W. Scott Howard
Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry. Ed. Jeanne Heuving and Tyrone Williams. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019. ISBN: 978-0-8263-6046-5. $75.00 USD (hardback and e-book), xxi + 244.
This volume offers a dynamic collection of capaciously engaged and cogently argued essays, and I hope that UNM Press will soon release a more affordable trade paperback edition because the current list price of $75.00 (for either the hardback or the e-book) may prove prohibitive for many readers, writers, and educators who would otherwise be most interested in the book’s timely subject and incisive methods. Heuving and Williams have produced an edited collection of multifaceted yet unified essays that combine creative and critical, historical and theoretical, institutional and political approaches to the study of “poetics itself as well as” concerning “changing poetic valuations and practices” (ix) within and against the contiguous legacies of literary modernism and postmodernism; poststructuralist theory, cultural criticism, multiculturalism; and more contemporary methodologies investigating race, class, and gender; disability studies, intersectionality, conceptual writing, documentary poetics and trans-discursive institutional critique(s). With one exception, I’m in agreement with Pierre Joris’s back cover blurb: “This is a necessary and most welcome gathering of essays for anyone interested in the most advanced and challenging contemporary modes of writing. A must-read for young writers who want to know where the cutting edge of poetry and poetics is situated at this point in the twenty-first century.” In my view, this book is a must-read for all writers who engage with the fields of modernist and postmodernist poetry and poetics from 1900 to the present with particular emphasis given to the poststructuralist legacy of the so-called linguistic turn since the 1960s.
Considering that capacious historical and theoretical framing, Heuving and Williams thus reflect:
For poetry—long understood as a language art—the turn to language and the broad interest in questions of discourse formation brought with it
the need for new definitions, understandings, and practices. What did it mean to write poetry with an orientation that understood language not
only to reference but also to construct reality? And what did it mean that questions regarding the production of texts that had hitherto been
largely a literary and poetry concern were now being engaged throughout the humanities, and sometimes also the social sciences and
science[?] Indeed, the expanded realm of poetics introduced to the study of poetry a much larger range of questions, including those of
social justice and parity in gender, race, and class, among other determinations. (ix – x)
Many of the fifteen essays gathered in Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry were “first given as presentations at the Convergence on Poetics” in 2012 that “commenced the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program at the University of Washington Bothell” (vii). As such, readers will notice slight variations of tone across the volume’s chapters, which is to be expected; those essays that were first presented as talks at the 2012 conference carry those performative personae forward into these discursive adaptations. (Only one of the chapters was previously published: Nathaniel Mackey’s excerpt from Late Arcade.) To my eyes and ears, that performative energy is a driving force at the heart of this book’s conviction, as Williams argues, “that there is something at stake, something worth fighting over” (227). Heuving and Williams organize the book’s essays among four thematic sections: “What is Poetics?”; “Critical Interventions”; “Cross-Cultural Imperatives”; and “Digital, Capital, and Institutional Frames.” Their collaboratively written Introduction and a Coda by Williams respectively frame the collection’s abiding concerns with poetry’s “cultural and social institutions and practices” (xi) and “the very ground of responsibility, not only to our histories but also to our present positions, when and wherever those obtain” (230).
Given the book’s historical and theoretical contexts that emphasize the legendary linguistic turn as well as the shaping institutional occasion of the 2012 conference at the UW Bothell, some readers might wonder why there’s no consideration given to the enduring legacy of the paradigm-shifting symposium held at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center during October of 1966 as represented by the volume of papers from that event that were edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato and published as The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (Johns Hopkins, 1970), which was republished (as a 40th anniversary edition) under the chiastic title, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey (Johns Hopkins, 2007). That edited collection has long been recognized as foundational for the emergence of the postmodernist turn to language across the fields of anthropology, classical studies, comparative literature, linguistics, literary criticism and poetics, history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiology, and sociology. Considering the methodological emphasis on the “turn to language” variously engaged by all of the essays in Inciting Poetics, this seems like a missed opportunity because there would have been much to critique, such as the politics of race, class, and gender in play at that 1966 symposium and as represented by the essays collected in those 1970 and 2007 anthologies. Articulating the crux of Inciting Poetics within and against those kindred institutional (inaugural conferences) and methodological (poststructuralist) frameworks, even if only briefly, would have given readers an incisive reflection by which to measure the critical difference that this 2019 anthology brings to the field. “Together these essays incite poetics because of their simultaneously profound commitment to poetry as well as their implicit and explicit disagreements” concerning “the ongoing production of poetry with respect to its relationship to larger cultural and social institutions and practices as well as the exacting activity of poets themselves” (xi).
Despite the editors’ assertions that “the turn to language has so permeated the understanding and practice of poetry and poetics as well as other fields of endeavor that it no longer serves as an urgent impetus or as an organizing question” (x), and that “there is no resolution, no sublation, to be construed from these essays” other than “a profound consideration of just what poetics can or might entail” (xi), in my reading of the book, the crux of this volume (and in each of the essays) underscores deeply attentive studies of linguistic self-reflexivity that incite poetics (making) to praxis (action). The resistance of language to language informs, for each contributor, deconstructive interventions that amplify poetry’s multifarious forms and forces that shape social and political conditions for institutional critiques and positive democratic social change. Although their richly diverse poetries under investigation in each chapter differentiate these essays (thereby representing a remarkably complex field of works from emerging and established poets), the contributors’ methods unify the book’s focus, which remains steadfastly poststructuralist.
