The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
he feels need to be prefixed (or appended) to virtually every one of his major poetic experiments. These are stage directives as much as interpretations — in other words, they specify how the interpretation of poetry should be considered in terms of its real-time agency. One result of Coleridge’s desynonymy of judgment and identification was to describe an ethics by which the creative acts of others could be appreciated: “To admire on principle, is the only way to imitate with loss of originality”;56 the result was intended to have been the gentlemanly inculcation of value to be shared by those in the inner circles of culture (if not full membership in the national clerisy). Mac Low’s prescriptions for the public staging of his poetry in performance can be seen in relation to Coleridge’s moral imperative of taste. Rather than being simply didactic instructions for the realization of possible meanings, however, Mac Low’s prefaces are also a historical criticism of the kind of literary community Coleridge configured around the appreciation of poetry. For this reason, the directives for the performance of his poetry are not only technical but affective:
All words must be audible and intelligible to everyone present. Readers must listen intently to their own voices and (in simultaneities) to those of other readers and to all ambient sounds audible during a reading, including those of the audience, if any. Amplitudes are free, within the range of full audibility, but readers in simultaneities must never drown each other out or try to outshout each other. Words must be read soberly and seriously, but without fake solemnity or any other artificial type of delivery.57
Mac Low reinterprets the “severer keeping” of poetry as reasonable rules for social conduct. The subjective investments of organic form that can give the contemporary poetry reading its mock sublimity (and interpretive latitude) are clearly corrected for here; the work’s multiple performers are no longer the isolated subjects whose expression matters so much in the usual staged reading scenario. Mac Low’s open form is to an important degree normative, but his scripted scenarios are a prerequisite for engagement in a public space encompassing more than private interests finding expression through lyric form.
Mac Low’s poetics thus move toward political notions of representation in their enactment of community even as they hold back from representation in the epistemological sense. Mac Low acknowledges as much in titling his 1986 collection Representative Works in homage, as he says in his preface, to Emerson’s essay “Representative Men,” but with the difference that it is the work rather than the man that is representative.58 In Coleridge’s Biographia (and by extension the literary tradition it founds), while much can be said for language’s relation to subjectivity and judgment, values for representation in both epistemological and political senses are deferred to the sublimity of the encompassing form of poetic address. Otherwise put, that Wordsworth imitates common speech per se does not matter for a politics and is a dubious distraction for a poetics. For Hamilton, this is one reason why the commonsense or social aspect of desynonymy did not survive the failed transcendence that would account for the imagination. It also offers a reason for why private interests to be socially organized in relation to literary forms need not be grounded in representation — showing the Coleridgean basis of a liberal poetics that proposes self-expression as an inalienable right as long as it is mediated by acceptable form. Mac Low’s at times pedantic emphasis on the origins of his source texts, and his labored descriptions of the means of their translation into target forms, takes on value here against the liberal precedence of expressive form for represented content. In other words, Mac Low insists on the constructed nature not only of subjectivity but of community. In detailing the most basic presuppositions for the production of his works, Mac Low outlines a poetics of representation based on an ethics in which expression is seen as the reflexive enactment of values held in common by communities. This commonality of value can be seen as much in the selection of Mac Low’s source texts as in the performance of their target forms, as the provisional texts that mediate between the two take on their values for representation precisely in their open-ended possibility for collective realization.59
Mac Low’s description of the musical source text and target form of “Machault” (1955), for example, offers a key to the politics of representation that is distributed everywhere in his poetry. Mac Low details the source of the language of the poem in a note:
Written in January 1955 at 152 Avenue C, New York 9, NY, by translating the pitches of Guillaume Machault’s motet QUANT THESEUS (p. 6 in Lehman Engel’s Renaissance to Baroque, Vol. 1 French-Netherlands Music, Harold Flammer Inc., New York, 1939), into a gamut of words from T.H. Bilby’s Young Folk’s Natural History with Numerous Illustrative Anecdotes, published by John W. Lovell Company, New York, copyright 1887, by Hurst & Co.60
These sources exist in a world of texts at large; they are the randomly acquired materials of a secondhand bookstore, available to anyone and bearing with them prior histories of their realization in the name of a common good (the historical responsibility of Renaissance to Baroque; the educative pathos of Young Folk’s Natural History with Numerous Illustrative Anecdotes). What Mac Low achieves by mapping one text onto the other at first appears to celebrate their incommensurability, but it is precisely in the determination of its value in performance that the commonality of his text’s materials may be seen as a publicly available. Such language, rather than assuming an inaccessible interiority, is separated from the expressivist core of poetic form as it interprets its outside sources as equally available to anyone, like the detritus to be found in a secondhand bookstore:
it wits it it by the lasso)
tired animal.” tired lasso) it
wits it that it
it by lasso) that by that
the so lasso) lasso) tired lasso)
the by wits it
lasso) the lasso)
it it it lasso) lasso) by lasso) by lasso)
it by that it lasso) . . . (35)
The children’s book provides an arbitrary vocabulary, memorable for its marked curiousness, that is in turn used to overlay the musical sequence of the motet. The vocabulary taken from the book becomes the source text mapped onto the structure of the motet and making a new source text for the second target form, the poem as realized when read or performed aloud. It is important that poetic vocabulary is being given quasi-referential values by being assigned to particular notes in the motet. Say “lasso)” were to be assigned to B
The representation of common sense and understanding as not conventionally subsumed within communicative norms is crucial here. As a result, an open, nonnormative concept of experience becomes a primary site for the critique of representation, allowing for a radical freedom of action and interpretation within a horizon of stabilized meaning. Mac Low textualizes experience in this sense in a 1960 poem, “Night Walk.” Describing the construction of the poem’s vocabulary, he notes: “The words in ‘Night Walk’ are all taken from a list of 100, representing objects, actions, and states of mind remembered as having figured in an actual situation” (54) of everyday activity. Much like his isolation