The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence. Leslie Scalapino
itself.
As successful current poetic-critical ‘theory’—a description of itself as ‘radical’ (left), which is at once sign and definition of status, is dependent on reproducing the conventional distinctions (as categories of thought).
The closing of bookstores and the utter commercialization of publishing and distribution indicate there will be few reading anywhere.
My sense is ‘subjectivity’—rendered at all—is separation per se simply as observation of phenomena.
Poetically, this separation itself (delineated as writing, as its shape/syntax) is also a shadow (evocation) of that which is ‘exterior,’ the public.
Much of contemporary writing practice (of the ‘experimentalist’ mode) now is delineation (in its syntax—i.e. it is gestural, an action) of this separation of one. Writing now is being the ‘interior’ and the ‘exterior.’ To make these occur, and to see them ‘real’-ly.
“We’re not going to go on playing games, even if the rules are downright fascinating. We require a situation more like it really is—no rules at all. Only when we make them do it in our labs do crystals win our games. Do they then? I wonder.”7
—in one’s conflict—in surveillance—is at once interior and exterior. The ‘directions’ (as in a text of a play, in italics), which is the same as the rendering (as reading) of public context/scene, are the same as interior-speaking to oneself. Writing to engage the interior of the writing itself, (which are then) as exterior events, for anything to occur—its motions change events.
The discovery that poetry has no relation to society—I’d been struggling to maintain a relation. Yet writing’s an interiorization (not/of that relation?). That is a separate action.
In a critical reading group where, in one meeting, writers were discussing dreams they had had, a man, having recounted (or read) his dream, whose connections and process were its activity said—yet how could this (dream) be translated into a thought that was not personal, that was not the dream? (to be made useful—in that it is not from oneself, not a mind action.)
Articulated only as experience—an intense separation where there’s no translation. If one speaks his language one can’t be in friendship with him. Friendship having to do with extending across the social line or interior division where one has no power. Or it is that, one articulates a relation to him that is not related to power.
My sense of relief that ‘poetry has no relation to society’—is that one has despair in ‘experiencing’ that people have no connection to actions (outside, or their own)—even though these actions as if taking place ‘secretly’ change everything.
That ‘poetry’ (interior) ‘has no relation’ occurs as its being extended, as it is not determined actions by being ‘those’ (initiating in that space)—it has to be continual motions.
In a footnote to his book The Marginalization of Poetry, Perelman quotes a passage from my exchange with Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange.” In this complex exchange, (published in the Poetics Journal),8 I was answering Silliman’s position that women, gays, and minorities tend to write “conventional narrative” in that they have to “tell their stories,” arising from their social conditions; whereas white heterosexual male writers (he says) are in a position to experiment formally.
The passage that Perelman quoted from my response to Silliman implies that I simply ‘favor’ “narrative” (whatever that is); that is, it reverses, erases the argument I was making by quoting a tiny passage out of context.
A person describing a creationist view that all minute events and phenomena are in God’s eye or plan beforehand—so evolution cannot exist or occur—nothing is occurring first or apart from the plan—no actions are later events; astonished, I made the remark, “This is completely alien to poetry.” Alien to observation, and also to action.
There is no cause or effect—the moment of occurrence doesn’t exist either—in that the present moment is disjunction per se only (Nāgārjunian logic, which is early Zen, rendering modern physics?). All times (past, present, and future) are occurring at the same time separately as that disjunctive space or moment (rendition of Dōgen’s and Einstein’s sense of being as time). So occurrence is not hierarchically ordered. (These views of time and being are also [elsewhere] articulated as socially shared experiences.)
The language that is ‘experimentally’ based corresponds to people’s experience; as the act of ‘one’s’ experiencing; and (though not widely disseminated, thus not part of ‘communal’ experience) it is not an ‘elite’ language.
Doctrine doesn’t reflect ‘our’/their experience; is alien to it.
The contradictory, problematic factor is in divorcing ‘experience’ from ‘non-referential’ writing (originally with radical intention); a separation that sometimes simply stems from an attitude that ‘experience’ is lowly (that is, from snobbery and also regard for authority as opposed to demonstration).
One point I made to Silliman in the exchange was that the form of one’s articulation may be a reconstituting of the general social narrative, may be a radical change in expression arising from one’s separation from social convention.
Silliman’s position was negating the factor of the individual’s articulation as motions/shape in syntax being a radical change in thought.
In the early eighties, Silliman, in conversation and talks in San Francisco, urged poets to write syntax that was paragraphs without line breaks, paratactic, described as a communal, non-individualistic expression. The syntax has a recognizable sound pattern (which is what poetic syntaxes are, as from other periods, say languages called Beat or New York School). In the same spirit in that period, Bob Perelman stated, during a talk given by Michael Palmer on autobiography, that the erotic was not to enter into writing, the erotic was a form of ego to be stricken or omitted from writing. (At the time, this was related to a Marxist-based conception of writing that should be egoless: ‘non-narrative’ is not ‘self-expression’—that’s an action.)9
Roughly, paratactic syntax is juxtaposition to each other of ‘unrelated,’ which itself becomes a form of relation, statements or questions in one paragraph—a series of such leaps in continuing paragraphs or lines. A single statement is potentially examined or refuted by being in a series of such single ‘unrelated’ statements. This is a form of ‘not holding onto a thought.’ However, I think in order for the structure not to be deterministic, one would have to transgress the entirety—(as reader or writer) not be ‘inside’ the statements or questions having to respond to them. Either power or critique of it occurring as poetic syntax (of the time), ‘one’ must continually instigate—that is, one will write outside a ‘given’ syntax; not being defined by social articulation in any instant as syntactically.
There is no way in which women can apprehend conservative social articulation if they write uniform syntax (dictated by men) that excises the erotic.
One could not be separating the event—from/as thought (or apprehension).
Recently a man giving a (literary) talk showed slides of a ‘pin-up girl’—interpreting the past to make the point that he thought she had a lot of “autonomy.” The subject (pin-up girl10) has no writing ‘as poetry’/expression that’s its writing—and she’s ‘in’ the past. Granting those in the past, in their erotic being, “autonomy.”
Present as disjunct per se only—that space/time cannot be his narrative—or one’s. Event is between. One has to modify one’s tone if one is a woman to be heard as saying anything.
“To change without belief is anarchistic as instinct pricks from the Latin (stinguere), no law but that the absence of law is the resistance