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Ten Different Fruits on One Different Tree: Experiment as a Claim of the Book

Prefacing his selection of Language poets for his 1986 anthology In the American Tree, Ron Silliman noted that "the resources available to this moment in writing have been remarkably abundant." This reflection follows immediately upon a list of over eighty poets not included, but from whom a "volume of absolutely comparable worth could be constructed."(1) Silliman's list was prescient, including numerous poets likely to be on an informed short list for a prospective anthology today: Ken Irby, Beverly Dahlen, Rosmarie Waldrop, Alice Notley, Kathleen Fraser, Keith Waldrop, Craig Watson, Norman Fischer, John Taggart, Joan Rettalack, Leslie Scalapino, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Maureen Owen, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Lorenzo Thomas, and Aaron Shurin, to cite a generous baker's dozen.(2) Needless to add, Silliman's more concrete act of anthologizing thirty-eight poets established a canon of "Language poetry" which has proven secure and nearly intractable, at least as an object of reference, reverence, or derision. But his was hardly a peremptory or self-aggrandizing gesture. In the American Tree remains an exemplary assembly (in every sense of the word: as a book it works); and what's more, a lion's share of significant books of American poetry since 1986 has been authored by Silliman's picks. The cynical view is that the phenomenon of Language poetry has proven, like Surrealism, to be a grand enterprise in publicity, a platform hoisting a legion of minor talents into major prominence. I think, however, that the polemical value of Language poetry as an issue is past - which is to say, the cheap shots are less and less viable as serious objections, and by the same token a superficial enthusiasm for sheer surface discontinuity may also have run its course. Finally, the careful placement of Language writing in broader poetic and discursive contexts in Marjorie Perloff's Radical Artifice, Charles Bernstein's A Poetics, Bob Perelman's The Marginalization of Poetry, Hank Lazer's Opposing Poetries and my The American Poetry Wax Museum should invalidate in advance any further blanket dismissals like those common in the past. This is a roundabout way of declaring that the issue of Language poetry is "aufgehoben" - to use that peculiar word Hegel makes much of, a word meaning both preserved and canceled. In other words, I assume Language poetry as a necessary given of the contemporary American poetic landscape, but I also assume this givenness in the mode of dissolution and absorption. Many of the most interesting demonstrations of the insistence of Language writing are no longer to be found in the work of Silliman's core group; the lessons have migrated; the emphasis on the signifier has rhizomatically penetrated the grassy horizon established by Whitman and Dickinson. In turn, it is increasingly untenable to think of the Language writers themselves as merely executing further proofs or demonstrations of first principles, comporting, that is, within the boundaries of groupthink, the impugning of which would presumably disqualify their individual achievements. So I propose, on this occasion, to take up an issue raised by Susan Howe in 1989 in her Talisman interview in which she noted a tendency for anthologists to "eliminate the work of women who have used or are using language in an experimental way."(3) The point here is not anthologies (Hoover and Messerli significantly adjust the material ground of Howe's complaint), but "experiment." Most pertinent among the effects of Language poetry is its erosion of the complacent security on which the lyrical ego hoists its banner. The lyrical ego is by no means deposed as such (and in any case, a wholesale attunement of poetic activity to chronicling language itself would suggest nothing so much as a return of the repressed, in which the egoic fortification would be immunized from direct scrutiny by its artful displacement onto resistant surfaces(4)); but the diversification of poetic means and strategies open up sites of "agency" which do not require validation by an heroic ego, and do not serve as vigilant fortifications of identity. …