Postmodernism, in language and poetry: what, where &, more particularly, how

Ron Silliman reading from "The Alphabet"

The subject is poetic innovation; the title by which it's become known is LANGUAGE. One chapter from Ron Silliman's The New Sentence, entitled "The New Sentence", ought to be enough for our appreciation of poetic innovation and, more specifically, the sentence-LANGUAGE nexus which his celebrated treatise describes. But it isn't. He said in a previous chapter entitled "Of Theory, To Practice" that "The goal of poetry can never be the proof of theory, although it is inevitably a test of the poet's beliefs." (59) Really? Isn't it just the purpose of  theory to justify a poetics? A "poet's prose", as he says in "Towards Prose"? So which is it: "goal of poetry" or "the poet's beliefs"? It's in those troubling waters of poetry per se and how it works that Silliman's dropped his own 'new sentence'.

Between what poetry is and the how of its meaning & beliefs, is just where that intermediary 'sentence' solution of Silliman's lies, the kernel of a more satisfying prose poem that he says has already been around, at least since Stein and Williams, and just needs the benefit of a little theory ( provided, as Silliman admits, by Barthes, Bemevoste & Vološinov). But Silliman seems to spend most of his creative energies in delineating a concept's ancestry rather than in justifying its radical newness. When Hugo Ball, for example, coined the phrase "new sentence" to refer to the super-charged ("transrational") vocables of language, the product had the immediacy of a sound poetry. To know it is to hear it or at least see the distinctive visual reconfigurations on a page's neutral surface as concrete poetry. But Silliman has the unenviable task of restricting the "poet's prose" to an examination of its visual (linguistic) properties only, giving a very different "feel" to poetry reading, and it's not the first time it's been done either. I think his efforts to do so make him Chomskyan (or Platonist) outright. But more of that later.Theorists as important (and refreshingly honest) as Silliman purposely give themselves away and leave it to us to connect the dots.

Let's ask instead of what poetry is, what is the sentence, since the two seem interchangeable at interesting levels of coherence, and see if we can get from where Silliman says it is, i.e. in prose poetry of the right kind, to how it got there in the first place.The offering of the 'sentence', the most oddly problematized 'syntagm' of all, is the latest accession to the postmodern debate. Well, what do we make of that? When I see the discussion in "The New Sentence" skirt gingerly round some pretty sophisticated linguistic theory, I eagerly await the arrival of the classical 'straw man', and I get one: naturally some ill-conceived view of the sentence (even that of Saussure, of all people) made either to conform to (or change places with) Silliman's own.

The sentence that won't work is just the ordinary one of propositions, carrier of common language (after Ayer, Quine); what's needed is a sentence loaded with the potential for self-critique (after Wittgenstein) or the most wildly implausible but workable rearrangement of its parts (after Stein). But where this comes from requires a rather clever trope of "ground and figure" that Canadian critic Brian Fawcett says is a rhetorical posturing, wherever it's found in contemporary discourse, that amounts to making any viewpoint "suspended above an abyss." Silliman's discourse is the same: with just a little archaeological work we discover in language itself that essential impulse to shake off messiness ( its potential for fragmentariness) and rise to a new position over all language. Why hasn't Silliman acknowledged here Derrida's admonition not to see language as anything but a harbinger of death, the "abyss"? The hope for the Language poet is that the  postmodern poem can't just mean anything, after all.

Derridean binary-bashing doesn't seem to be to Silliman's liking (not if all he's got is the mundane prose/poetry type) so he's opted for what I think is an argumentum ad origines, claiming "that the sentence [read the stuff of poetry] as distinct from the utterance of speech, is a unit of prose" (73), a type of prosody now wonderfully attuned to its own inner grammatical dynamisms. So it seems what the 'new sentence' is is a product of the places it's already been, first seen embryonically in the proto-models of Baudelaire, Mallarmé. Now that traditional poetry seems to have run its course, as the New Critics have talked about it, it's best to examine what's been overlooked most of all in the search for the origins of poetry: namely, language itself (whether prosodic or poetic), with its rich thick mantle layer of sentences and the heady atmospheres of expression once they've been charged with larger stylistic intentions. That's what poetry is, LANGUAGE, staring right in front of you, and why it sings by means of the 'new sentence'.