In the volume’s first section, “What Is Poetics?,” careful attention to linguistic self-reflexivity determines meta-discursive distinctions between poetry and poetics that provoke critiques of social engagement, aesthetic pleasure, and the politics of race, class, and gender. Lyn Hejinian’s chapter, “An Art of Addition, an Eddic Return,” considers the Icelandic Prose Edda as a work of poetry that recursively engenders its own poetics as a form of socio-cultural action. The four parts of the Prose Edda (also known as Snorri’s Edda) move “progressively from without to within the very cultural and literary practices it addresses, emerging ultimately as itself a site of poetry-making, poeisis. But in its history, it develops conversely. Poem and theory emerge in a relation of reciprocal presupposition, and the process in which this happens can be equally termed ‘poetics’ and ‘praxis’” (7). This meta-poetic analysis shapes Hejinian’s subsequent concerns with aesthetic self-reflexivity and contextualism (7), lyric sociality (8), and the “turn to poetics, as it occurred in the immediate wake of the almost-global events of 1968 and the appearance, in English translation, of (principally French, but also Russian) literary theory and metaphilosophy” (9)—all of which informed and energized poetics as a form of social praxis kindred with activist principles shared among artists and writers associated with Language Writing, the Black Mountain school, the Black Arts movement, and the San Francisco Renaissance (10). Considering the differences between the world of the Prose Edda poet, Snorri Sturluson (1179 – 1241), and our world today, Hejinian concludes that “his motivations were expansively social” (10), thereby reaffirming the centrality of praxis then and now because it is “from a social world that the poet makes poetics, adding devices and dimensions, ideas and ideals, to the cultural span, extending the given world’s referential matrices and horizons of meaningfulness” (10). In her essay, “Statement on Poetics: Pleasures, Polemics, Practices, Stakes,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis investigates the indwelling dialectical relationship between poetry and poetics—that is, the self-reflexivity of “meta-commentary in poetics that one sometimes finds in a poem” (13)—in order to define and defend poetry “as saturated segmentivities in social-sensuous language” (15). Poetry’s infinitely generative capacity to work the “‘materiality of language’” (17) provokes poetics (as an inherent, micro- co-presence) to honor and discuss maximally “that necessity—given all the layers of information, thought, bibliographic meanings (textual, visual, material, and historical), intertextuality, sonic pulse, cultural allusions, and social understandings that are prolonged by the work, evoked in the making of the work, and embedded in the practices of language” (17). DuPlessis amplifies and examines this dynamic self-reflexivity between poetry and poetics across a sequence of deft intra-/inter-textual attunements to detail (19), contingency (23), betweenness (24), deixis (26), literary montage (29), and polemic (30), finally underscoring praxis (32) at the heart of the “intricate bottomless tangibility” (33) that the poetry of embodied poetics incites. Nathaniel Mackey’s excerpt from Late Arcade offers “a work of critical fiction poised on the horizon where performance and poetics, expression and reflection, theory and practice, and related antinomies meet” (39) at the self-reflexive resistance of text to jazz music, which engenders and escapes music criticism. In this excerpt, N., “founding member of a band in Los Angeles known as the Molimo M’Atet” (39)—which is “beset by text-bearing comic-strip balloons that occasionally emerge from [the musicians’] instruments and from their debut recording[,] Orphic Bend” (39)—writes a series of letters to his Angel of Dust, expressing bemusement over a music review published in the Santa Monica Weakly (as his Aunt Nancy calls it). The band’s dilemma with the text-bearing balloons has become acute because Aunt Nancy suggested they should distribute “actual rubber balloons to audience members prior to [their] encore number, instructing them to play the balloons, in whatever way they chose, as accompaniment to the music” (39). The parodic stunt has provoked a misguided review in which the reviewer praises the band’s “‘decision to embrace the balloons and the audience in one bold stroke’” (41). One of the band’s members, Lambert, laments that the reviewer has completely missed the self-reflexive irony: “‘the balloons embody their own self-critique … a hedge against what they otherwise embody, advancing legibility as an inflated claim’” (42).
In the book’s second section, “Critical Interventions,” intertextual analyses of literary critical discourses associated with particular schools (e.g. New York School, Language Writing, Black Mountain) and methods (e.g. projective practice, contextualism, documentary witnessing) inform self-reflexive critiques that refashion the linguistic grounds of those very investigations, calling for renewed considerations of poetics and praxis in each case. Charles Altieri’s essay, “Poetics Today,” offers a tentative manifesto that begins by imagining “two choices for a poetics”—to engage with composition as a site “for poetic experience” or to grasp poems as forms of action that move “audiences to identify with authorial projects and to explore what difference they can make in their lives” (53 – 54). Altieri quickly deconstructs this false binary via discussions of rhetoric (54) and aesthetics (55) that respectively underscore emphases given to linguistic techniques and artistic judgments during the premodern eras (55) when (as Altieri asserts) theoretical discourse was dominated by mimesis—that is, representing reality as opposed to constructing it. Following these double articulations, which establish a basis for contrast, Altieri presents his central argument that “painterly abstraction” (57)—especially in the poetries of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—and the linguistic “turn to figuration” became “a means to bring freedoms derived from abstract expressionism into conjunction with energies basic to quotidian life” (58). Altieri’s concluding paragraphs consider the praxis of “painterly worldliness” (58) and of “stylizing the quotidian” (59) in the poetry and poetics of James Schuyler, Ben Lerner, and Joshua Clover (59 – 61). In “The Material and Medium of Language,” Jeanne Heuving astutely observes that one of the consequences of the turn to language was that “some innovative poets drew a line between themselves and their immediate predecessors, namely the Beats and New American or Black Mountain poets[,]” because “the preceding poets were seen to be naïve about how language constructed, rather than reflected realities, including emotional response itself” (63 – 64). Another consequence of the poststructuralist linguistic turn has been an increasing emphasis (in poetics discourse, especially since Zukofsky) given to the so-called materiality of language, which, as Heuving cogently argues, is less capacious than a complementary notion of “language as a medium” (65). If the notion of linguistic materiality “inclines us toward thinking of the poet as an agent acting on language,” an emphasis given to the medium of language “prompts us toward conceiving the poet as a medium on whom language acts” (66). Heuving applies this renewed perspective to a reconsideration of “Projectivist orientations that have received delimited and debased evaluations as narrowly ‘speech-based’ poetics, when in fact they involve complex relationships to language production” (66). Heuving then amplifies this self-reflexive critique of poetics discourse through a sequence of deft readings of works from Plato and Foucault (68) to Pound, Duncan, and Mackey (68 – 78) among others (including Gertrude Stein and Wilson Harris). In each of these close readings, Heuving’s insightful attention to language as a medium amplifies connections between poetics and praxis by expanding “the sense of how language functions in poetry that aims to intervene in existing cultural and social orders but is inadequately discussed through an exclusive emphasis on language as material” (78).
