Untitled

Unoriginal Genius
Unoriginal Genius
Poetry by Other
Means in the
New Century
Marjorie Perloff
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

Marjorie Perloff, professor of English emerita at
Stanford University, is currently the Florence Scott
Professor Emerita of English at the University of
Southern California. Among her many publications
are, most recently, John Cage: Composed in America
(1994), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the
Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and The Sound of
Poetry / The Poetry of Sound (2009), all published by the
University of Chicago Press.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2010 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2010
Printed in the United States of America
Permission to quote from Jacques Jouet, “Qu’est-ce

qu’un poème de métro” (2000), is gratefully
acknowledged to P.O.L. Éditions. Permission
for Ian Monk’s English translation is gratefully
acknowledged.
19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 1 2 3 4 5
isbn-13: 978-0-226-66061-5 (cloth)

isbn-10: 0-226-66061-3 (cloth)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perloff, Marjorie.
Unoriginal genius : poetry by other means in the
new century / Marjorie Perloff.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-13: 978-0-226-66061-5 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-226-66061-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Poetry—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Poetry—21st century—History and criticism.
3. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Criticism and
interpretation. 4. Multilingualism and literature.
I. Title.
pn1271.p47 2010
809.1⬘911—dc22
2010018363
o The paper used in this publication meets the

minimum requirements of the American National
Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.
For Joseph
Contents
List of Figures : ix
Preface : xi
Acknowledgments : xv
1 u nor igi n a l ge n i u s
An Introduction : 1
2 p h a n ta s m ag or i a s of t h e m a r k e t p l ace
Citational Poetics in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project : 24
3 f r om ava n t - g a r de t o digi ta l
The Legacy of Brazilian Concrete Poetry : 50
4 w r i t i ng t h r ou gh wa lt e r b e n ja m i n
Charles Bernstein’s “Poem including History” : 76
5 “ t h e r at t l e of s tat i s t ic a l t r a f f ic ”
Documentary and Found Text
in Susan Howe’s The Midnight : 99
6 l a nguage i n m igr at ion

Multilingualism and Exophonic
Writing in the New Poetics : 123
7 conce p t ua l br i d ge s / digi ta l t u n n e l s
Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic : 146
Afterword : 167
Notes : 171
Index : 195
Figures
(color plates follow p. 68)

Plate 1. Augusto de Campos, “Lygia” (1953)
Plate 2. Augusto de Campos, cover from Gertrude Stein’s Porta-Retratos
(1989)
Fig. 1.1. Ernst Jandl, “creation of eve” (1997) : 13

Fig. 1.2. Cia Rinne, page from zaroum (2009) : 15
Fig. 2.1. Passage Choiseul (1908) : 25
Fig. 2.2. Philibert Louis Debucourt, Passage des Panoramas à Paris (1807) : 26
Fig. 2.3. Walter Benjamin, “Konvolut A” (1908) : 29
Fig. 2.4. Walter Benjamin, notes and materials for The Arcades Project
(1928–40) : 30
Fig. 2.5. Walter Benjamin, manuscript list from “A Konvolut” (1928–40) : 31
Fig. 2.6. Walter Benjamin, manuscript page from of The Arcades Project
(1928–40) : 33
Fig. 2.7. Walter Benjamin, overview of The Arcades Project (1928–40) : 34
Fig. 2.8. Walter Benjamin, “Overview” (1908) : 35
Fig. 2.9. J. J. Grandville, “The marine life collection” (1844) : 40
Fig. 2.10. J. J. Grandville, “An interplanetary bridge; Saturn’s ring is an iron
balcony” (1844) : 40
Fig. 2.11. Anon., Tools used by Haussmann’s Workers (n.d.) : 44
Fig. 2.12. Marcel Duchamp, Coffee Mill (1911) : 44
Fig. 2.13. Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder (1913) : 44
Fig. 2.14. Anon., “Moulins” (1912) : 45
Fig. 2.15a. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) : 46
Fig. 2.15b. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (1937) : 47
Fig. 3.1. Eugen Gomringer, “silencio” (1953) : 51
Fig. 3.2. Augusto de Campos, “sem um numero” (1957) : 51
Fig. 3.3. Ezra Pound, from “Canto 86” (1934) : 57
Fig. 3.4. Velimir Khelbnikov, “Here is the way the syllable so is a field”
(1912–13) : 59
Fig. 3.5. Eugen Gomringer, “ping pong” (1953) : 63
Fig. 3.6. Eugen Gomringer, “wind” (1953) : 63
Fig. 3.7. Eugen Gomringer, the “o” poem (1953) : 63
Fig. 3.8. Augusto de Campos, Panaroma do “Finnegans Wake” (1971) : 71
Fig. 3.9. Augusto de Campos, “REV ” (1970) : 75
Fig. 4.1. Ernst Jandl, “der und die” (2009) : 85
Fig. 4.2. Charles Bernstein, “dew and die” (2005) : 96
Fig. 5.1. Susan Howe, page 72 from The Midnight (2003) : 100
Fig. 6.1. The Phoenician Alphabet (2005) : 124
Fig. 6.2. Ezra Pound, from “Canto 34” (1934) : 128
Fig. 6.3. Caroline Bergvall, Say: ‘Parsley’ (2008) : 133
Fig. 7.1. Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic (2007) : 153
Fig. 7.2. Anon., photograph used for the cover of Traffic (n.d.) : 154
Fig. 7.3. Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend (1967) : 155
x : l i s t of f igu r e s
Preface
In 1990, when I was completing Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of
Media, access to the World Wide Web was still a few years away. The “media”
then in question were primarily television (as in the Phil Donahue talk
show), radio, advertising copy, and signage as in the case of “personalized”
license plates. Radical Artifice was certainly written on a computer—an old
Kaypro, as I recall—but surfing the Web, googling, blogging, viewing or
making videos on You Tube, writing on Facebook walls, or Twittering: these
were still in the future. There was, it is true, much talk of the possibilities of
“E-poetry”—poetry written and formatted for the new electronic screen.
But E-poetry never quite got off the ground, the compositional process of
an E-poem (however much animation might be used) not being essentially
different from that of a “normal” print poem.
The revolution that soon occurred was not in writing for the computer
screen but writing in an environment of hyperinformation, an environment,
moreover, where we are all authors. The first poetry blogs and Web sites, for
example, were a novelty; today, those listed in the left-hand column of Ron
Silliman’s now famous and influential poetry blog number more than twelve
hundred! At this writing, Silliman’s own poetry blog has received 2.5 million
hits—a daunting figure when one thinks that this poet’s printed books, Ket-
jak and Tjanting and The Alphabet, cannot have sold a fraction of this number.
But it is not just a matter of quantity; the fact is that in the blog world or
on Facebook just about anything goes. There is usually no editor, no peer re-
view, no critique for which one might be held accountable by anyone outside
one’s particular community. In this climate, what Hart Crane called the po-
et’s “cognate word” begins to take a back seat to what can be done with other
people’s words—how already existing words and sentences are framed, re-
cycled, appropriated, cited, submitted to rules, visualized, or sounded. The
poetry of 2010 is thus curiously different from that of 1990, even when its
authors remain the same.
Paradoxically, this new citational and often constraint-bound poetry—a
poetry as visually and sonically formalized as it is semantically charged—is
more accessible and, in a sense, “personal” than was the Language poetry
of twenty years earlier. Since intertexts are central to this writing, poetry
: xi
has turned once more to the literary and artistic tradition—whether the
poems of Yeats and Stevenson in Susan Howe’s Midnight, or Heine’s Lorelei
in Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime, or Dante’s Inferno in Caroline Bergvall’s
Via, whether the reprise of Futurist aesthetic in Brazilian concrete poetry or
of Troubadour lyric in Oulipo writing. Then again, the “literary” can now
absorb the most curious bits of scientific documentation: think of Christian
Bök, the author of the Oulipo Eunoia, now writing poetry into the genetic
code of bacteria. His project, dubbed Xenotext, was, he tells us, “inspired by
a previous feat of genetic engineering in which microorganisms were made
to carry the tune of Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World (After All)’ in their DNA. In-
formation retrieval is this providing a strange new poetic challenge.”
: : :
Unoriginal Genius looks at some key exemplars of what we might call poetry
by other means, from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project to Kenneth Gold-
smith’s Traffic. Six of the book’s seven chapters were delivered as the 2009
Weidenfeld Lectures in European Comparative Literature at Oxford (St.
Anne’s College) during Trinity Term. A perverse choice for the traditional
world of Oxford poetry? No doubt, but perhaps for that very reason the
lectureship posed an exciting challenge. I am, in any case, very grateful to
Lord and Lady Weidenfeld, who listened so attentively to the first lecture,
for making this visiting professorship possible and to St. Anne’s principal
Tim Gardam for his hospitality. Among my hosts, Michael Sheringham of
All Souls, Karen Leeder of New College, Ronald Bush of St. John’s, and Jeri
Johnson of Exeter were especially gracious. I also had a chance to try out my
ideas about constraint, citation, and concretism on lively audiences at the
Universities of Warwick, Kent, and Southampton. At these venues, Peter
Middleton, Daniel Katz, Andrew Roberts, Anna Schaffner, and Peter Nich-
olls (then of the University of Sussex) kept me on my toes.
In an earlier incarnation, the first chapter of Unoriginal Genius was given
as the keynote address as the 2008 symposium Conceptual Poetry and Its
Others at the University of Arizona Poetry Center—a symposium I organ-
ized with the then director of the center, Frances Sjoberg. The Arizona sym-
posium was exhilarating in that the poets in attendance—Caroline Bergvall,
Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Kenneth Goldsmith, Tra-
cie Morris, and Cole Swensen (Peter Gizzi and Susan Howe were on the
program but unable to attend)—elicited a very strong response from our
roundtables, which included still other important new voices—for example,
the poets Vanessa Place and Jesper Olsson and critics ranging from Wyston
xii : p r e fa c e
Curnow (New Zealand) to Graça Capinha (Portugal). The Arizona Poetry
Center is fortunate to be able to draw on experts from the University of Ari-
zona’s English Department, including Carlos Gallego, Tenney Nathanson,
and the publisher of Chax Press, Charles Alexander.
Earlier versions of some of the book’s other chapters were delivered as
keynote lectures at international meetings—the Another Language: Poetic
Experiments in Britain and North America conference in Bochum Germany
(2005), organized by Kornelia Freitag; the 2007 AFEA (L’Association française
d’études américaines) in Paris, where Helène Aji, Antoine Cazé, and Chris-
tine Savinel were my hosts; the 2007 Colloquium of Comparative Literature
in Porto, Portugal, chaired by Ana Luisa Amaral; Eduardo Espina’s Poetry of
Americas festival at Texas A&M in 2007; and the International Conference on
20th Century American Poetry in Wuhan, China ,overseen by Luo Liangong
and Nie Zhenzhao in 2008. International as is this roster, Unoriginal Genius, as
the Oxford audience made me aware, is at heart a very American book, and
its conception was formed in classrooms both at Stanford and, more recently,
at the University of Southern California, where Marie Smart and Amaranth
Borsuk gave much help with my own Web site and the figures for the book.
It is impossible to cite the many former students, colleagues, and friends who
helped me articulate my ideas. When I think about my own poetic-critical
community (online and off ), I feel truly blessed. Here I wish to thank only
my two no-longer-anonymous readers for the University of Chicago Press:
Gerald Bruns and Adelaide Russo. No one could ask for more thorough and
perceptive readers than these, and their unflagging support, as well as that
of my longtime Chicago editor Alan Thomas, have meant the world to me.
This book is dedicated to the person with whom I most often discuss
poetry even if—or precisely because—he often expresses deep skepticism
about the contemporary poetry landscape and much prefers Kipling’s “The
Buddha at Kamakura,” Poe’s “The Raven,” or Eliot’s The Waste Land, the poem
with which I begin here, to their later incarnations. If I can convince Jo-
seph that a particular text is a work of genius—and he made this claim for
Georges Perec’s Life, a User’s Manual, before I did—then I know I’m on the
right track. But as Joseph loves to say, citing Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime,
Just a-
round the corner is another corner.
Marjorie Perloff
Pacific Palisades, 2009
p r e fa c e : xiii
Acknowledgments
An earlier version of chapters 1 and 2 in combination was published as “Un-

original Genius: Benjamin’s Arcades as Paradigm for the New Poetics,” Études
Anglaises 61, no. 9 (April- June 2008), 229–52.
A short version of chapter 3 appeared as “From Avant-Garde to Digi-
tal: The Legacy of Brazilian Concrete Poetry,” Interdisciplinary Humanities,
Spring 2008, 66–89. A portion of the chapter was also published in Do mod-
ernismo a contemporaneidade (Porto, 2008), 11–45.
An earlier version of chapter 4, ”Constraint, Concrete, Citation: Refig-
uring History in Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime,” was published in Poetics
Today: Constrained Writing I, ed. Jan Baetens and Jean- Jacques Poucel, 30, no.
4 (Winter 2009): 693–718. A short version also appeared in Foreign Literature
Studies (Wuhan), 2008, 12–30.
An earlier version of chapter 5, “The Rattle of Statistical Traffic: Con-
straint and Citation in Susan Howe’s The Midnight,” was published in bound-
ary 2, special issue, “American Poetry after 1975,” ed. Charles Bernstein, 36,
no. 2 (Fall 2009): 205–28.
: xv
1
Unoriginal Genius:
An Introduction
We are in the midst of a mighty recasting
of literary forms, a melting down in which
many of the opposites in which we have
been used to think may lose their force.
Walter Benjamin
I love originality so much I keep copying it.

Charles Bernstein1
Récriture
The publication in 1922 of The Waste Land—surely the most famous poem
in English of the twentieth century—met with a largely negative reception,
even on the part of admirers of T. S. Eliot’s earlier poetry like Edgell Rick-
word, who reviewed The Waste Land for the Times Literary Supplement.2 A
World War I poet, student of French poetry (he published one of the first
critical studies in English of Rimbaud), and founding editor of the Calendar
of Modern Letters (1925–27), which took a strong stand against the Edward-
ians in the name of Modernism,3 Rickword expressed admiration for Eliot’s
“sophistication” but could not condone The Waste Land’s extensive use of
citation:
[Mr. Eliot’s] emotions hardly ever reach us without traversing a zig-zag of allu-
sion. In the course of his four hundred lines he quotes from a score of authors and
in three foreign languages, though his artistry has reached that point at which it
knows the wisdom of sometimes concealing itself. There is in general in his work
a disinclination to awake in us a direct emotional response. . . . He conducts a
magic-lantern show; but being too reserved to expose in public the impressions
: 1
stamped on his own soul by the journey through the Waste Land, he employs
the slides made by others, indicating with a touch the difference between his re-
action and theirs.4
As for the vegetation myths that Eliot cites as his key source in the infamous
notes, this “cultural or middle layer” of the poem “is of no poetic value in it-
self. We desire to touch the inspiration itself, and the apparatus of reserve is
too strongly constructed.” True, there are a few direct expressions of feeling,
like the “concluding confession ‘These fragments I have shored against my
ruins,’ ” but on the whole, the poet’s method is “reticence itself ”:
Here is a writer to whom originality is almost an inspiration borrowing the
greater number of his best lines, creating hardly any himself. It seems to us as if
“The Waste Land” exists in the greater part in the state of notes. This quotation
is a particularly obvious instance:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Acquitaine à la tour abolie5
This collage of nursery rhyme, Dante’s Purgatorio, the Pervigilum Veneris, and
Gerard de Nerval prompts the following assessment:
Perhaps if the reader were sufficiently sophisticated he would find these echoes
suggestive hints, as rich in significance as the sonorous amplifications of the ro-
mantic poets. None the less, we do not derive from this poem as a whole the sat-
isfaction we ask from poetry. Numerous passages are finely written; there is an
amusing monologue in the vernacular [the Lil passage in “The Game of Chess”]
and the fifth part is nearly wholly admirable. The section beginning “What is
that sound high in the air . . .” has a nervous strength which perfectly suits the
theme; but he declines to a mere notation, the result of an indolence of imagi-
nation.
Mr. Eliot, always evasive in the grand manner, has reached a stage at which he
can no longer refuse to recognize the limitations of his medium; he is sometimes
walking very near the limits of coherency.
And Rickword concludes with the hope that the poet will soon “recover”
from this “ambitious experiment.”
This TLS review is an important document for anyone who wants to
understand the poetry emerging in the twenty- first century. Rickword’s
basic charge is quite clear: citation, especially citation that draws on other
languages, undermines and destroys the very essence of poetry, which is
(or should be) the expression of personal emotion—emotion conveyed, of
2 : c h a p t e r on e
course, in the poet’s own words, invented for this express purpose. The “zig-
zag of allusion” thus bodes ill; one’s “magic- lantern show”—a term Rick-
word no doubt derived from Proust6—should not consist of “slides made
by others.” A poem as a “set of notes,” most of them “borrowed” from other
texts: such “mere notation” can only be “the result of an indolence of the
imagination.”
It is one of the nice ironies of literary history that Eliot himself, having
produced his “ambitious experiment,” never used its citational mode again.
Was he listening to his critics? The Waste Land was, after all, partly the prod-
uct of Ezra Pound’s extensive cuts: did Eliot come to think better of Pound’s
collagist method? Whatever the reason, his most important later poems,
“Ash Wednesday” and the Four Quartets, are lyric meditations, oblique and
dense in their communication of emotion but certainly reliant almost wholly
on the poet’s own words. “We do sometimes wish to hear the poet’s full voice,”
says Rickword, and in Ash Wednesday and the Quartets we hear it, however
carefully Eliot avoids the particulars of his actual life.
It is The Waste Land, however, that, almost a century after it was written,
remains Eliot’s most celebrated poem—the poem that has given most read-
ers “the satisfaction we ask from poetry.” The immediacy of the pub scene,
for example, with its “borrowed” lines—
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight—
where the refrain, a crossing of the barman’s nightly last call with the warn-
ing of Isaiah (“A little one shall become a thousand, and a small one a strong
nation: I the Lord will hurry it in its time,” 61:22), modulates into the rou-
tine words of the pub crawlers (which will in turn modulate into the “mad”
Ophelia’s “Goodnight sweet ladies”), has itself become an appropriated text,
cited by many later writers for its suggestibility and ironic potential.
In his important study La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (The Second
Hand or the Work of Citation), Antoine Compagnon writes:
Blessed citation! Among all the words in our vocabulary, it has the privilege of
simultaneously representing two operations, one of removal, the other of graft,
as well as the object of these operations—the object removed and the object
grafted on, as if the word remained the same in these two different states. Is there
known elsewhere, in whatever other field of human activity, a similar reconcilia-
tion, in one and the same word, of the incompatible fundamentals which are dis-
junction and conjunction, mutilation and wholeness, the less and the more, ex-
u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 3

port and import, decoupage and collage? The dialectic of citation is all-powerful:
one of the vigorous mechanisms of displacement, it is even stronger than sur-
gery.7
The “doubling” function of citation is characterized even more dramatically

by Walter Benjamin, himself a great citational writer, in this instance talking
about a fellow appropriationist, Karl Kraus:
In the quotation that both saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of
justice. It summons the word by its name, wrenches it destructively from its con-
text, but precisely calls it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and rea-
son, sonorously, congruously, in the structure of a new text. As rhyme, it gathers
the similar into its aura; as name, it stands alone and expressionless. In citation
the two realms—of origin and destruction—justify themselves before language.
And conversely, only where they interpenetrate—in citation—is language con-
summated.8
The language of citation—Compagnon appropriately calls it récriture—

has found a new lease on life in our own information age. It is a commonplace
that in the world of digital discourse, of the Internet, e-mail, cell phone, and
Facebook, communication has been radically transformed both temporally
and spatially. The speed whereby the sender’s message reaches its destina-
tion has obviously created a new sense of simultaneity even as space has be-
come increasingly indeterminate. Neither telephone area codes nor e-mail
addresses tell us where caller and recipient are actually located at the mo-
ment of communication, nor do most e-mail addresses (e.g., AOL or Gmail)
provide vital statistics about their possessors: they reveal neither nationality
nor ethnicity, race nor religion, age nor even gender. And even when, as on
Facebook, such information is given, how do we know it is accurate? Then,
too, forwarded e-mails can be altered without the recipient’s knowledge so
that the sender’s identity actually merges with that of the writer whose text
is being forwarded. And poets’ blogs, heavily dependent as most are on re-
cycled material, are further framed by viewer responses, producing a curious
amalgam of voices that begins to take on a life of its own.
Under these circumstances, communication is likely to shift from a spe-
cific geographic location (for example, the New York of Frank O’Hara) or
one’s particular local circle (e.g., the Beats) to those, wherever and whoever
they are, who share a particular set of interests and allegiances. The word
community thus takes on an entirely new meaning: the community now ex-
ists on particular websites or in the blogosphere—a situation whose far-
reaching implications we have not even begun to understand.
Consider the following message sent to me on Facebook (June 6, 2009):
Dear MP,
My name is Ina Serdarevic and I’m a poet, artist and student at the University
of Copenhagen, Denmark.
I just finished reading Soliloquy by Kenny G (the whole thing, well, sort of ).
I’m working on an article about Contemporary Literature and Conceptual Poetry
in USA, and it hit me that Soliloquy is even funnier and more groundbreaking
today than it was in the 90’s when it was first published. Because of the new tech-
nology; I mean, yes there was internet back then but things—such as myspace,
blogspot, twitter, flickr, youtube and most importantly facebook are casting a
new kind of light on Goldsmith’s book that reveal new layers of importance and
new possibilities. Like for instance, look at this very message I’m sending you:
you are one among many characters in the book, I call you characters because
Kenny G earlier described Soliloquy as poetry, and a lot of these characters that
I’m reading about in my book are directly available and accessible to me on Face-
book. I type your name and Voilà!—a second later I’ve established contact. How
many writers can actually take credit for building up a secret network between
his readers and book characters?? I mean, this is truly amazing, and by taking ad-
vantage of the various search engines on the net, along with Facebook contact-
ing, it’s in fact possible to create a map of the world within Soliloquy. I can look
up people and talk to them about their personal experience beyond the frame
that Goldsmith is creating, I can disprove and invalidate certain situations in the
book and get multiple angles on them by addressing the different characters.
People like John Post Lee, Karin Bravin, Carter Kustera, Alix Pearlstein, Steve
Clay, Charles Bernstein and yourself, are all presented in the book and connected
to their own proper equivalents of flesh and blood, they are all to be found on
Facebook by anyone who wishes to find them. This awareness gives an odd feel-
ing while reading the book but is also creating a cool and interesting fuzz about
it. It’s almost like reading Finnegans Wake and having access to all its characters
and a key to all the allusions and covert indications.
With this message, I’m simply trying to establish contact with a prominent
figure from the book.
What to make of this ingenious and engaging e-mail from a total stranger? Its
address (MP) and reference to Kenneth Goldsmith by his disc jockey name
(Kenny G) is nothing if not casual and certainly irreverent. And Serdarevic’s
recipients (of whom I am one) could easily take umbrage at the idea that
an overseas student is using a poetic text along with Facebook as a way to
make contact with the American artists or critics she wants to know. But
her letter does argue persuasively that Soliloquy (1997) curiously anticipates
our own moment. A conceptualist text that transcribes every word its au-

thor spoke during an entire week in New York City (while omitting all the
words of those he spoke to), Soliloquy blurs the distinction between “real”
people—people with Internet profiles and publications—and fictional
characters. In doing so, it prompts the reader to investigate more fully to
what extent Goldsmith’s portraits, of himself as well as of others, are reli-
able, the poet’s “actual” speech notwithstanding. On the one hand, Soliloquy
has the air of a urban documentary; on the other, its submission to a rigid set
of constraints—the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, as well as
its governing rule that only the narrator is to be heard—gives the book an
aura of hyperreality. Reading such a text, one must negotiate between in-
side and outside in ways that are still unfamiliar. As in the case of Finnegans
Wake, each reading yields new connections. The mirrors, as Serdarevic un-
derstands, keep multiplying.9
But how did this student happen to hear about Goldsmith’s work in the
first place? Copenhagen, like Stockholm or Helsinki or Olso—for that mat-
ter, like São Paulo, Brazil, and Wuhan, China—has become in recent years
a center for avant-garde poetics, hosting festivals at which poets from the
United States have joined others from around the world. Partly this shift
in literary venues has been brought about by the changing relationship
between majority and minority literatures. As recently as the 1980s, US
anthologies had titles like In the American Tree, Ron Silliman’s important
compendium of Language poetry, which divided its contributors into two
sections, West and East—eighteen West Coast poets (mostly from San Fran-
cisco) and twenty from the East (mostly from New York).10 In the American
Tree excluded such leading Language poets as Steve McCaffery (Canadian)
and Tom Raworth (British) and made no attempt to bring poets from other
regions of the United States into the Language fold. Two decades later, the
notion of a “new American poetry” restricted to those who dwell and work
in the United States seems increasingly anachronistic. Where poets actu-
ally live is much less important than what they do, and mobility—whether
of texts, now eminently movable, or of their authors—is the status quo. In
the Scandinavian countries, where English is a strong second language and
where Modernist avant- gardes have found a receptive audience, Internet
sites now have a broadly global reach.
Consider the electronic journal of international contemporary poetry
and poetics nypoesi (New Poetry), which is edited from Norway by Paal Bjelke
Andersen.11 nypoesi regularly features poetry, both in the original and in
translation, from the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Ger-
many, as well as from Scandinavia. It also publishes intriguing theoretical
essays like Alexandr Skidan’s “Poetry in the Age of Total Communication”
(November 2007), translated from Russian into both Norwegian and En-
glish.12 In the same vein, the Brazilian journal Sibila, founded and edited by
Régis Bonvicino in São Paulo, carried in issue 11 an exciting roundtable on
“poésia em tempo de guerra e banalidade” (poetry in a time of war and ba-
nality), in which the Finnish poet-translator Leevi Lehto has an essay, also
reproduced on the Sibila in English website, called, with a nod to T. S. Eliot,
“Plurifying the Languages of the Trite,” with its partly tongue-in-cheek “cen-
tral claim . . . for an absolute and global pluralism of forms, contents, and lan-
guages.”13 When I was searching for Lehto’s essay on Google, I got the prompt
“Did you mean: ‘Purifying the Languages of the Tort’?” Clarifying the lan-
guage of torts: a poet like Lehto could have a marvelous time making con-
nections between the trite and the tort, the relation of the pure to the plural.
Invention
Reading nypoesi or Sibila or the French-English website and electronic jour-
nal Double Change,14 one is struck by how different the new poetics is, not just
from the mainstream poetry of print journals like The New Yorker or American
Poetry Review but also from the first wave of Language poetry in the 1980s.
Here are some representative extracts:
(1) were I idiom and

the portray
what on
idiot you remarking
cessed to only up
opt hope this
was soundly action
more engineer
taut that the
Bruce Andrews, from “While” (1981)
(2) at the end of delight, one

who or that which revolves
more than chests have

to heave “. . . where gold,

dirt, and blood flow
together”! : margins
the family, not personal

fallibility leads
to instrumentality
in self-restraint
Diane Ward, from “Limit” (1989)
(3) morrow every listen

ago potato who have a paper voice
the hole where the effort went
tome is crayern
a fasten into trance, necklace some awake of notes, floorer
as classed some follow
Peter Inman, from “Colloam” (1986)15
Different as these three selections are, theirs is a period style that exhibits
specific features. First, this is a poetry of programmatic nonreferentiality,
words and phrases refusing to “add up” to any sort of coherent, much less
transparent, statement. Syntactic distortion is the key: in Andrews’s “While,”
articles modify verbs rather than nouns (“the portray” where we expect “por-
trait”), infinitive slots contains adverbs (“to only”), syllables are elided as in
“cessed” (processed? recessed? accessed?), and it is not clear whether “this” in
line 6 is the direct object of “hope” or the subject of “was” in the following
line. Similarly in Diane Ward’s “Limit,” the agent (“one / who or that which”)
is indeterminate, and nouns in apposition (“margins / the family”) don’t form
a sequence. Inman’s “Colloam” (the title word is not in the OED; it seems to
be a neologism formed of colophon and loam), the verb “fasten” does not have
“necklace” as its object; rather, we are given the phrase “a fasten into trance,”
where “fasten” and “trance” relate phonemically rather than semantically. All
three poems use predominantly abstract language, and the pronouns have
no discernible referents. Who is Ward’s “one / who . . . revolves”? Or Inman’s
“who” with the “paper voice”? In each case, linkage is produced by sound
rather than signification: in Andrews’s poem, “idiom” is related to “idiot” (see
line 5), the words “up / opt hope” alliterate, and “taut” (pun on taught) in the
last line visually echoes “that” and “the.” Inman rhymes “ago” and “potato,”
“floorer” leads to “follow,” and “crayern” seems to be a phonetic spelling of
“crayon” or a reference to crayer, an obsolete word meaning “small vessel.”
“Tome” and “crayon” can be related metonymically, but why and how would
a large, heavy book be equated to a small vessel?
The defeat of reader expectation—a kind of cognitive dissonance—is
central to these poems. Ward’s “At the end of ” anticipates a noun phrase like
“the day” or “the journey” but not “the delight”; in Inman, the “hole” prom-
ises to contain something tangible rather than “effort,” and although “mor-
row” (as in tomorrow) and “ago” are related temporally, neither the potato nor
the neologism “crayern” fits into its syntactic slot. Reading these lines, one
has to make one’s way through a maze, with no guidance from a controlling
voice or a context. “The family / not personal,” as Ward puts it.
At the same time, it is important to note that the words, morphemes, syn-
tactic units, and sound patterns in each of these examples have been chosen
by the poet in question. Even the jagged free verse (or “new sentence” in the
case of much Language-centered prose), designed to obstruct the very possi-
bility of pattern or ordering principle, underscores the primacy of the poet’s
inventio as constructive principle. This is a poetry that conceives of the poem
as meaning-making machine and takes its motive from what Adorno termed
resistance: the resistance of the individual poem to the larger cultural field of
capitalist commodification where language has become merely instrumental.
Central to such resistance is the drive to Make It New, to avoid depen-
dence on earlier poetic models. Allusions to Modernist lyric, let alone Ro-
mantic ode or Renaissance elegy, give way to a rapprochement with the
language of theory, references to Derrida and Deleuze, Foucault and Baudril-
lard, cropping up in epigraph or wordplay. Form, in this scheme of things, is
(in Robert Creeley’s phrase, though not in his practice) never more than the
extension of content. Thus the look of the poem as well as its sound struc-
ture are primarily instrumental, used to emphasize the poem’s semantic den-
sity and verbal originality.
Verbal originality: it is this criterion that links the “language poems” in
question to the lyric of the 1960s and ’70s. Now that the much-fabled poetry
wars of that era have receded into the distance, we can see that however dif-
ferent, the poems of Elizabeth Bishop and Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath and
James Wright, Denise Levertov and A. R. Ammons, all are, to put it most
concisely, Originals. Here are the openings of some famous American poems
of the period:
This is the time of year

when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear,

climbing the mountain height,
rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Armadillo”
What thoughts I have of you tonight Walt Whitman, for I walked down the
sidestreets under the trees with a headache self- conscious looking at the full
moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit su-
permarket, dreaming of your enumerations.
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles
full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Gar-
cía Lorca, what were you doing down by the water-melons?
Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”
What a thrill—
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge—
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Sylvia Plath, “Cut”
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass,
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
James Wright, “A Blessing”
The ache of marriage:
thigh and tongue, beloved,

are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion

and are turned away, beloved,
each and each
Denise Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage”
I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

to the sea,
then turned right along
the surf
rounded a naked headland
and returned
along the inlet shore
A. R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet”16
Whether in rhyming stanzas (Bishop, Plath), free verse (Ammons, Levertov,

Wright), or rhythmical prose (Ginsberg), whether explicitly first- person
(Plath, Ammons, Ginsberg) or more outer-directed (Bishop, Wright, Lever-
tov), whether speech- based (Plath, Ammons), self- consciously literary
(Bishop, Wright), or even surreal (Ginsberg, Levertov), these are poems of
strong individualistic cast: each has its own voice, its own discourse radius,
that connects it to other poems by the same author.
Language poetry had as its explicit aim to oppose such “natural” expres-
sivist speech, such individual voicing and accessible syntax. But for the most
part—and this has been insufficiently recognized—the poets represented
in, say, Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree did accept their predecessors’ trust
in invention, in the poet’s power to create a unique parole from the language
pool of the culture—a parole framed to resist what Adorno had defined as
the culture industries. In the climate of the new century, however, we seem
to be witnessing a poetic turn from the resistance model of the 1980s to dia-
logue—a dialogue with earlier texts or texts in other media, with “writings
through” or ekphrases that permit the poet to participate in a larger, more
public discourse. Inventio is giving way to appropriation, elaborate con-
straint, visual and sound composition, and reliance on intertexuality. Thus
we are witnessing a new poetry, more conceptual than directly expressive—
a poetry in which, as Gerald Bruns puts it with reference to Cage’s “writings
through” Finnegans Wake, the shift is “from a Chomskyan linguistic compe-
tence, in which the subject is able to produce an infinite number of original
sentences from the deep structure of linguistic rules, to the pragmatic dis-

course that appropriates and renews what is given in the discourse that con-
stitutes a social and cultural world.”17
Poetry by Other Means

In this new poetic climate, The Waste Land, with its “zig- zag of allusion,”
to use Edgell Rickword’s dismissive phrase, its “unoriginal” lines and bor-
rowed “magic lantern slides,” can be seen as a foundational text. Together
with Pound’s Cantos, with their amalgam of citation and found text, it looks
ahead not only to the mosaic of borrowings found in Louis Zukofsky’s “A”
but also to the impacted pastiche of John Ashbery’s later poems, where al-
most every line has an intertextual referent. Both Susan Howe and Steve Mc-
Caffery, who began their poetic careers under the sign of Concrete poetry,
have always devised complex uses of citation and constraint, intertext and
intermedia: Howe’s The Defenestration of Prague (1983) is a classic example
of “writing through,” in this case, Jonathan Swift’s “Journal to Stella,” while
constraint is exemplified in such McCaffery sequences as Evoba or the more
recent Dark Ladies, a dazzling, rule-generated writing through Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
All the same, nothing quite prepared the poetry world for the claim, now
being made by conceptual poets from Kenneth Goldsmith to Leevi Lehto,
Craig Dworkin to Caroline Bergvall, that it is possible to write “poetry” that
is entirely “unoriginal” and nevertheless qualifies as poetry. In fall 2007, for
example, Kenneth Goldsmith, in a set of short manifesto statements for the
blog of the venerable Poetry Foundation of America, announced his advo-
cacy of conceptual or “uncreative” writing—a form of copying, recycling, or
appropriation that “obstinately makes no claim on originality.” Indeed, “at a
reading I gave recently,” Goldsmith recalls wryly, “the other reader came up
to me and said incredulously, ‘You didn’t write a word of what you read.’ ”18
Incredulous as that “other reader” may have been, let’s remember that Ed-
gell Rickword made almost the same complaint about The Waste Land: “Here
is a writer [Eliot] . . . borrowing the greater number of his best lines, creat-
ing hardly any himself.” Indeed, the poetics of “unoriginality,” now hotly de-
bated in journals like Poetry and on the blogosphere, can be traced back to
a number of movements and paradigms that antedate Language writing by
decades. One such was the concretism of the 1950s and ’60s (itself a bridge
to the great avant-garde projects of the early twentieth century)—a move-
ment associated with the smaller or marginalized nations of the postwar:
Sweden (Oyvind Fahlström), Switzerland (Eugen Gomringer), Scotland (Ian
Hamilton Finlay), Austria (Ernst Jandl), and especially Brazil (Augusto and
Figure 1.1. Ernst Jandl, “creation of eve.” Poetische Werke © 1997 by Luchterhand Literaturver-
lag, Munich, a member of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH.
Haroldo de Campos). The concretist program is best understood as a revolt

against the transparency of the word, which had dominated the discourse
of the 1950s and ’60s; in Ernst Jandl’s “creation of eve” (fig.1.1), for example,
the breath of life is viewed as issuing from the o in “Gott”—God’s mouth, so
to speak—in an alphabetical sequence (opqrstu) that culminates in the v of
“eva,” even as, on the left, the word “adam” (Adam alone) disappears, while
his rib (Rippe) is reduced, step by step, to its final letter, e, which yields the
name “eva,” its last letter—a—providing the ground for Adam’s diagonal
reemergence to Eva’s right.19
Such concretist texts—texts in which lettristic or morphemic form is in-
extricable from meaning—anticipate contemporary digital poetics, where
letter, font, size, spacing, and color are used to generate complex verbo-
visual configurations. The German-Finnish digital poet Cia Rinne, for ex-
ample, has recently produced a work called archives zaroum, the title fusing

the Russian zaum (transrational) with the German word warum for “why”
and darum (because).20 Archives zaroum consists of twenty-nine animated and
interactive multilingual visual poems, emerging from a set of seven tabbed
file folders, each with a title typed in black and red. Clicking on the tabs and
on the diagrams—boxes, lines, circles, flow charts—within each file, one
makes repeated discoveries. Take, for example, a still version of animated
text from the first file called “1, 2, 3, Soleil” (fig.1.2), with its tension between
verticals and horizontal possibilities of “on” and “no,” between circle and
point, its couplet
i am what i am what i ami

a mia mi ami a miami amen
and the love theme qualified by the ambivalence between the words “to,”
“get,” and “her,” in their separate boxes, and the parenthesis containing
“together,” as well as the juxtaposition of “a part” and “apart.” But of course
in the animated version, where every word, letter, and pictogram turns out
to be clickable, these “simple words and phrases yield further puns, rhymes,
and anagrams, complicated by the layering of languages used.”21
A second precursor of twenty-first-century poetics was the Oulipo (Ou-
vroir de littérature potentielle), founded in Paris in 1960 and still going
strong. The aim of Oulipo, as one of its founders, Jacques Roubaud, puts it
in an introductory essay, is “to invent (or reinvent) restrictions of a formal
nature [contraintes] and propose them to enthusiasts interested in compos-
ing literature.” The potential of constraints is more important than their ac-
tual execution. But the constraint is not just some arbitrary rule, randomly
chosen and imposed on a given text. On the contrary, in Roubaud’s words,
“a text written according to a constraint describes the constraint.”22 Thus
Georges Perec’s La disparition, a lipogrammatic novel written without using
the vowel e (in French the most frequent letter of the alphabet), tells the
story of a group of people who disappear or die, one after the other, their
deaths being occasioned by their inability to name the unnamable—the let-
ter e in eux (them), for example, eux being the “undesirables” who “disap-
peared” in World War II.
Like concretism, Oulipo thus insists that the verbal cannot be separated
from its material representation and vice versa. In such recent incarnations
as Jan Baetens’s Vivre sa vie (2005), a “poeticization” of Jean-Luc Godard’s
well-known film, source material for the poet’s “writing-through” is often
drawn from popular culture—film, comic strip, newspaper column, how-to
manual. But at its best, the constrained text never just replicates source mate-
Figure 1.2. Cia Rinne, page from zaroum (Helsinki, Finland, 2009). Reprinted by permission of
the author.
rial; rather, the submission to a chosen rule becomes, as Baetens says, a way of
freeing oneself “from the burden of the stereotypes of one’s own culture,” of
calling one’s own identity “radically into question.”23
A third poetic mode now prominent is what might be called translational
poetics—a poetics for the twenty-first century that has two poles: multilin-
gualism on the one hand, exophonic writing on the other.24 Ezra Pound’s
Cantos, with their insertion of Chinese characters, Greek and Latin phrases,
lines from Guido Cavalcanti, or passages of American dialect and phonetic
spelling, provide a paradigm for the former, which has recently given us such
works as Caroline Bergvall’s French-English “About Face” and her syncretist
Middle/Modern English version of Chaucer’s “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Alyson
Singes. The exophonic, familiar to us from the French poems of Paul Celan
or the English lyrics of Fernando Pessoa, has become much more common
today, thanks to the current state of mobility and migration, in which the use
of English (or French or German or Dutch) as a second language has become
almost normative.25 Consider the writing of Yoko Tawada, who composes in
the German of her adopted nation—a German made strange both phone-
mically and syntactically by the overt mise en question to which it is subjected
by this native Japanese speaker. Homophonic translation, now practiced by
many poets—for example, Charles Bernstein in “Laurel’s Eyes,” based on He-
ine’s Lorelei—is a form of exophonic poetry, whereas the dialect and hip-hop
poems of Tracie Morris exemplify multilingualism.
Writing poetry in a second language is, of course, itself a major con-
straint. In a discussion of sound and poetry, for example, the Finnish poet-
translator Leevi Lehto remarks on the difficulties of translating Charles Bern-
stein’s poem “Besotted Desquamation,” in which every line contains four
words beginning with the same letter:
When I sat down to translate Charles’s poem into Finnish, I was disappointed,
confused even, to find that the words my dictionary suggested for replacement
seemed to begin with just about any letter. I began to have doubts as to the very
fundaments of the profession of translation. I mean, how can we imagine how to
translate anything, when we cannot even get the first letters right? Eventually,
I think I did find a problem to the solution. What I did was to put the original
away—for good, I never looked at it again. . . . I then proceeded, not to translate,
not even to rewrite, but to write the poem, exactly the way Charles had done
before me.26
Haroldo de Campos called this practice “transcreation.” A multilingual poet

like Lehto—and there are now many such poets, especially in the Scandi-
navian countries or in South America—can recreate another’s poem with
great finesse. At the same time, more and more poets and their readers in
the English- speaking world cannot read any language but their own and
so rely on translation as if it were the primary text. Again, Lehto has an apt
comment:
I tend to see translation—and the translation of poetic sound in particular—

as part of a larger dynamics of cultural development and interaction. In a sense,
I don’t think of translation as having anything to do with interlingual communi-
cation, and I’m all for inverting the currently dominant paradigm where the lan-
guages are seen as something primary, translation as a secondary, ensuing “prob-
lem.” To me, “in the beginning was translation.” Translation, not languages per
se, forms the basis of cultures—meaning, among other things, that translation is
always also (already) political.
In the beginning was translation: the layering of languages is one variant

of the citational or intertextual poetics I spoke of earlier. From the Eliot of
The Waste Land, the Pound of The Cantos, or the Marcel Duchamp who re-
produced his early ready-mades and notecards in The Green Box,27 to Charles
Bernstein’s “writing-through” Walter Benjamin in the opera-libretto Shadow-
time, and the use of appropriated text, including archival material, documen-
tary, informational manual, and, most recently, the discourse of the Internet
from hypertext to blog to database, citationality, with its dialectic of removal
and graft, disjunction and conjunction, its interpenetration of origin and
destruction, is central to twenty-first-century poetics. Indeed, récriture, as
Antoine Compagnon calls it, is the logical form of “writing” in an age of
literally mobile or transferable text—text that can be readily moved from
one digital site to another or from print to screen, that can be appropriated,
transformed, or hidden by all sorts of means and for all sorts of purposes.
This is not Pound’s “Make it New!” but Jasper Johns’s “Take an object. Do
something to it. Do something else to it.”28 In his Introduction to the UbuWeb
Anthology of Conceptual Writing, Craig Dworkin puts it this way:
What would a non- expressive poetry look like? . . . One in which substitutions
at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation
of language itself, with “spontaneous overflow” supplanted by meticulous pro-
cedure and exhaustively logical process? In which the self- regard of the poet’s
ego were turned back onto the self- reflexive language of the poem itself. So that
the test of poetry were no longer whether it could have been done better (the
question of the workshop), but whether it could conceivably have been done
otherwise.29

The rejection of the “lyrical interference of the ego,” aggressively formu-
lated by Marinetti in his 1912 Manifesto of Futurist Literature, has, of course,
been with us at least since Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” (1950), and it
was a major theme in language poetics: witness Charles Bernstein’s Content’s
Dream (1986), with its strong critique of “voice” models and the “natural look”
in poetry.30 But appropriation, as manifested in Bernstein’s own later works,
goes much further than the earlier constructivist model, advocating, in Gold-
smith’s words, “uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagia-
rism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its perceptions: information manage-
ment, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies”
(“Conceptual Poetics”). “You didn’t write a word of what you read!”—the fa-
bled Death of the Author has, in recent poetry, finally become a fait accompli.
Or has it? Here it will be helpful to look more closely at that “death,” as
formulated by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault. and, closer to home, Fred-
ric Jameson.
Whose Death?
“Writing,” Barthes declared famously in “The Death of the Author” (1968),
“is the destruction of every voice, every origin. Writing is that neuter, that
composite, that obliquity into which our subject flees, the black-and-white
where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that
writes.”31 Barthes was countering, of course, the still popular belief in the Au-
thor as origin—as the “past of his own book” and hence its supreme exposi-
tor—as well as the corollary claim that we must look to biography or auto-
biography for the necessary explanation of the work. “To assign an Author to
a text,” Barthes wrote, “is to impose a brake on it, to furnish it with a final sig-
nified, to close writing” (53). He wanted, instead, to give the authority over a
text to its reader—“that someone who holds collected into one and the same
field all of the traces from which writing is constituted” (54). The reader,
freed of interference by the author, can make his or her own way through the
text, allowing its multiple and subliminal meanings their full play. “The birth
of the reader must be requited by the death of the Author” (55).
When Barthes made this somewhat grandiose pronouncement, he was
hardly devaluating the genius of a Balzac, a Proust, a Mallarmé—the writers
he alludes to in his essay. On the contrary, he takes the greatness of Balzac’s
and Proust’s novels as such a given that he longs for a subtler, deeper, more
nuanced reading of these texts than any biographical explanation or source
study would allow. In essence, he is carrying to its extreme the Modernist no-
tion contained in D. H. Lawrence’s aphorism “Never trust the author, trust
the tale.” For Barthes, as for the Foucault of “What Is an Author”(1969), to
read critically is to understand that “writing is primarily concerned with cre-
ating an opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears.”32
But what would Barthes, or the Foucault who declared that “the writing
of our day has freed itself from the necessity of ‘expression’ . . . the confines
of interiority” (116), have made of the conceptual poems and fictions of our
own time? What role, they would have asked, can the individual imagination
play in a work like Caroline Bergvall’s Via, a sequence, in alphabetical order,
of the forty-seven English translations archived at the British Library of the
first tercet of Dante’s Inferno? An opening where the writing subject end-
lessly disappears into the words of some unknown and some famous Dante
translators from the mid-nineteenth century to the present? A black-and-
white text where all identity is lost?
The problem is compounded in the historicist turn such formulations
as the “Death of the Author” were given in the 1980s and ’90s. In the con-
clusion to his seminal Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991), Fredric Jameson is less concerned with the disappearance of the sub-
ject in the interstices of a writing that “speaks” its author than in the contrast
between a Modernist epoch of Great Authors, of “demiurges and prophets,”
and a postmodernist ethos in which the very concept of “genius” is irrelevant.
“If the poststructuralist motif of the ‘death of the subject’ means any-
thing socially,” writes Jameson, “it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and
inner-directed individualism, with its ‘charisma’ and its accompanying cat-
egorical panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the ‘genius’ in the
first place.” The new order “no longer need prophets and seers of the high
modernist and charismatic type. . . . Such figures no longer hold any charm
or magic for the subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic
age.”33 Jameson goes on to spell out how, in the age of the simulacrum, genius
theory is simply passé. Indeed, the Modernists themselves have now been
reified as classroom “classics”—and hence become safe and largely unread
and uninteresting.
Or have they? Jameson himself returns to the Modernist masters in his
more recent collection of essays The Modernist Papers (2007). The critic who
had asked dismissively, ‘Whatever happened to Thomas Mann and André
Gide?” and “Is T. S. Eliot recuperable?” (Cultural Logic, 303), is now writing
trenchant analyses of works by Baudelaire and Rimbaud, Kafka and Joyce,
Yeats and Mallarmé, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace
Stevens—and yes, Thomas Mann. The Modernist Papers contains two essays

on Mann, the first on the dialectical irony of The Magic Mountain, the sec-
ond on rereading Dr. Faustus. If, as Jameson posits, these “great” and now
classical writers failed in their attempt to transform the institutional system
in which they produced their work, they were also notable for their willing-
ness to “believe success is somehow possible.”34 Following Adorno, Jameson
rejects the simplistic equation of the Modern with “the new and innovation
and analogized by comparisons with scientific discovery,” in favor of a nega-
tive dialectic:
What drives modernism to innovate is not some vision of the future or the
new, but rather the deep conviction that certain forms and expressions, proce-
dures and techniques, can no longer be used, are worn out or stigmatized by their
associations with a past that has become conventionality or kitsch, and must be
creatively avoided. Such taboos then produce a desperate situation in which the
nature of the innovation, to continue to use such language, is not traced or given
in advance; rather what emerges then determines the form by which the blocks
and taboos of the next generation will be governed (and in this sense, postmo-
dernity and its pluralisms have been seen as a final turn of the screw in which it
seems to be just such taboos and negative restrictions that have themselves be-
come taboo). (Modernist Papers, 5)
Given this—and Jameson often implies this—our own literature can only be
a kind of end run: its “final turn of the screw” (but why final?) can produce a
“postmodern” art significant only for its overturning of previous taboos and
negative restrictions in what is held to be a “desperate situation.” That art,
as Jameson made clear in his earlier essay “The Cultural Logic of Late Capi-
talism,” is characterized by “the ‘death’ of the subject itself—the end of the
autonomous bourgeois monad or ego or individual,” the dissolution of “the
high-modernist conception of a unique style, along with the accompanying
collective ideals of an artistic or political vanguard” (Cultural Logic, 15). And
in this new culture of pastiche, talk of “great writers” and artistic genius is
obviously meaningless. Après Modernism, le deluge.
But of course no turn is the final turn. In a series of studies made in the
1920s, the Russian Formalist critic Juri Tynyanov gave, like Jameson, a dia-
lectical account of literary change but one that is less teleologically driven.35
“Evolution,” Tynyanov held, “is caused by the need for a ceaseless dynamics.
Every dynamic system inevitably becomes automatized and an opposite con-
structive principle dialectically arises.”36 A device obsolete in one period can
be restaged and reframed at a different moment and in a different context
and once again made “perceptible.” The poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov is a
case in point. “Transrational language” [zaum’],” writes Tynyanov, “always
existed in the language of children and mystics, but only in our time did it
become a literary fact. And, on the other hand . . . charades [and] logogriphs
are children’s games for us, but in [Nikolai] Karamzin’s period [the 1790s], in
which verbal trifles and the play of devices were foregrounded, they were a
literary genre” (Russian Formalism, 106–7). An example closer to home would
be the turn in Language poetry from the ubiquitous short free-verse line of
mainstream poetry in the 1960s and ’70s to the “New Sentence” as a way of
calling attention to a poeticity that does not rely on lineation as marker. And
the New Sentence has been in its turn replaced by citational or documentary
prose, drawn from a variety of source texts, high and low, as well as by the
use of visual layout on page or screen, used to defamiliarize poetic material.
Once we grant that current art practices have their own particular mo-
mentum and inventio, we can dissociate the word original from its partner ge-
nius. If the new “conceptual” poetry makes no claim to originality—at least
not originality in the usual sense—this is not to say that genius isn’t in play.
It just takes different forms.
Make It (Not) New

Original genius: the common phrase is, at heart, a tautology. The Oxford En-
glish Dictionary tells us that original comes from the Latin verb oriri, to arise,
to be born; the Latin genius, like genesis, derives from gen, the root of gignere
(to beget), which comes from the Greek gignesthai, to be born. In classical
pagan belief, a genius was “the tutelary god or attendant spirit allotted to
every person at his birth, to govern his fortunes and determine his charac-
ter, and finally to conduct him out of the world; also the tutelary and con-
trolling spirit similarly connected with a place (genius loci), an institution,
etc.” (OED). Until the later seventeenth century, good and evil geniuses con-
trolled our fates; the first occurrence of genius in the modern sense of “natural
ability or capacity; quality of the mind, the special endowments which fit a
man for his [sic] peculiar work” is in Milton (1649), and although men might
have a genius for this or that, the notion of an individual person being a ge-
nius was a nineteenth-century invention, especially in Germany in the age of
Sturm und Drang. And of course the genius of Beethoven or Goethe had to
be original: the noun originality, defined by the OED as “the fact or attribute
of being primary, first hand: authenticity, genuineness,” made its first appear-
ance in 1776 (H. Swinburne’s Travels in Spain): “One of the most valuable pic-
tures in the world. I do not know how Amiconi came to doubt its originality.”
In this example, originality refers to the “real” work as opposed to a copy

or simulation. In this sense originality is, of course, an important legal con-
cept with respect to intellectual property. In Walter Benjamin’s famous for-
mulation in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility, “The pres-
ence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of authenticity,” and it
is the original, not its reproduction. that has full aura. But in the looser sense,
originality means (OED, 4b) “made, composed, or done by the person him-
self (not imitated from another), first-hand.” Originality is often defined by
what it is not—not derivative, not arising from or dependent on any other
thing of the kind, underived. And further: originality, whether in the arts
or the sciences, is synonymous with novelty, invention, creativity, and inde-
pendence of mind. Plato, according to Benjamin Jowett (1875), was “a great
original genius struggling with unequal conditions of knowledge” (OED 5b).
The “death of the author” in the years of poststructuralism meant, of
course, the death of genius theory as well, with social theorists like Pierre
Bourdieu turning their attention to the way culture creates the illusion of
“genius” for the evidently gullible masses. “It is this ideology [that a work
of art has value],” Bourdieu posits, “which directs attention to the apparent
producer, the painter, writer, or composer, in short, the ‘author,’ suppress-
ing the question of what authorizes the author, what creates the authority
with which authors authorize.” And again, “The ideology of creation, which
makes the author the first and last source of the value of his work, conceals
the fact that the cultural businessman . . . by putting it on the market, by ex-
hibiting, publishing, or staging it, consecrates a product which he has ‘dis-
covered’ and which would otherwise remain a mere natural resource.”37
But Bourdieu was himself by no means immune to the attraction of that
“otherwise . . . natural resource.” The whole second section of The Field of
Cultural Production is devoted to Flaubert, whose fiction is taken to exem-
plify the “literary field and habitus” of his time. The opening lecture begins
with this comment on Flaubert’s Sentimental Education: “I believe that this
fascinating and mysterious work condenses all those enigmas that literature
can put to those who wish to interpret it. A true example of the absolute
masterpiece, the novel contains an analysis of the social space in which the
author was himself located, and thus gives us the instruments we need for
an analysis of him” (145). Absolute masterpiece: what enabled Flaubert, rather
than, say, the Goncourt brothers, to produce such a “fascinating and myste-
rious,” such an emblematic work? And if masterpieces were produced in the
mid-nineteeth century, is it really plausible to believe that it is no longer pos-
sible to produce a “fascinating and mysterious work” today? Or is it just that
our own “masterpieces” no longer make the claim to be “original”?
Appropriation, citation, copying, reproduction—these have been cen-
tral to the visual arts for decades: one thinks of Duchamp, whose entire
oeuvre consists of “copies” and found materials; of Christian Boltanski,
whose “artworks” treated photographs of his actual childhood classmates; or
of the carefully staged auto-images of Cindy Sherman. In the poetry world,
however, the demand for original expression dies hard: we expect our poets
to produce words, phrases, images, and ironic locutions that we have never
heard before. Not words, but My Word. As Hart Crane puts it in the con-
cluding stanza of his great lyric sequence “Voyages”:
The imaged Word, it is, that holds,
Hushed willows anchored in its glow,
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.38
Despite the bravado of that conclusion, within six years of “Voyages,” Crane’s
last published poem, “The Broken Tower,” contains this passage:
My word I poured. But was it cognate, scored
Of that tribunal monarch of the air
Whose thigh embronzes earth, strikes crystal Word
In wounds pledged once to hope,—cleft to despair?
(Complete Poems, 106–7)
Was the crystal Word “cognate”? For Modernist poets from Crane to
Robert Lowell or Sylvia Plath, and well into the present, the drive to “pour”
out one’s own Word was assumed to be the poet’s primary mission. But as the
various avant-garde movements demonstrated as early as the 1910s—think
of Khlebnikov’s Tables of Destiny, Pound’s Cantos, the Merz-works of Kurt
Schwitters—there were other ways of Making It New. In the year Crane
published “Voyages,” Walter Benjamin, living in exile in Paris, began a project
called Das Passagen-Werk—a huge collage- text/commonplace book, made
up in large part of the words of others. This encyclopedic set of handwrit-
ten notes, not published in anything like complete form until 1983 (and in
English not until 1999), is not, strictly speaking, a poem, certainly not a lyric
one. Nor is it a narrative or even a fiction. And yet, as I shall argue in my next
chapter, its juxtaposition of poetic citation, anecdote, aphorism, parable,
documentary prose, personal essay, photograph, diagram—indeed every
genre—makes Benjamin’s assemblage a paradigm for the poetry of “unorig-
inal genius” to come.

