleton 2005, 47). What becomes clear from his observations is that literature may operate as both creative and reflective of the sociolinguistic condition, that is, the dynamics of narratology productive of our social web. Thus, Middleton writes: If modernist and postmodernist experiments with novelistic form challenge philosophy by working within its rhetorics, so too may the forms of conventional fiction be providing templates for the pretheoretical

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givens of the new philosophy, which deserve investigation not least because even the radical novels may still share significant taken-forgranted features with the paradigms of more conventional fiction. (Middleton 2005, 47–48) Yet whilst ‘understanding the history of dialogue in the twentieth-century novel’ can, as Middleton claims ‘help us learn more about the political efficacy of idealised self-images of interaction and intersubjectivity’, poetry may offer a more insightful paradigm for such reflections (Middleton 2005, 56). As Stewart explains, ‘poiēsis as figuration relies on the senses of touching, seeing, and hearing that are central to the encounter with the presence of others, the encounter of recognition between persons’ (Stewart 2002, 3). Critical to poetry, where we fi nd a condensed and thus highly charged field of intersubjectivity, perhaps more so than prose, are ‘the senses of face-toface meetings’. Poetics experiments with language-use as it deals with the senses of faceto-face meetings. As language is the material for the performance of and engagement with these senses, speech and voice become paramount to their presentation. This is especially true of the second phase of my trajectory. Allen Ginsberg, for example, recognised in the late 1950s that, to quote Hannah Arendt, ‘wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by defi nition, for speech is what makes man a political being’ (Arendt 1958, 3). In Ginsberg’s poem ‘HŪM BOM!’ from his collection The Fall of America: poems of these states 1965–71, the continuous repetition of the word ‘bomb’ switched alternately between possessive, interrogative and relative pronominals, makes explicit the political ideology that is carried over into language: Whom bomb? We bomb them! Whom bomb? We bomb them! Whom bomb? We bomb them! Whom bomb? We bomb them! Whom bomb? You bomb you! Whom bomb? You bomb you! Whom bomb? You bomb you! Whom bomb? You bomb you!

190 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry What do we do? Who do we bomb? What do we do? Who do we bomb? What do we do? Who do we bomb? What do we do? Who do we bomb? What do we do? You bomb! You bomb them! What do we do? You bomb! You bomb them! What do we do? We bomb! We bomb them! What do we do? We bomb! We bomb them! Whom bomb? We bomb you! Whom bomb? We bomb you! Whom bomb? You bomb you! Whom bomb? You bomb you! (Ginsberg 1972, 181–182)

As this poem illustrates, we cannot separate language as a social material— and the corresponding questions of voice and identity that emerge in its use—from the wider politics of our social world. The experimental language of poethical praxis challenges our cognitive faculties; cohesive bindings of totalised discourse are broken down into the smallest units of algebra (as in Andrews’ work) and are recomposed in a manner resistant to passive consumption. Where our senses have been numbed to the dynamic nuances of language play, poethical praxis enables us to explore its resources. Charles Bernstein writes: ‘the problem is being stuck in any one modality of language—not being able to move in, around, and about the precincts of language’ (Bernstein 1998, 20); a problem implicitly recognised by such experiments. The multi-modality of language recognised in poethical works is further complicated by the fact that they are found in multi-foliate versions across distances of reception. Taking up the challenge of Susan Noakes to rethink ‘the temporal dimension of the non-identity’ (Noakes 1993, 50) in close

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reading, Middleton’s work has been instructive of these distances. For Middleton, there is no objective viewpoint from which the ‘interpretive critic’ can claim ‘to have closed the loop that the text began’ (Middleton 2005, 8). Rather, in discussing the ‘social forms of poetry reception’ (xiv), Middleton recognises a distance, or ‘density of reception’ measured in ‘space, time, and culture’, between the composition and reading (3). In other words, the structural arrangement of signs in composition does not prescribe the totality of a poem’s meaning. Rather, that significance may only be perceived in the social history of its co-production across the distances of reception. Thus, for Middleton, distance may be thought of as a ‘sign of a text’s intersubjective embeddedness in mutually negotiated histories of cultural and social change’ (11). The presence of another’s face is sensational and language is called upon to register fully that sensory reception. Similarly, poethical praxis must allow us to move in, around and about the precincts of language; in the co-production of composition at every distance of reception it must allow for what I have called a “performative dialogics”. In that performativity is the possibility of an ethical saying, a poetry that is otherwise than being, or beyond essence. Similarly, in our critical reception of such performances, the task is of a reading ‘that would then not represent itself as the fulfilment of the poem but as a partner in the poem’s continuance, its projective orientations that may require engagement with its commitments, as much as attention to the speed of its forms’ (Middleton 2005, 24). With ethics as fi rst philosophy, the literary critic can relinquish the search for a fi nal interpretation in explication of the totality of a text’s meaning. However, the practice of literary criticism is bound to a new responsibility: the continual regeneration of a text’s ethical saying. A critical “reading” becomes an engagement with the text, perhaps better understood as an ongoing work, rather than a specific task. Indeed, there is no fi nal interpretation of a poem precisely because there is no original. In a democratising metamorphosis of our concept of an artwork, poethical praxis takes the poem to be found in a plurality of engagements, as multi-foliate versions across distances of reception, rather than as a unique entity of copyright. As Middleton explains, it is the ‘history of responses, uses, memories, expectations, and other actions,’ that constitutes ‘the only unity the poem has’ (3). In “The Performing and the Performed: Performance Writing and Performative Reading,” Robert Sheppard argues that ‘a successful reading will be one that exposes the saidness of the text to an openness of performance’ (Sheppard 2001). Reading activates the performative dialogics of poethical works. This is what is meant by the co-operative responsibility of poethical praxis. For the writer, through experimentation, composition requires an active engagement with the interstices of language. The conventional search for idealised expression is transposed into experimentation with form towards the maintenance of alterity, and with that, a welcoming of intersubjective participation. For the reader, the conventions of interpretation

