The Public World/Syntactically Impermanence. Leslie Scalapino
those relations, as oneself having power. One would have to disrupt in writing one’s own articulation of power at all.
A communal syntax being community could have occurred in an instant. When it occurs again, it isn’t in the same syntax?
Format (when experiment becomes format) is not articulating occurrence (events/thought). It cannot, inherently. That is, those experimenting formally (as per Silliman’s description) by accepting polemic directive are per se not practicing experiment—in that they are divorced from the live gesture?
The very nature of descriptive language is ‘other’ than the subject. What Giorgio Agamben identifies (locating it in infancy) as a silent pre-language state is going on at all times in one simultaneously ‘alongside’ one’s language apprehension.12
(“Experiment”—not as itself a brand of writing or as ‘unfinished’ ‘attempts’ rather than the ‘finished product’—but as ‘scientific experiment’: to find out what something is, or to find out what’s happening.)
In the view (such as in Anne Waldman’s statements13) that (which is the real) poetry is “speech,” there’s a sense of “speech” (spoken is social, convention of ‘conversation’?)—that is not “thought” [interior], is not ‘felt spatially / such as correspondences in the limbs.’ Tonal is considered thus as ranges of speaking voice or breath.
Yet poets have been writing other tones—that are in the written text only—tones not occurring as speaking. These are ‘sounded’ silently, spatially—a separation; between ‘one’ and ‘social’? Or separation between ‘one’ and ‘correspondences in the limbs’—and night. (As if a butterfly and the butterfly motion of a swimmer.)
We’ve mutated and become ventriloquists who speak ‘inner’ unspoken ‘movements’ and various types of speech at the same time.
I was interested in a syntax whose very mode of observation was to reveal its structure; that is, its subject and its mode are subjectivity being observation. Since it is itself subjective the viewpoint is ‘without basis.’ It removes its own basis, that of exterior authority, as a critique of itself.
As an example, sentences that are single, dual, or multiple clauses are only intonations, dislocating their ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ subject—by one’s ‘interior’ intonation and ‘exterior’ reference being the same (being a clause of the sentence, dissonant notes played at the same time) and as such also mutually exclusive, separately critiquing each other.
Statements of definition (that perceived as ‘givens’ ‘in-coming’ from the outside society, which ‘determine’ social reality) are apprehended as bogus. Because they are revealed as subjective, without basis. One is only constructing a reflection of these as one’s reorientation of apprehension. The syntax itself reorients one’s apprehension (by continual dis-location) and enables that which is exterior to be included in a process of its examination, necessarily self-examination.
My argument to Silliman was that no one can conceive within the ‘given’ language—and articulate reality, as that. It can’t be ‘there’ because it isn’t that.
This may or may not be a different concern from that of women and imported minorities working here as illegal indentured servants who are slaves, for example.
That is, individuals in writing or speaking may create a different syntax to articulate experience, as that is the only way experience occurs. Or they may describe their circumstances and contexts, as if from the outside, using normative language.
The dichotomy is in anyone as a function of the world? Language as interior and entirely from the outside at once—which is a series, starting up throughout.
“Holding to a course with the forbidden sublime, love of beauty originally obfuscates or sublimates to refine what is unclear to be scrambled later from its perception of perfection by that continuing. Which is to change the world. As it does which is why, nothing individually lost, there’s a difference to be told.”14
Notes
1. Clark Coolidge, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, ed. Paul Hoover (New York: Norton, 1994), 652. My intention in taking all the written quotes from one source was to indicate the similarity of direction articulated by poets with widely varying aesthetics collected in one text. I was pointing to the existence of a commonality, which is ‘public’ even if not numbered in millions. However, Joan Retallack accurately pointed out to me that I didn’t comment on the role in the canon of anthologizing: “A surface illusion of comprehensiveness gives these compendiums the power to conceptually blot out the possible presence of multitudes of other interesting writers and (in the case of the Hoover and Messerli anthologies) the small presses that publish them. I.e., they become a substitute (for teachers and writers) for going to the individual books of individual poets. That there are many anthologies of contemporary work coming out right now seems to me the only good sign…. Since the essay is entitled ‘The Cannon’ I immediately assumed you would be commenting on the way in which anthologies take over the reference market so to speak.”
2. Leslie Scalapino, way (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988), p. 105.
3. Clark Coolidge, in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 651.
4. Susan Howe, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 648.
5. Amiri Baraka, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 645.
6. “Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man’s Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can’t be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on.” Frank O’Hara, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 633.
7. John Cage, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 652.
8. Ron Silliman and Leslie Scalapino, “What / Person: From an Exchange,” Poetics Journal 9 “The Person,” pp. 51–68, ed. Lyn Hejinian and Barrett Watten, Berkeley, Calif., June 1991.
9. Bob Perelman doesn’t remember making this remark and states he would not make such a comment as it is puritanical and offensive. It was not recorded (the tape ended). His words were only part of an exchange in which a number of the men spoke, then agreed with his statement. No women spoke to this. He replied to this essay: “So I look at the picture of my literary position in your piece and see an inflexible anti-erotic commissar insisting that people write conventionally.” His point or remark to me here is well-taken: I do not mean to characterize his writing or thought in that manner, but rather to demonstrate occurrence in public expression of ideology.
10. Betty Page, referred to in a talk by Barrett Watten at the University of Maine.
11. Bernadette Mayer, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 659.
12. Infancy & History / Essays on the Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben, Verso, 1993.
13. Talk given at Philip Whalen’s Birthday Reading at the San Francisco Art Institute, October 20, 1996; and talk given at Allen Ginsberg’s memorial in San Francisco.
14. Bernadette Mayer, quoted in Postmodern American Poetry, p. 659.
:: Silence and Sound/Text
Note on my work:
I would like to do a writing in which ‘cultural’ (that is, both outside one and interior) scrutiny can occur as being the process of the writer’s thought and recognition coming up to the surface.
In As: All Occurrence in Structure, Unseen—(Deer Night), I intended a double—that an outside culture as seen interiorly by one be brought to bear on one’s own culture, that ‘conceptualization’ and ‘experience’ be at once apprehension and overt (as a play, yet read in silence) illusion.
This