Elisabeth Frosts’s chapter, “Toward Transformation: The Contextual Turn in US Poetry,” challenges lingering disagreements in poetics discourse about vexed differentiations between “experimental” and/or “innovative” writing (81) by shifting the conversation away from such binary formulations and toward Denise Levertov’s emphasis given to poetry’s “‘potential influence’” upon a reader and Erica Hunt’s concern with “‘social consciousness’” (82), thereby connecting aesthetics with politics; poetics, praxis. For Frost (as for Levertov and Hunt) the poet’s and poem’s self-reflexive attunement to social context energizes that bridge between making and action, thereby engendering what she calls transformational poetics:
A contextualized, self-theorizing poetics, whether formally recognizable or formally disruptive, offers us a way to elide the historical battle
lines between instrumental accessibility on the one hand and avant-gardist rupture on the other: the self-theorization of a work and its methods
can become a means of promoting cross-aesthetic practices, avoiding a reification of formal characteristics, and allowing greater access to
new work for a maximum number of readers—which itself opens the possibility of readerly transformation. (83)
Frost develops this argument for transformational poetics across a sequence of incisive theoretical critiques addressing local context (84), cultural poetics (85), feminist standpoint theory (85), strong reflexivity (85), and praxis (86), thus establishing her essay’s “‘contextual turn’” (86) for subsequent investigations of documentary poetics and praxis in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands; Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (co-edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northern); Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, and Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, among other works. Cynthia Hogue’s chapter, “‘To Make from Outrage Islands of Compassion’,” revisits the competitive friendship between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan concerning the poetics and praxis of traumatic witnessing, especially with regard to Duncan’s advice on Levertov’s work-in-progress (1967 – 1969), “Staying Alive” (published in 1971 as To Stay Alive). Hogue argues that the crux of their disagreement hinged upon linguistic self-reflexivity: whereas Duncan recommended an inward turn from the time-bound moments of traumatic witnessing toward a transcendent “‘immediacy of the ideal and of the eternal’” (107), Levertov sought “an alternative subjectivity, which could bridge the divide between the eyewitness and one bearing witness, between facts and truth” (107). As a counter to Duncan’s criticism of her work-in-progress, Hogue reasons that Levertov’s “bridge-poetics of eye-witnessing” (109) emulates Robert Kaufman’s arguments for poetry’s “ethical reflection” of face-to-face encounters “between people, and also between people and art forms” that amplify the lyric’s embodiment of historical experience (111) and public engagement.
In the volume’s third section, “Cross-Cultural Imperatives,” poets and critics “draw attention to difficulties inherent in liberal solutions of diversity and tolerance[,] given the indelibleness and complexity of culture itself, especially within already racialized and racist societies” (xvi). These trans-discursive chapters deconstruct white privilege through contextual counter-readings of ethnography, the white gaze, and transcendental signification that respectively engender trenchant critiques of “the power of observation” (134), “racism in white readers” (153), and poetic “detachment from the immediacy of the social” (159). Sarah Dowling’s essay, “Ethnos and Graphos,” begins with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s” from Annie Allen, which, argues Dowling, “turns on its doubled anthropological structure of observation” (121) that engages linguistic self-reflexivity in the dynamics of a “role reversal between observer and observed that makes whiteness an object of study and white tourists in Bronzeville representative specimens to be analyzed” (122). From that opening frame, Dowling builds her critique of “the technique of participant observation” in which “the question of who is studied by whom remains deeply fraught” (133). Dowling’s cross-disciplinary investigation of ethnographic methods and documentary poetics engages sagaciously with the works of James Clifford (123), Sterling Brown (124), Cathy Park Hong (125), Jerome Rothenberg (127), Garry Thomas Morse (128), and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (129), among others, that individually and collectively underscore a renewed call to poetic praxis that continuously brings “the blank center of objectivity under careful scrutiny” (134). Aldon Nielsen’s essay, “White Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck, and White People,” delivers a sequence of self-reflexive contextual excoriations that deconstruct the “rear-guard revisionism” (146) of documented cases in which former colleagues (David Berlinski), modernist literary scholars (Christopher M. Mott, Jacqueline Brogan), high school educators (Marilyn Bart), and poets (Tony Hoagland) have insisted, in their own defense, that “seemingly racist language is, in fact, a subtly subversive deployment of racist tropes against themselves in the interests of ending racism” (143) within the rhetorical contexts of their own demonstrably racist writings, actions, and inabilities to recognize their strategic deployment of such white mischief. Nielsen’s vigilant counter-readings connect these bracing individual case studies to a broadly engaged critique of cross-cultural poetics, arguing that the very notion of race as a social construction must be taken to task anew:
How does the present-day rhetoric of race reproduce race for a postracial nation? How does the very term ‘postracial’, with its presupposition
of race, operate to silence exactly the mode of analysis I am here calling for? Where do our assumptions about how poems sound racially
come from, how do they evolve, and how does ‘sensitivity’ rhetoric serve to cloak their operations? Even after more than a decade of
‘whiteness studies’, these questions remain largely unaddressed. (148 – 149)
Nielsen’s unrelenting critique demands our confrontations with the structural mechanisms of those very constructions—that is, for a renewed poetics and praxis of racial justice that would begin by deconstructing entrenched ideological and linguistic self-reflexive methodologies that cover racism with white mischief. Leonard Schwartz’s essay, “Transcendental Tabby,” reconsiders the transcendental signifier’s dialectical structure at the heart of lyric poetry (and in the lament, in particular) as a highly charged self-reflexive modality that invests poetics with a praxis capable of inciting personal and political liberation. Through a rich sequence of deft and vital readings from the works of Kamau Brathwaite (158), Emmanuel Levinas (160), and especially Ibn Arabi (161 – 163), Gershom Scholem (163 – 166), Taha Muhammed Ali (166 – 169), Martin Buber (169 – 171), Mahmoud Darwish (171 – 172), and Sumaiya el-Sousy (172 – 174), Schwartz argues that the dialectical critique for poetics today “remains a question of defamiliarizing language as a natural condition, of allowing poetry, a language within a language, to open like a sluice, of changing the language from the inside, of being aware of the silence within words that allows for such liberating motion, of arriving at a new language by way of an exploration of the old” (158). Schwartz’s concluding passages amplify that dialectical lyrical tension via the poetics and praxis of el-Sousy’s “haunting words” of the Palestinians of Gaza, as their lamentations flow through the poet’s “words [that] press up against the glass walls of the cyber-ghetto, and the veiled walls of dream, and the actual guns enforcing incarceration and limiting speech and movement in the actual ghetto” (174).
