The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
target forms at specific historical moments (not only horizons but dates).
But here there is a contradiction not fully theorized by Mac Low that can be seen in his overall identification of poetic form with definition, “the general framework & set of ‘rules’ given by the poet.” For example, “Tree* Movie” is a conceptual poem (realized at successive intervals) in which a movie camera is set up to photograph a tree for “any number of hours.” But, as a note states, its referent is wholly arbitrary: “For the word ‘tree’, one may substitute ‘mountain’, ‘sea’, ‘flower’, ‘lake’, etc.,” and the poem would be the same. Dated 1961, the concept of the work as given in Representative Works anticipates Andy Warhol’s famous film Empire, which would then be, by definition (or according to the poet), an “unacknowledged [realization] of ‘Tree* Movie,’ with subjects other than trees”63 — though Mac Low’s own realizations of “Tree* Movie” were in the 1970s. The transparency of definition (analogous to the literalism of many of Mac Low’s techniques) is telling here, and it inflects even work with seemingly opaque vocabularies such as “A Vocabulary for Annie Brigitte Gilles Tardos” of 1980, where all possible lexical units made from the letters of her name are syntactically recombined to add up to an interpretative horizon that finally means the name itself. In other words, all horizons of meaning are predetermined in Mac Low’s specifications for substitute symbols, much as the self-evident reasonableness of the BASIC word list would finally specify values for the dancers’ performance of the texts. In “Converging Stanzas” of 1981, the reinscription of lexical substitution toward a predetermined horizon is carried out to a (fully acknowledged) terminal degree. This poem progressively reduces its operative poetic vocabulary from an original stanza of words randomly chosen from the BASIC English word list, which in turn becomes the source for random choices until the probability of any word from the first stanza appearing in the final stanza, except the surviving one, experience, gradually approaches zero. Language converges on experience in a total resynonymy:
experience experience experience experience experience
experience experience experience
experience
experience experience experience experience experience experience experience experience
experience experience experience experience
experience experience
experience experience experience experience experience experience experience (102)
It is entirely appropriate, but equally fortuitous given the influence of chance operation on the resynonymy of poetic vocabulary here, that BASIC is lexically reduced to the ultimate horizon of experience (a pure form of which, without any other qualities, is produced by the reading of the poem). “Experience,” it turns out, was one of Richards’s central critical categories, a universal horizon against which particular poems are read:
Let us mean by Westminster Bridge not the actual experience which led Wordsworth on a certain morning about a century ago to write what he did, but the class composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words, which do not differ within certain limits from that experience.64
“Experience” then will be, for Richards, the horizon of value toward which meanings of words will be addressed (as opposed to a more limited horizon of objects of experience). Mac Low might be surprised to see how “Converging Stanzas” produces not only a word central to the BASIC’s methodology but reproduces Richards’s argument for a horizon of experience “composed of all actual experiences, occasioned by the words,” as well.
In a 1985 interview, I asked Mac Low whether his choice of BASIC conveyed any judgment of that vocabulary’s scientistic, cultural, and objectifying motives; his answer was no, “I simply regarded the Basic English list as just another source of words.”65 This may be contrasted to Kit Robinson’s choice of his selected vocabulary, the Dolch Basic Sight Word List. A certain adult-child dynamic, to say the least, is conveyed in the visual evidence of these words; the child is being asked to take them on faith, not to analyze them but to know them as such as they are read. What results in Robinson’s use of these words conveys a sense of playfulness, an optimistic buoyancy in putting words together in new combinations, as much as it evokes the regression of deliberately restricting language to words from a second-grade reader. For Robinson, the horizons of new meaning are as open as the processes of learning being imitated in the poem, even as the psychological consequences of an earlier stage of development are being retrospectively explored. For Mac Low, however, the specific values for the meaning and syntax that result in any given realization of his work may be discontinuous from the procedural regularities of language determined by his generative rules. The partial nature of Robinson’s chosen vocabulary allows for sudden breaks away from its established level of arbitrary substitution, yielding moments of nonparticipation that assuredly have as much ethical import as the plotted scenarios of Mac Low’s rule-governed performances — especially for a political liberationist such as Mac Low. It is precisely this difference between a psychological horizon for the selection of predetermined language, as opposed to a definitional one, that brought about the major shift in Mac Low’s poetics in the early 1980s, when he began to deemphasize what he now calls nonintentional procedures for more spontaneous and embodied improvisatory methods. Even so, his disciplined attention to desynonymy and resynonymy, the substitution and expansion of poetic vocabulary, in six decades of writing is revealed in the stunning examples of new meaning that he continues to create.66 Mac Low’s production continues unabated, while we are only beginning to read the surface opacity of his texts in terms of the ethical ideas encoded in their transparent motives.
NEW MEANING
Moving from a concept of poetic diction to one of poetic vocabulary involves a shift as well to a historicist and context-specific notion of the opacity of poetic language. In the discussion of the examples of poetic praxis above, there is an evident progression from Coleridge’s notion of poetic form as conserved by community (the clerisy) to Mac Low’s poetics of community self-enactment as the completion of poetic form. Both forms of poetic praxis are rule governed, Coleridge’s in the “severer keeping” of poetic form and Mac Low’s in the literal conditions given by the author for the performance of his works. However, it would be unhistorical to suggest a merely formal inversion as accounting for the difference but also congruence between romantic and postmodern poetic praxes. Between these moments lies the contested terrain of modernism, seen in the different models for the relations between language, community, and poetic form in Ogden and Richards’s BASIC English and in Zukofsky’s response to and interpretation of it. Ogden and Richards generalize the community of Coleridge’s clerisy as the men of research who are suitable interpreters of meaning, likewise generalizing the regulative ideals of Coleridge’s organic form as the necessary conditions for communication. Poetic diction is crucial, then, to the imperial project of fitting vocabulary to meaning in a universal language. Zukofsky’s contestation of and fascination with BASIC is a cultural intervention into the construction of English as a universal language seen in relation to that which it excludes, a Tower of Babel of many languages that includes Zukofsky’s original Yiddish. At the same time, Zukofsky’s modernist commitments paradoxically require similar values of condensation and lexical substitution as those of BASIC English. What results is the new meaning of Zukofsky’s opaque style, a modernist interpretation of Coleridge’s analysis of ideological investments in the habitual judgments of poetry that the tradition founded on his work has done so much to institutionally preserve. Mac Low continues this project of ideological critique, motivated in Zukofsky by the differences between communities of speakers, as the basis for a poetic experiment in the enactment of polity. Nonintentional composition does not simply free language from reference and create the illusion of a nonhistorical subject who is free to make meaning; rather, Mac Low’s methods are historically produced and invoke contextual reenactment as a model for interpretation. If this thought experiment shows a way out of the expressivist confines of organic form (and it does), we may find a new meaning in radical experiments in language.