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).

The Little Magazine in Canada 1925-1980 (ECW Press, 1984) by Ken Norris

It is generally better for the poet to accept than oppose the values inherent in his [sic] society; it is better for him to aim at simplicity than to perpetuate the the obscurity which is killing off the respect for poetry in the minds of intelligent readers; and it is better for him to use and not oppose the traditions of poetry—and for the Canadian poet not to completely ignore his relation to the traditions of poetry in Canada. (John Sutherland, cited in The Little Magazine in Canada)

Likewise, a history of literary criticism could be written, identifying its origins also within the poem, its exteriorizing serialization and the resolution of its subsequent crisis through state subsidy by its implantation into the university structure, a process of bureaucratization through which writing is transformed into the canon of Literature. (Ron Silliman, The New Sentence)

Norris is both a poet and historian of literary events, and for both he's gotten some well-deserved praise. As one of the 70s Vehicule Poets in Quebec he understands poetry movement; as an American-Canadian who teaches in Maine he's seen the foreign influence debate from both sides. As poet-activist he may very well have been the type of disgruntled, youthful advocate for "the little magazine" and the (post-)modernist writings they showcase, "view[ing] the world of publishing and popularizers with disdain, sometimes with despair." (7) Louis Dudek, Norris's friend and mentor, quoted on the same page, aptly describes the hostile opposition new magazine and writing are likely to encounter in Canada, "open to attack both from the side of popular taste of the great majority, and from the side of the conservatively-traditional educated class." (7) Dudek himself, perhaps Canada's most eloquent defender (and critic) of Modernism, wrote of the "small press" movement: and not surprisingly he seems to sit as guiding genius over the pages of Norris's work. So Norris is an observer of the Canadian literary scene with an ear close to the ground: his work giving invaluable insights into the nature of this dual poetics-press phenomenology as well as an honest prospectus on any future developments in those areas.

Norris's book is well articulated, open-handed and critical at the same time: it discloses the mechanisms through a transparent medium. And if anything, it's confirmed a hunch of mine that the Canadian literary scene tends to chase its own tail. It seems we've come full circle. With just the names of poets and poetry movements changed, a general picture of literary and publishing history emerges in which the conquering also become the conquered (conquering elements coming from both the outside and inside): so that if the early Modernists decry the bland servile work of the 20s "Canadian Authors' Association",for example, and the pioneering people's poetry movement of First Statement can decry that of the more urbane, Eurocentric Preview; and even if Alphabet, inspired by the writings of Northrop Frye, can try to put myth and symbol into the void left by sterile social-realist poetry (just to name some notable developments)—if these can occur, all the Leagues and Federations and Unions of today (the offsprings of that original Modernist impetus), and the failed experimentalist writing they've popularized, are fair game, ripe for renewal and even overthrow. Norris's work (in its narration of the twin press and poetries dialectic) urges me to view contemporary poetry as coming in for the same sort of radical questioning, and mostly by writers of what I've elsewhere called suppressed 'aesthetic' styles. It may just have been an unintended effect of this book to make 'radicals' of its readers, inspiring a need to dismantle oppressive literary regimes everywhere.

Norris's book is a call to action: radicalism hid in scholarly sheep's-clothing. Looked at as a whole it makes boundaries between literary styles and lit mags fluid and porous: this much is pretty evident, at least in principal, and leads me to conclude that we're set for  interesting literary realignments today. In fact, a close look at the way little magazines throughout the decades evolved makes that need for critique today seem mandatory. The author clearly outlines the stages through which this rise and fall of small magazines came about: beginning with the overturn of the Victorian monolith, the common enemy to youth and Modernism, we end with the wildly dissonant (and decentered) voices of today's predominantly left-wing poetics, and their literary mouthpieces (such as Open Letter), further solidified by Canada Council and its provincial grants program. But what actually did take place in the intervening decades, roused to vilification of English literary sensibilities and models, is a chronicle of the continuously shifting ground of poetry paradigm and the record of those seismic movements in poetry communities, and through the small magazines they created. In Norris's own words,

That the little magazine is engaged in a literary ferment and literary transformation is a point I have tried to make clear. Beginning with Pound and his circle in England, we see the little magazine as a vital and necessary tool in the furthering of Modernist poetry. Indeed, because the inclinations of Modernism are anti-consumerist and non-commercial, Modernist writing must literally create a home for itself. That haven, first and foremost, is the little magazine, the testing-ground and proving-ground for subsequent generations of literary experimenters and innovators. (179)

 And impulse for newness also always seemed to turn into compromise and sensible marketing opportunity, a tendency conjoined to the need for self-affirmation in foreign authorities. Nowhere is the need for experimentalism of a distinctly Canadian type ever expressed (The less well-known attempt of poets James Reaney and Jay Macpherson to write a 'mythopoeic' work based on the writings of Northrop Frye probably came closest to a made-in-Canada poetics (88-89)). The die was cast early. Consider closely, Norris says, the direction that the development of the "little magazine" ultimately was to give to the contemporary poetry scene and the dizzying array (typology) of presses and poetries it spawned: see how, particularly through editorial fiat, verses projected (in postmodern parlance) into every and yet no one distinctive type of writing. Magazines and later anthology collections looked like an index of open forms and fields rather than established specimens of 'good' writing.