The chapters in the book’s fourth section, “Digital, Capital, and Institutional Frames,” engage in meta-critiques of the humanist and increasingly posthumanist means and modes of information production and management: from the codex to web platforms, conceptual art, capitalist semiotic economies, data remediation, and grid-spaced poetic nominalism. Within and against such “totalizing powers” these chapters underscore “strategic actions that have the power to intervene in these harrowing conditions” (xviii) through self-reflexive “guerilla tactics that simultaneously are complicit with and disruptive of the conditions” (xix) of hegemonic power. Ron Silliman’s essay, “The Codex is Broken,” begins with the premise that although it may appear that “the role of the book as the end-all and be-all of writing has been eroding” since CERN launched the first-ever website in 1991, “we are forced to concede that the book never was a fixed vessel for the written word” (179 – 180). This reflection shapes a sequence of self-reflexive critiques of information systems that concomitantly provoke renewed defenses of emerging poetries and poetic practices. Although “the only format that can now be read by every existing e-reader is plain text, the format least capable of handling poetry or any sort of textual complexity” (180), Silliman observes that new modalities “of communication are reconfiguring national boundaries, shifting the balance between state and individual as well as state and corporation” (181). The stakes for praxis are higher than ever because “the stunning rise in the number of practicing English language poets” and a global “resurgent hybridism” energize “transnational networks of the like-minded to arrive at levels of sustainability in ways previously not possible” (181). Vanessa Place’s performative essay, “Empire Aesthetics: It’s Not the Point, It’s the Platform—Detroit Model,” parodies her agency as poet, writer, artist of all sorts, and former CEO of her own agency, Vanessa Place, “the world’s first transnational poetry corporation” (185) famous for producing frictionless aphorisms, such as “Information is architecture,” “Navigation is content” (189), “The platform is the message” (191), and “All art is now site-contingent” (193). Despite her patented dismissal of self-reflexivity in her definition of conceptual poetry, Place’s critique of conceptualism hinges upon chiastic apophatic haecceity reminiscent of deconstructive dédoublement: “poetry trades on sincerity, even in irony. Art trades on itself, which is always sincere. So, poetry is now art, art poetry” (192). Place’s satirical encounters with works by Britney Spears (186), Jorie Graham (187), Vanessa Place (188 – 189), and Rosalind Krauss (190), among others, self-reflexively deconstruct subjects, objects, and sobjects (190), eviscerating poetics and praxis until “absolutely limpid” (192), flipping “an ethics of ambiguity” to “an ethics if ambiguity” that provokes her concluding frictionless slogan, “You better work bitch” (194). Brian Reed’s chapter, “Now That’s a Poem: Vito Acconci, Conceptual Writing, and Poetic Nominalism,” decodes the nested and contested reception history of Acconci’s early works, particularly “REMOVAL MOVE (LINE OF EVIDENCE),” through deftly self-reflexive contextual counter-readings of allusive / elusive / illusive critiques of Acconci’s works embedded within a sequence of texts by Bruce Andrews, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, and Charles Bernstein in which their publications’ parodic intra-/inter-textualities disclose “a prior history of disagreements, disciplinary and otherwise, concerning a tag-team plotline, conceptual art > language poetry > conceptual-writing-that-is-occasionally-poetry-too” (208). Reed’s meta-discursive methods determine his subsequent assessments of notable disagreements among critics of conceptual writing, including the arguments of Stephanie Burt (209), Arthur Danto (210 – 212), and Marjorie Perloff (212 – 214), which inform his concluding affirmation (by way of Duchamp) of “poetic nominalism” because what “constitutes poetry is subject to change over time … has no transhistorical essence” and “could, in the abstract, become anything at all” (216). This resoundingly anodyne deictic reflection incites a redoubled commitment to praxis and poetics: although the “art of information … may be more invested in exploring institutional histories and large aggregates of data than the modernist and postmodernist art of language” (220), such grid-spaced incommensurabilities affirm that “poetry will never be the same” (221).
In all of these ways, the linguistic turn shapes the essays gathered in Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry, engendering methods and interpretations that leverage self-reflexivity in ways that connect poetics (making) to praxis (action). The poststructuralist ‘turn to language’ haunts this book because of its monstrous ubiquity (x). (There are other ghosts as well in this volume, including the unchallenged influence of an entrenched mythology about mimesis that could be robustly countered via key texts from Jacopo Mazzoni (1548 – 1598) and Margaret Cavendish (1623 – 1673) among so many other early modern writers who understood that poetic language constructs reality via contingent fields and methods of production and social action.) In his Coda, Tyrone Williams conjures the linguistic self-reflexivity of poetry and poetics as a call for praxis—that is, for a movement to “Occupy Everywhere”:
I simply want to mark the place and moment where and when poetry longs to become what it is not. It is here, now, between retention
and protention, at the eternal, and thus indeterminate, border between the experimental and inscrutable, that poetry imagines itself as a god
or goddess refusing the solipsism of immortality for the ethical trappings of mortal responsibility, or as some marine or landlocked
behemoth moving “forward” or turning “back” to an amphibian existence, in short, a creature comfortable in the skies and on earth, on land
and at sea, a monstrosity that wants to claim and occupy everywhere as its home. (229)
Such a movement, as energized by our abiding care and concern for the most essential and enduring medium at the heart of poetry, would indeed “validate poetics as an important and worthy activity in its own right [that] was significantly spurred [by] and [which] gained focus through urgent questions that the turn to language brought with it” (x).
