The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
in which her patronage of the avant-garde is politically suspect: “Kristeva’s formulation of the marginal forces of subversion has a romantic, even mythic, dimension, and it is this dimension which binds [her project] to some of the more conservative strands of modernism. . . . This trust in an individualistic avant-garde rather than anything that could call itself a revolutionary collectivity can be seen as part of a general intellectual backlash in the west [that] has its parallel in the clamor for a return to ‘family’ and a politics of self-help in other cultural registers.”62 Hennessy’s association of the avant-garde with the New Right, as well as her sense of entitlement to speak for collectivity in denial of the avant-garde’s actual experience of revolution (or Kristeva’s, for that matter), is self-centered and distorted. What ought to give pause for thought here, though, is the rejection of the avant-garde as a fantasy having nothing to do with the interests of women. Such a rejection can also be seen, in another register, among women writers associated with the Language School during the period in which Legend was written. When Carla Harryman was asked by Ann Vickery, in the course of the latter’s research on women writers and the Language School, about the possibility that her collaborative novel The Wide Road (written with Lyn Hejinian) was influenced by Legend, she responded:
I have been working on collaborations (albeit often in performance — but also textual) since the early to mid 70s, [so] The Wide Road is part of a process/practice that predates Legend. You could as easily argue that Legend was motivated by collaborations that preceded it, and that it was almost a reaction to the more open-ended interrogations of that early period — as if it wanted to foreclose on the possibility of on-going collaborative experimentation by constructing [a work] so definitively masculinist. [Legend] was one of the least interesting manifestations of collaboration vis-à-vis its process to me: that’s because of its monolithic (homosocial) affect, i.e., its intention seemed to create a monolithic edifice.63
Harryman then goes on to describe her early collaborative work with a number of artists, in different genres and genders. The intensity of her rejection of Legend, here, is marked; as a “monolithic (homosocial) . . . edifice,” it offers no avenue in for the feminine reader, and she rejects it as an example either for collaboration or performance.
Legend certainly takes its place, even as a monolith, among a wide range of multi-authored collaborations in and around the Language School, from the 1970s to the present. The collective form of the magazines published in the period, of course, is evidence of this, but there are many other instances where an aesthetic of collective practice is concretized in individual multiauthored works. One such instance, described by Bob Perelman, involved a three-person group of collaborative writers in San Francisco (Perelman, Steve Benson, and Kit Robinson) who produced lengthy and unedited texts of free writing in relation to written source material read aloud by a member of the group (these sessions bear some relation to the automatic writing practiced by the surrealists in their collective practice). In Perelman’s discussion, the line “Instead of ant wort I saw brat guts” stands as an example of the material produced by this process; the line itself was then used by all three authors in different poems (and it appears in the final section of Legend as a kind of homage as well).64 Steve Benson’s use of it appeared in a series of poems generated from this collaborative material in This 8 (1977), three years before publication of Legend and likely an influence on it. The line itself is crucial for the values of this textual practice; in what I am going to call the Brat Guts aesthetic, a certain masculine regression (a “brat” is an Oedipal subject position defined by its relation to the phallic mother of castration anxiety) spills its “guts” (the body, however, is still in pieces, fragmented, before the advent of the Mirror Stage and the ego’s imaginary limits) in a form of Kristevan textual productivite. It is important that this first stage of boundary disruption between masculine subject positions was followed by a moment of recuperation in which the material was reintegrated into single-authored works, although in Benson’s case the poetry that results shows the deep impact of this ego-shattering experience.
About this time, also in San Francisco, I was well aware of the Brat Guts project; though distant from it, I was curious to know what was going on. I visited a session once, but did not participate; even so, I remember feeling included. Somewhat later, I proposed to Benson, once the group’s project had ended, that we write a collaborative poem that would be made of two poems in intersubjective, if not intertextual, dialogue. We specified a certain number of stanzas and lines, but wrote relatively independently of each other. What resulted were two poems titled “Non-Events” which were published together as an issue of A Hundred Posters, edited by Alan Davies, in November 1978. On the title page it is clear that while the two poems are separately authored, the title “Non-Events” is held in common between authors (figs. 26–27). The rules for the poem were purely formal: each would have twenty-five stanzas of five sentences each; for Benson, the sentences would each be relatively autonomous, with the kind of indented sentence/line that Jack Spicer often used, while for me the sentences would make up regular eight-line stanza units, adding the additional rule that the five sentences would always make up eight lines. Thematic motivations for the work were not shared, although there was a partial overlap. In dedicating the poem to “B W,” Benson was toying, in his address, with accounting for his relationship to another male poet of the same initials as mine; the addressee, not only the subject, is split. My choice of the title “Non-Events” had to do with a heterosexual relationship; the poem’s textualization of desire was thus deeply ironic, even self-canceling. While clearly the homosociality of the Brat Guts aesthetic, and later Legend, influenced the intersubjective process between the two authors, there is an important difference in that Benson and I identified each other at the time with object choices of different genders, as much as with holding an object choice of the same gender in abeyance; our collaboration depended on an understanding of that difference. What resulted, in any case, was a loaded negotiation in which subject position and object choice were carefully separated and reconfigured in the form of the poem. There may have been, at some point, a typed version of both poems in which the stanzas interlocked, and the poem may have been written as a form of alternation from stanza to stanza. When the poems were finally published, however, they were separated, and both end up in respective collections from the period: Benson’s in As Is and mine in 1-10.65
26. Steve Benson, from “Non-Events,” A Hundred Posters, no. 35 (November 1978).
27. Barrett Watten, from “Non-Events.”
Benson’s poem bears stylistic resemblance to the work of the Brat Guts group, and may even incorporate textual material — from Flaubert’s Sentimental Education, Gogol’s “The Overcoat,” and Freud’s essay on Leonardo — taken from their collaborative sessions. Benson uses this material within an improvisatory form of erratic condensations and surprising coruscations of impeded narrative, but the poem’s textual play leads as well to more thematic areas that begin to find rich veins of material as cues for introspection:
In this case none other than a so-called infantile
memory,
and certainly a peculiar one. Odd things and
an odd time to remember: no memory of the period
you’re still being nursed
can be believed, but the idea of a vulture opening
Leonardo’s mouth with its tail
is so incredible, a construction that eliminates all
strangeness likes us better.
Benson’s open, improvisatory form collides with the resistance of his