THE MARGINALIZATION OF POETRY by BOB PERELMAN University of Pennsylvania _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991) Copyright (c) 1991 by Bob Perelman, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the author and advance notification of the editors. If poems are eternal occasions, then the pre-eternal context for the following was a panel on "The Marginalization of Poetry" at the American Comp. Lit. Conference in San Diego, on February 8, 1991, at 2:30 P.M.: "The Marginalization of Poetry"--it almost goes without saying. Jack Spicer wrote, "No one listens to poetry," but the question then becomes, who is Jack Spicer? Poets for whom he matters would know, and their poems would be written in a world in which that line was heard, though they'd scarcely refer to it. Quoting or imitating another poet's line is not benign, though at times the practice can look like flattery. In the regions of academic discourse, the patterns of production and circulation are different. There, it--again--goes without saying that words, names, terms are repeatable: citation is the prime index of power. Strikingly original language is not the point; the degree to which a phrase or sentence fits into a multiplicity of contexts determines how influential it will be. "The Marginalization of Poetry": the words themselves display the dominant _lingua franca_ of the academic disciplines and, conversely, the abject object status of poetry: it's hard to think of any poem where the word "marginalization" occurs. It is being used here, but this may or may not be a poem: the couplets of six word lines don't establish an audible rhythm; perhaps they haven't, to use the Calvinist mercantile metaphor, "earned" their right to exist in their present form--is this a line break or am I simply chopping up ineradicable prose? But to defend this (poem) from its own attack, I'll say that both the flush left and irregular right margins constantly loom as significant events, often interrupting what I thought I was about to write and making me write something else entirely. Even though I'm going back and rewriting, the problem still reappears every six words. So this, and every poem, is a marginal work in a quite literal sense. Prose poems are another matter: but since they identify themselves as poems through style and publication context, they become a marginal subset of poetry, in other words, doubly marginal. Now of course I'm slipping back into the metaphorical sense of marginal which, however, in an academic context is the standard sense. The growing mass of writing on "marginalization" is not concerned with margins, left or right --and certainly not with its own. Yet doesn't the word "marginalization" assume the existence of some master page beyond whose justified (and hence invisible) margins the panoplies of themes, authors, movements, general objects of study exist in all their colorful, handlettered marginality? This master page reflects the functioning of the profession, where the units of currency are variously denominated prose: the paper, the article, the book. All critical prose can be seen as elongated, smooth-edged rectangles of writing, the sequences of words chopped into arbitrary lines by typesetters (Ruth in tears amid the alien corn), and into pages by commercial bookmaking processes. This violent smoothness is the visible sign of the writer's submission to norms of technological reproduction. "Submission" is not quite the right word, though: the finesse of the printing indicates that the author has shares in the power of the technocratic grid; just as the citations and footnotes in articles and university press books are emblems of professional inclusion. But hasn't the picture become a bit binary? Aren't there some distinctions to be drawn? Do I really want to invoke Lukacs's antinomies of bourgeois thought where rather than a conceptually pure science that purchases its purity at the cost of an irrational and hence foul subject matter we have the analogous odd couple of a centralized, professionalized, cross-referenced criticism studying marginalized, inspired (i.e., amateur), singular poetries? Do I really want to lump _The Closing of the American Mind_, Walter Jackson Bate's biography of Keats, and _Anti-Oedipus_ together and oppose them to any poem which happens to be written in lines? Doesn't this essentialize poetry in a big way? Certainly some poetry is thoroughly opposed to prose and does depend on the precise way it's scored onto the page: beyond their eccentric margins, both Olson's _Maximus Poems_ and Pound's _Cantos_ tend, as they progress, toward the pictoral and gestural: in Pound the Chinese ideograms, musical scores, hieroglyphs, heart, diamond, club, and spade emblems, little drawings of the moon and of the winnowing tray