This volume offers a dynamic collection of capaciously engaged and cogently argued essays, and I hope that UNM Press will soon release a more affordable trade paperback edition because the current list price of $75.00 (for either the hardback or the e-book) may prove prohibitive for many readers, writers, and educators who would otherwise be most interested in the book’s timely subject and incisive methods. Heuving and Williams have produced an edited collection of multifaceted yet unified essays that combine creative and critical, historical and theoretical, institutional and political approaches to the study of “poetics itself as well as” concerning “changing poetic valuations and practices” (ix) within and against the contiguous legacies of literary modernism and postmodernism; poststructuralist theory, cultural criticism, multiculturalism; and more contemporary methodologies investigating race, class, and gender; disability studies, intersectionality, conceptual writing, documentary poetics and trans-discursive institutional critique(s). With one exception, I’m in agreement with Pierre Joris’s back cover blurb: “This is a necessary and most welcome gathering of essays for anyone interested in the most advanced and challenging contemporary modes of writing. A must-read for young writers who want to know where the cutting edge of poetry and poetics is situated at this point in the twenty-first century.” In my view, this book is a must-read for all writers who engage with the fields of modernist and postmodernist poetry and poetics from 1900 to the present with particular emphasis given to the poststructuralist legacy of the so-called linguistic turn since the 1960s.
Considering that capacious historical and theoretical framing, Heuving and Williams thus reflect:
For poetry—long understood as a language art—the turn to language and the broad interest in questions of discourse formation brought with it
the need for new definitions, understandings, and practices. What did it mean to write poetry with an orientation that understood language not
only to reference but also to construct reality? And what did it mean that questions regarding the production of texts that had hitherto been
largely a literary and poetry concern were now being engaged throughout the humanities, and sometimes also the social sciences and
science[?] Indeed, the expanded realm of poetics introduced to the study of poetry a much larger range of questions, including those of
social justice and parity in gender, race, and class, among other determinations. (ix – x)
Many of the fifteen essays gathered in Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry were “first given as presentations at the Convergence on Poetics” in 2012 that “commenced the MFA in Creative Writing & Poetics program at the University of Washington Bothell” (vii). As such, readers will notice slight variations of tone across the volume’s chapters, which is to be expected; those essays that were first presented as talks at the 2012 conference carry those performative personae forward into these discursive adaptations. (Only one of the chapters was previously published: Nathaniel Mackey’s excerpt from Late Arcade.) To my eyes and ears, that performative energy is a driving force at the heart of this book’s conviction, as Williams argues, “that there is something at stake, something worth fighting over” (227). Heuving and Williams organize the book’s essays among four thematic sections: “What is Poetics?”; “Critical Interventions”; “Cross-Cultural Imperatives”; and “Digital, Capital, and Institutional Frames.” Their collaboratively written Introduction and a Coda by Williams respectively frame the collection’s abiding concerns with poetry’s “cultural and social institutions and practices” (xi) and “the very ground of responsibility, not only to our histories but also to our present positions, when and wherever those obtain” (230).
Given the book’s historical and theoretical contexts that emphasize the legendary linguistic turn as well as the shaping institutional occasion of the 2012 conference at the UW Bothell, some readers might wonder why there’s no consideration given to the enduring legacy of the paradigm-shifting symposium held at the Johns Hopkins Humanities Center during October of 1966 as represented by the volume of papers from that event that were edited by Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato and published as The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy (Johns Hopkins, 1970), which was republished (as a 40th anniversary edition) under the chiastic title, The Structuralist Controversy: The Languages of Criticism and The Sciences of Man, edited by Richard Macksey (Johns Hopkins, 2007). That edited collection has long been recognized as foundational for the emergence of the postmodernist turn to language across the fields of anthropology, classical studies, comparative literature, linguistics, literary criticism and poetics, history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, semiology, and sociology. Considering the methodological emphasis on the “turn to language” variously engaged by all of the essays in Inciting Poetics, this seems like a missed opportunity because there would have been much to critique, such as the politics of race, class, and gender in play at that 1966 symposium and as represented by the essays collected in those 1970 and 2007 anthologies. Articulating the crux of Inciting Poetics within and against those kindred institutional (inaugural conferences) and methodological (poststructuralist) frameworks, even if only briefly, would have given readers an incisive reflection by which to measure the critical difference that this 2019 anthology brings to the field. “Together these essays incite poetics because of their simultaneously profound commitment to poetry as well as their implicit and explicit disagreements” concerning “the ongoing production of poetry with respect to its relationship to larger cultural and social institutions and practices as well as the exacting activity of poets themselves” (xi).
Despite the editors’ assertions that “the turn to language has so permeated the understanding and practice of poetry and poetics as well as other fields of endeavor that it no longer serves as an urgent impetus or as an organizing question” (x), and that “there is no resolution, no sublation, to be construed from these essays” other than “a profound consideration of just what poetics can or might entail” (xi), in my reading of the book, the crux of this volume (and in each of the essays) underscores deeply attentive studies of linguistic self-reflexivity that incite poetics (making) to praxis (action). The resistance of language to language informs, for each contributor, deconstructive interventions that amplify poetry’s multifarious forms and forces that shape social and political conditions for institutional critiques and positive democratic social change. Although their richly diverse poetries under investigation in each chapter differentiate these essays (thereby representing a remarkably complex field of works from emerging and established poets), the contributors’ methods unify the book’s focus, which remains steadfastly poststructuralist.
