Reddy, Srikanth - Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry

Changing Subjects
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Changing Subjects
Digressions in Modern American Poetry
Srikanth Reddy
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reddy, Srikanth, 1973
Changing subjects : digressions in modern American poetry / Srikanth Reddy.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-19-979102-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. American poetry20th centuryHistory and criticism.
2. Moore, Marianne, 18871972Criticism and interpretation. 3. Hejinian, LynCriticism and interpretation.
4. Ashbery, John, 1927Criticism and interpretation. 5. Whitman, Walt, 18191892Influence.
6. Digression (Rhetoric) in literature. 7. Poetics. I. Title. II. Title: Digressions in modern American poetry.
PS323.5.R43 2012
811.509dc23 2011043099
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
For Sarada P. Reddy
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
1. It Must Change: The Art of Digression in Twentieth-Century

American Poetry 3
2. To Explain Grace Requires a Curious Hand: Marianne Moores
Interdisciplinary Digressions 30
3. Changing the Sjuzet: Lyn Hejinians Digressive Narratology
and the Writing of History 61
4. Digression Personified: Whitman, the New York School, and the
Drift of Poetry 95
5. New Digressions: John Ashbery and the Changing Subjects of the
Twenty-First Century 128
Notes 157
Works Cited 173
Index 183
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It seems fitting that a book about digression should enter into the world in
a somewhat circuitous fashion. During my graduate studies, I changed the
subject of my doctoral dissertation so many times that it eventually became
clear to me that I ought to write about digression itself. Since then, the
writing of poetry has diverted me from the work of scholarship for years at
a time, though I hope this literary distraction will have somehow benefited
the pages that follow. Along the way, my friends, colleagues, teachers, and
family have made every detour a pleasure and have allowed me to see this
work through to the end. This book would never have arrived at its destina-
tion without them.
I am grateful for the guidance and support of many teachers during my
graduate studies at Harvard University. Helen Vendlers care for poems
remains my model to this day. I feel very fortunate to have benefited from
her advice and encouragement over the years as she oversaw this project
from its origins to completion. Peter Sacks showed me that one can be both
a poet and a scholar and, as if this were not enough, a gracious teacher, too.
His comments on the early stages of this study were invaluable to me. Jorie
Grahams work as a poet was an inspiration to me long before I had the
opportunity to study with her, and she proved to be even more of a galva-
nizing presence in propria persona. In addition to these advisors, I would
like to thank Elaine Scarry, Philip Fisher, and James Engell for their gener-
osity and example in the classroom. The creative writing faculty at Harvard,
too, influenced my approach to scholarship by teaching me to view poems
from the inside. I am grateful to Lucie Brock-Broido, Henri Cole, Louise
Gluck, and Seamus Heaney for the hours they all spent with me illuminating
how poems work. A Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities allowed me to
embark upon this project in earnest during my time at Harvard, and I would
like to thank the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for this support.
My current institution, the University of Chicago, has provided an ideal
environment for intellectual inquiry while nurturing creative practice in
equal measure. I would like to thank the Humanities Division of the university
for the generous support of a junior faculty leave that allowed me to complete
a draft of this study. A fellowship from the Franke Institute for the Humani-
ties provided an additional year to revise the book. I am grateful to the direc-
tor of the Franke Institute, James Chandler, as well as to the staff and fellows
at that center for providing such a collegial home for scholarship and creativ-
ity. The universitys program in Poetry and Poetics has offered a model of
intellectual community during my time here. Robert Von Hallberg made this
community possible, and I thank him for welcoming me into it. Oren Izen-
berg transformed my approach to thinking about poetry in ways too numer-
ous to outline in this space. Richard Striers dedication to close reading has
kept me honest, or, at least, I have tried to live up to his high standards of
attentiveness and rigor in the explication of poems. Liesl Olsons work has
been as valuablethat is to say, invaluableto me as her friendship. My col-
leagues Bradin Cormack, Lauren Berlant, John Wilkinson, Janice Knight,
Lisa Ruddick, Jennifer Scappettone, Kelly Austin, Alison James, Mark Payne,
and Bozena Shallcross have all enriched this work, either directly or simply
by making my time here at the university such a pleasure. I would also like to
thank my research assistant, Chalcey Wilding, for her remarkable attention to
detail and her thoughtful comments on this work.
Portions of this book have appeared, in earlier versions, in American
Literature, Contemporary Literature, Literary Imagination, and Raritan. I am
grateful to the editors of those journals for their suggestions and encourage-
ment. The anonymous readers for Oxford University Press provided valuable
comments on the manuscript that I have tried to honor wherever possible. I
would like to thank my editor at Oxford, Shannon McLachlan, for making
a home for this book during a time of uncertainty in academic publishing.
Brendan ONeill has been the most energetic and genial steward imaginable
in moving this project through the processes of production and publication
at the press.
Finally, I cannot thank my family enough for their love and support
throughout the writing of this book. My parents, Srinivasalu and Sarada
P. Reddy, have indulged my poetical inclinations with incomparable
patience and generosity over the years. Along with my sister, Vineetha, they
have shown me that poetry flourishes best upon the ground of affection.
My mother and father-in-law, Ann and Frank Buffam, provided the hospi-
tality and kindness that made it possible for me to write many of these pages
during extended visits to their home. My daughter, Mira, is still too little to
read, but she has given me the joy and perspective that I have needed to
bring this work to completion. Last but certainly not least, my wife, Suzanne
Buffam, has shaped my writing and given it direction. She has done the
same in every other aspect of my life as well. Acknowledgment is too meager
a word for what I owe to her.
[x] Acknowledgments
Changing Subjects
CHAP TER 1
It Must Change
The Art of Digression in Twentieth-Century
American Poetry
I n the autumn of 1937, a visitor to the offices of the Hartford Accident

and Indemnity Company, leafi ng through the pages of that institutions
venerable house organ, The Hartford Agent, might have come across a wry
litt le reflection, penned by a newly minted vice president in the agencys
Bonding Division, on the subject of Insurance and Social Change.
Toward the end of this commentary, the authorwho had, like his fic-
tional contemporary Walter Mitt y, excavated from countless ordinary
evenings in bourgeois Connecticut a rather extraordinary imaginative
cosmosdraws our attention to a surprisingly stable market for secu-
rities in this period of economic and social upheaval:
In a late number of the Accident Companys Confidential Bulletin, it was said that
Cemeteries have been found by a number of offices to be a very defi nite market for
the Hartfords All Risk Securities Policy. Th is observation would apply to the Hart-
fords policies generally under Communism and, to some extent, under Fascism.
(Stevens, Collected, 796)
A grave irony rests in the fact that cemeteries, their inhabitants blissfully
oblivious of both accident and indemnity, require coverage against flood,
fi re, and sundry other acts of God. The living must underwrite the dead.1
In his alter ego as debonair aesthete, Wallace Stevens had articulated an
earlier version of this custodial imperativehere inflected by the American
drama of racein his modernist version of Grays Elegy in a Country
Churchyard: Mow the grass in the cemetery, darkies, declaims the
speaker of Two at Norfolk, a poem added to the 1931 edition of Harmo-
nium (Collected, 92). With the engineers of Joseph Stalins Great Purge
making a burial site of the Karelia Forest and the Buchenwald camp now
fully operational in the beech woods that Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
once so loved to sketch, the ossuaries of Europe must have seemed a world
apart from the manicured New England cemeteries of Wallace Stevenss
literary perambulations. But under American liberal democracy, under
Soviet Communism, and, to some extent, under European Fascism, this
poet-executive mordantly notes the posthumous solidarity of those who
dwell beyond change on both sides of the Atlantic.2 The capitalist, Com-
munist, and Fascist dead alike must be covered. They fi le their claim, as it
were, regardless of the regimes ceaselessly changing above.
Only a year earlier, Stevens had been subjected to some fairly trenchant
criticism for his studied indifference toward the drama of social change
unfolding on a global stage throughout this period. Of course, writes
Stanley Burnshaw in his infamous review of Stevens and the now largely
forgotten Haniel Long, neither poet is weakening the class in poweras
yet they are potential allies as well as potential enemies (Statue, 366).
In the face of a Second World War brewing in Europe, labor unrest at
home, and an unprecedented economic depression deepening across the
globe, this inscrutable poetas yet neither ally nor enemy to readers of
The New Massesremains aloof from questions of social change, like the
dead haunting the margins of his commentary in The Hartford Agent. Mis-
trustful of ideology, Stevens prefers to frame his own Utopian inquiries in
a theological light from the outset of his literary career, asking in Sunday
Morning, Is there no change of death in paradise? / Does ripe fruit never
fall? (Collected, 55). While acknowledging that Stevenss imaginative
universe is far from an idiots paradise, Burnshawwho, in his darker
moments as a Marxist believer, would confront his own misgivings
about the glory of the life-to-come in the stateless utopia (Statue,
359)faults this writer for a failure to advocate change in a world desta-
bilized by class confl ict. Bypassing both the Romantic tree and the mod-
ernist machine as figures for poetry, the young radical imagines the
Stevensian text as a frozen thing, separated from its kernel of fi re and
allowed to sett le, cool off and harden in the poets mind until it emerges a
strange amazing crystal (364). 3 But a strange and amazing thing about
crystalsas any student who has watched one ramifying over time
knowsis that they do, however slowly, change. Ten years and an unim-
aginable war later, allowed to sett le, cool off, and harden in the poets
mind, Burnshaws crystal provides Stevens with an image not of the poem
but, rather, of the world. Returning at twilight from a lecture at the
Sorbonne, the speaker of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction pauses in a
[4] Changing Subjects

gildered street to intimately address by name a fluent mundo that will,
at last, have stopped revolving except in crystal (Collected, 351). Ste-
venss sly appropriation of this image crystallizes his differences with
Burnshaw over the question of change while, at the same time, disclosing
a symbolic economy at work in this dialectical contretemps between poet
and critic.
No self-respecting political radical will, of course, be content with a
revolution in crystal. Realists have been bitter at the inanity of Popes
Whatever is is right, Burnshaw complains, but Stevens plunges ahead
to the fi nal insolence: For realists, what is is what should be (Statue,
364). Popes theodicy does indeed reflect a conservative desire to insure
his Enlightenment England, shaken by political revolution a century ear-
lier, against further social change. It should not surprise us, then, that Ste-
venss revision of Pope along the axis of iswhatever is is right
crystallizing into the even more rigid chiasmus of what is is what
should so infuriate Burnshaws revolutionary sensibilities.4 Adding one
last fi llip to the fi nal insolence, however, Stevens cannot resist rebuking
the young critic a year afterward, in a poem from Owls Clover titled Mr.
Burnshaw and the Statue. As the poem opens, an imaginary Burnshaw,
dandled on the authors knee like a ventriloquists dummy, utters revolu-
tionary mottos:
The thing is dead ... Everything is dead

Except the future. Always everything
That is is dead except what ought to be. (Collected, 570)
Thus caricatured, Burnshaws radical slogans may seem a far cry from Popes
royalist rhetoric. But the Marxist lament regarding commodificationthe
thing is deadinitiates a curious rhyme with the classic call-and-response of
monarchical succession: The thing is dead... . Long live the thing. The histori-
cal progression from Popes inanity to Stevenss insolence to the cry of the
imaginary Burnshaw thus maps a curiously circumscribed grammar of social
change across the poetics of modernity:
1. Whatever is is right (Conservative)

2. What is is what should be (Realist)
3. Always everything that is is dead except what ought to be (Radical)
From a formal perspective, the progression from a predicate of divine

political right to secular modernitys ethical sense of what ought to be
merely registers a shift in nomenclature within a firmly fi xed chiastic syn-
tax. Faced with such a multiple-choice problem, Stevens the grammarian
IT M UST CH A NGE [5]

would, of course, choose option 4: none of the above. For this interro-
gator of the the, the common denominator is is belies a common fail-
ure of the conservative, the realist, and the radical alike to construct a
poetics capable of registering the elusive imperatives of change within the
ceaselessly shift ing historical moment.
IT MUST CHANGE
Th is book is a study of the multifaceted imperative to changethe world,

the poem, or ones lifeas it was encountered by American poets in the
twentieth century. No other passage from the literature of the period con-
fronts this question so squarely as the poetic sequence at the heart of Ste-
venss Notes toward a Supreme Fiction: It Must Change. For readers
sympathetic to Burnshaws point of view, the grammar of Stevenss motto
will seem incomplete. Change, from this perspective, ought to be transi-
tive: the supreme fiction must change class consciousness, or the
distribution of capital, or any number of other unsatisfactory states of af-
fairs. The intransitivity of Stevenss formulation, on the other hand, inti-
mates that the grammatical subject itthe supreme fiction itselfmust
alter, vary, and evolve. In his study New Deal Modernism, however, Michael
Szalay argues that Stevens ultimately regards both social and literary
change as two sides of a single coin, for insurance and poetry alike seek to
redress the volatility of a world in flux: the objectification of social rela-
tionships intrinsic to both practices compensates for the fact that no pre-
meditated planin either poetic or political tertiacan ever make the
future sufficiently secure (127). To read Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
within its historical context, then, is to study the intersecting obligations
of changepolitical, literary, and beyondwhich made simultaneous
claims upon American intellectual life during the fi rst half of the century.
Stevenss poem is the cry of this occasion. We say / Th is changes and that
changes, writes the author:
Thus the constant

Violets, doves, girls, bees and hyacinths
Are inconstant objects of inconstant cause
In a universe of inconstancy. (Collected, 337)
In this Heraclitean universe, an old seraph haunts the public gardens in

spring. Descended from the highest angelic order in the Dantean cos-
mology of this American Commedia, Stevenss seraph might at first seem
indifferent toward change, like the dead of New England or their comrades

across the ocean in Europe. But even an angel is subject to time (this one,
once young, is now old) and the mutability of moods: The seraph / Is
satyr in Saturn, according to his thoughts (337). Parcel-gilded (336),
this figure resembles both the worldly Stevens himself on the way home
from a days shopping and the buzzing workers, gilt with pollen, that he so
studiously observes in the park: The bees came booming as if they had
never gone, / As if hyacinths had never gone (337). In Stevenss mutable
cosmos, however, only wishful constructions like as if can sponsor such
a dream vision of eternal bees and hyacinths. By the end of the canto, this
fugitive Utopia fractures. The bees came booming, the poet begins to
repeat as if out of fi xed habit, only to fi nd that as if will no longer bear the
weight of refrain: As ifThe pigeons clatter in the air (337). 5 Change
relentlessly overtakes the world of Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, from
the heavenly kingdom of the aging seraph to the earthly offices of the per-
ambulating poet to the creaturely order of Virgilian bees in their season.
Perhaps no writer since Ovid has so obsessively documented the meta-
morphoses of our fluent mundo as Stevens. My mind leads me to speak
now of new forms changed / into new bodies writes the classical poet at
the outset of his history of the world, chronicling the ceaseless transfor-
mation of heroes into constellations, queens into waterfalls, and immor-
tals into echoes (Metamorphoses, 5). By the fi nal canto of the It Must
Change sequence in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, we fi nd our modern-
ist Ovid seated on a park bench, viewing a pond in which swans / Were
seraphs, were saints, were changing essences (Collected, 343). If swan
becomes seraph over the course of the sequence, this quiet metamorpho-
sis subtends a work of art thatlike an egg hatching into an instar, an
instar forming a chrysalis, and, from this chrysalis, emerging a winged
creatureitself undergoes radical transformations from one canto to the
next. Here we have the old seraphs vigil in the park; a cartoon-Presidents
oafish fiats against time; an ekphrasis on the statue of the General Du
Puy; a Whitmanian meditation on opposites; an elegy for a planter in the
tropics; the wild song of a Shelleyan sparrow; the poet alone among lilacs
by moonlight; the failed epithalamion of Ozymandias and Nanzia Nun-
zio; a modernist De vulgari eloquentia that seeks to reconcile the imagina-
tions Latin with our lingua franca et jocundissima; and an eventual
return to Stevenss beloved park bench, his Theater of Trope (343).
Where Ovid remains bound by the frame of narration in his book of
changes, Stevens moves freely between story and song, epithalamion and
elegy, satire and poetics in this carnivalesque text. It follows that to
change modes is to change the world, observes the poet in his Conversa-
tion with Th ree Women of New England, establishing the grounds for his
own brand of discursive activism (470). Within Stevenss idiosyncratic

rhetoric of literary forms, description may be revelation, but digression is
revolution.
Framed by the famous slogans It Must Be Abstract, It Must Change,
and It Must Give Pleasure, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction stages a curi-
ous intervention in an age of literary manifestos. An exceptionally
charged genre, poetically and politically, the manifesto in this period
becomes the place where the most pressing issues and questions faced by
twentieth-century art, including the relation to the audience, to society,
to politics, indeed, the whole conception of what an artwork is or should
be, are being dogmatically as well as symptomatically worked out,
observes Martin Puchner in his wide-ranging study Poetry of the Revolu-
tion (71). Perhaps the most pronounced formal symptom of this dog-
matic genre is its emphatically linear exposition. Dryly claiming that I
am on principle against manifestos, the irreverent subversive Tristan
Tzara acknowledges this aspect of the form in his Dada Manifesto of 1918:
To proclaim a manifesto you have to want: A.B.C., thunder against 1, 2, 3, lose your
patience and sharpen your wings to conquer and spread as, bs, cs litt le and big, sign,
scream, swear, arrange the prose in a form of absolute and irrefutable evidence, prove
your non-plus-ultra ... . (Approximate, 148)
From F.T. Marinett is Manifesto of Futurism on the Fascist Right to Vlad-

imir Tatlins Theses on the Bolshevik Left , the trope of enumeration has
deeply informed the manifesto genre regardless of the authors political
creed.6 (To impose your A.B.C. is a natural thing, laments Tzara, and
therefore regrettable (149)). Th is sequential compulsion aligns the
manifesto with a teleological poetics of purpose within the period:
Manifestos tend to present themselves as mere means to an end, writes
Puchner, demanding to be judged not by their rhetorical or literary
meritstheir poetrybut by their ability to change the world (Revolu-
tion, 2). Indeed, the proliferation of manifestos throughout Europe and
the United States in the fi rst half of the twentieth century effected a
profound instrumentalization of aesthetics within modernist literary
culture. Andr Bretons Second Manifesto, for instance, served as a disci-
plinary instrument that rid surrealism of suspected renegade members,
most famously Artaud and Georges Bataille, while also defending the
movement against the attacks of the Third International (Puchner, Revolu-
tion, 186). In the hands of a literary Robespierre, this cultural form, like the
guillotine and oubliette of a prior era, can be employed to both discipline
and punish.
The manifesto, with apologies to Clausewitz, may be regarded as a
continuation of the ars poetica by other means. Set up like a battlefield in