Consider some of the more noteworthy developments, already begun above: how, to begin with, the cosmopolitan Preview in time gave way, under the American influence, to the more native First Statement, both of which merged into the Northern Review, the latter,under even the stronger American influence of Corman and Pound, to be supplanted by Souster's ultra-modernist Contact. And look at the way the demise of Contact ushered in CIV/n, an even more "realistic and vital poetry" (66) inspired almost wholly by Pound holding literary court from St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, and Souster's Contact and Dudek's Delta  became the 60s Combustion vying with the notorious Trish and GrOnk for subscriptions and readers. Marvel, too, at the way Tish's experimental form (mostly derivative in origin and design) morphed into Imago's need for a longer, more sequenced poem, then into George Bowering's search for the epic (of all things!) in the Open Letter.  And note that for  a time the Canadian Cerberus and American 'Black Mountain'/Origin groups formed a sort of literary offensive against the regressive forces of academic and bourgeois poetry everywhere.

Layton, Souster, and Dudek appeared side-by-side with Olson, Creeley, Corman, and others of the Black Mountain group because they all shared a tangible commitment to poetry, to keep it moving ahead and to write it in the real language of the day (68)

All the bluster about daring experimentalism in the history of the little magazine is really that of heady optimism for change (under the banner of "social realism") tempered by the exigencies of politics and demographics, and with the odd poetic temperaments threatening to take literary ideology down a markedly wrong path (as witness the infighting between Frank Davey and George Bowering in Open Letter). So that what started as initial opposition to one common English ancestry (the first parricide) gets displaced and twisted so often it's hard to see Can Lit today as anything but a collection of weak splinter factions. The "little magazine", mimeographed, bound and, if successful enough, issued as a quarterly, is the most telling indicator of that growth of a national literature towards its own present form .

Between the period of the first anti-Victorian rebellion and the present (to which Norris's book is devoted) lay all the poets and poetic innovations the "small magazine" movement promoted. And the curious interrelationships and transborder communiqués along the way just made things more interesting. Whatever was new, fresh and innovative, a clarion call for new poetics, almost within a decade was sure to become old, in some cases reversing editorial policy completely and catering in the end for styles it set out to supplant (as in the case of John Sutherland's Northern Review). It was a pattern most of the small magazines followed, minus the few that weren't on the market scene long enough to matter. And as in the case of Souster's joining forces with Cid Corman and his Origin poets Canadians were also prone to bouts of  self-effacement and the need to imitate the American and European masters: a fawning attitude particularly evident in matters of new Imagist poetic styles. Self-contradictions (such as that between Souster's internationalism and Dudek's nationalism )inherent in a small press movement coupled with a tendency to subserve foreign influences (primarily of the American Imagists) were factors bound to make the Canadian culture industry always unsteady on its legs, a fledgling enterprise from beginning to end. A condition that persists to this day.

Canada, then as now, never could get clear about what Modernism as a literary movement meant, certainly not with all their incessant editorial changes, about-faces and inner squabblings. And with the baby-boomers flocking to the universities in the 60s, and the emergence of creative writing instruction (a curriculum development inspired by marketing rather than purely aesthetic needs), things got even more cluttered, more confused. Canada went from a few well-known poets to almost an entire generation of student-writers more attuned to creativity and self-expression and, of course, addicted to recreating their own versions of the prototypical American 60s scene.

In the universities, many students turned their backs on the business interests of their parents' generation and concentrated on the arts and humanities. More emphasis was placed upon individual creativity, and there was an increase in creative-writing classes and classes in all aspects of the fine arts. University people of the sixties were never very far away from the act of creation, and so the number of young poets, artists, and artisans multiplied. (77)

Poets came out in unprecedented numbers.The result was a proliferation of styles and publication venues; the value of poetry was gauged more by publication success rates than by any perceived development in literary styles. The radical was bound to become mainstream, and it did. Perhaps the most perplexing irony, of all, is the institutionalized presence today of Coach House (131), what was once the spirit of poetic rebellion and insouciance now hardened into the dreaded Other: mainstream state-funded Art. And then, of course, the creation of Canada Council in 1957 permanently solidified the lethal nexus of poetry and politics for all time. Demographics, advances in the area of printing technology (gone were the Gestetner and mimeographed copies), widening market opportunities and a the creation of  state-run culture were to change the face of Canadian poetry for ever. 

A poetry of 'gnosis' (inspired by my reading of the Nag Hammadi)

"Follow the clue patiently and you will understand nothing" (Basil Bunting)

Seth says,

she's the unimpressionable ever diffused wildly in wrong light, and brightly as the worm who worms into the wrong-wheeled soul, sewing the leprous

song of men's hearts; and surfeited, as worms in the wrong unimaginable light go and the empty and forlorn flower gardens, too is Sophia,

who's never one to tell the inconstant & wrong-headed souls they've been trampled in the unwise night of earth, and entwined at its airy ends,

nor that star-airy night can rile the wise; and who says "The heart's a niche for nettles that the aeons recoil from (unimaginable how!), & that it lisps

til it's dark and queens the uninquisitive who like to ease into the cattail mud, lazy and proud, and whose shield is more of the same insensate night"—

Sophia who says all this, never one to rise nor start too lightly or rather blame the scent of day for the abyssal Night, not liking to rise

dunged in all this abyssal heart of night, emptied and out-emptying like all the poor flowerless, the poor starless who coil out of dark inscrutable mud

Aeons! Aeons! boring into the sky's derisory mouth & maddening all the rest, quick-eyed are and just til Sophia riles them, without pity, hair of gristly snow

Hymns sure of this owl-vinctrix, limbs agile and congruous, claw deep into mud And her pitiless falling unkings the dark and scatters all its seed,

gelid-eyed vinctrix, & she disembowels deep to make the archons shriek and
the angels sleep, Barbelo, Adamas, & scatters tansy over their bones;

or stands twenty-four hours round them, the gelid bones and windpipes, and
archons lying in twitch grass, & twenty-four more, shrieking

or is double stars high, in cahoots with the swelling All or high over the grasses, a dying  half-voiced song from the wrong light, unlinked by the All

and chorusing moodily over the windpipes