In the volume’s first section, “What Is Poetics?,” careful attention to linguistic self-reflexivity determines meta-discursive distinctions between poetry and poetics that provoke critiques of social engagement, aesthetic pleasure, and the politics of race, class, and gender. Lyn Hejinian’s chapter, “An Art of Addition, an Eddic Return,” considers the Icelandic Prose Edda as a work of poetry that recursively engenders its own poetics as a form of socio-cultural action. The four parts of the Prose Edda (also known as Snorri’s Edda) move “progressively from without to within the very cultural and literary practices it addresses, emerging ultimately as itself a site of poetry-making, poeisis. But in its history, it develops conversely. Poem and theory emerge in a relation of reciprocal presupposition, and the process in which this happens can be equally termed ‘poetics’ and ‘praxis’” (7). This meta-poetic analysis shapes Hejinian’s subsequent concerns with aesthetic self-reflexivity and contextualism (7), lyric sociality (8), and the “turn to poetics, as it occurred in the immediate wake of the almost-global events of 1968 and the appearance, in English translation, of (principally French, but also Russian) literary theory and metaphilosophy” (9)—all of which informed and energized poetics as a form of social praxis kindred with activist principles shared among artists and writers associated with Language Writing, the Black Mountain school, the Black Arts movement, and the San Francisco Renaissance (10). Considering the differences between the world of the Prose Edda poet, Snorri Sturluson (1179 – 1241), and our world today, Hejinian concludes that “his motivations were expansively social” (10), thereby reaffirming the centrality of praxis then and now because it is “from a social world that the poet makes poetics, adding devices and dimensions, ideas and ideals, to the cultural span, extending the given world’s referential matrices and horizons of meaningfulness” (10). In her essay, “Statement on Poetics: Pleasures, Polemics, Practices, Stakes,” Rachel Blau DuPlessis investigates the indwelling dialectical relationship between poetry and poetics—that is, the self-reflexivity of “meta-commentary in poetics that one sometimes finds in a poem” (13)—in order to define and defend poetry “as saturated segmentivities in social-sensuous language” (15). Poetry’s infinitely generative capacity to work the “‘materiality of language’” (17) provokes poetics (as an inherent, micro- co-presence) to honor and discuss maximally “that necessity—given all the layers of information, thought, bibliographic meanings (textual, visual, material, and historical), intertextuality, sonic pulse, cultural allusions, and social understandings that are prolonged by the work, evoked in the making of the work, and embedded in the practices of language” (17). DuPlessis amplifies and examines this dynamic self-reflexivity between poetry and poetics across a sequence of deft intra-/inter-textual attunements to detail (19), contingency (23), betweenness (24), deixis (26), literary montage (29), and polemic (30), finally underscoring praxis (32) at the heart of the “intricate bottomless tangibility” (33) that the poetry of embodied poetics incites. Nathaniel Mackey’s excerpt from Late Arcade offers “a work of critical fiction poised on the horizon where performance and poetics, expression and reflection, theory and practice, and related antinomies meet” (39) at the self-reflexive resistance of text to jazz music, which engenders and escapes music criticism. In this excerpt, N., “founding member of a band in Los Angeles known as the Molimo M’Atet” (39)—which is “beset by text-bearing comic-strip balloons that occasionally emerge from [the musicians’] instruments and from their debut recording[,] Orphic Bend” (39)—writes a series of letters to his Angel of Dust, expressing bemusement over a music review published in the Santa Monica Weakly (as his Aunt Nancy calls it). The band’s dilemma with the text-bearing balloons has become acute because Aunt Nancy suggested they should distribute “actual rubber balloons to audience members prior to [their] encore number, instructing them to play the balloons, in whatever way they chose, as accompaniment to the music” (39). The parodic stunt has provoked a misguided review in which the reviewer praises the band’s “‘decision to embrace the balloons and the audience in one bold stroke’” (41). One of the band’s members, Lambert, laments that the reviewer has completely missed the self-reflexive irony: “‘the balloons embody their own self-critique … a hedge against what they otherwise embody, advancing legibility as an inflated claim’” (42).
In the book’s second section, “Critical Interventions,” intertextual analyses of literary critical discourses associated with particular schools (e.g. New York School, Language Writing, Black Mountain) and methods (e.g. projective practice, contextualism, documentary witnessing) inform self-reflexive critiques that refashion the linguistic grounds of those very investigations, calling for renewed considerations of poetics and praxis in each case. Charles Altieri’s essay, “Poetics Today,” offers a tentative manifesto that begins by imagining “two choices for a poetics”—to engage with composition as a site “for poetic experience” or to grasp poems as forms of action that move “audiences to identify with authorial projects and to explore what difference they can make in their lives” (53 – 54). Altieri quickly deconstructs this false binary via discussions of rhetoric (54) and aesthetics (55) that respectively underscore emphases given to linguistic techniques and artistic judgments during the premodern eras (55) when (as Altieri asserts) theoretical discourse was dominated by mimesis—that is, representing reality as opposed to constructing it. Following these double articulations, which establish a basis for contrast, Altieri presents his central argument that “painterly abstraction” (57)—especially in the poetries of Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery—and the linguistic “turn to figuration” became “a means to bring freedoms derived from abstract expressionism into conjunction with energies basic to quotidian life” (58). Altieri’s concluding paragraphs consider the praxis of “painterly worldliness” (58) and of “stylizing the quotidian” (59) in the poetry and poetics of James Schuyler, Ben Lerner, and Joshua Clover (59 – 61). In “The Material and Medium of Language,” Jeanne Heuving astutely observes that one of the consequences of the turn to language was that “some innovative poets drew a line between themselves and their immediate predecessors, namely the Beats and New American or Black Mountain poets[,]” because “the preceding poets were seen to be naïve about how language constructed, rather than reflected realities, including emotional response itself” (63 – 64). Another consequence of the poststructuralist linguistic turn has been an increasing emphasis (in poetics discourse, especially since Zukofsky) given to the so-called materiality of language, which, as Heuving cogently argues, is less capacious than a complementary notion of “language as a medium” (65). If the notion of linguistic materiality “inclines us toward thinking of the poet as an agent acting on language,” an emphasis given to the medium of language “prompts us toward conceiving the poet as a medium on whom language acts” (66). Heuving applies this renewed perspective to a reconsideration of “Projectivist orientations that have received delimited and debased evaluations as narrowly ‘speech-based’ poetics, when in fact they involve complex relationships to language production” (66). Heuving then amplifies this self-reflexive critique of poetics discourse through a sequence of deft readings of works from Plato and Foucault (68) to Pound, Duncan, and Mackey (68 – 78) among others (including Gertrude Stein and Wilson Harris). In each of these close readings, Heuving’s insightful attention to language as a medium amplifies connections between poetics and praxis by expanding “the sense of how language functions in poetry that aims to intervene in existing cultural and social orders but is inadequately discussed through an exclusive emphasis on language as material” (78).