of fate; or those pages late in _Maximus_ where the orientation of the lines spirals more than 360 degrees--one spiralling page is reproduced in holograph. These sections are immune to standardizing media: to quote them you need a photocopier not a word processor. In a similar vein, the work of some contemporary writers associated more or less closely with the language movement avoids standardized typographical grids and is as self-specific as possible: Robert Grenier's _Sentences_, a box of 500 poems printed on 5 by 8 notecards, or his recent work in holograph, often scrawled; the variable leading and irregular margins of Larry Eigner's poems; Susan Howe's writing which uses the page like a canvas--from these one could extrapolate a poetry where publication would be a demonstration of private singularity approximating a neo-Platonic vanishing point, anticipated by Klebnikov's handcolored, single-copy books produced in the twenties. Such an extrapolation would be inaccurate as regards the writers I've mentioned, and certainly creates a false picture of the language movement, some of whose members write very much for a if not the public. But still there's another grain of false truth to my Manichean model of a prosy command-center of criticism and unique bivouacs on the poetic margins so I'll keep this binary in focus for another spate of couplets. Parallel to such self-defined poetry, there's been a tendency in some criticism to valorize if not fetishize the unrepeatable writing processes of the masters --Gabler's _Ulysses_ where the drama of Joyce's writing mind becomes the shrine of a critical edition; the facsimile of Pound's editing-creation of what became Eliot's _Waste Land_; the packets into which Dickinson sewed her poems, where the sequences possibly embody a higher order; the notebooks in which Stein and Toklas conversed in pencil: having seen them, works like _Lifting Belly_ can easily be read as interchange between bodily writers or writerly bodies in bed. The feeling that three's a crowd there is called up and cancelled by the print's intimacy and tact. In all these cases, the particularity of the author's mind, body, and situation is the object of the reading. But it's time to dissolve or complicate this binary. What about a work like _Glas_? --hardly a dully smooth critical monolith. Doesn't it use the avant-garde (ancient poetic adjective!) device of collage more extensively than most poems? Is it really all that different from, say, the _Cantos_? (Yes. The _Cantos_'s incoherence reflects Pound's free-fall writing situation; Derrida's institutional address is central. Derrida's cut threads, unlike Pound's, always reappear farther along.) Nevertheless _Glas_ easily outstrips most contemporary poems in such "marginal" qualities as undecidability and indecipherability--not to mention the 4 to 10 margins on each page. Compared to it, these poems look like samplers upon which are stitched the hoariest platitudes. Not to wax polemical: there've been plenty of attacks on the voice poem, the experience poem, the numerous mostly free verse descendants of Wordsworth's spots of time: first person meditations where the meaning of life becomes visible after 30 lines. In its own world, this poetry is far from marginal: widely published and taught, it has established substantial means of reproducing itself. But with its distrust of intellectuality (apparently indistinguishable from overintellectuality) and its reliance on authenticity as its basic category of judgment (and the poems principally exist to be judged), it has become marginal with respect to the more theory-oriented sectors of the university, the sectors which have produced such concepts as "marginalization." As a useful antidote, let me quote _Glas_: "One has to understand that _he_ is not _himself_ before being Medusa to himself. . . . To be oneself is to-be-Medusa'd . . . . Dead sure of self. . . . Self's dead sure biting (death)." Whatever this might mean, and it's possibly aggrandizingly post-feminist, man swallowing woman, nevertheless it seems a step toward a more communal and critical way of writing and thus useful. The puns and citations that lubricate Derrida's path, making it too slippery for all but experienced cake walkers are not the point. What I want to propose in this anti-generic or over-genred writing is the possibility, not of genreless writing, but rather of a polygeneric, hermaphroditic writing. _Glas_, for all its transgression of critical decorum is still, in its treatment of the philosophical tradition, a highly decorous work; it is %marginalia%, and the master page of Hegel is still Hegel, and Genet is Hegel too. But a self-critical writing, poetry, minus the shortcircuiting rhetoric of vatic privilege, might dissolve the antinomies of marginality.