Mary Ann Cawss formulation, this militant form demolishes the collegial
fireside atmosphere established by Horace in his original Ars Poetica two
thousand years earlier (Caws, Manifesto, xx). Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
thus would have struck Burnshaw and readers of The New Masses as all too
comfortably couched within an outmoded Horatian tradition during an era
of urgent social crisis. Like the classical poet addressing his avuncular epis-
tle to the young Piso, Stevens instructs his own imaginary ingnue on the
genesis of invention in the poems opening lines: begin, ephebe, by per-
ceiving the idea / Of this invention, this invented world, / The inconceiva-
ble idea of the sun (Collected, 329). But where the Latin auctoritas outlines
his poetics in an orderly fashionprogressing from questions of unity and
harmony (lines 137) to the aims of the writer (lines 3872) to traditions
dictates (lines 73118), and so onour skeptical modernist comically
capsizes beneath the burden of literary instruction:
Theres a meditation there, in which there seems

To be an evasion, a thing not apprehended or
Not apprehended well. Does the poet
Evade us, as in a senseless element? (Collected, 343)
Evasion, of course, is precisely the charge leveled by Burnshaw against

Stevenss work: one can rarely speak surely of Stevenss ideas, com-
plains the young critic (Statue, 364). Though the eponymous subject of
any ars poetica customarily would be the art of poetry, the speaker of
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction continually discovers that detours from
aesthetics give pleasure as well, ranging from the genealogy of religion
to the postcolonial epithalamion to the drama of domesticity within
High Anglicanism in the poems fi nal sequence (346348). Indeed, few
and far between are the cantos phrased in a Horatian dictionThe
poem refreshes life (330), The poem goes from the poets gibberish
(342), To sing jubilas at exact, accustomed times (344) in Stevenss
evasive work. Horace, who advises aspiring ephebes to say here and now
whats to be said here and now, would be perplexed, no doubt, by this
twentieth-century ars poetica that habitually avoids the subject of poetry
itself (Epistles, 163).
In a lecture on The Irrational Element in Poetry delivered at Har-
vards campus in the winter of 1936, Stevens refers to the difficulty of
sticking to the true subject of any literary enterprise (Collected, 785).
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction makes its central artistic virtueIt Must
Changeof this difficulty. Shifting scenes from one canto to the next,
this mercurial ars poetica presents its ephebe with a whimsical lumber
room of the imagination:

V
On a blue island in a sky-wide water
The wild orange trees continued to bloom and to bear,
Long after the planters death ...
VI
Bethou me, said sparrow, to the crackled blade ...
VII
After a lustre of the moon, we say
We have not the need of any paradise,
We have not the need of any seducing hymn.
It is true. Tonight the lilacs ...
VIII
On her trip around the world, Nanzia Nunzio
Confronted Ozymandias... . (339342)
One can never predict what will come next in this disorderly paean to
changing the subject. Though Notes toward a Supreme Fiction professes
to teach us poetics by numbers, the Roman numerals of this sequence
deliberately fail to map Stevenss aesthetics onto the orderly coordi-
nates of purposeful exposition. The digressive ars poetica thus cleverly
vitiates the trope of enumeration that propels the manifestos of figures
such as Marinett i within the period: 1. We intend to sing the love of
danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. 2. Courage, audacity, and
revolt will be the essential elements of our poetry. 3. Up to now litera-
ture has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep (qtd. Caws,
Manifesto, 41). In lieu of such a purposeful march toward a collective
future, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction advocates a disorderly poetics of
detours and digressions that eludes description as either purposeful or
purposeless. How, then, can one productively theorize Stevenss relation
to the question of purpose? The problem may lie in the derivational
suffi xes that we attach to this vexing signifier. Exploring a liminal terrain
somewhere between the purposeful and the purposeless, Stevens asks us
to imagine a purposive poetics that rejects orthodoxies of teleological
order and authorial intention within the period. Purposiveness can thus
exist without an end, writes Immanuel Kant in the third Critique, insofar
as we do not place the causes of this form in a will, but can still make the
explanation of its possibility conceivable to ourselves only by deriving it
from a will (105). Stevenss unruly numbers occupy precisely this
purposive space. We do not posit the causes of this poems form in a mod-
ernist will to literary power, yet we can grasp the explanation of its
possibility only by deriving it from Stevenss self-proclaimed will to
change (Collected, 344).
[ 10 ] Changing Subjects
It is in this Kantian tradition that Stevens has to be placed, argues the
philosopher Simon Critchley in an article titled Wallace Stevens and the
Intricate Evasions of As, before proceeding to intricately evade this claim:
I am not saying that Stevens is simply a Kantian, but rather that he begins
from Kantian premises read through romantic spectacles. That is, he begins
from a perceived failure of Kantianism, from what might be called a dejected
transcendental idealism (qtd. Armand, Contemporary, 105). To place such
an evasive poet squarely within any philosophical tradition seems a
fraught enterprise at best. Without subjecting the author to a Knigsber-
gian makeover, however, it may nonetheless be useful to recuperate con-
cepts such as purposiveness from Kants critical project for our contemporary
understanding of Stevenss digressive aesthetics. Viewed through Kantian
spectacles, the trope of digression itself shares in beautys oblique relation-
ship to questions of purpose: Beauty is the form of the purposiveness of an
object, insofar as it perceived in it without representation of an end (Critique,
120). Digression, in this respect, is the rhetorical expression of Kants theo-
rem of beauty.7 Purposive in form yet evading the representation of a pur-
pose, digression has long vexed authors with strong teleological interests.
Thomas Hobbes, for example, writes in the first book of Leviathan:
... Without steadiness, and direction to some end, a great fancy is one kind of mad-
ness; such as they have, that entering into any discourse, are snatched from their pur-
pose, by every thing that comes in their thought, into so many, and so long digressions,
and parentheses, that they utterly lose themselves. (46)
Anxiety regarding the consequences of digression for the body politic

even subtends the personification of this trope in George Puttenhams Art
of English Poesie, in which, following the Greek original [parecbasis], we
also call him the Straggler, by allusion to the soldier that marches out of
his array, or by those that keep no order in their march, as the batt les well
ranged do; of this figure there need be given no example (318). Denied
exemplary representation of this figure there need be given no
examplePuttenham quietly banishes the digressive figure of the Strag-
gler from the social and discursive order that it fails to advance. Stevens,
however, remains wary of mobilizing his discourse in any sort of military
formation. How easily the blown banners change to wings, writes the
poet in his aubade to George Santayana, noting the instability of our im-
perial imperatives on the horizons of perception (Collected, 432).
Changing the subject within his own digressive ars poetica, Stevens deft ly
evades the militarization of art that was promoted by movements such as
futurism in modernist literary culture. For this writer, the ideal poem
would register both the epic banners of historical confl ict and the distinct
IT M UST CH A NGE [ 11 ]
shades cast by fluttering things with equal care, a mutable work that, like
Notes toward a Supreme Fiction itself, makes changing the subject its pur-
posive method.
The teleological view of the world answers relational questions of
means and ends magnificently and extremely admirably, Kant observes
in the fi nal volume of his critical trilogy, but art, the philosopher con-
cludes, lies beyond means and ends (Critique, 304). By inventing a purpo-
sive form for his literary desiderata in Notes toward a Supreme Fiction,
Stevens unbinds aesthetics from the teleological rhetoric that governed
art theory throughout the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Moreover,
this metaphysician in the dark intimates that the grounds for such a lit-
erary operation are philosophicalpredicated upon the play of difference
between the purposeful, the purposeless, and the purposive as ways of
thinking about language and intentionrather than political (218). Thus,
this writers critique of the poetics of purpose does not entail a quarrel
with Burnshaws radical Left exclusively but, rather, with all who would
impose any Utopian aesthetics whatsoever upon poetic discourse. In the
unpublished manuscript of Romance for a Demoiselle Lying in the
Grass, for instance, Stevens composes a veiled parody of Walt Whitmans
beloved figure for an idealized American society:
It is grass.
It is monotonous. (Collected, 551)
Lampooning Whitmans invocation of a triumphant American imperium,

this poetic speaker ponderously declaims that I invoke the monotony of
monotonies / Free from images and change, only to collapse into an
operatic surrender by the poems end: Clasp me, / Delicatest machine
(551). Stevens critique of Utopianism, then, rests upon an abiding skepti-
cism with regard to the monotonies of any fi xed paradise. Indeed, this
writers own political beliefs seem to have been in perpetual motion
throughout his life. In a letter to Ronald Lane Latimer that would have
taken Burnshaw by surprise, Stevens once confided, I hope I am headed
left, but there are lefts and lefts (9 October 1935, Letters, 456).
There are lefts and leftsbut there are lefts and Lefts, too. For a poet
like Stevens who prefers to dwell in transition, both the Communist Left
and the Fascist Right represent fi xed coordinates that lock down the polit-
ical imaginary. Recent studies such as Alan Filreiss Modernism from Right
to Left seek to complicate the binary opposition between the ideological
left and right within the period: the main point of Burnshaws criticism,
and of Stevenss long poem-response, was to propose continual inter-
ideological struggle as a model for negotiating opposing positions that
were themselves shifting (221). Uncomfortable with the compulsive capi-
talization of political orientation within American culture of the period,
Stevens fashions his world from lowercase lefts and rights thatlike the
plural lefts and rights of one who fi nds herself facing in various directions
while traversing an uneven topographyreconfigure themselves depend-
ing upon the momentary orientation of a moving center. Moreover, such
commonplace distinctions necessarily entail a metaphysical considera-
tion, as Kant observes in his Prolegomena:
I cannot put such a hand as is seen in the mirror in the place of its original; for if the
one was a right hand, then the other in the mirror is a left ... . There are no inner dif-
ferences that any understanding could merely think; and yet the differences are inner
as far as the senses teach, for the left hand cannot, after all, be enclosed within the
same boundaries as the right (they cannot be made congruent), despite all reciprocal
equality and similarity; one hands glove cannot be used on the other. What then is
the solution? These objects are surely not representations of things as they are in
themselves, and as the pure understanding would cognize them, rather, they are sen-
sory intuitions, i.e. appearances, whose possibility rests on the relation of certain
things, unknown in themselves, to something else, namely our sensibility. (3738)
A philosophical puzzle subtends, a priori, the manual self-difference that

gives rise to our language of political orientation. For Kant, the solution
lies in regarding left and right as products of our sensibility. Th is
sensibility, or the feeling of ones own embodiment, authorizes all sorts of
self-orientation in the world: On this feeling, observes Allen Grossman,
Kant builds the legitimacy ... not only of spatial, but also of mathematical,
logical, and theological orientation (True-Love, 8).8 Although illusory
there are no inner differences that any understanding could merely think;
and yet the differences are inner as far as the senses teach usthese inner
differences allow us to determine our position within a manifold of
abstract paradigms. Stevenss offhand aperu regarding the plurality of
lefts and lefts thus invites us to reflect upon the everyday mysteryAs
if the air, the mid-day air, was swarming / With the metaphysical changes
that occur, / Merely in living as and where we live (Collected, 287)of
orienting oneself within a fluent mundo.
While the Stevens of the letters expresses a covert desire to step left-
ward, the poetical Stevens remains stubbornly leery of any political incli-
nation whatsoever. Alpine landscapes periodically surface in the work of
this poet who, throughout a lifetime of writing, repeatedly repairs to a
neutral Switzerland of the imagination. In the prefatory lines to Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction, the wartime poet locates peace itself in the
uncertain light of single, certain truth, / Equal in living changingness to
the light / In which I meet you, in which we sit at rest, / For a moment in
the central of our being (329). The I and you here may be Stevens and
Henry Church (the poems dedicatee), or author and reader, or we may
encompass these and any number of other dramatis personae: lover and
beloved, poet and supreme fiction, present and former self. But the most
slippery word in this peculiar dedication is the adjective central. Ordi-
narily, one would expect the line to read as follows: we sit at rest, / For a
moment in the center of our being. To transform the center into the
central is to rarefy this noun into the abstract condition of a modifier.
Like the lefts and lefts of the letters, then, the replacement of the center
by the central in this poem illustrates the subtlety of Stevenss lexicon
for the political imaginary. Though he is generally regarded as a centrist
by critical default, Stevens views even the fragile political center of the
period as a fi xedand therefore falsecoordinate for determining ones
position in a volatile world. Making a dwelling place of an adjective, this
elusive countryman elects to meet you in the intangible central of our
collective being.
And do not call it fi xity, T.S. Eliot cautions us when, like Dantes Bea-
trice, he escorts his reader to the still point of the turning world (Eliot,
Collected, 177). Yet Eliots the ... the in this famous phrase marks a sub-
tle reification of the axis mundi in his Four Quartets. A cosmology set spin-
ning not upon the nominal spindle of Eliots bedded axle-tree but,
rather, around the adjectival axis of Stevenss central might best be
described as a moving contour, a change not quite completed (Stevens
351). All of Stevenss work following Notes toward a Supreme Fiction
endeavors to trace the unceasing revolutions, seasons, and phenomeno-
logical ephemera of this fluent world. In the fi nal chapter of Ariel and the
Police, Frank Lentricchia describes this provisional and fugitive aspect of
the poets late verse:
What he is writing is a kind of pre-poetry, a tentative approach to the poem, an enact-

ment of desire not as a state of mind, with all the inert implications of the phrase
state of mind, but as movement, and not movement in a straight line, as if he could
see the end of the journey, but a meandering sort of motion: desire as improvisational
action which gives us the sense of starting, stopping, changing direction, revising the
phrase, refi ning the language, draft ing the poem and keeping the process of draft ing
all there as the fi nal thing because the fi nished thing cant be had. (202)
Though I have been reading Notes toward a Supreme Fiction against the
literary genres of manifesto and ars poetica in the preceding pages, this poem
also belongs to the philosophical tradition of the prolegomena or Grundle-
gung. Like Kant outlining his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
Stevens lays the theoretical foundation for his valedictory pre-poetry in
this literary groundwork. Disarticulating not only the poetics of purpose
that propels the manifesto movement within the period but the orderly
Horatian decorum of the classical ars poetica tradition as well, Notes
toward a Supreme Fiction thus underwrites a highly provisional sense of
literary form in modernist aesthetic theory. Changing the subject within
his evasive ars poetica, moreover, Stevens ultimately clears a discursive
path for digressive authors with such varying approaches to the political
as Lyn Hejinian and John Ashbery in postwar American poetry. In the
following pages, I will outline some consequences of Stevenss digressive
poetics for literary studies in general and, more specifically, for our under-
standing of American poetry over the course of the twentieth century. But
before proceeding with this study of changing subjects, it may be useful to
consider just what we mean when we talk about subjects per se in the hu-
manities today. Following Lentricchia, who fi rst situated Stevens in rela-
tion to Michel Foucaults work on subjectivity and power in Ariel and the
Police, then, I will offer a brief account of how the Foucauldian subject has
come to inflect our understanding of modern poetics within contempo-
rary critical practice.
THE DISJUNCTIVE FALLACY
Lentricchias pugnacious broadside, which sought to redeem the per-

sonal subject of Wallace Stevens for history (Ariel, 23), epitomizes both
the enthusiasm and the suspicion that accompanied the reception of Fou-
caults thought in American literary criticism throughout the 1980s. On
one hand, Lentricchia asks whether Foucaults theory of power, and his
account of the emergence of modern society, constitute, however unwit-
tingly, a testament of despair? (31). Given Lentricchias ultimate assess-
ment of a text like Discipline and Punishthe most persuasive, if
depressing, statement yet published, from radical quarters, on the appar-
ently endless stamina, the perfect flexibility, and the bottomless cunning
of capitalism to sustain itself (86)it would appear that Foucaults work
vitiates any attempt to redeem the personal subject for critical practice.
In this respect, Foucault plays the bugbear to Lentricchias redemptive
project in Ariel and the Police. On the other hand, however, this de-
pressing theorist provides his American reader with an escape route for
imaginative individualism:
For Foucault undisciplined individuality may be precisely the unintended effect of a

system which would produce individuality as an object of its knowledge and power ...
but which instead, and ironically, inside its safe, normalized subject, instigates the
move to the underground where a deviant selfhood may nurture sullen counter-
schemes of resistance and revolution. (26)
The unruly subject may fi nd cold comfort in such a subterranean

redoubtwhere, like William Shakespeares Caliban or John Miltons
Satan, she hatches sullen counterschemes for the triumphant return of a
deviant selfhoodbut this is the best one can hope for under Lentric-
chias account of the Foucauldian paradigm. For an American critic who,
like his beloved Stevens, remains committed to lyric itself and its impera-
tive: a politics of lyricism (27), Foucault can offer only a lyricism of mar-
ginality, a lyricism of the criminal, the outcast, the madman, the
homosexual, the freak: a lyricism of the figure who roams the edges of
society as the other of that societys perfected identity (46). Though he
conscripts the author of Discipline and Punish in his campaign to redeem
the personal subject of Wallace Stevens for history, the Foucauldian sub-
ject remains indelibly stained by a theoretical fatalism in Lentricchias
critical imagination.9
Of course, Foucault himself is largely responsible for this fatalistic
interpretation of his thought by Lentricchia and a host of American liter-
ary scholars. To catalogue examples of this intellectuals gallows humor
would fi ll many pages, though Foucaults early quip that the death of the
subject is nothing to get particularly excited about epitomizes the sar-
donic sensibility that so unsett led humanists on both sides of the Atlantic
throughout his career (Live, 61). Critical projects like Ariel and the Police
seek to redress the privative model of art entailed by such a fatalistic
outlook regarding the fractured, decentered, and dispersed speaking
subject within the period.10 In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalismwhich, in its earliest iteration, began as a New Left essay
roughly contemporaneous with Lentricchias critical intervention in Ariel
and the PoliceFredric Jameson diagnoses this artistic condition:
... It becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a [split]
subject could result in anything but heaps of fragments and in a practice of the
randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory. These are, however, very
precisely some of the privileged terms in which post-modernist cultural production
has been analyzed (and even defended, by its own apologists). They are, however, still
privative features; the more substantive formulations bear such names as textuality,
criture, or schizophrenic writing. (256)11
One way to redeem the personal subject from this privative model of art
might be to celebrate the very symptoms of postmodernityfragmentation,
heterogeneity, randomnessidentified under Jamesons account. While
Eliot amassed these fragments I have shored against my ruins (Collected,
68) for purposes of a modernist jeremiad, one could argue that Bob Perel-
mans postwar Language poem China Run in front of your shadow. //
A sister who points to the sky at least once a decade is a good sister. // The
landscape is motorized (Primer, 60)assembles its heaps of fragments
toward more ecstatic ends. One generations fatalism thus becomes anoth-
ers euphoria. When it becomes generalized as a cultural style, writes
Jameson, the disjunctive criture of a poem like China ultimately ceases
to entertain a necessary relationship to the morbid content . . . and
becomes available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria
which we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation (Post-
modernism, 29). Like the protagonist of Stevenss Man on the Dump,
this cultural theorist wonders whether it may be possible to sit among
matt resses of the dead, / Bott les, pots, shoes and grass and murmur aptest
eve, sublimating dejection into rapture amid the disjecta membra of mo-
dernity (Stevens, Collected, 186).
In lieu of the more joyous intensities of a euphoric postmodern sub-
jectivity, however, the scribes of disjunction may succumb to the waning
of affect identified elsewhere in Postmodernism: As for expression and
feelings or emotions, Jameson writes, the liberation, in contemporary
society, from the older anomie of the centered subject may also mean not
merely a liberation from anxiety but a liberation from every other kind of
feeling as well (15). Several critics have expressed their discontent with
the ambivalent account of postmodern affect that complicates Jamesons
reading of China as an exemplar of disjunctive criture.12 In his magiste-
rial apologia for Language writing, A Poetics, for example, Charles Bern-
stein argues that Jameson fails to adequately adjudicate among the
affective outcomes of various kinds of disjunction in postwar American
poetics:
One has to be able to distinguish between, on the one hand, a fragmentation that at-
tempts to valorize the concept of a free-floating signifier unbounded to social signif-
icance, that sees no meaning outside conventional discourse and only arbitrary
codicity (conventions arbitrary formalism) within it; and, on the other hand, a frag-
mentation that reflects a conception of meaning as prevented by conventional narra-
tion and so uses disjunction as a method of tapping into other possibilities of meaning
available within the language. (93)
To overlook such differences is, for Bernstein, like failing to distinguish