Elisabeth Frosts’s chapter, “Toward Transformation: The Contextual Turn in US Poetry,” challenges lingering disagreements in poetics discourse about vexed differentiations between “experimental” and/or “innovative” writing (81) by shifting the conversation away from such binary formulations and toward Denise Levertov’s emphasis given to poetry’s “‘potential influence’” upon a reader and Erica Hunt’s concern with “‘social consciousness’” (82), thereby connecting aesthetics with politics; poetics, praxis. For Frost (as for Levertov and Hunt) the poet’s and poem’s self-reflexive attunement to social context energizes that bridge between making and action, thereby engendering what she calls transformational poetics:
A contextualized, self-theorizing poetics, whether formally recognizable or formally disruptive, offers us a way to elide the historical battle
lines between instrumental accessibility on the one hand and avant-gardist rupture on the other: the self-theorization of a work and its methods
can become a means of promoting cross-aesthetic practices, avoiding a reification of formal characteristics, and allowing greater access to
new work for a maximum number of readers—which itself opens the possibility of readerly transformation. (83)
Frost develops this argument for transformational poetics across a sequence of incisive theoretical critiques addressing local context (84), cultural poetics (85), feminist standpoint theory (85), strong reflexivity (85), and praxis (86), thus establishing her essay’s “‘contextual turn’” (86) for subsequent investigations of documentary poetics and praxis in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands; Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (co-edited by Sheila Black, Jennifer Bartlett, and Michael Northern); Muriel Rukeyser’s Book of the Dead, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony, and Mark Nowak’s Coal Mountain Elementary, among other works. Cynthia Hogue’s chapter, “‘To Make from Outrage Islands of Compassion’,” revisits the competitive friendship between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan concerning the poetics and praxis of traumatic witnessing, especially with regard to Duncan’s advice on Levertov’s work-in-progress (1967 – 1969), “Staying Alive” (published in 1971 as To Stay Alive). Hogue argues that the crux of their disagreement hinged upon linguistic self-reflexivity: whereas Duncan recommended an inward turn from the time-bound moments of traumatic witnessing toward a transcendent “‘immediacy of the ideal and of the eternal’” (107), Levertov sought “an alternative subjectivity, which could bridge the divide between the eyewitness and one bearing witness, between facts and truth” (107). As a counter to Duncan’s criticism of her work-in-progress, Hogue reasons that Levertov’s “bridge-poetics of eye-witnessing” (109) emulates Robert Kaufman’s arguments for poetry’s “ethical reflection” of face-to-face encounters “between people, and also between people and art forms” that amplify the lyric’s embodiment of historical experience (111) and public engagement.
In the volume’s third section, “Cross-Cultural Imperatives,” poets and critics “draw attention to difficulties inherent in liberal solutions of diversity and tolerance[,] given the indelibleness and complexity of culture itself, especially within already racialized and racist societies” (xvi). These trans-discursive chapters deconstruct white privilege through contextual counter-readings of ethnography, the white gaze, and transcendental signification that respectively engender trenchant critiques of “the power of observation” (134), “racism in white readers” (153), and poetic “detachment from the immediacy of the social” (159). Sarah Dowling’s essay, “Ethnos and Graphos,” begins with Gwendolyn Brooks’s poem, “I love those little booths at Benvenuti’s” from Annie Allen, which, argues Dowling, “turns on its doubled anthropological structure of observation” (121) that engages linguistic self-reflexivity in the dynamics of a “role reversal between observer and observed that makes whiteness an object of study and white tourists in Bronzeville representative specimens to be analyzed” (122). From that opening frame, Dowling builds her critique of “the technique of participant observation” in which “the question of who is studied by whom remains deeply fraught” (133). Dowling’s cross-disciplinary investigation of ethnographic methods and documentary poetics engages sagaciously with the works of James Clifford (123), Sterling Brown (124), Cathy Park Hong (125), Jerome Rothenberg (127), Garry Thomas Morse (128), and Guillermo Gómez-Peña (129), among others, that individually and collectively underscore a renewed call to poetic praxis that continuously brings “the blank center of objectivity under careful scrutiny” (134). Aldon Nielsen’s essay, “White Mischief: Language, Life, Logic, Luck, and White People,” delivers a sequence of self-reflexive contextual excoriations that deconstruct the “rear-guard revisionism” (146) of documented cases in which former colleagues (David Berlinski), modernist literary scholars (Christopher M. Mott, Jacqueline Brogan), high school educators (Marilyn Bart), and poets (Tony Hoagland) have insisted, in their own defense, that “seemingly racist language is, in fact, a subtly subversive deployment of racist tropes against themselves in the interests of ending racism” (143) within the rhetorical contexts of their own demonstrably racist writings, actions, and inabilities to recognize their strategic deployment of such white mischief. Nielsen’s vigilant counter-readings connect these bracing individual case studies to a broadly engaged critique of cross-cultural poetics, arguing that the very notion of race as a social construction must be taken to task anew:
How does the present-day rhetoric of race reproduce race for a postracial nation? How does the very term ‘postracial’, with its presupposition
of race, operate to silence exactly the mode of analysis I am here calling for? Where do our assumptions about how poems sound racially
come from, how do they evolve, and how does ‘sensitivity’ rhetoric serve to cloak their operations? Even after more than a decade of
‘whiteness studies’, these questions remain largely unaddressed. (148 – 149)
Nielsen’s unrelenting critique demands our confrontations with the structural mechanisms of those very constructions—that is, for a renewed poetics and praxis of racial justice that would begin by deconstructing entrenched ideological and linguistic self-reflexive methodologies that cover racism with white mischief. Leonard Schwartz’s essay, “Transcendental Tabby,” reconsiders the transcendental signifier’s dialectical structure at the heart of lyric poetry (and in the lament, in particular) as a highly charged self-reflexive modality that invests poetics with a praxis capable of inciting personal and political liberation. Through a rich sequence of deft and vital readings from the works of Kamau Brathwaite (158), Emmanuel Levinas (160), and especially Ibn Arabi (161 – 163), Gershom Scholem (163 – 166), Taha Muhammed Ali (166 – 169), Martin Buber (169 – 171), Mahmoud Darwish (171 – 172), and Sumaiya el-Sousy (172 – 174), Schwartz argues that the dialectical critique for poetics today “remains a question of defamiliarizing language as a natural condition, of allowing poetry, a language within a language, to open like a sluice, of changing the language from the inside, of being aware of the silence within words that allows for such liberating motion, of arriving at a new language by way of an exploration of the old” (158). Schwartz’s concluding passages amplify that dialectical lyrical tension via the poetics and praxis of el-Sousy’s “haunting words” of the Palestinians of Gaza, as their lamentations flow through the poet’s “words [that] press up against the glass walls of the cyber-ghetto, and the veiled walls of dream, and the actual guns enforcing incarceration and limiting speech and movement in the actual ghetto” (174).