192 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry in the production of a “reading” are transposed into an interruption of the said text, a maintenance of alterity that is responsible for, rather than merely responsive to, the text’s meaning. The fact that poethical praxis transforms our concept of the artwork, and transposes the acts of reading and writing, is of critical importance. Without this renewed understanding of literature, claims for a Levinasian ethics of reading would be preposterous. As Robbins has argued: Levinas’s philosophy cannot function as an extrinsic approach to the literary work of art, that is, it cannot give rise to an application. Of course, much will depend on what one means by literary criticism. If literary criticism is conceived as a more originary questioning of the nature and the conditions of literature and poetic experience [ . . . ] this incommensurability may prove to be only apparent. (Robbins 1999, xx-xxi) Robbins’ recognition of the incommensurability between Levinas’ philosophy and that which gives ‘rise to an application’ becomes the foundation for an exploration of ‘the ways in which reading alters—or interrupts—the very economy of the same that the other interrupts’ (Robbins 1999, xxiv). However, whilst she can then argue that ‘literary criticism, as a response to this textual interruption, might be said to have an ethical content’, her thesis neglects the co-operative responsibility central to the negotiation of a text’s meaning. This is not to suggest, as Robbins also makes clear, that ‘a text has alterity in the same way that the other person does’, but rather that we need to take account of the ethical work involved in both reading and in composition, that is, in poethical praxis.

THE PERFORMATIVE DIALOGICS OF POETHICAL PRAXIS

1. The Public Reading The counter-cultural movements that began in the 1950s made popular the poetry reading. Since then, as Charles Bernstein has observed, ‘the poetry reading has become one of the most important sites for the dissemination of poetic works in North America’ (Bernstein 1998, 5). Of the multi-foliate versions of a poem, it is in its public reading that the ethical and political dynamics of the work are most explicitly realised. The critical essay, as a reading of one version of a poem (its printed appearance in a particular publication), must conceptualise the text’s performativity. Analysis of the poetry reading, on the other hand, can be descriptive of the performative dialogics of poethical praxis that are made materially present. It is for this reason that ‘the performance of the poem,’ as Middleton suggests, ‘compels recognition of the limits of our understanding of language’ (Middleton 2005, 72).

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Fundamental relations of face-to-face commitments tend to be recognised in the printed poem, only with some prior knowledge of their agency as might be gained through familiarity with their theorisation elsewhere. With the poetry reading, these relations are brought into sharp relief: ‘Staging, authorship, sound, and intersubjectivity are constitutive elements of a poetry reading that are revealed as elements of reading itself and reveal how much all reading, silent as well as public, depends on the network of hermeneutic communicative interactions within which we live’ (Middleton 2005, 59). Whilst all forms of poetry, whether printed or spoken, may be said to have a dialogical performativity, it is their performance in multi-foliate versions that enables a plurality of engagements with differing political contexts. When Ginsberg performed his poem ‘Hum Bomb’ at the Knitting Factory, New York City in 1995, he added several new stanzas: Saddam said he had a bomb Bush said he better bomb Saddam said he had a bomb Bush said he better bomb Saddam said he had a bomb Bush said he better bomb Saddam said he had a bomb Bush said he better bomb Saddam said he had a bomb Bush said he better bomb What did he say he better bomb for?

Whilst the “original” poem in The Fall of America was written in protest at the carpet bombing of North Vietnam in the 1970s, the additional stanzas related the poem to the bombing of Iraq in 1991. However, in 2003 both parts of the poem performed at the Knitting Factory in 1995, gained yet another political layering. The repeated and alternated questions ‘Who do we bomb?’ ‘What do we bomb?’ ‘Who has a bomb?’ interrupts and throws into contention the Federal government’s reasoning behind their third Gulf War, or “Operation Iraqi freedom”. Bernstein writes: ‘The poetry reading extends the patterning of poetry into another dimension, adding another semantic layer to the poem’s multiformity’ (Bernstein 1998, 10). Whilst the printed poem resists temporal absorption, its public reading brings precisely that process into tension. Middleton writes: Poetry readings foreground the ordinary processes whereby meanings are produced within linguistic negotiations between speakers in

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Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry a textual culture, by balancing on the knife-edge boundary between two signifying media, sound and writing, at the moment of reception. (Middleton 2005, 103)

This extension and materialisation of the poem’s performative dialogics thus makes explicit the political potential of its ethical work: ‘Reading is made aware of itself as an activity organized by and within communities that calls for a locally civic virtue’ (Middleton 2005, 103). With the material realisation of voice in the public reading of a poem, Michel de Certeau’s defi nition of ‘voice’ is given a physical presence: ‘a sign of the body that comes and speaks’ (De Certeau 1988, 341). This material realisation makes explicit the performative dialogics essential to our encounter with another. As Regis Durand has suggested, ‘there is no such thing as a neutral voice, a voice without desire, a voice that does not desire me. If there was, it would be an experience of absolute terror’ (quoted in Bernstein 1998, 162). Yet as Steve McCaffery has pointed out, the physical materialisation of the voice does not emancipate that voice from code: ‘Language, signification, and code are certainly corporealised [ . . . ] yet voice, empowered by this embodiment, is still not freed from language’ (McCaffery 1998, 163). The ethical demands and commitments to social responsibility of poethical praxis require a transformation of our conventional understanding of the public reading of poetry. Conventionally, such readings enable individual identification of each member of the audience with a speaking voice. That voice assumes stability as it fi nds its physical materialisation in the public reader and offers a potential modality of being (as configured in its original conception). Yet for the listener to clothe him or her self by way of this significatory act would entail an immediate reduction of the other to the same. The counter-cultural agency assumed under this conventional notion of the poetry event is thus flawed. Similarly, the conventional transference of new ideas must also be rejected according to poethical praxis. The direct transference of an idea, an alternative politics for instance, is inherently limited to a re-ordering of priorities. The work presented may be oppositional to the dominant discourses of a society, but it nevertheless operates within and thus continues to support that ontological regime. In poethical praxis we do not step outside language, but in interrupting the language of the said we avoid the unwitting reinscription of an ontological violence. From the purview of poethical praxis, the public reading is a collective event constitutive of one of the multi-foliate versions of a poem. Indeed, the social responsibility of poethical praxis commits the event as fundamental to the poem’s meaning. Joan Retallack writes: ‘the audience is invited to participate in the making of new intelligibility, that is, a new form of life. This need not be a major revolution—just a swerve of thought toward a use