between youth gangs, pacifist anarchists, weatherpeople, anti-Sandinista
contras, Salvadoran guerrillas, Islamic terrorists, or U.S. state terrorists
(93). Th is poet seeks to recuperate the literary fragment for poetic prac-
tice through an activist, rather than either a fatalistic or a euphoric, use of
disjunction. To wield ones literary fragments in a discursive engagement
with the worldand not to eject, to pull / The day to pieces and cry
stanza my stone, like Stevenss man on the dump (Collected, 186)exem-
plifies one way of redeeming the personal subject for history that is over-
looked in Postmodernism, according to Bernsteins argument. In his
Poetics, then, this Language writer calls for a more diversified taxonomy of
disjunction that would include the tactical uses of fragmentation for polit-
ical praxis. The critical debate elicited by Jamesons reading of China
thus illustrates how various critical positions regarding postmodern sub-
jectivity continue to devolve upon the figure of the literary fragment in
modern American poetry.
Following the Language writers initial response to Postmodernism, a
new wave of scholarship has sought to elaborate our taxonomy of disjunc-
tion in twentieth-century English-language poetry.13 Amie Elizabeth Par-
rys 2007 study Interventions into Modernist Cultures, for instance,
distinguishes the modernist fragment that exerts a new and exclusionary
universalism in its reaffi rmation of its own status as an end within the
cultural projects of British and American imperialism (149) from the
politically resistant textual fragments put to interventionary ends in
minor modernisms by Taiwanese writers such as Y Kwang-chung and
Hsia Y (4). Parrys work thus proposes a comparative approach to the
transnational poetics of fragmentation under modernity. Within an
Americanist context, contemporary scholars have sought to extend the
study of textual disjunction beyond modernism into the postwar work of
Objectivist poets such as Louis Zukofsky and contemporary writers like
Susan Howe as well. In his study Disjunctive Poetics, for example, Peter
Quartermain argues that the broken surfaces of these writers texts reflect
the linguistic disruption and even demolition of empowered cultural pat-
terns through the agency of foreign immigration into the United States
throughout the twentieth century (9). Ellis Island, then, may be viewed as
a kind of New World Helicon, where the literary ethos of fragmentation is
continually renewed by waves of avant-garde immigrants who disarticu-
late the American dream in a difficult, adopted, hegemonic tongue.
Indeed, these marginalized subjects fractured utterance even provides an
index of discursive liberty under Quartermains account: the poem is free
to be inarticulate. Even to stutter (3). Foregrounding various limit-cases
of this free yet inarticulate literary speech, Craig Dworkins Reading the
Illegible in turn ventures an ambitious formalist and theoretical celebra-
tion of the most difficult iterations of postmodern criture. Dworkins criti-
cal enterprise seeks to promote illegible art without recourse to a
rhetoric of beauty or subjectivity, observing how suggestively the rheto-
ric of the sublime reads in relation to illegible writing, as well as how neatly
it dovetails with descriptions of the inhumanness of language, further
emphasizing the striking affi nities between those descriptions and related
theorizations of language (83). Parrys resistant transnational fragments,
Quartermains eloquently inarticulate immigrants, and Dworkins illegi-
ble sublime represent but one constellationcomparativist, Americanist,
and theoretical/formalistamid the rich panorama of contemporary
critical responses to the privative model of disjunctive art.
Still, exercising ones freedom to stutter may not wholly deliver the per-
sonal subject from a poetics of privation.14 Broken literary speech runs the
risk of simply reproducing a fatalistic dialectic whereby poetic enunciation,
for the fractured authorial sensibility, requires abandoning normative syn-
tax, and even intelligibility (Quartermain, Disjunctive, 19, emphasis
added). The art of fragmentation may thus offer a mimesisrather than a
subversionof the dividing practices of Foucauldian power. In this regard,
contemporary criticism has inclined toward what could be called a disjunc-
tive fallacy within twentieth-century American poetics. The divided sub-
ject need not always, a priori, express her inwardness in fragmentary
formsas the eloquent autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Marcel
Prousts elaborate syntactical and narrative architectures, or the confes-
sional poems of Adrienne Rich attestfor more fluent modalities of liter-
ary production may be available to her as well. In this study, I hope to
balance our account, hitherto biased toward the fractured and the fragmen-
tary, of twentieth-century American poetry by bringing to light an under-
studied poetics of artful digression. The poets I examine in detailMarianne
Moore, Frank OHara, Lyn Hejinian, and John Ashbery, along with a
younger generation of contemporary writersdisavow stuttering in favor
of loquacity, the illegible in favor of the ornate, and fragmentation in favor
of transition as methods for eluding the government of the tongue. Power
is in transition and serves the interests not of any settled condition, writes
Jonathan Levin in the preface to his study The Poetics of Transition (ix).
Transition, then, may offer a literary tactic for writers who seek to interro-
gate and evade the imperium of divisive power.15 In the chapters that follow,
I will consider the poetic text as a theater of transition or, in Stevenss words,
a moving contour, a change not quite completed. Though they may be
elegantly reticulated or willfully unruly in form, the poems of Moore, Hejin-
ian, OHara, and others freely change the subject of their literary excur-
sions, and, en route, such wayward work elaborates a digressive alternative
to the disjunctive fallacy that has shaped the study of poetics today.
Curiously, a digressive approach to poetic form parallels Foucaults
own description of literary criture in his classic essay What Is an
Author?: the essential basis of this writing is not ... the insertion of a
subject into language. Rather, it is primarily concerned with creating an
opening where the writing subject endlessly disappears (Language, 116).
At the outset and, again, toward the end of this veiled manifesto, Foucault
obliquely propounds an ars poetica of digression. The authors in this study,
too, imagine writing as a space into which the subjectconstrued as both
the subject who writes and as her subject mattercontinuously disap-
pears amid the moving contours of a mercurial enunciation. Like Foucault
at the conclusion of What Is an Author, Stevens, Moore, OHara, Hejin-
ian, and Ashbery seek to answer the question of what placements are
determined for possible subjects? in their literary works (138). Indeed,
Foucault himself seeks to emulate just such a digressive ethos:
For me, theoretical labor doesnt so much consist of establishing and fi xing the set of
positions to which I will hold myself, and, in the space between these supposedly
coherent positions, forming a system. My problemor the only possibility of theo-
retical labor that I see for myselfwould be to leave the trace, according to the most
intelligible design possible, of the movements thanks to which I am no longer where
I once was. (qtd. Paras, Foucault 2.0, 116)
The theoretical fatalism that Lentricchia and other defenders of personal

subjectivity ascribe to Foucault may ultimately arise from a partial reading
of this thinkers multifaceted work. In his interviews, Foucault frequently
resembles nothing so much as an avant-garde poet with boundless confi-
dence in the capacity of language to transform ones identity: I am an
experimenter, says Foucault; I write in order to change myself and in
order not to think the same thing as before (Power, 240). The digressive
poem, likewise, seeks not only to change the subject of ones discourse but
also to transform the speaking subject in the process. In his more intimate
reflections on writing, then, Foucault opens avenues for imagining not
only a poetics but a politics of digression as well.
To read Foucault as a theorist of digression will, understandably, appear
to run against the grain of this writers own ubiquitous reflections on frag-
mentation and historical subjectivity. Ordinarily, Foucault is read within
contemporary critical practice as an unapologetic celebrant of disjunction
and dispersion. In his writings on Ren Magritte, in his lecture Of Other
Spaces, and, again, in the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault imag-
ines an alternative to Utopian visions of a totalizing discursive unity
through his advocacy of the disjunctive figure of the heterotopia:
Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language,

because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle
common names, because they destroy syntax in advance, and not only the syntax
with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes
words and things (next to and also opposite to one another) to hold together. (xviii)
Foucaults heterotopian gaze rigorously scrutinizes historical, episte-

mological, and aesthetic topographies for the points of rupture and
self-difference where the order of things can no longer hold together.
Yet the heterotopia also provides a way of reframing those very topog-
raphies as more diverse and more elaborate unities than one had previ-
ously imagined. In the methodological inquiry into The Unities of
Discourse, which opens The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault pro-
poses that by freeing [the facts of discourse] of all the groupings that
purport to be natural, immediate, universal unities, one is able to
describe other unities, but this time by means of a group of controlled
decisions (29). Foucaults archaeology of previously obscured histori-
ographical unities in this treatise can yield a critical method for exam-
ining literary works as well. In this sense, the poems of Hejinian,
Moore, OHara, and others may be read as heterotopias writ small.
However, these literary heterotopias do not seek to destroy syntax in
advance of their digressive investigations. Instead, they collate and
reinscribe diverse topoi by means of a group of controlled decisions
that unsett le formal orthodoxies while introducing new ideas of order
into modern poetic practice.
Without crossing into the illegible sublime, digressive works ranging
from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction to Flow Chart are highly difficult
nonetheless. Their authors assiduously map out unruly detours and devi-
ations from imperatives of readerly expectation that have historically
governed the decorum of poetic discourse. In this respect, the poets
studied in the following chapters interrogate a normative poetics of
order that has been traditionally associated with neoclassical literary
culture. Foucaults work on this period, moreover, has come to defi ne the
Enlightenment (or Classical age in Continental parlance) as an era
whose orderly mathesis extends beyond the arts to incorporate the
empirical sciences as well: the project of a general science of order; a
theory of signs analyzing representation; the arrangement of identities
and differences into ordered tables, writes Foucault in The Order of
Things, these constituted an area of empiricity in the Classical age that
had not existed until the end of the Renaissance and that was destined to
disappear early in the nineteenth century (7172). In the methodological
sequel to this work, however, Foucault emphatically cautions his readers
against any reductive alignment of a historical period with a corresponding
discursive order:
Nothing would be more false than to see in the analysis of discursive formations an
attempt at totalitarian periodization, whereby from a certain moment and for a cer-
tain time, everyone would think in the same way, in spite of surface differences, say
the same thing, through a polymorphous vocabulary, and produce a sort of great dis-
course that one could travel over in any direction. (Archaeology, 148)
If the Enlightenment witnessed the consolidation of an orderly discursive

decorum, it was also, in many ways, an age of digression as well. Indeed,
even those imperial (and sometimes imperious) poets who sought to pro-
mote hegemonic narratives of expansion in the period construct their
arguments by accretion and reiteration, notes Suvir Kaul in his study of
writers like John Dyer, James Thomson, Edmund Waller, and Edward
Young, adding that the Enlightenment poetry of advancement and
progress is replete with digressions and looping returns (Nation, 18).
The accretions, reiterations, digressions, and looping returns woven
throughout Enlightenment ideas of order thus complicate and enrich the
poetics of a period that Foucault posits as the historical ground of moder-
nity. In the field of literary studies, however, litt le critical attention has
been accorded to the reverberations of the long eighteenth century within
the inexorably expanding echo chamber of modern poetry.
We fi nd ourselves asking whether modernity constitutes the sequel to
the Enlightenment and its development, or whether we see it as a rupture
or a deviation with respect to the basic principles of the eighteenth cen-
tury, writes Foucault in a manuscript left unpublished at the time of his
death (What is Enlightenment? Ethics, 309). Taking up this unresolved
question, Changing Subjects ventures an archaeology of disorder that
highlights the trace of Enlightenment poetics within the digressive con-
tours of twentieth-century American writing. In this respect, my readings
of Moore, Hejinian, OHara, and others seek to widen the historical aper-
ture of scholarly work on modern American poetry. Literary studies from
Harold Blooms landmark Anxiety of Influence (1973) to contemporary
criticism such as Deborah Forbess Sinceritys Shadow (2004) regularly
theorize American poetry as a lovers quarrel with British Romanticism,
unintentionally obscuring the dialectic of Enlightenment that informs
modern poetics. In her study Professing Sincerity: Modern Lyric Poetry,
Commercial Culture, and the Crisis in Reading , for example, Susan B.
Rosenbaum locates the emergence of contemporary literary culture
within an institutional history of the nineteenth century:
... Organizations that began to address the concerns and needs of writers, and which
formalized writers into a professional class, emerged in the nineteenth century; today,
organizations such as PEN and the Society of Authors are an accepted part of the
landscape, and certification of the writer as a professional is readily available through
creative writing programs, which came to prominence after World War II. (15)
Though she observes that the legal changes in property law that permitted
authors to make a living from the sale of their work occurs in the eigh-
teenth century (15), Rosenbaum frames her investigations within the
ideological paradigm of British Romanticism, pairing modern American
poets such as OHara, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop with Romantic
precursors like William Wordsworth, Charlotte Smith, and Anna Laetitia
Barbauld in her historical examination of lyric sincerity. Such a scholarly
emphasis upon British Romanticism as prologue to the contemporary has
resulted in the cathexis of certain critical topoipastoralism, childhood,
and sincerity, to name but a few examplesin our scholarly reception of
twentieth-century American verse. Of course, poets of the period do
indeed engage in a literary conversation with the visionary company of
Romantic writers, but they enter into a dialogue with Alexander Pope,
Denis Diderot, Benjamin Franklin, and numerous other voices from a
prior era as well. I understand Romanticism not as a historical period
now over writes Forbes in the introduction to Sinceritys Shadow (10). The
poets considered in Changing Subjects might say the same of a very long
eighteenth century that continues to inform literary practice to this day.
In his unfi nished manuscript, Foucault goes on to dryly caution us
against the blackmail of the Enlightenment (What Is Enlighten-
ment? Ethics, 312). To consider ones own position in relation to the poet-
ics of the eighteenth century does not mean that one has to be for or
against the Enlightenment (313). Reading twentieth-century American
poets alongside methodical, orderly writers such as Pope and Franklin
discloses one aspect of their modernity; placing these poets in the ram-
bunctious company of authors like Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne
paints a very different picture. (It is worth noting, too, that such literary
precursors frequently expound an orderly poetics in one work while exer-
cising more digressive liberties in the next). In this study, I hope to pre-
serve a sense of the Enlightenments complexity by invoking a diverse
constellation of authors from the long eighteenth century, treading lightly
on any totalizing claims regarding the discursive protocols of the period.
Each chapter that follows will open with a brief discussion of some signifi-
cant topos within Enlightenment poetics that, to my mind, broadly
informs the practice of poetry in American literature of the twentieth cen-
tury. These topoi, in sequence, correspond to various theoretical concepts
that shape Foucaults account of modernity: the archive, historiography,
and subjectivity. In other words, this bookhaving touched upon digres-
sion as a method for reflecting upon aesthetics in its opening pageswill
examine the ways modern American poets change the subject to unsett le
fi xed assumptions regarding knowledge, history, and identity. Th is work
done at the limits of ourselves must, on the one hand, open up a realm of
historical inquiry and, on the other, put itself to the test of reality, of con-
temporary reality, writes Foucault toward the conclusion of What Is
Enlightenment? (316). The poetry of Stevens, Moore, Hejinian, OHara,
and Ashbery invites precisely this kind of inquiry into the shift ing limits
of ourselves. It is my hope, then, that the artfully digressive poems under
study in Changing Subjects may help us to grasp the points where change
is possible and desirable, and to determine the precise form this change
should take (316).
CHANGING SUBJECTS
Though I frame the following chapters within a theoretical armature