The chapters in the book’s fourth section, “Digital, Capital, and Institutional Frames,” engage in meta-critiques of the humanist and increasingly posthumanist means and modes of information production and management: from the codex to web platforms, conceptual art, capitalist semiotic economies, data remediation, and grid-spaced poetic nominalism. Within and against such “totalizing powers” these chapters underscore “strategic actions that have the power to intervene in these harrowing conditions” (xviii) through self-reflexive “guerilla tactics that simultaneously are complicit with and disruptive of the conditions” (xix) of hegemonic power. Ron Silliman’s essay, “The Codex is Broken,” begins with the premise that although it may appear that “the role of the book as the end-all and be-all of writing has been eroding” since CERN launched the first-ever website in 1991, “we are forced to concede that the book never was a fixed vessel for the written word” (179 – 180). This reflection shapes a sequence of self-reflexive critiques of information systems that concomitantly provoke renewed defenses of emerging poetries and poetic practices. Although “the only format that can now be read by every existing e-reader is plain text, the format least capable of handling poetry or any sort of textual complexity” (180), Silliman observes that new modalities “of communication are reconfiguring national boundaries, shifting the balance between state and individual as well as state and corporation” (181). The stakes for praxis are higher than ever because “the stunning rise in the number of practicing English language poets” and a global “resurgent hybridism” energize “transnational networks of the like-minded to arrive at levels of sustainability in ways previously not possible” (181). Vanessa Place’s performative essay, “Empire Aesthetics: It’s Not the Point, It’s the Platform—Detroit Model,” parodies her agency as poet, writer, artist of all sorts, and former CEO of her own agency, Vanessa Place, “the world’s first transnational poetry corporation” (185) famous for producing frictionless aphorisms, such as “Information is architecture,” “Navigation is content” (189), “The platform is the message” (191), and “All art is now site-contingent” (193). Despite her patented dismissal of self-reflexivity in her definition of conceptual poetry, Place’s critique of conceptualism hinges upon chiastic apophatic haecceity reminiscent of deconstructive dédoublement: “poetry trades on sincerity, even in irony. Art trades on itself, which is always sincere. So, poetry is now art, art poetry” (192). Place’s satirical encounters with works by Britney Spears (186), Jorie Graham (187), Vanessa Place (188 – 189), and Rosalind Krauss (190), among others, self-reflexively deconstruct subjects, objects, and sobjects (190), eviscerating poetics and praxis until “absolutely limpid” (192), flipping “an ethics of ambiguity” to “an ethics if ambiguity” that provokes her concluding frictionless slogan, “You better work bitch” (194). Brian Reed’s chapter, “Now That’s a Poem: Vito Acconci, Conceptual Writing, and Poetic Nominalism,” decodes the nested and contested reception history of Acconci’s early works, particularly “REMOVAL MOVE (LINE OF EVIDENCE),” through deftly self-reflexive contextual counter-readings of allusive / elusive / illusive critiques of Acconci’s works embedded within a sequence of texts by Bruce Andrews, Kenneth Goldsmith, Craig Dworkin, and Charles Bernstein in which their publications’ parodic intra-/inter-textualities disclose “a prior history of disagreements, disciplinary and otherwise, concerning a tag-team plotline, conceptual art > language poetry > conceptual-writing-that-is-occasionally-poetry-too” (208). Reed’s meta-discursive methods determine his subsequent assessments of notable disagreements among critics of conceptual writing, including the arguments of Stephanie Burt (209), Arthur Danto (210 – 212), and Marjorie Perloff (212 – 214), which inform his concluding affirmation (by way of Duchamp) of “poetic nominalism” because what “constitutes poetry is subject to change over time … has no transhistorical essence” and “could, in the abstract, become anything at all” (216). This resoundingly anodyne deictic reflection incites a redoubled commitment to praxis and poetics: although the “art of information … may be more invested in exploring institutional histories and large aggregates of data than the modernist and postmodernist art of language” (220), such grid-spaced incommensurabilities affirm that “poetry will never be the same” (221).
In all of these ways, the linguistic turn shapes the essays gathered in Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry, engendering methods and interpretations that leverage self-reflexivity in ways that connect poetics (making) to praxis (action). The poststructuralist ‘turn to language’ haunts this book because of its monstrous ubiquity (x). (There are other ghosts as well in this volume, including the unchallenged influence of an entrenched mythology about mimesis that could be robustly countered via key texts from Jacopo Mazzoni (1548 – 1598) and Margaret Cavendish (1623 – 1673) among so many other early modern writers who understood that poetic language constructs reality via contingent fields and methods of production and social action.) In his Coda, Tyrone Williams conjures the linguistic self-reflexivity of poetry and poetics as a call for praxis—that is, for a movement to “Occupy Everywhere”:
I simply want to mark the place and moment where and when poetry longs to become what it is not. It is here, now, between retention
and protention, at the eternal, and thus indeterminate, border between the experimental and inscrutable, that poetry imagines itself as a god
or goddess refusing the solipsism of immortality for the ethical trappings of mortal responsibility, or as some marine or landlocked
behemoth moving “forward” or turning “back” to an amphibian existence, in short, a creature comfortable in the skies and on earth, on land
and at sea, a monstrosity that wants to claim and occupy everywhere as its home. (229)
Such a movement, as energized by our abiding care and concern for the most essential and enduring medium at the heart of poetry, would indeed “validate poetics as an important and worthy activity in its own right [that] was significantly spurred [by] and [which] gained focus through urgent questions that the turn to language brought with it” (x).