2
Phantasmagorias
of the Marketplace:
Citational Poetics
in Walter Benjamin’s
Arcades Project
Only the meeting between two different
street names makes for the magic of the
“corner.”
Walter Benjamin1
Walter Benjamin’s monumental Passagen-Werk, begun in 1927 and still in pro-

gress at the time of his death in 1940, reproduces the encyclopedic collec-
tion of notes the writer made over thirteen years of reflection on the Paris
Arcades (Passages)—the glass-covered, marble-walled shop-lined walkways
that were built through entire blocks of buildings in the early nineteenth
century and that look ahead to our own indoor shopping malls (figures 2.1–
2). Drawing on the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale and other libraries,
Benjamin assembled his observations and reflections, along with citations
from an astonishing variety of sources, into sets or sheafs of papers, known
in German as Konvoluts.2 Originally conceived as an essay of fifty pages, the
project grew and grew into an elaborate network of entries, numbering well
over a thousand pages. Benjamin’s German editor Rolf Tiedemann lists some
850 sources consulted between 1934 and 1940.3
Benjamin’s original intention was to use these notes to produce a coher-
ent book called Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century—the French transla-
tion of the Passagen-Werk bears that title, and the two synoptic essays (1935,
1939) by that name now constitute the prelude to The Arcades Project 4—but
the plan kept shifting. The material, as it was presented in the first German
24 :
Figure 2.1. Passage Choiseul (Paris, 1908). Photographer unknown (from
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 927).
edition (1982), is described by Benjamin’s English translators as having “the

form of montage—with its philosophic play of distances, transitions, and in-
tersections, its perpetually shifting contexts and ironic juxtapositions” (Ar-
cades, xi). But the term montage implies a continuity absent here: as the trans-
lators admit, “what is distinctive about The Arcades Project . . . is the working
of quotations into the framework of montage, so much so that they eventu-
ally far outnumber the commentaries” (xi).
The astonishing piling up of quoted passages dismayed the Passagen-
Werk’s first readers, most notably Benjamin’s close friend, collaborator, and
prospective editor, Theodor Adorno. In May 1949, the latter wrote to Ger-
shom Scholem:
At the beginning of last year I finally received the Arcades material hidden in the
Bibliothèque Nationale. During last summer I worked through the material in
the most detailed fashion, and some problems then arose. . . . The most signifi-
cant is the extraordinary restraint in the formulation of theoretical thoughts in
comparison with the enormous treasure of excerpts. This is explained in part
by the (for me, already problematic) idea, which is formulated explicitly in one
p h a n ta s m a g or i a s of t h e m a r k e t p l a c e : 25
Figure 2.2. Philibert Louis Debucourt, Passage des Panoramas à Paris
(1807). Gouache, 24.5 × 16.5 cm. Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Car-
navalet, Paris. Photograph: Erich Lessing / Art Resource, New York.
place, of the work as pure “montage,” that is, created from a juxtaposition of
quotations so that the theory springs out of it without having to be inserted as
interpretation. (Buck-Morss, 73; Passagen, 1042)
The reference is to a remark Benjamin made early in the assemblage of the Ar-
cades: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely
show. I shall appropriate no ingenious formulations, purloin no valuables. But
the rags, the refuse—these I will not describe but put on display” (Arcades,
860; Passagen, 1030). Adorno was always skeptical of his friend’s predilection
26 : c h a p t e r t wo
for such montage, but when, in 1938, Benjamin sent him the completed manu-
script of the “Baudelaire” essay, to be published, as stipulated, by the Institute
for Social Research in New York, Adorno exploded. In a long and famously
devastating letter (November 10), he complained that “Panorama and ‘trace,’
flaneur and arcades, modernism and the immutable without theoretical inter-
pretation—is this ‘material’ that can patiently wait for interpretation without
being consumed by its own aura?” And again, “Bypassing theory affects the
empirical evidence. . . . the theological motif of calling things by their proper
name reverts tendentially to a wide-eyed presentation of the bare facts.”5
Rolf Tiedemann, working with Adorno, had similar reservations about
the insufficiently dialectical argument of the Passagen-Werk. The quotations,
he posits, are like the building blocks of a house: “Next to the foundations
we find the neatly piled excerpts, which would have been used to construct
the walls; Benjamin’s own thoughts would have provided the mortar to hold
the building together. The reader now possesses many of these theoretical
and interpretive reflections, yet in the end they almost seem to vanish be-
neath the very weight of excerpts. It is tempting to question the sense of
publishing these oppressive chunks of quotations” (Arcades, 931). Yet Tiede-
mann does respect Benjamin’s own explanation that the cited passages serve
“to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the
total event. And therefore to break with vulgar historical naturalism.”6 How-
ever boring and annoying these “oppressive chunks of quotations” may be,
they are, Tiedemann concludes reluctantly, necessary to the whole.
But such “necessity” hardly accounts for the fact that, as Richard Sieburth
notes in his seminal “Benjamin the Scrivener,” “of the quarter of a million
words that comprise Tiedmann’s edition, at least 75 per cent are direct tran-
scriptions of texts Benjamin collected over thirteen years. The amount of
source material he copied so exceeds anything he might conceivably need
to adduce as documentary evidence in an eventual book that one can only
conclude that this ritual of transcription is less a rehearsal for his livre à venir
than its most central rite de passage.”7 Indeed, however earnestly Benjamin
may have tried in his later years to produce the historical /philosophical
study of nineteenth-century capitalism and the role of the commodity fetish
that would have accorded with Frankfurt School principles of dialectical
materialism, the Passagen-Werk is less interested in representing the realities
of life in nineteenth-century Paris or in establishing the motive of Baude-
laire’s poetic production than in creating its own textual “arcade,” at once
historical/geographical and yet, in Sieburth’s words, “the book of a dream
(Finnegans Wake) and the dream of a book (like Mallarmé’s Livre), in its most
Utopian conception a text without author, speaking entirely by quotation” (32,
my emphasis). As such, the Passagen-Werk could hardly have been brought
to any kind of satisfactory conclusion, even if Benjamin had lived to “com-
plete” it, because the citational material took on a life of its own—a life, not
of historiography or of philosophical treatise but of poetic construct. There
is now a whole library on the philosophical/political perspective of the Ar-
cades Project,8 but its literary appeal—an appeal evident in the response of its
avid readers over the past few decades—remains less clearly understood.9
To begin with—and this central aspect of the work is distorted in the En-
glish edition, which translates both the French citations and Benjamin’s com-
mentary into one uniform language10—the Passagen-Werk is a bilingual text,
constantly shifting between French citation (whether nineteenth-century
popular song, extract from Baudelaire, old Paris guidebook, or 1930s news-
paper) and German commentary. A given page may also include diagrams, as
in the replication of signage (e.g. “ANGELA, 2d floor, to the right”) in the A
Konvolut (Arcades 40; figure 2.3). Then too, Benjamin used small black squares
to signal cross-references, and in the original thirty-six Konvoluts or sheafs,
“a further system of thirty-two assorted symbols (squares, triangles, circles,
vertical and horizonal crosses—in various inks and colors) to refer the editor
to related papers” (Arcades, 958). The editors of Benjamin’s Archive observe:
Benjamin often applied much care to the graphic form, the physical arrangement,
of his manuscripts. While he worked extremely carefully on the structure and
layout of his essays and books, equally important to him were the proportions of
the architecture of the page. Part of the writing’s sense of form involved the need
to create something for the eye to do. Topographical relationships, spatial orga-
nization, optical alignments and divisions are not only apparent on the drafts and
the pages that include calligraphic elements. Countless scraps and sheets in the
bequest are evidence of a sensibility attuned to graphic elements, spatial dimen-
sions, and design. (Marx, 231)
Figure 2.4, for example, is a manuscript page from the “Baudelaire” (J) Kon-
volut.11 Benjamin’s pages were folded down the middle, “making of them
double sheets, and in each case, he wrote on the first and third side in the
left- hand column. . . . Each side with writing on it bears an alphanumeric
classmark in the top left corner”12 (J 68; see Marx, 253).
The Frankfurt edition makes no attempt to replicate this format, but it
does retain the black squares, so that the opening section of the A Konvolut
(“Passagen, Magasins de Nouveauté(s), Calicots”) looks like this (figure 2.5).13
The configuration of the page, in any case, is hardly that of “normal” prose.
Figure 2.3. Walter Benjamin, “Konvolut A” (1908). Reprinted by permission of the publisher
from THE ARCADES PROJECT by Walter Benjamin, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin
McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), p. 40. Copy-
right © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Figure 2.4. Walter Benjamin, notes and materials for The Arcades Project
(1928–1940) (10.4). Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Walter Benjamin Ar-
chiv [WBA Ms 2330]. © Hamburger Stiftung zu Förderung von Wissen-
schaft und Kultur / Suhrkamp Verlag.
In the German edition, the typeface of the citations is smaller than that of the
author’s commentary; in the English, citation and commentary are the same
size but, again, rendered in different fonts, and the cross references are given
in outline rather than as black squares.14 Translations into other languages
no doubt proceed in still other ways.
But of course the “original” German (more properly German/French)
Figure 2.5. Walter Benjamin, manuscript list from “A Konvolut,” Das Passagen-
Werk (Erster Band, p. 83). © Suhrkamp Verlag.
version is not really “original” or definitive: who knows how Benjamin would
have used his fragments had he lived to see the project into print? Where, for
example, would the visual images—scientific drawings, lithographs, photo-
graphs—that Benjamin had gathered into a separate album have been placed
in a given Konvolut?15 In the end perhaps it doesn’t matter, for the project is
best understood as an ur-hypertext: the numerical classification of the notes
(e.g., A3, 1, A3, 2, . . . A3a, 1) providing ready passage from link (black square)
to link in this Passagen-Werk—a passage that would be even easier in a hypo-
thetical digital version of the whole, which would allow the reader to follow
particular threads (hyperlinks) from text to text, indeed to rearrange them.
Benjamin’s Arcades is thus literally a movable feast: its hypertextual mode
looks ahead to such filing projects as Cia Rinne’s archives zaroum for nypoesi.
Consider, to begin with, Benjamin’s use of lists. When he first set up his
classification system in 1934, so Susan Buck-Morss tells us (50), he used the
motifs assembled in early notes to create an alphabetical list of his files (figures
2.6–7). But the twenty-six capital letters listed here (figure 2.8; see Arcades,
29; Passagen, 81), followed by a second sequence in lowercase, the majority of
whose entries are missing, are curiously nonparallel. Take the first four:
A Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks

B Fashion
C Ancient Paris, Catacombs, Demolitions, Decline of Paris
D Boredom, Eternal Return
First the arcades themselves, then the shops inside them, and then the
clerks who work in those shop—all under one category, A. Second, “fash-
ion,” which is sold under the first rubric. Third, a temporal and spatial shift
to the old Paris and the history of its underground life. And fourth, a state
of mind—boredom, cette tristesse diserte et plate qu’on appelle l’ennui, as Louis
Veuillot called it in 1914 (D2, 5, Passagen, 161)—ennui broken now and again
by the dream of eternal return.16
But this very gap between expectation and fulfillment replaces sequential
exposition and coherent argument with what looks like web-page design,
the A file connecting just as readily with K (Dream City) or with Z (the Doll,
the Automaton) as with B. The technique of the Konvoluten is thus less mon-
tage than sampling, literally defined as the act of taking a portion, or sample,
of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or element of a new
recording. The sampling form, moreover, nicely mimes the flâneur’s own
movement through the “masquerade of space” (M1a, 4), which is the world
of the Arcades themselves: one moves at will from toy shop to skating rink to
pub to Oriental carpet merchant, from cited poem to photograph to travel-
guide documentation, without bounded map or master plan.
The A Konvolut (Passagen, 83; Arcades, 31), for example, begins with two
epigraphs, one from a popular Parisian song of the early nineteenth century,
the other being the opening of Rimbaud’s prose poem “Solde,” from the Il-
luminations:
Figure 2.6. Walter Benjamin, manuscript page from The Arcades Project (convolutes, 10.5).
Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Walter Benjamin Archiv [WBA Ms 2001]. © Hamburger Stif-
tung zu Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur / Suhrkamp Verlag.
Figure 2.7. Walter Benjamin, overview of The Arcades Project (convolutes, 10.5). Akademie der
Künste, Berlin. Walter Benjamin Archiv [WBA Ms 2002]. © Hamburger Stiftung zu Förder-
ung von Wissenschaft und Kultur / Suhrkamp Verlag.
Figure 2.8. Walter Benjamin, “Overview” (1908). Reprinted by permission of the
publisher from THE ARCADES PROJECT by Walter Benjamin, translated by How-
ard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press), p. 29. Copyright © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
De ces palais les colonnes magiques
A l’amateur montrent de toutes parts,
Dans les objets qu’étalent leurs portiques,
Que l’industrie est rivale des arts.
A vendre les corps, les voix, immense opulence inquestionable, ce qu’on ne ven-
dra jamais.17
The magic columns of these palaces

Show to the amateur on all sides,
In the objects their porticos display,
That industry is the rival of the arts.
For sale the bodies, the voices, the tremendous unquestionable wealth, what will
never be sold.
The cited passages are not quite opposites. Rimbaud’s mysterious “Solde”
expresses a deep yearning for those splendeurs invisibles and délices insensibles
one longs to purchase—those palaces with magic columns, so to speak, of
the popular song. But it also casts a jaundiced eye on the notion that every-
thing—even bodies and voices—is for sale in the new commodity culture
of the nineteenth century. The stage is thus set for Benjamin’s own quite am-
bivalent presentation of the luxury and phantasmagoria—a favorite Benja-
minian term—of the magasins de nouveautés.
The A file opens with Benjamin’s quotation from a nineteenth-century
guidebook. In the English translation,18 it reads:
“In speaking of the inner boulevards,” says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete
picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1852, “we have made
mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent
invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending
through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such en-
terprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are
the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature. 䡲 Flâneur 䡲,
in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the
arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if re-
stricted promenade—one from which the merchants also benefit.” 䡲 Weather 䡲
And the author now adds his brief commentary: “This passage is the locus
classicus for the presentation of the arcades; for not only do the divagations
on the flâneur and the weather develop out of it, but, also, what there is to be
said about the construction of the arcades in an economic and architectural
vein, would have a place here.”
Benjamin thus introduces his subject matter and points to the cross-
references or links: “The Flâneur” (M) and “Weather.” The latter never be-
came a separate file; its notes were accommodated under “Boredom” (D),
which has entries like D2, 8, a reference to Émile Tardieu’s “humorous book”
L’ennui (Paris, 1903), where weather is called “one among many factors sup-
posedly causing boredom” (105). And the D link also thickens the poet’s plot
with cautionary tales like the following (D 3a, 4):
Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840s.

Lamartine is said to be the first to have given expression to the malady. It plays a
role in a little story about the famous comic Deburau. A distinguished Paris neu-
rologist was consulted one day by a patient whom he had not seen before. The
patient complained of the typical illness of the times—weariness with life, deep
depressions, boredom. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” said the doctor after a
thorough examination. “Just try to relax—find something to entertain you. Go
see Deburau some evening, and life will look different to you.” “Ah, dear sir,” an-
swered the patient, “I am Deburau.”
A single page of Arcades thus gives us citations of popular song from the Na-
poleonic era, lyric poem, documentary prose (the travel book), and autho-
rial commentary, as well as literary narrative. And finally—we are now at the
bottom of the first A page—the list:
Namen von Magasins de Nouveautés: La fille d’honneur / La Vestale / Le page incon-

stant / Le masque de fer / Le petit chaperon rouge / La petite Nanette / La chaumière
allemande / Au mamelouk / Au coin de la rue—Namen die meist aus erfolgreichen
Vaudevilles stamen. 䡲 Mythologie 䡲 Ein gantier: Au ci-devant jeune homme; ein con-
fiseur: Aux armes de Werther. (A1, 2)
Names of magasins de nouveautés: La Fille d’Honneur, La Vestale, Le Page Incon-

stant, Le Masque de Fer <The Iron Mask>, Le Petit Chaperon Rouge <Little Red Rid-
ing Hood>, Petite Nanette, La Chaumière allemande <The German Cottage>, Au
Mamelouk, Le Coin de la Rue <On the Streetcorner>—names that mostly come from
successful vaudevilles. 䡲 Mythology 䡲 A glover: Au Ci-Devant Jeune Homme. A con-
fectioner: Aux Armes de Werther. (A1, 2)
Here the seemingly sober catalog of names looks ahead to the cataloging
of such recent long poems as Kenneth Goldsmith’ s No. 111 2.7 93–10.20.96,
with its constraint-generated alphabetically organized syllable lists.19 Ben-
jamin’s ambiguous fille d’honneur (the term means “maid of honor,” but the
word fille itself designates a girl of the streets or prostitute) stands next to
the Vestal Virgin, and that figure, in turn, next to the inconstant page, the
iron mask, and Little Red Riding Hood. The ironies multiply: German cot-
tages are juxtaposed to Persian cavalry, the glove shop is designed for the ci-
devant (would-be aristocratic) young man, and the confectioner named for
the pistols of Goethe’s suicidal lover, Young Werther, or its vaudeville ver-
sion in Massenet’s dramatic operetta.
The resonance of such lists—and they recur throughout the Arcades—is
enormous. Take the gantier or glove shop Au Ci-Devant Jeune Homme. The
Arcades are, of course, the emblem of the new bourgeois Paris of the Second
Empire, in which the glove of the pre-Revolutionary aristocrat has been re-
placed by the commercial glove shop. Juxtaposed to Aux Armes de Werther,
moreover, the glove becomes the dueling glove, thrown down in the mo-
ment of challenge. Romantic dueling, romantic love, Liebestod: all these have
become, in midcentury Paris, grist for the commerce of the shopping arcade.
No more grand amour, only pastries and sweets. No wonder this catalog of
shop names has a link to “Mythology,” which was never assigned its own file
but is a major thread throughout the entire book.
In the next paragraph of this entry (A1, 2), Benjamin’s list of shops modu-
lates into a set of citations:
“The name of the jeweler stands over the shop door in large inlaid letters—inlaid with
fine imitation gems.” Eduard Kroloff, Schilderungen aus Paris (Hamburg 1839), vol.
2, p. 73. “In the Galerie Vero-Dodat there is a grocery store; above its door, one reads
the inscription: ‘Gastronomie Cosmopolite.’ The individual characters of the sign are
formed, in comic fashion, from snipes, pheasants, hares, antlers, lobsters, fish, bird kid-
neys, and so forth.” Kroloff, Schilderungen aus Paris, vol. 2, p. 75. 䡲 Grandville 䡲 (A1, 2)
A minor social commentator of the 1830s, Eduard Kroloff here character-

izes the commercial sleight- of-hand that corrodes the very language of
nineteenth-century Paris. The jeweler’s name is cast in large letters carved
from fake stones (täuschend nachgeahmten Edelsteinen); an even more egre-
gious sign, this time on an elegant grocery store, boasts letters, spelling Gas-
tronomie cosmopolite, made out of animal and fish parts—even bird kidneys.
Here urban signage is implicitly presented as an assault on nature—an as-
sault ingenious yet troubling, with animals and birds surviving only as so
many dead and stuffed remnants.
The paragraph concludes with the one-word link “Grandville,” a refer-
ence to the great French caricaturist and illustrator J. J. Grandville (the nom
de plume of Jean Ignace Isidore Gérard), whose lithographic fantasies (see
figure 2.9) “confer,” so Benjamin observes, “a commodity character on the
universe” (Arcades, 8). Grandville’s “sybilline books of publicité ” (853) get a
Konvolut of their own, “Exhibitions, Advertising, Grandville” (G), but the
link also connects A to “Fashion” (B), “The Flâneur” (M), and, perhaps most
ingeniously, to “Iron Construction” (F), where we find such entries as this:
Gußeiseisenzauber: “Hahblle put se convaincre alors que l’anneau de cette planète

n’était autre chose qu’un balcon circulaire sur lequel les Saturniens viennent le soir
prendre le frais.” Grandville, Un autre monde (Paris 1844), p. 139 䡲 Haschisch 䡲
Magic of cast iron: “Hahblle was able then to convince himself that the ring around
this planet was nothing other than a circular balcony on which the inhabitants of Sat-
urn strolled in the evening to get a breath of fresh air.” Grandville, Un autre monde
(Paris, 1844), p. 139. 䡲 Hashish 䡲 (F1, 7)
The curious name “Hahbble” is not a misprint but Grandville’s own slang for
hâbleur or “boastful chatterbox,” a character in Grandville’s book of illustra-
tions Un autre monde (see Arcades 963, note 2). The “magic” of cast iron that
allows the planet Saturn to appear like a giant “circular balcony” (see figure
2.10) connects, via the link that concludes the paragraph, not to a folder by
that name—for a “Hashish” file does not exist—but to the largest and most
important Konvolut, “Baudelaire,” with its drug motif taken from the poet’s
Le vin et le haschisch (e.g., J68, 4).20 We can thus make our way spatially from
the shop sign “Gastronomie cosmopolite,” assembled from animal compo-
nents (A1, 2), to the magic of cast- iron balconies (F1,7), then to the trance
or phantasmagoria induced by hashish, and thereby to the folder central to
Benjamin’s entire enterprise—the one called “Baudelaire.”
This, the J Konvolut, which takes up roughly one-fifth of the Passagen-
Werk, appears to be more of a piece than the others, and there are fewer black
squares signaling links to other folders. But the technique is the same: the
analysis of Baudelaire’s oeuvre is composed not in any linear or logical fash-
ion but out of small fragments—citations from Baudelaire, whether from
his poems, critical writings, letters to his mother, or diaries; citations from
other writers of the period, ranging from Victor Hugo’s La légende des si-
ècles to Félix Pyat’s drama Le chiffonier de Paris; quoted statements specifically
about Baudelaire made by other writers, ranging from Baudelaire’s contem-
poraries (e.g., Alfred de Vigny, Edgar Allan Poe) to the Modernists Proust,
Gide, and Valéry as well as scholars and commentators who are Benjamin’s
contemporaries; descriptions of the Paris of the Second Empire by travel
writers, journalists, sociologists, and memoirists of the period—and so on.
What Adorno bemoans as Benjamin’s “refusal of interpretation,” his “wide-
eyed presentation of the bare facts,” actually produces a composite image of
Baudelaire that is as vivid as it is complex and contradictory. Consider, for
example, the following entry:
Figure 2.9. J. J. Grandville, “The marine life collection.” From Un autre
monde (1844), in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benja-
min and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 156.
Figure 2.10. J. J. Grandville, “An interplanetary bridge; Saturn’s ring is

an iron balcony.” From Un autre monde (1844), in Susan Buck Morss, The
Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 153.
Nadar beschreibt das Kostüm von Baudelaire dem er in der Nähe von dessen Woh-
nung dem Hotel Pimodan beg(eg)net. “Un pantaloon noir bien tiré sur la botte vernie,
une blouse—blouse roulière bleue bien raide en ses plis neufs—pour toute coiffure
ses longs cheveux noirs, naturellement bouclés, le linge de toile éclatante et stricte-
ment sans empois, quelques poils de barbe naissante sous le nez et au menton, et les
gants roses tout frais . . . Ainsi vêtu et non coiffé, Baudelaire parcourait son quartier
et la ville d’un pas saccadé, nerveux et mat à la fois, comme celui du chat, et choissi-
sant chaque pavé comme s’il eût à se garer d’y écraser un oeuf.” cit Firmin Maillard;
La Cité des intellectuels Paris (1905) p 362
Nadar describes the outfit worn by Baudelaire, who is encountered in the vicinity of
his residence [of 1843–45], the Hôtel Pimodan. “Black trousers drawn well above his
polished boots; a blue workman’s blouse, stiff in its new folds; his black hair, natu-
rally curly, worn long—his only coiffure; bright linen, strictly without starch; a faint
moustache under his nose and a bit of beard on his chin; rose-colored gloves, quite
new. . . . Thus arrayed and hatless, Baudelaire walked about his quartier of the city
at an uneven pace, both nervous and languid, like a cat, choosing each stone of the
pavement as if he had to avoid crushing an egg.” Cited in Firmin Maillard, La Cité des
intellectuels (Paris, <1905>), p. 362 (J 1a, 3)
Nadar, who was one of Baudelaire’s close friends, photographed the poet
many times; indeed, Nadar’s visual image of Baudelaire has become ours
today. But of course the photographs were black and white, and so we don’t
see the poet’s “bright” linen or “rose-colored gloves.” Indeed, Nadar’s verbal
sketch of the flâneur as a nervous yet languid cat, calculating its movements
along the pavement as if to “avoid crushing an egg,” has a Baudelairean cast,
as if the visual artist might here capture the poet’s words as readily as he had
rendered his physical appearance. The shift from the German of the explan-
atory note to the French of the citation underscores the weight Benjamin
gives to Nadar’s own words. But rather than elaborating on Nadar’s portrait
or relating it to Les Fleurs du mal itself, Benjamin soon shifts gears:
Zum allegorischen Element. “Dickens . . . parlant des cafés dans lesquels il se faufilait
aux mauvais jours . . . dit de l’un qui se trouvait dans Saint-Martin’s Lane: ‘Je me sou-
viens que d’une chose, c’est qu’il était situé près de l’église et que, dans la porte, il y
avait une enseigne ovale en verre avec ce mot Coffee Room peint à l’adresse des pas-
sants. S’il m’arrive, encore maintenant, de me trouver dans tout autre café, mais où il y
a aussi cette inscription sur une glace, et si je la lis à l’envers (moor eeffoc) comme je les
faisais souvent alors dans mes sombres rêveries, mon sang ne fait qu’un tour. Ce mot
baroque moor eeffoc est la devise de tout vrai réalisme.” G. K. Chesterton: Dickens
(Vies des hommes illustres No 9) Traduit de l’anglais par Laurent et Martin-Dupont
Paris 1927 p. 32 (J 3, 2, ellipses Benjamin’s)
On the allegorical element. “Dickens . . . mentions, among the coffee shops into which
he crept in those wretched days, one in St. Martin’s Lane, ‘of which I only recollect that
it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with coffee
room painted on it, addressed toward the street. If I ever find myself in a very different
kind of coffee room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it
backwards on the wrong side, moor eeffoc (as I often used to do then in a dismal
reverie), a shock goes through my blood.’ That wild word, ‘Moor Eeffoc,’ is the motto of
all effective realism.” G. K. Chesterton, Dickens (series entitled Vie des hommes illustres,
no. 9), trans. from the English by Laurent and Martin-Dupont (Paris, 1927), p. 32 (J3, 2)
Baudelaire’s Second Empire Paris here gives way, as in film montage, to a

parallel London, specifically Dickens’s London, with the further twist that
Benjamin is citing Dickens not directly but through Chesterton, and Ches-
terton in a French reference book series, Vie des hommes illustres, at that. The
link seems random, as when today one jumps from one Google item to an-
other, often not certain where the search will lead. In this case, it leads to the
eerie mirror image of the coffee- room inscription—moor eefoc—which
provides a perfect counterpart to the Baudelairean “shock” experience in
Second Empire Paris. Two pages later, we read:
Baudelaire über den im Kreise der Ecole païenne großgewordenen: “Son âme, sans
cesse irritée et inassouvie, s’en va à travers le monde, le monde occupé et laborieux;
elle s’en va, dis-je, comme une prostituée, criant: Plastique! Plastique! La plastique,
cet affreux mot me donne la chair de poule.” Baudelaire: L’Art romantique Paris p 307
Baudelaire on the child raised in the company of the Pagan School: “His soul, con-
stantly excited and unappeased, goes about the world, the busy, toiling world; it goes,
I say, like a prostitute, crying Plastique! plastique! The plastic—that frightful word
gives me goose flesh.” Baudelaire, L’Art romantique (Paris), p. 307. (J4, 7)
Neoclassical art with its call for plasticity—the sculpturesque—was the bête
noire of Baudelaire, the proponent of Delacroix and Romantic painting.21
Here, in a nice sleight-of-hand, the word plastique shifts from aesthetic crite-
rion to synthetic product peddled by the harlot, whose cry, reminiscent of
Blake’s “London,” gives the narrator “goose flesh”—again, a shock experi-
ence. Throughout the text, the phantasmagoria at the heart of Baudelaire’s
poetic is presented metonymically in every possible representation, so that
when individual poems like À une passante or Le Mauvais Vitrier are cited or
discussed by this or that critic, the reader already has familiarity with the con-
text and texture of Baudelairean lyric. Benjamin’s text, that is to say, far from
being a critical exposition of Baudelaire’s ethos, forces us to enter the poetic
universe itself, in all its multiplicity. Indeed, the J Konvolut becomes a kind
of theater on whose stage Baudelaire’s actual writings, verse and prose, can
be reenacted as if their presence were of immediate interest to all concerned.
“Baudelaire” thus exhibits the tension between authenticity and artifice,
disclosure and impenetrability that we have witnessed on those very first
pages of the A Konvolut, whose elaborate textile network juxtaposes cita-
tion and commentary, image and scholarly material so as to dramatize the at-
traction—yet also a kind of horror—of the Paris Arcades. In A1.4 we read: “It
was the time in which Balzac could write, ‘The great poem of display chants
its stanzas of color from the Church of the Madeleine to the Porte Saint-
Denis.’ ” (“Es war die Zeit in der Balzac schreiben konnte: ‘le grand poème de
l’étalage chante ses strophes de couleur depuis la Madeleine jusqu’a la porte
Sainte-Denis.’ ”) The reference is to Balzac’s Le diable à Paris (1846), and it is
startling to see le grand poème de la mer of Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre replaced
by le grand poème de l’étalage—display. Signage—here made from antlers or
pheasants, from fake diamonds and rubies—is all. And yet, in Eliot’s phrase,
such signs are taken for wonders, not only by the flâneurs of the passages but
by Benjamin himself. A true hall of mirrors, as enticing as it is chilling, the
realm of the arcades becomes the poet’s phantasmagoria.
Page after page of Benjamin’s astonishing text contains movable passages
that can (and do) reappear in altered contexts; the repeated juxtapositions,
cuts, links, shifts in register, framing devices, and visual markings conspire
to produce a poetic text that is paradigmatic for our own poetics. The most
sober documentation—for example, F. A. Beraud’s account of police edicts
regulating prostitution in 1830 in the O Konvolut—is placed side by side
with an extract from Baudelaire or Rimbaud, from popular song, tall tale,
comic anecdote, cartoon, legend, or myth.
But there is a further resonance Benjamin’s book permits, this time an in-
tertextual—and potentially digital—one made possible by the Arcades Proj-
ect’s exfoliating references. Consider Konvolut E, “Haussmannization, Bar-
ricade Fighting,” which splices together fascinating yarns, observations, and
images, detailing the painful process of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s
construction of the Paris boulevards—a construction- demolition project
that figures so largely in Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal. Here is a French citation
from Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme:
“Le baron Haussmann fit dans Paris les plus larges trouées, les saignées les plus ef-
frontées. Il semblait que Paris ne saurait supporter la chirurgie d’Haussmann. Or,
Paris, ne vit-elle pas aujourd’hui de ce que fit cet homme téméraire et courageux? Ses
moyens? La pelle, la pioche, le charroi, la truelle, la brouette, ces armes puériles de
Figure 2.11. Anon., Tools used by Haussmann’s Workers. Artist unknown. From Walter Benja-
min, “E Konvolut,” in The Arcades Project, p. 134.
Figure 2.12. Marcel Duchamp, Coffee Mill (Moulin à café) (1911). Oil on cardboard. 33 × 12.5 cm.
Tate Gallery, London. © 2009 Artists Rights Society, New York.
Figure 2.13. Marcel Duchamp, Chocolate Grinder (Broyeuse de chocolat), no. 1 (1913). Oil on can-
vas. 62 × 65 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. ©
2009 Artists Rights Society, New York.
tous les peuples . . . jusqu’au machinisme neuf. C’est vraiment admirable ce que sut
faire Haussmann.” Le Corbusier: Urbanisme (Paris <1925>,) p 149.
“Haussmann cut immense gaps right through Paris, and carried out the most startling
operations. It seemed as if Paris would never endure his surgical experiments. And
yet, today, does it not exist merely as a consequence of his daring and courage? His
equipment was meager; the shovel, the pick, the wagon, the trowel, the wheelbarrow—
the simple tools of every race . . . before the mechanical age. His achievement was truly
admirable.” Le Corbusier, Urbanisme (Paris <1925>), p. 149. (E 5 a, 6)
In the Harvard edition, this passage is accompanied by an illustration from

Benjamin’s files of the “Tools used by Haussmann’s workers” (figure 2.11).
Here are those “simple tools” Corbusier is talking about: the shovel, the pick,
the wagon, the trowel, the wheelbarrow. But what does that not-so-simple
machine with the crank depicted in the lower right remind us of ? Those
familiar with the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp will recognize its affin-
ity to the painted Coffee Mill of 1911 (figure 2.12) and to its offshoot the 1914
Chocolate Grinder (figure 2.13), which was, in turn, to become an important
property of The Large Glass.
Figure 2.14. “Moulins,” from Nouveau petit Larousse illustré: Dic-

tionaire encyclopédique (1912).
Figure 2.15a. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un escalier),
no. 2 (1912). Oil on canvas. 146 × 89 cm. Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Louise and
Walter Arensberg Collection. © 2009 Artists Rights Society, New York.
Figure 2.15b. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase (Nu descendant un escalier),
no. 3 (December 1937). Pochoir-colored reproduction with attached postage stamp.
© 2009 Artists Right Society, New York.
Surely the Chocolate Grinder has nothing to do with Le Corbusier’s refer-
ences to the tools and machines of Haussmann’s Paris, as illustrated here. Or
does it? We know that Duchamp based this and related ready-mades on cur-
rent illustrations of mechanical drawings, not unlike those reproduced in
the Passagen-Werk: for example, one of moulins (mills) from the Petit Larousse
illustré of 1912 (figure 2.14). But there is a more specific link. In late spring
1937, when Benjamin was working away at the notes for his Arcades project,
he wrote in his diary, “Saw Duchamp this morning, same Café on Blvd. St.
Germain. . . . Showed me his painting: Nu descendant un escalier in a reduced
format, colored by hand en pochoir, breathtakingly beautiful, maybe men-
tion.”22 The reference is to Duchamp’s pochoir (one of a series), replicating in
miniature (35 × 20 cm, approximately one-quarter of the original size) his
famous Nude Descending a Staircase of 1912 (see figure 2.15a- b). The pochoir
was made by taking a black- and- white reproduction of the painting and
then “colorizing” it by applying ink and gouache using stencils or templates
cut from a thin sheet of metal. Duchamp called the resulting pictures colo-
riages originaux and signed them “Marcel Coloriavit”; on some of the sheets,
he pasted below the illustration a five-centime French revenue stamp, over
which he wrote his signature.23
Original or copy? Benjamin’s enthusiasm for Duchamp’s “breathtakingly
beautiful” pochoir reflects the aesthetic that governs the entire Arcades Project:
to copy and reproduce one’s own earlier words or the words of others can be
a very fruitful exercise. If the 1912 Nude was “shocking,” Duchamp asks, what
about this miniature produced twenty-five years later? Has its delicately al-
tered color substantially changed it? And if not, why not? In Wittgenstein’s
words, “But isn’t the same at least the same?”
The lesson here is that context always transforms content. Suppose the
mirror image of the sign for Coffee Room—moor eeffoc—that Benjamin
cites from a French translation of Chesterton, who in turn is citing Dickens,
appeared in a film noir or a Susan Howe poem, or perhaps in stenciled let-
ters on the bottom of a painting by Jasper Johns. Clearly, it would function
quite differently from the way it does here, in a set of intricately metonymic
notes designed to pinpoint the particularity of Baudelaire’s poetics. In the
context of Konvolut E with its Haussmann story—a story hardly as sanguine
for Benjamin as for Le Corbusier, whom he cites—the image of the work-
ers’ tools produces nostalgia for a time when Paris was not yet sliced up by
boulevards. In the context of Duchamp’s ready-mades, on the other hand,
these tools are understood as entering the new industrial age, the age of me-
chanical reproduction.
: : :
“The power of a country road,” remarked Benjamin in his essay- memoir

“One-Way Street” (1928), “is different when one is walking along it from
when one is flying over it by airplane. In the same way, the power of text
is different when it is read from when it is copied out. . . . Only the copied
text commands the soul of him who is occupied with it, whereas the mere
reader never discovers the new aspects of his inner self that are opened by
the text.”24 These words anticipate in an uncanny way the turn writing would
take in the twenty-first century, now that the Internet has made copyists,
recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all. Benjamin’s Passages
become the digital passages we take through websites and Youtube videos,
navigating our way from one Google link to another and over the bridges
provided by our favorite search engines and web pages. In this new arcade-
world, writing a poem is no easier than it ever was. Just different.
3
From Avant-Garde
to Digital:
The Legacy of Brazilian
Concrete Poetry
In the spring of 2001, the poet Kenneth Goldsmith participated in a panel on

Brazilian concrete poetry with, among others, one of the movement’s found-
ers, Decio Pignatari.1 Goldsmith recalls:
I was stunned. Everything [Pignatari] was saying seemed to predict the mechanics
of the internet . . . delivery, content, interface, distribution, multi-media, just to
name a few. Suddenly it made sense: like de Kooning’s famous statement: “His-
tory doesn’t influence me. I influence it,” it’s taken the web to make us see just
how prescient concrete poetics was in predicting its own lively reception half a
century later. I immediately understood that what had been missing from con-
crete poetry was an appropriate environment in which it could flourish. For many
years, concrete poetry has been in limbo: it’s been a displaced genre in search of a
new medium. And now it’s found one.2
The limbo Goldsmith refers to was quite real: in the 1980s and ’90s, the going
view, especially in Anglo-America, where concrete poetry had never really
caught on, was that the 1950s experiment in material poetics was ideologi-
cally suspect—too “pretty,” too empty of “meaningful” content, too much
like advertising copy. In the university this estimate still prevails. To this
day, one would be hard put to find an English or comparative literature de-
partment that offers courses in concrete poetry. Doesn’t the subject belong
more properly, if at all, in the art department, my colleagues ask, specifically
in courses on graphic design?
Even books about concrete poetry have raised this issue. Consider Caro-
line Bayard’s sophisticated theoretical study The New Poetics in Canada and
Quebec: From Concretism to Post-modernism (1989). Bayard begins with a sur-
vey of the midcentury poetics of Oyvind Fahlström, Eugen Gomringer, and
50 :
Figure 3.1. Eugen Gomringer, “silencio” (1953). Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author.
Figure 3.2. Augusto de Campos, “sem um numero” (1957). From An-

tologia Noigandres 5 (São Paulo, 1962). Reprinted by permission of the
author.
Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, only to conclude that the “fusion of ex-
pression and content” being advocated by the concretists was an instance of
what Umberto Eco had termed the “iconic fallacy”—the fallacy that “a sign
has the same properties as its object and is simultaneously similar to, analo-
gous to, and motivated by its object.”3 At its most naive “naturalizing” level
the iconic fallacy manifests itself, Bayard argues, in poems like Gomringer’s
“silencio” (figure 3.1), where the empty rectangle at the center of the compo-
sition is presented as the equivalent to the “silence” conveyed by the verbal
sign. But even where the motivation is much subtler, as in Augusto de Cam-
pos’s “sem um número” (without a number), which makes no reference to
an external object but uses graphic space structurally so as to dramatize the
central o (zero) status of the peasant (figure 3.2), concrete poetry, Bayard
contends, is bedeviled by a lingering Cratylism—the doctrine put forward
f r om ava n t - g a r de t o digi ta l : 51
by Plato’s Cratylus in the dialogue by that name, that the sound and visual
properties of a given word have mimetic value, and that, by extension, con-
crete poetry equates “graphic-typographical form with semantic function”
(Bayard, 23). This is, Bayard believes, a dangerous doctrine. “Typographi-
cal and calligraphic aesthetics were most striking in the 1960s, but also the
least durable. They corresponded to the Cratylian phase of the experience,
and while they inserted into texts typefaces hitherto unknown to literature,
the experiment was short-lived” (163). For—and here ideology comes in—
“changing the sign system does not in any way imply that one is modifying
the political system” (171). And Bayard refers us to Herbert Marcuse’s argu-
ment that far from representing a breakthrough, the innovative typographic
devices of the concretists “dissolve the very structure of perception in order
to make room . . . for what?” (171).
This “for what?” functions as a battle cry. Visual poetry and with it sound
poetry, as in the case of Henri Chopin (Bayard, 27–28), are thus both judged
to be questionable practices. Indeed, Bayard argues, it was only when the
“form=content” assumption of concretism was abandoned, as it was in the
1970s and ’80s by poets like bpNichol, bill bissett, and Steve McCaffery, who
turned their attention to the anagrammatic and paragrammatic play inherent
in language rather than on such concretist elements as font, color, and spac-
ing, that a more adequate poetics was born.
It is a compelling argument: in my own Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in
the Age of Media, written in the late ’80s, I was persuaded, as was Caroline Ba-
yard, that post-concrete poetics was providing a needed “corrective” to the
purported mimeticism and aestheticized composition of the earlier work.4
But now that, in Goldsmith’s words, “an appropriate environment in which
[concrete poetry] could flourish” has become available, the texts in question
have recovered their place in the larger poetic field. To understand how this
process of recovery works and how concrete poetry itself perceived its role
as the renewal of the avant-garde practices of the early twentieth century,
it may be useful to take up the concept of the arrière- garde, now gaining
currency.5 We need, in other words, to ground concretism in its history, to
understand, for example, its relation to the two world wars as well as to the
varying cultures that produced it. And further: from the vantage point of
the twenty-first century, we can begin to discriminate between the various
manifestations of what once seemed to be a unified movement. Not all con-
cretisms, after all, are equal.
52 : c h a p t e r t h r e e
Bringing Up the Rear
As William Marx makes clear in the introduction to Les arrière-gardes au xx e
siècle, the concept of the avant-garde is inconceivable without its opposite.
In military terms, the rear guard of the army is the part that protects and
consolidates the troop movement in question; often the army’s best gener-
als are placed there. When an avant-garde movement is no longer a novelty,
it is the role of the arrière-garde to complete its mission, to ensure its success.
The term arrière-garde, then, is synonymous neither with reaction nor with
nostalgia for a lost and more desirable artistic era; it is, on the contrary, the
“hidden face of modernity” (Marx, 6). As Antoine Compagnon puts it in his
study of Barthes in the Marx collection, the role of the arrière garde is to save
that which is threatened. In Barthes’s own words, “Être d’avant-garde, c’est
savoir ce qui est mort; être d’arrière garde, c’est l’aimer encore.”6
The proposed dialectic is a useful corrective, I think, to the usual concep-
tions of the avant-garde, either as one-time rupture with the bourgeois art
market, a rupture that could never be repeated—the Peter Bürger thesis—
or as a series of ruptures, each one breaking decisively with the one before, as
in textbook accounts of avant-gardes from Futurism to Dada to Surrealism
to Fluxus, to Minimalism, Conceptualism, and so on. This second or pro-
gress narrative, ironically, continues to haunt the academy even when the
avant-garde is by no means at issue: I am referring to the unstated premise of
critical theory that the perspective of enlightened globalists, postcolonial-
ists, or multiculturalists on a given artwork or movement is inherently more
“advanced” than what came before. But as Haroldo de Campos points out in
a blistering attack on Third World studies, it is condescending—indeed, as
he says, overaltern—to assume, as does, for example, Fredric Jameson in his
“theory of a cognitive aesthetics of third- world literature,” that subaltern
fiction, “having as a necessary goal the achievement of a ‘national allegory,’
will not offer the satisfaction of a Proust or Joyce.” At the current stage of de-
velopment, Jameson posits, a given novel—his example is Guimarães Rosa’s
Grande Sertão: Veredas—may be understood as “a high literary variant of the
Western.” To which Haroldo responds:
The first thing that occurs to me, before a somewhat deprecating label like this
one, is that the author of The Political Unconscious ignores the Brazilian Portuguese
language and has built a fake, oversimplified image of the complex Faustian,
metaphysical struggle between God and Devil embedded in the deep structure
of Rosa’s masterpiece. . . . The Anglophone master’s discourse of the overaltern
“salvationist” critics works as a rhetorical by-product of unconscious imperial-
ism by effacing the subaltern “minor” languages and by underrating their crea-
tive verbal power.7
The “new realism,” Haroldo insists, has not shed the language of Joyce and
Borges as readily as it might seem.
This commentary provides us with a useful entry into the discourse of
the concretism of the 1950s. In 1953, the Brazilian- born Swedish poet Oy-
vind Fahlström published a “Manifesto for Concrete Poetry” under the title
“Hipy papy bithithdthuthda bthuthdy,” a version of “Happy Birthday” he
took from A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh.8 The second epigraph for this mani-
festo—the first announces that Fahlström has shifted from “normal” writing
to the creating of worlets (words, letters)—is in French and declares, “Rem-
placer la psychologie de l’homme par l’obsession lyrique de la matière.”
The citation is from Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Literature (1912)—the
famous manifesto, first printed as a leaflet in French and Italian, supposedly
spoken by the propeller of the airplane in which Marinetti finds himself. The
Technical Manifesto, the modernist reader will recall, advocates the destruc-
tion of syntax, of adjectives, adverbs, and all verbs forms except the infini-
tive, and of punctuation, in favor of “tight networks of analogies” between
disparate images,” as in “trench= orchestra” or “machine gun=femme fatale.”
Such strings of unrelated nouns—what Marinetti called parole in libertà—
would replace the tedious lyric “I,” which is to say all psychology: “the man
who is damaged beyond redemption by the library and the museum, who
is in thrall to a fearful logic and wisdom, offers absolutely nothing that is
any longer of any interest.” For psychology, Marinetti insisted, we must sub-
stitute matter, specifically such categories as noise, weight, and smell. And
Marinetti exemplifies this “new” poetry by reciting from his onomatopoeic
battle poem Zang tumb tuuum with its cataloging of such items as “lead + lava
+ 300 stinks + 50 sweet smells paving mattress debris horseshot carrion flick-
flack piling up camels donkeys tumb tuuum.”9
Like Marinetti, Fahlström has little time for the conventional pieties of
his day: his manifesto begins with a satiric thrust at the Sigtuna lakefront
art colony (rather like our Yaddo and McDowell summer colonies), whose
cultural hero was the neo-Romantic poet Bo Setterlind, the author of a long
poem called Mooncradle. Like Marinetti, Fahlström senses that words “have
lost their luster from constant rubbing on the washboard” (110) and believes
that “changing the word order is not enough; one must knead the entire
clause structure. Because thought processes are dependent on language,
every attack on prevailing linguistic forms ultimately enriches worn- out
modes of thought” (117). And just as Marinetti dismisses ego psychology,
Fahlström dismisses the fixation on “content” as the chief “unifying ele-
ment” of the poetic text:
The situation is this: e v e r s i n c e t h e w a r, [there has been] a l o n g,