derived from Foucaults methodological writings, my own critical posi-
tion in Changing Subjects is neither for nor against this thinkers work.
In this book, I hope to avoid the blackmail not only of the Enlightenment
but of Foucault as well. Thus I argue against a quasi-Foucauldian reading
of twentieth-century American poeticsone that regards disjunction as
the logical expression of a modern subjectivity fractured by the dividing
practices of powerby borrowing selectively from this philosophers
conceptual lexicon. In my view, the contemporary scholarly bias toward a
poetics of fragmentation arises from a critical misprision of Foucaults
work, fetishizing the split subject and the schizophrenic as exemplary
figures for the poet under modernity.16 In this respect, a psychoanalytic
thinker like Lacan might have served equally well as my theoretical inter-
locutor throughout Changing Subjects. But our ongoing scholarly empha-
sis on the dialectic of subjectivity and power in contemporary literary
studies renders Foucault the more apposite theorist for purposes of this
work.17 By investigating critical topoi such as the archive, historiography,
and subjectivity in the chapters that follow, then, I hope to show how the
poets and poems under study negotiate the questions of knowledge, his-
tory, and identity that have so thoroughly informed the scholarly recep-
tion of twentieth-century American poetry today. En route, I hope that
the poems under examination in Changing Subjects may themselves show
that Foucaults work does not necessarily lead one to a fatalistic reading of
literary history. Couldnt everyones life become a work of art? asks this
theorist toward the end of his career (On the Genealogy of Ethics,
Beyond, 236). In the conclusion to this book, I will propose that Foucauld-
ian concepts such as the art of living may be mobilized to ameliorate the
theoretical fatalism that has inflected the interpretation of modern poetry
in contemporary scholarship. Such theoretical arguments, however, remain
secondary to my primary purpose in writing this book, which is to allow the
poems of Moore, Hejinian, OHara, Ashbery, and others to speak eloquently
for their own digressive literary ethos in the pages that follow.
The archive is fi rst the law of what can be said, the system that governs
the appearance of statements as unique events, writes Foucault in The
Archaeology of Knowledge: but the archive is also that which determines
that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an amorphous
mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity (129). In the poetry
of Marianne Moore, digression provides a discursive method for navigat-
ing ones passage between the normative Scylla of unbroken linearity
and the anarchic Charybdis of amorphous accumulation in the literary
management of knowledge. Coming of age as a poet in a period of library
reform, the democratization of information through mass media, and new
schemes for public education, Moores work testifies to a subtle and com-
plex epistemological shift in early twentieth-century American culture.
(The institutionalization of the Dewey Decimal System provides one
noteworthy example of this reconfiguration of the archive within the
period). Modeling her poetry on the free evening lectures available
through progressive venues such as the Brooklyn Institute and the Pratt
Free Library of New York, Moore delivers digressive literary talks on a
remarkable range of subjects and disciplines, from theology to geology to
science and technology and beyond. In these instructional poems, chang-
ing the subject opens up a discursive space for what I call interdisciplinary
explanation: in The Pangolin, for instance, the morphology of an Afri-
can anteater is explained via a sweeping excursus on the philology of
grace in the medieval world. Interdisciplinary explanation thus provides
Moore with a digressive response to the Augustan poetics of perspica-
cious instruction exemplified by Popes Essay on Man. In her ongoing col-
loquy with the didactic tradition in eighteenth-century verse, Moores
explanatory excursions demonstrate how literary digression may be
imbricated within the procedures and poetics of modern democratic edu-
cation. I frame this discussion around an extended close reading of
Moores bewilderingly intricate text The Pangolin not only because this
poem so beautifully exemplifies Moores digressive interdisciplinarity but
also to examine as minutely as possible the labyrinthine architecture of
the digressive lyric as a cultural form. If the poetry of fragmentation
presents readers with the dispersed remains of a fractured metaphysical
edifice, the elaborate syntactical, prosodic, and epistemological latt ice-
work of The Pangolin shows how an artful armature of digression may
underwrite an alternative sense of literary form in American poetry.
Following my discussion of Moores instructive excursions into the
archive of modernist literary culture, I turn to questions of narration and
history in the poetry of the endlessly digressive Language writer Lyn
Hejinian. Th roughout her early love affair with Russia, this American
poet of dissent adopts the Soviet narratological theory of Viktor Shklovsky
and the Russian Formalists as a subversive method for interrogating the
grands rcits of a Cold War era in which she and her fellow Language
writers fi nd themselves fatefully emplotted. In works like Oxota, further-
more, Hejinians poetic examination of the Russian novel (and Alexander
Pushkins Eugene Onegin in particular) yields a conception of plotor
sjuzet, in Shklovskys formulationthat disavows linear continuity in
favor of more digressive protocols of sequence and consequence. Hejinians
subversive narratology thus converges with the historiographical project of
Foucauldian archaeology, which assays to show how the continuous is
formed in accordance with the same conditions and the same rules as
dispersion; and how it entersneither more nor less than differences,
inventions, innovations or deviationsthe field of discursive practice
(Archaeology, 174175). Curiously, however, Hejinian assumes the mantle
of a fatalistthe very term that has so haunted our critical reception of
Foucaults thoughtin her efforts to combine a digressive narratology
with an archaeological perspective on the grands rcits of political history.
Modeling her literary persona on Diderots unruly Jacques in her recent
collection The Fatalist, for example, Hejinian wryly adapts Enlightenment
reflections on narrative sequence and historical consequence for a new
era. Fate, writes this heir apparent to the fatalistic Jacques, sees things
in all their relations (The Beginner, 38). Her idiosyncratic interpretation
of amor fati thus provides Hejinian with a philosophical position from
which the critique of modernitys master-narratives may be launched.
Unlike the chapter that precedes it, my discussion of Hejinians changing
sjuzets in this section of Changing Subjects ranges widely throughout one
writers oeuvre. Broadening the object of this study from my explication de
texte on Moores The Pangolin to a more panoramic view of another
poets unfolding body of work, I hope to show how a digressive ethos may
shape not only individual poems but the ongoing life of the writer as well.
In the fourth chapter of Changing Subjects, I consider some ways that
American poets have explored digression as a literary method for fashion-
ing what Lentricchia calls the personal subject. A book I have made,
writes Walt Whitman in the 1865 edition of Leaves of Grass, the words of
my book nothing, the drift of it every thing (Leaves, 175). The notion of
ones drift as something that eludes literary reification underwrites an
informal and spontaneous approach to self-expression shared by American
poets from Whitman to Frank OHara and beyond. In this chapter, then, I
further enlarge the scope of my analysis, progressing from the digressive
poem as exemplified by The Pangolin and the digressive oeuvre of
Hejinian to the rambling historical course of twentieth-century American
poetics. Like Foucault responding to the anonymous interlocutor at the
conclusion of The Archaeology of Knowledge, OHara, too, seeks to defi ne
the positions and functions that the subject could occupy in the diversity
of discourse within postwar American poetry (Archaeology, 200). Th is
garrulous poet transposes Whitmans drift ing poetics into the urban
milieu of the New York Schools festive socius by inventing what I call the
poetry of metropolitan conversation. In their confabulations with the
history of the conversation-poem as a genre, moreover, the meandering
literary dialogues that proliferate throughout OHaras Collected Poems
investigate the philosophical grounds of personhood itself through the con-
struction of a digressive social poetics. (OHaras aleatory self-fashioning
thus responds to exemplary eighteenth-century American models of self-
invention such as Benjamin Franklins Autobiography). Moving from
Whitman through OHara to the postwar Manhattan art world, this
chapter closes with a discussion of the abolition of the pictorial subject
under the aesthetics of abstraction. Wielding conversational digressions
instead of oils and acrylic in poems such as Digression on Number 1,
1948, OHara imports the New York Schools painterly project of con-
structing a text without a subject into the postmodern poetics of literary
identity. Whether one addresses her as the self of Whitmans songs, the
person in OHaras Personism, or the subject of Foucauldian inquiry, the
literary speaker in twentieth-century American poetry repeatedly traces
figures of identity through digressive forms of enunciation.
Though the New York School has been famously hailed as the last avant-
garde, Hejinians fellow Language writers would likely argue for their own
claim to this title. David Lehmans dismissal of Language writingas
Gertrude Stein said of Hemingway, the Language School looks modern
but smells of the museums (Last, 370)serves only to underscore his
critical anxiety regarding the cultural prominence of this contemporary
literary vanguard. The most significant poetry after 1848, and certainly
much of twentieth-century poetry, has been consciously language ori-
ented, writes Jerome McGann in the preface to the aptly titled collection
The Point Is to Change It, situating Language poetics within his revisionary
account of literary history: nowhere was that self-study more rigorously
pursued than in the line of experimental verse known as language writing
(xi). Yet even some of the most outspoken champions of Language writing
have begun to wonder what will succeed their own last avant-garde. In an
essay titled After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Dis-
contents, Marjorie Perloff, for example, identifies the visual texts of poets
like Johanna Drucker and a form which I call, for want of a better name, dif-
ferential poetry, that is, poetry that does not exist in a single fixed state but can
vary according to the medium of presentation: printed book, cyberspace,
installation, or oral rendition as heralds of a new poetics (qtd. Armand, Con-
temporary, 33).18 While Language writing and the New York School certainly
comprised two of the most influential literary movements within the poetics
of our most recent fin de sicle, the topography of contemporary verse in the
twenty-first century remains largely unmapped. Proceeding from my chapters
on the Language writers disorderly sjuzets and the mercurial interlocutors of
New York School writing, then, Changing Subjects goes on to consider the uses
of digression by writers across a spectrum of schools and poetics in a bewil-
dering new millennium.
The conclusion of this project, New Digressions: John Ashbery and the
Changing Subjects of the Twenty-First Century, ventures an afterword on
the challenge faced by a new generation of American writers who seek to
extend the digressive project of a poet important both to literary scions of
the New York School and to practicing Language writers like Hejinian:
there is, to be sure, some overlap between the Language movement and the
New York School, writes Lehman, hardly needing to add that Ashbery is
the connecting link (Last, 371). John Ashberys prolix personae commonly
address us from the drifting literary platforms of houseboats, hot air balloons,
and countless other pleasure craft. These floating speakers provide a figure
for what might called the interiorization of drifting in this writers work, for,
in Ashbery, the experience of inwardness is modeled upon the very rivers
that convey his literary protagonists to their fugitive elsewheres. Formalizing
William Jamess notion of the stream of consciousness, Ashbery ultimately
constructs a riverine poetics in which both the inner life and literary enun-
ciation assume the digressive contours of a rivers shifting topology. In con-
cluding this study, I turn to various strategies employed by an emerging
generation of younger American poets writing in the wake of such fluid mas-
terpieces as A Wave and Flow Chart. The poems of Robyn Schiff, Juliana
Spahr, and the collaborative duo of Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer
are to varying degrees inscribed upon digressive palimpsests authored by
Moore, Hejinian, and OHara, respectively. This new generation elaborates
upon their historical precursors ramifying poetics through innovations in
prosody, poetic logic, and collaborative practice, to name but a few of their
literary fields of interest. In the process, these poets demonstrate how con-
temporary writers across a spectrum of political and artistic perspectives
may resist the dividing practices of power in a new century through the cul-
tivation of a diverse array of digressive methods. Changing Subjects thus
arrives at the garden of forking paths that American poets of the unfolding
millennium will both map and traverse.
Like the poems it explores, Changing Subjects is eclectic in its methods,
enthusiastic in its affi nities, and provisional in its conclusions. However, I
have triedperhaps unsuccessfullyto resist my own propensity toward
digression in writing this book. As with conspiracies and ironies, once
one begins to seek out digressions, one fi nds them everywhere, and
nowhere more so than in twentieth-century American poetry. A chapter
on the meandering poems of A.R. Ammons, for example, would have
easily fallen within the compass of this project. But the Foucauldian cate-
gories of archive, historiography, and subjectivity should, I hope, provide
a simple yet elastic theoretical framework for broadly understanding the
work of digression in modern American poetics. (Ammonss rambling ru-
minations in Garbage, for instance, parallel both OHaras digressive self-
presentation and the didactic excursions of Moore in many ways). It is
also worth acknowledging that the poets I examine in this study all per-
tain to a single national literature, although they frequently express a pro-
nounced disagreement with American policies and proclivities. To
consider digressive poems from other traditions, such as Raymond Rous-
sels profoundly parenthetical Nouvelles Impressions dAfrique, would have
been a delightful yet interminable enterprise. Thus, I fi nd myself em-
bracing certain normative principles of linearity and concision in a study
that seeks to interrogate those very principles. Following Pope, it may
have been even more perspicacious to frame my literary arguments in
verse, but both contemporary critical decorum and the dynamics of figure
and ground have inclined me to examine poetry within the medium of
prose in these pages. As a practicing poet, however, I fi nd myself highly
sympathetic toward the poems in question. Th is is an enthusiastic rather
than a skeptical book, unabashed in its admiration for the poets it investi-
gates. En route, I hope to avoid the partisan criticism and scholastic alle-
giances that so frequently divide contemporary poets into quarreling
tribes today. The diversity of aesthetics and ideologies professed by the
writers in this study highlights the imaginative claim of digression on
poets of widely varying sensibilities. (Though their authors may employ
very different approaches to the political, for instance, few recent collec-
tions by major American poets so closely resemble one another as do
Hejinians The Fatalist and Ashberys Where Shall I Wander). Thus,
Changing Subjects seeks to identify a common though shift ing ground
within the fractious topography of contemporary poetic practice. Individ-
uals of varying and fi xed creeds write poems, but, as Stevens reminds his
imaginary Burnshaw, change composes, too (Collected, 574).
CHAP TER 2
To Explain Grace Requires

a Curious Hand
Marianne Moores Interdisciplinary Digressions
For, what though his head be empty provided his commonplacebook be full, and if you will bate
him but the circumstances of method, and style, and grammar, and invention; allow him but the
common privileges of transcribing from others and digressing from himself as often as he shall see
occasion; he will desire no more ingredients towards fitting up a Treatise that shall make a comely
figure on a booksellers shelf; there to be preserved neat and clean for a long eternity, adorned with
the heraldry of its title fairly inscribed on a label; never to be thumbed or greased by students nor
bound to everlasting chains of darkness in a library... .
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub
S wifts portrait of a literary hack in the satirical Digression in Praise of

Digressions could very well double as a formula for how to compose
a poem in the inimitable manner of Marianne Moore. Availing herself of
the common privileges of transcription and digression, Moore con-
structs a poetics capable of ranging from zoology to theology to heart-
break within a unified literary text in early twentieth-century American
writing. While scholars such as Cristanne Miller and Margaret Holley
have explored Moores use of transcription with regard to questions of
poetic authority and modernist aesthetics, litt le critical attention has been
focused on the poets employment of digression as a vehicle for traversing
the literary landscape of an America where there previously had been no
proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions (Moore, England, Poems,
141). Having gone on to assiduously proofread major documents within
the debates surrounding modernism during her editorship of The Dial
and, later, installing herself as a local authority on matters of fashion
whether of wool, velvet, or silk in popular American publications such as
Harpers Bazaar and Womens Wear Daily (Prose, 596, emphasis added),
Moore quietly cultivates the poetics of digression within American literary
modernism as well. Indeed, this poets digressive method, and style, and
grammar, and invention address precisely those Enlightenment debates
regarding the proper employment of knowledge within purposeful dis-
course that provoked Swift to publish his satirical digression in praise of
digressions two centuries earlier.
In his sardonic fashion, Swift articulates a critique of the rambling period
stylethe society of writers would quickly be reduced to a very inconsider-
able number if men were put upon making books with the fatal confinement
of delivering nothing beyond what is to the purpose (Digression, 130)
within a highly stylized digression itself. The Digression in Praise of Digres-
sions thus illustrates the complexity of theorizing this trope within the
rhetoric of Enlightenment. For Swift, writing in the midst of what Kenneth
Craven calls the information explosion and culture wars of the eighteenth
century (Swift, 154), digressions within a text indicate a failure to mobilize
and govern knowledge in an orderly manner:
Digressions in a book are like foreign troops in a state ... with knowledge it has fared as
with a numerous army encamped in a fruitful country, which for a few days maintains
it self by the product of the Soil it is on; till provisions being spent, they are sent to
forage many a mile, among friends or enemies it matters not. Meanwhile the neigh-
bouring fields, trampled and beaten down, become barren and dry, affording no suste-
nance but clouds of dust. (Swift, Digression, 130131)
In rebuttal to this image of unruliness and depredation, Moore regularly

employs digression as the most graceful manner of arranging various fields
of knowledge within a literary work. An exemplary text, The Pangolin
provides a useful case study for examining the role of digression within
the procedures and poetics of modern democratic instruction in this poets
oeuvre. (As I will argue, scholarly disagreements regarding the subject of
this poem also demarcate a crux in our understanding of poetrys relation-
ship to the notion of subject matter within current critical discourse on
twentieth-century American verse). But before examining Moores
excursus on grace in this text, a full reading of its historical and cultural
context is necessary to adumbrate the poetics of digression in The Pan-
golin. Representative of the cosmopolitan eclecticism within American
intellectual life of the early twentieth century, Moores digressive personae
freely change the subject of a poem to rearticulate their didactic and lit-
erary intentions as they speak, inventing new protocols of poetic instruc-
tion in the process.
TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 31 ]

CURIOSITY AND INSTRUCTION
On March 23, 1943, Joseph Cornell wrote Moore a letter of gratitude for
favorable comments she had made regarding work of his recently featured
in the art magazine View (Leavell, Visual, 52). In the lower left-hand corner
of the page, a turbaned juggler effortlessly tosses an oversized pangolin
into the air, where, unperturbed, it contemplates a tableauglobe, galleon,
swordsman, ocean, mapwhich allegorizes the Age of Exploration. Cor-
nells epistolary collage carries out, in miniature, a visual paraphrase of
Moores poetics. The eclecticism of source material; the synecdochic
construction of a microcosm from marginalia, exotica, and emblems from
the history of Western civilization; the use of a nonhuman perspectival
center (here, a pangolin) to organize the world of the compositionthese
are all features common to the work of Moore and Cornell alike. In this
pictorial footnote to his introductory letter to the poet, Cornell tacitly
suggests that Moores adoption of curious subjects such as the pangolin
may indicate a common ground for the two artists parallel endeavors.1 A
curiosity itself, Cornells pangolin remains coolly inquisitiveeven while
fl ipping topsy-turvy through the margins of the pagewith regard to the
exploratory phase of European history. To explain grace, writes Moore in
a poetic motto that could serve as a caption to this image, requires a
curious hand (The Pangolin, Poems, 227).
To make art about a pangolinan exotic, elusive, inhuman Other that
Moore and Cornell could encounter only in textual form, in the pages of a
book or at screenings of nature films2commits one to a poetics of curios-
ity, research, and exploration not of the uncharted globe but, rather, the
archives of published knowledge. Just as a lovers body is the conventional
focus for the poetry of sexual desire, the pangolin is a topic for the poetry of
curiosity and research. Both Moore and Cornell practice a form of modern-
ist bricolage that seeks curious, hard-to-find material in open, democratic,
inexpensive sources; these artists carry out their research in what could be
called the democratic archives of early twentieth-century American culture.3
A typical days work for Cornell might involve rummaging through discount
stores like Woolworths or Grants five-and-dime, browsing at the second-
hand bookstalls along Fourth Avenue, or leafing through the collections at
the 42nd Street Public Library (Cornell, Theater, 167, 362, 410). Moore also
gathered material from sources easily available to anybody living in the
precincts of New York City in the period; the Pratt Free Library, the Ameri-
can Museum of Natural History, the New York Times, and the Brooklyn
Institute of Arts and Sciences are only a few of her archives of curious matter.
Moore even makes these sources readily available to her readers by footnot-
ing her own poems, as if she were encouraging us to follow up on her
independent research. (In contrast, readers of Ezra Pounds Cantos could
only begin to apprehend his poems archival infrastructure upon the publi-
cation of Carroll F. Terrells exhaustive scholarly commentaries on that
work). The routine, methodical excavation of the curious and uncommon
an icosasphere, a pangolinwithin common public resourcesa lending
library, a discount storemarks a democratizing methodological innova-
tion within the aesthetic practice of American modernism.
The second stage in the compositional process shared by Moore and
Cornell could be described as the construction of a secondary, private
archive from the miscellany (notes, photographs, clippings, and other
material) gathered on their eclectic research expeditions. Cornell dili-
gently fi led this material in expandable folders variously referred to as
source fi les, extensions, or constellations (Theater, 254); this archival
process becomes so central to his method that he even composes a mini-
ature Ode to Filing in one diary entry: Creative filing / Creative arrang-
ing / as poetics / as joyous creation (163). Moore was equally meticulous
in organizing her curious material, as Grace Schulman discovered while
studying Moores papers at the Rosenbach Library in Philadelphia:
In one of the notebooks, a converted address book whose organizing labels of Name,
Street, City, and Telephone she ignored for her purpose, she made alphabetical
indexes to the quotations, anecdotes, jokes and drawings found in the notebooks. A
few of the entries listed under M, for example, in one book, are: Machiavelli; MacKenzie;
K. Mansfield; Marriage; Masefield; Maugham; Mayran; Medieval mind; Men vs. Women;
Mercury; Mechanisms of language; Michael Angelo; Middleton; Missionaries, Arabs,
etc. (qtd. Willis, Moore, 33)
To create an alphabetical index to such a miscellany displays an extraordi-

nary archival commitment to imposing order on ones knowledge prior
to the act of writing.4 In an index, unrelated topics exist in a metonymic
relation to one another; the daily sexual politics of Men vs. Women
naturally takes its place beside the otherworldly terrain of the planet (or
the chemical element) Mercury, which is juxtaposed in turn with the
elusive inner mystery of Mechanisms of language. A map of Moores
eclectic, book reviewers mind, the index makes visible the armature of
knowledge underlying discursive texts like The Pangolin.
This ethos of research, dossiers, and indexes requires a new working
vocabulary of creativity. Moore and Cornell shared just such a language; in
one letter to Moore, Cornell describes the inner life as a rapturous yet frustrat-
ing bureaucratic affair: there seems to be such a complexity, a sort of endless
cross-indexing of detail (intoxicatingly rich) in connection with what and
how I feel that I never seem to come to the point of doing anything about it