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of history that enables a vital invention of self in the reciprocal alterity of the contemporary moment’ (Retallack 2001). The practical limitations as well as constructivist choices made by the event organisers will delimit to a certain extent the potential for audience participation, but where poethical considerations are admitted, audience autonomy will be maximised. ‘Special possibilities’ are available to the “listener,” a spectrum of which Bernstein has described: ‘from direct response to the work, ranging from laughter to derision; to the pleasure of getting lost in language that surges forward, allowing the mind to wander in the presence of words’ (Bernstein 1998, 7). Furthermore, Sheppard, drawing on Guattari’s analysis of performance art, allows for ‘a process of existential detachment and disordering which is then supplemented by existential recomposition of the fragments for the audience’ (Sheppard 2001). The demands of poethical praxis, however, would allow not just a recomposition for the audience, nor a recomposition by the audience, but active participation, as part constitutive of the composition. Those responses of laughter or derision, together with the chains of association followed in that process of ‘getting lost in language,’ and, we might add, the politics of the particular event (including that which is inherent to the practical and constructivist elements) all contribute to that particular version of the poem. As Middleton explains, ‘the field of interaction, of intersubjectivity, in which the performance occurs, is the work, not some meaning or assertion the uttered text might contain’ (Middleton 2005, 39). It is this dynamic, unique to the poethical performance, that creates genuine possibilities for a counter-cultural work. In the collective composition, that is, the continual regeneration of the text’s ethical saying in each participatory moment of its said, the ‘presentation of the poetry in a public space,’ as Middleton claims, ‘enables the poem to constitute a virtual public space that is, if not utopian, certainly proleptic of possible social change as part of its production of meaning’ (Middleton 2005, 103). The concept of a ‘holding environment’ that Nick Piombino has borrowed from the British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott, the ‘intermediate area’ or ‘third area’ that he parallels with Barret Watten’s sense of a ‘conduit,’ usefully conceptualises this proleptic space (Piombino 1998, 56–57). Its conceptualisation, however, may well be a totalising limit on its potential, if we take this space to be that instigated by interruption. Appropriation of the proleptic space, offered in poethical praxis, as a ‘conduit’ of ‘intersubjective’ composition, risks the violence inherent in use and application. Nevertheless, Bernstein has rightly claimed for the ‘poetry reading’ that it is a ‘public tuning’ (Bernstein 1998, 6). Indeed, there appears to be some recognition of the ethical commitment to alterity when Middleton suggests that ‘The ambitions of the poetry reading to place its art within a community of listeners should not be collapsed into either a moment when a work independent of the collective process is handed over in speech, nor into a

196 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry moment of collective shared understanding that “reads” the work within its own encompassing discursivity’ (Middleton 2005, 37). However, by delimiting Gillian Rose’s vision of the ‘large ethical ambitions in performance, a figure for the middle ground between objectified poem and its interpretation,’ as ‘a field of flawed ethical and semantic ambitions,’ Middleton is writing of a being otherwise, rather than an otherwise than being. Whilst on the one hand, Middleton valorises the performative dialogics of poethical praxis, he unwittingly reinscribes those dialogics within ontological parameters. For him the limit of such performances sees the presentation of an ‘ethics that does not yet exist’ (13). Yet, as Levinas’ philosophy proposes, the realm of the ethical is the antecedent of existence. This, again, does not indicate a lack of content—although we would have to admit that it is a paradox of phenomenology. The content is recognised by Middleton in his citation from John Shotter’s Cultural Politics of Everday life: Social Constructionism, Rhetoric and Knowing of the Third Kind: ‘given the poetic, rhetorical, and “reality-creating” nature of talk (speech), it is possible for dialogue, for argument, to produce the very object which the talk in the argument is supposed to be about,’ because ‘new ways of talking, new forms of debate, work to produce, to invent, rather than simply to reflect the entities we talked about’ (Shotter 1993, 201–202). The improvised “talk poems” of the “Language writer” David Antin, for example, construct a critical social space or dialectics of interaction rather than offering a conventional performance of a previously written poem. Antin later published text versions of his “talk poems,” revised from the audio reproduction, in the collections talking at the boundaries (1976), tuning (1984), and what it means to be avant-garde (1993). The public reading of poetry activates the performative dialogics of poethical praxis when the event itself is treated as the holding environment or intersubjective field of the poem. Yet the public reading may also close down these performative dialogics, if the event becomes thematised as a performance. As Sheppard has observed, ‘a bad performance, while acting as a saying for the performer [ . . . ] might operate as a said for the reader. The thematics in such a situation may not so much be the semantics of a text, but the excess of performance that thematizes itself as performance, as an event in which the audience does not participate’ (Sheppard 2001). The quality of a public reading cannot be equated then with the performance itself. The reading may utilise the most advanced of vocal pyrotechnics, but if it neglects to involve the audience, then that event closes off the ethical. The performative dialogics of this process are, as previously suggested, operative across the multi-modalities of poetry. The transformation of the public reading demonstrative of poethical praxis, is not limited then to this sphere, but is in fact an opening of reception to the demands of the ethical. ‘Reception,’ Middleton suggests, ‘is not simply an addition of individual receptions, each autonomous from the others, because the performed poem

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both modulates existing networks of intersubjective relations and articulates new ones, so that the aggregate reception of the poem is not purely a series of independent auditions’ (Middleton 2005, 101).

2. Sound Composition The second phase of my “poethical trajectory” corresponds to the increased popularity of poetry readings in the 1960s, particularly in the Lower East Side of New York City and the Bay Area of San Francisco. Poetry readings have also played an important role for the poets of my third phase, in particular, Antin’s Writing/Talks series and the Poetry Project readings held at St. Mark’s church in New York City during the 1970s. Whilst the second phase followed in the tradition of Olson’s “Projective Verse” and the Beat Bebop aesthetic—focusing on the presence and breath of the poet— the third phase has, as Bernstein notes, ‘allowed a spinning out into the world of a new series of acoustic modalities, which have had an enormous impact in informing the reading of contemporary poetry’ (Bernstein 1998, 7). The composition of sound material is crucial to poethical praxis and public readings have made this aspect of the printed versions both more apparent and necessary. Indeed, public readings might be said to represent, as Bernstein suggests, ‘the acoustic grounding of innovative practice—our collective sounding board’ (7). Bernstein, however, is referring here to a minority of performances, those by avant-garde experimental writers. In fact, mainstream poetry readings are antithetical to the experimental work of poethical praxis. ‘American poetry,’ Jed Rasula suggests, ‘has developed a laconic, speech-oriented vocalization,’ an ‘idiomatic plainness’ in the ‘measured sanity of the pedestrian reading’ (Rasula 1998, 255). Yet the ‘vocal autoregulation’ generic to the mainstream poetry reading is but further evidence of the importance of sound to poethical praxis. ‘To listen to the varieties of modern poetry reading’ across the mainstream, Rasula writes, ‘is to encounter a version of poets’ [ . . . ] fear of what poetry might become if words wander too far off the page, and meanings drift apart from the words’ (255). The sound composition of a third phase poethical praxis may be defi ned in opposition to a “traumatised semiotics”, for the mainstream fi nds its cohesion in the conformity of cognitive tuning. The hyper-stylisation of dominant discourses limits our cognitive receptivity to identification, or co-option with, an “anonymous” modality of being. In this process, that is, the very traumatising of semiotics, the deafening silence of the ethical saying is marked. There is little refuge from this deafening silence as global media networks pride themselves on total coverage. As Piombino has observed, ‘we live in a world that pounds everyone constantly with excruciating emotional trauma, much of it frequently presented in the media in an almost unbearable blaring and glaring manner’ (Piombino 1998, 70). The metaphorical use of a violent pounding in Piombino’s description is