a b j e c t, d o o m s d a y m o o d, a feeling that all experimental extremes have
been exhausted. For those of us unwilling to drift into the world of alcoholic or
heavenly sustenance, all that remains is to use what means we have at our disposal
to
Analyse
analyse
analyse our wretched predicament.
Today with laboured symbolic cryptograms, silly romantic effusions or desper-
ate grimaces outside the church gate being propounded, as the only healthy op-
tions, the concrete alternative must also be presented. (Fahlström, “Hipy papy,”
110–11)
But as the reference above to the postwar doomsday mood makes clear,
there are, of course, also enormous differences between the avant- guerre
Futurist Marinetti and the post– World War II Fahlström—differences
that similarly define the relationship of Pound and Joyce to the Noigandres
group. The Utopian avant-garde, of which Marinetti was very much of a rep-
resentative, believed in definitive rupture with the stultifying past. “A roar-
ing motorcar,” Marinetti declared famously in the First Manifesto (1909), “is
more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Marinetti, 13). And
one of his best-known manifestos is Contro Venezia passatista (1910), which
insists, partly tongue- in-cheek, that the famed Venetian canals should be
drained and filled with cement so that factories might rise up to replace the
“dead’ museum culture of this passéist city, whose abject citizens are little
better than cicerones, guiding the wealthy foreign tourists from one museum
or church to another.
Or again, there is the manifesto called Down with Tango and Parsifal, with
its diatribe against Wagner and those who dance like “hallucinated dentists.”
For the Italian Futurists, as for their Russian counterpart and the Cabaret
Voltaire, the past is not only dead but deadly. Avant-garde means to make it
new. Accordingly, there is no homage to the poets and artists of the preced-
ing century. The 1912 manifesto “Slap in the Face of Public Taste” (signed by
David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Maya-
kovsky) declared that “the past is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are
less intelligible than hieroglyphs,” and exhorted fellow poets to “throw Push-
kin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity.”10
The new technology, it seems, has changed everything. “If all artists were
to see the crossroads of these heavenly paths,” says Kasimir Malevich, refer-
ring in 1915 to the “brilliance of electric lights” and “growling of propellers”
of the modern city, “if they were to comprehend these monstrous runways
and intersections of our bodies with the clouds in the heavens, then they
would not paint chrysanthemums.”11 Who was it that did paint chrysanthe-
mums? Monet for one, Renoir for another: artists of the great Impressionist
movement who were now considered passé. Indeed, Duchamp went further
and rejected retinal art tout court—dismissing Courbet, not to mention the
Impressionists, as devoid of any real ideas.
The arrière- garde, in contrast, treats the propositions of the early
twentieth-century avant-garde with a respect bordering on veneration. One
can’t imagine Marinetti or Malevich using the words of his late nineteenth-
century precursors as epigraphs, but Fahlström certainly does so. And the
Brazilian Noigandres group specifically derives its names from a passage in
Pound’s Cantos. Thus concretism, cutting-edge (literally!) as it was vis-à-vis
the normative verse or painting of its own day, transformed the Utopian
optimism and energy of the pre–World War I years into a more reflective,
self-conscious, and complex project of recovery.
Consider the curious triangulation that occurs when we read Fahlström
or the Brazilian concretists against such of their postwar North American
contemporaries as Elizabeth Bishop or Robert Lowell. “They are doing some-
thing in Rio now called ‘concretionist,’ ” Bishop, then a resident of Brazil, tells
Lowell in April 1960. “It seems like pre-1914 experiments, with a little ‘tran-
sition’ & Jolas, and a dash of Cummings. It’s awfully sad. I was interviewed
about it in Belém and said ferociously that perhaps it had ‘A certain nostalgic
charm.’ ” And in the next paragraph she remarks, “How is thrones? I refused
to buy rockdrill. Pound criticism is wildly confused, don’t you think, but I
agree with D. Fitts that poetry is not to be drilled into you, nor is music and
that’s one of P’s—oh well—I’ll skip it.”12
It may seem remarkable that both Lowell and Bishop, poets who came
of age under the sign of Pound, could be so indifferent to the late Cantos.
But for them, as for most poets of the midcentury, Pound remained the poet
of Imagism, of the Vorticist Lustra epigrams and the satiric Homage to Sextus
Propertius, even as the radical late Cantos, with their collocation of Latin and
Provençal phrases, American slang, numbers, symbols, and Chinese ideo-
Figure 3.3. Ezra Pound, from “Canto 86.” From THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND,
copyright © 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Pub-
lishing Corp.
grams (see figure 3.3) set the stage for the “concretionism” Bishop found so
“awfully sad.” Rock-Drill, Thrones: the newly reconfigured page layout of
these Cantos was dismissed as some sort of elaborate game, a collocation of
unrelated fragments not worth reading, much less purchasing. Lowell, who
found even the “loveliness and humor” of the Pisan Cantos (1948) spoiled by
a severe disjunction—“the drift must be cut somewhere,” he told Pound13—
had by 1959 returned to the Romantic lyric paradigm, as his Life Studies of
that year testifies.
The arrière- garde, then, is neither a throwback to traditional forms—
in this case, the first-person lyric or lyric sequence—nor what we used to
call postmodernism. Rather, it is revival of the avant-garde model—but with
a difference. When, for example, Oyvind Fahlström makes his case for the
equivalence of form and content, his argument amalgamates Khlebnikov’s
zaum poetics of the Russian avant-garde with principles developed by the
French lettristes who were his contemporaries. The basic axiom, developed
by Khlebnikov in his examination of etymologies, is that, as Fahlström put
it, “l I k e—s o u n d i n g w o r d s b e l o n g t o g e t h e r” (“Hipy papy,”
115). “Myths,” for example, “have been explained in this way: when Deukalion
and Pyrrha wanted to create new human beings after the Flood, they threw
stones and men and women grew from them: the word for stone was ‘laas,’
for people ‘laos.’ . . . Figs are related to figment, pigs to pigmentation” (115).
Here is the Cratylian or iconic “fallacy” so regularly called into question
by critics of concretism. From an arrière-garde perspective, however, there
is an important precedent for Fahlström’s formulation, which also covers
rhythm (“metrical rhythms, rhythmic word order, rhythmic empty spaces”),
homonyms, syllepsis, which “unites words, sentences, and paragraphs”
(“Hipy papy,” 114–15), anagram, paragram, and the “arbitrary attribution of
new meanings to letters, words, sentences, or paragraphs.” “We might,” for
example, “decide that all ‘i’s in a given worlet signify ‘sickness.’ The more
there are, the more serious the illness” (116).
Khlebnikov, whom Roman Jakobson considered the great poet of the
twentieth century, expended much labor on tracing the relationships of
meanings produced by such words and syllables. In a short essay (1913) on
cognates of the word solntse (sun), Khlebnikov observes: “Here is the way
the syllable so [with] is a field that encompasses son [sleep], solntse [sun], sila
[strength], solod [malt], slovo [word], sladkii [sweet], soi [clan—Macedonian
dialect], sad [garden], selo [settlement], sol’ [salt], slyt’ [to be reputed], syn
[son].”14 And to make the relationships more vivid, Khlebnikov sketches
them as the rays of a sun bearing the key word “SO” (figure 3.4). Logically,
the relationship between these verbal units is largely arbitrary—what does
salt have to do with sun?—but poetically, Khlebnikov shows, they can be
made to inhabit the same universe: “Although the refined tastes of our time
distinguish what is solenyi [salty] from what is sladkii [sweet], back in the
days when salt was as valuable as precious stones, both salt and salted things
Figure 3.4. Velimir Khelbnikov, “Here is the way the
syllable so is a field” (1912–13).
were considered sweet; solod [malt] and sol’ [salt] are as close linguistically as
golod [hunger] and gol [the destitute].” And the analysis continues in this vein.
Khlebnikov’s poetic etymologies recall Plato’s Cratylus, where despite
Socrates’s arguments against the representability of the sign, he is the one
to come up with ingenious meanings for letters and syllables. The noun for
truth, αληθεια (aletheia), is shown to be an “agglomeration of θεια αλη
(thea alé, divine wandering), implying the divine motion of existence.” Or
again, Ψευδος ( pseudos) is “the opposite of motion; here is another ill name
given by the legislator to stagnation and forced inaction, which he compares
to sleep (ευδειν, eudein), but the original meaning of the word is disguised
by the addition of ψ ( ps).”15 If, as Rosmarie Waldrop put it neatly, “concrete
poetry is first of all a revolt against the transparency of the word,” making
“the sound and shape of words its explicit field of investigation,”16 the Plato
of the Cratylus and Khlebnikov after him are certainly involved with con-
crete Poetry. For the link between stagnation and sleep or between truth and
a divine wandering are precisely the links that intrigue poets.
This, then, is the force behind Fahlström’s worlets and his fascination with
complex forms. In his own case, the early concrete experiments were only
a first step in the elaborate language games we find in his collages, instal-
lations, musical compositions, and especially the radio plays, which I shall
consider later vis-à-vis sound poetry. In all these instances, materiality and
medium are central: Fahlström had dissociated himself early from the Sur-
realists who were his contemporaries, remarking that his aesthetic differed
from theirs in that “the concrete reality of my worlets is in no way opposed to
the concrete reality of real life. Neither dream sublimates nor myths of the
future, they stand as an organic part of the reality I inhabit.”17
In its inattention to sound and syntax, Fahlström implies, Surrealism
should be understood as a deviation from the true avant- garde path. The
new poetics thus positions itself elsewhere—as the arrière-garde of Italian
and Russian Futurism, of the “destruction of syntax” (Marinetti) and the
“word set free” (Khlebnikov). The question remains why such concretism as
Fahlström’s, with its marvelous recovery of zaum, sound poetry, innovative
typography, and appropriated text, came into being when and where it did.
And what did the two World Wars have to do with it?
The Gomringer Variant

In The Geography of the Imagination (1981), Guy Davenport made a comment
that sheds much light on the relation of concrete poetry to the avant-gardes
of the early century:
Our age is unlike any other in that its greatest works of art were constructed
in one spirit and received in another.
There was a Renaissance around 1910 in which the nature of all the arts changed.
By 1916 this springtime was blighted by the World War, the tragic effects of which
cannot be overestimated. Nor can any understanding be achieved of twentieth-
century art if the work under consideration is not kept against the background
of the war which extinguished European culture. . . . Accuracy in such matters
being impossible, we can say nevertheless that the brilliant experimental period in
twentieth-century art was stopped short in 1916. Charles Ives had written his best
music by then; Picasso had become Picasso; Pound, Pound; Joyce, Joyce. Except
for individual talents, already in development before 1916, moving on to full maturity, the
century was over in its sixteenth year. Because of this collapse (which may yet prove to
be a long interruption), the architectonic masters of our time have suffered critical
neglect or abuse, and if admired are admired for anything but the structural in-
novations of their work.18
Extreme though Davenport’s assessment may sound—surely many avant-

garde works were produced after 1916—his basic premise is, I think, cor-
rect. Pound, for example, had not yet begun the Cantos, but the ideogrammic
technique that made them so famous—their fragmentation, collage, multi-
lingualism, and use of citation—were already in place in “Cathay.” Duchamp
had already produced his first ready-mades, and Malevich had exhibited his
black-and-white squares at the O.10 show in St. Petersburg.
The interwar years witnessed the refinement of these early innovations—
El Lissitsky’s of Malevich’s abstractions, Duchamp’s incorporation of his
ready-mades into the Large Glass, Gertrude Stein’s permutations in How to
Write of her early prose technique—but the rupture that caused such wide-
spread shock and consternation in art circles had already occurred. And in
the 1930s and ’40s, as Socialist Realist writing came to the fore, avant-garde
innovation was considered suspect. When revival came after World War II,
it occurred not in Paris, where the postwar ethos was one of existentialist
introspection as to how France had taken such a terribly wrong turn in the
pre-Hitler years, and certainly not in the war capitals, Berlin, Rome, Mos-
cow—but on the periphery: in Sweden (Fahlström), Switzerland (Eugen
Gomringer), Austria (Ernst Jandl), Scotland (Ian Hamilton Finlay), and es-
pecially São Paulo, Brazil.
The periphery, as we have seen in Fahlström’s case, defined itself by its
resistance to the dominant aesthetic of its day, turning instead to the avant-
gardes of the early twentieth century. But the rear flank of the army can’t
protect the troops without understanding the moves the front-runners have
made—a situation that makes arrière-garde activity much more than mere
repetition. Eugen Gomringer, generally considered the father of concrete
poetry,19 is a case in point. Gomringer differed from Fahlström, as from the
Campos brothers, in coming out of an artistic rather than a literary milieu.20
As early as 1944 he had seen the international exhibition of concrete art
organized by Max Bill in Basel, and in 1944–45 he made the acquaintance
of Bill and Richard Loehse at the Galerie des eaux vives in Zurich.21 Soon
he was collaborating with two graphic artists, Dieter Rot and Marcel Wyss,
to create a new journal called Spirale. Bauhaus, Hans Arp, Mondrian, and De
Stijl—these were Gomringer’s chief visual sources.
At the same time he had a taste for poetry, having begun as a student to
write sonnets and related lyric forms in the tradition of Rilke and George,
many of them on classical subjects, like the dramatic monologue “Antinous”
(1949) or the Petrarchan sonnet “Paestum,” which begins:
Am Strand und in der Dünen Einsamkeit
Läßt sich von kleinen Händen nichts bewegen,
Da scheinen Sonne, Mond und fallen Regen
Und Winde wehn im alten Maß der Zeit.22
On the shore in the loneliness of the dunes

Nothing can be moved by small hands,
Here shines the sun, the moon, and rain falls
And winds blow, as they did in ancient times. (my translation)
The poem moves through neatly rhyming quatrains and sestet, tracking the
poet’s contemplation of the stones of Paestum and their testimony to the
human potential for greatness.
The turn to concrete poetry, based on the abstract art (called “concrete”
because of its emphasis on the materials themselves) exhibited in the Zur-
ich and Basel galleries, thus came without a working out of the problems of
iconicity and representation that we find in Fahlström and the Noigandres
poets. Gomringer merely turned from the conventional lyric to Concrete
art-inspired “constellation.” Here is the 1952 “avenidas,” written in Spanish
in homage to Gomringer’s birthplace, Bolivia:
avenidas
avenidas y flores
flores
flores y mujeres
avenidas
avenidas y mujeres
avenidas y flores y mujeres y

un admirador
This minimalist poem, divided into four couplets, repeats the three nouns
avenues, flowers, and women with six repetitions of the conjunction and ( y), in
the following pattern: a, a + b; b, b + c; a, a + c; a + b + c +; the final line intro-
duces a fourth noun modified by an indefinite article—un admirador—thus
bringing the poet, discreetly referred to in the third person, into the picture.
Structurally, “avenidas” is not yet a “concrete” poem: the stanza breaks,
for example, could be elided and the spacing between couplets could be
changed without appreciably altering the lyric’s meaning. Within the year,
however, Gomringer had written “silencio” (see figure 3.1), “ping pong,”
“wind,” and the “o” poem (figures 3.5–7), poems whose typography is clearly
constitutive of their meaning.23 The motivation of these “constellations,” as
Gomringer called them, was closely related to the situation of Switzerland
in the immediate postwar era. In the 1930s and ’40s there had been much talk
of German Switzerland’s becoming a separate nation and adopting a written
German variant of its own. Although the plan was abandoned, the war fur-
ther isolated Switzerland, turning it into a neutral island surrounded by war-
ring power blocs. After the war, a unified but still multilingual Switzerland
once again opened its borders to the larger European world, but that world
(including Germany itself ) was now newly divided by the Iron Curtain. Con-
Figure 3.5. Eugen Gomringer,
“ping pong” (1953). Reprinted
by permission of the author.
Figure 3.6. Eugen Gomringer,

“wind” (1953). Reprinted by
permission of the author.
Figure 3.7. Eugen Gom-

ringer, the “o” poem (1953).
Reprinted by permission of
the author.
crete poetry, Gomringer insisted, could break down the resultant linguistic
and national borders by transcending the local dialects associated with Hei-
matstil, the endemic Swiss nativism. In using basic vocabulary as in the short
poem beginning “sonne man / mond frau” (sun man / moon woman), poetry
could avoid the local.24
But such globalism was not without its problems. From his first mani-
festo, “From Line to Constellation” (1954), Gomringer emphasized the
need for reduction, concentration, and simplification as “the very essence of
poetry.” “Headlines, slogans, groups of sounds and letters,” he wrote, “give
rise to forms which could be models for a new poetry just waiting to be taken
up for meaningful use.” The “new poem” should be “simple” and could be
perceived “visually as a whole as well as in its parts. It becomes an object. . . .
Its concern is with brevity and conciseness.” Such a poem is called a “con-
stellation” in that “it encloses a group of words as if it were drawing stars
together to form a cluster.”25
Reduction, compression, simplicity, objecthood: note that these are
not equivalent to Fahlström’s call for “verbivocovisual” language and para-
grammicity. In his second major statement on the subject in 1956, Gom-
ringer declared that “Concrete poetry is founded upon the contemporary
scientific- technical view of the world and will come into its own in the
synthetic-rationalistic world of tomorrow.”26 This functional definition of a
“universal poetry” brings Concretism dangerously close to industrial design
and conformity to the political-ideological status quo. And indeed by 1958,
in “The Poem as Functional Object,” Gomringer is talking about “reduced
language” as necessary to “the achievement of greater flexibility and freedom
of communication.” “The resulting poems,” he wrote, “should be, if possible,
as easily understood as signs in airports and traffic signs.”27
But what happens when the identity of poem and industrial sign is com-
plete? How, then, is art different from commerce, poetry from good de-
sign? In 1967 Gomringer took on the position of chief design consultant
for Rosenthal, the famous china and glass manufacturer, and increasingly his
work involved consolidation rather than innovation. Perhaps the difficulty
was that his concept of poeticity set itself against the traditional model of
Goethean—or Rilkean—lyric without absorbing the Italian parole in lib-
ertà and Russian zaum works that had performed such a similar role. He had,
in other words, no useful paradigm to revive and adjust, believing that his
“simple” and “direct” constellations were something entirely new. In 1965, in
his last major poem, with its Rilkean title das stundenbuch (the book of hours),
Gomringer turned from visual “constellation” to the normal page, produc-
ing fifty-eight pages, most with five couplets each, containing permutations
of twenty-four short conceptual nouns (e.g., Geist, Wort, Frage, Antwort—
mind, word, question, answer), each modified by mein and dein (“my” and
“your”) in a latter-day meditation on the relationship of life to death. Here
the role of graphic space has become much less significant:
deine frage
mein geist
deine frage
mein wort
deine frage
meine antwort
deine frage
mein lied
deine frage
mein gedicht28
Iconicity, anagram, paranomasia—these now give way to the accessibil-

ity of the sign: Gomringer’s is a poem readable by anyone with a minimum
of German. True, the elegantly produced 1980 edition provides not only
the text but also four complete translations, into English (Jerome Rothen-
berg), French (Pierre Garnier), Spanish (Jaime Romagosa), and Norwegian
(Jan Östergren), respectively. But the very fact that stundenbuch translates so
nicely shows that the materiality of the signifier no longer plays the central
role in the poem’s production. The lines “deine frage / mein wort” inevitably
become “your question / my word”: the translator need only follow the score.
Pós-Tudo, Pós-Utopico
The Brazilian concretists, to whom I now turn, had a close relationship to
Gomringer at the inception of the movement, but their work soon took
a different direction.29 The very name Noigandres, chosen by the Campos
brothers and Decio Pignatari for their movement, launched in 1952, is re-
vealing. Noigandres, Augusto has explained, was taken from Ezra Pound’s
Canto XX, in which the poet seeks out the venerable Provençal specialist
Emil Lévy, a professor at Freiburg, and asks him what the word noigandres
(used by the great troubadour poet Arnaut Daniel) means, only to be told
by Lévy that for six months he has been trying without success to find the
answer: “Noigandres, NOIgandres! / You know for seex mons of my life / Ef-
fery night when I go to bett, I say to myself: / Noigandres, eh noigandres, Now
what the DEFFIL can that mean!”30 But despite this colorful disclaimer with
its phonetic spellings, “Old Lévy” had, in fact, gone on to crack the diffi-
cult nut in question: the word, he suggested, could be divided in two—enoi
(ennui) and gandres, from gandir (to ward off, to remove)—and in its origi-
nal troubadour context the word referred to an odor (probably of a flower)
that could drive ennui away. Other Provençalists have suggested that noigan-
dres might also refer to noix de muscade (nutmeg), which is an aphrodisiac—a
reading that is plausible given that Arnaut’s poem is a love poem. And since
the nutmeg plant is prickly on the outside and silky on the inside, noigandres
may also be a sexual metaphor.31
For our purposes here, it matters less what the word noigandres actually
means than that the Brazilian concretists took a word of complex etymol-
ogy from Pound’s Cantos to name their movement and journal. This was an
unusual move: in the Brazil of the early 1950s Pound was barely known. In-
carcerated in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital for his wartime activities, he was at best
a controversial figure—one whose reception of the 1948 Bollingen Prize,
awarded by a panel of distinguished fellow poets, had aroused the ire of most
critics and journalists. Then, too, he had long been an exile, living in obscu-
rity in Rapallo, Italy, so that the interwar literary world of Europe had largely
forgotten him.
Why, then, The Cantos and Joyce’s controversial Finnegans Wake rather
than models closer to home? As Augusto de Campos explained it in a 1993
interview with me:
In the fifties . . . there was a very important demand for change, for the recovery
of the avant-garde movements. We had had two great wars that marginalized,
put aside for many many years, the things that interested us. You see, the music of
Webern, Schoenberg and Alan Berg, for example, was not played because it was
condemned both in Germany and in Russia, the two dictatorships. You could say
that all experimental poetry, all experimental art, was in a certain sense margin-
alized. Only in the fifties began the rediscovery of Mallarmé, the rediscovery of
Pound. Pound suffered at that time from the charge of fascism. His work was very
much condemned. We participated in an international movement . . . that tried
to rescue Pound, who was excluded from American anthologies.32
The war, Augusto observes, had put all artistic experiment on hold. “It was
a traumatic situation . . . [in] all the arts. Duchamp was rediscovered in the
sixties by the Pop movement and by Cage, and then he balanced the influ-
ence of Picasso. . . . There was a great movement in music, in Europe as in the
U.S.—the revival of Charles Ives, Henry Cowell and Cage. So, I think it was
a necessity to recover the great avant-garde movements.” And now Augusto
adds a comment that is significant for our understanding of concrete poet-
ics today. It is the need for recovery of the avant-garde, he argues, that has
prompted him to turn a critical eye on postmodernism: “There is inside the
discussion of post-modernism a tactic of wanting to put aside swiftly the recovery
of experimental art and to say all this is finished!”33
Here is the important distinction between avant- and arrière-garde. The
original avant- garde was committed not to recovery but discovery, and it
insisted that the aesthetic of its predecessors—say, of the poets and artists
of the 1890s—was “finished.” But by midcentury the situation was very dif-
ferent. Because the original avant- gardes had never really been absorbed
into the artistic and literary mainstream, the “postmodern” demand for total
rupture was always illusory. Haroldo de Campos, following Augusto’s lead,
explains that the concrete movement began as rebellion—“We wanted to
free poetry from subjectivism and the expressionistic vehicle” of the then-
dominant poetic mode. But it is also important to appreciate continuity.
Thus Haroldo praises Paul Celan’s work, which has “the contemporaneity
of concrete poetry. He was a poet who was . . . influenced by the syntax of
Hölderlin, by some devices of Trakl, but on the other side, there are visual
elements in his poetry, there is a reduction and fragmentation of language
typical of concrete poetry.” Indeed, the “German tradition” in concrete
poetry is criticized for being “much less interested in the field of semantics
than, for instance, Brazilian poetry.” “The Gomringer poetry,” Haroldo adds,
“is very interesting, but very limited.”34
What about Surrealism? For the Brazilian arrière- garde, as for Oyvind
Fahlström, Surrealism was distraction rather than breakthrough. In Latin
America, Augusto de Campos declares, Surrealism, with its “normal gram-
matical phrases’ and the “very conventional structure” that belies its reputed
psychic automatism (170), had “a traumatic influence as a kind of avant-garde
of consummation!” Haroldo adds, “A kind of conservative avant-garde . . . all
the emphasis on the unconscious and on figurality. I think French poetry did
not free itself from surrealism until now. They did not understand Un coup de
dés. . . . No poet after Mallarmé was as radical as Mallarmé. Not even Apol-
linaire. Apollinaire is decorative where Mallarmé is structural.” And Augusto
cites Pignatari as quipping, “Brazil never had surrealism because the whole
country is surrealist.”35
The point here is that whereas the Surrealists were concerned with “new”
artistic content—dreamwork, fantasy, the unconscious, political revo-
lution—the concrete movement always emphasized the transformation of
materiality itself. Hence the chosen pantheon included Futurist artworks
and Finnegans Wake, Joaquim de Sousandrade’s pre-Modernist collage mas-
terpiece The Inferno of Wall Street (1877), and the musical compositions of
Anton Webern, Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and John Cage.
How, then, did this recovery project work in practice? The concrete
poems in Augusto’s first book Poetamenos (Poetminus), were, interestingly,
not iconic at all but fused Mallarméan spacing, Joycean pun and paragram,
and the Poundian ideogram with Webern’s notion (in Klangfarbenmelodie)
that musical notes have their own colors. Plate 1, from Poetamenos (1953),
shows the third color poem, “Lygia Fingers.”36
This love poem juxtaposes the “red” title word with green, yellow, blue,
and purple word groups to create a dense set of repetitions with variations
and contrasts. The need for translation is minor here, since Augusto himself
has invented a multilingual poetics that curiously anticipates twenty-first-
century “translational” poetics. “Lygia” contains English, Italian, German,
and Latin words and phrases, and it bristles with puns and double entendres.
Thus finge (“feints” or “tricks”) in line 1 becomes finge/rs (line 2). Do Lygia’s
fingers play tricks? The third and fourth lines confirm this possibility with
the anagram digital and dedat illa[grypho]. As Sergio Bessa has explained, in
lines 3– 4 Augusto deconstructs the Portuguese verb datilografar (to type-
write) in order to insert his beloved’s name into the scene of writing: grypho,
moreover, can be read both as “glyph” and “griffin.”37 By the time we reach
line 5, Lygia has morphed into a lynx, a feline creature ( felyna), but also a
daughter figure ( figlia), who makes, in a shift from Italian to Latin, me felix
(me happy). Note too that “Lygia” contains as paragram the English suffix
-ly (repeated five times, twice color coded so as to stand out from the word
in which it is embedded)—a suffix that functions as teaser here, given that
the adjective it modifies (happily? deceptively? treacherously? generously?)
is wholly indeterminate. The German phrase so lange so in line 8 puns on So-
lange Sohl, whose name Augusto, as he tells it, had come across in a news-
paper poem and had celebrated as the ideal beloved in the Provençal man-
ner ses vezer (without seeing her) in his 1950 poem “O Sol por Natural.”38 In
line 10, the second syllable of Lygia morphs into Italian to give us gia la sera
sorella—“already evening, sister,” where sorella may be the addressee or an
epithet for sera, the longed-for evening. The poem then concludes with the
English words so only lonely tt- and then the solitary red letter l, recapitulat-
ing the address to Lygia, but this time reduced to the whisper or tap of tt and
a single liquid sound.
Plate 1. Augusto de Campos, “Lygia” (1953). From Poetamenos (São Paulo: Edições Inven-
ção,1973). Reprinted by permission of the author.
Plate 2. Augusto de Campos, cover from Gertrude Stein’s Porta-Retratos (Santa Catarina:
Editora Noa Noa, 1989). Reprinted by permission of the author.
To recapitulate: in this and related poems in Poetamenos, what Umberto
Eco called the “iconic fallacy” continues to be operative, but here it is made
reflexive and subversive—as if to say that representation must itself be called
into question. And indeed, issues of iconicity or even spatial design—striking
as that design surely is—are subordinated to the poem’s overall verbivocovi-
sual composition, all of whose materials have a signifying function. Pound’s
familiar distinction between melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia is applicable
here, but note that phanopoeia is transferred from the realm of representation
(e.g., the word or word group as effective “image” of X or Y) to that of the ma-
teriality of the poem: its sound (emphasized by color) and its visual appear-
ance on the page. Logopoeia, the dance of the intellect among words, occurs
throughout, and it is melopoeia that dominates: I have already talked of the
lygia–finge–digital–illa gryphe–lynx lynx–figlia thread; consider also the echo
of so lange so in sorella and then in so only lonely, the spacing further drawing out
these word-notes. “Lygia” thus emerges as a troubadour lyric made new: the
time frame of the aubade or planh gives way to the spatial-aural construct of
this amorous Klangfarbenmelodie. The love song, moreover, nicely ironizes its
conventional subject matter: Lygia, both lynx and digital, has her own tricks,
and in any case the figure of Solange Sohl looms in the background.
The next step—and we find it in the work of both Augusto and Haroldo
de Campos—was the large- scale translation, more properly, in Haroldo’s
words, transcreation,39 that included works from the Iliad (Haroldo) and Ar-
naut Daniel (Augusto), from Goethe and Hölderlin to August Stramm and
Kurt Schwitters (Haroldo and Augusto), to Rimbaud, Hopkins, and e. e. cum-
mings (Augusto), from essays on Hegel, Christian Morgenstern, and Bertolt
Brecht (Haroldo), to the “rhythmic criticism,” as Augusto calls it, the “venti-
lated prose” or prosa porosa used in Augusto’s riffs on Lewis Carroll, Gertrude
Stein, Duchamp, and Cage in O Anticritico (1986). Together, Haroldo and
Augusto have given us an artist’s book called Panaroma do “Finnegans Wake,”
which contains translations of selected fragments from the Wake, together
with critical and scholarly commentary and artwork.40
The poetics of such “translation” has been described by Haroldo as fol-
lows:
Writing today in the Americas as well as in Europe will mean, more and more, as
far as I can see it, rewriting, remasticating. Writers of a monological, “logocentric”
mentality—if they still exist and persist in that mentality—must realize that it
will become more and more impossible to write the “prose of the world” without
considering at least some reference point, the differences of these “ex-centrics,” in
the same time Barbarians (for belonging to a peripheral so-called underdeveloped
world) and Alexandrians (for making “guerilla” incursions into the very heart of
the Library of Babel).41
The texts that come out of this program are very much artworks in their own
right. The Panaroma, for example, takes as one of its epigraphs the phrase
“to beg for a bite in our bark Noisdanger” from the Wake and provides an
anagram on Noigandres, thus reminding readers of the link between Joyce
and Pound. The translated fragments, many of them quite short, emphasize
the linguistic and poetic side of Joyce’s work at the expense of its narrative,
mythic analogues. And the illustrations sprinkled throughout the text are
themselves like abstractions from concrete poems, letters and ideograms ar-
ranged in new ways (figure 3.8). As a result, Panaroma is less a translation of
Joyce than it is a found text, a transposition taking on its own life. Indeed,
from here, it is a short step to Haroldo’s own Galaxias.
Another example of such transcreation may be found in Augusto’s ver-
sion of Gertrude Stein’s Porta-Retratos (Santa Catarina, Brazil: Editora Noa
Noa, 1989). The portrait on the cover (reprinted as the frontispiece), uma rosa
para Gertrude (plate 2), was made in 1988.42 In his preface, Augusto admits
that he came to Stein rather late, that in his youth he accepted Joyce’s and
Pound’s hostile estimate of her work and has only recently come to realize
how astonishing her verbal compositions really are. What interests him espe-
cially, Augusto notes, is Stein’s emphasis, in “Composition as Explanation,”
on the “continuous present.” His red “rose,” made of three concentric circles,
beautifully enacts this concept. The sentence “A rose is a rose is a rose . . .”
does not begin or end anywhere: begin reading the concentric circles wher-
ever you like and the clause is read as continuing. Then, too, the sequence
“roseisarose” contains a paragram on eis—Portuguese for “here is.” Here,
indeed, is the rose itself. In English Stein’s sentence remains linear, a one-
directional sequence followed by a period. In his visual variant Augusto has
found a way to apply Stein’s two other two principles from “Composition
as Explanation” as well: “beginning again and again” and “using everything.”
His cover ideogram thus provides the needed context for the translations
inside: “A Portrait of One: Harry Phelan Gibb,” “If I Told Him,” “Georges
Hugnet,” and “Identity: A Tale.”
Meanwhile—and this is another form of transcreation—Haroldo was
engaging in theoretical projects that similarly consolidated the position of
the arrière-garde. In Ideograma, a book that has gone through three editions
since its first appearance in 1977, Haroldo gives us a translation of Ernest
Fenollosa’s famous “The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry,”
Figure 3.8. Augusto de Campos, page from Panaroma do “Finnegans Wake” (São Paulo:
Editora Perspectiva, 1971), 36–37. Reprinted by permission of the author.
which had such a decisive influence on Ezra Pound. Haroldo’s purpose, how-
ever, is not merely to reproduce or enlarge on Fenollosa’s argument but, on
the contrary, to submit it to theoretical scrutiny. Indeed, his own long chap-
ter, “Poetic Function and the Ideogram,” is perhaps a more cogent critique
than any we have to date in English of a notion that Pound himself accepted
at face value: namely, that in the Chinese language words are much closer
to things than in English, that the “pictorial appeal” of the ideogram makes
Chinese a more “poetic” language than the Western ones, characterized as
they are by a high degree of abstraction.
Haroldo counters that, first of all, “in ordinary use Chinese readers treat
ideograms in the same way as users of alphabetical languages treat script,
as conventionalized symbols, without any longer seeing in them the visual
metaphor—the visible etymology—which so impressed Fenollosa.” More
important, “The Chinese Written Character,” at least as adapted by Pound,
displays an improper understanding of what Roman Jakobson called the
poetic function:
Whereas for the referential use of language it makes no difference whether the
word astre (“star”) can be found within the adjective desastreux (“disastrous”) or
the noun desastre (“disaster”) . . . for the poet this kind of “discovery” is of prime
relevance. In poetry, warns Jakobson, any phonological coincidence is felt to mean se-
mantic kinship . . . in an overall fecundating process of pseudoetymology or poetic
etymology. . . .
What the Chinese example enhanced for Fenollosa was the homological and
homologizing virtue of the poetic function.43
Haroldo will later complicate his theory of meaning by incorporating

Charles Peirce and Derrida, but for our purposes here, the Jakobson ref-
erence is central for an understanding not only of Fenollosa but of con-
crete poetry itself. The Cratylian argument, we can now see, is not a “fallacy”
in the sense Caroline Bayard took it to be one, for the whole point is that
poetry is that discourse in which astre and desastre belong together, even if
in ordinary discourse there is no meaningful relationship between the two.
Both Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, like Oyvind Fahlströhm and such
other concretists as Ian Hamilton Finlay and Ernst Jandl, understood this
distinction. The iconic aspect of concrete poetry, emphasized in the early
stages by Gomringer and Max Bense, was always subordinate to the neces-
sity for relational structure, whereby, to enlarge on Jakobson’s thesis, any
phonological or visual coincidence is felt to mean semantic kinship. In this
sense the material is the meaning. Fenollosa—or at least Fenollosa-Pound,
as Haroldo recognizes—was onto something important, but by natural-
izing the ideogram, and thus the image, he assumed that word and thing
could be one.
Haroldo’s “rear- guard” operation vis-à-vis the early twentieth- century
avant-garde is thus pivotal: indeed, it paves the way for Haun Saussy’s 2008
critical edition of The Chinese Written Character, an edition that demonstrates
incontrovertibly that Pound largely—and willfully—misread Fenollosa,
even as that “misreading” of Chinese ideogrammicity became the gospel that
guided many later poets in Pound’s wake.44 More important, Haroldo’s un-
derstanding of how the materiality of the signifier really could work in the
new poetics made it possible for him to write his long hypnotic poem Galáx-
ias (1984), which the poet himself described as follows:
An audiovideotext, videotextogram, the galaxies situate themselves on the bor-
der between prose and poetry. In this kaleidoscopic book there’s an epic, narra-
tive—mini- stories that articulate and dissolve themselves like the “suspense”
of a detective novel . . . but the image remains, the vision or calling of the epi-
phanic. . . . This permutational book has, as its semantic backbone, a recurrent
yet always varied theme all along: travel as a book and the book as travel. . . .
Two formants, in italics, the initial one (beginning-end: “and here I begin”) and
the final one (end- beginning- new beginning), encompass the game of move-
able pages, interchangeable in their reading, where each fragment introduces
its “difference,” but contains, in itself, like a watermark, the image of the entire
book.45
Haroldo’s dense network of verbal and sonic echoes, whose first “galaxy”
begins with the words e começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço
e arremesso (translated into French as et ici je commence et ici je me lance et ici
j’avance ce commencement), marks, as critics, myself included, have noted,46 a
major bridge between Khlebnikov’s “Invocation by Laughter,” with its vari-
ations on the morpheme smekh on the one hand and the bravura morphe-
mic variations of Ernst Jandl and later Christian Bök on the other,47 with
Finnegans Wake and Gertrude Stein’s How to Write providing additional mod-
els for the text’s larger articulation.
Galáxias is thus, as Haroldo himself put it, a limit text—the logical cul-
mination of the concretist program. The other possibility—and I come back
now to my beginning—is the electronic. In 1997, when digital poetry was
still in its infancy, Augusto began to produce, for the Casa das Rosas in São
Pãolo, electronic constellations in which meaning is produced both spa-
tially and temporally, both kinetically and musically. The most elaborate of
these is probably “SOS,” his 1983 “expoema” now set, so to speak, to digital
music.48 In his Anthologie despoesia Jacques Donguy has produced the 1983
text in both Portuguese and French and provided a transcription of the Por-
tuguese, which I give here in English:
ego eu ya ich io je yo I ego eu ya ich io je yo I
sós pós nós alone after we
que faremos apos? what will we do afterwards?
sem soi sem mãe sem pai without sun without mother without father
a noite que anoitece in the night that becomes night
vagaremos sem voz we will go roaming without voice
silencioso silently
SOS SOS
Augusto’s note reads, “A centripetal voyage toward the dark hole of the un-
known. From the ego-trip (the personal pronoun of the first person singu-
lar in different languages) to the SOS-trip. To the enigma of the after-life.”49
The stationary concrete poem is extremely effective as the eye moves
from the outer circle of those first-person pronouns into the eye of the storm
“SOS.” But it cannot compare to the electronic version, which uses animated
text and sound. In “SOS” the words first appear as stars in the black night,
against the background of discordant musical phrases and ambient sounds,
and then disappear again as Augusto declaims the words, bringing in, in time
for the third visual circle, a second reader, his son Cid, the two voices pro-
ducing a kind of counterpoint in a series of verbal rounds of repetition and
variation as the wheel of words starts turning, circle by circle. The sounds
become more and more ominous until in the final moment of the “bomb”
explodes in the center, the yellow circle spreads out to the margins, SOS ap-
pearing in huge black letters on yellow ground. Quickly the image bursts
and dissolves into a black hole. What will we, who are alone, do afterward?
Then, too, “SOS” contains a pun on eso es (that is): that, so to speak, is the
human condition.
As an electronic poem, SOS, like such related works as “cidade-city-cité”
and “ininstante” (both 1999), obviously has an iconic dimension. The spin-
ning circles of words represent the planets spinning out of control as dooms-
day nears. But the poem’s iconicity would not add up to much were it not
for that central pun on SOS—at once the classic distress symbol as relayed in
Morse Code and, with an accent over the o, the Portuguese adjective, in plu-
ral form, for only or alone. Sós, moreover, rhymes with pós (after). The black
hole that awaits us in Augusto’s poem is a terrifying image, especially in its
verbivocovisual dimension.
Like “Lygia,” “SOS” retains such traditional poetic features as pun, sym-
bol, and rhyme: its language, moreover, is the poet’s invention. But many of
the “clip-poems” and later digital experiments are essentially found texts—a
word, say, seen on a billboard or computer screen is reconstructed to pro-
Figure 3.9. Augusto de Campos, “REV ” (1970).
From Equivocábulos (São Paulo, 1970). Reprinted
by permission of the author.
duce poetic effect. Figure 3.9 shows Augusto de Campos’s one-word poem
“REV .”50
The title means “to see again” or “to review,” with a pun on the French
rever, to dream. But far from containing dream imagery, visual or verbal, Au-
gusto’s digital poem consists of no more than the word REV , a mirror
image around the central V, itself alternately silhouetted in black against
a double blue and green band and a larger red and green one. The red and
green bands move to fill the whole screen, first one and then the other, but
the word REV shoots out like a noisy rocket, one letter at a time, repeat-
edly demanding our attention. The piece continues indefinitely until the
reader clicks it to stop. No undisturbed sleep, it seems, for the viewer, who
is forced to watch the formation of the single word REV . No escape from
the eternal word, noisily intruding on our contemplation of “pure” color.
REV : will it never go away, will it play out for-ever? A Cratylist, more-
over, could hardly help noticing the presence of eve in the poet’s green gar-
den.
In dreams begin responsibilities. “REV ” positions itself against all
those avant- garde dream poems from Rimbaud’s “Le bateau ivre” to John
Berryman’s Dream Songs, abjuring the semantic density of these lyrics even
as it slyly spins out its own. Then, too, Augusto’s recent digital poems cast
an ironic eye on the poet’s earlier stationary works: “REV ” does so by its
very title, and “SOS” makes use of the pós/vós/sós rhyme to call into question
the poet’s earlier concrete book Pós-Tudo (Post-everything).51 To view these
and the whole corpus of concrete poems, sound recordings, debates, mani-
festos, interviews, broadsides, book designs at the newly founded site of the
Academy of Culture (Basel), called poesia concreta o projecto verbivocovisual,
is to have the sense that this particular poetic movement is only now, half a
century after its inception, coming into its own.
4
Writing through
Walter Benjamin:
Charles Bernstein’s
“Poem including
History”
The events surrounding the historian, and
in which he himself takes part, will underlie
his presentation in the form of a text written
in invisible ink. The history which he lays
before the reader comprises, as it were,
the citations occurring in this ext, and it is
only these citations that occur in a manner
legible to all. To write history thus means to cite
history. It belongs to the concept of citation,
however, that the historical object in each
case is torn from its context.
Walter Benjamin
If everything is allowed, nothing is possible.

Jean Ricardou1
The French translation of the Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos’s 1984 “Con-
crete” book Galáxias contains a preface by Jacques Roubaud called “Sables,
syllabes”—itself a kind of prose poem that bears remarkable similarities to
de Campos’s own work.2 Galáxias, as its author described it in a 1977 essay,
“was conceived as an experiment in doing away with limits between poetry
and prose, projecting the larger and more suitable concept of text (as a corpus
of words with their textual potentials. . . . The text is defined as a ‘flux of signs,’
76 :
without punctuation marks or capital letters, flowing uninterruptedly across
the page, as a galactic expansion. Each page by itself makes a ‘concretion,’ or
autonomously coalescing body, interchangeable with any other page for
reading purposes. There are ‘semantic vertebrae’ which unify the whole.”3
The function of the “galaxy” or “constellation” as “limit text” is both ver-
bal and visual: de Campos’s strophes (each page contains one long block of
“prose” with jagged right margins) are built on what we might call hyper-
repetition; they permutate a carefully selected set of syllables, words, and
phrases whose “verbivocovisual”4 echo-structure recalls Finnegans Wake as
well as such Gertrude Stein compositions as “Regular Regularly in Narra-
tive,” in How to Write.5
“Sables, syllabes,” with its rhyming, anagrammatic title—a title that re-
gards each syllable as a unique grain of sand—works in similar ways: Jacques
Roubaud’s elegiac homage to his friend of many decades has fourteen five-
and six-line strophes that begin and end in midsentence: only strophe 1, with
its opening “En ce temps-là,” recalling Blaise Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien,
and strophe 14, with its memory of first reading, some twenty-five years ear-
lier, “the first syllables . . . of galaxies,” exhibit anything like closure.
The monologue begins with an image from the narrator’s past, some
twenty years earlier, an early morning street scene. From the window of his
room on the rue de la Harpe in the 5th arrondissement, Roubaud suddenly
sees, directly across the narrow street, in the sunlit window of the Hôtel du
Levant at number 18, the unanticipated figure of his friend Haroldo and hails
him. Rue, hôtel, temps, fenêtre, lumière, and especially the punning levant—
these words, along with precise names, dates, and street numbers, repeat
and permutate so as to heighten the sense of presence and produce a fur-
ther memory, prompted by a photograph of Haroldo taken during a poetry
festival in Provençe: the bearded Haroldo emerging from the waters of the
Mediterranean Sea, rather like Odysseus some twenty-seven centuries earlier
found on the shore of the wine-dark sea by the young and innocent princess
Nausicaa. Haroldo is remembered rising from the surf, spitting out “des syl-
labes d’Arnaut Daniel”; indeed, as Roubaud now suggests, shifting in mid-
phrase from French to Italian to English, Haroldo is “le forgeron de syllabes”
(the blacksmith of syllables), “le fabbro” (the maker), “le poète le plus barbu,
le plus écumeux le plus syllabeux le plus idéogrammatique, le plus idéodram-
matique le plus pound / poundien . . . pounding upon our ears” (“the most
bearded, the most foamy, the most syllabous, the most ideogrammatic, the
most ideodrammatic, the most pound / poundian . . . pounding upon our
ears”). And “Sables, syllabes” ends with the memory:
w r i t i n g t h r ou g h wa lt e r b e n j a m i n : 77
je me retrouve parlant avec lui de ce qui nous occupe tous les deux
la po&
sie et dans la po&sie les moments qui sont pour nous les premiers du commence-
ment et du recommencement les moment des cansos des troubadours et les mo-
ments de la voix japonaise ancienne qui se rejoignent et se mêlent et également
à des milliers de kilomètres nous frappent nous martèlent nous saissisent nous
persuadent nous émulent enfants de ‘l’ère à pound’ que nous sommes quand je
revois haroldo après une deux années quand nous parlons ensemble de ce qui
nous occupe nous préoccupe et n’en finit pas de
commencer et recommencer à nous inquièter nous révulser nous enthousiasmer

nous décourager nous stimuler nous replonger dans l’écume indéfinement émi-
etée dans les grains de sable innombrablement énumérés de la lumiére quand
tout cela je me souviens et me ressouviens et retrouve ce moment inoubliable ce
moment de poésie d’il y a vingt-cinq ans où j’ai vue sur la page et commencé le
commencement de lire les premières syllabes les premières lignes immenses et
longues et serrées des galaxies
i can see myself talking with him about that which occupies us
both po-&
try and within po-eh-try the moments that are for us the first of the beginning
and rebeginning the moments of the songs of the troubadours and the moments
of the ancient japanese voice that merge and mix equally even thousands of ki-
lometres apart strike us pound us grab us persuade us pronounce us the children
of the pound era that we are when i once again see haroldo after a year or two
when we talk to one another of that which occupies us and preoccupies us and
never ceases to
begin and rebegin to upset us disgust us excite us discourage us stimulate us re-

plunge us into the foam indefinitely dissipating the grains of sand innumerably
enumerated by the light when all this i remember and again remember that un-
forgettable moment that moment of poetry of twenty-five years ago when i saw
on the page and began the beginning of reading the first syllables the first lines
immense and long and taut of the galaxies
Note that this passage is designed as a visual as well as verbal composition,

the variants of commencer and the prefix re- creating a dense graphic field
that alludes to the opening page of the French version of the Galaxies itself:
et ici je commence et ici je me lance et ici j’avance ce commencement et je relance

et j’y pense quand on vit sous l’espèce du voyage ce n’est pas le voyage qui compte
mais le commencement du et pour ça je mesure
78 : c h a p t e r f ou r
and here i begin and here i throw myself in and here i advance this beginning and
i throw myself in again and i think about it when one sees beneath the sort of voy-
age it is not the voyage that counts but the beginning of it and for that i count
And there are other visual devices like the line-break that splits up “po&sie,”
and especially the paragram on “page,” which takes us back to “la plage” and
its “grains de sable.” Indeed, what unites such improbable poets as Haroldo
de Campos and himself, Roubaud records, is their derivation from the trou-
badours on the one hand and Japanese haiku art on the other, the two com-
ing together in the poetry of Ezra Pound.
It is a fascinating moment de la poésie, a rapprochement between two seem-
ingly divergent aesthetics: French Oulipo and Brazilian concrete—move-
ments that on the face of it could hardly be more different. In its original
formation in the mid-1950s, let’s recall, the term concrete poetry referred to
those poetic texts in which meaning could not be separated from the text’s
visual form—the distribution of verbal units, whether letters, morphemes,
or whole words—on the page. In concrete poetry, as Augusto and Haroldo
de Campos and Decio Pignatari put it in their “Pilot Plan” of 1958, “graphic
space acts as structural agent.”6 And further: the concrete poem is usually
short. “Its most obvious feature,” writes Rosmarie Waldrop, “is reduction. . . .
Both conventions and sentence are replaced by spatial arrangement.”7 Hence
the terms ideogram and constellation, used by Eugen Gomringer, Oyvind Fahl-
ström, Max Bense, and the Brazilian Noigandres group to describe their
poetic texts.
The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle), which dates from the
same period—it started in 1960—said nothing about length: indeed, among
the most important Oulipo works is Georges Perec’s great novel La vie mode
d’emploi. Although lyric has always been central to Oulipo concerns—its
founders François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau invented impor-
tant poetic constraints—the successes of the movement have largely been
in narrative: witness, aside from Perec’s own great novels, those of Jacques
Roubaud and Harry Mathews. Again, Oulipo differs from concretism in that
in the former visual format does not necessarily play a central role. On the
contrary, Oulipo is primarily a literary movement; its aim, as Roubaud puts
it in an introductory essay, “is to invent (or reinvent) restrictions of a for-
mal nature [contraintes] and propose them to enthusiasts interested in com-
posing literature.” The potential of constraints is more important than their
actual execution. Most important, “a text written according to a constraint
describes the constraint.”8 A classic example, which I cited earlier, is Perec’s
lipogrammatic novel La disparition, where the disappearance of the vowel e
points to the disappearance of eux (them)—those expunged by the Nazis in
World War II. But constraints do not always function so thematically; more
often they are intensely intertextual, as when Michel Bénabou and Roubaud’s
sonnet “Les chats” fuses the hemistychs of Baudelaire’s “Chats” and Rimbaud’s
“Bateau ivre” to create “perfect” alexandrines that wittily ironize these great
nineteenth-century originals.9 In their 2009 essay “The Challenge of Con-
straint” Jan Baetens and Jean- Jacques Poucel give this useful definition:
A constraint is a self-chosen rule (i.e., different from the rules that are imposed
by the use of a natural language or those of convention); it is also a rule that is
used systematically throughout the work . . . both as a compositional and a read-
ing device. Constraints are not ornaments: for the writer, they help generate the
text; for the reader, they help make sense of it.10
Concretism, let’s recall, was the product of what Deleuze and Guattari have
called a minor literature: it was born after World War II on such peripheries
as Brazil and Scotland, Switzerland and Sweden, rather than, as was the case
with Oulipo, in Paris, or other movements in any cultural capital. Its affinities
were and are with the visual arts as well as with music: Webern’s Klangfarben-
melodie and Cage’s compositions were major models for the Brazilian concre-
tists. Oulipo, by contrast, looks to mathematics for its parameters. Many of
its original members, including Roubaud, were mathematicians, and some of
its key constraints depend on differential equations. Concretism is related to
the senses, Oulipo more to the intellect. Again, concrete poets—Ian Ham-
ilton Finlay, Oyvind Fahlström—often work in isolation, whereas Oulipo is
a workshop that depends on admission to membership and regular meet-
ings. Indeed, as Roubaud puts it, “The Oulipo’s work is collaborative, and
its product—proposed constraints and their illustrations—are attributed
to the group, even if certain constraints are invented by individuals.”11
Yet behind these obvious differences there is a common thread. Take,
for starters, the rejection, by both movements, of what Waldrop refers to
as the “transparency of the word.”12 In the very first concrete manifesto,
Falhström’s 1953 “Hipy papy bthuthdththuthda bthuthdy,” we read: “It re-
mains . . . to re-endow form with its own set of criteria,” the central axiom
of poetry being that “like-sounding words belong together.” The poet’s task
is thus to “knead the linguistic material: this is what justifies the label con-
crete. Don’t just manipulate the whole structure; begin rather with the small-
est elements—letters, words. Recast the letters as in anagrams. Repeat let-
ters, within words; throw in alien words.”13
This notion of the nontranslatability and irreducibility of poetic language
is echoed by Roubaud: “In modes of speech other than poetry, meaning must
be considered public, ideally transmissible; that which is not transmissible is
not part of the meaning. In the case of poetry, it’s the exact opposite—which
is not to say that poems do not contain a transmissible meaning; if there is
one, it’s there as a surplus.”14
This emphasis on “words you can’t see through” has as its corollary the
elimination of ego. “Let’s say goodbye,” says Fahlström, “to all systematic
or spontaneous depiction of private psychological, contemporary cultural
or universal problems.”15 Students of Oulipo will recognize this rejection of
spontaneous invention and creativity as the central axiom governing the use
of constraints: it is the constraint, the Oulipians have argued from the first,
that forces the poet to give up an illusory artistic “freedom” in favor of what
Roubaud calls “the freedom of the difficulty mastered.”16
The constraint, we should note, is not necessarily verbal. “In order for
there to be an Oulipian constraint,” writes the poet Jacques Jouet, “an ex-
plicit procedure must be used—a formal axiom whose implications, whose
deductive of events—will create the text. The constraint is the problem; the
text the solution.”17 One of Jouet’s own inventions, for example, is the poème
de métro, whose constraint is defined in its first exemplar, “Qu’est-ce qu’un
poème de métro?”18
J’écris, de temps à autre, des poèmes de métro. Ce poème en est un.