(Theater, 104). And while Swift ridicules the archival writer who freely com-
poses though his head be empty provided his commonplace book be full
(Digression, 132133), Moores image of the pangolin as a decorative,
delicately poised furled fringed frill / on the hat-brim of Gargallos hollow
iron head of a / matador (Poems, 227, emphasis added) wittily revises the
common figuration of interiority as the origin of poetic creation. Here, the
curious archival subject is likened to an ornament gracing a hollow interior;
the anteater exists in relation to Moores inwardness in the way that a
flamboyant frill on a hat is expressive of the wearers personal character. For
the archival artist, the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling enters repre-
sentation through just such a painstaking, deliberate arrangement of curious
material into elliptical ornaments of identity.
Literary anatomy takes an archival approachtoward melancholy, pan-
golins, or criticism itselfas the principle of its design. In his anatomy of
literary genres, Northrop Frye describes anatomy as an encyclopaedic form
in which the creative treatment of exhaustive erudition is the organizing
principle (Anatomy, 311). In this sense, many of Moores archival poems
may be read as anatomies in miniature; for instance, the poem Marriage
anatomizes the marital contract under its social, religious, ritual, and literary
aspects within a ruminative framework of disputation and citation:
He says, What monarch would not blush

to have a wife
with hair like a shaving brush?
The fact of woman
is not the sound of the flute
but very poison.
She says, Men are monopolists
of stars, garters, buttons
and other shining baubles
unfit to be the guardians
of another persons happiness.
He says, These mummies
must be handled carefully
the crumbs from a lions meal,
a couple of shins and the bit of an ear;
turn to the letter M
and you will find
that a wife is a coffin... . (Poems, 160, emphasis added)
Here, Moore arranges various quotations from her private miscellany

(with sources in The Rape of the Lock, Abraham Rihbanys The Syrian
Christ, a recent Founders address at Mount Holyoke College, the book of
Amos, and a grisly aphorism by Ezra Pound) into an ongoing debate
between a postlapsarian Adam and Eve. Turning to the letter M in an imag-
inary commonplace book, Moores Adam mimics the poets own procedure
of leafing through archived citations to spur literary production. Among
Fryes exemplary anatomists, Izaak Walton (in The Compleat Angler) pro-
vides one paradigmatic model for Moores use of dialogue and debate to
organize archival knowledge within Marriage, yet earlier anatomists
such as Thomas Browne and Robert Burton serve as presiding figures for
Moores encyclopedic poetics as well. (Knowledgeable digressions are a
common feature of early modern anatomical writing; Burtons anatomy
of melancholy, for instance, incorporates sections such as a Digression of
Anatomy, a Digression on the Miseries of Scholars, and a Digression
of Air). The genre of curiosity, research, and the encyclopedic exposition
of knowledge, the literary anatomy provides a digressive forum for
Moores exploration of topics ranging from marriage to the mind to pan-
golins within the endlessly elaborating index of poetic consciousness.
In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes the archive of a
civilization as a middle stage in the passage of language into artifactuality
and order (or the corpus):
Between the language (langue) that defi nes the system of constructing possible
sentences, and the corpus that passively collects the words that are spoken, the archive
defi nes a particular level: that of a practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to
emerge as so many regular events, as so many things to be dealt with and manipu-
lated ... It is the general system of the formation and transformation of statements. (130)
While we ordinarily think of an archive as a collection of texts gathered

together in a library or any number of other public or private cultural
institutions, Foucaults sense of the term is somewhat more abstract and
transitional. In the conceptual lexicon of Foucauldian archaeology, a
librarys holdings would represent the corpus that passively collects the
words that are spoken, while the archive refers not to any established
collection of documents but, rather, to the diverse set of epistemological
practices which enable us to form and manage informational statements
regarding the world. This sense of the archive as a practice offers a
useful model for theorizing Moore and Cornells artistic procedures. A
Foucauldian analysis would not refer to Cornells constellations or
Moores notebooks as archives, properly speaking, but it might regard
their literary and artistic methods as archival in nature. To construct
images or poems from the bewildering profusion of publicly available
information in early twentieth-century American culture is to invent a

practice that causes a multiplicity of statements to emerge ... as so many
things to be dealt with and manipulated within the modernist work of art.
In this respect, Moores adoption of rigorous syllabic forms for organizing
information and Cornells volumetric disposition of images within the
three-dimensional space of the box both participate in an epistemological,
as well as an aesthetic, practice. For such artists, form itself performs an
archival function. A poem like Marriage or an Aviary by Cornell does not
aim to reify a fixed corpus of knowledge, then, so much as it seeks to inves-
tigate the epistemological practices of a particular historical moment.
Moore and Cornell invented their archival procedures against the
background of a broad reorganization of knowledge within American
culture in the early twentieth century. Louise Collins has pointed out that
Moore spent the summer after her graduation from Bryn Mawr working
as a secretary at the Lake Placid Club, then the center of Melvil Deweys
various reform projectsthe most famous of which remains his adminis-
tration of the Dewey Decimal System (qtd. Willis, Moore, 5355). If
Moores indexes and notebooks construct a system of the formation and
transformation of statements for use in the field of poetry, this private
work reprises, in miniature, Deweys public project of arranging human
knowledge into an intelligible, practical, and reproducible system of
library classification within the period. Far from being only that which
ensures that we exist in the midst of preserved discourse, writes Foucault
in a description of the archive that could also serve as a motto for Deweys
innovations in the classification and periodization of texts, it is that
which differentiates discourses in their multiple existence and specifies
them in their own duration (Archaeology, 129). Moore, who would
eventually go on to work at the Hudson Park branch of the Brooklyn
Public Library, came of age as a writer not in the fields and hillsides of a
Wordsworthian landscape but, rather, in the reading rooms of public
libraries, during an extended missionary period of library reform
marked by the introduction of reference service, the promotion of rec-
reational reading and self-culture programs, and the introduction of
free evening lectures to the public on a variety of subjects within these
popular institutions (Williams, Library, 32; L. Martin, Enrichment, 13).
More than any other American poet, Moores development is nurtured by
this national project of archiving knowledge and making it available to
the public in a democratic fashion.
The free evening lecture completes the logic of this movement within
American Progressivism; for reformers like Dewey, the final stage of the
archival process was instruction. With its roots in the Lyceum and Chau-
tauqua of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the free evening lecture
was open to individuals curious about topics ranging from Men vs. women
to Mercury to Mechanisms of language. Throughout the 1930s, Moore
could often be found at such talks at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sci-
ences (her mother even suggested that she take along a sleeping bag on her
trips to this home away from home), attending sessions on architecture,
philosophy, religion, and, most importantly for my argument in this chap-
ter, illustrated lectures on natural history (Molesworth, Literary, 248
249).5 Her work from this period constructs a new kind of didactic poetry
that is mimetic of the free evening lecture; Moores speakers deliver digres-
sive talks on an eclectic range of disciplines, ranging from horticulture
(Camellia Sabina) to geology (An Octopus) to archaeology (the Too
Much section of The Jerboa) to recent advances in technology (Four
Quartz Crystal Clocks). The topics of these lectures are of limited practi-
cal application, or classical use-value, for the listener; rather, they address
the generalized curiosity of an audience engaged in the Progressive enter-
prise of self-culture.
Ordinarily, we think of didactic poetry within a teleological frame-
work; Virgil casts his Georgics as practical advice to farmers, and the
archangels lectures to Adam in Paradise Lost inculcate obedience to
Calvinist moral and theological principles. Moore, however, outlines a
new approach to instruction within modernist writing.6 Placing useless
subjects like the pangolin at the center of didactic utterance, she reorients
poetic instruction toward an oblique teleology of self-culture and enrich-
ment. As Natalia Cecire points out in an insightful essay on Moores pre-
cision, however, this recreational ethos of instruction does not always
serve to broaden the epistemological horizon of its popular audience.
Indeed, public institutions of self-culture such as the natural history
museum took the crowd into its bosom within the period in order to keep
it at bay, withdrawing the bulk of the scientific collections into separate
research areas into which the public could not venture at all (Precision,
101). Moores poetics of instruction, then, is shot through with the contradic-
tions that belie the optimism of the Progressive enterprise in early twentieth-
century American culture. Moores work has not yet been adequately
contextualized within this complex paradigm of research, archival poetics, and
the fraught cultural project of Progressive education, yet precisely this context
is needed to historically situate the digressive speaker of The Pangolin.
THE PANGOLINS CURIOUS TAIL
In contravention of the poems title, Moores most rigorous and sympathetic

interpreters have maintained over the years that The Pangolin is not about
a pangolin. One critical approach to reading this text construes religious

grace as the authors true subject; Linda Leavell, for instance, writes that
the subject of the poem is not strictly the pangolin, but grace (Visual,
191), and Ann Struthers argues that the major thrust of the poem is,
indeed, toward the very point of defining grace (qtd. Willis, Moore, 130).
Another common interpretation of The Pangolin regards human nature
as the actual subject of this text; Grace Schulman writes that the true
subject of the poem is man as a seeing being (qtd. Willis, Moore, 90), and
Bernard Engel holds that Moores real subject is the nature of man
(Marianne Moore, 78). To interpret a poem as employing animals as a
pretext for exploring religious matters or human nature is to classify it as an
allegory or a fable, yet such readings overlook what sets the pangolin apart
from the sphere of the human:
... The giant-pangolin-

tail, graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like
an elephants trunk with special skin,
is not lost on this ant- and stone-swallowing uninjurable
artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable
whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done
so... . (Moore, Poems, 227, emphasis added)
With the haughty, arch invective of early poems like Pedantic Literalist,
Moore suggests that the pangolins curious tailthe most obvious marker
of difference between this comically humanoid Other and mankind7is
lost on fabulist simpletons who misconstrue her anteater as a surrogate
for man. Moore, a fastidious translator of La Fontaine, examined the uses
of fable more closely than any other American poet in this centuryyet
critical interpretations of The Pangolin have disregarded Moores own
refusal to consider this animal a living fable. To say that The Pangolin is
about either grace or man is to elide the first half of the poem, which is
emphatically about pangolins; considered in its entirety, this text is actu-
ally about pangolins and grace and man. While Whitman had employed
parataxis in the form of anaphora and catalogs that place multiple sub-
jects in relation to one another within a unified literary text, the mod-
ernist speaker of The Pangolin invents a new kind of inclusive poem
within the American idiomone constructed upon a hypotactic archi-
tecture of digression.
Demarcating the animal kingdom as the realm of its opening movement,
The Pangolin opens with a naturalists (as opposed to a fabulists) episte-
mological approach to this curious Other:
Another armored animalscale
lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they
form the uninterrupted central
tail-row! This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard,
the night-miniature artist engineer is,
yes, Leonardo da Vincis replica
impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.
Armor seems extra. But for him,
the closing ear-ridge
or bare ear lacking even this small
eminence and similarly safe
contracting nose and eye apertures

impenetrably closable, are not; (Poems, 226)
As if we had entered the auditorium in medias res during an illustrated

lecture on defensive strategies in the animal kingdom, The Pangolin
opens with the speaker moving on to another armored specimen.8 Here,
the world of artnever fully abolished from Moores textis syntacti-
cally subordinated to the speakers primary zoological investigations:
Compact like the furled fringed frill / on the hat-brim of Gargallos hollow
iron head of a / matador, he will drop and will / then walk away / unhurt,
or he draws / away from danger unpugnaciously, / with no sound but a
harmless hiss; keeping // the fragile grace of the Thomas- / of-Leighton Buz-
zard Westminster Abbey wrought-iron vine (emphasis added). Even the
simplest sentence in this poem of sprawling syntactical architectures,
Armor seems extra, is the utterance of a zoologist contemplating the
mysteries of adaptation. The grammar of representation in the opening
section of Moores poetic lecture, then, consistently subordinates cultural
history to natural history: a modernist sculpture, a wrought iron vine in
Westminster Abbey, and even a replica by Leonardo da Vinci are recruited
to piece together the pangolins curious design.
Curiosity has long been associated with the epistemological practices of
natural history. Histories of ideas or of the sciences, observes Foucault in
The Order of Things, credit the seventeenth century, and especially the eight-
eenth, with a new curiosity: the curiosity that caused them, if not to discover
the sciences of life, at least to give them a hitherto unsuspected scope and
precision (125). Foucaults examination of this curious archival specimen
assigns natural history a life span roughly coterminous with that of the long
eighteenth century; according to his archaeological project, the knowledge-
practice of natural history gives way to the new field of biology in

post-Enlightenment European culture. However, it is possible to discern the
lingering trace of natural history throughout nineteenth-century American
intellectual life as well. In The Poetics of Natural History, Christoph Irmscher
writes that, toward the end of the nineteenth century, natural history
ceased to be what it once was, an instrument for the discovery of what
appeared curious (i.e., noteworthy, interesting, remarkable) in American
nature. Instead ... it became a curiosity itself, in the sense of the adjective
curious that still persists today: something odd and strange (238239).
The epistemological curiosity that spurs the enterprise of natural history
under the Enlightenment thus shades into the anomalous curiosity of a
marginalized discourse throughout nineteenth-century American culture.
Earlier ways of knowing do not simply vanish outright at the dawn of the
modern episteme. Rather, the language of natural history enters into a pur-
gatorial phase of existencesurfacing in such cultural fields as the poetry
of early modernismlong after that discourse had been wholly displaced
within modern scientific inquiry.
The Pangolin reflects one modernists nostalgia for just such dis-
courses on the cusp of extinction; throughout her animal investigations,
Moore mobilizes the curious, fading procedures of natural history to
simultaneously satirize and celebrate the provisional, historicized condi-
tions of knowledge in American intellectual life of the period. In The
Plumet Basilisk, for instance, the speakers close observation of a lizards
morphology comes to resemble the rhapsodic descriptive style of fi n de
sicle naturalists like Louis Agassiz:
... the slight lizard that

can stand in a receding flattened
Ssmall, long and vertically serpentine or, sagging,
span the bushes in a foxs bridge. Vines suspend
the weight of his faint shadow fixed on silk.
As by a Chinese brush, eight green

bands are painted on
the tailas piano keys are barred
by five black stripes across the white. This octave of faulty
decorum hides the extraordinary lizard... . (Poems, 198)
The intelligent student of Natural History is led unconsciously, by the

study of the animal kingdom itself, to these conclusions, the great divisions
under which he arranges animals being indeed but headings to the chapters of a
great book which he is reading, writes Agassiz during the twilight of natural
history in American intellectual life (Intelligence, 37). Moores text, how-
ever, quietly suggests that this great book simply cannot be read. Her
literary naturalist employs various strategies for making the elusiveand,
according to the ancients, deadlybasilisk legible: if its fluid form will not
hold the shape of the alphabetical character S, she will examine the crea-
tures simplified shadow; if this silhouette will not retain the static outline
of a silk-screen image, she will examine the lizards markings through the
(culturally different) paradigm of Chinese calligraphy; if these hiero-
glyphs, in turn, serve to camouflage her subject, she will invoke the abstract
potentialities of the musical octave to represent this storied creature. Yet
epistemologically speaking, any attempt in this poem to read the natural
world is predicated upon Agassizs outdated faulty / decorum that, in the
end, serves only to conceal the subject of inquiry (Moore, Poems, 198).
Even as she fails to capture each / digression of the shape of the basilisk
amid her private textual wilderness of zoological articles and nature fi lms
(199), Moores speaker conducts a postmortem anatomy of natural history
as a knowledge-practice within American culture.
In this respect, Moores zoological project recapitulates and extends the
literary enterprise of an earlier American anatomist: in Moby-Dick, notes
Samuel Otter in his extensive study of Melvilles anatomical imagination,
Melville employs the whales massive corpus as the revealing stage on
which to play out the tragedy and comedy of nineteenth-century bodily
investigation (Anatomies, 132). Though Otter foregrounds the racialized
aspects of Ishmaels examination of the whales head (in effect, making a
racial fabulist of Melville), the passages in Moby-Dick that dwell on the
white whales curious tail also herald the demise of natural history as a
knowledge-practice in Moores time.9 Like Moore, Melville commits an
extraordinary degree of analytical labor to the tail of his curious Other. If
Moores speaker will lavish poetic attention on this morphological
endpointwhere earlier it had been described as an animal, an
anteater, an engineer, and even an artist, her pangolin comes by its
proper name only in association with this fi nal anatomical feature, the
giant-pangolin- / tailMelville will devote an entire chapter of his novel
to enumerating the functions of the sperm whales flukes:
Its flexions are invariably marked by exceeding grace... . Five great motions are pecu-
liar to it. First, when used as a fi n for progression; Second, when used as a mace in
batt le; Th ird, in sweeping ... . It seems to me, that in the whale the sense of touch is
concentrated in the tail; for in this respect there is a delicacy in it only equaled by the
daintiness of the elephants trunk. (Moby-Dick , 294295)
Both marked by grace and sensation (like the tip of an elephants

trunk), the functional similarities between these two literary tails are re-

markable as well: just as Moby-Dicks tail is used for progression, the
pangolins is a prop to aid its passage through the natural world; the
whales mace in batt le becomes the pangolins more diminutive ax;
even the pangolins use of its tail as a broom and the whales habit of
sweeping partake of a common language of domesticity. As the terminus
of their subjects respective morphologies, however, these curious tails
each impose a kind of epistemological closure on both Melvilles and
Moores anatomical investigations. The physiological end of ones subject
of inquiry inevitably calls to mind a more general foreclosure of knowl-
edge for these endlessly inquisitive sub-sub-librarians of the American
archive.
The more I consider this mighty tail, the more do I deplore my inability
to express it, writes Melville on arriving at the end of the sperm whales
anatomy: Dissect him how I may, then, I but go skin deep; I know him not,
and never will (296). In The Pangolin, the anatomists frustration
on reaching the end of her subjects morphology finds formal expression
in Moores quiet curtailment of the stanza devoted to the pangolins curi-
ous tail:
... The giant-pangolin-

tail, graceful tool, as prop or hand or broom or ax, tipped like
an elephants trunk with special skin,
is not lost on this ant- and stone-swallowing uninjurable
artichoke which simpletons thought a living fable
whom the stones had nourished, whereas ants had done
so. Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between
dusk and day they have the not unchain-like machine-like
form and frictionless creep of a thing
made graceful by adversities, con-
versities .. . (Poems, 227)
Every stanza in The Pangolin consists of eleven lines (roughly rhymed