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especially apt. This ‘blaring’ discourse is not a benign sound, but physically violates the other. ‘It should be no surprise to anyone,’ Piombino writes, ‘that under these circumstances the failure to communicate, or the wish to fi nd ways of avoiding communication, are pandemic’ (70). Andrews, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet, has recognised the ethical potential of working with sound material. ‘The key,’ he has suggested, ‘is to stop treating sound as if it were a natural phenomenon’, that is, to recognise that sound is always already socially coded (Andrews 1998, 82). With the predominance of totalising social discourse, sound, as Andrews notes, ‘has become functional’ (74). Yet sound, in a Levinasian philosophy of language, is the medium and material of language, intrinsic to the originary passivity of an ethical saying. Sound cannot give rise to an application because it is bound, in its phenomenological condition, as a response (before content) to the other. The sound that Andrews identifies as functional in ‘presentational enactments at the service of a representational idea,’ is the sound of totalising ontological discourse, with its ‘subheadquarters in Identity and Image’ (74). In these streaming discourses, ‘the smoothed, comforting harmony affi rms, locks in, and eternalizes’ (74). The ‘restorational hygiene’ that Andrews describes as providing an ‘ideological solace’, is sound made functional in the naturalising of ontology (74). Of course, the ‘equilibrium is fraudulent’ for it has silenced the ethical saying that would act as witness to social inequalities. As Andrews suggests, ‘so much smoothness dishonours the larger incompatibilities nested inside the society outside’ (74). For Bernstein, ‘the most resonant possibilities for poetry as a medium can be realised only when [ . . . ] we stop listening and begin to hear; which is to say, stop decoding and begin to get a nose for the sheer noise of language’ (Bernstein 1998, 22). This possibility is made explicit in the tension that Stewart identifies ‘between the intentional and volitional dimensions of both sound production and listening and the involuntary dimension of hearing’ (Stewart 2002, 83). From a Levinasian perspective, this tension might be viewed as that ensuing between the ethical saying and its said within the confi nes of the ontological parameters of our social world. Indeed, critical to our attention as readers, then, is an ‘unregulated openness of the ear to the world and the infi nite nuance of the unsaid’ (83). Poethical praxis, with a view towards ‘experience in language rather than a representation by it’ (McCaffery 1986, 21), thus looks to what Andrews calls ‘the social subtext of sound—at how it is repressed and how praxis might excavate it’ (Andrews 1998, 81). The social codings naturalised according to the smooth harmonies of a totalising discourse are interrupted by a poethical praxis that works, in the words of Maggie O’Sullivan ‘underneath, behind, with language’ (quoted in Sheppard 2001). Composition with sound material—the disharmonies or dissonance of sound—conventionally defi ned as noise, challenges totalitarian terms of social engagement. For Andrews, noise is ‘wayward, unregimented sound’,

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in contradistinction to the ‘managed data’ of dominant discourses (Andrews 1998, 75). With its ‘excess timbral richness, its over-tones untameable in harmonic terms’, such sound material undercuts ‘expectations of determinate pitch’ and interrupts the ‘representational determinacy’ of harmonised social terms. Yet there is no ideal language and it is precisely for this reason that Andrews emphasises the importance of active composition. Unregimented sound will have social associations, even if they are not fully predetermined, and so composition must work to make explicit and reconfigure such associations towards an ethical saying. Andrews describes the poetic process of engaging noise as ‘an informalist construction with the raw materials of social regulation’ (Andrews 1998, 84). With a view perhaps to maintaining alterity, Andrews suggests that ‘we should probably look to a social subtext of sound or noise—to uncork the full restiveness of qualitative difference’ (82). However, there is a danger here that we separate out the multi-modalities of poethical praxis, as if they were in no way interdependent. The performative dialogics of sound and visuality are, on the contrary, co-dependent, just as in the face-to-face experience, sound and vision work together. Stewart’s recognition of the co-dependence and the difference between these senses is again useful: Like the reception of visual phenomena, the reception of sound might be framed as a feeling; we receive light and sound waves as we receive a touch, a pressure. They touch not only our ear membrane but also the entire outer surface of the skin. Yet when we hear, we hear the sound of something; the continuity of sight does not provide an analogue to this attribution of source or cause in sound reception. And we do not pinpoint sound in space. We see properly only what is before us, but sound can envelop us; we might, as we move or change, have varying experiences of sound’s intensity, but it will not readily “fit” an epistemology of spatiality, horizon, or location. (Stewart 2002, 100) Stewart’s explication of sound phenomena and the process of its receptivity, points towards the essential quality of sound material as enabling an ethical saying. As sound is received as ‘a touch, a pressure’ and is felt across ‘the entire outer surface of the skin,’ it is essentially that which calls us to an ethical accountability in the face of an other. Furthermore, Stewart proposes that such sounds are ‘heard in the way a promise is heard’ (Stewart 2002, 104). Here the event of speech—like the proleptic space of the poetry reading or the phenomenological horizon of the poem—creates ‘an expectation, an obligation,’ and the promise ‘must be fulfi lled in time; a “broken promise” cannot be mended—it can only be regretted or used to establish new grounds of demand or indifference’ (Stewart 1998, 46). This promise is much like that of the artwork, as defi ned by J. M. Bernstein:

200 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry ‘like a promise, a work of art “intends” a future that is not legible from the present other than through its very being [ . . . ] a work of art is impotent in the face of future reality’ (Bernstein 2001, 420). Sound, as the locus of an ethical saying, is registered in De Certeau’s understanding of voice, which he describes as moving, ‘in effect, in a space between the body and language’ (De Certeau 1988, 230). In this, there is ‘a strange interval, where the voice emits a speech lacking “truths”, and where proximity is a presence without possession.’ Poethical praxis seeks to enable this proximity via an intersubjective field in which the other is emancipated from the possessive identificatory or representational agency of totalitarian discourse. Thus poethical praxis troubles the cognitive tuning endemic to a social reality mapped via ontological parameters; ‘to understand a phrase’ is then, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, ‘to welcome it in its sonorous being’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 155). Poethical praxis thus disrupts what Bernstein calls ‘rationalizable patterns of sound’ (Bernstein 1998, 13). ‘The intervallic irruption of acoustic elements not recuperable by monologic analysis’ (Bernstein 1998, 13), that which Middleton lists as the ‘neologisms, nonsense words, partial segments of words and syntactic disjuncture’ (Middleton 2005, 55), allow us to participate in the poem’s meaning and become witnesses for a cooperative responsibility. According to Roman Jakobson, it is in the aural ellipsis that the listener contributes: ‘whatever had been omitted by him as listener [ . . . ] the hearer who fi lls in the elliptic gaps creatively’ (Jakobson 1995, 172). Indeed, it is partly with the intervention of an intersubjective field, a space that opens up within the cartography of our social reality, that nonrationalisable acoustic elements can enable the political work of poethical praxis. From the neologisms, portmanteaus and syntactical disjunctions of the aural ellipsis, ‘it is almost as if an idiolect, a personal register of language,’ as Sheppard has suggested, ‘becomes a loose sociolect that the audience temporarily shares’ (Sheppard 2001). Indeed, for Piombino, we have here ‘the development of an international language of thought and sound’ (Piombino 1998, 62). In this process, the ethical and political responsibilities of poethical praxis are perhaps realised. ‘With this internal access,’ Piombino writes, ‘words and languages can become a shared “zone,” on one accessible scale, where all “exiles” can discover a common “home.”’ Piombino’s vision is admirable, but perhaps premature. The sociolect he envisions relies purely on sound, yet the dynamics of an ethical saying in the face-to-face experience is only made possible with the interdependence of each of the senses. Poethical praxis, in short, must involve a performative dialogics commensurate with the full range of the sensual dynamics witnessed by the ethical saying. Nevertheless, as Andrews has argued, ‘to take the full measure of sense in sound would celebrate non-identity, perhaps even obliviousness of self, or at least disrupt the cozy traces of personalization’ (Andrews 1998, 74).

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For Andrews, through an ‘emancipatory constructivism’, the composition of sound materials presents ‘the forward motion of an intrinsic otherness’ (Andrews 1998, 76, 84). The resultant poethics cannot be read through the conventional analysis of accentual systems; rather, the critic must take account of the acoustic systems of sound shapes. He or she must learn to read, as Bernstein has suggested, ‘the intonations, pitch, tempos, accents (in the other sense of pronunciation), grain or timbre of voice, nonverbal face and body expressions or movements, as well as more conventional prosodic features such as assonance, alliteration, and rhyme’ (Bernstein 1998, 13). Indeed, this more nuanced cognitive receptivity is demanded by poethical praxis where ‘regularizing systems of prosodic analysis break down before the sonic profusion of a reading.’

3. e-poetries The “turn to language” that I have explored in Andrews’ work might well be seen as the dénouement of my “poethical trajectory”. Yet his most recent compositional experiments—with the HTML publication of The Millennium Project and its erotics of desire—points towards a new area of poethical exploration. Since the early 1990s, widespread access to the internet has created both new poetic communities—freed from a single geographical locale—and a new poetic genre, “e-poetry”. Indeed, the advanced technological capabilities of personal computers together with the advent of various “new media” have considerably increased the possibilities of poetic form. Across the diverse array of e-poetries on the World Wide Web, the work of the poet and Director of the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY Buffalo, Loss Pequeño Glazier, is exceptional. As an indication of the possibility for an ethical politics in the poetics of new media and digital technologies, this fi nal section reads Glazier’s e-poetry as instructive of a new phase in poethical praxis. In the mid-1990s, Glazier began his initial experiments with e-poetry, generating text and visual images using computer-related processes. In “writing” his e-poem ‘eclout’, Glazier used optical character recognition (OCR), for example, to produce an electronic translation of his type-written source text, a poem by the French-Norwegian poet and text-based artist, Caroline Bergvall.1 Indicative of a third-phase poethical praxis, Glazier’s early experiments with e-poetry take the form of a self-reflexive critique of the compositional process. In particular, ‘eclout’ challenges the notion of a locatable author as it brings into tension the codex form of the book—that which is digitally scanned to provide the machine-editable text—and the HTML rendering of the fi nal poem. Indeed, retaining the formatting errors of the OCR-generated reading, Glazier provides for a liminal space of authorship between Bergvall’s source text and his own HTML translation. The materiality of language is emphasised in this compositional process where unrecognised