Voulez-vous savoir ce qu’est un poème de métro?
Admettons que la réponse soit oui. Voici donc ce qu’est un poème de métro.
Un poème de métro est un poème composé dans le métro, pendant le temps
d’un parcours.
Un poème de métro compte autant de vers que votre voyage compte de stations
moins un.
Le premier vers est composé dans votre tête entre les deux premières stations
de votre voyage (en comptant la station de départ).
Il est transcrit sur le papier quand la rame s’arrête à la station trois. Et ainsi de
suite.
Il ne faut pas transcrire quand la rame est en marche.
Il ne faut pas composer quand la rame est arrêtée.
Le dernier vers du poème est transcrit sur le quai de votre dernière station.
Si votre voyage impose un ou plusieurs changements de ligne, le poème
comporte deux strophes ou davantage.
Si par malchance la rame s’arrête entre deux stations, c’est toujours un moment
délicat de l’écriture d’un poème de métro.
From time to time, I write subway poems. This poem being an example.
Do you want to know what a subway poem consists of? Let’s suppose you do.
Here, then, is what a subway poem consists of.
A subway poem is a poem composed during a journey in the subway.
There are as many lines in a subway poem as there are stations in your journey,
minus one.
The first line is composed mentally between the first two stations of your
journey (counting the station you got on at).
It is then written down when the train stops at the second station.
The second line is composed mentally between the second and the third
stations of your journey.
It is then written down when the train stops at the third station. And so on.
You must not write anything down when the train is moving.
You must not compose when the train has stopped.
The poem’s last line is written down on the platform of the last station.
If your journey necessitates one or more changes of line, the poem will then
have two or more stanzas.
An unscheduled stop between two stations is always an awkward moment in
the writing of the subway poem. (translated by Ian Monk)
Such a “poetic” procedure, Jouet claims, has a particular advantage. The

metro acts as metronome. “It is a ruled paper. . . . The poem alternates the
written (black) line with a blank (white) line. The metro alternates the light
of the station stop with the darkness of the tunnel. The poem resembles
the space-time of its composition.”19 This tongue-in-cheek account of the
metro- poem’s form- as-meaning echoes the concretist stress on construc-
tion—a construction always threatened, however, by the clinamen inherent
in any given system: in this case, how to regard the potential moment when
the train gets stuck between stations. Time to compose or time to write
down? The metro-poem, in any case, is “a poem struggling against its own
marginality—presence in the world, integration of the poem in repetitive
everyday life; use of a place reputedly non-poetic.”20 This tongue-in-cheek
incorporation of the “everyday” should not be confused, however, with such
values as “spontaneity” and directness. As the Flemish poet-critic Jan Baetens
puts it in an editorial for his journal Formules:
To write with the help of constraints is first of all a procedure that allows us to
resist the weight of stereotypes. Literary speech that is not constrained, whether
romantic or realist, whether it comes out of the direct expression of self or of
the representation of the external world, inevitably runs the risk of falling into
the trap of the commonplaces that come to us “spontaneously,” especially when
we think of writing “about ourselves.” Language thinks us and so we must re-
sist its insidious influence so as to rid ourselves of the crushing presence of the
déjà-dit.21
To put it succinctly: écrire à contraintes entrave le vouloir-dire (to write using

constraints impedes the longing to say something).22 Thus in Sables, syllabes,
Roubaud “says” nothing about the book for which he is ostensibly writing his
preface, permitting the constraints chosen—the repeated citation of date,
time, arrondissement, street number—to define the particular mode of com-
position that is Haroldo’s.
Like the concretists, both Oulipo and the related Franco-Belgian For-
mules group (which has suggested that the decision to write in French—a
foreign or at least second language—is itself a valuable constraint)23 are op-
posed to such distinctions as the opposition of modernism to postmodern-
ism; there is only, in the present as in the past, the drive to exceed the ac-
ceptable limits of discourse.24 Indeed, in both Oulipo and concretism the
recovery of the past—both as source material and as foundational text—is
central. Again, given the emphasis in both Oulipo and Concretism on inter-
textuality, the enemy is not only, as might be expected, the Romantic expres-
sivist lyric but also the poetry of Surrealism. The Surrealists, as Warren Motte
notes, “erected the aleatory and the psychological construct based on it, the
unconscious as a means to transcendence”25—a drive diametrically opposed
to Oulipo intentionality and discipline. Augusto de Campos voices exactly
the same objection, adding that despite their claim to represent the uncon-
scious, the Surrealists use “normal grammatical phrases, a very conventional
structure”; they do not “de-autonomize language structures.”26 Surrealist in-
novation, in other words, is held to be thematic rather than formal and mate-
rial: it does not operate at the level of word formation, paragram, or syntax.
And so the Oulipians, like the concretists, bypass their Surrealist contempo-
raries to go back to Duchamp, and beyond Duchamp to Mallarmé. Indeed
it is the poetics of Un coup de dés that, so to speak, gives permission both to
Oulipo and to concrete poetry. And further, the Formules group has posi-
tioned itself even closer to concretism in its experiments with hybrid and
cross-media works. For whereas Oulipo makes a clear distinction between
itself and Oupeinpo (for painters) or Oumupo (for musicians), Baetens, Ber-
nard Schiavetta, Jacques Jouet, and others are now trying to elide these clear
lines of demarcation.
Rules, moreover, were always more important to concretists than might
appear to be the case when one looks at their early visual inventions like
Gomringer’s “silencio.” In Oyvind Fahlström’s remarkable radio collage
called Birds in Sweden (1962), with its mix of actual bird calls, invented lan-
guage, and recyclings of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” the orchestration of
sounds is portrayed visually in a series of numerically organized charts. In
Ernst Jandl’s concrete poems—for example, “der und die,” which Charles
Bernstein “translates” in Shadowtime—grids are often prominent, in this case
a grid restricted to common three-letter words, generated by permutation
and addition (figure 4.1). And as Inês Oseki-Dépré and David Jackson have
shown, de Campos’s Galáxias is based on elaborate mathematical and musi-
cal schemes.27 Indeed, in Oulipo, as in concretism, the choice of constraint is
designed to produce poems in which the semantic is conveyed primarily by
the visual and phonic elements. Here form really is meaning, in keeping with
the early avant-garde doctrines of, say, Velimir Khlebnikov or of the Russian
Formalist theorist Roman Jakobson. Then, too, in both Oulipo and concre-
tism intertextuality and appropriation play a major role: in Roubaud’s elegy
Quelque chose noir,28 for example, the visual format of the strophes is deter-
mined by the constraint—the application of the number 9—which relates
Roubaud’s poetic sequence to its source text, Dante’s Vita Nuova.
“Oulipian texts,” writes Adelaide M. Russo, “are the literature of a belated
age, an age in which texts are composed on word processors . . . in which the
notion of originality has been replaced by a doctrine of citationality. The
very way in which these texts are constituted, often using another text as
matrix or point of departure for the Oulipian exercise, reflects an economy
based on production through recycling.”29 Our own poets have used re-
cycling to produce complex and intriguing works of unoriginal genius. Lan-
guage poets from Lyn Hejinian and Steve McCaffery to Joan Retallack and
Tina Darragh experimented with constraint- governed citational texts. It
was in the next or Conceptual generation, however, that constraint, visual as
well as verbal, became central: consider the work of Christian Bök and Caro-
line Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin. Dworkin’s “Strand,”
for example, adapts the Cage mesostic rule to “write through” Wittgenstein’s
On Certainty, using as the key word string the name of the poem’s dedica-
tee, Anh Quynh Bui. And in a more Perecian vein, in her performance piece
Gong, Bergvall has used constraints to generate a set of “ordinary” declarative
sentences that “describe” particular individuals in minute—and ultimately
absurd—detail.30
The text I want to consider here, however, marks what is perhaps a point
of departure in its improbable fusion of Oulipo constraint, concretism, and
citationality in its application of a genre seemingly quite alien to such con-
Figure 4.1. Ernst Jandl, “der und die.” From Reft and Light (2009) © Rosmarie Waldrop.
cerns—namely, what Pound called with reference to his Cantos, “a poem in-
cluding history,” or, for that matter, a poem including biography. The highly
distinctive text I have in mind is Charles Bernstein’s 2005 libretto “about”
Walter Benjamin’s life and works called Shadowtime.
As a cofounder (with Bruce Andrews) of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Bern-
stein is regularly cited as one of the key theorists of the Language move-
ment, with its resistance to the then dominant notions of authorial pres-
ence, “natural” speech, and the ability of language to communicate prior
thought and feeling. The thrust of Language poetry, as I have argued in vari-
ous places,31 was largely semantic: it concerned itself with how meaning is
and is not produced, how reference works, how, in Bernstein’s own words,
“there are no thoughts outside of language.”32 In Poundian parlance, lan-
guage poetry emphasized logopoeia rather than phanopoeia or melopopeia; in-
deed, this third term was under suspicion in a movement that claimed the
“new sentence” as central to an avowed commitment to make poetry from
prose, dismissing all established metric and stanzaic structures as inhibiting
the forward thrust of the writing.
Yet we should remember that both Susan Howe and Steve McCaffery
began their careers under the sign of concrete poetry and that Barrett Watten,
Ron Silliman, and Bernstein himself looked to Jackson Mac Low’s procedural
texts as exemplars: in Silliman’s Tjanting, for example, the number of words
per sentence are generated by the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
13, 21 . . .).33 In “Hinge Picture” Bernstein himself wrote an homage to George
Oppen, generating his stanzas “using an acrostic procedure (G-E-O-R-G-E-
O-P-P-E-N), adapted from Mac Low, to select lines, in page sequence from
the Collected Poems.”34 In Girly Man (Chicago, 2006), such list poems as “In
Particular” and “Let’s Just Say,” as well as homophonic poems, ekphrases, and
appropriated texts, mark a turn in Bernstein’s work from the nonsemantic
experiments of the 1980s and ’90s to a more intertextual, formally aware,
and we might say literary lyric. It is a tendency that comes to the fore in this
poet’s “thought opera” Shadowtime, in which appropriation, constraint, and
concretist poetics come together in an astonishing ensemble.
A Poem including History

The choice of Walter Benjamin as the subject for the opera Shadowtime was
made by its composer, Brian Ferneyhough. Benjamin’s “understanding of
the world largely in terms of allegory and epiphany,” observed Ferneyhough
in an interview for the Guardian, “lay very close to my enduring interest in
codes of representation.” Accordingly, when the composer approached Ber-
nstein with the idea of an operatic treatment of Benjamin’s conceptual do-
main, he proposed certain parameters:
I laid out quite stringent numerical constraints—number of lines, number of

syllables in a line and so on—for each unit of the text. . . . The most important
precondition, however, was my wish that the final libretto would also be able to stand
as an independently viable poetic work. This seemed to me essential, if we were to do
justice to the key re-representational aspect of the project. All this functioned
perfectly—in fact the libretto of Shadowtime has just appeared as a book of poetry
with Green Integer Press, Los Angeles.35
What did this mean in practice? Ferneyhough explains that he gave Bern-
stein “a series of more or less detailed diagrams from 1998–99 in which the
seven-part overall layout, the internal subdivision of each of these parts and
their aesthetic- dramatic significance is registered. . . . The work falls into
two halves, hinging around the Portal to Hades / Las Vegas nightclub solo
piano piece Opus Contra Naturam. This was always part of the architecture:
any modification of this would seriously disbalance the whole.” Accordingly,
Bernstein, working with the set of musical constraints and overall musical-
dramatic structure provided by the composer, was free to create a verbal text
of his own—a text that, as the poet explained it, is “one acoustic element in
the overall sonic constellation, a layer, not a foregrounded, articulated voice.
Words, and words with meanings even if hidden are veiled, semantically ac-
tive and allegorical.”36
Many of us, when we attended the performance of the opera at Lincoln
Center in summer 2005, were disappointed that we couldn’t “catch” most
of the words and certainly not their nuances, double-entendres, puns, ana-
grams, or paragrams. But if we think of Ferneyhough’s opera not as a musi-
cal “translation” of the libretto but as a generative device, a series of musical
constraints that governed the poetic invention, its function becomes clearer.
Here is Bernstein’s own account:
The unintelligibility of the words is a basic condition of most of the opera. At the
same time, the words are always there, always being articulated: so you get words
that you can hear but not understand, or words that approach the condition of
music. But they are still words and the words are bound to the meaning of each
scene. . . . In a sense, the opera presents a marked translation of the words, just
as the text presents a marked translation of motifs in Benjamin. (e-mail, June 30,
2005)
Now consider how this works. The standard way to write a poetic drama
about an important literary figure like Benjamin would have been to proceed
biographically, perhaps in the style of Brecht’s Galileo, in a series of scenes
revelatory of the hero’s being vis-à-vis historical events and cultural condi-
tions. And indeed, Bernstein’s synopsis of scene 1 suggests that a Brechtian
drama awaits us:
In September 1940, one step ahead of the Nazi invaders, Walter Benjamin fled
France, making an arduous journey, on foot, over the Pyrenees mountains. He
died the day after his arrival in Spain. . . .
The primary layer, “War Time,” takes center stage. The setting is just over the
French border, in the Pyrenees, at the hotel, Fonda de Francis, Portbou, Spain.
The time is just before midnight, September 25, 1940. Benjamin has arrived at the
hotel with his traveling companion Henny Gurland. The trip has been made more
difficult by Benjamin’s bad heart: every ten minutes of walking was followed by
one minute of stopping. Benjamin’s plan was to continue on to Lisbon, and from
there to America. But the Innkeeper informs Benjamin and Gurland their transit
visas have been voided and that they must return to France. . . . At center stage,
the cruel Innkeeper gives the exhausted travelers the bad news, to Gurland’s pro-
tests and Benjamin’s despair. (Shadowtime, 18)
It sounds straightforward enough, but even this opening scene is highly

stylized, the Innkeeper’s simple commands punctuated at every other line
by an address, in chiastic form, to the two principals:
I regret to inform you

Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland
but I must inform you
Frau Gurland, Herr Benjamin
you will understand
it is my duty to inform you
that your transit visas
your transit visas
Are not valid (30–31)
And so on for another ten lines; and after the protests of Gurland and Benja-
min, the refrain is repeated in a second speech that begins, “We are a nation
of laws / Herr Benjamin, Frau Gurland” (35). But this “composition of place”
soon collapses, giving way first to flashbacks (Benjamin and his young wife
Dora in 1917, Benjamin in dialogue with his close friend the great writer on
Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, and then with the poet Hölderlin), and
soon the entire documentary frame is dissolved, Benjamin’s “life” giving way
to his own words, which are now “written through,” ventriloquized, paro-
died, anagrammatized, riffed upon, rhymed, translated both literally and ho-
mophonically—in short, subjected to linguistic practices that, so to speak,
lay bare the devices of Benjamin’s own writings.37
The disappearance of “character” and “plot” is, of course, appropriate
for a theorist for whom memory, as his American editor Peter Demetz noted
long ago, “is a remarkable absence of people,” whose imagination is spatial
rather than historical. And Demetz asks:
I wonder if it would be possible to listen to Benjamin in a musical rather than a

literary way and to concentrate as if his individual writings were fragments of an
inclusive score, on the thematic orchestration of his ideas and arguments. Benja-
min works with a few intimate leitmotifs that fascinate him throughout his life,
regardless of the particular stage of his ideological transformation. The threshold
and the city, the flâneur and the archeologist of culture—these are a few of his
elemental topoi and recurrent figures.38
It is this spatial imagination that prompts Bernstein’s treatment, the par-

ticular irony in his appropriation of Benjamin’s words being that this poet-
philosopher- critic was himself, as we saw in the discussion of The Arcades
Project, the ultimate citational writer.39 What Benjamin wrote of Karl Kraus,
for example, applies to his own work:
To quote a word is to call it by its name. So Kraus’s achievement exhausts itself

at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable. He transports it to
his own sphere, and the empty phrase is suddenly forced to recognize that even
in the deepest dregs of the journals it is not safe from the voice that swoops on
the wings of the word to drag it from its darkness. . . . In the quotation that both
saves and punishes, language proves the matrix of justice. It summons the word
by its name, wrenches it destructively from its context, but precisely thereby calls
it back to its origin. It appears, now with rhyme and reason, sonorously, congru-
ously, in the structure of a new text. . . . In citation the two realms—of origin and
destruction—justify themselves before language.40
Kraus, a great satirist with whom Bernstein might be fruitfully compared,

understood, as did the Benjamin of the Arcades Project after him, that, in Rich-
ard Sieburth’s words, one “cites the past not in order to reproduce it, but
in order to reveal it, to literalize it, to lay bare its device by the alienating
effect of quotation marks” (Sieburth, 31). But in Shadowtime, which shows at
every turn its author’s immersion in and familiarity with Benjamin’s manifold
writings, citation is complicated by its submission to numerical constraint,
rhyming, soundplay, paragram, visual pun, and especially fragmentation, re-
location, and the grafting of other German texts—from Heinrich Heine to
Ernst Jandl—onto the language of Benjamin, his name now pronounced
with a hard fricative j rather than the German y-glide, so as to bring him into
the American orbit. Ironically, then—and Bernstein’s is a deeply ironic take
on the Benjamin phenomenon—Shadowtime, at one level a libretto, whose
performance as opera provides visual and musical complementarity for the
verbal text, is, from another angle, a long lyric-dramatic poem that follows
Benjamin’s own aphorism: to write history is to cite history.
Consider scene 3, “The Doctrine of Similarity,” which Bernstein summa-
rizes as follows in the synopsis:
“The Doctrine of Similarity” consists of thirteen short movements, sung by vari-

ous groupings of the chorus of the Angels of History. Each of the movements
reflects on the nature of history, time, and translation/transformation. The
title comes from an essay by Benjamin with a similar name—“Doctrine of the
Similar”—in which he considers the ways that the physical sounds of language
echo or mimic the primordial structures of the cosmos. In the scene, various nu-
meric patterns create reverberations within and between the text and music. The
theme of temporality is explored musically by the use of canon forms throughout
the scene. (Shadowtime, 20)
In an interview for the British online journal The Argotist, Bernstein adds:
In the libretto, I have the angel of history say the opposite of what Benjamin
writes in “The Concept of History.” Benjamin writes that “the angel would like
to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” Our angels, in
contrast, ask that we imagine no wholes from all that has been smashed. Because
for me . . . it’s very important not to imagine a totality but rather a multiplicity,
the shards, and the sparks around the edges. We don’t live in a Messianic moment,
the scales have not fallen from our eyes, our seeing is double and triple not uni-
tary. The Benjaminian “now time” (Jetztzeit) lets us hear the cathected material
moment amidst the multiplicity of omnivalent vectors.41
Benjamin’s “Doctrine of the Similar” mourns what it takes to be the con-

temporary “dying out of the mimetic faculty,” the faculty of noting the di-
rect similarities between natural and human phenomena, between, say, a
human face and a constellation of stars. In our time, Benjamin posits, this
“onomatopoeic mode of explanation” has given way to the development of
language as carrier of the realm of “nonsensuous similarities.”42 “The most
recent graphology,” for example, “has taught us to recognize, in handwriting,
images—or, more precisely, picture puzzles—what the unconscious of the
writer conceals in his writing. . . . Script has thus become, like language, an
archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences.” And
further, “the nexus of meaning which resides in the sounds of the sentence is
the basis from which something similar can become apparent out of a sound,
flashing up in an instant.”43
Benjamin’s meditation on this “magical aspect” of language was com-
pleted in the very weeks (February 1933) of the Reichstag fire, which pre-
cipitated the final consolidation of Hitler’s power and hence Benjamin’s
flight to Paris in March 1933. Read in this context, “Doctrine of the Similar”
could hardly be a more puzzling text, pointing as it does to the persistent
gap between Benjamin’s private and public worlds, his mental life and the
political reality. It is this gap Bernstein seizes upon in the “Amphibolies” of
Shadowtime’s scene 3: an amphiboly, according to the OED, is “a phrase or sen-
tence that can be read in two ways, usually because of the grammatical con-
struction rather than the meaning of the words themselves.” A philosophy
website gives the following examples from newspaper headlines:
drunk gets nine months in violin case

high school drop outs cut in half
farmer bill dies in house
british left waffles on falkland islands
enraged cow injures farmer with axe
stolen painting found by tree
include your children when baking cookies 44
Bernstein’s “amphibolies” are, of course, not just such simple double-

entendres. In the first of the canons, as the poet refers to the individual units
in keeping with their musical form, we have three poems of thirteen lines
each, each line containing only prime numbers of words between 1 and 5.
Here is “Amphibolies I (Walk Slowly)”:
Walk slowly
and jump quickly
over
the paths into
the
briar. The
pricks are points on a
map
that take
you back behind the stares
where shadows are
thickest at
noon. (62)
This lyric is generally straightforward: it presents a choric representation of
the protagonist’s fears on the arduous mountain climb, the mind seizing on
the similarity between the prickles of the briars and the points on his map.
But in the next two lyrics (63–64), both homophonic versions of the first and
structurally identical with it, a different “similarity” occurs:
Fault no lease
Add thump whimsy
aver
a sash onto
a
mire. The
sticks are loins on a
gap
not fake
rude facts remind a fear
tear tallow mar
missed case at
loom.
balk sulky
and hum prick fee
clover
an ash insure
at-
tire. The
flicks are joints on a
map
(nutmeg)
glue’s knack refines the dare
near fallow bars
quickest latch
gone. (63–64)
Pure nonsense? The language of nonreferentiality carried to an extreme?

Not really. For jumbled as these homophonic poems are, their vocabu-
lary—“thump, “mire, “sticks, “gap, “rude facts,” “fear, “tear tallow, mar” and
“missed case” in 2 “balk sulky,” “ant hum prick free,” “clover,” “nap,” “dare,”
“near fallow bars,” “latch,” and “gone” in 3—acoustically render the traveler’s
trials even as they provide a brilliant send-up of Benjamin’s “Doctrine of the
Similar.” If, after all, “the nexus of meaning which resides in the sounds of
the sentence is the basis from which something similar can become apparent
out of a sound,”45 then the sound imitation of the homophonic version will
convey the very meaning of the original: indeed, “add thump whimsy” and
“ant hump prick free” give more graphic images of malaise than does “jump
quickly.” And the parallelism between the three poems is guaranteed by the
numerical constraint of the prime numbers.
There are further variations. “Amphibolies II” (Canon 5), which comes a
few pages later and begins “noon / at thickest / are shadows where,” is a word-
for-word mirror inversion of #1, concluding with “quickly jump and / slowly
walk” (68). It yields further appropriate echoes like “take that / map” and the
halting phraseology of “the briar / the / the paths into.”
“Amphibolies III” (Canon 12), called “Pricks,” uses a similar constraint, but
now reversing #1 line by line rather than word for word:
Noon
thickest at
where shadows are
you back behind the stares (74)
and concluding with “walk slowly” to make a perfect round. And indeed,
Benjamin and his friends do nothing so much as walk in circles.
In the performance itself the words are lost in the “extreme polyphony”
produced by layers of musical sound. The libretto, however, adds the di-
mension of sight: these poems must be seen to be understood, the numerical
constraints providing estrangement from the narrative, lines like “that take,”
“at- / tire,” or “tear tallow mar” visually undermining what might otherwise
be perceived as continuity. Or again, a rhyming line like “Bulk sulky” enacts
the “Doctrine of the Similar” at yet another level, that of visual conjunction.
Yet as the verbal reversals and homophonic echoes suggest, this landscape
of similarities is in fact a world turned upside down. As was Benjamin’s own
world in 1933.
Between the three sets of amphibolies, Bernstein gives us some poignant
variations. “Dust to Dusk” (64) has eleven words that complement the pre-
ceding eleven lines: “The leaves turn dark before the trees are shot with
light,” with its pun on “shot,” suggesting imminent disaster. This poem has its
echo in the later “Dusts to Dusks” (74), which reads, “The heavens turn dark
before the trees are shot full of light”—a telling variation, for whereas the
turning dark of the leaves merely connotes nightfall, the heavens’ turning
dark, before the lightning flash that follows, suggests cataclysm, doomsday.
There are further ingenious permutations. From the eleven lines of “Walk
Slowly” (63) and eleven words of “Dust to Dusk” (64) , we move in the third
poem, “Cannot Cross,” to an eleven-stanza ballad, alternating casual individ-
ual speech—“Don’t want consolation / Just a ticket home” or “Knew a man
once / Had no tongue / Walked in fog / Till the fog was gone”—to the more
formal first-person plural refrain “It’s been so long / Words cannot console
us / Where there is sorrow / We cannot cross” (64–65). The a4b3c4b3 ballad stanza
is mimed (the Doctrine of the Similar again) by the use of three or four words
per line, but that number dwindles to three and then two as gridlock occurs:
Song is coming
Find no words
Cannot cross
Cannot cross (66)
That gridlock leads directly to one of the key sections of the poem (no. 4),
“Indissolubility (Motetus absconditus),” which Bernstein calls in the syn-
opsis a “palimpsestic parody of a late medieval motet from the Montpelier
Codex.” Here seven prose aphorisms present, in garbled form, variants on
Benjaminian statements, for instance from his essay on Kierkegaard (2:703–
5), culminating in the sentence “It is never just a matter of recognition as re-
figuration but redemption through resistance” (Shadowtime, 67), the latter
phrase epitomizing what Benjamin’s lifelong intellectual project is all about.
But before we can sentimentalize this notion, Bernstein gives us seven more
sentences, this time homophonic versions of the first group, line 14 reading:
Lit hiss ever just a bladder of recuperation as infantilization gut exemption

through insistence. (68)
And that is surely another way of putting it: “exemption through insistence.”
Poems 6 and 7 are variants on the prime-number lyrics of the Amphib-
olies. But number 8 takes a whole new tack. Titled “Anagrammatics,” it con-
tains seventeen anagrams on the fourteen letters W-A-L-T-E-R-B-E-N- J-A-
M-I-N, the rule being to have the word “Jew” in every line: “Brain metal Jew,”
“Barn rat linen Jew,” “Rat bam Lenin Jew,” and so on (72–73).46 It is the first
of the poems in “Doctrine of Similarity” to bring out the Jew in the protago-
nist’s German name, as that name is visualized. And from here it is just a step
to the concrete/sound poem (9), “dew and die,” a structural/homophonic
translation of Ernst Jandl’s “der und die” (figure 4.1).47 The latter has two
grids of 13 × 13 (thirteen lines of thirteen words each, each word containing
three—and only three letters, with many words, especially the ubiquitous
und (and) repeated again and again.
Jandl’s word grid is a representation of a lovers’ rendezvous, reduced to
its most basic elements of coming together in a nonspecified setting: there
is a valley, ice, a lake, a gateway, a door. The rhyming paratactic units mime
the process of sexual coupling and final satisfaction, “he” and “she” gradually
turning into a red, wet, and tired “we.” But there is also violence in this love-
making. “Der” and “die” (note that these words are not personal pronouns but
masculine and feminine articles demanding completion by their respective
nouns) “riß und biß und zog” (tore and bit and pulled), and near the end, the
word tot (dead”) occurs as the lovers presumably “die” into each other’s arms.
But the narrative remains unclear; the reader is tempted to move vertically or
diagonally as well as horizontally through this precisely laid-out word square.
Bernstein’s version (figure 4.2) does not deviate from Jandl’s rule—2 × 13
× 13—all the words again having exactly three letters. The only liberty taken
with the source is to turn “Der” (he) into “Du,” which gives Bernstein the En-
glish equivalents “dew and die.” In the world of Shadowtime there is no sexual
union, only the separation of “war mud and bog,” of “war tug for kin,” of “tic
eye and mud and woe” (72). Yet Bernstein’s visual poem “dew and die” looks
exactly like Jandl’s: it even uses some of the same words, although there is no
similarity whatsoever between, say, the English rot and German rot (red) or
the English tot and German tot (dead). Language, it seems, can’t quite supply
that field of nonsensuous similarities Benjamin hoped to convey.
This argument for irreducibility takes us to number 10, “Schein” (73),
three lines of prime numbers followed by a variant. Schein is one of Benja-
min’s key concepts. In an essay fragment on the word as well as in his great
essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Benjamin plays on its connotations, not-
ing that although it may mean mere appearance or even facsimile or simula-
crum, the word also designates a shining or showing forth, the glimmer of
the numinous, the truth behind the beautiful appearance. “Everything beau-
tiful in art can be ascribed to the realm of beautiful semblance [Schein],”48
writes Benjamin (1:224). The translation isn’t quite adequate here because
the word semblance, used in the Harvard edition, limits the range of mean-
ings of Schein; Bernstein knows this and opens up the word’s possibilities:
There’s no crime like the
shine in the space between
shine and shame.
No shine like the mine between meaning and history. (73)
The aura remains.

And so “Amphibolies III” looks ahead to the poem’s “Envoi,” with its
Figure 4.2. Charles Bernstein, “dew and die.” From Shadowtime © 2005 Charles Bernstein.
Reprinted by permission of the author and Green Integer Books, www.greeninteger.com.
variation on the last line of Mallarmé’s “Salut,” the famous sonnet placed as
the headpiece to the 1899 edition of Poésies.49 “Salut” is the poet-navigator’s
salutation or toast to his fellow poets, exhorting them to make good on “le
blanc souci de notre toile,” “the white care of our sail.” Here the white sail
or sheet is a metaphor for the blank page of the book, Mallarmé’s legacy to
future poets. All the odder, therefore, that in scene III of Shadowtime, head-
piece becomes coda: the promise of this salut (the word also means “salva-
tion”) remains veiled in ambiguity despite the precise visual symmetry (the
constraint is the same as that of “dew and die”) of its three lines:
The blank sail of our soil [toil]

The blank toil of our sail [veil]
The blank soul of our toil [soil]— (75)
The stage is thus set for Benjamin’s descent into the underworld, which
occurs in the next scene (IV) of the opera.
How Oulipo Is It?

Strictly speaking, Shadowtime is not an Oulipo work. There is no master
constraint governing or generating the whole; indeed, the articulation of
its parts is eclectic and unpredictable. Yet the Oulipo axiom, “A text written
according to a constraint describes the constraint,” could hardly be more ap-
plicable than it is here. Whether combining lines made of prime numbers, in-
venting homophonic translations, devising word squares based on the work
of the concrete poet Ernst Jandl, or adapting Mallarmé’s “Salut” to the word
count (3-5-4-2-3-4-[4]) of each line of his coda, Bernstein is dramatizing the
obsession with order in what is a curiously disordered life. For Benjamin,
thought and action exist on separate planes. Bernstein’s “poem including
history” thus takes the measure of the Benjaminian ethos not by biographi-
cal narrative or thematic exposition but spatially, in keeping with Benjamin’s
own spatialization of history in “A Berlin Chronicle” or the Arcades Project.
Hence the resort to concrete poems like “dew and die” and “Salut,” hence
the mirror imaging of the “Amphibolies” to chart Benjamin’s trajectory and
the failure of his escape.
Again, Bernstein uses citation to measure, evaluate, and critique the all-
consuming citationality of his protagonist. Here, the libretto implies, is a
great critic who believes in the reality behind the Schein or “semblance” but
cannot avoid those pricks that are “points on a / briar” as well as “points on
a / map.” Bernstein’s source texts—Benjamin’s own writings, the poetry of
Jandl and Mallarmé, Hölderlin and Scholem, Heine’s Lorelei and Goethe’s
Faust—function, as does the language of de Campos’s Galáxias, to produce
a particular constellation, densely layered and verbivocovisual.50
In comparison to earlier Language poems, including Bernstein’s own,
Shadowtime signals the return of the repressed, which is to say, the desire to
write a poem of semantic density even though here, as in such earlier poems
as “Lives of the Toll Takers” or “Let’s Just Say,” there can be no closure, no
covering statement, no center or set presence. The Stillstand of constellation
is only momentary: its inevitable dissolution leads to another and yet an-
other amphibole or paradox. Bernstein’s “transcreation,” to use Haroldo de
Campos’s word,51 of Walter Benjamin’s textual world is at once homage and
elegy, lyric and critical essay, an “ideogrammatic” language game in which
the unexpected is always around the corner. But why should that surprise
us? As the poet puts it in a later scene called “One and a Half Truths” (106):
Just a-
round the corner is another corner
5
“ The Rattle of
Statistical Traffic”:
Documentary
and Found Text
in Susan Howe’s
The Midnight
We lack confidence in our authenticity.
Henri David Thoreau
In citation the two realms—of origin and

destruction—justify themselves before
language. And conversely, only when they
interpenetrate—in citation—is language
consummated.
Walter Benjamin
To quote is to adduce words as facts, as

exhibits, documents, to lift them out of
context, to isolate them, to make them
self-evident.
Richard Sieburth1
“Vagabond Quotations”
Halfway through Susan Howe’s complex book-length poem The Midnight 2—
a poetic text that embeds varieties of prose as well as treated photographs,
reproduced paintings, maps, catalogs, facsimiles of tissue interleaves, and
enigmatic captions in what is a tripartite sequence of short, highly formal-
: 99
Figure 5.1. Susan Howe, page 72 from The Midnight. Copy-
right © 2003 Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of
New Directions Publishing Corp.
ized lyrics—we find an item titled “ALB,” followed by the image of a post-
age stamp from eire (Ireland), portraying the poet’s maternal great- aunt
Louie Bennett (figure 5.1). Underneath the stamp, Howe places the follow-
ing paragraph:
The first of a series of Irish suffrage societies began in 1908 when Hanna
Sheehy Skeffington and Margaret Cousins founded the Irish Women’s Franchise
League (IWFL). Aunt Louie Bennett’s name was on the subscription list for the
Irish Women’s Suffrage and Local Government Association (IWSLGA) in 1909
and 1910; in 1911 she was appointed an honorary secretary. After WWI she was in-
tensely involved in the Irish labor movement and served as General Secretary of
the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU). In 1932 she became the first woman
President of the Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC), a position she held until
1955. She died in 1956. Recently her face appeared on a 32p Irish stamp, and there
is a bench dedicated to her memory in Stephen’s Green.3
What place does such a dry, factual paragraph have in a text ostensibly clas-
sified as poetry? How do those dates (seven in all), names, and acronyms func-
tion in what purports to be imaginative writing? Is the paragraph an encyclo-
pedia entry? Not quite, given its reference to Aunt Louie Bennett (the ALB
of the caption), but otherwise it does read like one.
Found text, and especially documentary, has always been important to
Susan Howe. Her long lyrical montage- essay “Sorting Facts; or, Nineteen
Ways of Looking at [Chris] Marker” (1996) begins with an epigraph from the
great Soviet film director Dziga Vertov:
100 : c h a p t e r f i v e
the FACTORY OF FACTS.
Filming facts, sorting facts. Disseminating facts. Agitating with
facts. Propaganda with Facts. Fists made of facts. . . .
Hurricanes of facts.
And individual little factlets.
Against film-sorcery.
Against film-mystification. (1926)4
Vertov’s and Marker’s lyric- documentary films provide a model for what
Howe calls poetry as “factual telepathy”: ” I work,” she declares, “in the poetic
documentary form.”5
A document (from the Latin documentum, meaning lesson, proof, instance,
specimen, charter) is defined by the OED (no. 4, 1751) as “something written,
inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject, as
a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, picture, etc.” But the term docu-
mentary was not used until 1926, and then with reference to film; the Oxford
American Dictionary defines the adjective as follows: “Of a movie, a television
or radio program, or photography) using pictures or interviews with people
involved in real events to provide a factual record or report.” As such, Tyrus
Miller reminds us, the documentary has generally been taken as the antith-
esis of the modernist artwork with its obliquity, difficulty, and heightened
self- consciousness: “Documentary, in contrast, seem[s] to draw its energy
and inspiration from the antithetical realm of the everyday, the popular
world upon which modernist art and writing had demonstratively turned
its back. . . . Honesty, accuracy, and openness to the contingent details of
the empirical world were premium values in the documentary aesthetic, and
objectively existing ‘reality’ its formal touchstone.”6
The fabled “accuracy” of contemporary docudrama and reality TV is, of
course, an elaborate simulacrum, the irony being that the easier it becomes
to alter photographs or to introduce hidden changes into existing text, the
more reassuring may be the presence of an actual date or surname. “Con-
statation of fact,” Ezra Pound called it, and the sense of the real provided by
archival documentation stands at the heart of Pound’s Cantos as of Walter
Benjamin’s Arcades. Indeed, in our own information age the lyric self is in-
creasingly created by a complex process of negotiation between private feel-
ing and public evidence. I am not only what my subconscious tells me but
a link—an unwitting one, perhaps—in a cultural matrix. Here names and
dates play a central role: the most important event in recent memory, after
all, is known by its date—9/11.
Consider that biosketch of Louie Bennett, Susan Howe’s maternal
“ t h e r at t l e of s tat i s t ic a l t r a f f ic ” : 101
great- aunt. In an earlier section, titled “Pandora,” we read, “The relational
space is the thing that’s alive with something from somewhere else” (M 58).
In this case, that something else is an odd inscription: “My great-aunt Louie
Bennett has written the following admonition on the flyleaf of her copy of
The Irish Song Book with Original Irish Airs, edited with an Introduction and
Notes by Alfred Percival Graves (1895): ‘To all who read. This book has a value
for Louie Bennett that it cannot have for any other human being. There-
fore let no other human being keep it in his possession.’ ” This admonition
is presented as a caption underneath a reproduction of the flyleaf itself,
inscribed in a large scrawl. But the admonition obviously wasn’t honored:
not only did this Irish Song Book pass out of Louie Bennett’s possession, but
someone marked it up: on the facing page, partly covered by tape, is a stick
figure, presumably drawn by a child (figure 5.2). Below the illustration we
read:
Graves’s collection, part of a larger New Irish Library series edited by Sir Charles
Gavan Duffy, holds lullabies, ballads, laments, songs of occupation, dust of
political conflict. How can the same volume contain so many different incompat-
ible intrinsic relations? . . . Names are only a map we use for navigating. Disobey-
ing Aunt Louie’s predatory withdrawal, or preservative denial, I recently secured
the spine of her Irish Song Book with duct tape. Damage control—its cover was
broken. So your edict flashes daggers—so what. (M 59)
Here—and this is characteristic of Howe’s writing—what begins as a matter-

of-fact description of an object, in this case a book, quickly turns oblique.
“Names,” we are told aphoristically, “are only a map we use for navigating,”
and the reference to “damage control” now leads from the literal (duct tape)
to the need to place Aunt Louie’s admonition in context:
some anonymous American preschooler has sketched a stick figure on the fac-
ing flyleaf—a merry unintegrated familiar—more diagram than imp—from oral
tradition—from wilds and mountains—running sideways—toward the gut-
ter—indifferent as twilight—maybe superior to you—maybe the source of your
power7
This is how booklore is disseminated. The anonymous preschooler—evi-

dently one of Howe’s own children8—puts his or her own stamp on what
is after all a book containing lullabies and songs to be read to children. And
the child is now presented as free spirit, running toward the gutter, which is
here also the street gutter where “imps” play. The “you” refers to Aunt Louie
but also to the poet herself, whose “power” comes from tapping into her Irish
family history. Here is the passage below the verso:
Figure 5.2. Susan Howe, page 59 from The Midnight. Copyright © 2003 Susan Howe.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Why shouldn’t I? In all transactions of life we have to take a leap. My mother’s

close relations treated their books as transitional objects (judging by a few sur-
vivors in my possession) to be held, loved, carried around, meddled with, aban-
doned, sometimes mutilated. They contain dedications, private messages, mar-
ginal annotations, hints, snapshots, press cuttings, warnings—scissor work. Some
volumes have been shared as scripts for family theatricals. When something in the
world is cross-identified, it just is. They have made this relation by gathering—
airs, reveries, threads, mythologies, nets, oilskins, briars and branches, wishes and
needs, intact—into a sort of tent. This is a space children used to play in. The coun-
try where they once belonged. A foreign audience will always be foreign. (M 60)
The Midnight itself is just such an instance of “scissor work.” But how does
the poet’s meditation on the dislocated “space children used to play in” re-
late to the factual entry on Louie Bennett’s contribution to Irish politics,
placed under the heading “ALB”? Is the dignified general secretary of the
Irish Women Workers’ Union, depicted on the postage stamp, the same per-
son who declares with tongue-in-cheek bravado that no one else may have
her Irish Song Book? How sort out such different aspects of what the poet rue-
fully calls her “maternal Anglo-Irish disinheritance” (M 66)? And what about
Howe’s mother, Mary Manning—Irish actress, dramatist, novelist, critic,
friend of fellow Anglo-Irish Protestant Samuel Beckett, wife of Boston Brah-
min, Harvard law professor, and biographer Mark DeWolfe Howe—Mary
Manning, whose death at the age of ninety-four in 1999, the “midnight” of
the twentieth century, was the catalyst for Howe’s book?
“A true account of the actual,” Thoreau quipped in a passage Howe likes
to cite, “is the rarest poetry.”9 How to recast the elegiac memoir—a memoir,
in this case, of Howe’s mother as well as of her other maternal relations—
this became the challenge, a challenge made difficult by the surplus of infor-
mation available to readers in the age of the Internet. Traditionally, elegists
have assumed the right—indeed the necessity—to make judgments. Yeats,
for example, writing his great elegy for Robert Gregory in 1916, could my-
thologize his not-so-heroic subject, celebrating Lady Gregory’s son, tragi-
cally shot down in World War I, as “soldier, scholar, horseman,” indeed “our
Sidney and our perfect man.” W. H. Auden’s 1939 elegy “In Memory of W. B.
Yeats” makes an eloquent case for Yeats’s brilliance as a poet despite the nec-
essary recognition of his shortcomings: “You were silly like us. / Your gift sur-
vived it all.” Twenty years later, Robert Lowell’s family elegies in Life Studies
are distinguished by their pointed, if loving, critique of his once- notable
Beacon Hill blueblood family.10
But today, as the conflicting information found in obituaries testifies,
generally acceptable statements about the dead are much harder to make. In-
creasingly, the information, but not its assessment, is at our fingertips. Search
for “Louie Bennett” on Google and you find more than ten sites, beginning
with the following from the Princess Grace (Monaco) Library (EIRE):
life 1870–1956; b. and brought up at Temple Hill, N. Dublin; ed. Dublin, Lon-
don and Bonn, where she studied singing; became journalist; helped establish the
Irishwoman’s Suffrage Federation, 1911, closely involved in 1913 Lock-Out Strike;
elected 1st woman President of Irish Trades Union Conference, and elected to ex-
ecutive of Labour Party, 1927; resisted Labour Party support for Fianna Fáil, also
1927; issued novels incl. Prisoner of His Word (1908), on Thomas Russell; founder
Irish Women Workers’ Union; close friend and colleague of Helen Chenevix;
latterly resisted proliferation of nuclear energy and advocated establishment of
joint council with Northern Ireland to deal with these and other problems; d. 25
Nov, at her home, St. Brigid’s, Killiney.
[ top ]
works The Proving of Priscilla (London: Harper 1902); A Prisoner of His Word :
A Tale of Real Happenings (Dublin: Maunsel 1908), 240pp.; Prisoner of His Word
(Dublin: Maunsel; rep. 1914), 240pp.; Ireland And A People’s Peace: Paper Read by
Miss Louie Bennett at a Joint Meeting of the Irishwomen’s International League and
the Irish Section of the Union of Democratic Control, Feb. 27, 1918 (Dublin/London:
Maunsel and Co. 1918), 16pp.
[ top ]
criticism R. M. Fox, Louis Bennett: Her Life and Times (Dublin: Talbot Press 1958),
123pp. [infra]; Diane Tolomeo, ‘Modern Fiction,’ in Recent Research on Anglo-Irish
Writers, ed. James F. Kilroy (MLA 1983), [q.p.]; Margaret Ward, ‘Nationalism,
Pacificism, Internationalism: Louie Bennett, Hanna-Sheehy Skeffington and the
Problems of “Defining Feminism”,’ in Anthony Bradley and Maryann Gialanella
Valiulis, ed., Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland (Massachusetts UP 1997) [q.p.];
Rosemary Cullen Owens, Louie Bennett [Radical Irish Lives Ser.] (Cork UP 2001).
See also Christina Murphy, The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the
Early Twentieth Century (Brighton: Harvester Wheatsheaf 1987).
bibliographical details R. M. Fox, Louis Bennett: Her Life and Times (Dublin:
Talbot Press 1958), 123pp., ded. to Helen Chenevix; CONTENTS, Author’s Note
[7]; Early Years [9]; Keynote [19]; Going Forward [33]; Suffrage, Peace—and Con-
nolly [40]; Baptism of Fire [52]; Shouldering the Burden [64]; Impact of War [74];
Peace Offensive [83]; Leadership [96]; Work and Vision [113] .11
Howe’s own “factual” account represents literally a fraction of the above.