abaccdedefg) except for this curtailed stanza on the pangolins tail, which
has only ten. If Moore will go on to describe human understanding as cur-
tailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done (228, empha-
sis added), her calculated infraction against the poems prosodic scheme is
mimetic of epistemological curtailment in this passage. Yet, though mor-
phological examinations of the Other do not fulfill the desire for anatom-
ical epiphanies, as Otter notes, they do reveal the structures of compulsion
(Anatomies, 134). Once we arrive at the end of her subjects anatomy,
Moores speaker continues to compulsively describe the pangolinonly
now, in terms of what it is not. It is not a fable; it is not aggressive; its shape
and motion are not unchain-like. (This last double-negative demonstrates
the thoroughness of Moores turn to an epistemology of negation once an-
atomical inquiry has shut down in the poem; by this point, it seems per-
fectly natural for this speaker to describe something chain-like as not
unchain-like). As soon as we read its proper name, the pangolin tumbles
into the obscure ontological status of a mere thing, its anatomical text
exhausted.
In Moores lifetime, the obsolescent array of cultural practices known as
natural history in the United States was gradually replaced by the new, spe-
cialized discipline of zoology.10 The rise of a discipline marks a tectonic
shift within the archival ground of a culture; with the consolidation of zool-
ogy in American educational institutions of the period, for instance, moral,
aesthetic, and theological forms of inquiry are marginalized within the
higher study of the natural world (Welch, Book, 219232). Furthermore,
the emergence of modern zoology toward the fin de sicle contributes to an
ongoing reappraisal of the place of metaphorical language within scientific
writing under modernity (Walls, Seeing, 510). As a poet, Moores histori-
cal situationsimultaneously inside and outside of natural historys dilapi-
dated epistemepositions her particularly well for the sort of investigation
into the archive of a vanishing knowledge-practice advocated by Foucault
in The Archaeology of Knowledge:
The analysis of the archive, then, involves a privileged region: at once close to us, and
different from our present existence, it is the border of time that surrounds our pres-
ence, which overhangs it, and which indicates it in its otherness; it is that which, out-
side ourselves, delimits us. The description of the archive deploys its possibilities
(and the mastery of its possibilities) on the basis of the very discourses that have just
ceased to be ours. (130)
In its excursions into the defunct language of natural history, The Pangolin
is nothing if not an archaeological poem. Disavowing both the archaic rhe-
toric of antiquitys fabulists and the contemporary scientific discourse of
zoology, Moore investigates the historical middle distance of knowledge
itself in this text. The possibility of any archaeology is established by the
discontinuity that separates us from what we can no longer say, writes
Foucault in a formulation that captures this poems reliance upon the
dying (if not dead) language of natural history in early twentieth-century
American culture (Archaeology, 130). Th is artful violation of epistemo-

logical decoruminhabiting the very discourses that have just ceased to
be ours to think about what we can no longer saylends Moores
speech its slightly belabored or pedantic air in this text. But to regard her
curious tone as outdated or, worse, as mere pedantry would be to miss the
archaeological project of The Pangolin. The subtle irony that inflects
Moores voice throughout this archaeological work dramatizes her soci-
etys ambivalence regarding the epistemological status of natural history
within the period.
Even as they gently parody the outdated rhetoric of natural history,
Moores lyrical naturalists also sing an elegy for the fading, richly figura-
tive language of this earlier way of knowing. On completing her study of
the pangolins anatomy, for instance, Moore disavows the new epistemo-
logical decorum of zoology by reading the thoroughly unscientific
att ribute of grace into her biological specimen:
... between
versities. (Poems, 227)
Waddling precariously on the outside / edges of his hands, quivering vio-

lently under a swarm of driver ants, or plummeting unceremoniously from
a tree, the pangolin seems to exemplify ungainliness, and not grace, in this
text. Moore, however, claims that the anteaters grace is threefold: when
coiled around a tree it has the fragile grace of a wrought-iron vine; its tail is
a graceful tool; and it has the general shape and motion of a thing made
graceful by adversities and conversities. Within the disciplinary paradigm
of zoology and, indeed, within our everyday notion of graceful movement, it
is difficult to discover grace in a pangolin. Yet Moores skeptical investiga-
tions into the physiology of anteaters lead to an encounter with grace in its
religious, social, and aesthetic contexts in the second half of The Pangolin.
(Theres more than just one kind of grace the poet attests in The Syca-
more (291)). Pausing to offer the listener a gloss on grace midway through
her poetic lecture, Moore digresses from zoological investigation to recuper-
ate this theological signifier for use in the study of the natural world. The end
of one subject marks the beginning of a new field of inquiry for Moores
curious speaker; this poet repeatedly and flagrantly disregards the divisions
imposed upon discourse by the consolidation of archival disciplines in the
period. Moores graceful digressions across the intellectual disciplines thus
testify to a new method of organizing and disseminating knowledge within
the aesthetic practice of American modernism.
DIGRESSION AND GRACE
To explain grace has been the ambition of works from Paradise Lost to
The Wreck of the Deutschland; what Margaret Holley has called Moores
digression on grace (Voice, 101) at the heart of The Pangolin under-
takes this epic theological project within the syntactical space of a single
sentence. While calling this central passage a digression may seem to
marginalize the subject of grace within the text, Moores explanation is
a form of instructive digression. Acknowledging that the language of
grace may seem out of place within scientific discourse of the period,
Moore interrupts her zoological lecture to explain how this concept
might continue to signify across a variety of segregated disciplines. As a
pedagogical gesture, explanation is the mark of a progressive model of
instruction; where a neoclassical approach to instruction might employ
memorization and repetition, the progressive paradigm emphasizes con-
ceptualization and explanation.11 While she admired some modernists
refusal to explain themselves within their poetryStevens did not
digress to provide exegeses for bewildered readers, Moore writes in a
late encomium (Prose, 580)this poets explanation of grace both inves-
tigates a major theological concept and illustrates the role of digression
within a progressive poetics of instruction as well.
Like Brecht, whose exposure of the pulleys, spotlights, and dramaturgy
of the theater renders the mechanics of dramatic instruction visible
onstage, Moores modernist instruction exposes its own methodology,
explaining how it will explain: To explain grace requires / a curious
hand (Poems, 227). While explanation is a didactic method, explaining
how to explain is a metadidactic procedure; Moore prefaces her examina-
tion of grace with this infi nitive construction (to explain) to teach us
how to teach. In the intellectual life of early twentieth-century America,
the metadidactic infi nitiveto teach to teachunderwrites the broad
cultural project of John Deweys Democracy and Education as well. If
Dewey articulates a philosophy of education within the discourse of American
Progressivism, Moores instructional verse outlines a poetics of education that
runs parallel to Deweys public project. Their common metadidactic enter-
prise, however, raises a major methodological difference between the phi-
losophy and the poetics of progressive instruction: Dewey emphasizes

transparent and direct discourse in pedagogy (Democracy, 173175, 179),
while Moore adopts a deliberately elliptical approach to teaching in texts
ranging from The Student to Style to The Pangolin. For Moore, the
expositor of grace must be curious in the sense of the word as inquisi-
tive, but the less common senses of curious as eccentric or intricately
constructed are central to her educational method as well. Among this
writers poetic axioms and aphorisms, to explain grace requires a curious
hand unfolds an ars didactica in miniature; both the epistemological
(inquisitive) and formal (intricate) aspects of her instructional verse are
set forth in this metadidactic motto.
Complexity is not a crime, writes Moore in the poem In the Days of
Prismatic Color, but carry / it to the point of murkiness / and nothing
is plain (Poems, 136). The central paradox in Moores curious ethos of
instruction is apparent in the poets effort to secure epistemological clarity
through the labyrinthine involutions of poetic form:
... Complexity,
moreover, that has been committed to darkness, instead of
granting itself to be the pestilence that it is, moves all a-

bout as if to bewilder us with the dismal
fallacy that insistence
is the measure of achievement and that all
truth must be dark. Principally throat, sophistication is as it al-
ways has beenat the antipodes from the init-
ial great truths. Part of it was crawling, part of it
was about to crawl, the rest
was torpid in its lair. In the short-legged, fit-
ful advance, the gurgling and all the minutiaewe have the classic
multitude of feet. To what purpose! (136, emphasis added)
Like Complexity, the allegorical monster who fitfully advances upon man-
kind amid the gurgling and all the minutiae of modernity, Moores poetry
has caused some readers to quail before a (prosodic) multitude of feet.
Moore, however, never disavows such a curious approach to poetic compo-
sition; in her criticism and poetry alike, formal intricacy is continually sub-
jected to Deweys pragmatic test of instrumentality: to what purpose! In
Moores work, prosodic complexity is only one element in an aesthetics of
grammatical, rhetorical, and expository intricacy mobilized for purposes of
instruction. While critics such as Richard Poirier and Gail McDonald have
read poetic difficulty as a strategy for attaining cultural prestige within the
literary milieu of Anglo-American modernism, Moores idiosyncratic brand
of difficulty reflects this writers meticulous mapping of the learning proc-
ess. Among the original theorists of literary difficulty, then, George
Steinerthrough his notion of tactical difficultymay come closest to
conceptualizing the perplexities of Moores pedagogical style (Difficulty,
270). Unraveling the excursus at the heart of The Pangolin, one discovers
that complexity itself serves an instrumentalor, in Steiners formulation,
tacticalpurpose in the poetics (if not in the philosophy) of progressive
instruction.
Phrased as a logical proof of the everlasting, Moores explanation of
grace is one of the longest and most curiously constructed sentences in
this poets oeuvre:
... If that which is at all were not forever,

why would those who graced the spires
with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious
low stone seatsa monk and monk and monkbetween the thus
ingenious roof-supports, have slaved to confuse
grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt,
the cure for sins, a graceful use
of what are yet
approved stone mullions branching out across
the perpendiculars? (Poems, 227)
Wary of dogma and doctrine, Moore proves that that which is at all is
forever in the interrogative mode of curiosity and epistemological doubt.
Yet, at the same time, this uncertain proof rests on the doctrinal authority
of medieval auctoritas, in the religious culture of the craftsmen who fash-
ioned the roof supports of a Gothic church long ago. Like their vanished
makers, the stone monks carved into the architecture dwell in anonymity,
for Moores unindividualized monk and monk and monk phlegmati-
cally evade the burdens of identity. Stone themselves, they fi nd respite
from their labors on cold luxurious / low stone seats. This relief sculp-
ture represents an idealized social world for Moore, its selfless ascetics sit-
ting side by side among everlasting animals in a tableau that reifies the
poems framing activity of contemplating Creation.12 The proof of the
everlasting, however, does not lie in Utopian art. Rather, in the grammar
of Moores proof, these carved roof supports are merely a supporting, or
syntactically subordinated, detail. The intricate architecture of explanation

requires that we cross this historical and sculptural threshold into the
medieval world to understand the pangolins grace.
For Moores curious wordsmith, the proof of the everlasting lies not in
art but in the archival discipline of philology. Grammatically, the primary
verbal work performed by Moores Medieval artisans is not carving or
chiseling but slaving to confuse grace with its various cultural defi ni-
tions. Moores use of the verb confuse has understandably led to consider-
able confusion on the part of the poems readers; Margaret Holley is not
alone in reading the word in its pejorative sense (Voice, 101). Yet Moore
herself fi nds a peculiar literary pleasure in rehabilitating this signifier,
declaring of the storm-swept coastal landscape in the Steeple-Jack that
it is a privilege to see so / much confusion (Poems, 183). I would argue
that Moore, who has already foregrounded the prefi x con- at the moment
of greatest formal deliberation within The Pangolinthe enjambment
of the curtailed stanzas con- // versitiesemploys confuse in a less
pejorative and more literal Latinate sense of fusing together in this text.
Moores medieval monks did not only slave to grace the spires of their
church; they also participated in the cultural labor of fusing together vari-
ous segregated fields of human activity under the rubric of a single term,
grace. Etiquette (a kindly manner), the social forbearance known as a
grace period (time in which to pay a debt), religious absolution (the
cure for sins), and building design (a graceful use / of what are yet /
approved stone mullions) are all gathered, like the stone monks on
their luxurious stone seat, under a common signifier (227). Furthermore,
this explanation of grace anatomizes a concept, just as Moore anatomizes
a creature (the pangolin) in the fi rst section of the text. The anatomy of
grace thus shows how a single term came to operate across a spectrum of
cultural scenarios in the medieval world. Importing this concept into her
illustrated lecture on the ungainly pangolin, Moore continues the van-
ished artisans labor of extending the discursive reach of grace into new
fields of practice.
Th is excursus at the heart of The Pangolin questions the entrenchment
of institutionalized disciplines within human understanding. Moore
makes sense of the pangolins anatomical text by trespassing into
philological inquiry, and philological knowledge, in turn, emerges from a
preliminary study of ecclesiastical sculpture. Crossing from zoology to
philology to art history, Moores process of interdisciplinary investigation
could, in theory, be extended indefi nitely. As a forum for idealized
instruction, moreover, the genre of poetry allows this amateur educational
theorist to carry what could be called interdisciplinary explanation far
beyond its ordinary use within the material institutions of Progressive
education in the period. (Dewey himself would have responded to
Moores circuitous lesson plan with skepticism). In this respect, the
metadidactic project of The Pangolin participates in a broader critique
of institutionalized education staged within the imaginative theater of
literary modernism toward the beginning of the century. Pounds notion
of the Ezuversity, for instancewhich Gail McDonald describes as an
actual and metaphorical location well outside the American campus
represents another modernists attempt to construct an idealized space
for instruction liberated from the material institutions of American
educational practice of the time (Learning , 49, emphasis added). Moores
poetry of instruction establishes a lab school of the imagination, where
radical pedagogical experimentation flourishes despite the ongoing
cultural resistance to Progressive reform from conservatives throughout
the period. Indeed, this poets interdisciplinary digressions reform the
rhetoric of modern instruction in ways that unsett le even Deweys
pragmatic, Progressive ethos of transparency and directness. Implicit
within such modernist literary critiques of early twentieth-century
American education is the radical claim that poetryand not philosophy,
or even the modern universityprovides an ideal forum for thinking
about teaching.
With remarkable foresight, Moores imaginary lecture anticipates late
twentieth-century developments in humanistic studies. Like Moores medi-
eval artisans, contemporary scholars have slaved to confuse previously
segregated fields of intellectual practice within a diverse yet unified peda-
gogical discourse; in a sense, Moores digressive poetics finds its institu-
tional ratification in modern interdisciplinary studies.13 While educational
theorists such as Julie Thompson Klein have documented and theorized
the advent of interdisciplinary fields such as urban affairs, environmental
studies, and American studies in the postwar university curriculum (Inter-
disciplinarity, 111116), little historical research has been carried out on
the origins of interdisciplinarity toward the beginning of the century in
American intellectual culture. Among recent scholarship, Roberta Franks
suggestion that our contemporary concept of interdisciplinarity was born
in New York City in the mid-1920s at the corner of 42nd Street and Madi-
son Avenue in the offices of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
provides one possible window onto a localized zeitgeist that may have
inflected Moores digressive investigations (qtd. Stanley and Hoad,
WORDS, 91, 9495). However, Moores didactic poems appear to have
foreseen pedagogical initiatives that her contemporaries at the SSRC were
only just beginning to conceive. Had she ever embarked upon her long-
planned treatise on higher education (Molesworth, Literary, 362), this poet
might now be read as American democracys counterpart to Matthew
Arnold; subordinating various branches of knowledge (natural history, art

history, the history of language) within a single text, The Pangolin implic-
itly poses questionsWhere does one discipline end and another begin?
How can one field of knowledge illuminate another?that shape educa-
tional method and practice in our universities today.
At the center of Moores idealized auditorium stands an idealized instruc-
tor, a polymath as intimately familiar with the anatomy of the African ant-
eater as she is with medieval cultural history, Gargallos modernism, and
every corner of Westminster Abbey. As a coda to her excursus on grace, this
encyclopedic virtuoso trumps her prior excursus with a further interdisci-
plinary digression on the history of technology:
If that which is at all were not forever,

why would those who graced the spires
with animals and gathered there to rest, on cold luxurious
low stone seatsa monk and monk and monkbetween the thus
ingenious roof-supports, have slaved to confuse
grace with a kindly manner, time in which to pay a debt,
the cure for sins, a graceful use
of what are yet
approved stone mullions branching out across
the perpendiculars? A sailboat
was the fi rst machine. (Poems, 227, emphasis added)
Drifting from cathedrals to etymology to sailboats, Moores speaker appears

to have entirely forgotten the matter of pangolins by this point in the text;
this digressive instructor seems more concerned with displaying her miscel-
lany of knowledge (here quoting from F. L. Morses Power, its application from
the 17th Dynasty to the 20th Century) than she is with teaching her audience
about either anteaters or grace. Most interpreters of The Pangolin pass over
this final digressive grace note in Moores excursus, or, at best, dismiss it as
irrelevant to the poems larger concerns; Taff y Martin considers the sentence
an answer that seems to answer nothing at all (Subversive, 17). Yet this
digression within a digression actually performs the deliberate discursive
work of returning the poem to the subject of the pangolin. If we delete the
extended excursus on grace from Moores text, this little aside on sailboats
fits seamlessly into the fabric of Moores original natural history lecture:
Pangolins are not aggressive animals; between

versities. A sailboat
was the first machine. Pangolins, made
for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,
on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,
with certain postures of a man... . (Poems, 227, emphasis added)
In my revised version, the exemplum of the sailing machine clearly il-

lustrates the pangolins machine-like grace. Moores aside on sailboats
thus establishes a meticulous architecture of return in The Pango-
lin, for what at first reads as the scholastic rambling derided by Swift
actually locks into place with the inexorable logic of a polymaths mas-
terful lesson plan. Moreover, rewriting Moores text in this fashion
corrects the prosody of the poems curtailed stanza, restoring it to
the eleven-line scheme that governs the rest of the poem. While
Deweywho devotes an entire section of Democracy and Education to
The Nature of Subject Matterclaims that digressions from ones
subject signify divided interest and evasion (176), this discursive
return illustrates the calculated internal design of Moores instruc-
tional poetics. The embedded digressions in The Pangolin thus
show how the curious complexities of poetic form map the idealized
consciousness of Moores exemplary literary instructor, a writing-
master to the world.
POSTURES OF MAN
The digressive poem reflects a model of consciousness that favors

association over ratiocination, provisionality over consistency, and
distraction over concentration as governing features of the inner life.
Th roughout The Poems of Marianne Moore, this implicit philosophy of
mind underwrites the poets curious theorization of literary and
pedagogical style. Appropriately enough, Moores poem Style
presents her readers with an oblique ars poetica whose baroque
linguistic surface is expressive of just such a digressive, associative,
uncertain mind:
... Entranced, were you not, by Soledad?

black-clad solitude that is not sad;
like a letter from
Casals; or perhaps say literal alphabet

