Demonstrategy. H. L. Hix
as prose, but the book is tagged for marketing purposes ambiguously as “lyric essay / poetry.” It couldn’t have been written if Rankine had accepted as her model for poetry the contrast between poetry and prose. The page referred to above, the list of pharmaceutical companies, defies the lineation model. Yet lists have value for us, including potential emotional value: the most obvious example of a list laden with emotional value is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., which simply lists names. Rankine’s list turns out to be a list of the “thirty-nine drug companies [that] filed suit in order to prevent South Africa’s manufacture of generic AIDS drugs,” a suit that attempts to enforce the companies’ claim to own, as “intellectual property,” antiretrovirals, thus protecting their own profits, though doing so would entail the deaths of millions of people, the great majority of “the five million South Africans infected by the HIV virus.” Rankine laments in the poem that “it is not possible to communicate how useless, how much like a skin-sack of uselessness I felt.” The list of pharmaceutical companies comes close to communicating that, though. When I face the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, I understand the irrecoverable loss of thousands of lives of individual human persons in a different way than before, with an emotional immediacy that my general awareness of the fact of those deaths does not possess; similarly, when I see Rankine’s list of pharmaceutical companies, I understand her uselessness because I recognize it as my own uselessness in the face of, and my complicity in the fact of, colonialist plunder of material wealth and scorn for human life. I understand my uselessness and complicity in a different way than before, with far greater immediacy. If we do not wish for that possibility to be excluded from poetry, then we cannot accept as given or fixed the lineation model as our way of thinking of poetry.
The lineation model is inadequate, but what about the model Aristotle proposes in the Poetics? He specifically states that the lineation model won’t do: “the distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse.” Even in verse, Herodotus still would be history, and the difference between history and poetry “consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be,” which makes poetry “more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” Call this the “algebraic model.” If the lineation model establishes parameters for poetry by differentiating it from prose, the algebraic model constructs poetry by differentiating it from history. History documents the facts, accounting for what actually occurred. Poetry portrays the necessities and principles that underlie the facts, accounting for what did not in fact occur but might have, and may yet. Poetry’s contrast with history resembles algebra’s contrast with arithmetic. The arithmetic equation 2 + 2 = 4 tells me that the two bananas I had today for breakfast and the two I had yesterday total four bananas. The algebraic equation x + .02x = y tells me how much any salary would be after a two percent raise. It is hypothetical, in the logical form of material implication: if a particular thing happens in particular conditions, then the result will be such-and-such. It tells me that if I made $100,000 last year and got a two-percent raise, I’d make $102,000 this year; and it tells me that, even though I didn’t make $100,000 last year, and I didn’t get any raise.
This “algebraic model” gives a way of finding King Lear, a play about events that never happened, and persons who never existed, more edifying than The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a history of events that did happen and were performed by persons who did exist. Or again, of finding The Waste Land, though Eliot’s characters were invented, more edifying than Democracy in America, though Tocqueville’s characters were “real people.” Yet, for all its virtues, the algebraic model cannot be all things to all poems. Where, to name one instance, would the Divine Comedy, with its many “real people,” even people of Dante’s personal acquaintance, fit in this scheme?
Jena Osman could hardly have included in The Network the etymology charts of which the page referred to above is an instance, if she accepted Aristotle’s model as her own. Osman wants to include in her book, and to emphasize, the factuality of language. As she herself formulates things on the first page of her book, “Rather than invent a world, I want a different means to understand this one. I follow Cecilia Vicuña’s instruction to use an etymological dictionary: ‘To enter words in order to see.’” Osman’s book enacts a premise formulated in this way by Jan Zwicky: “Few words are capsized on the surface of language, subject to every redefining breeze. Most, though they have drifted, are nonetheless anchored, their meanings holding out for centuries.” Words, though they change, do not change randomly, so any word contains in itself a form of history, is itself a kind of history. It is this history that Osman seeks to access, and to make available to a reader willing to wonder how Wall Street came to have the power it does over our country and over our lives.
Etymologies are forms of association, to which Osman adds other forms, such as maps and chronologies. Forms of association invite further association, as for example when Osman gives a chronology, listing various events in the order of their occurrence, identifying them by the year of their occurrence, and ending with this event:
1920: A horse and buggy loaded with dynamite explodes in front of the J.P. Morgan Bank, killing 40 people. Although the perpetrators are never identified, the event fuels suspicion of immigrants and anarchists and builds support for the deportation of foreigners. Wall Street and the financial markets become a patriotic symbol; questioning the economic system becomes anti-American. The Washington Post calls the bombing “an act of war… The bomb outrage in New York emphasizes the extent to which the alien scum from the cesspools and sewers of the Old World has polluted the clear spring of American democracy.”
Because chains of association ask to be continued, Osman does not have to tell her readers to note the points of analogy between this event and the events of 9/11. Simply offering it as the last item in a chronology invites continuation of the chronology with the association to that later event. But the association is between historical events. Osman’s poetry bases itself in, and purports to present, history. Aristotle’s privileged model of poetry as a contrast to history doesn’t cover this case; Osman must have had some other privileged model in mind when she was writing her book.
A third common cognitive model is proposed by Shakespeare’s Theseus in the familiar speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” The lunatic sees devils everywhere, the lover sees beauties everywhere. The frenzied poet sees what isn’t there: “as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name.” The model Theseus offers is exciting enough, bordering as it does on sex and madness. Poetry, his model would have it, is poetry not by contrast with prose, as in the lineation model, or with history, as in the algebraic model, but with reason. Call this the “fantastic model.” In it, poetry is the discursive result of seeing things. The lunatic imagines things that aren’t there, but fails to make and maintain a distinction between things that aren’t there and things that are. The lover sees one thing, the beloved, as he or she is not. The poet experiences the same press of imagination as the lunatic or the lover, but records it, displays it to others in words. Poetry records fantasy, the seeing of unreality in place of reality.
Like the lineation model and the algebraic model, the fantastic model, according to which the poet is animated, even overwhelmed, by her hyperactive imagination, enjoys currency in popular culture, but Lisa Fishman could not have written Flower Cart if she had accepted it. Fishman opens her book, not with something she imagined, but with something she found. The first full page of her book contains not a single word she herself wrote: it’s a photocopy, reproducing a 1916 letter from F. J. Sievers, the Superintendent of the Milwaukee County School of Agriculture and Domestic Economy, to Mr. C. E. McLenegan of the Public Library in Milwaukee, describing the results of tests performed on a sample of corn sent by McLenegan. Fishman is not transcending “cool reason” by means of her own “shaping fantasies.” She is, if anything, applying cool reason to a decidedly non-fantastic document. Fishman’s