To the question 'What is poetry' his reply 'The Sentence, stupid!' is very direct but also very problematical, as it should be. In a poetic manifesto whose title's too tantalizingly close to The New Organon not to be seen for the paradigm maker it is & the discourse never far from polemic for its own pleasurable sake, Silliman's exposition turns into rarefied fun: in fact, poetry is envisaged as a Pure Land "of the one great sentence" (Barthes, cited in article) in which the pent up forces of "once-exteriorized poetic forms" (87) get released & rise above themselves in obedience to higher lexical principles, and poet Ron Silliman as its contemporary avatar. In the article "Controlling Interests" he's even referred to the new sentence's "discontinuous-but-eternal presentness" (180-81). Nothing's been this deliciously mystified since Artaud & Barthes. What's at stake is the essential commensurability of both writing and reading, for

...here is an important insight, which is that the modes of integration which carry words into phrases and phrases into sentences are not fundamentally different from those by which an individual sentence integrates itself into a larger work. This not only gives us a good reason for demanding a theory of sentences, but also suggests that such a theory would lead us toward a new mode of analysis of literary products themselves.

The hooting and shrieking marketplace of prose is seen as a type of poetry, chthonic but rhythmically alive, impelled to the surface by its own latent energies. If language is made to look down deep into the nature of human commerce from the perspective of god-spectators at a Sophoclean tragedy rather than at surface level, it discovers new ways of saying the same old things.

The "upward falling" language in Silliman's essay is also very telling.The  sentence, "the hinge unit of any literary product" (78), and origin and telos of  language is where things "integrate up" (87) or "the syllogistic move above the sentence level to an exterior reference is possible"(84) or"The deemphasis on the materiality of the text in this manner is an example of prose shaping poetic form"(82), or "Exterior formal devices, such as rhyme and linebreak, diminish, and the structural units become the sentence and paragraph" (79), etc. What are all these but descriptors for the sentence, or "the one great sentence", or the Sentence of a radically new contextualized prose poem that's been around at least since Williams and Stein?

And at some significant level are these not also Chomskyan "kernels" or innate phrase structures (lying deep in all language) capable of generating an infinite array of possible sentences for the "poet's prose"? A field of pressurized sites resulting in"sly and carefully-honed incommensurabilities". (89) Eliminate a linebreak, for instance, or stop making words rhyme where we'd expect them to, i.e. stop writing poems, and watch a whole new network of interrelated and purposefully ambiguous senses arise.(89) Don't write poems, in short: write 'sentences' instead. Look at the particularly Chomskyan way in which Silliman unpacks the potential grammaticalities of Perelman's sentences (88-89) or the linguistic contortions of a Jack Spicer reading (in a chapter entitled "Sentences"): he might as well have been talking about d-structure and s-structure.What we want in the prose poem is where we get it in practice, courtesy of the "new sentence". The ideal and real poem in language: both essentially there for the viewing.

This continual torquing of sentences is a traditional quality of poetry, but in poetry it is most often accomplished by linebreaks, or by devices such as rhyme. Here poetic form has moved into the interiors of prose. (89)

So Saussure's wrong; the sentence is a bona fide part of langue because "Grammar has become...prosody". (88) What looks like parole, the speech of common discourse, never remains in prose poetry just below but also above the level of the sentence (Again, note the "ground and figure" trope). A prose poetry that retains its delicious ambiguity can at the same time move like a syllogism, antedating and moving beyond itself. Wonderful versatility (and wonderful realignment with the ordinary language philosophers). And like a Platonist Silliman doesn't discard the material world but rather incorporates it into a new Organon, seeing it as the catalyst for a whole new body of poetical work, and giving to the act of reading a conceptual rigor peculiar just to itself. "Imagine what the major poems of literary history would look like if each sentence was identical to a line".(90) Silliman is not just poet but linguist, ontologist and perhaps even cultural archaeologist (after Foucault).

Below are Silliman's celebrated characterizations of the "new sentence" that he enjoins us to look for in poetry.

1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;

5) Syllogistic movement is: (a) limited; (b) controlled;

6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;

7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

Below are mine (just to the extent that each is a statement of where I think the 'new sentence' as literary theory ought to belong).

1)The 'new sentence' accedes respectfully to classicism in thought (as per the suggestive title of Silliman's article);
2) The 'new sentence' theorist accedes gracefully but unwillingly to ordinary language philosophy;
3) 'New sentence' theory combined with a Silliman reading gets us closer to where the ideal postmodern 'site' is (see 'YouTube' above);
4) The verse line (in a true prose poem) hasn't been so much dematerialized as deterritorialized (after Deleuze);
5) 'Syllogistic movement' is the grossest misappropriation of poetic movment imaginable;
6) Restoring the lost ideal of the torqued line to poetic discourse owes a great deal to Plato, Chomsky & Hugo Ball;
7) The verse line (in a poet's prose) is not a quantity but quality of the "one great sentence" or Sentence;
8) Nothing reveals more the classicist temper in 'new sentence' theory than a Silliman reading (see 'YouTube' above).