S soundholes in a cello
set contradictorily; or should we call her
la lagarta? or bamboos with fireflies a-glitter;
or glassy lake and the whorls which a vertical stroke brought about,
of the paddle half-turned coming out. (Poems, 295, emphasis added)
The dancer Soledad (whose very name signifies the happy solitude of the
black-clad artist) provides only one example of style in a text that reg-
isters multiple orders of stylization in the world, from the tennis forehand
of Pierre Etchebaster to the epistolary idiosyncrasies of a musical stylist
like Pablo Casals to the stylizations of Chinese art to the particular
manner in which one paddles a canoe. As a pedagogical style, this ap-
proach presents the pupil with a complex, difficult linguistic surface.
Moores serial examples, however, seek to accommodate the fallibility of a
learners consciousness. If one illustration fails to elucidate the poets con-
ception of style, this resourceful educator will sift through her compen-
dium of knowledge to retrieve various other instances of stylization that
might better serve her instructional agenda. The multiplicity and interdis-
ciplinarity of examples in Moores work offer a range of opportunities for
the distractible, associative consciousness of her reader to apprehend the
subject of instruction.
In her copious use of examples, Moores work investigates a particular
strain of humanist poetics highlighted by Anne Cotterill in her historical
study, Digressive Voices in Early Modern English Literature: the classical
notion of copia, particularly as interpreted by Erasmus early in the six-
teenth century, offered a model for the association of fertile literary power
with the production of abundant, protean language whose plenitude and
playful productivity gives pleasure (34). Though Cotterill emphasizes
the place of copia within the early modern theory of language in her analy-
sis, this trope plays a critical role in the formation of a didactic tradition in
twentieth-century literary practice as well. From the countless historical
examples of usury, political corruption, and moral decline in Pounds
Cantos to the seemingly interminable procession of psychological por-
traits in Steins The Making of Americans, modernist writers have repeat-
edly predicated their literary works of instruction upon a matrix of copious
exemplarity. In Moores poetry, however, the digressive undertow of copia
is particularly pronounced. While the production of abundant, protean
language through copia may, as Cotterill observes, give pleasure to the
reader, the proliferating examples in Moores work sometimes appear to
lead one away from, rather than toward, the conceptsstyle, propriety, or
the enchanting thing of the mind itself (Moore, Poems, 295, 267, 260)
that they aim to illustrate. The digressive copia of Moores poetry thus
provide a forum for examining not only the possibilities but the problems,
too, posed by exemplarity for a modernist poetics of instruction.
Poststructuralist criticism has cast a long shadow upon the uses of
exemplarity in philosophy and literature alike. Can any example ever
truly fit a general proposition? writes Paul de Man. Is not its particu-
larity, to which it owes the illusion of its intelligibility, necessarily a
betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey?
(Rhetoric , 276). A major poststructuralist critique of exemplarity thus
focuses upon the dialectic of particularity and universality that deter-
mines any individual example per se. In his introduction to Unruly
Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, however, Alexander Gelley
also examines the effect of a series, the tendency or drift that multiple
instances set into motion (13). Opposing the singular instance to the
plural example, Gelley observes that the example does not stand alone
but inaugurates a dynamic that displaces the instance. Each variant or
alternative, whether introduced for clarification or refi nement, shift s
the direction of the argument, the point of the example (13). Moore is
sensitive to both critiques of exemplarity in her use of digressive copia .
Indeed, in the longer version of Poetryincluded at the end of her
1967 Complete PoemsMoore even offers the reader a curious series of
examples of what / we cannot understand:
... the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to
eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a
flea, the baseball fan, the statistician... . (Poems, 135)
Any single example within this series could suffice to illustrate a par-
ticular notion of what / we cannot understand. (A city-dweller visiting
the country for the fi rst time might fi nd herself bewildered, for instance,
by the behavior of a wild horse rolling upon the ground). But Moores
exempla from the natural world are difficult to reconcile with her exem-
pla from human societythe critic, the baseball fan, the statistician
that would appear to point toward a sociological, rather than a zoological,
sense of mystery. Here, the serial drift of Moores digressive copia
troubles the very concept that her examples purport to illuminate. Th is
self-conscious performance of exemplarity might meet with approval
from even a skeptic like de Man. If writers customarily employ examples
in service of understanding, here Moore will invoke the behavior of
bats, elephants, horses, wolves, and critics, as well as the mere existence
of sports fans and statisticians, to investigate the limits both of our
knowledge and of understanding itself.
Like her interdisciplinary explanations, Moores exemplary copia
examine the uses of digressive tropes in modern instruction. Her
digressive literary lectures assert that an ethos of obliquity, intricacy,
and curiosity should underwrite modern democratic education, even
at the expense of Deweyan transparency and directness. While attuned
both to the distractible aspects of the learners consciousness and to the
epistemological challenges of exemplarity, this approach refuses to
underestimate any individuals capacity to negotiate difficulty. Toward
the end of The Pangolin, Moores speaker turns to just this question of
the resourcefulness and limitation of individuals through a playful, exem-
plary sleight-of-hand:
Pangolins, made
for moving quietly also, are models of exactness,
on four legs; on hind feet plantigrade,
with certain postures of a man. Beneath sun and moon, man slaving
to make his life more sweet, leaves half the flowers worth having,
needing to choose wisely how to use his strength;
a paper-maker like the wasp; a tractor of foodstuffs,
like the ant; spidering a length
of web from bluffs
above a stream; in fighting, mechanicked
like the pangolin; capsizing in
disheartenment... . (227228)
Here, the digressive transition from natural history to the study of man-
kind is rhetorically enacted through what could be called the inversion
of exempla. If at first mans bearing simply illustrates the upright pos-
ture of the pangolin (Pangolins ... / are models of exactness, / on four
legs; on hind feet plantigrade, / with certain postures of a man), in
Moores next syntactical breath the anteater is demoted to the status of
one among several subordinated illustrations of man (in fighting,
mechanicked / like the pangolin) in his manifold postures.14 Inverting
the figure and ground of subject and example, this rhetorical turn marks
the speakers digressive graduation from the study of pangolins to the
study of humanity. Like Leonardo da Vinci, whose notebook entries on
animal physiology incubate a growing curiosity regarding his own anat-
omy (M. White, Leonardo, 46), Moores speaker eventually shelves her
study of the pangolin to anatomize the anatomist in the poems final
digressiona curious, tragi-comic, literary anatomy of man in all of his
fallible splendor.
Though the digressive coda to this poem beautifully highlights the mani-
fold aesthetic and philosophical questions raised by Moores entire oeuvre,
little has been written on the anatomy of man that concludes The Pango-
lin. In a footnote to her study of Moore, Bonnie Costello suggests that the
choral ode to man in Antigone might serve as a literary source for Moores
final digression on humanity (Imaginary, 130, 264). Pitched in the pane-
gyric register of prayer, however, Sophocles portrait of mastery (he is
master of ageless earth, there is nothing beyond his power, He is lord of
all things living (Antigone, 135136)) constructs a subject quite unlike
Moores comic writing- / master to the world who cannot even spell
error correctly:15
Bedizened or stark
naked, man, the self, the being we call human, writing-
master to this world, griffons a dark
Like does not like like that is obnoxious; and writes error with four
rs. Among animals, one has a sense of humor.
Humor saves a few steps, it saves years. Unignorant,
modest and unemotional, and all emotion,
he has everlasting vigor,
power to grow,
though there are few creatures who can make one
breathe faster and make one erecter.
Not afraid of anything is he,

and then goes cowering forth, tread paced to meet an obstacle
at every step... . (Poems, 228)
Margaret Holley reads this account of mans limitations as presenting a

classical, as opposed to a romantic, view of humanity (Voice, 30). I would
modify Holleys observation to place Moores speaker in conversation not
with classical, but rather with neoclassical discourse on human nature.
Here, Moores emphasis on error, the passions, and knowledge all speak
to concerns articulated within Enlightenment texts such as Humes Trea-
tise of Human Nature, Swifts Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the
Mind, and, in the sphere of poetry, Popes Essay on Man. If Sophocles
views man as lord of all living things, Popes Everyman is great lord of
all things, yet a prey to all (Pope, Essay on Man Epistle II, Major, 281,

emphasis added). Th is recurring gesture of comical self-correction dis-
tinguishes Popes skeptical anatomy from the stately chorus in Antigone.16
Indeed, a poetics of contradiction binds both Moores writing-master
who misspells error and Popes Sole judge of truth, in endless Error
hurld (281):
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest,

In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused,
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! (281, emphasis added)
Moore inscribes her anatomy within a satirical tradition sponsored by

Pope and Swift that views mans capacity for laughter and self-ridicule as a
saving grace: Among animals, one has a sense of humor.17 In lieu of the
traditional philosophical defi nitions of the human (which locate our
humanity in such faculties as moral or theological judgment), Moore ven-
tures a defi nition of persons as fundamentally comic beings. Like Hoga-
rth or Diderot, this speaker locates her own humanity in the ability to
laugh at the limitations of the individual.
In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the role of natural history in
consolidating the ideas of order that structure the Enlightenment indi-
viduals understanding of the world:
Natural history in the Classical age is not merely the discovery of a new object of cu-
riosity; it covers a series of complex operations that introduce the possibility of a
constant order into a totality of representations. It constitutes a whole domain of
empiricity as at the same time describable and orderable. (158)
It would come as no surprise to Foucault that Moores archaeology of

natural history in The Pangolin concludes with a meditation upon
mans place in the order of things. Moores poem is not merely about the
discovery of a new object of curiosity (i.e., the pangolin), but, rather, this
text investigates mans capacity to describe and order the world that sur-
rounds him. To anatomize man requires one to locate the individual
within a larger scheme of theological, natural, and political order. In the
eighteenth century, thinkers such as Pope and Adam Smith considered
poetic discourse to be the most rational and transparent forum for explor-
ing precisely such problems of order (Price, qtd. Nicholson, Pope, 4243).
This might I have done in prose, writes Pope in the prefatory Design to
the Essay on Man, and though it may seem odd, but is true, I found I could
express [the Essays theodicy] more shortly this way than in prose itself;
and nothing is more certain, than that much of the force as well as grace of
arguments or instructions, depends on their conciseness (270271).18
Digression has no place in Popes poetic legitimation of divine and politi-
cal authority. For Moore, however, much of the force as well as grace of
arguments or instructions depends not upon their conciseness but rather
upon their discursiveness. Where the Essay on Man unfolds its lesson plan
through the magisterial march of Popes heroic couplets, Moores modern
world becomes describable and orderable only through the graceful
detours of a digressive art.
Considered an illegitimate trope under Popes neoclassical poetics,
digression complicates any claim of expository, epistemological, or political
authority. This is why, in his inaugural lecture at the Collge de France,
Roland Barthes advocates a digressive ethos of instruction within the mod-
ern university curriculum:
For what can be oppressive in our teaching is not, fi nally, the knowledge or the cul-
ture it conveys, but the discursive forms through which we propose them. Since, as I
have tried to suggest, this teaching has as its object discourse taken in the inevita-
bility of power, method can really bear only on the lightening of this power. And I am
increasingly convinced, both in writing and in teaching, that the fundamental oper-
ation of this loosening method is, if one writes, fragmentation, and, if one teaches,
digression, or, to put it in a precisely ambiguous word, excursion. (Writers, 476)
For Barthes, fragmentation provides a literary strategy for lightening the

burden of power if one writes. Moore occupies a curious position in
relation to this prescription, however, for she does not simply write
rather, she writes about teaching. A metadidactic poet, Moore favors
Barthes pedagogical method of excursion over the writerly poetics of
fragmentation that came to dominate high modernism under Eliot and
Pound. Phrasing the grand humanistic question of mans place in the
world as an unruly digression from a natural history lecture, she antici-
pates Barthes call for the institutionalization of a digressive method
within the modern humanities curriculum. In this experimental enter-
prise, the subject of instruction is of secondary importance to the method
of instruction. Freely ranging from one field of knowledge to another,

Moores interdisciplinary explanations and digressive copia suggest that
it is not, fi nally, the knowledge or culture it conveys, but the discursive
forms through which we propose them that the poetry of instruction
may legislate modernity.
The bliss of Man, writes Pope in his First Epistle, is not to act or
think beyond mankind (Major, 294). The grand instructional project of
the Essay sets out to circumscribe human inquiry; throughout his ency-
clopedic anatomy of man, Popes didactic speaker tells us what not to
study. Inscribed within a modern democratic poetics of instruction, how-
ever, Moores text constructs an alternative version of bliss. From the
outset of The Pangolin (and in her sundry poetic investigations into top-
ics such as jellyfish, outer space, and unicorns), Moore thinks beyond
mankind to construct a poetry of curiosity, novelty, and exploration into
fields far removed from ordinary experience. Even at his most destitute,
Moores Everyman can still take heart in the possibility of further investi-
gation into the curiosities of the world:
... Consistent with the

formulawarm blood, no gills, two pairs of hands and a few hairsthat
is a mammal; there he sits in his own habitat,
serge-clad, strong-shod. The prey of fear, he, always
curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done,
says to the alternating blaze,
Again the sun!
anew each day; and new and new and new,
that comes into and steadies my soul. (Poems, 228)
Like Popes version of mandoing, suffering, checked, impelled

(Essay on Man Epistle I, Major, 274)Moores figure is perpetually
curtailed, extinguished, thwarted by the dusk, work partly done.19 Our
latter-day human, however, fi nds consolation not in the circumscription
of his studies but rather in the daily renewal of his unending research. The
ethos of inexhaustible curiosity is spelled out in the fi nal lines of The
Pangolin, when Moore delegates poetic utterance to her intrepid Every-
man, who exclaims: Again the sun! / anew each day; and new and new
and new, / that comes into and steadies my soul (Poems, 228). In a sense,
curiosity can be understood as the repetitive interiorization of the new by
a thinking subject; while the word new may no longer strike us as novel
by the end of this line, its sunrise still comes into and steadies mans
inquisitive, renovated soul.
The poetry of curiosity is premised upon the introduction of new top-
ics within literary discourse. To leaf through Moores oeuvre is to give
oneself over to the and new and new and new that closes The Pango-
lin. An albino giraffe, an Egyptian pulled glass bott le in the shape of a
fish, the arctic ox, a refrigerated crystal clock from the Bell research
laboratorythese are but a few of the curiosities gathered into verse by
Moore on her expeditions to the Brooklyn Institute, the Pratt Free
Library, and various other archives of democratic American culture.
Writing home from the control center of Progressive reform at the Lake
Placid Club, Moores description of her short-lived secretarial role there
could also serve as a gloss on the writers future poetics: My value is
miscellaneous (Collins, qtd. Willis, Moore, 55). At the same time, her
instructional digressions interrogate those very divisions of knowledge
that certain aspects of the Progressive movement (through the institu-
tion of the Dewey Decimal System, or the consolidation of academic dis-
ciplines such as zoology) labored to consolidate. In this respect, Moore
may be read as an archaeological poet par excellence. Her compositional
procedures, her formal innovations, and her digressive style all show how
poetic practice may interrogate the general system of the formation and
transformation of statements, or the archive, of ones time. If Foucault
examines the rise and fall of natural history as a knowledge-practice over
the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in The Order of
Things, Moore conducts a literary autopsy of this defunct discipline in
the early twentieth-century case study of The Pangolin. These two
researchers, however, arrive at different conclusions with regard to mans
position within a poetics of modernity. Where Foucault ultimately con-
cludes that man composed his own figure in the interstices of [a] frag-
mented language upon the disintegration of Enlightenment ideas of
order (Order, 386), Moore, on the contrary, composes her own figure of
man through the present-tense orchestrations of a digressive twentieth-
century music.
If The Pangolin can be said to be about any one thing, it may, in the
end, be a poem about the vexing complexity of learning. The chapter that
follows is prefaced with a literary vignette that dramatizes the Foucauldian
account of education as a form of institutionalized discipline within
Enlightenment society. Th is litt le story, from Jacques the Fatalist, illumi-
nates the relationship among instruction, power, and fatalism in ways
deeply consequential for our understanding of how contemporary poets
of the American avant-garde imagine the collective narrative of history. In
her colloquy with Popes didactic doctrine that The proper study of Man-
kind is Man, Moore (like Barthes) quietly insists that it is the liberty to
change the subject of ones studiesto change ones mindthat under-
writes autonomy itself in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. Lyn
Hejinian, too, asserts her right to change the subject, but in her case this

digressive work takes narration, rather than knowledge, as a site of literary
resistance. Unsett ling historical notions of epistemological decorum rati-
fied within the neoclassical poetics of Enlightenment, Moores poetry
instructs her readers in the digressive forms of inquiry that sponsor a
graceful consciousness under the curious conditions of modernity.
Hejinian, as we will see, brings those digressive practices to bear upon the
ramifying stories embedded within history.
CHAP TER 3
Changing the Sjuzet