It does not refer to Louie Bennett’s youthful singing lessons in Germany, or
to her novel, enticingly called A Prisoner of His Word, or to Aunt Louie’s mys-
terious relationship with Helen Chevenix. My curiosity piqued, I quickly
glanced at the other Bennett items and learned (from Rosemary Fox’s 1958
biography, a Google book) that Louie Bennett was evidently a member
of an important lesbian circle of suffragettes and Irish nationalists. I also
discovered that Louie Bennett was an acquaintance of the Countess Con-
stance (Gore-Booth) Markiewicz, the “political prisoner” of Yeats’s poem
by that name (“On a Political Prisoner”) and one of the key figures of “ter-
rible beauty” in “Easter 1916”; together with her sister, the countess was also
the subject of one of Yeats’s great elegies, “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth
and Con Markiewicz.” Lissadell, the Gore-Booth home, was one of the great
country houses of the Sligo region, mythologized a number of times by the
poet as an emblem of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. Indeed, to start with the
Bennett thread in The Midnight and to proceed along the route made pos-
sible by the eire entry above is to come first to the “woman question,” so
important to Yeats, who castigated those of his female friends, beginning
with Maud Gonne, whose voices had grown “shrill” from what he took to be
their “unwomanly” absorption in politics and public life, and then to the role
of Yeats’s poetry in the life of Mary Manning Howe and her children. Just as
Pound’s Cantos catapult the reader into the world of Malatesta, Cavalcanti,
Confucius, Eleusis, the Church of San Zeno in Verona, and the Sienese bank
Monte de Paschi, so Howe’s documentary “evidence,” juxtaposed to her lyric
and visual images, takes us into the complex world of the Anglo-Irish middle
class in the period entre deux guerres.
Indeed, as in the case of “the Possum” (Eliot) or Fordie (Ford Madox
Ford) in The Cantos, a given reference in The Midnight points both outside the
text to the countless memoirs, biographies, and gossip about this or that
Irish writer, actor, or relative who had anything to do with the poet’s mater-
nal background, and inside its covers to the diverse and contradictory clues
that are woven together to create the book’s “factual telepathy”—its layered
double portrait of mother and daughter, Mary Manning and Susan Howe.
In the poet’s own words (M 58): “The relational space is the thing that’s alive
with something from somewhere else.”
Four Ducks on a Pond

The Midnight opens with a reproduction of the title page of The Master of
Ballantrae: A Winter’s Tale by Robert Louis Stevenson, covered by a tissue
interleaf—or more accurately, the facsimile of one.12 On the page that fol-
lows, we read:
There was a time when bookbinders placed a tissue interleaf between frontis-
piece and title page in order to prevent illustration and text from rubbing to-
gether. Although a sign is understood to be consubstantial with the thing or
being it represents, word and picture are essentially rivals. The transitional space
between image and scripture is often a zone of contention. Here we must sepa-
rate. Even printers and binders drift apart. Tissue paper for wrapping or folding
can be used for tracing. Mist-like transience. Listen, quick rustling. If a piece of
sentence left unfinished can act as witness to a question proposed by a suspected
ending, the other side is what will happen. Stage snow. Pantomime.
“Give me a sheet.”
Characteristically, Howe’s prose shifts seamlessly from documentation (the

first sentence) to a statement of poetics (on the rivalry of word and image), to
the insertion of personal expression—“Here we must separate”—that may
well refer to a “separation” very different from that of word and image or
page and interleaf. The paragraph obliquely introduces the central concerns
of The Midnight: the contradiction between image and verbal caption, the
transparency of tissue paper as analogue for the “bed hangings” and curtains
to come—the “spectral scrap” that divides one thing from another or pro-
vides it with cover, a punning “stage snow” (show) or “pantomime.”
Dividing lines, margins, borders: the role of these and their various crossings
in Howe’s poetry has frequently been discussed. Stephen Collis, for example,
comments on Bed Hangings I, the opening section of The Midnight:
Beginning with the discovery of a copy of Bed Hangings: A Treatise on Fabrics and
Styles in the Curtaining of Beds, 1650–1850 in the gift shop of Hartford’s Wadsworth
Athenaeum, Howe proceeds to explore the relationship between the history of
“opus scissum,” the “cutwork” that was “Queen Elizabeth’s favorite form of lace”
and the literary “cutwork” of the poet-assembler who “cut[s] these two extracts
from The Muses ELIZIUM by Michael Drayton.” Text and textile rub against each
other in typically paratactic proximity: “versification a counterpane,” “a cot cover,
an ode, a couplet, a line,” in the mention of those who “Could wave and read at
once . . .”13
The resulting assemblage alludes to many literary and historic figures famil-
iar to readers of Thorow, Pierce Arrow, and Frame Structures, from Jonathan
Edwards to Charles Peirce and Emily Dickinson. “Bed Hangings” itself, as
Susan Bee’s parodically “genteel” images for the Granary Press edition sug-
gest,14 remains dedicated to Howe’s New England roots. But the prose sec-
tions of The Midnight, as well as the final lyric sequence “Kidnapped,” turns
from the world of the American father, the Harvard jurist-professor Mark
DeWolfe Howe, to the “matter of Ireland”—the “Ireland” transmitted to
Anglo-Irish children in the wake of World War II.
But why the opening spotlight on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Master of Bal-
lantree? The popular Scottish novelist of the late nineteenth century would
seem at first to be a writer quite alien to Susan Howe. Those popular late
nineteenth-century boys’ adventure stories—Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The
Master of Ballantrae—even the classic tale of the split personality, Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde—hardly seem the stuff of Howe’s aurally and visually charged
imagination. Yet The Midnight not only begins with the Stevenson title page
but concludes with a section called “Kidnapped.” And throughout its pages,
there are references to Uncle John (Manning’s) marked-up copy of Steven-
son’s Master of Ballantrae, with special reference to 1745, the year of the last
Jacobite rebellion, which ended all hope for the restoration of the Stuart
monarchy (see M 73). At least five of The Midnight’s illustrations, moreover,
present drawings and engravings of dramatic Stevenson episodes, these
complemented by the cropped postcard facsimile of Girolamo Nerli’s well-

known portrait of the novelist (M 56):
What if what we actually see is mistakenly dubbed appearance? Uncle John
has pasted a postcard with a reproduction of Count Girolamo Nerli’s half-length
portrait of the author, seated in a slouching or lounging posture, just inside the
front cover of Ballantrae. Nerli visited the Stevensons during 1892, at Vailima,
their newly built wooden two- story house (“an Irish castle of 1820 minus the
dirt”—Anonymous) in Samoa.
The Nerli portrait is juxtaposed to another fragment Uncle John Manning

pasted inside the cover of Ballantrae—the photograph of a naval officer in
full uniform, his back turned to what looks like an explosion. No doubt the
two pictures (figure 5.3) represent the contrast between Manning’s prosaic
life as a civil engineer, working for the Electricity Supply Board, and his lit-
erary, more exotic aspirations. Uncle John’s last years in a meager managed-
care facility called New Lodge on Morehampton Roadin Dublin (M 54) pre-
figure the fate of his sister Mary Manning. On the last page (verso) of “Square
Quotes II,” facing a recto photograph of little Mary (age seven) with her jump
rope and ribbons in her hair, we read the following biographical account:
I have one of the last photographs taken of Mary Manning Howe Adams
pinned to the wall over my desk. She is sitting on her La-Z-Boy chair with an old
lap robe woven in Connemara, in her two-room apartment at The Cambridge
Homes near Harvard Square on Mount Auburn Street. She appears to be aston-
ished, slightly submissive but sweetly welcoming nevertheless. I can tell she is
acting for the camera. The Cambridge Home is “an assisted living residence that
fosters independence, camaraderie, and well-being.” They still send us promo-
tional literature although she has been dead since 1999. Their most recent an-
nual development report is titled “Growing Older in Community: Mastering the
Challenges of Aging.” When she was a resident she had a blunter way of putting
it: “We’re already in the coffin, Dear—but the lid isn’t closed yet.” (M 146)
The photograph described so carefully here is pointedly not among Howe’s

illustrations for The Midnight; a picture, in this instance, would limit the
suggestibility of the poet’s ekphrasis. Howe’s account provides a number of
“hard facts”—the “La-Z-Boy” chair, Connemara “lap robe,” and “two-room
apartment” on Mount Auburn Street. But note that, with the possible ex-
ception of the chair, these facts are not deducible from the picture at all: the
viewer cannot know where the lap robe in question was made, much less
where the room where Mary sits is found. Fact, even hard fact, is always sub-
ject to elaboration or interpretation. Then, too, the sharp old lady’s bon mot
about the coffin (however accurate or not) is framed by the narrator’s some-
what catty remark “I can tell she is acting for the camera”—a remark that
undercuts the image of Mary’s “slightly submissive but sweetly welcoming”
appearance. But of course Mary Manning was first and foremost an actress,
so why wouldn’t she be acting here? Or is her daughter imposing her own
ironic judgment on the absent photo?
Both Mary and John Manning, as presented in The Midnight, are drawn to
Robert Louis Stevenson by their own self-exile; both can relate to his dépayse-
ment: the chronicler of his native Scotland who had to seek warm climates for
his health, settling finally in his “Irish castle minus the dirt” in Samoa, where
exotic foreign dialects became his passion:
Accent is the link that connects syllables together and forms them into a note
or a tone of voice. In his recently completed novella The Beach of Falesà R L S
had hoped to picture the modern world of the Pacific—phonetically. “You will
know more about the South Seas after you have read my little tale, than if you
had read a library. . . . There is always the exotic question; and everything, the life,
the place, the dialects—traders’ talk, which is a strange conglomerate of literary
expression . . .” (M 57)
To picture the world phonetically: this would become Howe’s own pursuit.
But the deeper link to Stevenson—the hidden figure beneath the “filmy fab-
ric” of the tissue paper flyleaf—is the familiar (perhaps too familiar) poetry
book every middle- class English- speaking child owned until at least the
mid-twentieth century: Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Neglected for
decades as naive, simple, and singsongy, erased from all the university an-
thologies (Norton, Oxford), this popular collection of children’s poems is
surely due for reassessment:
When I was down beside the sea
A wooden spade they gave to me
To dig the sandy shore.
My holes were empty like a cup,
In every hole the sea came up,
Till it could come no more.15
Stevenson’s ballad stanza (aabccb), with its alternate tetrameter and trimeter
lines, suspends its meaning till the last word: no more sea because there is no
longer a hole to receive it: the rhyme cup/ up says it all. It is the same sense of
loss we find in Mary Manning’s “favorite of all poems,” William Allingham’s
“Four Ducks on a Pond”
Four Ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue-sky of spring
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing
To remember for years—
To remember with tears. (M 79)
“Four Ducks on a Pond” was Howe’s original title for The Midnight. Per-
haps, the poet suggests, this late Victorian Anglo-Irish poem reminded Mary
Manning “of the beautiful landscape around Dublin in comparison to the
hideous (or so she felt) landscape in the Cambridge/Boston area. I always
wondered that something so simple could be so loaded with emotion for her, but I
suppose it represented the essence of nostalgia for her lost youth in another
country and to this day it keeps playing in my head any time I sit in a park
looking at ducks. Aunt Louie’s garden in Killiney (where we stayed the sum-
mer of 47) was to me the most beautiful place I had ever experienced. Just up
the road from the sea, past a druid circle in a dark grove of trees.”16
Gardens, groves, druid circles: the “white clouds on the wing” of Alling-
ham’s little poem may well refer to swans, and one remembers that Yeats’s
“wild swans at Coole” were also counted—there were “nine- and- fifty.”
“Analogies,” as Howe remarks after quoting “Four Ducks on a Pond,” “pass
like lightning” (M 80). Indeed, the poem “served as an audible symbol of de-
sire and remorse. . . . Allingham’s unreal reality points to the cold mystery of
windows lit in strange houses as opposed to your own house when you are
outside looking in” (80).
This conclusion is odd, given that there are no windows mentioned in
“Four Ducks on a Pond.” But Howe has provided the missing link most in-
geniously, pasting into the paragraph just cited an image of a double-page
spread, with the final page of Yeats’s romantic play Baile and Aillin on the left
and the title page of his 1904 volume In the Seven Woods on the right, the two
nearly hidden by Mary Manning’s own tipped-in bookmarks (figure 5.4).
The Seven Woods was Lady Gregory’s estate, of which Coole Park was a
part; the opening line of Yeats’s “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” is “Under my
window-ledge the water race,” and the beautiful “ancestral house” Lissadell
is characterized by its “great windows opening to the south.”17 In “writing
through” her mother’s copy of Yeats’s Later Poems (see M 177, note), Howe
thus juxtaposes Mary Manning’s acting career at the Abbey, where Baile and
Aillin was performed, as well as her love of the Irish balladry represented by
“Four Ducks,” to a poetry more sophisticated than Stevenson’s or Alling-
ham’s but partaking of the same Irish sources—namely, the poetry of Yeats:18
Maybe one reason I am so obsessed with spirits who inhabit these books is
because my mother brought me up on Yeats as if he were Mother Goose. Even be-
fore I could read, “Down by the Salley Gardens” was a lullaby, and a framed broad-
side “He wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” printed at the Cuala Press hung over
my bed. I hope her homesickness, leaving Dublin for Boston in 1935, then moving
on to Buffalo where we lived between 1938 and 1941, then back to Cambridge,
Massachusetts, was partially assuaged by the Yeats brothers. She hung Jack’s il-
lustrations and prints on the wall of any house or apartment we moved to as if
they were windows. Broadsides were an escape route. Points of departure. They
marked another sequestered “self ” where she would go home to her thought. She
clung to William’s words by speaking them aloud. So there were always three di-
mensions, visual, textual, and auditory. Waves of sound connected us by associa-
tional syllabic magic to an original but imaginary place existing somewhere across
the ocean between the emphasis of sound and the emphasis of sense. I loved lis-
tening to her voice. I felt my own vocabulary as something hopelessly mixed and
at the same time hardened into glass. (M 74–75)
Here again Howe produces a “paragraph” (prose poem?) that moves from flat
statement (“my mother brought me up on Yeats”) to the documentary assur-
ance of place-names and dates, to lyric fantasy. The broadsides as windows
look ahead to those windows of mysterious houses mentioned in connec-
tion with “Four Ducks on a Pond.” The “waves of sound” connect not only
to Mary Manning’s past and future but to the worlds of mother and daugh-
ter: the “three dimensions, visual, textual, and auditory” are the dimensions
of The Midnight itself.
This passage, then, dramatizes more fully than could any summarizing
statement or recounting of childhood incident the bond between mother
and daughter. Yeats’s Later Poems, inscribed by six Irish actresses who were
Mary’s friends (see M 75), contains four narrow brown paper markers with
the faded titles of Yeats poems. “Sometimes I arrange the four snippets as if
they were a hand of cards, or inexpressible love liable to moods. I like to let
them touch down randomly as if I were casting dice or reading tea leaves.
‘The Collar-bone of a Hare’ has just fallen on ‘The Cap and Bells.’ She loved
to embroider facts” (M 76).
Here two aesthetics diverge. For the actress Mary Manning, “poetry” is
the verbal magic that takes us to realm of the imaginary. For Susan Howe,
such “magic”—lovely but not quite grounded, as in Stevenson or Alling-
ham—must give way to the knottier, tenser language that is Yeats’s. Whereas
Mary Manning “loved to embroider facts,” her daughter, following Yeats’s
example, learned to cast off the Romantic “Coat,” “Covered with embroi-
deries / Out of old mythologies” (Poems, 127). Indeed, Yeats’s locutions now
become grist for Howe’s own “articulations of sound form in time,” her very
particular language games.” Thus,
Now “The Folly of Being Comforted” tip-in has fallen so it covers “The Heart
of Woman” in such a way I can only see
O
N
T rest;
He
An
O
T
m;
s,
h.
Here is Howe’s source poem, “The Heart of a Woman”:

O what to me the little room
That was brimmed up with prayer and rest;
He bade me out into the gloom,
And my breast lies upon his breast.
O what to me my mother’s care,

The house where I was safe and warm;
The shadowy blossom of my hair
Will hide us from the bitter storm.
O hiding hair and dewy eyes,

I am no more with life and death,
My heart upon his warm heart lies,
My breath is mixed into his breath. (Yeats, Poems, 60–61)
This is Yeats at his most fin- de- siècle: in Autobiographies, he disavows the
“overcharged colour inherited from the romantic movement.” “I deliberately
reshaped my style,” he recalls, “deliberately sought out an impression as of
cold light and tumbling clouds.” “The Folly of Being Comforted”19 was one
of the first poems to exhibit what Yeats referred to repeatedly as “an emotion
I described to myself as cold.”20
How appropriate, then, that the “Folly” bookmark should fall on “The
Heart of Woman.” Howe’s “writing through” retains only a skeleton of let-
ters, rather in the vein of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s concrete poems—a key influ-
ence on Howe’s poems of the 1970s.21 Like Finlay’s “Homage to Malevich,”
whose print block “Black Square” arrangement of words and letters Howe
discussed in an early essay,22 her version of Yeats’s “Folly” creates complex let-
tristic play. The O is the first letter of line 1, but the N, not quite in line with
“O,” is the last letter of the capitalized title. O is the first letter of both poems,
and here it anagrammatically gives us “ON” or the first two letters of Yeats’s
first word, “One.” Then, reading down, we have “The” and “An” with the sug-
gestion of “An OT[her]”—appropriate because for both speakers there can
be no other. And the skeletal poem concludes with a “sh” for silence but also,
perhaps, for Susan Howe.
Self-Portrait in a Citational Mirror

Howe’s “writing-through” of “The Folly of Being Comforted” implies that
however “cold” the emotion of Yeats’s 1903 poem, a century later its rheto-
ric inevitably demands revision: love poetry can no longer be so direct and
passionate. Then, too, the poet’s erasure prepares us for the elaborate ver-
bal play and fragmentation of the lyrics in “Kidnapped” that follow. For ex-
ample:
Book I am sorry fair

Covering have fallen
Silent O Moyle fair
maiden by cloudlight
Book I am sorry yet
say we recollect it
in Tenant (M 165)
What links the “prose” of The Midnight to the “Kidnapped” lyrics is the
marked citationality of the latter. In this particular poem, for example, Howe
pastes in another popular Irish ballad, Thomas Moore’s “Song of Fionnula,”
which begins, “Silent, oh Moyle, be the roar of thy water.” Such signature
phrases as “fair / maiden” and “by cloudlight” carry on the Irish folk thread.
The lyric breaks off in midtitle, Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (the
Brontës figure repeatedly in The Midnight), another Romantic favorite that
Mary Manning passed on to her children. No doubt Susan Howe thinks of
herself as a “tenant” to those master poets who are here memorialized.
“Irish oral history” and “Fisherman seaweed seven”—this latter a refer-
ence to Finlay’s “Fisherman’s Cross,” a poem carved on stone, juxtaposing
the words seas and ease—are brought together in the next poem (166), and
on the facing page, Yeats’s poetics are related to the Gate Theatre Company,
of which Mary Manning was a member:
Reader of poetry this book

contains all poetry THOOR
BALLYLEE seven notes for
stage representation May
countryside you reader of
poetry that I am forgotten
Long notes seem necessary
Unworthy players ask for
legend familiar in legend
the arrow king and no king (M 167)
Here the allusions to the two early Yeats poems “The Arrow” and “King and
No King,” as well as to the poet’s celebrated tower “Thoor Ballylee,” are seen
in the context of Mary Manning’s “seven notes for / stage representation”
as well as the “May / countryside”: May, one suspects, refers not only to the
season but to May Beckett, the mother of Mary’s great friend Sam Beckett,
who during their idyll in the summer of 1936 worked closely with Mary in
the theatre.
Yet The Midnight is hardly an Irish nostalgia trip containing sweet memo-
ries of “Four Ducks on a Pond,” Thomas Moore balladry, or even Thoor Bal-
lylee. “Unworthy players,” we read in line 8 above, “ask for legend.” Worthy
ones, presumably, demand a certain “constatation of fact.” Early on in The
Midnight, we find the following passage about Mary Manning:
In May 1944 the actor and director Micheál Mac Liammóir published an ex-
cerpt from his unpublished memoirs called “Some Talented Women” in Sean
O’Faoláin’s magazine The Bell. It included a description of my mother:
Rehearsals were in progress for a new play, “Youth’s the Season” by a new au-
thoress—a Dublin girl called Mary Manning whose brain, nimble and obser-
vant as I was, could not yet keep pace with a tongue so caustic that even her
native city . . . was a little in awe of her, and one all but looked for a feathered
heel under her crisp and spirited skirts. “Did you hear what Mary Manning
said about so-and-so?” was a favorite phrase; and her handsome, rather promi-
nent eyes, deeply blue, and dangerously smiling, danced all over the room in
search of prey. Copy was what she probably called it, but one knew that by
the time it appeared in a play or newspaper column as a delicately barbed
anecdote, it would be very well- worn copy indeed; much more like badly
mauled prey than copy.
Like many pullers from pedestals Mary Had A Heart and as Mr. Henry
Wood might have said, that was not only “in the right place” but in perfect
working order. An impulsive sympathy was fundamental in her nature; what
people called her cattery was simply a medium through which she expressed
her social ego. Her ruling passion was ambition. She worshipped success. It
was the most natural reaction of a temperament set in the major key against
the country in which she had lived all her life and where everything had failed;
and it was inevitable that she should later have married an American and gone
to live in Boston. (M 49–51)
Why would Howe cite this particularly unflattering, indeed cruel assessment
of her mother in her own memoir? How do we reconcile Mac Liammóir’s
portrait of the malicious girl whose “ruling passion was ambition” and who
“worshipped success” with the warm, imaginative Mary Manning who tire-
lessly conveyed her love of poetry to her daughter?
The plot thickens. In “Scare Quotes II,” Howe presents an extract from
an unnamed biography, beginning with the sentence “Born Alfred Willmore
in 1890, Micheál Mac Liammóir started life in Kensal Green, London.”23
“Straight” documentation, these facts immediately call Mac Liammóir’s own
account into question: the Abbey Theatre insider, it seems, was no Irishman
at all but an impostor of sorts from lower-class London. And further, Howe’s
own version of Mac Liammóir’s career mentions neither the plays he wrote
for the Abbey nor his later one- man show about Wilde, The Importance of
Being Oscar; rather, her biographical sketch recounts such petty details as
his “earliest stage appearance in The Goldfish (1911), written and produced
by Miss Lila Field, with music composed by a person whose name appears
on the program as Mr. Eyre O’Naut,” with its play on Eire, naught, and aero-
naut (M 118). We next learn that Mac Liammóir, aka Willmore, “doubled as
Macduff ’s son and the Second Apparition of a Bleeding Child (for no addi-
tional fee) in Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree’s production of Macbeth” (M 118).
Hardly the stuff of star biography! And the seemingly informational account
concludes with an anecdote about Mac Líammoir’s meeting with Sarah Bern-
hardt, whose “indescribable brilliance and seductiveness” he gushes about
even as he wickedly exposes the “uncanny stillness of the brown lace fring-
ing her wrists” as a fraud, whispering to a fellow actor that the lace was
“Gummed to her hands, dear’ ” (M 118).
Given these particulars, is Mac Liammóir’s description of Mary to be
taken seriously? Where does gossip end and truth begin? On the facing page
(M 119; see figure 5.5 below), Howe takes another stab at characterizing her
mother, this time focusing on her “survival tactics during a time of war, revo-
lution, counter-revolution” (M 119). But it is the two photographs that frame
the emigration story that are most telling. The upper one is annotated in the
list of illustrations at the back of the book as “Photograph of Mary Manning,
circa 1913. Caption reads, ‘Watching an aeroplane / Mary Manning’ ” (M 177).
Nothing in the rather muzzy photograph of a young girl holding her hat in-
dicates that she is watching an airplane. But the unseen caption does relate to
the photograph at the bottom of the page, which depicts, not as one might
expect, Mary as an old lady as compared to Mary the young girl, but rather
the first page of her last address book, composed not long before her death
at age ninety-four. A is evidently for Aer Lingus (800-223-6537) and also for
Audio-Ears, 484-8700; the entry above “Aer Lingus,” ending 8729, is hidden.
Mary, one might say, is still “watching” for planes, no doubt to take her back
to her beloved Ireland. Aer Lingus: the name of the Irish airline suggests
both song (air) and language (lingus, lingua), whereas Audio-Ears, the name
of a well-known hearing-aid service, brings the realm of sound into the pic-
ture. Then, too, “Ear” is an anagram on “Aer.” Song, language, sound: these
are Mary Manning’s domain, at least as her notepad is reconstructed by her
daughter. The most ordinary references, the poet suggests, are charged with
meaning, if we know how to read them. And even the cross-outs are signifi-
cant: the first number contains something behind the 6, and there is what
looks like an 8 crossed out after “Audio-.” It is the shaky error-prone penman-
ship of an old person.24
Names, numbers, citations, lists, photographs: such “constatations of
fact” constitute what is paradoxically Howe’s ambiguous evidence. Even
the lyrics of “Kidnapped” rely on “winnowing each slip for re- / appearance”
(M 171), the references to the Noh Theatre once more recalling Yeats, whose
“Sailing to Byzantium” is alluded to in the line “Tattered coat our journey
out” (M 171) and who supplies the “memory cradle” (172) for the entire book.
Most startlingly, the title The Midnight recalls two major Yeats poems that are
never mentioned by name in the book: “Byzantium” and “All Souls’ Night.”
Midnight is the hour of sudden illumination, the epiphanic moment, whose
emblems in “Byzantium” are the “great cathedral gong” striking the hour,
as well the “starlit or moonlit dome” of Hagia Sophia—a dome that “dis-
dains / All that man is, / All mere complexities, / The fury and the mire of
human veins.” Stanza 4 reads:
At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit

Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit,
Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame,
Where blood-begotten spirits come
And all complexities of fury leave,
Dying into a dance,
An agony of trance,
An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. (Poems, 248)
And “All Souls’ Night” begins with the stanza:
Midnight has come and the Great Christ Church bell

And many a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls’ Night.
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come:
For it is a ghost’s right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine. (227)
In a nice irony, Susan Howe’s own “All Souls’ Night” takes place not in
some mysterious, otherworldly realm but in the Houghton Library at Har-
vard, where she, a degreeless would-be scholar, has come to study the manu-
scripts, under lock and key, of Emily Dickinson. Again, the emphasis is on
realistic documentation: the Houghton vestibule, we learn, is “10 feet wide
and 5–6 feet deep,” with “plate glass” double doors looming ahead:
Passing through this first vestibule I find myself in an oval reception anti-chamber
about 35 feet wide and 20 feet deep under what appears to be a ceiling with a
dome at its apex. I think I see sunlight but closer inspection reveals a ceiling
with a dome at its apex reveals electric light concealed under a slightly dropped
form, also oval, illuminating the ceiling above. This first false skylight resembles
a human eye and the central oval disc its “pupil.” Maybe ghosts exist as spatiotem-
poral coordinates, even if they themselves do not occupy space. (M 120)
This description, at once precise and surreal, recalls the Beckett of The Lost
Ones or Imagination Dead Imagine: can a scholarly library really be so threaten-
ing? The narrative continues in this vein as the poet makes her way through
coatroom and gift shop, through the Edison and Newman rooms, till fi-
nally she enters the Reading Room or Houghton Library proper. The library
mix-up that follows (the poet’s credentials are called into question because
her ID cards bear her married name, Susan von Schlegell) is perceived, ir-
rationally but graphically, as Howe’s ultimate humiliation: “I feel the acne
rosacea on the Irish half of my nose getting worse. I am blushing, defensive,
desperate, and this is only the public sector” (M 122).
But then something strange happens. As the waiting reader glances
around, she notices the bookcases bearing engraved titles in gold, arranged
in groups of threes: “One, taller than the rest, has a blood-red leather bind-
ing with gold lettering: Presented to Charles I at Little Gidding” (M 123).
In an epiphany, the reference to Nicholas Ferrar’s 1633 book brings to mind
“ ‘Little Gidding,’ Eliot’s fourth Quartet [which] has served me as a beacon
for what poetry might achieve.” And so her mind turns, via Emily Dickin-
son, to the Concordance Room at Little Gidding in England, the Gospels
of the Four Evangelists, the design of the leather volumes, and the response
to them by King Charles in 1642—a circuit, incidentally, that can clearly in-
clude The Master of Ballantrae. Entering the world of the books themselves,
the poet begins to rally. But her “ordeal” is not yet over. Finally assigned
locker number 26 and admitted to the Reading Room, the novice meets new
obstacles. She doesn’t know how the buzz-in system works; she feels mocked
by the inquisitive eyes of the seasoned scholars—and then, to top it all, “the
material I requested isn’t there. They whisper among themselves, glance at
me now and then, and politely but firmly say they don’t have it. They ask to
see the Curator’s letter. I don’t have it” (126).
The deflation and despair are palpable. “I have waited weeks for this mo-
ment,” remarks the narrator melodramatically. “I think of the disarming of
the Antinomians in 1637, coinciding with the founding of Harvard College
in Cambridge, a provincial village of mainly British immigrants” (M 126).
However absurd at the literal level, such analogies are the very fabric of
Howe’s writing. “In a chiastic universe,” as she puts it, “only relations exist”
(M 127). The narrative is suspended—fragments about Frederick Olmsted
intervene—and only two pages later does the Houghton Library motif come
back, this time as the subject of an annotated background sketch, perhaps
from the Harvard brochure:
The Houghton Library built in 1942 (the year “Little Gidding” was published) is
named in honor of Arthur A. Houghton (Harvard ’29), chief executive of Steuben
Glassworks at Corning, New York. Under his management, Steuben’s use of in-
dependent designers brought out a new discipline to glassmaking. The American
National Biography tells us that Houghton showed he was serious about producing
a quality product by smashing every piece of glass (over 20,000 pieces valued at
one million dollars) in the Steuben warehouse about one month after he assumed
control. “From ash can to museum in half a generation” became the company’s
slogan. (M 130)
These facts could hardly be more deflationary. The august library on the
most august campus: is a career of smashing glass really the road to book
collecting and connoisseurship? Yet this Jamesian plutocrat really did col-
lect treasures: “Emily Dickinson’s heavily marked copy of Emerson’s Poems
is in the Emily Dickinson Room on the second floor in a book-case behind
locked glass” (130). And this transferred epithet (it is the bookcase, not the
glass, that is locked) is followed by the caption “Never-Never Land” and a
cropped portrait of Nicholas Ferrar. But the final deflation is yet to come, in
the following notice, “To Whom It May Concern” (131):
The books in the Emily Dickinson room have been repeatedly studied and ex-
amined with the hope of finding annotations of the handwriting of Emily Dickin-
son. After years of study, no one has found a single mark that could be positively
assigned to her.
In the process of this fruitful examination the books have suffered, and many
of them have been transferred to the repair shelf. In order to avoid more useless
wear and the shattering of 19th century publishers’ cloth cases, we have closed the
Emily Dickinson Room Library for further examination.
Yours Sincerely,
Roger E. Stoddard
Curator of Rare Books
Below this letter, Howe has placed a page from John Manning’s copy of Alice
in Wonderland: the sequence “In a Little Bill” depicting a humiliated giant
Alice bursting the seams of her Lilliputian room.
Here the found text and illustration measure the absurdity of Howe’s
situation more fully than could any direct narrative account. She who knows
that the Dickinson fascicles do indeed bear crucial marks revealing the poet’s
intent is not permitted to examine them. The regime of power, of “library
control,” that Howe has feared from the outset has won out—at least tem-
porarily.
Documentary, in other words, is in Susan Howe’s poetic lexicon both
threat and necessity. Roger E. Stoddard’s “To Whom It May Concern” rep-
resents the oppressive letter of the law, constraining the poet even as similar
documents once challenged her mother and her Aunt Louie. Yet only by
adopting the language of the library and the database—the language of
facts, dates, historical ledger, map, dictionary, biographical entry, literary
quotation—can the contemporary poet create what is paradoxically a new
poetic sphere. Howe’s lyric “bed hangings,” originally published separately,
are themselves tissues of citation, to be covered and yet laid bare by book-
marks, paper tip-ins, photographs. In the assemblage that is The Midnight,
everything is at once separate and interwoven. The postage stamp bearing
Aunt Louie’s picture is pasted beside Mary Manning’s tipped-in bookmarks,
these and many other scraps of paper and old snapshots defining what Howe
wryly calls her “Anglo-Irish disinheritance.”
The prose portion of The Midnight concludes on an elegiac note as Howe
pays tribute to a facet of that inheritance not usually talked about—her own
irreducible Irish accent. In British English, either is pronounced “eye-ther,”
never “eether” (M 145). Such laws are not to be violated. But in imperatives
begin new possibilities. Either may well be pronounced eye-ther, but one can
transpose the two middle letters of Eire, right above it in the dictionary, and
derive Erie, “the most southerly of the Great Lakes” (M 145), on whose shores
in Buffalo Howe spent her early childhood years.
From Eire to Erie: it is Mary’s—and also Susan’s—trajectory. “Each pho-
neme has an indeterminate nanosecond kink, each vowel its evocative vo-
calic value.” At this juncture, prose gives way to the lyric of the coda, which
concludes with the “sound twist” of the lines:
Style in one stray sitting I
approach sometime in plain
handmade rag wove costume
awry what I long for array
When documentary reaches a certain density, it morphs into its opposite—

the hyperreal of “factual telepathy.” As in Perec’s La Vie mode d’emploi, the
more “individual little factlets” the text generates, the less the reader knows
what they mean. In Howe’s memoir, the allusive is finally the elusive: the
handmade array of the stray gone awry.
6
Language in Migration:
Multilingualism and
Exophonic Writing in
the New Poetics
The limit: music needs no translation. Lyric
poetry: closest to music—and posing the
greatest difficulties for translation.
Walter Benjamin1
With the Warsaw Express, I arrived at

the “Berlin Zoologischer Garten” [Zoo]
and discovered a “B” in “Berlin,” a “C” in
“Zoologischen” and an “A” in “Garten.” The
alphabet always reminds me of the Middle
East. Vilém Flusser wrote, “The A still shows
the horns of the Syrian steer, the B still the
cupolas of the Semitic house, the C (G) still
the hump of the camel in the Near Eastern
desert.”
Yoko Tawada2
In the citation above from Sprachpolizei und Spielpolygotte (Speech police and
polyglottal play), Yoko Tawada recalls her first view of Berlin—the view of
a writer born and raised in Japan who, at age twenty-two, came on a visit to
Germany and never went back. For Tawada, a native speaker of a language
whose grammar makes no distinctions of gender, case, definite and indefinite
articles, or singular and plural, indeed that uses no prepositions, each German
(more accurately, each Western) word, phrase, or idiom becomes a conun-
drum. The alphabet itself poses a special challenge: Tawada cannot resist the
: 123
Figure 6.1. The Phoenician alphabet, with names of the letters inserted (http://
www.phoenician.org/alphabet.htm). Image by Sanford Holst in Phoenicians:
Lebanon’s Epic Heritage (Cambridge and Boston Press, 2005). Used by permis-
sion.
tendency to “ideogrammize” the individual letters of the modern alphabet,

whose Near Eastern roots provide a link to her own Far Eastern world (see
figure 6.1). Aleph, Beth, Gimel: in their derivations, the names of these letters
seem fitting, given that our Western numbers are, of course, Arabic numbers.
The introduction of foreign-language citations into a given piece of writ-
ing is hardly new: from the references to Latin texts in Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici to the transcription of the French conversation of the upper
classes in Tolstoy’s War and Peace to the network of foreign allusions in Eliot’s
The Waste Land, we are accustomed to a poetry or fiction that exceeds its
monolingual borders. But there is a significant difference between the func-
tion of the “foreign” citations in The Waste Land and their role a century later
in the global context of shifting national identities, large- scale migration
from one language community to another, and especially the heteroglossia
of the Internet. The writing of poetry under these circumstances calls for a
new set of language games.
The Language Vortex: Eliot and Pound

For Eliot, the role of foreign-language citations (in his case almost exclusively
Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German) is to heighten the authenticity, as
124 : ch a p t e r si x
well as the exoticism, of the allusion in question. When, for example, Eliot
cites, near the end of The Waste Land,3 Gerard de Nerval’s sonnet “El desdi-
chado,” “Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie” (The prince of Aquitaine at
his broken tower), as an analogue to the poet’s own sense of dispossession,
the French original is designed to give the reference a mysterious aura as
well as a certain distance, as if to say, my immediate feelings can best be ex-
pressed in the words of this remarkable and enigmatic nineteenth-century
French poet. And the Nerval reference is, in its turn, collaged into a sequence
of allusions ranging from English nursery rhyme (“London Bridge is falling
down . . .”) to Dante’s Purgatorio, to the late Latin of the Pervigilium Veneris,
and finally the Sanskrit of the Upanishads. ”Aurally,” Craig Raine remarks,
“the range of registers here introduces us to the auditory equivalent of the
Silk Road and the spice trail. The exotic is in our mouths and in our ears.”4
Such self-conscious and learned linguistic display has its own curious lim-
its. Note, for example, that when Eliot refers to the Old Testament, as in the
citations he himself identifies as stemming from Ezekiel or Eccelesiastes or
Isaiah, his source is hardly the original Hebrew or Aramaic but rather the
King James Bible. Partly this is a matter of historical and cultural circum-
stance: Eliot knew no Hebrew and neither did his classically educated audi-
ence. But it is also a telling omission: whereas a Wagner citation (Frisch weht
der Wind . . .) evidently required the original German, the Hebrew proph-
ets had long since turned into native English speakers. Indeed, the foreign-
language citations in The Waste Land, culminating in the esoteric translit-
eration of “Datta, dayadhvam, damyata” (Give, sympathize, control) and
“Shantih shantih shantih” (Eliot’s note tells us pretentiously, “ ‘The Peace
which passeth understanding’ is our equivalent to this word”), are more
epideictic than integral to the poem’s meaning. If, in other words, the mo-
mentary note of transcendence introduced into “The Fire Sermon” in the
citation from Verlaine’s “Parsifal”—“Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la
coupole” (l. 202)—had been rendered in English (And oh those children’s
voices, singing in the dome), the tenor of the passage in question would be
unchanged, but its “foreign” aura, enhanced by the assonance of open O’s in
O/coupole and the rhyme of enfants/chantant, would be lost.
The Waste Land depends on such effects, the language shifts inevitably
slowing down the reader’s absorption of the text and countering the speed
of the collage cuts. But Eliot himself seems to have felt that the polyglossia
of The Waste Land had its limits for the self-consciously English poet he had
become; by the time he wrote The Four Quartets, the collage mode with its tis-
sue of literary allusions—the Italian of Dante, the Latin of Ovid, the French
l a n guag e i n m ig r at ion : 125

of Baudelaire—has all but vanished in favor of the authoritative and largely
“pure” English of the poet’s maturity:
Here is a place of disaffection

Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.5
“Burnt Norton,” the first of the Quartets, has two Greek epigraphs from Hera-
cleitus;6 subsequently, although there are plenty of buried allusions to earlier
poems, there is only a single foreign citation in the entire sequence: “Twenty
years largely wasted, the years of entre deux guerres” in East Coker, part 5.7 And
this French phrase was hardly esoteric in British parlance of the time.
The multilingualism of Ezra Pound’s Cantos is of a very different order. If
Eliot carefully embeds the foreign, usually literary allusion inside what is of
course an English poem, Pound produces a multiform text whose language
layers intersect so as to create the meaning of a given passage. The Malat-
esta Cantos (8–11) are an early case in point. Their astonishing blend of En-
glish, Italian, Latin, and up-to-date American dialect and slang along with
Business English creates a wholly distinctive verbal texture, especially since
the “translations” of florid Renaissance letters are rendered in a hyperformal
English that functions parodically in the context. Here is the conclusion of
Canto 9:
That’s what they found in the post-bag

And some more of it to the effect that
he “lived and ruled”
“et amava perdutamente Isotta delgi Atti”

e “ne fu degna”
“constans in proposito”
“Placuit oculis principis
“pulchra aspectu”
“populo grata (Italiaeque decus)
“and built a temple so full of pagan works”
i.e. Sigismund
and in the style “Past ruin’d Latium”
The filigree hiding the gothic,
with a touch of rhetoric in the whole
And the old sarcophagi,
such as lie, smothered in grass, by San Vitale8
“He ‘lived and ruled’ ”: the short phrase, cut, it seems, from a longer sentence
in the chronicle that was Pound’s source, is intentionally flat. Of course Sigis-
mundo Malatesta, the lord of Rimini, “lived and ruled” but what and how?
The casual “to the effect that . . .” is now punctuated by a dramatic passage
in Italian from Pius II’s Commentaries: “Et amava perdutamente Isotta degli Atti
“(And he loved to distraction Isotta degli Atti), “e ne fu degna” (and she was
worthy of him).9 Here the shift to Italian heightens the immediacy of the
chronicle: the ability to love so perdutamente is presented as compensating
for Sigismundo’s earlier crimes, especially since Isotta is pronounced by the
pope himself to be deserving of such love.
In the next line, Pius’s Italian account shifts abruptly into Latin. Constans
in proposito (constant in purpose) refers to Horace, Odes 3.3:
Iustum et tenacem propositi virum
non civium ardor prava iubentium,
non vultus instantis tyranni . . .
(The man tenacious of his purpose in a righteous case is not shaken from his firm
resolve by the frenzy of his fellow-citizens bidding what is wrong, not by the face
of the threatening tyrant . . .)10
The phrase is one Pound also used at the conclusion of Canto 34 to praise John
Quincy Adams: Constans proposito / Justum et Tenacem” (C 171). The reference
is to an ivory cane with a gold ring around it that was presented to Adams in
1844; engraved on the ring were the words “To John Quincy Adams Justum
et Tenacem Proposito Virum” (Companion, 138–39). In Canto 34, the epithet
Constans proposito, placed underneath Pound’s visual image of the pyramid-
shaped marker (written in English and Hebrew) found by Adams near Buf-
falo, is accompanied by the Chinese ideogram for “integrity” (figure 6.2).
In seamlessly linking the authoritative Horatian reference to Pius’s praise
of Isotta degli Atti’s legendary beauty (“pulchra aspectu”) and charisma—she
is populo grata (Italiaeque decus) (pleasing to the people [and an ornament to
Italy])—the poem presents Sigismundo’s beloved as a lady of great con-
stancy and righteous resolve. Indeed, a few lines later with the quotation
“Past ruin’d Latium” (a paraphrase of Walter Savage Landor’s Victorian
poem “Past ruin’d Ilion”), she becomes another Helen of Troy.

Figure 6.2. Ezra Pound, from “Canto 34.” From THE CANTOS OF EZRA POUND,
copyright © 1934 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Pub-
lishing Corp.
It is the shift in language registers throughout this passage that produces

the equivocal image of Malatesta’s Renaissance Italy. Rome, Byzantium,
fifteenth-century Rimini, and twentieth-century America are juxtaposed on
a single plane, even as Pound’s protohypertextual poem can relate Malatesta
to John Quincy Adams, can link the free verse of Canto 9 to the pyramidal
frame of Canto 34, papal commentary to Chinese ideogram, the acoustic to
the visual. The method, as the poem itself tells us, depends upon “the filigree
hiding the gothic, / with a touch of rhetoric in the whole.” Pound’s language
reenacts the role of the delicate tracery on the stone carvings of the Tempio,
making strange the seemingly familiar Gothic church.
Contemporary multilingual poetics owes much to Pound, especially to
his anticipation of digital linkage in the creation of narrative assemblage.
Still, however many language registers Pound introduces into The Cantos,
there is never any doubt but that the voice that orchestrates these ingenious
variations is a well-versed and expert English speaker, a speaker whose voice
moves easily from the imperative of “Lie quiet Divus” (C 1) and “Hang it
all, Robert Browning” (C 2) to the personal narrative of “I sat on the Doga-
na’s steps” (C 3) or the parenthetical “I wonder what Tsu Tsze’s calligraphy
looked like” (C 80). It is this voice that playfully reminds us of the name of
the famed Oxford college—“Magdalen (rhyming dawdlin’)”—and imitates
the president of that “kawledg,” conversing about “a moddddun opohem he
had read” (C 74, p. 465).
Such comic spellings testify, of course, to the power of both poet and reader
to distinguish between proper English and mispronunciation, between “cor-
rect” speech and comic accent. Linguistic idiosyncrasies, in languages ranging
from Chinese to Greek to contemporary French argot and American Western
twang, are, in other words, measurable against a norm: we can laugh at the
reference to Clemenceau as “frogbassador” (C 464) because we know that
frog is a slang epithet for French and that the reference is thus to the French
ambassador. Or again, Pound’s imitation Spanish accent when he recalls that
back in 1906, a certain Padre José Elizondo told him, “Hay aquí mucho catoli-
cismo—(sounded catolithismo) / y muy poco reliHion” (C 537), strikes a reso-
nant note because the poet knows all about the distinction between spelling
and pronunciation in Peninsular Spanish. Again, when we come to the frag-
ment “Le Paradis n’est pas artificiel,” we understand that the statement is made
in French because it alludes to Baudelaire’s well-known book on haschish, Les
paradis artificiels (see C 458); the possibility for paradise persists, but it is—now
shifting to Italian appropriate for Pound’s location in the detention camp at
Pisa—“spezzato [broken] apparently.” And in the next line, the now authori-
tative voice of the poet remarks wistfully, “It exists only in fragments” (458).
Questions of Travel: Caroline Bergvall’s Say: ‘Parsley’

But what happens when there is no more commanding voice to assess those
“fragments”? In a world of relentless global communication, poetry has
begun to concern itself with the processing and absorption of the “foreign”
itself, given the vagaries of travel and migration, whether of persons or of
speech samples and forms of writing. Consider the work of the French-
Norwegian poet and conceptual artist Caroline Bergvall, who moved to the
United Kingdom in 1989, when she was twenty-seven. A graduate of the Sor-
bonne, Bergvall received an MPhil from Warwick and has made her main
home in London ever since. In her 2005 collection for Salt Press called Fig,
there are three important multilingual poems: the English-French “About
Face,” the arrangement of Dante translations called “Via,” and the text of

the installation piece Say Parsley, first commissioned for the Spacex Gallery
in Exeter in 2001.11
“Via,” which I have discussed elsewhere,12 is a constraint-based text, en-
tirely composed of citations—specifically the forty-seven English transla-
tions of the first tercet of Canto 1 of Dante’s Inferno:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita
By arranging the translations alphabetically (by the first letter of the first
line, beginning with “Along the journey of our life halfway”), regardless of
chronology, and placing the last name of the author and date in parenthe-
ses following the citation, Bergvall has produced an astonishing text that
demonstrates just how impossible—and yet how inevitable—translation
is. Dante’s selva oscura is alternately dark, sunless, darkling, gloomy, great,
obscure, shadowy, and darksome; his via diritta may be the nearest way or
the right one, the direct road or the proper path; that road is smarrita—lost,
blocked, strayed from, not to be found. The cited translators range from fa-
mous nineteenth-century poets like Longfellow (1867) to contemporaries
like Robert Pinsky (1994) and include established translators from Henry
Francis Cary (1805) to Allen Mandelbaum (1980), and such obscure figures
as James Innis Minchin (1885) or Geoffrey L. Bickersteth (1955). Equalized
by the alphabet game and deindividualized by the omission of the transla-
tor’s first name, these cited tercets (some rhymed aba as in the terza rima,
some in free verse or prose) convey the brilliance of the original, whose every
word resonates with possible meanings even as they produce an independent
poem written in a curious “midway” doggerel, repeatedly rhyming variants
midway/astray and beginning lines with “amid,” “in the middle of ” and “half-
way,” so that sound chiming produces a kind of chant, offset every fourth
line by the discordant sound and image of an ordinary proper noun and date.
During the writing process—“some two years in all,” Bergvall recalls in
her headnote for Fig—“it was as if the many systematic acts of counting and
collating were carrying with them a motive interior as much as ulterior to the
work being generated. The minutiae of writing, of copying out, of shadow-
ing the translators’ voicing of the medieval text, favored an eerie intimacy as
much as a welcome distance. . . . Increasingly the project was about keeping
count and making sure. . . . Making copy explicitly as an act of copy. Under-
standing translation in its erratic seriality” (Fig, 65).
Say: ‘Parsley’ begins at the opposite end. If “Via” collates and assembles
translations of Dante’s Italian text, Say: ‘Parsley’ takes a finite body of En-
glish words so as to understand their potential for translation, whether into
the various idiolects and dialects circulating in the United Kingdom or in
the warring speech registers of Belgium, specifically Flemish-speaking Ant-
werp, where English has replaced French as the second language of choice.
In this “differential” text—we have the print version, a series of installa-
tions (Exeter 2001, Liverpool 2004, and Antwerp 2008), and a digital sound/
screen version on the Internet—translation and translatability are viewed in
political as well as poetic terms.13
Bergvall’s headnotes, like Susan Howe’s, move easily from documentary
fact to poetic play. In exploring “speaking patterns. Slips of the tongue or
of the culture” (Fig, 50), Bergvall takes as her point of departure the shibbo-
leth. The Hebrew word shibboleth (˘È·ÂÏ˙) literally means the part of a plant
containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk of grain, or, in different
contexts, “stream, torrent.” It was used in Judges 12:4–6 by Jephthah “as a
test word by which to distinguish the fleeing Ephraimites (who could not
pronounce the sh of shibboleth) from his own men the Gileadites” (OED no. 1).
As such, it came to mean (OED no. 2) “a word or sound which a person is un-
able to pronounce correctly; a word used as a test for detecting foreigners,
or persons from another district, by their pronunciation.” Here is Bergvall’s
own commentary on shibboleth.
Speaking is a give- away. My tongue marks me out. It also trips me up, creates
social stuttering, mishearing, ambiguities. Say what. The shibboleth provides an
extreme case of speech as gatekeeper. The massacre of tens of thousands of Cre-
ole Haitians on the soil of the Dominican Republic during the dictatorship of
Trujillo in 1937 is still perhaps the most recent documented example of such a
shibboleth at work. For failing to roll the /r/ of “perejil” (parsley). This familiar
anodyne word makes the horror all the more disturbing.14
In Creole, the language of the Haitian peasant, r is pronounced like w and

there is no Spanish j, which is pronounced hard against the back of the
throat to give us “perrehíl.”
One language’s shibboleth is another’s everyday speech. In English the
word parsley is readily articulated, even as the parsley plant is one of the most
common. Bergvall, herself an exophonic poet, writing as she does in a sec-
ond, or at least secondary, language, is keenly aware of subliminal shibbo-
leths: “In the culturally pluralistic, yet divided, and markedly monolingual
society of contemporary Britain, variations in accent and deviations from a
broad English pronunciation still frequently entail degrees of harassment

and verbal, sometimes physical, abuse, all according to ethnic and linguistic
background” (Fig, 51). For the Exeter version, Bergvall and her collaborator
Ciarán Maher made recordings of speech overheard in London cafés and
shops, choosing words on the “parsley” model “for their tricksy difficulty
yet familiar (i.e. English) association. Say, ‘rolling hills.’ The thick English
‘l’ and liquid ‘r’ are especially prone to pronunciation variations” (Fig, 51).15
The reference here is to the fact that the Japanese language (as well as
other East Asian languages heard increasingly in the UK) does not have sepa-
rate sounds for the /r/ and /l/ phonemes. In Japanese, the /r/ sound is pro-
nounced as an alveolar lateral flap /ɹ)/, articulated with the tongue flapped
against the hard palate behind the front teeth, so that it sounds like a Spanish
soft /r/. Because the Japanese language does not have a separate equivalent
for the English /l/, Japanese speakers not fluent in English are often unable to
distinguish between the /r/ and /l/ sounds.16 Thus they often mispronounce
English words containing either sound, leading to endless ethnic jokes: “elec-
tion” is confused with “erection,” “clap,” with “crap”; flight attendants tell pas-
sengers to have a good “fright,” while serving their customers “flied lice.”
Say: ‘Parsley’ was designed as one response this particular form of discrim-
ination:
We . . . worked out pairings of words which were likely to yield the most varia-
tions on hearing. Pairs with dissimilar speech resonances: Proper/English, Noth-
ing/Certain, Speak/Freely. The way the loudspeakers were placed, on two walls
in the farthest room each carrying only one word per channel, spoken an octave
apart, was a classic psychoacoustic set-up. Listeners were caught in their own ears,
created their own sense of what they heard, moved around the room, piecing to-
gether the pairings only to discover more words in the recesses of their hearing,
their memory ear. Some thought they heard Italian words, others Hungarian.
Hidden or disused first languages resurfaced in this physical and social compre-
hension game. A grid of plumb-lines, pendular, pong-ping, punctuated the upper
floor [see figure 6.3].17
The accompanying poem, reproduced in Fig, defamiliarizes “ordinary”

speech by means of rhyme, pun, paragram, misspelling, typo, and fragmen-
tation:18
Say this language heels
language keals
over
S wallow in i
F hollow hollow fall low
S peak s low ly lie low
Say this feels c loose
the big mous the chokes
has a bong st r uck
in the throat
Spooks lulls angage language
Pulls teeth out
for the dogs
Keep watch r at s the gate
of the law
Say: “pig”
Say this
enflamed
gorge d
Figure 6.3. Stills from Say: ‘Parsley’ (2008),

a data piece conceived for the siting of
Caroline Bergvall’s installation at MuHKA,
Museum of Contemporary Arts (Antwerp,
May 28 to August 17, 2008), as presented on
Bergvall’s website (http://www.caroline
bergvall.com). Reproduced by permission of
Caroline Bergvall.