202 Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry letters are replaced with error characters and the words are fragmented, fonts altered, and typography rearranged. However, it is in his more recent works—from ‘Mi Pequeño Amor’ (1998) through to ‘Luz’ (2005)—that Glazier has incorporated technological developments in HTML coding whilst exploring an increasingly complex poetics of form. Indeed, “new media” has enabled a further crossfertilisation of literary genres, pushing at the boundaries of the static poem and singular perspective towards multiplicity, interaction and participation. With the composition of his e-poem ‘Viz Etudes’ (1996–1998), for example, Glazier replaces the static text of ‘eclout’ with animated GIFs and bitmap images. Similarly, ‘Mouseover’ (1998) provides for interactive composition via JavaScript, whilst ‘IF-Only / As-IF’ (2001) uses algorithms to allow the reader to construct the poem. Glazier’s e-poetry has thus extended the navigational choices of Andrews’ Millennium Project, progressively demanding active participation, rather than passive consumption, from the “reader”. Instructive of a new phase in my “poethical trajectory”, Glazier’s use of advanced HTML processes enables the performative dialogics of his work. For example, in his e-poem ‘C-O-G-(I)’ written in 2002, there is a dialectical movement between the source code or computer programming language—in combination with behavioural languages like JavaScript—and the visual rendering or appearance of the e-poem as controlled by the reader. Glazier thus describes ‘C-O-G-(I)’ as an ‘interactive kinetic textual composition’ (Glazier 2002). In this poem, the materiality of language as source code and the circuitry or totalising parameters within which it operates are thrown into a dialogical performativity, breaking down the binary opposition of an ethical saying and a totalising said. Indeed, Glazier achieves an ethical politics in his e-poetry by making explicit not only the ethical tension within language but also its political codings. The ‘internet that flows by the galon’ is monopolised by the multinational American corporation, Microsoft whose Anglophone colonisation is challenged in ‘C-O-G-(I)’ with the inclusion of linguistic phrases from oppressed minorities (Glazier 2002). However, ‘C-O-G-(I)’ also draws the materiality of the source code into the physical presence of the body. ‘Our genes, language’, he writes, drawing a parallel between HTML source code and our genetic programming or DNA (Glazier 2002). Indeed, like the erotics of desire that I described in Andrews’ work, Glazier’s e-poetry charges the materiality of source code with a corporeal quality. In an essay entitled “Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital Poetics”, Lori Emerson positions Glazier’s work ‘as a selfreflexive rendering of David Jay Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s groundbreaking concept of remediation’ (Emerson 2005). Emerson writes: For Bolter and Grusin, every medium is divided between two equally compelling impulses: the desire for immediacy (or the desire to erase media) and the desire for hypermediacy (or the desire to proliferate media). (Emerson 2005)

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In Emerson’s reading, ‘the desire for immediacy underlies Glazier’s effort to use digital media to work with words from the inside, to animate, enliven and make language present’ (Emerson 2005). This is certainly true of ‘C-OG-(I)’, where each rendering of the poem is unique, for as Emerson suggests, ‘there’s no experience more immediate than reading a poem written just for you.’ However, I would argue that in the performative dialogics between immediacy (intimacy) and hypermediacy (sociality), there also registers the potential of an ethical saying. In ‘C-O-G-(I)’, this ethical saying originates from the body (in face-to-face intimacy) and moves out into sociality (the multiple and multi-modal discourses of our shared language).

THE INFINITE TRAJECTORY The trajectory we have followed in our readings of American poetry since the mid- twentieth century, traces the development of poethical praxis. The ethical imperative motivating this work may be seen as a response to changing socio-political conditions, in particular, the way in which the proliferation of global media technologies have transformed language-use. Whilst the politics and poetics of each writer have proven to be unique, we nevertheless fi nd across their work a shared respect for alterity and an ambitious experimentation in form aspiring towards ethical perfection. Our readings have been much informed by Levinas’ ethical philosophy, and it is in the light of his work that poethical praxis can be seen to transform our concept of the artwork, our practices of reading and of writing. The “poethical trajectory” is infi nite, opening up the practice of literature to an ethical future.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1 1. Indeed, it was in light of the contamination of public language that T. S. Eliot wrote ‘To purify the dialect of the tribe’. See his poem ‘Little Gidding’ in Eliot, T. S. 1944. Four Quartets. London: Faber and Faber.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 2 1. Charles Olson, “Notes on Language, ca. October, 1951,” [37: Prose #41] Charles Olson Papers. Archives & Special Collections at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, University of Connecticut Libraries. (Subsequent references to material from this collection will use the abbreviation, TJD Research Center, Olson Papers [fi le location]) 2. For a detailed account of the Office of War Information, see Alan Winkler. 1978. The Politics of Propaganda: The Offi ce of War Information, 1942–1945. New Haven: Yale University Press. The OWI’s strategic position within the Roosevelt Administration and its foreign policy is well documented in Holly Shulman. 1990. The Voice of America: Propaganda and Democracy, 1941–1945. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press and Steven Casey. 2001. Cautious Crusade: Franklin D. Roosevelt, American Public Opinion, and the War against Nazi Gemany. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 3. Levinas, E. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Paris: Fata Morgana has been translated from the French title, “Humanism of the other man.” See Levinas, E. 2003. Humanism of the Other. Translated by N. Poller. Chicago, IL: University of Illinois.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 3 1. Conversely, the romantic tradition tends to ascribe priority to Percy Shelley’s dictum that ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ See Shelley, P. 1845. A Defence of Poetry. Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. London: E Moxon: 14. 2. In my recent correspondence with Snyder, he advised a cautionary use of the term “predatory”: ‘Budhist thought is not monotheistic or limited to human beings, and the lives and behaviour or all other beings (traditionally including spirits, gods, demons, angels, and so forth—varieties of creatures)

206

Notes deals with the ethics of all the realms. Consequently predators such as wolves or jaguars are given a close look, and it is assumed that it is so essential to their lives, and it is their karma, to be predators and that they have no anger or intention to harm. Intention is a big part of karma. [ . . . ] In the language we use “predatory” loosely to mean exploitative and unremorseful etc. This is an anthropocentric take on wild nature, and we need to come up with a better term for such behaviour of humans—nothing comes right to mind, though.’ Gary Snyder (email to the author, 26th November, 2008).

NOTES TO CHAPTER 4 1. The recent declassification in June 2007 of the CIA’s so-called “Family Jewels” report has revealed the extent to which the agency skimmed money from the Marshall Plan and violated its charter through illegal wiretapping, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, and human experimentation. The most recent account of the CIA’s covert operations is Tim Weiner. 2007. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday. 2. The journalist and writer John Clellon Holmes heralded Kerouac as ‘King of the Beats’ in an article for The New York Times Magazine, “This Is the Beat Generation”, 16th November 1952. 3. Although Kerouac had been thinking through the “road” concept for his second novel for some time (and preparing passages in his journals), the “original” scroll version was nevertheless composed within three weeks. Recently, critics have questioned the Beat claim to having produced “spontaneous prose” arguing that it was Kerouac’s idea to revise, re-write and edit the scroll (for publication as On the Road) rather than as a response to criticisms from the editor at Harcourt Brace, Robert Giroux. For further discussion, see Howard Cunnell’s introduction to Kerouac, J. 2007. On the Road: The Original Scroll. London: Penguin Books.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 6 1. Digital facsimiles of several of these now out-of-print small-press books and journals have been made available through the Eclipse archive, edited by Craig Dworkin at the University of Utah, Department of English. See http:// english.utah.edu/eclipse/ (Date Accessed: 20/12/06) 2. The fi nal chapter of Tim Woods’ Poetics of the Limit (2002) gives a detailed account of this history. 3. Jeffery Walsh and James Aulich’s Vietnam Images: War and Representation (Basingstoke, Hampshire: MacMillan Press, 1989) and Mark Taylor’s The Vietnam War in History, Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003) provide a good reference point for the representation of such faces. 4. I interviewed Bruce Andrews on the 12th May 2004 at the University of Southampton. My thanks to Bruce for his generosity and patience on that day and to Peter Middleton and Nicky Marsh for the hospitality they provided at the English Department. 5. Woods usefully proposes the term “melopoeia”—words charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property—to describe these sonic-based texts.