And now follows the imperative “Say ‘pig’ ” followed by thirty- one other
one- and two-syllable words, most of them quite common and many rhym-
ing or varying by a single phoneme (e.g., “crumple,” “crumble”) or rhyming,
culminating in the line “Say: ‘parsley.’ ” A subtle difficulty is built into the cat-
alog, of which more in a moment, with pairs such as “gurgle”/“turgle,” where
the first word is a common, onomatopoeic noun or verb, while the second is
urban slang for sneaking up behind someone and grabbing their backpack
and shaking it,” as in “John turgled the guy in the bathroom vigorously.”19
The print version does not record the polyglot phonetic transcription
of the words in question, but the recent presentation of Say: ‘Parsley’, in-
stalled at the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Antwerp in summer 2008,
provides an astonishing turn of the screw. In this Belgian city, where Flemish
and Dutch vie with the English that is the lingua franca of the non-natives,
Bergvall’s vocal rendering of the spoken English list prompts a set of “trans-
lations” that reveal a great deal about the way we process language. Here is
the video of that double- entendre, as reproduced on Bergvall’s website.20
The chart below provides the spoken list on the left, and the translations
from “pig” to “parsley” and back again in the second and third:
↓ ↑
pig pig pig
fig figue fig
fag vague fag
fog vogue fog
frog frock frog
fr ig fric fric
tr ig truk truk
tr im drum drum
tr am tram tram
tr amp trap trap
trump trom trom
trumpet trompet trompet
crumpet kroket kroket
crumple kromte kromte
crumble kronkel kronkel
rumple rimpel rimpel
rumble rommel rommel
rubble roddel roddel
bubble bobbel bobbel
puddle buidel* pummel*
cuddle kuiter kuiter
cur dle keuter keuter
gir dle keutel keutel
gurgle keuvel keuvel
turgle teugel teugel
turtle treuzel treuzel
myrtle meute meute
mortal mortel mortel
portal portaal* borstel*
portly portie* porsie*
partly paartje* paartche*
parsley parsley parsley
The listener/reader first assumes that the pop-up menu in column 2 (from
pig to parsley), which then reverses (from parsley to pig in col. 3), provides
phonetic translations into Flemish of the spoken English words. But the
transcriptions generated seem to follow no perceivable rules. Sometimes
the translated word looks very similar, as in the case of “trompet” and “mor-
tel.” But most of the transcriptions cannot be anticipated: why, for example,
is “girdle” (rhymes with “curdle” but spelled with an i rather than a u) heard
as “keuvel” or “trig” as “truk”? Indeed, the more one listens, the less the tran-
scription in question makes sense. Why, for example, should “tramp” be-
come “trap” whereas “trumpet” is understood as “trompet”?
More important: I found that I could not copy the spoken list, no matter
how hard I tried, until I turned off the sound and just looked at the writing
on the wall. So ingrained in my mind are the English words that I could not
follow the “foreign” transcription while hearing the familiar sound. And fur-
ther: it was only after listening dozens of times that I realized that the list of
words, read continuously by Bergvall both forward and backward, does not
stay the same. Thus “portal” can be “portaal” or “borstel”; “puddle” can be
“pummel” or “buidel,” and so on (see asterisked words). Sometimes a change
occurs when the list is reversed. Then, too, in the reverse list the last five
words (first five in the sequence)—“frog,” “fog,” fag,” “fig,” “pig,”—revert to
the correct English. Why is that? Has the audience caught on? Is the recorder
broken? Or are these monosyllabic words, with their short vowel sounds
ending on the voiced stop /g/, easier to repeat?
Say: “parsley.” Parsley gives us the structural key here, for after the first
four monosyllabic words, the r’s kick in—they are present in the next
twenty-eight words, whereas l’s occur in nineteen of them. The alliance of r
and l as in “partly” ( paartje, paartche) creates special problems for the listener/
reader. But even here no rule applies, because parsley comes out perfectly.

This version of Say: ‘Parsley’ thus calls into question some deep-seated lan-
guage assumptions.
First, Bergvall questions the notion that the division between “Flemish”
and “French” speakers in Belgium is, as many now think, inevitable, that the
nation can (or should) be divided along language lines. The transcriptions on
our list above are equivocal: Are they Flemish (“kronkel”)? French (“vague”)?
Or perhaps, like “paartche” (“for partly”), spoken by African immigrants?
Can the word itself identify the “true” Belgian? On the evidence of “Say Pars-
ley,” phonetic transcription—and, by extension, “real” translation—seems,
on the contrary, to be impossible. Every time one recites a rhyming, echoing
list, there are slight variations. As in Gertrude Stein’s “Arthur a Grammar”
or “Stanzas in Meditation,” time makes the difference. Repetition is never
precise reproduction. One cannot, so to speak, “say parsley.” And yet in our
culture such words can become shibboleths, used to discriminate against
those perceived as “outsiders.” Language as conduit thus becomes language
as object—a fig to contemplate. That “object, ” however, remains curiously
opaque. To hear the English word makes it all but impossible to see its “for-
eign” visual equivalent. In this Cagean poetic construct—a construct itself
a kind of chant that haunts the eye/ear—sound, far from underscoring sight,
almost always undercuts it.21
Traces of Cultural Collision:

The Language Games of Yoko Tawada
Trumpet: trompet: Bergvall’s Antwerp audience could get at least some of her
spoken words right. But what happens when the poet’s adopted language
has no common elements with her mother tongue? This is the case with Yoko
Tawada, the Japanese poet and fiction writer who took the Trans-Siberian
train from Tokyo to Hamburg in 1982 (when she was twenty-two) and stayed
in Germany, now writing in her second language. Tawada’s poems and short
stories, as well as her remarkable critical poem- essays, have as their great
subject the role of what she herself has called in a Japanese book by that title
(not yet translated) exophony. Here is an extract, translated by Keijiro Suga:
To write literature is at the opposite end from repeating and recombining arbi-
trarily the words that you hear on a daily basis. It is an attempt to face and con-
front the possibility of the language in which you write. By consciously doing so,
the traces of your memory are highly activated and your mother tongue, your
older linguistic stratum, intervenes to transform the actual language you use for
creation.
When I write and read aloud sentences in German by searching [for] the cor-
rect rhythm, my sentences come out differently from the usual, natural sound-
ing German. People say my sentences in German are very clear and easy to hear,
but still they are “not ordinary” and deviant in some ways. No wonder, because
they are the results of the sound that I as an individual body have absorbed and
accumulated by living through this multilingual world. It is of no use if I tried
to delete my accents or remove my habits in utterance. Today a human subject is
a place where different languages coexist by mutually transforming each other
and it is meaningless to cancel their cohabitation and suppress the resulting dis-
tortion. Rather, to pursue one’s accents and what they bring about may begin to
matter for one’s literary creation.22
In Tawada’s case, the situation is further complicated by the fact that hers
is a Asian language—a language most Westerners even today feel no obliga-
tion to learn. Perhaps, she argues, this can be turned to an advantage: “When
a writer whose mother tongue is a minor language begins to create in a major
language such as English, a certain change occurs in the target language. The
change is not limited solely to the linguistic level. A particular take on his-
tory, or a new sensorium to grasp the magical, come into literary language.”23
The smallest, simplest word takes on special importance. As Tawada explains
it to Bettina Brandt:
The German word for to translate [übersetzen] can also mean “to steer a boat from
one shore to the other.” In Japan we use honyaku for “to translate,” which is a Sino-
Japanese word, a word of Chinese origin. . . . The first ideogram of his word sug-
gests a slightly dramatic and romantic gesture, which means “to turn over,” or “to
flip over,” not simply turning a page. In performances I like to read my work in
several languages—including in the available English translations—and I hope
to visualize the act of translation through this gesture.24
In keeping with this gestural poetics, Tawada’s 2007 Sprachpolizei und

Spielpolygotte (Speech police and polyglot play) begins with a poem, “Slavia
in Berlin,” in which ordinary German street conversation is viewed from the
angle of the foreign visitor, who processes simple directions and bits of in-
formation according to the place-names they contain:
“Hier Ägypten es aber kein Prag.”

“Ich were sie schon Finnland” 25
where “Ägypten” (Egypt) sounds like “gibt es” (there is) and “Finnland” like
“finden,” in the sentence: “Here there is no Prague.” / “I’ll find it. Or again,
“San” as in “San Francisco” and “San Diego” is understood as the first syllable
of the German “San-atorium.’ It is a playful introduction, but the next piece,

“An der Spree” (On the Spree; the reference is to the river that divides central
Berlin) is both darker and disorienting. Here is the opening:
I am in Europe, I don’t know where I am. One thing is sure: the Near East is
quite near from here. The place from which the Near East is quite near, is called
Europe. When I was still living in the Far East, the Near East was quite far.
But this too was a mistake. The Near East was not so far from the Far East, as
was thought in the Far East. The Silk Road rapidly connected one point to an-
other. So the old imperial city Kyoto was built by the Persians who migrated be-
yond China to Japan. Kyoto is thus a Persian city. The Near East is the place that
is near everywhere. Europe lies there where the Silk Road ends.26
Tawada’s seemingly “simple” prose is a variant on the Wittgensteinian

language game. Consider the following passage in the Philosophical Investi-
gations:
Someone coming into a strange country will sometimes learn the language of
the inhabitants from ostensive definitions that they give him; and he will often
have to guess the meaning of these definitions; and will guess sometimes right,
sometimes wrong.
And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human lan-
guage as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the lan-
guage of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one.27
Tawada’s narrator poses precisely as such an innocent—one who has not

yet learned what the term Near East refers to. But of course she knows quite
well, just as she now knows that the name of the downtown railway terminal,
Berlin Zooologischer Garten, refers to the Berlin Zoo and not to an image
of camels, as figured in the Gs and Cs of the printed name (see epigraph). In
juxtaposing the Augustinian equation of word and thing to the Wittgen-
steinian axiom that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (no.
43), the poet is able to confront the fissure—or call it collision—between
her own two worlds.
“An der Spree” begins with a meditation on numbers—the Chinese
numbers of her childhood that have no zero, the straight and diagonal lines
that make up Roman numerals (and are used sequentially to designate train
tracks in the station), and the more “advanced” Arabic ones that identify
the different trains: “The Indian numbers wandered toward the West. In the
West, the Arabs took over these numbers and spread them around Europe.
Since then those in Europe can do arithmetic quickly. You can see right away
who has more and what is better” (Spiel, 14).
What, then, is this thing called Europe? In the course of Tawada’s prose
poem, it emerges as the Arabic zero, missing in the poet’s mother tongue.
Its “Siamese twin,” the Near East, haunts it everywhere; witness the Dragon
of the fabled Ishtar Gate in the Pergamon Museum, right in the middle of
the Spree: “It had the eyes of a fish and the body of a cat. The forelegs re-
minded me of a lion, the hind those of an eagle. A horn and two crooked
ears graced the head. His tongue was split three ways; he was thus multilin-
gual. From here, his place of birth is not far away. He came to Berlin from
the Near East and was named the striding dragon” (15). As soon as the sum-
mer sun comes out, the Spree turns bright blue, reminding the narrator that
its waters eventually run into the Nile. Everything is connected, and yet the
division between East and West Berlin, still experienced by the narrator as
she rides on the U-Bahn, spells out the lack of real connection. Contemplat-
ing her impending visit to America, where she has an East German (Sorb)
friend, who refers to Kleist’s “Marquise of O” as the “Marquise of Zero,” she
anticipates the view of the Pacific, “her” ocean and yet entirely different from
the one she knew as a child. Besides, “the water doesn’t remain where it is
now. Another water flows into it. It moves as the clouds above it move.” And
yet in a bookshop where she buys two postcards—one of the Brandenburg
Gate, the other the former building site on the Potsdamer Platz—she reads
about a Berlin artist who has tried to produce his own clouds in a studio.
Evidently it’s easy:
I. Fill a glass case with dusty air. II. Spray it with water. III. Stir the mass of water
and air. IV. Let sit for a while. V. Carefully take the mass out of the case. VI. Set
it into the open air or, even better, right away on a mountain so that the cloud
doesn’t have far to rise. A newborn cloud doesn’t have much strength. The art-
ist painted the clouds the color of the national flags because he thought even the
clouds had an ideology and a history. The clouds put on trousers when they fly
to Russia.
This last sentence, an allusion to Mayakovsky’s great poem “The Cloud

in Trousers,” brings the narrator back to her Berlin reality. On the U2, she
goes to Pankow and checks into a pension on the Mayakovsky Ring. Again
a circle, again zero. At her desk in her rented room, she writes a postcard. “I
will stay here. But I don’t know where I am.” She writes a second card: “I am
coming to you. But where are you actually?” (22). And now we read:
If there is a zero, one knows that there is an empty place. If there is no zero, one
is overlooking a free place. That’s why one cannot, without zero, orient oneself
nor do arithmetic well. I drew a zero on a piece of stationery and wrote next to it,

“Look, the zero is India. The Far East is exactly as far from point zero as is Europe.
The zero in the middle, on the left the Near East with its Europe, on the right the
Far East: this is a symmetrical picture. Now I know where I am.” (22)
No wonder, the poet concludes, that in the Far West (California), a third
of the computer scientists are from India. “They operate between zero and
one.” Whereas, “I sit east of the East Coast on the Spree and have still not
understood what zero is” (22). The abacus, after all, knows no zero. You
push a stone from bottom to top to designate 1, when you get to 5, you push
from top to bottom: “There is no stone that designates zero. A stone is never
less than a stone. But is zero less than one? Zero [null] swallows the phrase,
whether something is less or more” (23).
Like numbers, words have meaning only within a given system, only re-
lationally. “East,” “West,” “Far East,” “Far West”: it all depends on your per-
spective. The Museum “Island” on the Spree in Berlin, the recently divided
city (its Mayakovsky Ring, now Yoko’s “home,” was once the seat of the East
German government), can be viewed as the great crossroads or as an empty
circle, zero itself. Or again, Berlin is the site of sinister collision: even the
clouds, after all, wear trousers.
Tawada’s poetic language is not like that of many of her Asian American
contemporaries (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Myung Mi Kim), a mongrel lan-
guage: it is entirely “German”—but a German whose ordinary words, espe-
cially proper names, are everywhere measured against their absent Japanese
equivalents. In a stunning lyrical essay called “Metamorphosen des Heiden-
rösleins,” the poet deconstructs Goethe’s famous ballad “Heidenröslein,” a
poem set to music by Schubert that every German schoolchild once knew by
heart and still a well-known song around the world—witness the thirty-plus
versions, spoken and sung, now available on YouTube, including a Japanese
video sung by Herman Weng. Here the key word is Heiden: Goethe’s is a wild
rose, one that grows on the open heath or meadow: “Röslein auf den Heiden”
appears twice in each stanza as a refrain:
Sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehn,

Röslein auf den Heiden,
War so jung und morgenschön
Lief er schnell, es nah zu shen,
Sah’s mit vielen Freuden.
Röslein, Röslein, Röslein rot,
Röslein auf der Heiden.
Knabe sprach: Ich breche dich,
Röslein auf der Heiden!
Röslein sprach: Ich steche dich,
Daß du ewig denkst an mich,
Und ich will’s nicht leiden.
Röslein auf der Heiden
Und der wilde Knabe brach

‘s Röslein auf der Heiden;
Röslein wehrte sich und stach,
Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach,
Mußt’ es eben leiden
Röslein auf der Heiden.28
Tawada tells us she learned this song in Japan, where the first two lines be-
come “warabe wa mitari / nonaka no bara.”29 The three-syllable word warabe
means “Knabe”—boy—but Japanese uses no article and omits the verb sah
(saw); then, too, the word for “Röslein” is not repeated. The music, Tawada
notes, forces an unnatural accent on the third syllable of warabé, as later on
other syllables, so that the Japanese words lose their separate identity and
the sense of Goethe’s poem more or less evaporates. Such loss of identity,
Tawada suggests, has its value, for the reader/listener begins to notice things
that may well escape the poem’s Western audience.
Goethe’s ballad, based on a medieval folk song, has invariably been read
as a love poem: like so many rose poems in our tradition, the rose is the beau-
tiful and desired young girl who blossoms, ripens, is “plucked” by the amo-
rous male, and “dies,” whether literally or figuratively. Goethe’s biographers
usually read “Heidenröslein” in the light of the poet’s youthful affair with
Friederike Brion, the innocent young daughter of the village pastor at Ses-
enheim. Critics who speak of the poem (or Schubert’s song) declare that its
subject is not a flower but “deflowering”—indeed rape.30
Tawada’s own reading of “Heidenröslein” has to do with her understand-
ing of the term Die Heiden, the plural noun derived from the Heide, wild
meadow or heath, meaning “heathens, pagans.” When, in the sixteenth cen-
tury, Catholic missionaries came to Japan, she remarks, perhaps they thought
that the heathens had to be converted to Christianity before they would stop
plundering the earth of its fruits. Heiden, she posits, relating “Heidenröslein”
to other Goethe lyrics as well as to the novels The Sorrows of Young Werther

and Elective Affinities, is regularly related to conversion. Our current slogans
such as “Save the forests” and “Save the children of the Third World” always
imply that those to be converted are “heathens” or at least those Others who
have not yet seen the light.
In this scheme of things, it is important that the word Röslein, is gram-
matically neuter. Tawada knows very well that in German, grammar and gen-
der don’t always match—the sun, for example, is feminine (Die Sonne), the
moon (Der Mond) masculine. But the neuter case of the diminutive Röslein
provides a case for the flower’s bisexuality. Then, too, this little wild rose is
no shrinking violet. In stanza 2, Röslein warns the boy that, if plucked, it will
prick him and that furthermore, “Ich will’s nicht leiden” (I won’t tolerate it).
In stanza 3, the wild rose fulfills this threat, and in the enigmatic lines 18–19
we read that no moaning and groaning (“Kein Weh und “Ach”) helped him,
that he “mußt es eben leiden”: he had to put up with the pain. The will to
violate the flower, in other words, does not go unpunished.
Goethe, as Tawada knows, was no sort of Christian: his concept of re-
demption involves recycling rather than removal. Thus at the climax of Faust
II, Heiden (pagans) in the form of fauns, witches, giants, and figures from
Greek mythology cast a spell that brings the rose petals strewn on Gretchen’s
grave back to life. It is in this sense that Gretchen is gerettet (saved). The re-
venge of nature is real: as the Heidenröslein warns its destroyer, he will have
something to remember it by.
It is an ingenious argument for an ecological reading of a poem or song
usually understood as the generic lament for the transience of beauty and
love. But it is not the persuasiveness of Tawada’s argument qua argument
that is at issue here but rather the role such creative reading plays in Tawa-
da’s own exophonic poetics. The point about Heiden would not be—indeed
has not been—noticed by the native German reader; it is only in “making it
strange” that the exophonic writer raises the deeper issues of both reading
and writing poetry. Indeed, so careless are our usual reading habits that in
actual transcriptions of “Heidenröslein” found on the Internet, the pronoun
ihm (him) in line 18—“Half ihm doch kein Weh und Ach”—is falsely tran-
scribed as ihr (her), transforming the entire meaning of the ballad: “Half ihr
doch kein Weh und Ach”: “No oh’s and ah’s could help her.”
What a difference a phoneme makes! The title piece of Tawada’s Sprach-
polizei und Spielpolyglotte was originally written as an homage to the great
Austrian experimental poet Ernst Jandl, whose “der und die” is riffed upon
by Charles Bernstein in Shadowtime (see chapter 4), and whose collections of
poems, bearing titles like lechts und rinks (reft and light) and Laut und Luise
(loud and Louise, the pun being on leise, soft) provide Tawada with a set of
generative citations in the essay itself.31
Sprachpolizei opens with a series of questions, presumably those the poet
herself is regularly asked by well-meaning friends and colleagues:
Does the Japanese language have a grammar too, or do people speak without
any rules?
How do you mean?
Is there gender? No? Are there plural and singular? No? Is there declension?
No? Are there prepositions? No? Definite and indefinite articles? No?
“Is there botany in Japan or do plants grow without rules?” (25)
So alien is a language without those Western oppositions—masculine-

feminine, singular-plural, definite-indefinite article—and without prepo-
sitions, that Japanese evidently strikes Germans (indeed any European or
American) as having no grammar at all: hence the absurd question about
botany. In return, Tawada cannot understand why nouns should be mascu-
line or feminine—“do words have wombs?”—especially since gender is so
often arbitrary: “Is der Rock [skirt] masculine, while die Hose [pair of trousers]
is feminine?”
But it is not just a question of a foreign grammar to be mastered. The
words themselves, as we saw in the case of ihm and ihr in Heidenröslein, give
way to paragrammatic possibilities not apparent to the native German
speaker. Suppose, the poet wonders, you were to separate the two words in
the compound Radfahren (to ride a bike). Would the break suggest that there
are two bikes in use?
When you prefer to write the two words together, we are riding a tandem. Here
comes a policeman who says it is against the law to ride a tandem on the new
street in the Inner City. Why? We’ve always used a tandem before. We can’t divide
the bicycle in half. (Spiel, 26)
The stubborn literalism of Tawada’s logic (one thinks of Rimbaud’s “j’ai

voulu dire ça littéralement et dans tous les sens”)—a literalism that makes it
impossible to read through the words in question—raises the stakes of poetic
possibility. The compound noun Mundharmonika, divided differently, be-
comes Mundhar (mouthhair) plus Monika. “But what is a mouthhair? A hair
that grows in the mouth?” (Spiel, 27). Evidently Ernst Jandl, whose poems
Tawada cites throughout, uses the phrase in his “straßenelend in westber-

lin”—literally, “street misery in West Berlin,” which has five words instead of
the German three. In Tawada’s new lexicon, this would suggest—wouldn’t
it?—an increase in poverty.
How, in any case, to deduce the meaning of a foreign word from its
physical appearance? “What happens if one writes ‘Anna’ with two small a’s
and two small n’s? Then Anna becomes as small as Alice in Wonderland.” Or
again, “Some think the length of a word can be measured by the number of
its letters. Leben [life] has five letters, whereas Krankenversicherung [health in-
surance] has nineteen.” What is the relationship between the two? And how
does one learn what a given suffix might mean? “Many adjectives end with
‘ant,’ for example: significant, redundant, elegant, or arrogant. All the same,
everyone knows that an elephant can never be an adjective”(Spiel, 30). This
last example complicates the issue even further because “everyone” must
refer to native speakers for whom “the meaning of a word is its use in the
language” (Wittgenstein). For the exophonic poet, such commonsensical no-
tions as that one cannot call someone “my elephant friend,” or observe that
“she gave an elephant speech,” take some time to learn, and when the distinc-
tions become clear, these may be precisely the locutions the poet wishes to
use, as when the narrator of Beckett’s How It Is refers to a “llama emergency
dream” or an “asparagus burst abscess.”
Having invented language games for the adjectives and adverbs, the small
qualifiers like nur (“only,” “just”), and the homonyms and antonyms, Tawada
concludes her meditation with a lettriste passage:
A sentence is a form of power. A word is a riddle. A letter is a traveler. He can
leave the sentence. In his stead comes another. A G is replaced by a P, so Gott be-
comes Pott. A P is exchanged with a G, so your record [Platte] becomes a smooth
disc [Glatte Scheibe]. . . . You cross the border between l and r, between a long and
short vowel, between ö and e. The Lord [der Herr] is no hell [Hölle]. And he doesn’t
go there. But the Lord [der Herr] hears what has happened in Hell [der Hölle]. I
suddenly remember the Japanese word Jigokumimi, which translates literally as
“the hearing of hell” [das Hören der Hölle]. It means someone who is hard of hear-
ing, who can hear well only when someone speaks badly of him. So clear hearing
[Hellhörikeit] also takes you to hell. The punishment occurs because of the confu-
sion between Hölle and Hell. Catholic grammar waits eagerly for the punishment
and deliberately plays the wicked child. (35–36)
Hölle, hören, Herr, hell (hell, hear, Lord, light): substitute these words for one
another or place them side by side and remarkable things happen. Hölle, it
turns out, needn’t be hell.
“Last year’s words,” we read in Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” “belong to last
year’s language.” This is an important admission on Eliot’s part. And in ABC
of Reading, Pound insists that “good writers are those who keep the language
efficient. That is, keep it accurate, keep it clear.”32 For these great modern-
ists, efficiency and renewal went hand in hand with a cleaning-up opera-
tion, the poet’s aim being, in Eliot’s words, “to purify the language of the
tribe.” But in the twenty-first century, purity can hardly be the norm, given
the polyglot speech of our “tribe” of citizens. On the contrary, if poetry is,
in Pound’s words, “the most concentrated form of verbal expression,” if it is
“language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree” (ABC, 36,
28), the “charge” must include continuous infiltration and translation—a
watchful steering of one’s boat “from one shore to another.” Say parsley.

7
Conceptualist Bridges /
Digital Tunnels:
Kenneth Goldsmith’s
Traffic
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path—condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Hart Crane, “To Brooklyn Bridge,” 19301
Right now you’ve also got jam-ups on the

Brooklyn Bridge, bumper-to-bumper to
Brooklyn but the lower roadway is wide
open. The Brooklyn Bridge is swamped.
Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic2
The Brooklyn Bridge, whose elegant “curveship” Hart Crane and other Mod-
ernists celebrated as the emblem of a new visionary engineering, is now just
another of the many clogged arteries—bridges and tunnels—connecting
the island of Manhattan to the surrounding landmasses—Brooklyn and
Queens to the east, the Bronx to the north, New Jersey to the west. Those
headlights, once seen from the city’s skyscrapers as constituting a “swift un-
fractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,” have become the glare of the
giant gridlock of the New York nightscape. Bridge, tunnel, highway traf-
fic—or even passage through one-way city streets, whether in New York or
London, Athens or Beijing—has become a fact of life that we accept with
a sigh or shrug as we navigate our way through it, ears tuned to those radio
146 :
“sigalerts,” as we call them in Los Angeles, that tell us which freeway to avoid,
which tunnel is undergoing roadwork, and which bridge is blocked by an
overturned vehicle.
Traffic is the second volume of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Trilogy. The first,
Weather (2005), transcribes a year’s worth of daily weather reports for the
tri-state area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) from the New York radio
station WINS (1010 AM); Traffic (2007) records a twenty-four-hour period
of WINS’s “Panasonic Jam Cam [Camera]” New York traffic reports at ten-
minute intervals on the first day of a holiday weekend; the third, Sports
(2008), contains a broadcast transcription of an entire (five-hour) baseball
game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in August
2006, as reported by the well-known Yankees commentators John Sterling
and Suzyn Waldman.
Transcribing weather forecasts, traffic reports, play-by-play Yankee Sta-
dium broadcasts: what could be more pointless than such neo-Dada games?
Goldsmith himself has added fuel to the critical fire by insisting that his
“conceptual” pieces are “boring,” “unreadable,” and “uncreative.” In a widely
disseminated manifesto published on the website of the august Poetry Foun-
dation of America, for example, he declares:
Conceptual writing or uncreative writing is a poetics of the moment, fusing the

avant-garde impulses of the last century with the technologies of the present, one
that proposes an expanded field for 21st century poetry. . . . Conceptual writing
obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs inten-
tionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility,
appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; informa-
tion management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its meth-
odologies; and boredom . . . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detri-
tus. . . . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic
repetition. Obsessive archiving & cataloging, the debased language of media &
advertising; language more concerned with quantity than quality. . . . With the
rise of appropriation-based literary practices, the familiar or quotidian is made
unfamiliar or strange when left semantically intact. No need to blast apart syntax.
Conceptual writing is more interested in a thinkership rather than a readership.
Readability is the last thing on this poetry’s mind. Conceptual writing is good
only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the re-
sultant texts.3
And in the related “Paragraphs on Conceptual Writing” Goldsmith adds, “In

conceptual writing the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the
conce p t ua l br i d ge s / digi ta l t u n n e l s : 147

work. When an author uses a conceptual form of writing, it means that all of
the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a per-
functory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the text.”4
If this last passage sounds familiar, it’s because “Paragraphs on Concep-
tual Writing” is an almost verbatim recycling of Sol LeWitt’s foundational
statement on Conceptual art, first published in Artforum in 1967 and widely
disseminated.5 In the sentences above, substitute “author” for “artist,” and
“text” or “writing” for “art,” and the two are identical. Was Goldsmith, then,
too lazy to make up his own theoretical statement? Is he just pulling our
leg? Or is his “plagiarism” in fact a sly way of reinforcing his argument that
aesthetic concepts formulated in the art world half a century ago, and now
so widely accepted that they are no longer subject to debate, are treated as
suspect in a literary world that has not yet caught up with the visual arts?
How do we account for the time lag? Unlike the visual arts or music, ar-
chitecture or dance, photography or video—art forms that turn to the verbal
to convey the “idea or concept” at issue—literature is, by definition, always
already made of language: indeed, it is language, no doubt defamiliarized
and reconstructed but the language we all use nevertheless. Accordingly,
the prominence of language in the visual field of the artwork—a situation
central to Duchamp’s Readymades and, by the 1960s, to the work of Joseph
Kosuth and Yoko Ono, Yves Klein and Lawrence Weiner, as well as to the
dance pieces of Yvonne Rainer—has no real parallel in poetry. Duchamp
could take an ordinary dog comb and make it count as “art” by giving it the
caption “Classify combs by the number of their teeth.” Or again, he endowed
a nondescript French window (not so nondescript since its panes were made
not of glass but green leather and hence opaque) with the ambiguous title
French Widow. To make a comparable move in poetry, one would have to
eliminate or at least decompose all the words and phrases. Concrete poetry
comes close to this goal, breaking down larger coherent phrasal units into
assemblages of morphemes and letters to be looked at. Sound poetry is even
more radical: at its best, as in the work of Henri Chopin or Steve McCaffery,
“translation” into coherent semantic units is quite impossible, although the
suggestibility quotient of the enunciated sounds may be quite high.
Goldsmith’s own poetry began under the sign of concrete poetry (see
the elegant word/number constellations in his early artist’s book 73 Poems),
and his recorded “singings” of the “big” theorists—Derrida and Baudrillard,
Adorno and Benjamin—may be classified as “sound poems,” in their move
to undermine meaning in favor of pitch and rhythmic structure.6 But the
so-called Conceptual works, beginning with Soliloquy (2001)—the transcrip-
148 : c h a p t e r se v e n
tion of every word Goldsmith spoke for a one-week period in New York City
(but not those of the many people he spoke to)—are designed to look like
normal “books,” one block of print following another in what we might call
“referential” prose. In Conceptual writing, as opposed to Conceptual art,
Goldsmith implies, positioning himself against the Sol LeWitt he “plagia-
rizes,” the issue is less to bring together diverse media (e.g., word and image)
than it is to relate the stated conceptual germ (“this book reproduces a year’s
worth of daily weather forecasts”) to the text itself. But because both con-
cept and resultant text draw on the same linguistic base, most readers have
taken Goldsmith at face value when he declares, “I am the most boring writer
that has ever lived,” or again, “You really don’t need to read my books to get
the idea of what they’re like; you just need to know the general concept,” and
so on.7 Indeed, Goldsmith’s provocative equation of poetry with “word pro-
cessing” or “information management” has met with strong resistance from
the poetry community—not just from the Establishment but, perhaps sur-
prisingly, from such well-known experimentalists as Ron Silliman.
“What does it mean for a work of art to be eminently likeable and almost
completely unreadable?” Silliman wonders in a long entry (2006) on his in-
fluential poetry blog. “This is the ultimate trick at the heart of the project
of Kenny Goldsmith’s self-announced uncreative writing.” Since the poet’s
“projects, by design, never stand on their own,” Silliman argues, the reader
invariably turns to “the cult of the artist as his own work of art.” And egotism
is not the only problem: another is the refusal of history. For in merely re-
cycling the words of others—whether from the New York Times as in Day or
from radio as in Weather—Goldsmith denies the very possibility of the poet’s
ability to have perspective on the cultural moment, much less to critique it.
A valueless synchronicity becomes all: indeed, “Kenny Goldsmith’s actual art
project is the projection of Kenny Goldsmith.”8
This argument sounds reasonable if we assume that what Goldsmith says
about a given work is equivalent to what it is. For Silliman and similar crit-
ics of the books in question, there is evidently never a question but that Day
(2003) is a mechanical transcription of a single day’s copy of the New York
Times, that the earlier Fidget documents every move Goldsmith’s body made
for a twenty-four-hour period, or that Soliloquy records every word Gold-
smith uttered for a week in 2000.9 It is the poet, after all, who insists that it
is only the “concept” of these books that counts, that indeed it is impossible
to “read” Day or Fidget or Soliloquy.
“Never trust what writers say about their own work,” observes Wal-
ter Benjamin, himself a master of appropriation, in a note for his Arcades

Project.10 In the case of Conceptual art, this warning makes little sense, given
that, by definition, what the Conceptual artist says about the work is often
equivalent to the work itself, as in the case of Robert Rauschenberg’s famous
“telegram”—“This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so”—sent to the Iris Clert
Gallery in Paris in response to its request for a Rauschenberg painting. But
“Conceptual” poetics works somewhat differently: in Goldsmith’s own case,
the appropriated text is often submitted to a particular Oulipo- like con-
straint that complicates the process, even as the materiality of the text—its
visual dimension—plays a central role.
Consider the place of D. H. Lawrence’s short story “The Rocking-Horse
Winner” in Goldsmith’s six-hundred-page volume No. 111. 2.7.93—10.20.96,
published in 1997. In an interview, I asked Goldsmith if he had ever read
Lawrence’s brilliant modern parable, which he includes without title or ac-
knowledgment in what he calls his “useless encyclopedic reference book.”11
No. 111 is an assemblage of all the phrases collected by the poet between the
two dates listed in the title that end in the ubiquitous phoneme schwa (“er”
as in “father”); the phrases are organized alphabetically by syllable count,
beginning with one-syllable entries for chapter 1 (“A, a, aar, aas, aer, agh, ah,
air . . .”), two for chapter 2 (“A door, à la, a pear, a peer, a rear, a ware”), and
ending with chapter VMMCCMMVIII, the 7,228-syllable “Rocking-Horse
Winner.”12 In response to my question, Goldsmith insisted he had never read
Lawrence’s story, except insofar as he had counted its syllables:
I only chose that story because the last syllable of the last word in the story, “win-
ner,” ended in an “er.” Because the story had more syllables than any other entry in
the book, it was used as the last chapter. So theoretically, I felt that I could have
included any short story or even full-length novel into 111 and would have been
justified in doing so. It was just a matter of nerve or finding the courage to do
so. . . . I know it sounds prudish or puritanical, but for me to read “The Rocking
Horse Winner” as is—within the context of No. 111—would destroy some crucial
conceptual part of my book.13
But is the selection of “The Rocking-Horse Winner” really just a matter of

chance? Would any short story—there must be hundreds whose title ends on
er, for example, “The Secret Sharer”—do? In an essay for Open Letter, Molly
Schwartzburg notes:
The story brilliantly describes the ultimate “one-trick pony”: a toy horse—and
a boy—that can only do one thing over and over again. Just as the boy helps his
uncle win massive purses at the racetrack, Goldsmith produces massive books.
And like the Goldsmith of Day, Lawrence’s unnamed boy is utterly uncreative. . . .
The name of the winning horse is merely a fact that he knows before anyone
else. . . . . Goldsmith and the boy are doubles of a sort: like the boy, Goldsmith
rides his hobbyhorse, and yet at the same time, seems to be undertaking a deeply
serious project.14
And one could posit further connections. Like the John Cage who regu-
larly insisted he had never bothered to read Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a text he
“wrote through” quite frequently, Goldsmith wants us to believe that Law-
rence’s story is mere grist for the conceptual mill. But then the description of
the constraint used throughout No. 111 is itself dubious: Goldsmith claims to
be arranging, by syllable count, all the phrases collected between February 7,
1993, and October 20, 1996, that end in schwa (er), but how were these in fact
assembled? In chapter 6, for example, there are six six-syllable units ending
in er that begin with the letters b-o: “Bob The Anal Fissure,” “Bolshevick Be-
havior, bootblack wickerwhacker, bored to a bellwether, both knew how
to shower, Boy what a bagbiter.” From what sources could these disparate
and fantastic items have been “collected”? And why these and no others like
“born to be wealthier”? We are given the ostensible rules of the game, but
what is the game?
Nothing but an actual reading of the text can clarify the questions of
choice and chance that arise here and elsewhere. This is as true of the Tril-
ogy, with its ostensibly simple transcriptions of weather, traffic, and sports
reports, as of No. 111, Soliloquy, and Day. Suppose, then, that we put aside, for
the moment, Goldsmith’s insistence that his books are “unreadable” and read
Traffic as a book about traffic.15
Midnight Gridlock
Traffic is the second installment of what should properly be called The New
York Trilogy.16 All the speech recorded in these books, from the WINS daily
weather reports to the twenty-four-hour traffic alerts to the commentary on
the Yankees game, is entirely New York material. Indeed, a stranger would
not recognize many of the names included: such commonly used abbrevia-
tions as BQE (Brooklyn-Queens Expressway) and LIE (Long Island Express-
way) may be unfamiliar even to those, like myself, who grew up in New York.
More important than names: the ballpark is New York’s iconic Yankee Sta-
dium, the weather is New York weather—which is to say extreme and un-
predictable, ranging from scorching summers to glacial winters—and the
traffic flow is determined by the basic fact that Manhattan is an island: a very

crowded island. Los Angeles traffic may be just as heavy and the distances to
be traveled even greater than in New York, but it doesn’t quite have the grid-
lock produced by the dependency on bridges and tunnels. And San Fran-
cisco, which also depends on its bridges, offers fewer options, so that there
is less scrambling for the hot tips offered by WINS’s Jam Cam. Then, too,
the dramatic seasonal contrasts that characterize New York are absent from
San Francisco and Los Angeles; in the latter, according to a common quip,
there are only two seasons—day and night. The rhythm of the different cir-
culation systems is thus quite variable.
The twenty-four-hour WINS traffic reports (numbered American-style,
12 to 12, rather than from 0 to 24, but with the designations a.m. and p.m.
missing) take place, we learn in the very first sentence, on a “big holiday
weekend.” But which holiday is it? For all the seeming precision and doc-
umentary veracity of Goldsmith’s book, one can’t tell. There are no refer-
ences to ice or snow, so it does not seem to be Christmas or New Year’s or
even Presidents’ Day; there is no turkey talk, so it doesn’t sound much like
Thanksgiving, which is, in any case, more than just a weekend. Memorial
Day? The Fourth of July? Labor Day? There are no identifying tags—a situa-
tion that makes the reader wonder how Goldsmith managed to erase any and
all references to specific holiday paraphernalia such as Fourth of July fire-
works or Memorial Day gravestones. Indeed, we don’t even know whether
the legal holiday is a Friday or a Monday and thus whether the twenty-four-
hour cycle transcribed in Traffic is that of Thursday midnight through Friday
midnight or later in the weekend. Then, too, by the end of the narrative, the
traffic has eased up enough to suggest that we have reached the end of the
holiday: if alternate side-of–the-street parking rules will be in effect “tomor-
row,” the next day must be a workday. But how can this be the case—how do
we get from beginning to end of the holiday weekend in twenty-four hours,
whichever the legal holiday?
There is, in other words, something surreal about this seemingly ordi-
nary sequence of traffic reports. Not only do the particular weekend and
day of the week remain elusive, but consider the cover (figure 7.1). It cannot
be a photograph of New York—as the larger source photograph (figure 7.2)
makes even clearer, given the predominance of small old cars on the road, the
obviously foreign buses, and taxis, the sign “Mudanzas” (Spanish for “Mov-
ers”) on the big rig in the center lane, and the foreign license plate (971 BSK)
on the second car in front. Then, too, New York drivers are unlikely to get
out of their cars to inspect the scene as the men (no women visible) do here,
but the urge to step outside the car may also have to do with the weather—
Figure 7.1. Front cover of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic (Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007).
it seems to be a very hot day—or with the sighting of an accident up ahead.

The many long-sleeved white shirts suggest, moreover, that this photograph
dates from an earlier time—say, the 1970s. The six-lane highway (with dan-
gerous access lanes) may well be in Mexico City, the sly implication being
that New York circulation in the twenty- first century can be channeled
through the images of gridlock in the smog-ridden chaotic thoroughfares
of the Mexican metropolis of thirty or forty years ago.
But our climate is also very different. In WINS- speak, accidents are
viewed as something to avoid by taking another route: “On the Garden State
Parkway north near the Bergen tolls, an accident has two right lanes closed
off ” (W 33), or “They’re clearing that accident over by the Brooklyn-Queens
Expressway, all lanes are being reopened” (W 70). The personal element—
represented by the anonymous men on the cover—has been erased. Indeed,
in its focus on traffic tips rather than travelers, Traffic positions itself as a cu-

Figure 7.2. Anon., photograph used for the cover of Traffic.
rious antidote—or at least response—to such searing critiques of postmod-

ern automobile traffic as Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967).17
Godard’s famous nouvelle vague film follows a bourgeois Parisian couple
as they leave for a weekend trip across the French countryside to collect (by
murder, if need be) what they consider to be their rightful inheritance from
the wife’s parents. After a breakdown on the road, the couple gets involved
in scenes of violence, killing, and even cannibalism: the film is designed to
present traffic as the emblem of the brutal consumerism of the capitalist
class. Thus the film’s most famous scene is an eight-minute tracking shot of
a traffic jam on the country road outside Paris (figure 7.3). It is a shot almost
unbearable to watch and listen to: bombarded by a soundtrack of incessant
honking of horns, we see cars, trailers, and trucks wiggling through the traf-
fic, stuck in the roadside ditches, overturned, going backward, and crashing
Figure 7.3. Still from Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend (1967).
into one another. Bleeding corpses line the roadside, even as passengers in
some of the stalled vehicles play cards or car-to-car volleyball, embrace, sun-
bathe, have picnics, and flag down each other’s cars. Only at the very end of
this seemingly interminable sequence does the couple’s black convertible
pass the police barrier and make a right turn into the “open” countryside,
the sound of screeching horns giving way to pop music. And of course, their
newfound mobility doesn’t last long.
Weekend presents a terrifying image of traffic as an embodiment of the
evils of consumerism in a heartless society. Technology is seen as the enemy
of the human spirit: the automobile pollutes and ultimately destroys the
natural world. Godard’s is the antithesis of F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist dream in
which “combustion engines and rubber tires are divine. Gasoline is divine.”18
But the spirit of 1968 with its Maoist fervor and taste for violence has not
lasted: in the new century, Godard’s indictment of contemporary consumer
culture is as anachronistic as is Marinetti’s celebration, in the 1909 manifesto,
of his beautiful black shark of a motor car overturned in a ditch. Indeed, in
our own moment the weekend traffic crunch is nothing if not normative,
quite simply the condition of everyday life. And here Goldsmith’s Traffic is
apposite.
Unlike Weekend, or, for that matter, unlike J. G. Ballard’s great science-
fiction novel Crash (1972), where, in the novelist’s own words, “the car crash,
a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology,” is
used “not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in
today’ society,”19 Traffic, written as it was at the beginning of the new cen-

tury, takes the minute-by-minute traffic incidents it records very much in
its—forgive the pedestrian term—stride. Submitting his chosen Jam Cam
reports to the Aristotelian unities of time, place, and action, Goldsmith has
produced a vivid representation of contemporary urban life in all its rit-
ual, boredom, nervousness, frustration, fear, apathy—and also its pleasure.
Goldsmith’s book casts no blame, finds no first cause, and attributes no ve-
nality to anyone, nor does it assume that traffic has brought out the worst in
us. Rather, traffic is that which is—messy, unbearable, infuriating, debilitat-
ing, but also challenging, invigorating, and unpredictable. Traffic is both an
existential and a linguistic challenge: the anonymous Jam Cam voice tries to
liven things up by using colorful phrases like “what a doozy,” “snail’s pace,”
“absolutely crawling,” “stacked up,” “getting clobbered,” “the makings of a
rough ride.”20 And yet the real action of this twenty-four-hour period can
be conveyed only by the anchors’ description of what is happening, one mo-
ment at a time.
Among the great ironies of radio traffic reports, as they are transcribed
here, is that they tell us so little and that their predictions are so often wrong.
At 12:31 (in the opening chapter), “midnight gridlock” has taken over both
bridges and tunnels: “there is a stalled bus inside the Lincoln Tunnel that is
refusing to move, blocking all access to New Jersey” (T 2). But by 1:21, less
than an hour later, the reporter is telling us that the “Lincoln Tunnel [is] still
your best way across the Hudson River” (T 6), and at 1:51, “the good news” is
that “the Lincoln Tunnel, that’s still the best way across the Hudson” (T 7).
Then again, tunnels and bridges, all of them, are the greatest gamble, for
once the driver has opted for the George Washington Bridge or the Midtown
Tunnel, there is no turning back and no alternative. Elevated highways like
the Major Deegan, running through the East Bronx, are more user-friendly;
clogged as they are, they might just reopen. Here is the entry for 11:21 on the
getaway morning:
Whoa! What a backup lining up to the tolls here at the Holland and Lincoln
Tunnels. We now have probably close to a twenty minute wait lining up for
the tolls at the Holland Tunnel from all approaches, and twenty- five to thirty
minutes coming down into the Lincoln Tunnel. Still pretty good along the GW
Bridge. And we had an accident and construction on the Tappan Zee Bridge in
Westchester, but not a bad looking ride overall. The Brooklyn Bridge has gotten
very slow coming back into Manhattan and the delay coming into the Midtown
Tunnel has ballooned. There’s gotta be over a thirty-minute backup, it goes back
up to before the BQE [Brooklyn-Queens Expressway]. As I look in live here on
the Panasonic Jam Cam, you do have delays along the Whitestone and Triboro
Bridge too. And if you’re in Manhattan coming downtown, it has improved a
bit on the West Side Highway and the FDR Drive, especially the FDR Drive in
the 90s. But what has gotten worse is Broadway. Don’t get involved in Broad-
way at all. (T 53)
This radio bulletin, as Goldsmith transcribes it, makes for theater of the ab-
surd. There is an accident on the Tappan Zee Bridge, yet the report maintains
that the bridge crossing is “not a bad looking ride overall.” The Whitestone
and Triboro bridges, connecting the Bronx and Queens to Manhattan, are
jammed, but they feed into the FDR Drive, which is “OK,” whereas Broad-
way is inexplicably jammed. The Jam Cam reports suggest no solution, no
corrective; they merely offer practical alternatives for specific problems.
Here’s a tip: take the Holland Tunnel rather than the George Washington
Bridge. Given the existential situation—too much available money, too
many cars, too many places to go, even on weekends and even through
bumper-to-bumper traffic—there is little that can be done to change things.
But problems also produce solutions; one must be flexible and inventive so
as to find another road—an alternative. Driving, in this scheme of things,
becomes a mental challenge—how to get there—rather than a preplanned
move toward one’s destination. Getting there, ironically, really does become
half the fun!
John Cage often cited the Zen koan “If something is boring after two
minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty- two,
and so on. Eventually one discovers that it’s not boring at all but very inter-
esting.”21 It is in this sense that Goldsmith’s “uncreative” and “boring” narra-
tive becomes increasingly absorbing. The more traffic bulletins one reads,
the more questions occur. Where, for starters, are all these people going
and why? If it is common knowledge that “big holiday” weekend traffic is
unbearable, why subject yourself to it? What percentage of New Yorkers
stay home? And what is the difference between those who come into the city
and those who go out? Between the natives, who have a shared vocabulary as
to the LIE Expressway, Tappan Zee Bridge, FDR Drive, and so on, and the
strangers who try to take the straightest path recommended by MapQuest,
only to find themselves stuck in the Holland Tunnel for hours?
And what about the traffic anchors themselves, those invisible voices that
deliver the reports at ten-minute intervals? From the perspective of a Go-
dard—or, say, a Guy Debord22—to be an anchor would be, no doubt, to be
confined to one of the lowest circles of hell, aiding and abetting what should
in any decent society be banned as a menace. But when, out of curiosity, I

googled the radio station 1010 WINS, the first item that appeared was a bio-
graphical sketch of one such job-holder:
Pete Tauriello has been 1010 WINS morning traffic anchor for 18 Years. Pete
began his radio career 29 years ago at Seton Hall University as a disc jockey on
WSOU. . . .
“The last thing I ever expected to be was a traffic reporter,” he says. “I sort of
fell into this job and then fell in love with it, so here I am 18 years later and lucky
enough to be on the biggest radio station in the world!”
Pete has a BA in communications, and has been married to his college sweet-
heart, Maureen, for 25 years. His 3 children, Sean 22, Kim 19 and Mark 14, keep
him as busy off the air as he is during the morning rush hour!
Ask him what his favorite jam cam is and he’ll tell you, “It has to be our East
River camera. I’m a bridge freak and I get to look at these beautiful works or archi-
tecture all day at the touch of a button. I really can enjoy both of my passions . . .
radio and beautiful bridges . . . and they pay me too. I ask you, does it get better
than that?”
As far as his favorite traffic story goes, “One day we had this gigantic water
main break and the subway stations looked like waterfalls. I was called upon to
do this story for our sister station in Chicago, WMAQ.” His biggest fear? “That
all the traffic jams will one day be solved and I’ll be out of a job.”
Pete, don’t worry about it.23
Twin passions: “radio and beautiful bridges.” What makes this little vignette
so amusing is its element of genuine surprise—a surprise too often absent in
the pages of so-called original writing. The Canadian Coach House Press has
recently published a book of poems by the experimental feminist poet Sina
Queyras called Expressway, a book that, according to the book jacket, “ex-
poses the paradox of modern mobility: the more roads and connections we
build, the more separate we feel.” And the poems, with their strong indict-
ment of the “corporations and commerce” that have allowed expressways to
dominate our lives, includes lines like the following:
Car Crashes into Petrol Station Making a left-hand.