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6. Bruce Andrews, quoted in message from Brian Stefans, 29 th March 2001, on the State University of New York list-server (cited 4th January 2007); available from http://listserv.acsu.buffalo.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0103&L= poetics&D=1&P=43911.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 7 1. A selection of Los Pequeño Glazier’s e-poetry (including ‘eclout’ and ‘C-OG-(I)’) is available online at: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/. Retrieved 7th September, 2007.

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Index

A Allen, Donald, 91–92, 114 Alterity, 9–12, 16–17, 19, 31–32, 44, 49, 51–52, 64, 67–68, 70, 72–75, 77, 88, 101, 102, 107– 108, 110, 113, 127, 134, 137, 140, 143, 145–146, 149, 172, 178, 180–182, 184, 191–192, 195, 199, 203 Altieri, Charles, 26–27, 33–34, 65 Andrews, Bruce, 20, 28, 147–179, 183–184, 188, 190, 198–202, 206n4 Getting Ready To Have Been Frightened, 20, 160–163, 174 Give Em Enough Rope, 20, 164–166 I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (Or, Social Romanticism), 164–165, 167, 171–173 Lip Service, 20, 168, 171–174, 176 Millennium Project, The, 20, 28, 168, 171, 174–179, 201–202 Mistaken Identity, 168–171, 173 Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis, 147–154, 159–160, 162–165, 167–170, 174–176, 178–179, 184 SONNETS (Memento Mori), 20, 154–158, 159 Antin, David, 114, 123, 126, 196, 197 Auden, W. H., 89

B Baraka, Amiri, 79 Beat writers, 18, 19, 21, 77, 80, 83, 84, 91, 92, 97, 100, 102, 107, 110, 114–115, 148, 165 aesthetic sensibility of, 77, 80–82, 84, 97, 107, 110, 116

at Six Gallery Reading, 91 mythologised as the “Beat Generation”, 19, 64, 77, 79, 80, 81, 115, 206n2 Bergvall, Caroline, 201 Bernstein, Charles, 153–154, 158, 165–166, 167, 190, 192–195, 197–201 Black Mountain College, 19, 24–25, 181 Black Mountain Poets, 19, 21, 25, 92, 114, 126, 165 Black Mountain Review, The, 25, 91 Buell, Lawrence, 1, 52–54, 56 Burroughs, William, 80, 85–86, 88, 99, 106, 115, 152

C Celan, Paul, 116–118 Civil Rights Movement, 48–49, 79–80, 87, 105, 111, 115, 150 and the Alternative press, 19, 150–152 Cold War, 54, 77–79, 88, 89, 105, 110, 115, 116, 148, 149, 150 culture, 83 political economy, 77–80, 89, 105 Creeley, Robert, 25, 126 Critchley, Simon, 1 Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas, The, 9

D Darwinism, 3–4 Diamond, Stanley, 127–128, 130 Duncan, Robert, 25, 92, 123, 126–127, 136, 143

E e-poetries, 201–203 Ecocriticism, 53–54, 67

220

Index

Eliot, T. S., 28, 48, 91, 205n1 Eshleman, Clayton, 123–124 Ethics etymology and definition of, 1–3, 7. See also MacIntyre, A. philosophy of, 6–7 turn to, 1, 20, 53–54 Ethnopoetics, 20, 113, 123–127, 129–131, 133–134, 138, 141, 144–146

Humanism, 7, 12, 26, 28–30, 32, 46, 48–49, 54, 64, 67, 129 Husserl, Edmund, 7–8, 14

I Intersubjectivity, 27, 29, 34, 38, 42, 44, 48, 52, 65, 70, 85–86, 113, 145, 180, 182, 184, 187–188, 189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 197, 200

F

J

Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 58, 91 Freedom, 7–10, 13, 18, 31, 71, 73, 79, 105, 107, 111, 124, 125, 133, 141, 142, 150, 180, 193 Frobenius, Leo, 132–133, 141

Jazz, 100–103

G Garrard, Greg, 53–54 Gifford, Terry, 53, 67 Ginsberg, Allen, 19, 28, 48, 77–111, 112–116, 119, 148, 150, 152, 171, 182–183, 184, 189–190, 193 Composed on the Tongue: A Book of Literary Conversations, 1967– 1977, 84–85, 104–107 Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952–1995, 79–80, 82, 85, 87–88, 90–92, 102–108 Empty Mirror, 92, 93, 103 Fall of America: poems of these states, 1965–1971, The, 109–111, 189, 193 Howl, 28, 81, 100, 102–111 Journals: Early Fifties Early Sixties, 94, 103, 105–106 Planet News: 1961–1967, 109–111 Reality Sandwiches, 92–99, 103 Ginsberg, Louis, 86 Glazier, Loss Pequeño, 201–203 Goffman, Erving, 128, 170 Graves, Robert, 90 Grenier, Robert, 153

H Heidegger, Martin, 7, 115 Hejinian, Lyn, 153 Hemingway, Ernest, 81 Howe, Susan, 44, 154 Hudson River School, The, 50–51 Human Rights. See Freedom. See also Civil Rights

K Kane, Daniel, 80, 86, 91 Kelly, Robert, 91, 114, 121, 126, 129 Kerouac, Jack, 18–19, 77, 80–84, 88, 91–92, 99–103, 106–107, 115–116, 165, 206n2, 206n3 Desolation Angels, 19, 106 Jack Kerouac: Selected Letters 1940–1956, 81–84, 99–101 On the Road, 19, 83, 99–102, 206n3 Subterraneans, The, 101 Town and the City, The, 84 Visions of Cody, 81, 84, 101 Visions of Gerard, 84