His car was broadsided.
Fatal car crash in Al Ghusais. Police investigate.
Survivor remembers. Impact. Crash.
Plane crash-landed on a major expressway.
“Honeybee” dies in Two-car accident.
Near Mustang Road.
Does this scene look familiar?24
Perhaps too familiar. The “real” action, when we turn to the minute-by-
minute transcriptions in Traffic, is much more variable and surprising. Es-
caping the city on a holiday weekend—or, conversely, coming into the city
on the holiday weekend—is seen as a challenge to be overcome by the alert
driver. Paradoxes—nothing as abstract or general as “modern mobility,” but
such paradoxes as that, on the eve of a holiday weekend, midnight turns out
to be the worst time to travel because it is the hour when “holiday” road re-
pair is scheduled—haunt the scenario. Despite such “setbacks,” the narrative
moves from pain to progress, from the “Hudson River horror show” of 12:01
(T 1) and the “absolute nightmare” of 1:11 (T 5) to the moment at 11:01 the fol-
lowing evening when the report begins with the words “It’s been a long day
here but there is an end in sight on the East Side as we are actually beginning
to see movement on the southbound FDR for the first time in hours now that
that accident’s been cleared by the 59th Street Bridge” (T 111). By 11:21, our an-
chor person is exclaiming, “And a happy holiday to you too” (112). The tun-
nels to New Jersey are “looking swell,” the GW Bridge “still moving nicely,”
and “no delays at the Verrazano [Bridge].” There is always, of course, a colli-
sion somewhere—right before midnight on Highway 134 in Yorktown. But
the final entry (12:00) of the book reads as follows:
We’re over the hump and into the official holiday weekend. I want to wish every-
body out there a safe and happy holiday, especially when traveling on the road
this weekend. If you’re trying to get out of town now, you’re in for an easy time
of it. No reported delays around the metropolitan area as I see it live on the Pan-
asonic Jam Cam. Let’s head over to the East River where we’ve got no reported
delays running the length of the river from the Battery on up to the Triboro. FDR
is moving nicely as well. No reported incidents on the West Side Highway which,
if you recall, oh, say about six hours ago was simply not moving at all with delays
up to three hours. Now it’s deserted. And here’s what you need to know about the
bridges and tunnels: all the East River crossings moving well. No reported inci-
dents at the Triboro, 59th Street Bridge, Queens-Midtown Tunnel. Looking down
to the Williamsburg, Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges, it’s one big green light.
And over in Jersey, it’s never been better with traffic flowing smoothly across the
Hudson at both the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels. Even the GW Bridge which
has been choked for what seems like the last twenty-four hours is now flowing
like water. Remember, alternate side of the street parking rules are in effect for
tomorrow. (T 115)
“One big green light”—can life really be so beautiful? From east to west,
north to south, traffic is “flowing like water.” A triumphant conclusion,

worth waiting and struggling for! But of course as the last line—the refrain
throughout the piece—suggests, however peaceful that midnight moment
is, the cycle never stops: by tomorrow the streets, tunnels, and bridges will
once more be clogged.
“Remember, alternate side of the street parking rules are in effect tomor-
row.” This admonition, which is repeated with minor changes at set intervals
throughout Traffic—a kind of reality check on the chaotic traffic flow, her-
alding, as it does, the end of the holiday weekend—gives the book its very
particular rhythm. As in minimalist music, a single chord, like the name “GW
Bridge,” is introduced, repeated in different contexts, and then diminished
while a second motif comes to the fore. The melodic phrase “bridges and
tunnels” is repeated again and again, with only the slightest variation.
The “alternate parking” refrain, which will appear more than sixty times
in the “every ten minutes on the ‘ones’ ” traffic sequence, makes its first ap-
pearance at 4.31 a.m.:
Don’t forget the alternate side of the street parking rules, if you do manage to
drive into the city, will be suspended for the duration of the holiday, but you’ll
still have to pay the meters. (T 18)
The warning continues to appear, in shortened form and slightly altered

wording, every ten minutes or so until, shortly before 8 a.m., traffic is so
choked up that the focus shifts from the Manhattan streets themselves to the
movements of the trains, buses, and ferries that serve as traffic alternatives—
the Long Island Railroad, Jersey Transit’s commuter rail, the Staten Island
Ferry, Westchester County Bee Line Buses. Only by 10:41 are cars themselves
moving adequately enough for the “alternate side” rule to be mentioned.
Jams become worse in the course of the day, and when alternate side parking
is mentioned again. it is to say (5:21) that “tomorrow, alternate side parking
back in effect citywide in all Five Boroughs” (T 83). From here on out, the
refrain is steady: by 11:51 we hear, “Alternate side of the street parking rules
are back in effect” (T 113).
But wait a minute: what happened to the holiday? If the alternate side
rules were suspended in its honor, how long were they actually in effect?
Goldsmith’s “factual” narrative, plotted so carefully and divided into neat
block-paragraph segments, turns out to be wholly implausible, indicating as
it does that this holiday weekend is over before it has even begun. For before
anyone can take advantage of the open parking situation, the alternate side
rule is back in effect. Time’s linear progress, in other words, is illusory: it can-
not encompass the events supposed to occur at particular moments on the
scale; indeed, time collapses into space. If the final section (12:00), defined as
being “over the hump and into the official holiday weekend,” is terminated
by the resumption of normal traffic rules “tomorrow,” then the weekend has
all but never happened.
Goldsmith’s “transcription” is thus hardly passive recycling. The design
of the book emphasizes the hour in question, that hour (e.g., 3:00) printed
in boldface on an otherwise blank page, thus calling special attention to
the new “chapter.” But the chapter separation is illusory, as “events” merely
continue. Moreover, these numeric titles are left undesignated (a.m. versus
p.m.), and the individual entries, so specifically referring to the exact time
of day (e.g., 5:11), never tell us which day this is. In skipping from one day
to the next, or starting in midweekend, Goldsmith’s book thus transforms
the intersection of time and space into a wholly surreal situation. The week-
end, far from extended as it is in Godard’s film, is here telescoped to fit into
twenty-four hours. But in the digital age, a marked segment does not signal
any particular chronological frame, even as “place” can be multiple and “ac-
tion” simultaneous. At the same time, the “plot” ironically turns out to be a
perfect Aristotelian one with beginning, middle, and end, as the image of the
nightmare city gives way to a momentary vision of the open road—“one big
green light” pointing us into the future.
Inevitably, too, this green light recalls the one at the end of Daisy’s dock
in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Consider that novel’s famous final para-
graphs:
And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s
wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He
had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close
that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind
him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity, beyond the city, where the dark fields
of the republic rolled on under the night.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year re-
cedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run
faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the
past.25
Traffic gives these memorable images of desire an interesting spin. The cars
skimming the Long Island Expressway “against the current,” headed toward
the waters of Long Island Sound, “beat on” into an unknowable future that,
as we have already seen with respect to the narrative’s time course, is al-
ready past. Like Gatsby, Traffic’s drivers long to reach “that vast obscurity

beyond the city” where all those tunnels and bridges lead, to the streets be-
yond—streets never mentioned in the radio bulletins. And unattainable as
those mysterious “dark fields of the Republic” are, “tomorrow we will run
faster” to get there.26 “Over in Jersey it’s never been better with traffic flow-
ing smoothly across the Hudson.”
“The Madness of the Unexpected”

The July/August 2009 issue of Poetry features a little anthology of “Flarf and
Conceptual Writing,” edited by Goldsmith. In the introduction, he declares:
Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the
past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and
desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has
returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincer-
ity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s
really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined,
honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of
free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.27
This, like Goldsmith’s earlier provocations, has prompted strong objections

from fellow poets: Ron Silliman, for example, has again risen to the bait, de-
claring that no, no, disjunction is not dead at all, and that indeed Goldsmith’s
own transcriptions (e.g., of the New York Times in Day) are full of disjunctive
words and phrases. As for the claims made for appropriation: “the use of
found language being folded, spindled & mutilated in a variety of fashions”
is hardly news; consider “Jackson Mac Low’s use of insurance texts in Stanzas
for Iris Lezak, or Kathy Acker’s appropriation of the work of Harold Robbins
in the 1970s.”28
Such accusations recall nothing so much as the uproar over Duchamp’s
ready- mades (from the time of their inception in the 1910s well into the
1960s)—an uproar that the artist himself aided and abetted by insisting that
“the choice of readymades is always based on visual indifference and, at the
same time, on the total absence of good or bad taste.” “I don’t believe,” Du-
champ famously told Pierre Cabanne, “in the creative function of the art-
ist.” “He’s a man like any other. . . . Now everyone makes something, and
those who make things on canvas, with a frame, they’re called artists. For-
merly, they were called craftsmen, a term I prefer.”29 Such statements must,
of course, be understood in context. Duchamp took his “art” very seriously
indeed, his objection being not to art as such but specifically to what he took
to be the excessive importance given by the artists of his own day to “reti-
nal” art:
Since Courbet, it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That
was everyone’s error. The retinal shudder! Before, painting had other functions:
it could be religious, philosophical, moral. . . . Our whole century is completely
retinal, except for the Surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still
they didn’t go very far! In spite of the fact that Breton says he believes in judging
from a Surrealist point of view, down deep he’s still really interested in painting
in the retinal sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has to change.30
It has to change. These hardly sound like the words of an artist who doesn’t
care. “I tried constantly,” said Duchamp, “to find something which would not
recall what had happened before.” And by “what happened before,” he meant
before in his own work as well as that of others, prompting him to turn to
the reproduction in miniature of his earlier work in the boxes and boîtes en
valise rather than the making of new ready-mades or paintings. “Everything,”
he tells Cabanne, “was becoming conceptual.”31
Everything, one might add, including Duchamp’s own statements on
art, which must be read carefully and contextually in order to understand
the artist’s actual conception of art making. The same is true for Goldsmith.
When, in the Poetry feature, he outlines the relation of Conceptual poetry to
Flarf and presents specific poets from each category for our consideration,
he is, I would argue, producing what is itself a conceptual piece, designed to
produce debate as to the value of particular movements—movements from
which, in fact, Goldsmith has kept his distance, even as Duchamp never quite
allowed Dada to claim him as one of its own, citing instead such influences
as that of the Cranach paintings he saw in Munich in 1912 and the use of
the mathematical perspective of machine drawings he studied at the Biblio-
thèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris.32
But why the need for so much displacement, so much ironic self-
invention? Why call oneself boring or indifferent or uncreative when one
obviously has a passionate desire to create something new? For Goldsmith,
as for such of his precursors as Andy Warhol, John Cage, and especially Du-
champ, art defines itself by its struggle with its immediate past. For Du-
champ, this meant the retinal art of the Post-Impressionists and Cubists.
Since he wouldn’t (or couldn’t) emulate the painting skills of Picasso or
Matisse, Braque, or Gris, he decided at a critical moment to “do something

else.”33 But this emphatically did not mean that anything goes or that anyone
can be an artist. On the contrary, the enemy was a particular kind of paint-
ing, then dominant in Europe as in America.
Goldsmith, educated at the Rhode Island School of Design, was trained
to be a visual artist—a painter and sculptor. But since his coming of age
coincided with a general acceptance of Conceptual, Minimalist, and Lan-
guage art, he could move elsewhere only by shifting to the verbal/musical
realm, rethinking art issues from the outside: his now celebrated and unique
website Ubuweb gives special prominence to avant-garde musical compo-
sition, sound poetry, and film. And indeed, only from the outside could it
become clear to Goldsmith that the art discoveries of the later twentieth
century could function to renew the poetry world. At the same time, from
his vantage point the Language school, with its emphasis on nonreferential-
ity and the dissolution of the first-person lyric mode, was itself still rooted
in aesthetic issues no longer fully relevant. Whereas poetry anthologies and
blogs continue to this day to debate the relationship of experimental to tra-
ditional, raw to cooked, “post-avant” to the “school of quietude” (Silliman’s
terms),34 it must have seemed to Goldsmith, as to such other Conceptualists
as Caroline Bergvall and Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin and Jan Baetens,35
that as in Duchamp’s case, the time had come to do something else.
Ergo, poetry that doesn’t look like any poetry we’ve seen, presented as
“unreadable” so as to challenge us to read it. Its premise, Goldsmith has sug-
gested, is that in a digital environment, language, once “locked onto a page,”
has become “completely fluid; it’s lifted off the page and therefore able to
be poured into so many different forms and take so many different shapes
and really be molded and sculpted in a way that wasn’t possible before.”36
The WINS traffic reports, for example, seemingly identifiable by precise
time, can be taken from different calendar dates and spliced to produce a
new construct. A similar realignment takes place in The Weather or, in a dif-
ferent form, in Fidget, where despite the ostensibly “full” record of the body’s
every movement in the course of a twelve-hour time period, there are curi-
ous omissions. The protagonist, for starters, never dresses: as Rubén Gallo
notes, “The body wakes and walks about, showers, drinks, and masturbates,
but never once does he put on an item of clothing. . . . The nudity of Fidget
extends beyond the body. The book is . . . a nude text in which language has
been stripped down to its most basic elements. . . . The movements included
in the book are completely detached from emotions or other affective re-
sponses. . . . Fidget’s body is thus naked, abject, and machine-like.”37
Fidget could not have been produced without a tape recorder: Goldsmith
taped a small microphone to his body and went about his day describing
each of his movements as fully and accurately as possible. But what is accu-
racy in this context? Having completed his experiment, Goldsmith turned
from recording to transcription—a process by no means “natural”; on the
contrary, in his role as “word processor” Goldsmith has drastically edited
the tape so as represent the movements of a hypermechanical body, a body
twitching, pressing, stretching, grinding—in short, so “fidgety” it could
never sit still long enough to write what is transmitted to us as a piece of
writing.38 It is this paradox that animates Fidget throughout. Traffic similarly
“freezes” the speech flow of the radio anchors, creating, in the final analysis,
a long minimalist poem, whose Oulipo constraints, visualization of repeated
proper names, and mutating signs create textual “bridges and tunnels” that
challenge our reading habits.
Indeed, a reading of the New York Trilogy takes us back to Benjamin’s
Passagen-Werk, the site of those intricately appropriated and defamiliar-
ized texts that reimagine the ethos of the Second Empire from the vantage
point of a soon- to-be Nazi- occupied Paris of the 1930s. Who knows how
the “holiday weekend” circulation system detailed so exhaustively (and yet
so ambiguously) in Traffic will play itself out in the decades to come? Will
Manhattan still be accessible by means of the same bridges and tunnels? Will
city parking, alternate-side or otherwise, have been eliminated completely?
Or will the streets empty out as digital communication replaces “real” trans-
port? And how will poets conceptualize that unimaginable future?

Afterword
Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith’s new Anthology of Conceptual Writ-

ing1 features many texts that have anticipated or taken up the challenge
posed by what Goldsmith has called “uncreative writing.” Vanessa Place’s
Statement of Fact, for example, is composed of actual court records and police
reports, detailing such cases as that of sixty-plus counts against a particularly
indefensible rapist, followed by his fruitless appeal—a record that become
more and more ambiguous, puzzling, and contradictory as the detailed facts
are laid out and the felon’s victims’ own complicated stories unfold.2 The
more doggedly factual and informational the set of documents presented,
the more it manifests a surreal edge.
A similar process occurs in Craig Dworkin’s own Parse.3 As the endnote
tells us, Parse is a “translation” of a widely used 1874 grammar book by the
Reverend Edwin A. Abbott called How to Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Prin-
ciples of Scholarship to English Grammar. Abbott’s treatise, available to this day
and currently a Google book, tries to rationalize every possible grammatical
slot, beginning with the definition in chapter 1, “Subject and Object”: “The
Subject of a Verb in a stating sentence is the word or collection of words an-
swering to the question asked by putting ‘Who?’ or ‘What?’ before the Verb.”
In Abbott’s system, this definition is followed by “Caution I. If the Verb is
accompanied by an Adverb, as ‘He seldom sleeps’ . . . the Adverb should be
repeated in the question: ‘Who seldom sleeps?’ Answer: ‘He,’ Subject.” But as
Wittgenstein shows so fully in the Philosophical Investigations, not every word
in the language can be thus defined. Dworkin’s own parsing provides literal
renditions of every single punctuation mark or word in Abbott’s how- to
book, creating a composition with a surreal edge, as in the following:
parenthesis cardinal Arabic numerical parenthesis marks of quotation Definite Ar-

ticle subject preposition of the infinitive active present tense transitive verb infinitive mood
definite article direct object past tense verb period marks of quotation (Parse, 18)
The more complete the description of the units in a given sentence, the less
we know. Indeed, the hyperrationalism of Dworkin’s codified grammar re-
calls Beckett’s Watt in its mania to communicate what is finally incommuni-
: 167
cable. What, the Duchampian author seems to be asking, is grammar any-
way? And could we return to origins, “translating” Dworkin’s sentences back
into the sentences they purport to describe?
In his earlier Dure, Dworkin’s intertext is an unsigned 1519 self-portrait
by Albrecht Dürer that bears the inscription “Do der gelb fleck ist and mit
dem finger darauff deut do ist mir weh,” which Dworkin translates, “Where
the yellow spot is and where I am pointing with my finger, that is where it
hurts.”4 The title Dure, from durus (Latin for “hard”), refers both to the enig-
matic art of Dürer as well as to the English derivatives of durus like duration,
durable, and endure. And Dworkin’s intricate citational mosaic-poem exam-
ines the poet’s own ability to endure a particularly painful but very obliquely
treated love affair.5
In a related vein, the Belgian poet Jan Baetens, whose work has close ties
with Oulipo, has produced a witty and moving “novelization” of Jean-Luc
Godard’s classic 1962 film Vivre sa vie by transposing the film’s twelve “chap-
ters” into fifteen highly formal love poems—pantoums, hepta- syllabics,
reduced sonnets, rhopalic verses—that bear witness to the power of lyric
to distance the banality of everyday life and to ironize the film’s didactic
approach to that life via homage to its visual images, the very images the
lyric sequence can render only verbally.6 As in the case of Dworkin’s Dure,
Baetens’s experiment allows for the revival of love poetry by other means.
Meanwhile, Goldsmith is working on a new book to be called Capital,
modeled on Benjamin’s Arcades Project and set in New York in the century
leading up to the turning point of 9/11/2001. For the past five years, Gold-
smith explains, he has been scanning and digitizing every book he could find
“about” about New York and then electronically cutting and pasting their
“best parts,” throwing away the remainder “like empty husks.” Thus although
the book, which will be finished when it is the exact length of Arcades, is
made entirely of appropriated text, the passages in question, sorted into
folders with alphabetically arranged titles (ranging from “Abstraction,” “Ad-
vertising Signage,” “Alcohol, Bar, Drugs,” and “Amnesia” to “World’s Fair 39,”
“World’s Fair 64,” and “Writing”) and cross-referenced without attribution
(except in the bibliography at the end), the actual composition of Capital
will depend on the artist’s particular choices. ”In the end,” says Goldsmith, “I
want this to be neither reference book nor history book. It should not have
any function whatsoever except to give a completely poetic and subjective
view of the way one person might find his way through the mass of literature
written about the capital of the twentieth century, New York.”7
The selection process, rule-bound as it is, with Benjamin’s Arcades Project
168 : a f t e rwor d
providing the parameters, is ultimately carried out according to taste, as John
Cage put it some twenty years ago in characterizing his own “writings-
through,” ostensibly generated by chance operations.8 According to taste: it is
important to remember that the citational or appropriative text, however
unoriginal its actual words and phrases, is always the product of choice—
and hence of individual taste. Let me cite once more Antoine Compagnon’s
La seconde main:
When I cite, I excise, I mutilate, I extract. There is a primary object, placed
before me, a text I have read, that I am reading, and the course of my reading is
interrupted by a phrase. I return to the beginning; I reread. The phrase reread
becomes a formula, isolated from the text. The rereading separates it from that
which precedes and that which follows. The chosen fragment converts itself into
a text no longer a bit of a text, a part of a sentence or a discourse, but a chosen bit,
an amputated limb, not yet a transplant, but already an organ, cut off and placed
in reserve.9
In the twenty-first century, it is those “reserve” organs, no longer mere frag-

ments but often the texts themselves, that people the poetic landscape.
Sometimes the graft works, sometimes it doesn’t. But the difference, in Ger-
trude Stein’s words, is spreading.
a f t e rwor d : 169
Notes
c h a p t e r on e
1. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer” (1934), in Selected Writings, vol. 2,

1927–1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rod-
ney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1999),
771; Charles Bernstein, “Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Im-
plausibly Deniable Links,” Poetry, February 2009, http://www.poetryfoundation
.org/journal/feature.html?id=182837.
2. Times Literary Supplement, September 20, 1923. This review was reprinted in the
TLS’s “Then and Now” series, June 4, 2009, http://entertainment.timesonline.co
.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article6430746.ece. Edgell Rickword’s
review is also reprinted in Jewel Spears Brooker, ed., T. S. Eliot: The Contempo-
rary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 110–12. Brooker’s
invaluable book includes the whole gamut of responses to The Waste Land, from
Edmund Wilson’s praise to the newspaper critiques: see 75–120.
3. Poems by Rickword (1898– 1922) appeared in the Oxford Poetry 1921 anthol-
ogy, alongside those of Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Richard Hughes, and
others. He studied French at Oxford, adored Baudelaire, and published Rimbaud:
The Boy and the Poet in 1924. In 1934 he joined the Communist Party and edited
the Left Review. See Charles Hobday, Edgell Rickword: A Poet at War (London: Car-
canet, 1989);Rickword, “A Conversation with Edgell Rickword,” interview by
Alan Young and Michael Schmidt, PN Review 1 (1973): 73–89.
4. “Then and Now,” Times Literary Supplement, June 4, 2009. In fact, Eliot uses six
different foreign languages in The Waste Land: French, Italian, German, Latin,
Greek, and Sanskrit. I discuss this issue more fully in chapter 6.
5. For a useful discussion of the sources and use of these and the other direct quo-
tations in The Waste Land, see Elizabeth Gregory, Quotation and Modern American
Poetry (Houston: Rice University Press, 1996), 25–72.
6. The magic lantern is a central symbol in the opening chapter of Proust’s Du Côté
de chez Swann, published in 1913; the entire novel, A la recherché du temps perdu, was
published in 1922, the same year as The Waste Land.
7. Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main ou le travail de la citation (Paris: Éditions du
Seuil, 1979), 29. My translation.
8. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” (1931), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–1934, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, trans. Rodney Livingstone
(Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1999), 454.
: 171
9. On the vagaries of reading such conceptual texts, see Craig Dworkin, Reading the
Illegible (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003).
10. Ron Silliman, In the American Tree (orig. 1986; Orono, ME: National Poetry Foun-
dation, 2001).
11. For the range of Andersen’s poetic activities, see his bilingual (English/Norwe-
gian) Facebook page. The Audiatur festival for nypoesi hold annual poetry festivals
in Oslo.
12. http://www.nypoesi.net/. It is interesting that the beautiful 800+-page Audiatur:
Katalog for ny.poesi, published in Bergen, Norway (September 2007), reproduces
the works mostly in Norwegian translation (a few essays, including my own, are
exceptions). Book form, it seems, demands a readership in the native language.
13. See http://sibila.com.br/. Lehto is playing on T. S. Eliot’s lines “Since our con-
cern was speech, and speech impelled us / To purify the dialect of the tribe,” from
“Little Gidding,” the fourth of the Four Quartets. Eliot’s passage is, in its turn, an
allusion to Mallarmé’s ”Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe”: “Donner un sens plus pur aux
mots de la tribu.”
14. http:// www.doublechange .com. Double Change is published bilingually and
brings together such leading U.S. poets as Rosmarie Waldrop and Cole Swensen
with their French counterparts Dominique Fourcade, Olivier Cadiot, and Abi-
gail Lang, translation and exchange playing a major role in the journal and in the
group’s lecture series.
15. I take these three examples from Douglas Messerli’s anthology From the Other
Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon,
1994), 1057, 512, 997.
16. All six of these poems appear in Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert
O’Clair’s The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, vol. 2 (New
York: W. W. Norton, 2003). For the original sources see Elizabeth Bishop, “The
Armadillo,” in The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969),
122–23; Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row,
136); Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (New York: Harper & Row, 1981), 191; James
Wright, “A Blessing,” in The Collected Poems (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 1971), 135; Denise Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage,” in Poems, 1960–67
(New York: New Directions, 1983), 77; A. A. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet,” in Selected
Poems, exp. ed. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1987), 147.
17. Gerald Bruns, “The Pagans and Karen MacCormack,” in Antiphonies: Essays on
Women’s Experimental Poetries, ed. Nate Dorward (Toronto: The Gig, 2006), 207.
18. Kenneth Goldsmith, “On Conceptual Writing,” http://www.poetryfoundation
.org/dispatches/journals/2007.01.22.html. This web manifesto is reprinted as a
pamphlet, “A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation” (2007), and may also
be found on Kenneth Goldsmith’s website (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/
goldsmith/). Cf. Goldsmith’s works posted on UBUWEB (http://www.ubu.com).
19. See Ernst Jandl, “erschaffung der eva” (The creation of Eve), 1957), in Concrete
172 : n o t e s t o pag e s 6 –12

Poetry: A World View (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 21–22; com-
mentary, 267, and figure 36. The poem is taken from Ernst Jandl, Laut und Luise
(Stuttgart: Philip Reklam, 1976), unpaginated.
20. Cia Rinne, archives zaroum, 2008, http://www.afsnitp.dk/galleri/archiveszaroum.
See Leevi Lehto’s commentary about Rinne’s work on his website, http://www
.leevilehto.net.
21. The print version of the web image (see figure 1) is called zaroum and was printed
and bound by Karisto Cy in Finland in an edition of one thousand copies. In
her new notes for soloists (Stockholm, 2009), Cia Rinne reproduces related visual-
verbal experiments, this time in book form: the printed page complements her
flash works. Here is a striking short poem from the section “notes on war & god.”
In German, war means “was” (singular past tense of the verb “to be”):
war was
was war
was war?
war war
war was?
war was
here.
22. Jacques Roubaud, “Introduction: The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art,” in Oulipo
Compendium, ed. Harry Matthews and Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas, 1998),
38–39.
23. Jan Baetens, “Free Writing, Constrained Writing: The Ideology of Form,” Poetics
Today 18, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 5–6.
24. Multilingualism has also been called xenoglossia: see Keigo Suga, “Translation,
Exophony, Omniphony,” in Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Doug Slay-
maker (New York: Lexington Books, 2007), 21–33. For further discussion of these
terms, see chapter 5.
The great exophonic writer of the twentieth century is, of course, Samuel
Beckett, who is also a great multilingual one. Writing in French proved to be a
liberating constraint for Beckett; indeed, sentences in his English texts usually
contain phrasing from three or four foreign languages: witness his recently pub-
lished letters as well as the novels and plays. Beckett’s multilingualism and exo-
phony demand a full study; at the same time, he is neither a concretist nor, after
Whoroscope and the early “Provençal” poems, a primarily citational writer, so I do
not include him here.
25. For an interesting discussion of this situation, see Zadie Smith, “Speaking in
Tongues,” The New York Review of Books 61, no. 3 (February 26, 2009): 41–44. Smith
points out that, like so many contemporary writers, Barack Obama weaves other
languages and dialects into the fabric of his Dreams from My Father.
26. Leevi Lehto, “In the Beginning Was Translation,” in The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry
n o t e s t o pag e s 13–16 : 173

of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2008).
27. See Perloff, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992),
77–120.
28. See Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New
York: Museum of Modern Arts / Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 54.
29. Craig Dworkin, introduction to The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing,
http://www.ubu.com/concept.
30. Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1976), in Content’s Dream:
Essays, 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986), 40–48. Bernstein brilliantly
parodies the expressivist model of the 1970s:
Or take it this way: I want to just write—let it come out—get in touch

with some natural process—from brain to pen—with no interference of
typewriter, formal pattern. & it can seem like the language itself—having to
put it into words—any kind of fixing a version of it—gets in the way. That I
just have this thing inside me . . . this flow, this movement of consciousness.
But there are no thoughts except through language. (47–48)
31. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Rich-
ard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 49–55.
32. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” (1969), in Language, Counter-memory, Prac-
tice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1977), 116.
33. Fredric Jameson, conclusion to Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capi-
talism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 306. Subsequently cited as
Cultural Logic.
34. Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 4.
35. In The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian
Formalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), Jameson singles out
Tynyanov as the most “lucid” expositor of the Formalist position and one who at
least understood history as dialectic, even if Tynyanov’s was not a fully fledged
Marxism: see 91–96.
36. Yury Tynyanov, “Literaturnyj fakt,” in Archaisty i novatory (Leningard, 1929), as
translated by Peter Steiner in Russian Formalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1984), 107, and see 99– 137. For Tynyanov’s “On Literary Evolution,” see
Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, eds., Readings in Russian Poetics: Formal-
ist and Structuralist Views (orig. 1971; Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), 66–78.
The essay is also available in French in Tzvetan Todorov, Théorie de la littérature:
Texts des Formalistes russes réunis, présentés et traduits par Tzvetan Todorov (Paris: Édi-
tions de Seuil, 1965), 120–36. For discussions of Tynyanov’s theory of literary evo-
lution and literature as system, see Viktor Erlich, “Literary Dynamic,” in Russian
174 : n o t e s t o pag e s 16 – 2 0
Formalism: History and Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton, 1980), 251–71; Jurij Striet-
der, Literary Structure, Evolution, and Value: Russian Formalism and Czech Structural-
ism Reconsidered (Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 69–74.
37. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 76.
38. Hart Crane, “Voyages, VI,” in White Buildings (1926) and Complete Poems and Se-
lected Letters (New York: Library of America, 2006), 29.
c h a p t e r t wo
1. Walter Benjamin, “First Sketches,” in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 840.
Subsequently cited in the text as Arcades. For the original, see “Erste Notizen,” in
Das Passagen-Werk, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
1982), 5:1008. Subsequently cited as Passagen.
2. According to the translators, Konvolut, literally a bundle, derives not from Benja-
min himself but from his friend Theodor Adorno, who sifted through the manu-
script, which was sent to him in 1947; it had been hidden away by Georges Bataille
in the Bibliothèque nationale during World War II. Konvolut is an awkward term
in English because of its cognate convoluted, but the translators decided to retain
it rather than to use sheaf, file, or folder (Arcades, xiv).
3. On the genesis and organization of the Arcades Project, see Rolf Tiedemann, “Ein-
leitung des Heraußgebers,” in Passagen, 11–41; translated as “Dialectics at a Stand-
still: Approaches to the Passagen-Werk,” in Arcades, 929–46; Susan Buck-Morss,
The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1989), 1–7, 47–57; Ursula Marx et al., eds., Walter Benjamin’s Archive:
Images, Text, Signs (London: Verso, 2007), 251–54, subsequently cited as Marx.
4. Paris, capitale du XIXième siècle: Le livre des passages, trans. Jean Lacoste (Paris: Édi-
tions du Cerf, 1989).
5. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem and The-
odor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994), 580, 582.
6. See Arcades, 931, Passagen, 13. The reference is to the N Konvolut, note N2, 6; see
Arcades, 461.
7. Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin the Scrivener,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, His-
tory, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28.
8. See http://www.wbenjamin.org/walterbenjamin.html for a very useful compen-
dium of recent studies, conferences, and symposia. Christopher Rollason’s essays,
especially “The Task of Walter Benjamin’s Translators: Reflections on the Dif-
ferent Language Versions of ‘Das Passagen-Werk,’ ” lay out the details about the
various translations and their problems.
no t e s t o page s 2 0 –28 : 175

9. For a somewhat different perspective on the poeticity of the Passagen-Werk, which
the author sees in terms of “colportage,” see Graham Lyons, “Citation as Expla-
nation: Walter Benjamin and Louis Zukofsky as Colporteurs,” Jacket 36 (2008),
http://jacketmagazine.com/36/index.shtm.
10. The French “translation” is not quite a translation either, since the original French
citations need merely be reproduced, and the German commentary is translated
into French so that the text appears to be seamless. But in the French edition the
reader is at least presented with the citations from Baudelaire, Rimbaud, etc., in
the original, whereas the all-English Arcades Project undercuts the work’s polylin-
gualism completely.
11. The page (Ms 2330) is reproduced in Marx, 261.
12. See Marx, 253; the page illustrated is marked J68.
13. Cf. the similar p. 65 of the French translation.
14. According to Sieburth (“Benjamin the Scrivener,”33), Benjamin evidently “wanted
to inscribe citation and commentary, the text and its interpretation on the same
plane of the page (with the uncanny result that even his own authorial intrusions,
many of which can be found in his other published works, themselves begin to
sound like quotations).” I think this is often the case—commentary and citation
merge—but in the manuscript the citations are regularly indented, so that Tie-
demann certainly had the authority to proceed as he did.
15. According to Buck-Morss, in 1935–36 Benjamin was working in the archives of
the Cabinet des estamples in the Bibliothèque Nationale looking for visual images
that would serve as analogues to his citations. “Benjamin had copies made of rel-
evant illustrations . . . keeping them in his Paris apartment as ‘a kind of album.’
The album appears to have been lost” (Dialectics of Seeing, 71).
16. The relation of capital to lowercase entries is equally eccentric. “Modes of Light-
ing” (Beleuchtungsarten) is assigned T; “Reproduction, Technology, Lithography”
is under i, and many of the files in the lowercase sequence had not yet been filled.
And in neither case do titles have anything to do with the letter of the files: “Pros-
titution,” for example, could have been given P but it is O.
17. “Chanson nouvelle,” in Nouveaux tableaux de Paris, ou Observations sur les moeurs et
usages des Parisiens au commencement du XIX e siècle (Paris, 1828), 1:27; Arthur Rim-
baud, “Solde,” in Oeuvres, ed. Susanne Bernard (Paris: Garnier, 1960), 293.
18. Arcades, 31. I use the black squares of the German edition as more accurate than
the empty rectangles of the English text. When Benjamin embeds French cita-
tions into his German notes, my practice here will be to give both the German
and the English texts. If it is only the German, I give just the English translation.
19. Kenneth Goldsmith, No.111 2.7.93–10.20.96 (Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997).
This encyclopedic poem collects all the phrases collected between the title dates
that end in sounds related to the sound er (schwa), organized alphabetically by
syllable count, beginning with one-syllable entries for chapter 1 and ending with
the 7,228-syllable The Rocking Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence.
176 : no t e s t o page s 28 –37

20. The reference also sends the reader to Benjamin’s various essays on his own hash-
ish experiences, especially “Hashish, Beginning of March 1930,” in Selected Writ-
ings, 327–30, and “Hashish in Marseilles” (1932), in Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927–
34 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1999), 673–79.
21. Cf. J22a2, which Benjamin himself cross-references.
22. Cited by Ekke Bonk, “Delay Include,” in Joseph Cornell / Marcel Duchamp . . . in
Resonance, exh. cat., Menil Collection, Houston, and Philadelphia Museum of Art
(New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 1998), 102; cf. Francis M. Naumann, Mar-
cel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 17–18, 135–36.
23. See Naumann, Marcel Duchamp, 136.
24. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Ed-
mund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979), 66.
chapter thr ee
1. The program (March 6, 2001), held at the Society of the Americas on Park Avenue,
also included K. David Jackson, A. S. Bessa, and Claus Clüver, all speaking on the
Noigandres poets.
2. Kenneth Goldsmith, “From (Command) Line to (Iconic) Constellation,” Ubuweb
Papers, http://www.ubu/com/papers/goldsmith_command.html.
3. Caroline Bayard, The New Poetics in Canada and Quebec: From Concretism to Post-
modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 24. Umberto Eco’s
term appears in his Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1979), 191.
4. See Marjorie Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 114–18.
5. See especially William Marx, ed., Les arrière-gardes au xxe siècle (Paris: Presses uni-
versitaires de France, 2004). Translations from this text are my own.
6. Antoine Compagnon, “L’arrière-garde, de Péguy à Paulhan et Barthes,” in ibid.,
99. The reference is to Roland Barthes, “Reponses” (1971), in Oeuvres complètes
(Paris: Seuil, 2002), 3:1038: “To be avant-garde is to know that which has died. To
be arrière-garde, is to continue to love it.”
7. Haroldo de Campos, “The Ex- centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation,
Transculturation: Second thoughts: the dialectics of subaltern and overaltern lit-
erary models,” in K. David Jackson, Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian
Poet (Oxford: Center for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University Press, 2005), 11–13.
8. Oyvind Fahlström, “Hipy papy bithithdthuthda bthuthdy,” in Teddy Hultberg,
Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Manipulating the World, bilingual text (Stockholm:
Sveriges Radio Förlag,” 1999), 108–20. The manifesto, translated by Karen Lo-
evgren, is also found in Mary Ellen Solt’s classic Concrete Poetry: A World View
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968), 74–78. Parenthetical phrases are
n o t e s t o pag e s 37–5 4 : 177

Hultberg’s. For a detailed consideration of Fahlstrom’s “Hipy papy,” see Antonio
Sergio Bessa, Oyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing (Evanston, IL: Northwestern
University Press, 2008), 3–30.
9. F. T. Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” in Critical Writings,
new ed., ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 20060), 107–19. The manifesto, originally printed as a four-page leaf-
let in French and Italian, is dated May 11, 1912, and August 11, 1912. For the full Ital-
ian text, see F. T. Marinetti, Opere, vol. 2, Teoria e invenzione futurisa, ed. Luciano
de Maria (Milan: Mondadori, 1968), 40–54.
10. David Burliuk et al., “Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in Russian Futurism through
Its Manifestos, 1912–1928, ed. Anna Lawton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1988), 51–52.
11. Kasimir Malevich, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Painterly
Realism (1915), in Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934,
ed. and trans. John E. Bowlt (New York: Viking, 1976), 116–35; see 126.
12. See Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence
between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Ham-
ilton (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2008). Bishop is referring to Eugene
Jolas’s famed transition magazine, where Finnegans Wake first appeared along with
other seminal avant-garde works, including, in issue 6, some of the experimental
poems of e. e. cummings. D. (Dudley) Fitts was a noted classicist. Ezra Pound’s
Thrones (Cantos 96–109) had appeared in 1959, following Rock-Drill (Cantos 85–
95), published in 1955.
13. See Robert Lowell to Ezra Pound, July 12, 1952, cited in Humphrey Carpenter, A
Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound (London: Faber, 1988), 680.
14. Velimir Khlebnikov, Collected Works, 3vol. 1, Letters and Theoretical Writings, ed.
Charlotte Douglas, trans. Paul Schmidt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1987), 272–73.
15. Plato, “Cratylus,” in Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1961), 456 (no. 421b).
16. Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Basis of Concrete Poetry” (1977), in Dissonance (if you are
interested) (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 47–57; see 57.
17. See Solt, Concrete Poetry, 119.
18. Guy Davenport, “Narrative Time and Form,” in The Geography of the Imagination
(San Francisco: North Point, 1981), 314, my emphasis.
19. See, for example, Solt, Concrete Poetry, 8.
20. In his essay “Brazilian and German Avant-Garde Poetry,” in Novas: Selected Writings
of Haroldo de Campos, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2007), 249–75, Haroldo de Campos notes that
“Gomringer practiced an extremely concise poetry with a rigorous and orthogo-
nal construction, thematically limited to notes from nature or an urban land-
178 : n o t e s t o pag e s 5 4 – 61
scape, or instead abstract motifs of dynamic structures. . . . Brazilian concrete
poetry . . . was more complex. It employed, instead of a two- dimensional (or-
thogonal) construction, a multidimensional, less concentrated one” (252). This
book is subsequently cited in the text as Novas.
21. See Cornelius Schnauber, “Einleutung,” in Deine Träume, Mein Gedicht: Eugen
Gomringer und die Konkrete Poesie (Nördlingen, Germany: Greno, 1989), 5–6.
22. Ibid., 7.
23. In “How the Letters Learnt to Dance: On Language Dissection in Dadaist, Con-
crete and Digital Poetry,” in Avant-Garde / Neo-Avant-Garde, ed. Dietrich Scheun-
emann (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), 149–72, Anna Katharine Schaffner points out
that in the “wind” ideogram, movement is evoked in that “the word ‘wind’ can
be read in four directions, pairs each running the reverse course” (163). In the “O
Poem” the title’s circle becomes a negative presence, the two circle halves out-
lined by four triangles made of the container words: show, flow, blow, grow.
24. See Kurt Marti, “Zu Eugen Gomringers ‘Konstellationen,’ ” and Peter Demetz,
“Eugen Gomringer und die Entwicklung der Konkreten Poesie,” in Schnauber,
Deine Träume, 88–94, 151, respectively.
25. Solt, Concrete Poetry, 67.
26. Ibid., 68.
27. Ibid., 69–70, emphasis mine.
28. Eugen Gomringer, das stundenbuch, the book of hours, le livre d’heures, el libro de las
horas, timebook (1965; Stamberg, Germany: Joseph Keller Verlag, 1980), unpagi-
nated. In the English translation of Jerome Rothenberg, this page reads: “your
question / my mind / your question / my word / your question / my answer / your
question / my song / your question / my poem.”
29. For an excellent short visual history of the Brazilian movement, see the DVD
Poesia Concreta: O projeto verbivocovisual, curated by Cid Campos et al. (São Paulo:
Academia di Cultura, 2009). This DVD exhibits many of the concrete poems as
well as the clip poemas (in motion).
30. Ezra Pound, The Cantos (New York: New Directions, 1993), 89–90.
31. In the preface to his French translation of Augusto de Campos, Anthologie des-
poesia (Romainville, France: Al Dante, 2002), 7– 8, Jacques Donguy has a long
scholarly footnote explaining the etymology of Noigandres. See also Hugh Ken-
ner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 116. In an e-mail
to me on June 26, 2002, Augusto de Campos provides further information about
the term, describing his own consultation of the four- volume Provenzalisches
Supplement-Wörterbuch (1904), where he found additional etymological data
on Arnaut Daniel’s use of the word. But Augusto is skeptical about the sexual
theme put forward, Donguy says, by Provençalists like Julien Blaine, and he has
remarked, in e-mails to me, that he thinks Donguy is also too ingenuous.
32. See “Brazilian Concrete Poetry: How It Looks Today; Harold and Augusto de
n o t e s t o pag e s 61– 6 6 : 179

Campos interviewed by Marjorie Perloff,” Arshile, 1994; rpt. in Jackson, Haroldo
de Campos, 165–79; see 171.
33. Jackson, Haroldo de Campos, 171, emphasis mine.
34. Ibid., 173.
35. Ibid., 170, 175–76.
36. Augusto de Campos, “Lygia,” first published in Poetamenos (1973) in Futura type-
face offset, reproduced in many of Augusto’s volumes—for example, Poesia,
1949–1979 (São Paulo: Atelier Editorial, 2001), rpt. in Noigandres 2 (1955) in Kabel
Sanserif typeface. The digital version used here is in Futura bold font; it is most
easily accessible online at Augusto de Campos’s official website, http://www2.uol
.com.br/augustodecampos/poemas.htm.
37. Antonio Sergio Bessa, “The Image of Voice in Augusto de Campos’s Poetamenos,”
manuscript.
38. See Augusto de Campos, Anthologie despoesia, 22, and e-mail to me on June 26,
2002. Augusto recalls how he first saw the name Solange Sohl in 1949 “signing a
very beautiful poem in a newspaper,” and then learned this was a pseudonym of
Patricia Galvao or “Pagu,” the former wife of political activist Oswald de Andade
and first translator of Joyce’s Ulysses into Portuguese. In 1983 Augusto published
an edition of her work under the title PAGU: VIDA-OBRA.
39. See Jackson, Haroldo de Campos, 9.
40. In the order cited: Haroldo de Campos, os nomes e os navios: Homero, Ilîada, II (Rio
de Janeiro: Sette Letras, 1999); Augusto de Campos, Mais Provençais (São Paulo:
Capnhia das lettras, 1987); Augusto de Campos, Irmaos Germanos (Santa Caterina,
Brazil: Editions Noa Noa, 1992); Augusto de Campos, Rimbaud livre (São Paulo:
Editora Perspectiva, 1992); Augusto de Campos, Hopkins: A beleza difiicil (Editora
Perspectiva, 1997); Augusto de Campos, e.e. cummings 40 POEM(A)S (São Paulo:
Editora Brasiliense, 1987); Haroldo de Campos, O Arco-iris branco (Rio de Janeiro:
Imago, 1997); Augusto de Campos, O anticritico (São Paulo: Companhia des Let-
ters, 1986); Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Panaroma do “Finnegans Wake” (São
Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 1971).
41. Jackson, Haroldo de Campos, 10.
42. The cover image of Una rosa para Gertrude is available online at http://www.fotolog
.com/afasiadeldeseoso/50624715/.
43. Haroldo de Campos, “Poetic Function and Ideogram: The Sinological Argu-
ment.” The translation here cited is that of Kevin Mundy and Mark Nelson in H.
de Campos, Novas, 47.
44. See Haun Saussy, “Fenollosa Compounded: A Discrimination,” in The Chinese
Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, critical ed. by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra
Pound, ed. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2008), 1–40. Saussy notes that Haroldo, in line with the Derrida
of Of Grammatology, came to regard Fenollosa as a pioneer in the articulation of a
graphic, as opposed to a vocal or mimetic, poetics (see 36–37).
180 : n o t e s t o pag e s 6 6 – 73
45. Haroldo de Campos, Galáxias, trans. Odile Cisneros with Jill Susan Levine, http://
www.arts.ualberta.ca/~galaxias/; Galáxias, 1963–1976 (São Paulo: Ed. Ex-Libris,
1984; 2nd ed., org. Trajano Vieira, São Paulo Editora 34, 2004). There is an excel-
lent French edition prepared by Inès Oseki-Dépré and the author (Paris: La main
courante, 1998).
46. “The Invention of ‘Concrete Prose’: Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias and After,”
in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Pres,
2004), 175–93. The essay is reprinted in K. David Jackson, Haroldo de Campos: A
Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet (Oxford: Centre for Brazlian Studies, Ox-
ford University Press, 2005), 139–61. Jackson’s collection contains other impor-
tant essays on Galáxias, including his own, “Music of the Spheres in Galáxias,”
119–28.
47. For examples of Jandl’s techique, see “Jandl” on Ubuweb, http://www.ubu.com/
historical/jandl/index.html; for Bök, see especially Tango with Cows: Book Art of the
Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1917, proceedings of a Getty Research Center sympo-
sium, 2009, at http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Explodity.php/.
48. Augusto de Campos, “SOS” (2000), in Clip-Poemas, http://www2.uol.com.br/au-
gustodecampos/clippoemas.htm.
49. Donguy, preface, 118.
50. Augusto de Campos, “REV ” (1970), in Equivocábulos (São Paulo: Author, 1970);
see Clip-Poemas, http://www2.uol.com.br/augustodecampos/clippoemas.htm.
51. The intertextual reference was pointed out to me by Odile Cisneros, April 12,
2007. On the relation of Augusto’s clip poems to later digital poetry, see Fried-
rich W. Block, Mark Amerika, and Giselle Beiguelman, POEs1s: The Aesthetics of
Digital Poetry (Berlin: Hatje Kanz, 2004); Christopher Funkhouser, “Augusto de
Campos, Digital Poetry and the Anthropophagic Imperative,” Ciberletras, http://
www.lehman.cuny.edu/ciberletras/v17/funkhauser.htm (sic).
c h a p t e r f ou r
1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-
lin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press / Harvard University Press, 1999), 476 (N11, 3);
my emphasis; Jean Ricardou, Pour une théorie du nouveau roman (Paris: Seuil, 1971),
118, translation mine.
2. Jacques Roubaud, “Sables, syllabes: Préface,” in Galaxies, trans. Inés Oseki-Dépré
and Jacques Roubaud (Paris: La Main courante, 1998) unpaginated. For the origi-
nal, see Haroldo de Campos, Galáxias (São Paulo: Editora Ex-Libris, 1984).
3. Haroldo de Campos, “Sanscreed Latinized: The Wake in Brazil and Hispanic
America,” Tri Quarterly 38 (Winter 1977): 56.
4. This portmanteau word is James Joyce’s; see Finnegans Wake (New York: Penguin,
1971), 341.
5. I discuss this more fully in my “The Invention of ‘Concrete Prose’: Haroldo de
n o t e s t o pag e s 73– 77 : 181

Campos’s Galáxias and After,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press, 2004), 175–93. See also Inês Oseki-Dépré, “Transla-
tion as Creation and Criticism: Galáxias as Text as Theory of Translation,” in
K. David Jackson, Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet
(Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University Press, 2005), 119–28.
6. See “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” in Concrete Poetry: A World View, ed. Mary
Ellen Solt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 71..
7. Rosmarie Waldrop, “A Basis of Concrete Poetry” (1976), in Dissonance (if you are
interested) (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 49.
8. Jacques Roubaud, “Introduction: The Oulipo and Combinatorial Art,” (1991), in
Oulipo Compendium, ed. Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (London: Atlas,
1998), 37–44; see 38–39.
9. See Michel Bénabou and Jacques Roubaud’s set of perverses called “Alexandre au
greffoir,” in La bibliothèque oulipiènne (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1987), 2:227. I discuss
“Les chats” more fully in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: Univer-
sity of Alabama Press, 2004), 208–9.
10. Jan Baetens and Jean- Jacques Poucel, “Introduction: The Challenge of Con-
straint,” “Constrained Writing,” spec. issue of Poetics Today 30, no. 4 (Winter
2009), 613. This special issue, which contains an earlier version of this chapter,
also contains important essays on constraint by Jacques Roubaud, Richard Dem-
ing, Chris Andrewes, and Warren Motte.
11. Roubaud, “Introduction,” 39.
12. Waldrop, Dissonance, 46.
13. Oyvind Fahlström I etern—Manipulera världen / Oyvind Fahlström on the Air—Ma-
nipulating the World, bilingual ed., ed. and trans. Teddy Hultberg (Fylkingen, Swe-
den: Sveriges Radios Förlag, 1999), 109–20; see 115, 118. The manifesto, in Karen
Loewren’s translation, is also included in Concrete Poetry, ed. Solt, 75–78.
14. Jacques Roubaud, “Poetry & Orality,” in The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound,
ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2009), 20.
15. See Oyvind Fahlström, in Oulipo Compendium, ed. Harry Mathews and Alastair
Brotchie (London: Atlas, 1998), 110..
16. Roubaud, “Introduction,” 41.
17. Jacques Jouet, “With (and without) Constraints,” trans. Roxanne Lapidus, Sub-
Stance 30, no. 3 (2001): 4.
18. Jacques Jouet, “Qu’est-ce-qu’un poème de métro?” in ibid., 10–11; for the transla-
tion by Ian Monk, see the same issue, 64. The whole issue of SubStance is devoted
to Jouet. Jouet’s book Poèmes de metro was published by P.O.L. Éditions (Paris,
2000).
19. Jouet, “Qu’est-ce-qu’un poème de métro?” 12.
20. Ibid.
182 : n o t e s t o pag e s 76 – 82
21. Jan Baetens (with Bernardo Schiavetta), “Jugement esthétique des écritures à
contrainte,” paper presented at Research Conference, Paris, November 14, 2001;
see Archives, Centre d’études poétiques, Paris, http://cep.ens-lsh.fr/37060428/0/
fiche___pagelibre/&RH=CEP-AUTEURS; my translation. For a short statement
in English by Baetens, see “Doing things that don’t come naturally: A plea for con-
strained writing,” Drunken Boat 8 (2006), feature “Oulipo”: http://www.drunken
boat.com/db8/.
22. Jan Baetens, postface, in Slam! Poèmes sur le basketball (Bruxelles: Les impressions
nouvelles, 2006), 64–65.
23. See ibid., 64: “Mon goût de la littérature à contraintes prolonge presque directe-
ment le choix du français comme langue étrangère. . . . La découverte de la con-
trainte est intimement solidaire d’une approche littéraire privilégiant l’objet (en
l’occurrence l’objet linguistique) au detriment du sujet (en l’occurrence le mythe
de l’inspiration).” Baetens also writes in English, thus triangulating his language
pool. See also Bernardo Schiavetta, “Toward a General Theory of the Constraint,”
Electronic Book Review 10, http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr10/10sch.htm.
24. See Jan Baetens and Bernardo Schiavetta, editorial, Formules 1 (1997): 1, http://
www.formules.net/revue/01/programme.html. Cf. “Brazilian Concrete Poetry:
How It Looks Today; Haroldo and Augusto de Campos Interviewed by Marjorie
Perloff ” (1994), in K. David Jackson, Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazil-
ian Concrete Poet (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University Press,
2005), 165–79. “It was a necessity,” says Augusto de Campos, “to recover the great
avant-garde movements. This is why I am so critical of post-modernism. There is
inside the discussion of post-modernism a tactic of wanting to put aside swiftly
the recovery of experimental art and to say all this is finished!” (171).
25. Warren F. Motte Jr., ed. and trans., Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 18.
26. See “Brazilian Concrete Poetry,” 170. Later in the interview, Haroldo de Campos
quips, “Decio Pignatari has a good phrase for [surrealism]. He says that Brazil
never had surrealism because the whole country is surrealist” (176).
27. See Oseki-Dépré, “Translation as Creation and Criticism,” and K. David Jackson,
“Music of the Spheres in Galáxias,” in Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazil-
ian Concrete Poet (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University Press,
2005), 119–28.
28. Jacques Roubaud, Quelque chose noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1986); trans. Rosmarie Wal-
drop as something black (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1990).
29. Adelaide M. Russo, “Oulipo’s Mechanical Measure: The Consequences of ‘Litté-
rature Potentielle’ for Potential Criticism,” in 20ieme Siècle: La problématique du
discours, Michigan Romance Studies 6, ed. Roy Jay Nelson (1986), 116.
30. See Marjorie Perloff, “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian
Bök and Caroline Bergvall, Jacket 23 (August 2003); rpt. in Differentials: Poetry,
n o t e s t o pag e s 83– 8 4 : 183

Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004),, 205–26; “Vo-
cable Scriptsigns: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget and John
Kinsella’s Kangaroo Virus,” in Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Andrew
Roberts and John Allison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2,002), 21–
43; “Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential
Text,” New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adelaide Morris
and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 143–64.
On John Cage, see “The Music of Verbal Space: John Cage’s ‘What You
Say . . . ,’ ” in Perloff, Poetry On & Off the Page (Evanston, IL: Northwestern Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 290–308.
On Hejinian, “The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed: From Free Verse to
Procedural Play,” in Perloff, Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 134–70.
31. Marjorie Perloff, “Avant Garde Tradition and the Individual Talent: The Case of
Language Poetry,” in “Poètes américains: Architectes du langage,” ed. Helène Aji,
spec. issue of Revue francaise d’etudes américaines, no. 103 (February 2005): 117–41;
or in somewhat different form, as “Avant Garde Community and the Individual
Talent: The Case of Language Poetry,” Foreign Literature Studies 28, no. 4 (August
2006): 20– 37; Perloff, “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical
Discontents,” in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of
Alabama Press, 2004), 155–74; Perloff, “The Pleasures of the Déjà Dit; Citation,
Intertext, and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry,” in The Consequences of
Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008),
66–89.
32. Charles Bernstein, “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1976), in Content’s Dream:
Essays, 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1986), 49.
33. See, for example, Barrett Watten, “Mac Low’s Lexicons,” in The Constructivist Mo-
ment: From Material Text to Cultural Politics (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 31–42; Charles Bernstein, “Jackson at Home,” in Content’s Dream:
Essays 1975–1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon 1986), 252–58. Ron Silliman’s Tjant-
ing was published by The Figures (Berkeley) in 1981, reprinted by Salt Books
(London), 2002.
34. Charles Bernstein, “Hinge Picture,” in My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1999), 194–96.
35. Andrew Clements, interview with Brian Ferneyhough, The Guardian, June 2005,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/<give full URL or delete>, emphasis mine. For the
libretto, see Charles Bernstein, Shadowtime (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2005). All
further references are to this edition.
36. Bernstein, e-mail to me, June 30, 2005.
37. For an astute review of the opera that discusses its overall linguistic as well as mu-
sical effects, see Colin Browne, “Benjamin’s Angels, or Why We Sing the Lamenta-
tions,” Jacket 28, http://jacketmagazine.com/28/browne-shadow.html.
184 : n o t e s t o pag e s 8 6 – 8 9
38. Peter Demetz, introduction to Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Au-
tobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978) , lii–
liii.
39. For a seminal essay on Benjamin’s use of citation, see Richard Sieburth, “Benjamin
the Scrivener,” in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, ed. Gary Smith (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), 13–37.
40. Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writ-
ings, Vol.2, 433–58; see pp. 453–54.
41. Charles Bernstein, “What Does It Mean to Be a Poet in Our Time?” interview by Eric
Denut,” The Argotist Online, July-August 2004, http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/
Bernstein%20interview.htm. The interview has been reprinted in more readable
form on the website All About Jewish Theatre (2007), http://www.jewish-theatre
.com/visitor/article_display.aspx?articleID=1492.
42. Walter Benjamin, “The Doctrine of the Similar” (1933), in Selected Writings, 2:694–
98; see 696.
43. Ibid., 697.
44. See West Valley College Philosophy Home page: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/
lafave/amphib.html.
45. Benjamin, “Doctrine of the Similar,” 697.
46. There are two instances where the word Jew does not appear, “A mint bran jewel”
(line 2) and “A bawl intern gem” (line 8), perhaps to suggest the stereotype of the
greedy jewel-loving, gem-loving Jew.
47. Ernst Jandl, “der und die,” in Reft and Light: Poems by Ernst Jandl, with Multiple
Versions by American Poets, ed. Rosmarie Waldrop (Providence, RI: Burning Deck,
2000), 27. Cf. Karl Riha, “ ‘der und die’ im Kontext,” in Ernst Jandl, Gedichte, ed
Volker Kaukoreit and Kristina Pfoser (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2002), 61–72.
48. Benjamin, “On Semblance” (1919–20), in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed.
Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996), 224.
Cf. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” in vol. 1, 297–360.
49. Stephane Mallarmé, Poésies (1899), in Collected Poems, bilingual ed., trans. with
commentary by Henry Weinfeld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994),
and see commentary, 149–50.
50. Constellation is a key term in Benjamin’s own writing. See, for example, “Theses on
the Philosophy of History, XVII” (1940): “Where thinking suddenly halts in a con-
stellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through
which it crystallizes as a monad” (Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn [New York:
Schocken, 1968], 262–63). Again, in Arcades (N2a3, p. 462), we read: “It is not that
what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what
is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with
the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill”
(my emphasis).
51. Haroldo de Campos, “The Ex- centric’s Viewpoint: Tradition, Transcreation,
n o t e s t o pag e s 8 9 – 9 8 : 185
Transculturation,” in Haroldo de Campos: A Dialogue with the Brazilian Concrete Poet,
ed. K. David Jackson (Oxford: Centre for Brazilian Studies, Oxford University
Press, 2005), 3–13.
chapter five
1. Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac River, in Writings (New
York: Library of America, 1985); Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Selected Writ-
ings, vol. 2, 1927– 1934 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 453;
Richard Sieburth, Instigations: Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 121.
2. Susan Howe, The Midnight (New York: New Directions, 2003). Subsequently cited
in this essay as M.
3. M 72. I try to reproduce Howe’s paragraphs just as they are, with a justified right
margin.
4. See Kino-Eye, The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin
O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 58.
5. Susan Howe, “Sorting Facts, or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” in Beyond
Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown, CT: Wes-
leyan University Press, 1996), 297, 300. For Howe’s own etymological definition
of documentary, see 299.
6. Tyrus Miller, “Documentary / Modernism: Convergence and Complementarity
in the 1930s,” Modernism/Modernity 9, no. 2 (April 2002): 225–26.
7. In The Midnight, the verso with the stick- figure image is reproduced a second
time, in reduced size. But in the earlier version of Howe’s poem, the fine-press
book called Kidnapped (Dublin: Coracle, 2002), which is about half the length of
The Midnight and contains primarily its prose portions, there is only one image,
but a more striking one—the open book, silhouetted against a black ground on
the left, and, on the right, another open book beneath it, with the admonition
printed in italics at the right margin (M 19).
8. Susan Howe commented on the passage in her reading at the Kelly Writers’
House, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, February 2007, http://writing
.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Howe.html
9. Susan Howe, interview by Jon Thompson, Free Verse, Winter 2005, 5, http://
english.chass.ncsu.edu/freeverse/Archives/Winter_2005/interviews/S_Howe
.html. The passage in question comes from Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and
Merrimac Rivers.
10. See Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); see also Marjorie Perloff, “The Con-
solation Theme in Yeats’s ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory,’ ” Modern Lan-
guage Quarterly, Fall 1966, 306–22; Perloff, “Robert Lowell’s Winslow Elegies,” in
The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973), 131–60.
186 : n o t e s t o pag e s 9 9 –10 4

11. See Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco), http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/
pgil_datasets/authors/b/Bennett,Louie/life.htm.
12. In the expensively produced Kidnapped, there is a real tissue interleaf.
13. Stephen Collis, “Drawing the Curtain on Midnight,” Jacket 25 (February 2004),
http:// jacketmagazine .com/ 25/ collis-s-howe .html. See also Collis’s Through
Words of Others: Susan Howe and Anarcho-scholasticism (Victoria, BC: English Lit-
erary Studies Editions, 2006). Bed Hangings was originally a separate book with
pictures by Susan Bee (New York: Granary Books, 2001). It encompassed what
was to become “Bedhangings I.”
14. According to the Granary catalog, http://www.granarybooks.com/pages.php
?which_page=product_view&which_product=75&search=bed hangings howe
&category=, “This series of poems explores the themes of colonial America and
its decorative arts, religion and Puritanism through a visual and verbal inves-
tigation of the metaphysics of beds, curtains, and hangings. The poems and pic-
tures play off each other in a humorous, mystical and occasionally mischievous
manner.”
15. Robert Louis Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses (London: Longman’s, 1885), 5.
This is a Google book.
16. E-mail to me, July 14, 2008. Emphasis added.
17. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 1, The Poems, rev. ed., ed. Richard J. Finneran
(New York: Macmillan, 1989), 233, 243. Called Poems in later references.
18. In Letters to the New Island, ed. Horace Reynolds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1934), 103–4, Yeats declares, “Allingham had the making of a great
writer in him, but lacked impulse and momentum, the very things national feel-
ing could have supplied.”
19. Yeats, Poems, 78. The fourteen-line poem begins, “One that is ever kind said yes-
terday / Your well-belovèd’s hair has threads of grey,” and concludes “O heart! O
heart! if she’d but turn her head, / You’d know the folly of being comforted.”
20. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 74.
21. For an excellent discussion of Howe’s early visual poetry vis-à-vis such poets as
Ian Hamilton Finlay and the artist Ad Reinhardt, see Kaplan Page Harris, “Susan
Howe’s Art and Poetry, 1968–1974,” Contemporary Literature 47, no. 3 (Fall 2006):
440–71.
22. See Susan Howe, “The End of Art,” Stereo Headphones 8, 9–10 (1982): 40–43. Fin-
lay’s “Homage to Malevich” is reproduced on 43.
23. M 118. The biography in question is Christopher Fitz-Simon, The Boys: A Biogra-
phy of Micheál MacLíammóir and Hilton Edwards (Dublin: New Island, 2002); Howe
draws especially on material on 24–29.
24. For an earlier discussion of Howe’s page, see Perloff, Differentials: Poetry, Poetics,
Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), xxx–xxxii.
n o t e s t o pag e s 105–17 : 187

ch a p t e r si x
1. Walter Benjamin, “Translation: For and Against,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–
1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and
others (Harvard, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 250.
2. Yoko Tawada,” “An der Spree,” in Sprachpolizei und Spielpolyglotte (Tübingen: Ver-
lag Claudia Gehrke, 2007), 12. Translation of this and the other Tawada passages
is mine unless indicated.
3. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, in The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909–1950 (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), 37–55.
4. Craig Raine, T. S. Eliot (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 87. Not everyone,
of course, has admired this “exoticism”: see chapter 1 for Edgell Rickword’s objec-
tions to the citational method of The Waste Land.
5. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” III, lines 1–9; in Complete Poems and Plays, 120.
6. Ibid., 117.
7. In “ ‘Mature poets steal’: Eliot’s Allusive Practice,” in The Cambridge Companion
to T S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge, 1994), James Longenbach points
out that in the Quartets the allusions no longer have a structural function; rather,
Eliot adapts passages (without using quotation marks) when it suits his purpose.
In East Coker, for example, lines 137–39 come from St. John of the Cross (“In order
to arrive there, / To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not, / You
must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy”), and lines 32– 35 come from Sir
Thomas Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (“Two and two, necessarye coniunc-
tion, / Holding eche other by the hand or the arm / Which betokeneth concorde.”
The latter lines, Eliot explained to his friend John Hayward, give the passage in
question an early Tudor setting (185). Such allusions are, in any case, presented in
English.
8. The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1993), 41. All further refer-
ences are to this edition.
9. See Carroll F. Terrell, A Companion to the Cantos of Ezra Pound (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1980), 48.
10. Horace, The Odes and Epodes, trans. C. E. Bennett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1978), 178–79. Cf. Lawrence Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument
of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1991).
11. See http://www.carolinebergvall.com. Bergvall’s website, regularly updated, has
links to most of her work. In this case, the Say: ‘Parsley’ project can be both heard
and seen, the video documenting the Antwerp production where the English
source words were given to Flemish/French speakers, who recorded what they
heard or seemed to hear.
12. See Perloff, “The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Caroline Bergvall and
188 : no t e s t o page s 123–30

Christian Bok,” Textual Practice 18, no. 1 (2004): 23–45; rpt. in Differentials: Poetry,
Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 205–26.
13. By “differential,” I mean a text that exists in various states (e.g., print and digital,
or print and recorded voice) without any one variant being the authoritative text.
See my “Vocable Scriptsigns: Differential Poetics in Kenneth Goldsmith’s Fidget
and John Kinsella’s Kangaroo Virus,” in Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture, ed.
Andrew Roberts and John Allison (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 21–43.
14. In its print version, the title is “Say: ‘Parsley.’ ” See Bergvall, Fig (London: Salt,
2005), 51.
15. It is interesting to compare Bergvall’s treatment of the parsley shibboleth to Rita
Dove’s 1983 poem on the same incident: “Parsley,” in Museum (Pittsburgh: Carn-
egie Mellon University Press, 1983), recently reprinted on the Poetry Foundation
website, http:// www.poetryfoundation .org/ archive/poem.html?id=172128/.
Dove writes a narrative poem in which “El General” (Trujillo) searches for a word
that can kill; the poem concludes with the lines “The general remembers the tiny
green sprigs / men of his village wore in their capes / to honor the birth of a son.
He will / order many, this time, to be killed / for a single, beautiful word.” This mi-
metic account, in which the lyric poet assumes she can enter the mind of the evil
dictator, allows for no real reflection on an important issue. It is merely histrionic.
16. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engrish#cite_note-0.
17. Stills from Say: Parsley, 2008, a data piece conceived for the siting of Bergvall’s
installation at MuHKA, Museum of Contemporary Arts (Antwerp, May 28–
August 17, 2008), as presented on Bergvall’s website, http://www.carolinebergvall
.com/.
18. Bergvall discusses the significance of typos, misspellings, and the like in her essay
“Typose Translove: Mina Loy, Erin Mouré, Lisa Linn Kanae, Paolo Javier”: see
http://www.carolinebergvall.com/. An earlier version of this essay appeared as
“Truncated/Troncated: Mina Loy’s misspellings,” Open Letter (Toronto), June
1999.
19. See Urban Dictionary, http:// www.urbandictionary.com/ define .php?term
=Turgle.
20. http://www.carolinebergvall.com/#downloads/.
21. In a recent essay called “A Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants,” Jacket 37
(2009), http://jacketmagazine.com/37/bergvall-cat-throat.shtml/, Bergvall medi-
tates on what it means to be, like herself, a bilingual writer: “It is not about hav-
ing a ‘voice’ (another difficult naturalizing concept), it is about siting ‘voice,’ lo-
cating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s
languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of
traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange
between one’s body, the air, and the world.” In French, one must spit out “the cat
in one’s throat”; but in English, it’s a frog—a distinction worth pondering.
n o t e s t o pag e s 131–36 : 189

22. Yoko Tawada, Ekusophonii: Bogo no soto e deru tabi (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2003),
partially translated by Keijiro Suga in “Translation, Exophony, Omniphony,” in
Yoko Tawada: Voices from Everywhere, ed. Doug Slaymaker (Lanham, MD: Lexing-
ton Books, 2007), 27–28.
23. Ibid., 30; my emphasis.
24. Yoko Tawada, “Artist Books and Migration: A Conversation with Yoko Tawada,”
interview by Bettina Brandt, Comparative Literature Studies 45, no. 1 (2008): 19–20.
25. Yoko Tawada, Sprachpolizei und Spielpolygotte (Tübingen: Verlag Claudia Gehrke,
2007), 8.
26. Sprachpolizei, 11. Translations here and elsewhere are mine, unless otherwise noted.
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, ed. and trans. G. E. M. Ans-
combe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), no. 32 (15–16e).
28. J. W. von Goethe, Werke: Erster Band, Gedichte, Faust (Wiesbaden: Insel, 1945), 174.
29. “The Wild Roses,” sung by Herman Weng in Japanese; You Tube, Heidenr#3299C4.
30. See, for example, David Wellbery, The Specular Moment: Goethe’s Early Lyric and the
Beginnings of Romanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 225–33;
Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Towards a Critical History (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2001), 55–60.
31. I have translated this essay, in slightly abridged form, for Lyric (9 [2006]: 55–63),
but the version used in the Jandl homage, Volltext: Zeitung für Literatur, Sonder-
ausgabe no. 1/ 2005, 14–15, is slightly different from the book version, and hence
I have retranslated the citations here.
32. Eliot, Complete Poems, 140; Pound, ABC of Reading (New York: New Directions,
1960), 32.
c h a p t e r se v e n
1. Hart Crane, “Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge,” in The Complete Poems and Selected Let-
ters and Prose, ed. Brom Weber (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), 46.
2. Kenneth Goldsmith, Traffic (Los Angeles: Make Now, 2007), 78 (§4.21). Digital
reading edition on Eclipse: http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/projects/TRAFFIC/
Traffic.pdf, 51. Subsequently cited in the text as T.
3. http:// www.poetryfoundation .org/ harriet/ 2008/ 06/ conceptual-poetics-ken
neth-goldsmith/.
4. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics,” ed. Lori Em-
erson and Barbara Cole, special issue, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing
and Theory, ser. 12, no. 7 (Fall 2005): 98; see also http://www.ubu.com/papers/kg_
ol_goldsmith.html/.
5. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 79–
83, and widely reprinted: see http://radicalart.info/concept/LeWitt/paragraphs
.html/. In “American Trilogist: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith,” Rain Taxi
190 : no t e s t o page s 137–4 8

(Fall 2008), Kareem Estefan refers to the “stealing” of LeWitt’s paragraphs (http://
www.raintaxi.com/online/2008fall/goldsmith.shtml), but most readers, includ-
ing the editors of the special issue of Open Letter who published it (see note 4),
seem unaware that it is not an “original.”
6. Kenneth Goldsmith, 73 Poems, with Joan Le Barbara (1994; repr. New York: Per-
manent Press, 2000); for the “singings through,” see Goldsmith’s author page at
PennSound, http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Goldsmith.html.
7. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Being Boring,” delivered at Red Cat Symposium, 2004; see
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/goldsmith_boring.html.
8. Ron Silliman, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2006_02_01_archive.html, Feb-
ruary 27, 2006;http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/silliman_goldsmith
.html.
9. Kenneth Goldsmith, Day (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003); Fidget (To-
ronto: Coach House Books, 2000); http://archives.chbooks.com/online_books/
fidget/applet.html; Soliloquy (New York: Granary Books, 2001), http://www.epc
.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/soliloquy/days.html.
On Fidget, see Perloff, “ ‘Vocable Scriptsigns’: Differential Poetics in Kenneth
Goldsmith’s Fidget,” in Poetry, Value, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Andrew Rob-
erts and John Allison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002), 21– 43;
Rubén Gallo, “Fidget’s Body,” in “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics,”
special issue, Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, ser. 12, no. 7
(Fall 2005): 50–57.
10. Walter Benjamin, H Konvolut 1–3, in The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland
and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 203.
11. Kenneth Goldsmith, interviewed by Marjorie Perloff in “A Conversation with
Kenneth Goldsmith,” Jacket 21 (February 2003), http://jacketmagazine.com/21/
perl-gold-iv.html. The interview has been reprinted in Sibila, http://www.sibila
.com.br/2/index.php/sibila-english/303/.
12. Goldsmith, No. 111.2.7.93—10.20.96 (Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1997).
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” is reprinted on 588–606.
13. Goldsmith interview by Perloff, Jacket 21.
14. See Molly Schwartzburg, “Encyclopedic Novelties: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s
Tomes,” “Kenneth Goldsmith and Conceptual Poetics,” special issue, Open Letter:
A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory, ser. 12, no. 7 (Fall 2005): 30–31.
15. An excellent recent study is Tom Vanderbilt’s Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do
(And What It Says about Us) (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008).
16. This designation was first given the trilogy by D. J. Huppatz in an essay posted
on his blog Critical Cities in August 2008: “Kenneth Goldsmith: The New York
Trilogy.” The complete illustrated essay may be found on Goldsmith’s own web
page: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/huppatz-goldsmith-trilogy.pdf.
It is forthcoming, in slightly different form, in Critical Inquiry.
no t e s t o page s 14 8 –51 : 191

17. The parallel is drawn by Craig Dworkin on the back cover of the MakeNow edi-
tion. Dworkin also cites Guy Debord’s “Positions situationnistes sur la circula-
tion” as a model to be parodied here.
18. F. T. Marinetti, “The New Ethical Religion of Speed” (1916), in Critical Writings,
ed. Günter Berghaus, trans. Doug Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Gi-
roux, 2006), 256.
19. J. G. Ballard, “Introduction 1995,” in Crash (1983; London: Harper Perennial,
2008), unpaginated.
20. On a witty assessment of metaphor in Traffic, see Huppatz, “Kenneth Goldsmith.”
21. See, for example, Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan, 1973), 93.
22. On the back cover of Traffic, Craig Dworkin notes that Traffic “proves the last of
Guy Debord’s ‘Situationist Theses on Traffic,’ ‘Revolutionary urbanists will not
limit their concern to the circulation of things, or to the circulation of human be-
ings trapped in a world of things. They will try to break these topological chains,
paving the way with their experiments for a human journey through authentic
life’ ” (Dworkin’s translation). This is a suggestive connection, but I would argue
that Traffic submits these political notions, like Godard’s, to a playful and disil-
lusioned deconstruction.
23. http://www.1010wins.com/pages/7792.php.
24. Sina Queyras, Expressway (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2009), 43.
25. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925; New York: Scribners, 1953), 182.
26. The richness of the link was first pointed out to me by Craig Dworkin, e-mail
message, July 12, 2009. I am grateful to Dworkin to this and other special insights
into Traffic.
27. Kenneth Goldsmith, “Flarf and Conceptual Writing,” Poetry, July/August 2009,
315–16. This talk was originally delivered at the Whitney Museum of American
Art, April 17, 2009, on the occasion of a “debate” between Conceptualist and
Flarfist poets. See http:// epc.buffalo .edu/ authors/ goldsmith/ whitney-intro
.html. The term Flarf, invented by the poet Gary Sullivan to define a new aes-
thetic of the “inappropriate” in all its guises, has as its stated method “to mine the
Internet with odd search terms and then distill the results into often hilarious and
sometimes disturbing poems, plays, and other texts” (Wikipedia).
28. Silliman’s Blog, http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2009_07_07_archive.html,
July 7, 2009, and cf. the dozens of comments, responding to Silliman’s strictures,
made by other, mostly angry, bloggers. But for the opposite position, one close
to my own, see K. Silem Mohammed on his blog Lime Tree (http://lime-tree
.blogspot.com/<date/title of the post you’re quoting?>), with reference to Craig
Dworkin’s long conceptualist poem Parse (2008).
At nearly 300 pages, even the most diehard conceptualist might balk at
the prospect of actually reading Parse front to back, and in fact Kenny Gold-
smith has used it as an example of conceptual texts that don’t actually need to
192 : no t e s t o page s 154– 62

be read: the idea is enough. As appealing as I find this notion in many ways, I
don’t ultimately find it fully adequate to an assessment of Dworkin’s work
(or Goldsmith’s, for that matter). What I think books like this do is ask us to
reconsider what it means to read, and to find ways of actualizing new reading
practices. This might mean something as simple as flipping around here and
there throughout the book rather than reading straight through. It might
mean reading one or more sections in an intense state of attention, and gen-
eralizing outward from such readings to a larger engagement with the total
work. It might mean submitting for extended periods of time to the monot-
ony of the governing structure, so that when there is some kind of variation
in the pattern, it takes on an added value of surprise. (my emphasis)
29. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. from the French by Ron
Padgett (New York: Viking, 1968), 48, 16, and passim.
30. Ibid., 43.
31. Ibid., 38–39.
32. On the Munich interlude, see Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel
Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (1984; Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 19–56.
33. The phrase is Jasper Johns’s: see “Sketchbook Notes” in Jasper Johns: Writings,
Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern
Art, distributed Harry N. Abrams, 1996), 54.
34. The split, extending from at least Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (1960) to
the present, is well documented by Cole Swensen in her introduction to American
Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry, ed. Cole Swensen and David St. John
(New York: Norton, 2008), xvii– xxi. For Silliman’s terminology, see Silliman’s
Blog, passim.
35. On Craig Dworkin and Jan Baetens, see my “The Pleasures of the Déjà Dit: Ci-
tation, Ekphrasis, and Constraint in Recent Experimental Poetries,” in The Con-
sequences of Innovation: 21st Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof
Books, 2008), 255– 82. This essay was reprinted in Another Language: Poetic Ex-
periments in Britain and North America, ed. Kornelia Freitag and Katharine Veeter
(Berlin: Lit Verlag 2009), 125–48. On Bergvall, see chapter 5 above and my “The
Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall,”
in Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,
2004), 205–26.
36. Goldsmith, “American Trilogist,” 3.
37. Gallo, “Fidget’s Body,” 50–51, 53.
38. Goldsmith’s technique in Fidget is anticipated by David Antin’s Talking at the
Boundaries (New York: New Directions, 1976) and many subsequent collections
of “talk pieces”; like Goldsmith’s, these transcribe the poet’s own speech, produc-
ing a written simulation of speech rhythms in a continuous unpunctuated low-
n o t e s t o pag e s 162– 65 : 193

ercase prose that uses space between phrases to indicate pauses. But Goldsmith’s
strenuous minimalism creates an artifice that recalls the Beckett of How It Is rather
than such Antin pieces as “Who’s Listening Out There?” Antin, moreover, is not
primarily an appropriative poet.
a f t e rwor d
1. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2010). The anthology originated in

Dworkin’s Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing on Ububweb (http://www.ubu
.com), but it has been substantially changed and Dworkin has supplied an en-
tirely new introduction.
2. Vanessa Place, Statement of Fact (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2010). In an earlier form,
the book was published as no. 42 in the Publishing the Unpublishable series (Ubu
Editions, 2008). Place, a criminal defense appellate attorney for the state of Cali-
fornia in Los Angeles, has based Statement of Fact on her own cases. See also her
nonfiction book The Guilt Project: Rape, Morality, and Law (New York: Other Press,
2010).
3. Craig Dworkin, Parse (Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 2008).
4. Craig Dworkin, “Dure,” in Strand (New York: Roof Books, 2005), 75.
5. I discuss this poem at length in “The Pleasures of Déjà Dit: Citation, Intertext and
Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry,” in The Consequences of Innovation: 21st
Century Poetics, ed. Craig Dworkin (New York: Roof Books, 2008), 255–79; see
esp. 264–69. This essay appeared in slightly different form in Another Language,:
Poetic Experiments in Britain and North America, ed. Kornelia Freitag and Katharine
Veeter (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2008), 125–48.
6. Jan Baetens, Vivre sa vie: Une novelisation en vers du film de Jean-Luc Godard (Paris:
Les Impressions nouvelles, 2005). I discuss this text in “Pleasure of Déjà-Dit,”
258–64.
7. Letter to the author, November 4, 2009.
8. In describing the method of Roaratorio (1985), for example, Cage writes, “Do not
permit for a single appearance of a given letter the repetition of a particular syl-
lable. Distinguish between subsequent appearances of the same letter. Other ad-
jacent words from the original text . . . may be used according to taste, limited,
say to forty- three characters to the left and forty- three to the right.” See John
Cage, afterword to Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on “Finnegans Wake” (Königstein,
Germany: Athenaeum, 1985), 173.
9. Antoine Compagnon, La seconde main, ou Le travail de la citation (Paris: Seuil, 1979),
17. My translation.
194 : n o t e s t o pag e s 165– 6 9

Index
Numbers in boldface indicate pages on which main treatments of subjects can be found; numbers
in italic refer to pages with illustrations.
Adams, John Quincy, 127–28 Beckett, Samuel, 144, 167, 173n24, 193–
Adorno, Theodor, 9, 25–27, 148, 175n2 94n38
Allen, Donald, New American Poetry, Bee, Susan, 107, 187n13
193n34 Beethoven, Ludwig, 21
Allingham, William, “For Ducks on a Beiguelman, Giselle, 181n51
Pond,” 110–12, 187n18 Bénabou, Michel, 80
Amerika, Mark, 181n51 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 4, 22, 23, 76, 85–98,
Ammons, A. R., “Corson’s Inlet,” 9–11 99, 101, 123, 148, 149–50, 177n20,
Andersen, Paal Bjelke, 6 185n50; Arcades Project, xii, 24–49, 165,
Andrewes, Chris, 182n10 168, 176n10, 176nn14–16, “Doctrine
Andrews, Bruce, “While,” 7–8, 85 of the Similar,” 90–93; “Schein,” 95
Antin, David, 193–94n38 Bennett, Louie, 100, 103–5, 122
Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk) Bense, Max, 72, 79
(Benjamin), xii, 23, 24–49, 165, 168, Beraud, F. A., 43
176n10, 176nn14–16 Bergvall, Caroline, 12, 16, 84, 193n35;
Arp, Hans, 61 “A Cat in the Throat,” 189–90n21;
arrière-garde, 53, 56, 58, 60–61, 67, 70 Fig, 129–30, 132–33, 164; Say: ‘Parsley,’
Ashbery, John, 12 129–36, 188–89n11, 189n15, 189nn17–
Auden, W. H., 104 18; Via, xii, 19, 129–31, 133, 184n30
Audiatur, 172n12 Bernstein, Charles, 16, 18, 85–98, 184n33;
“Amphibolies,” 91–94; “dew and die,”
Baetens, Jan, 16, 80, 82–83, 164, 183n21, 94–96, 96; Girly Man, 86; “Hinge
181n23, 193n35; Vivre sa vie, 14, 168 Picture,” 86, “Schein,” 95; Shadowtime,
Ballard, J. G., Crash, 155 xii, xiii, 17, 84, 86–98; “Stray Straws
Balzac, Honoré de, 18, 43 and Straw Men,” 174n30
Barthes, Roland, 18–19, 53, 177n6 Berryman, John, 75
Bataille, Georges, 175n2 Bessa, Antonio Sergio, 68, 177n1, 178n8
Baudelaire, Charles, 19, 27, 28, 39, 41–43, Bickersteth, Geo∏rey L., 130
80, 126, 129, 171n3 Bill, Max, 61
Baudrillard, Jean, 9, 148 Bishop, Elizabeth, 56–57, 178n12; “The
Bauhaus, 61 Armadillo,” 9–10
Bayard, Caroline, 50–52, 72 bissett, bill, 52
: 195
Blake, William, 42 Cary, Francis, 130
Block, Friedrich W., 181n51 Cavalcanti, Guido, 16
Blunden, Edmund, 171n3 Celan, Paul, 16, 67
Bök, Christian, xii, 73, 84, 164, 181n47, Cendrars, Blaise, 77
184n30 Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 140
Boltanski, Christian, 23 Chaucer, Geo∏rey, 16
Bonk, Ekke, 177n22 Chesterton, G. K., 42, 48
Bonvicino, Régis, 7 Chopin, Henri, 52, 148
Borges, Jorge Luis, 54 Cisneros, Odile, 181n45, 181n51
Boulez, Pierre, 68 Clemenceau, Georges, 129
Bourdieu, Pierre, 22 Clements, Andrew, 184n35
Brandt, Bettina, 137 Clüver, Claus, 177n1
Braque, Georges, 163 Cole, Barbara, 190n4
Brecht, Bertolt, 69, 87 Collis, Stephen, 107, 187n13
Brönte, Anne, 115 Compagnon, Antoine, La Seconde Main,
Brooker, Jewel Spears, 171n2 3–4, 17, 53, 169
Browne, Colin, 185n37 Conceptualism, 12 18, 148–150, 162, 164,
Browne, Thomas, 124 167–68, 194n1
Bruns, Gerald, 11 concretism, 12–14, 50–75, 79–83, 97, 148
Buck-Morss, Susan, 40, 175n3, 176n15 Corbusier, Le, 43, 45, 48
Bürger, Peter, 53 Courbet, Gustave, 56
Burliuk, David, 55 Cranach, Lucas, 163
Crane, Hart, xi; “The Broken Tower,” 23;
Cabanne, Pierre, 162–63 “To Brooklyn Bridge,” 146; “Voy-
Cadiot, Olivier, 172n14 ages,” 23
Cage, John, 11, 68, 69, 80, 84, 136, 151, 157, Creeley, Robert, 9
163, 169, 184n30; “Roaratorio,” 194n8 cummings, e. e., 56, 69, 178n12
Campos, Augusto de, 13, 51, 65, 66–75,
83, 179–80n31; “Lygia,” 68–69, 74, Dada, 163
180n36, 180n38, 183n24, plate 1; Pan- Daniel, Arnaut, 65–66, 69, 179n31
aroma do “Finnegans Wake,” 69–70, Dante: Inferno, xii, 130; Purgatorio, 2, 125;
71, 79; “REV ,” 75, 75; ”sem um Vita Nuova, 84
numero,” 51, 51; “SOS,” 73–75; uma rosa Darragh, Tina, 84
para Gertrude, 70, plate 2 Davenport, Guy, The Geography of the
Campos, Cid, Poesie Concreta (DVD), Imagination, 60
179n29 De Bord, Guy, 157, 192n17
Campos, Haroldo de, 13, 16, 51, 53–54, Debucourt, Philibert Louis, 26
65, 67–73, 98, 178–79n20, 183n26; De Duve, Thierry, 193n32
Galáxias, 70, 73, 76–79, 84, 97; Delacroix, Eugène, 42
Ideograma, 70–73; Panaroma do Deleuze, Gilles, 9, 80
“Finnegans Wake,” 69–70 Demetz, Peter, 89, 179n24
Carpenter, Humphrey, 178n13 Deming, Richard, 182n10
Carroll, Lewis, 69 Denut, Eric, 185n41
196 : i n de x
Derrida, Jacques, 9, 72, 148, 180n44 Fitts, Dudley, 56, 178n12
De Stijl, 61 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby,
Dickens, Charles, 42, 48 161–62
Dickinson, Emily 107, 119–21 Fitz-Simon, Christopher, 187–88n23
Donguy, Jacques, 73, 179n31 Flarf, 162–163, 192n27
Double Change, 7 Flaubert, Gustave, 22
Dove, Rita, “Parsley,” 189n15 Formules, 82–83
Duchamp, Marcel, 17, 23, 45, 56, 60, 61, Foucault, Michel, 9, 18–19
66, 69, 83, 162–63, 168; Chocolate Fourcade, Dominique, 172n14
Grinder, 48; Co∏ee Mill, 44; French Fox, Rosemary, 105
Window,148; Nu descendant un es- Funkhouser, Christopher, 51
calier, 46, 47, 48 Futurism, Italian and Russian, xii, 54–55,
Dworkin, Craig, 12, 17, 164, 172n9, 60, 68, 155
184n31, 191–92n17, 192n22, 192n26,
193n35, 194n1; Dure, 168, 194n5; Parse, Gallo, Rubén, 164, 191n9
167–68, 192–93n28; “Strand,” 84 Garnier, Pierre, 65
George, Stefan, 61
Ecclesiastes, 125 Gide, André, 39
Eclipse, 190n2 Ginsberg, Allen, “A Supermarket in Cali-
Eco, Umberto, 51, 69, 177n3 fornia,” 9–11
Edwards, Jonathan, 107 Godard, Jean-Luc: Vivre sa vie, 14, 168;
Eliot, T. S., 7, 43, 120; “Burnt Norton,” Weekend, 154–55, 157, 155, 192n22
126; “East Coker,” 126, 188n7; “Little Goethe, J. W., 21, 38, 69, 95, 97, 185n48;
Gidding,” 120, 145, 172n13; The Waste “Heidenröslein,” 140–42
Land, 1–3, 12, 17, 124–25, 171n2, 171n4 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 50, 52, 84, 167–68,
Emerson, Lori, 190n4 191n6, 191n11; Day, 149, 162; Fidget,
Erlich, Victor, 174–75n36 149, 164–65, 184n30, 191n9, 193n38;
Estefan, Kareem, 191n5 No. 111, 150–51, 176–77n19, 192n27;
Exophonic Writing, 16, 123–45 “On Conceptual Writing,” 12, 18,
Ezekiel, 125 172n18; 73 Poems, 148; Soliloquy,
5–6, 148–49; TraΩc, xii, 146–65, 153,
Fahlström, Oyvind, 12, 50, 59–62, 64, 67, 154, 192n22; Weather, 147, 149, 164;
72, 79, 80; Birds in Sweden, 84; “Mani- Sports, 147
festo for Concrete Poetry,” 54–56, Gomringer, Eugen, 12, 50, 60–65, 67, 72,
58, 80–81, 178n8 79, 178–79n20; “avenidas,” 62; das
Fenollosa, Ernest, “The Chinese Written stundenbuch, 64–65; “o” poem, 62, 63;
Character,” 70–73, 181n44 “Paestum,” 61–62; ”ping pong,” 62,
Ferneyhough, Brian, 86–87 63; “silencio,” 51, 62, 84; “wind,”
Ferrar, Nicholas, 120–21 62, 63, 179n23
Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 12, 61, 72, 80, 113, Gonne, Maud, 105
115, 187n22 Grandville, J. J., Un Autre Monde, 38–
Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 6, 11, 27, 56, 66, 39, 40
68, 73, 77, 151, 178n12, 182n4 Graves, Robert, 171n3
i n de x : 197
Gregory, Elizabeth, 171n5 Joyce, James, 19, 53, 54, 70; Finnegans
Gregory, Lady Augusta, 111 Wake, 6, 11, 27, 56, 66, 68, 73, 77, 151,
Gris, Juan, 163 178n12, 181n4
Judges, 131
Harris, Kaplan Page, 187n21
Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 43, 44, Kafka, Franz, 19
45, 48 Kenner, Hugh, The Pound Era, 179
Hegel, G. W. F., 69 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 23, 55, 58–60, 73,
Heine, Heinrich, Lorelei, xii, 16, 89, 97 84; “Syllable SO,” 59
Hejinian, Lyn, 84, 184n30 King James Bible, 125
Hobday, Charles, 171n3 Kinsella, John, 184n30
Hölderlin, Friedrich, 69, 88, 97 Klein, Yves, 148
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 69 Kosuth, Joseph, 148
Horace, 127 Kramer, Lawrence, 190n30
Howe, Mark DeWolfe, 104 Kraus, Karl, 4, 89
Howe, Mary Manning. See Manning, Krolo∏, Eduard, 38
Mary Kruchenykh, Alexei, 55
Howe, Susan, 12, 48, 72, 86, 131, 186n5n8;
Bed Hangings, 107, 187n13; Kidnapped, Landor, Walter Savage, 127
186n7, 187n12; The Midnight, xii, 99– Lang, Abigail, 172n14
122, 100, 103, 108, 111, 118 Language poetry, 7–9, 12, 85–86, 97–98
Hughes, Richard, 171n3 Lawrence, D. H., 19, 150, “The Rocking-
Hugo, Victor, 39 Horse Winner,” 150, 177n19
Hultberg, Teddy, 177–78n8 Le Barbara, Joan, 191n6
Huppatz, D. J., 191n16, 192n20 Lehto, Leevi, 7, 16–17
Le Lionnais, François, 79
Inman, Peter, “Colloam,” 8–9 Levertov, Denise, “The Ache of Mar-
Isaiah, 125 riage,” 9–11
Levine, Jill Susan, 181n45
Jackson, K. David, 84, 177n1, 181n46, LeWitt, Sol, 148, 19091n5
183n24 Lissitsky, El, 61
Jakobson, Roman, 58, 72, 84 Loehse, Richard, 61
Jameson, Fredric, 18–20, 53 Longenbach, James, 188n7
Jandl, Ernst, 12, 61, 72, 73, 90, 97, 143– Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 130
44, 181n46, 185n47, 190n31; “creation Lowell, Robert, 23, 56–58, 104, 187n10
of eve” (“erscha∏ung der eva”), 13, Lyons, Graham, 176n9
13; “der und die,” 84, 85, 94–95, 142;
Laut und Luise, 143, 173n19 Mac Liammóir, Micheál, 115–17
Johns, Jasper, 17, 48, 193n33 Mac Low, Jackson, 86, 184n33
Jolas, Eugene, transition, 56, 178n12 Maher, Ciarán, 132
Jouet, Jacques, 83, poème de métro, 81–82 Mandelbaum, Allen, 130
Jowett, Benjamin, 22 Malatesta, Sigismundo, 126–28
198 : i n de x
Malevich, Kasimir, 56, 60, 61 Nerli, Girolamo, 108
Mallarmé, Stephane, 18, 19, 27, 67, 83, Nerval, Gerard de, 2
172n13; “Salut,” 96–97 Nichol, bp, 52
Mann, Thomas, 19–20 Noigandres, 56, 62, 65–66, 79, 179n31
Manning, John, 107, 109, 121 nypoesi, 6–7, 32, 172n11
Manning, Mary, 104, 106, 109–10, 112–13,
115–18, 122 Obama, Barack, 174n25
Marcuse, Herbert, 52 O’Hara, Frank, 4
Marinetti, F. T., 18, 54–56, 60, 155, Tech- Olmsted, Frederick, 120
nical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, Olson, Charles, 18
54, 178n9 Ono, Yoko, 148
Marker, Chris, 100–101 Oppen, George, 86
Marti, Kurt, 179n23 Oseki-Dépré, Inês, 84, 181n45, 182n5
Marx, William, 53, 177n5 Östergren, Jan, 65
Marx, Ursula, 175n3 Oulipo, xii, 14, 79–84, 97, 165, 168, 183n21
Massenet, Julien, 38
Mathews, Harry, 79 Panaroma do “Finnegans Wake” (Augusto
Matisse, Henri, 163 and Haroldo de Campos), 69–70, 71
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 55–56, 139 parole in libertà, 54, 64
McCa∏ery, Steve, 6, 12, 52, 84, 86, 148 Passagen-Werk, Das (Benjamin), 23
Messerli, Douglas, From the Other Side of Peirce, Charles, 72, 107
the Century, 172n15 Perec, Georges, 79, 122; La Disparition,
Midnight, The (Howe), xii, 99–122, 100, 14, 79–80
103, 108, 111, 118 Perlo∏, Marjorie, 183n24, 184n31, 187n10,
Mi Kim, Myung, 140 191n9; Di∏erentials, 182n5, 182n9,
Miller, Tyrus, 101 184nn30–31, 188n24, 189n12, 191n11,
Milne, A. A., 54 193n35; Poetry On & O∏ the Page,
Milton, John, 21 184n30; Radical Artifice, xi, 52, 177n4,
Minchin, James Innis, 130 184n30; 21st Century Modernism,
Mohammed, K. Silem, 192–93n28 174n27
Mondrian, Piet, 61 Pervigilium Veneris, 2, 125
Monet, Claude, 56 Pessoa, Fernando, 16
Monk, Ian, 182–83n18 Phoenician alphabet, 124
Moore, Thomas, 114 Picasso, Pablo, 163
Morgenstern, Christian, 69 Pignatari, Decio, 50, 67, 79, 183n26
Morris, Adelaide, 184n30 Pinsky, Robert
Morris, Tracie, 16 Pius II, 127
Motte, Warren, 83, 182n10 Place, Vanessa, 167, 194n2
multilingualism, 16, 123–45, 173n24 Plath, Sylvia, 23; “Cut,” 9–11
Plato, 22; Cratylus, 52, 59
Nadar, Félix, 41 Poe, Edgar Allan, 39, 84
Naumann, Francis, 177n22 Poucel, Jean- Jacques, 80
i n de x : 199
Pound, Ezra, 3, 23, 56–58, 60, 69, 70, 79, Schiavetta, Bernard, 83, 183n23n24
85–86, 101, 145; Cantos, 16, 58, 65– Schmidt, Michael, 171n3
66, 106, 128–29, 178n12; Canto IX, Schnauber, Cornelius, 179n21
126–28; Canto XXXIV, 127–28, 128; Scholem, Gershom, 88, 97
“Chinese Written Character,” 71–73, Schwartzburg, Molly, 150–51
126–28 Schwitters, Kurt, 23, 69
Proust, Marcel, 3, 18, 39 53, 171n6 Serdarevic, Ina, 5–6
Pyat, Felix, 39 Setterlind, Bo, 54
Shadowtime (Bernstein), xii, 86–88
Queneau, Raymond, 79 Sherman, Cindy, 23
Queyras, Sina, Expressway, 158–59 Sibila, 7
Sieburth, Richard, 27–28, 89, 99, 176n14,
Raine, Craig, 125 185n39
Rainer, Yvonne, 148 Silliman, Ron, xi, 86, 149, 164, 184n33;
Rainey, Lawrence, 188n10 Silliman’s Blog, 192–93n28, 193n34;
Ramazani, Jahan, 172n16, 187n10 In the American Tree, 6, 11
Rauschenberg, Robert, 150 Skidan, Alexandr, 7
Raworth, Tom, 6 Slaymaker, Doug, 190n22
Reinhardt, Ad, 187n21 Smith, Zadie, 173–74n25
Renoir, Pierre, 56 Solt, Mary Ellen, 178n8, 178n19
Retallack, Joan, 84 Sousandandre, Joaquim de, 68
Ricardou, Jean, 76 Stein, Gertrude, 19, 61, 69, 73, 77, 136;
Rickword, Edgell, 1–3, 12, 171n3, 188n4 uma rosa para Gertrude, 70, plate 2
Riha, Karl, 185n47 Stevens, Wallace, 19
Rilke, Rainer Maria, 61 Stevenson, Robert Louis, xii, 109, 112;
Rimbaud, Arthur, 19, 43, 69, 75, 80, 171n3; A Child’s Garden of Verses, 110; Master
“Solde,” 32, 36 of Ballantrae, 106–8, 120
Rinne, Cia: Archives zaroum, 13–15, 14, 32; St. John, David, 193n34
“war was,” 173n21 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 68
Roberts, Andrew, 184n30, 191n9 Stoddard, Roger E., 121–22
Rollason, Christopher, 175–76n8 Stramm, August, 69
Romagosa, Jaime, 65 Strietder, Jurij, 174–75n36
Rosa, Guimarães, 53 Suga, Keijiro, 136–37, 173n24, 190n22
Rot, Dieter, 61 Sullivan, Gary, 192n27
Rothenberg, Jerome, 6, 179n28 Surrealism, 67–68, 83
Roubaud, Jacques, 14, 79, 80, 84; Sables, Swensen, Cole, 172n14, 193n34
syllabes, 76–79, 83, 182n10 Swift, Jonathan, 12
Russo, Adelaide M., 84 Swiss, Thomas, 184n30
Saussy, Haun, 73, 18–81n44 Tango with Cows (exhibition), 181n47

Say: ‘Parsley’ (Bergvall), 129–36 Tardieu, Emile, 37
Scha∏ner, Anna Katharine, 179n23 Tawada, Yoko, 16, 136–44, 142; “An Der
200 : i n de x
Spree,” 138–40; “Heidenröslein,” Waste Land, The (Eliot), 1–3, 12, 17, 124–
140–42; Sprachpolizei, 123–24, 136– 25, 171n2, 171n4
38, 143–45 Watten, Barrett, 86, 184n33
Thompson, Jon, 186n9 Webern, Anton, 80
Thoreau, Henry David, 99, 104, 186n9 Weiner, Lawrence, 148
Tiedemann, Rolf, 24, 27, 175n3, 176n14 Weinfeld, Henry, 185n49
Tinyanov, Juri, 20–21, 174n35, 174– Wellbery, David, 190n30
75n36 Williams, William Carlos, 19
Todorov, Tzvetan, 174–75n36 Wilson, Edmund, 171n2
Tolstoy, Leo, 124 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 48, 84, 138, 144,
TraΩc (Goldsmith), xii, 146–69 167
Wright, James, “A Blessing,” 9–11
Ubuweb, 164 Wyss, Marcel, 61
Valéry, Paul, 39 Yeats, W. B., xii, 19, 104, 105, 111, 112,
Vanderbilt, Tom, 191n15 187n10, 187n18; “All Souls’ Night,”
Verlaine, Paul, 125 117, 119; “Byzantium,” 117, 119; “Coole
Vertov, Dziga, 100–101 Park and Ballylee,” 111; “In Memory
Veuillot, Louis, 32 of Eva Gore-Booth,” 105–6; In the
Vigny, Alfred de, 39 Seven Woods, 111; “The Folly of Being
Comforted,” 113–14, 187n19; “The
Wagner, Richard, 125 Heart of a Woman,” 113–14
Waldrop, Rosmarie, 59, 79, 80, 172n14, Young, Alan, 171n3
183n28
Ward, Diane, “Limit,” 8–9 Zaum, 14, 20, 60, 64
Warhol, Andy, 163 Zukofsky, Louis, 12, 176n9
i n de x : 201

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Unoriginal Genius

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

Permission to quote from Jacques Jouet, “Qu’est-ce

isbn-13: 978-0-226-66061-5 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

o The paper used in this publication meets the

6 l a nguage i n m igr at ion

(color plates follow p. 68)

Fig. 1.1. Ernst Jandl, “creation of eve” (1997) : 13

An earlier version of chapters 1 and 2 in combination was published as “Un-

I love originality so much I keep copying it.

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 3

The “doubling” function of citation is characterized even more dramatically

The language of citation—Compagnon appropriately calls it récriture—

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 5

(1) were I idiom and

Bruce Andrews, from “While” (1981)

(2) at the end of delight, one

more than chests have

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 7

the family, not personal

Diane Ward, from “Limit” (1989)

(3) morrow every listen

Peter Inman, from “Colloam” (1986)15

This is the time of year

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 9

Elizabeth Bishop, “The Armadillo”

Allen Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California”

Sylvia Plath, “Cut”

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,

James Wright, “A Blessing”

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,

We look for communion

Denise Levertov, “The Ache of Marriage”

I went for a walk over the dunes again this morning

A. R. Ammons, “Corson’s Inlet”16

Whether in rhyming stanzas (Bishop, Plath), free verse (Ammons, Levertov,

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 11

Poetry by Other Means

Haroldo de Campos). The concretist program is best understood as a revolt

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 13

i am what i am what i ami

Haroldo de Campos called this practice “transcreation.” A multilingual poet

I tend to see translation—and the translation of poetic sound in particular—

In the beginning was translation: the layering of languages is one variant

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 17

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 19

Make It (Not) New

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 21

(Complete Poems, 106–7)

u n or igi n a l ge n i u s: a n i n t r oduc t ion : 23

Walter Benjamin’s monumental Passagen-Werk, begun in 1927 and still in pro-

edition (1982), is described by Benjamin’s English translators as having “the

A Arcades, Magasins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks

The magic columns of these palaces

Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840s.