L Lamentia, Philip, 91 Language as clothes of signification, 4, 126, 168, 172, 180, 184 as ethical saying, 2, 10, 11, 14–15, 17, 21, 44, 46, 49, 95, 99–100, 111, 131, 151, 158, 165, 170, 172, 174, 178, 180, 183, 186–203 as face-to-face phenomenon, 10–11, 12–18, 69, 72, 96, 98, 170, 172, 193, 199, 200, 203 as reference, 10, 17, 20, 100, 145, 149, 152, 155, 158, 159, 160, 162, 164, 166–168, 170–172, 178, 187 as rhetoric, 4–5, 11, 75, 83, 88–90, 93, 101, 103, 105, 107, 147, 151, 157, 158, 160, 165, 169, 173, 181, 183, 185, 187, 188, 196 as traumatised semiotics, 2, 4, 5, 17, 18, 21, 36, 44, 46, 48, 76, 85, 106, 112, 113, 118, 129, 147,

Index 149, 151, 153, 155, 164–165, 170–171, 174, 176, 180–186, 187–188, 197 driven against its ethical grain, 2, 5, 18, 46, 85, 186. See also Language as traumatized semiotics “Language” Poetry, 151–179 defining, 151–153 Leopold, Aldo, 56–57 Levertov, Denise, 25, 123, 126 Levinas, Emmanuel on Art, 17, 21, 46, 69 Otherwise than Being: or beyond Essence, 8, 11–16, 72 Totality and Infinity, 2, 7, 8–11, 17, 18, 30, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 75, 113, 171, 185 Levitt, Helen, 108

M MacIntyre, Alasdair, 4–5, 6 Mac Low, Jackson, 121–123 McCaffery, Steve, 153, 187, 194, 198 McClure, Michael, 85 McGann, Jerome, 154, 158, 160 Mailer, Norman, 87 Melville, Herman, 23, 24, 26, 49, 91 Middleton, Peter, 124, 186–189, 191–197, 200 Miller, Arthur, 87 Morality definition of, 2–3, 7. See also MacIntyre, A.

N Naess, Arne, 53–54 New York School, 92, 114,

O Objectivists, The, 1, 127, 181 Olson, Charles, 18, 19, 23–49, 52, 62, 70, 84, 92, 104, 111, 113, 116, 119, 126, 130, 131, 142, 165, 171, 180–182, 183, 188, 197 at Black Mountain College, 19, 24–25 at the Office of War Information, 23–24 Call Me Ishmael, 24, 49 Human Universe, 27, 38, 39 Kingfishers, The, 26–27, 28 Maximus Poems, The, 18, 23–49, 59, 142, 171, 180, 182, 188 political career, 24

221

projective verse of, 26–27, 92, 104, 197 Special View of History, 27 Oppen, George, 48, 181–182, 185 Ortiz, Simon, 129

P Palma, Ray Di, 167 Perelman, Bob, 153, 158, 164 Perloff, Marjorie, 167 Piombino, Nick, 153, 195, 197, 198, 200 Poethical Trajectory, The, 1–2, 17, 18, 20, 21, 27, 28, 36, 46, 48, 53, 67, 74, 75, 76, 77, 85, 97, 147, 181, 188, 197, 201, 202, 203 environmental awareness in, 19–20 turn to language in, 20 Poetry public reading of, 77, 164, 192–197 Pound, Ezra, 28, 48, 91, 107, 127 Projective Verse. See Olson, Charles, projective verse of

Q Quasha, George, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126

R Responsibility, 2, 4–5, 9–14, 16, 17–19, 21, 30–31, 44, 48, 50, 51, 53, 64, 77, 82, 89, 95, 105–106, 108, 111, 114, 125, 129–130, 133, 149, 159, 170, 172, 180, 184–186, 191–192, 194, 200 Retallack, Joan, 50–52, 85, 93, 97, 102, 194–195 Rexroth, Kenneth, 58 Rich, Adrienne, 90 Rights. See Freedom. See also Civil Rights Movement, The Rothenberg, Jerome, 20, 48, 91, 112–146, 183 A Book of the Book, 124 Alcheringa, 124 America: A Prophecy, 125 Further Sightings, 140 New Selected Poems: 1970–1985, 134, 144–146 New Young German Poets, 116–118 Poems for the Floating World, 121, 146 Poems for the Game of Silence, 1960–1970, 134–141, 144

222

Index

Pre-Faces & Other Writings, 146 Shaking the Pumpkin, 124 Sightings, 140 Symposium of the Whole: A Range of Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, 116, 120, 124, 127–133, 136–137, 139–141, 144, 146 Technicians of the Sacred, 124–125 The Gorky Poems, 141–144 White Sun Black Sun, 121

S Salinger, J. D., 87 San Francisco Renaissance, The, 58, 64, 91–92, 114, 126, 153, 197 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 14, 94 Silliman, Ron, 152–153, 158–159, 167 Slocombe, Will, 76, 154, 171 Snyder, Gary, 19, 20, 28, 48, 50–76, 91, 111, 113, 116, 125, 130–131, 182–183 A Place in Space, 57 Axe Handles, 58–59, 65–67, 76 Back Country, The, 58, 63–65 Earth House Hold, 57, 64 Mountains & Rivers Without End, 28, 58 Myths and Texts, 58, 59–62, 65, 67 No Nature, 58 Practice of the Wild, The, 55–57, 67–68, 70–76, 182

Real Work, The, 57 Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems, 58, 63 Turtle Island, 58, 67–69, 72, 74–76 Solipsism, 8–10, 96 Stewart, Susan, 187, 189, 198, 199

T Tarn, Nathaniel, 123, 124 Tate, Allen, 90 Tedlock, Dennis, 124, 128, 129 Traumatised Semiotics. See Language as traumatised semiotics

W Watten, Barrett, 153, 195 Webb, Stephen H., 14–16 Whalen, Philip, 58, 91 Whitman, Walt, 28, 31, 49, 91, 104, 106, 152 Williams, Bernard, 5–6 Williams, Tennessee, 87, 89 Williams, William Carlos, 28, 49, 91, 92, 103, 104, 140 Woods, Tim, 1–2, 6–7, 20–22, 48, 158–160, 163–165, 167, 172, 181

Z Zen Buddhism, 58, 73, 82, 103–104 Zukofsky, Louis, 1, 21, 28, 48, 181