Lyn Hejinians Digressive Narratology and the
Writing of History
Jacques. One day, there was this little boy who was sitting under the counter in a laundry, crying
his eyes out. The laundrymans wife got tired of the noise, so she said:
Come, child, what are you crying for?
Because they want me to say A.
And why dont you want to say A?
Because the minute Ive said A, theyll want me to say B.
Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist
I n Diderots anecdote of the litt le boy in the laundry, alphabetical order

serves as a figure for the regulatory social order of eighteenth-century
European culture. For the unruly child, to utter the letter A would not
only compel this speaking subject to articulate the obligatory B that must
follow; it would pledge him to a schoolroom abecedary of instruction,
discipline, and orthodoxy as well. The comedy of Diderots anecdote lies,
of course, in the weeping boys conflation of his ABCs with a coercive
institutional order. But this savvy innocent does not cry without reason.
Two centuries after the publication of Jacques the Fatalist, the putative
latter-day fatalist Michel Foucault excavates precisely this scene of alpha-
betical instruction in his historical study of the dividing practices of power,
citing Charles Dmias distribution of individuals into an elaborate order of
classes in the 1716 manual Rglement pour les coles de la ville de Lyon:
The fi rst class would comprise four streams: one for those who are learning the
simple letters; a second for those who are learning the mixed letters; a third for
those who are learning the abbreviated letters (, ...); a fourth for those who are learning
the double letters ( ff, ss, tt, st). The second class would be divided into three streams: for
those who count each letter aloud before spelling the syllable, D.O., DO; for those who
spell the most difficult syllables, such as bant, brand, spinx, etc. (Discipline, 159160)
For Foucault, a technology of power is apparent in even such scenes of

elementary instruction; learning ones ABCs stages a sort of overture to
the seriation of labor in this historians archaeology of disciplinary prac-
tices under the sign of modernity.1 Though parents ordinarily applaud
their offsprings advancement into the world of letters, a childs passage
into literacy also establishes the possibility of characterizing, and there-
fore of using individuals according to the level in the series that they are
moving through in the historical analytic of Discipline and Punish (160).
The litt le boy in the laundry, then, is a Foucauldian ab ovo, for he knows in
advance that consenting to such elementary instruction would ratify his
subjection to a seriated order of things.
In the pages that follow, I will examine some digressive literary strate-
gies for evading the dialectic of seriation and power adumbrated by
Foucault in works like Discipline and Punish. Diderot himself sought to
interrogate the disciplinary projects of the Dmias of his day through a sly
engagement with seriality on multiple levels of discursive order. A natural-
born fatalist, the weeping childs rejection of the alphabetical seriesthe
minute Ive said A, theyll want me to say B (182)sets into motion a
small parable of sequence and consequence that reflects the overall philo-
sophical and literary concerns of Jacques the Fatalist. Th roughout the
novel, Diderots characters grapple with the fatality of consequence in all
its forms, endlessly cogitating, for instance, upon the grand metaphysical
problem of causation:
Postulate a cause and an effect will follow. A trivial cause will produce a trivial effect.
A passing cause will produce a passing effect. An occasional cause will produce an
occasional effect. A cause that is blocked will produce a reduced effect. (220)
Jacques orderly recitation of this scholiastic litany rhetorically reflects the

great chain of causation that binds this inveterate fatalist. On the level of
literary form, however, Jacques the Fatalist gleefully disregards protocols
of sequence and consequence within the conventions of novelistic prose
in the period, from its opening paragraphin which Diderots narrator
mocks readerly expectations of destination and purpose: where were
they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does
anyone really know where theyre going? (3)to its garden of forking
plots to its plural closure in three separate but equal endings. 2 In the long
run, the litt le boy in the laundrys stubborn refusal to utter the fatal A that
would symbolize his entry into the world of the written word precludes
any sort of literary resolution whatsoever to his schoolroom impasse. But
Diderot, as an esteemed citizen in the republic of letters, employs digres-
sion as a literary method for interrogating the philosophical premises of
fatalism, playfully dismantling normative protocols of rational order and
seriated progression in the process.
Though fatalism may seem more like a psychological condition than a
philosophical school today, the work of a self-professed literary fatalist
like Lyn Hejinian illuminates the enduring complexities of sequence and
consequence in contemporary American poetics. Constructing a poetry
of illogical sequiturs and logical / non-sequiturs in collections such as
her recent homage to Diderot, The Fatalist, Hejinian proposes a new,
digressive logic of discursive sequence within the poetic medium (65). 3
Indeed, the movement with which she is commonly associated, the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, bears embedded within the typography
of its name an implicit critique of abecedarian progression; in the subver-
sive schoolroom of these writers (where L, N, G, U, and E all equal A), it is
not difficult to imagine the litt le boy of Diderots parable happily singing
his LBZs. Th is is not to suggest that Hejinian rejects out of hand all
notions of consequence and causation; the irreversible undertow of mor-
tality, for example, is keenly felt throughout her work. (Toward the end of
The Fatalist, Hejinian writes of an acquaintance who fi nds herself nel mezzo
del cammin di nostra vita that M is not a careerist but an adventurer /
dressed for colder cities and soon / she will be N (78), intimating that this
characters ultimate destination is, like everybodys, the terminal Z of
mortality). Rather than dismissing all notions of sequential progression
entirely, Hejinian imagines alternative, experimental, and provisional
protocols of discursive continuity in works like The Fatalist, A Border
Comedy, My Life, and My Life in the Nineties:
It is true that life springs only from continuity and equally true that it springs only
from discontinuity. My mother said I look at what will follow me and am content.
Death, destruction, deduction, Degas, Delacroix, delayed coherence. (Nineties,
8384)
The fi rst sentence in this brief cameo of consequence reminds us that the
strange literary sequences within Hejinians text reflect Zenos ancient
philosophical problem of continuity versus discontinuity on a broad
existential level. Her mothers fatalistic acceptance of her own place
within an unfolding continuity of generations thus presents us with an
entirely logical / non-sequitur in the sentence that follows. The ensuing
CH A NGI NG TH E SJ UZET [ 63 ]
list, furthermore, perfectly illustrates the shift ing logic of Hejinians po-
etic sequences: death, destruction, deduction, Degas, Delacroix, delayed
coherence. Foregoing the syntactical order that had governed the pre-
ceding sentences, this grammarless series of words proceeds associatively
at fi rstfrom the death that follows the mothers memento mori to the
more generalized and impersonal force of destruction to the rhyming,
fatalistic logic of deductionbut then the (nondeductive) logic of this
list suddenly conforms to alphabetical order, progressing like the index of
a poststructuralist art historical study from Degas to Delacroix to
delayed coherence. Here one word follows another according to the
delayed coherence of a shift ing logic that becomes apparent only in retro-
spect, in keeping with the poetics of a writer who asks us to demand more
logics from life (Nineties, 27).
Within the theoretical order of things, Foucault, too, asks us to demand
more logics from life. Toward the beginning of Change and Transforma-
tions, the fi ft h chapter of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault disavows
both the theme that succession is an absolute and also the theme that
there is in discourse only one form and only one level of succession. In lieu
of such fatalistic themes of succession, Foucault proposes that we unearth
a multiplicity of orders within any form of discourse:
For these themes, [archaeology] substitutes analyses that reveal both the various
forms of succession that are superposed in discourse (and by forms I do not simply
mean the rhythms or causes, but the series themselves), and the way in which the
successions thus specified are articulated. (169)
Though readers like Frank Lentricchia interpret Discipline and Punish as

purveying a despairing perspective within humanistic study (Ariel, 31),
the archaeological method advocated by Foucault here seeks to interro-
gate the absolutist and exclusive themes of succession that underwrite any
fatalistic narrative. In the pages that follow, I hope to show how Hejinian
carries out a parallel project in her own inimitable fashion over the course
of a long and circuitous literary career. Again and again throughout her
work, this poet aims to heighten her readers sensitivity toward hidden or
mystified logics of sequence and consequence that heretofore may have
gone unnoticed under our normative reading practices. Like a literary
cryptographer, Hejinian insists that there are an infi nite number of se-
quences underway within any text and, every bit as emphatically, within
any life (Nineties, 69).
Ideas of order have fascinated the Language poets since the move-
ments inception, as a glance through their anthology In the American Tree
amply demonstrates. On the elementary level of the signifier, poets such
as David Melnick and P. Inman have questioned the normative sequences
of letters that make up individual words: a poem like Melnicks PCOET,
for instance, opens thoeisu / thoiea / akcorn woi cirtus locqvump (90),
and Inmans OCKER features passages such as (sbrim / m,nce //
(nome,id // armb,jor, (336). On a somewhat more intelligible discursive
order, Language writers have also examined the sequencing of words
within sentences in a host of poems that elaborate upon Gertrude Steins
experiments with grammar, such as Larry Prices Local Motions: Neu-
ral classic ring, crowbar assures hand, foot thought almost anyone, him
(114). Recent scholarship on Language writing has foregrounded this sec-
ond, grammatical, level of discursive sequence; in Being Numerous:
Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, for instance, Oren Izenberg argues
that the Language writers tacitly endorse a Chomskyan account of human
grammar to authorize their construction of personhood within contem-
porary American poetics (157159).4 Indeed, this grammatical approach
originates within the critical practice of the Language writers themselves,
in theoretical tracts with titles like Total Syntax and The New Sentence,
whose arguments build upon the premise that the sentence is the hinge
unit of any literary product (Silliman, Sentence, 385). Yet Ron Silli-
mans own focus on syllogistic reasoning in the latter treatise suggests
that his real interests lie not in the interior syntax of any individual sen-
tence but, rather, in what he calls above-sentence integration, or the
logic of sequencing sentences within a poem:
... The syllogism is the classic mode of above-sentence integration. For example, the
sentences All women were once girls and Some women are lawyers logically lead
to a third sentence or conclusion, a higher level of meaning: Some lawyers were once
girls. Literature proceeds by suppression, most often, of this third term, positing
instead chains of order of the fi rst two. (384)
Hejinian has considered the normative or obligatory sequencing of alpha-

betical characters within individual words, writing, in My Life, passages
such as after C, I before, E except. Obbligato (95), and she also has
delved into questions of authorial freedom versus grammatical order
within individual sentences: I can say I shall will it but not I will shall it
(Border, 74). But this writers literary investigations into the poetics of
sequence and consequence ultimately focus on higher discursive orders of
above-sentence integration. In this chapter, I will propose that Hejini-
ans interrogation of normative protocols of sequential order yields what
might be called a digressive narratology. If, as Peter Brooks writes, we
might think of plot as the logic ... of a certain kind of discourse, one that
develops its propositions only through temporal sequence and progression
(Plot, xi), Hejinians poetic disarticulations of plot unsett le the sequences
of beginnings, middles, and endings upon which literary form itself is
predicated. Moreover, I will propose that Hejinians subversive narra-
tology arises within the historical context of cold war political discourse
in late twentieth-century American writing. Drawing upon Russian lit-
erary theory in her study of narrative form, Hejinian ultimately repudi-
ates any absolutist or exclusive theme of succession in the story of
Americas historical agon with the Soviet Union. Th is writers narratolog-
ical investigations thus culminate in a digressive poetics that undermines
(rather than underscores) the grands rcits of history. Fatalism, as the in-
souciant Jacques so memorably demonstrates, need not pledge the indi-
vidual subject to any governing master narrative of experience, whether it
be the story of ones life or the collective tale of political history.
BEGINNINGS
While the senses of ending have fascinated academic writers for decades,
critical studies of closures antipodesbeginningsremain curiously
rare. 5 In one of the fi rst contemporary ventures toward a scholarly study
of beginnings in literature and culture, the 1975 volume Beginnings: Inten-
tion and Method, Edward Said draws a broad primary distinction between
an intransitive, pure beginning and a transitive, problem- or project-
directed beginning (50). 6 With this critical gesture, Said takes a fi rst step
toward what might be called a grammatology of beginnings. (Later, Said
observes that the grammar of beginnings not only may be transitive or
intransitive in the manner of verbs but also may have a prepositional
aspect, writing of beginning at the beginning, for the beginning (73)).
The start of a political campaign or the outset of a scientific study would,
in Saids view, count as transitive beginningsbeginnings that take as
their object some problem or projectwhile works of art, due to their less
teleological nature, open intransitively. Even before its opening line, then,
Hejinians poem The Beginner intimates through its title that this work
will explore the poetics of intransitive beginning:
This is a good place to begin.

From something.
Something beginning in an event that beginning overrides.
Doubt instruction light safety fathom blind.
In the doorway is the beginning thus and thus no denial.
A little beat of time, a little happiness quite distinct from misery as yet.
The sun shines.
The sun is perceived as a bear, then a boat, then an instruction: see.
The sun is a lily, then a whirlpool turning a crowd. (9)
Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea / Of this invention, this invented

world, / The inconceivable idea of the sun, writes Wallace Stevens in the
opening lines of Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction (Collected, 329). Like
Stevens, Hejinian senses that Phoebus was / A name for something that
could never be named (Stevens, Collected, 329), but this old hand at
beginning notes that we generate a series of names for the sun nonethe-
less: bear, boat, instruction, lily, whirlpool (Hejinian, Beginner, 15). Hejin-
ian thus quietly maps the beginning of her poem onto the opening of the
text that inaugurates Judeo-Christian civilization: God called the light
Day, and the darkness he called Night (Genesis 1:5). (The phrase In the
doorway is the beginning resonates with the traditional Septuagint trans-
lation of the first line of Genesis as well).7 Rather than proceeding from
this opening to a fatalistic narrative of the Fall, however, Hejinian proposes
a literary experiment: is it possible to construct a text that dwells in a state
of perpetual beginning and is therefore exempt from the fall into conse-
quence? If Saids austere dream of a pure intransitive beginninga
beginning that has no object or end whatsoeverseems difficult to ima-
gine, The Beginner proposes to fulfill this fantasy by taking nothing more
than beginning as its end.8
The Beginner may be read as a grand elaboration of Saids rudimentary
grammatology of beginning. The infinitive to begin that punctuates the
poems opening sentence sets into motion an intricate verbal machinery
that, over the course of the text, reveals not only the grammatical transitiv-
ity (or intransitivity) but the temporality of beginning as well. Extracted
from their original contexts over the course of The Beginner, usages of the
poems central verb coalesce into a fragmentary conjugation table of the
indicative mood:
SIMPLE PRESENT: a runner begins to run, a singer begins to . . . (42)

PRESENT PROGRESSIVE: yes, the music is beginning, is beginning
beginning, is ... (16)
SIMPLE PAST: I am about to experience something, it is already
underway, I began to experience it several nights ago (16)
PAST PROGRESSIVE: I didnt have to be very old to know what the chairs
were for, why they were thereto know that was beginning (16)
PRESENT PERFECT: the child has begun to confront fragments of
the world (35)
Additional lists easily could be constructed to illustrate Hejinians ex-
ploration of various other forms such as the participial and gerundive
indications are not enough, indications with obedience to provide
information beginning to do the job (18), perhaps, having begun, I
might compare a crystal with a town (38), beginning the beginner
feels that whats been begun is done (22)or the potential mood
one may begin unawares (15)which inflect the verb throughout this
text.9 Furthermore, Hejinian continues to instruct her readers in the
grammar of beginning throughout later collections as well, instructing us
in The Fatalist to think / of the future anterior: think of what will have
been. It begins / (is beginning) right now (59). Th is compulsive dril-
ling of the verb to begin ultimately assumes dimensions of a school-
room exercise in Hejinians poem; the eponymous protagonist of The
Beginner methodically conjugates this verbI began, I begin, I will
beginlike a diligent pupil carefully copying out exercises in a gram-
matical primer of origins.
If Hejinians perpetual Beginner were to rewrite Diderots parable of
sequence, the litt le boy in the laundry would likely recite a series of As in
response to his teachers abecedarian imperative. Though this incarnation
of the weeping child might feel that he begins afresh with each repetition
of the letter A, thereby avoiding the fall into sequence, his teacher will
observe that the child really utters an extended sequence of Aswith a
beginning, a middle, and an endwhich might be better represented as
A1A 2 A 3. The Beginner ends with just this sort of impasse. One might envi-
sion the fi nal lines of the poem as a dialogue between an exasperated
instructor and a willful pupil who has just recited a series of AAAs in lieu
of his ABCs:
[boy] We live in a temporal series that consists entirely of

beginnings.
[teacher] Then didnt anything come first?
[boy] No, nor anything second; the things were talking
abouttheyve existed always. (Beginner, 42)
The fact that one could seamlessly substitute for beginnings its oppo-
siteWe live in a temporal series that consists entirely of endings
lessens the narratological force of the Beginners closing argument.
Moreover, the page numbers that subtend the poem from beginning to
end belie this speakers dream of simultaneity. The laws of sequence
cannot be disregarded without consequence; in the fi nal analysis, The
Beginner is a repetitive sequence rather than a work of perpetual begin-
ning. Th is repetitiousness informs not only the overall structure of the
work but also its style; one odd consequence of Hejinians rejection of
consequence is a curious monotonyA1A 2 A 3to this text. While the
speakers compulsive conjugation of the verb to begin does lend The Be-
ginner a certain Heideggerian aspectthis conveys the experience of
beginning to see what one begins to see and with that knowing has begun
(19)no recursive phenomenology can provide the text with the sense of
continual novelty and refreshment that is the aim of any aesthetics of end-
less beginning. As the poems protagonist admits, it really is melancholy
being a beginner (22).
In the authors introduction to The Uses of Enchantment, Bruno Bettel-
heim describes his growing disenchantment with the instructional texts
used in early childhood education during his controversial stewardship of
the University of Chicagos Orthogenic School for emotionally disturbed
children:
I became deeply dissatisfied with much of the literature intended to develop the
childs mind and personality, because it fails to stimulate and nurture those resources
he needs most in order to cope with his difficult inner problems. The primers and
preprimers from which [the child] is taught to read in school are designed to teach
the necessary skills, irrespective of meaning. (4)
No stranger to difficult inner problems, Bettelheim goes on to advocate the

use of fairy tales instead of primers and preprimers to equip children for
the discovery of meaning in their lives. Like Bettelheim, Hejinian graduates
from the hornbook to the fairy tale in her study of sequence, subjecting the
classic trope of beginning, Once upon a time, to a delightful variety of
grammatical permutations throughout her work. These permutations may
take the form of qualification:
Once upon a time, far away and long ago, though not all that long ago, sometime after
the world began but before you were bornI cant be more precisewhat do you
think I am, a clock? (Nineties, 4243)
or pluralization:
Many times upon a time there lived a bird who laid a figure on a twisted bough and
invited a spider to help her raise it (Nineties, 74)
or even hypothesization:
There must once have been someone who stared into the sea and could see that it
turned and stared back (Border, 212)
Like the comparative folkloristwho studies variations on the once
upon a time formula from the There was, there was not of Czech fairy
tales (bylo nebylo) to the Algerian Ive told you whats coming (hajitek ma
jitek)Hejinian constructs an archive of variations on this fundamental
grammar of beginning. To alter the grammar of a beginning, however, is
to change everything that comes afterward. Rewriting once upon a time
as many times upon a time, for instance, replaces the exceptional singu-
larity of the fairy tales sequence of events with a cyclical sense of their
eternal recurrence. (Opening Sleeping Beauty with many times upon a
time would condemn the storys heroine to a nightmarish cycle of cen-
tury-long slumbers). Hejinians revisions of the once upon a time trope
thus show that changing the grammar of any beginning may carry serious
consequences for the story that follows.
Though the Beginner steadfastly refuses to step into the realm of con-
sequence, her baroque grammatology of beginnings opens the door to
further studies in narrative sequence. In the Language schools literary
curriculum, grammatologists graduate to advanced work in narratology,
just as beginnings give rise to middles (which in turn lead to endings). In
1983, the Language writer Carla Harryman published The Middle, a long
poem that examines the narratological space that unfolds in the aftermath
of all origins. The Beginner thus participates in the Language writers con-
struction of a comprehensive poetic narratologyan ongoing project
that may someday take the form of a trilogy composed of The Beginner, The
Middle, and an as-yet-unwritten work titled Endings. (The fact that Harry-
mans poem of middles antedates The Beginner perfectly underscores the
nonlinear logic of the Language writers conception of narrative sequence).
In Chapter 2: Determinism of The Middle, Harryman imagines a digressive
heroine who beautifully fits the profile of the author of My Life, A Border
Comedy, and The Fatalist:
Our heroine had an abhorrence of sticking to the subject. There were so many com-
pelling subjects. If one thing suggested another it was the other thing she would pur-
sue, for she couldnt draw a line and felt the following of lines to be too confi ning a
game. (14)
Perpetual beginning is not the only way to foreclose the fatality of conse-
quence; Harrymans heroine, like Hejinian, changes the subject of her
utterance in the middle of things, constructing a nonlinear poeticsfor
she couldnt draw a line and felt the following of lines to be too confi ning
a gamewhich entails a comprehensive literary ethos of digression as
well. While the Beginner seeks to avoid the middle ground of sequence,
plot, and subject matter entirely, it is precisely within this middle kingdom
that Hejinian ultimately conducts her most complex negotiations with
contemporary ideas of order: it is only after the beginning and before the
end, writes this poetic narratologist, that things and thinking about
them can begin anew (Language, 65).
MIDDLES
Toward the end of the summer of 1989, in a cultural exchange that epito-
mized the metropolitan dream of the glasnost era, four horsemen of the
Language movementMichael Davidson, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten,
and Hejinianattended a week-long conference with the rather ambi-
tious purview of LanguageConsciousnessSociety at the invitation
of the avant-garde literary collective Poetic Function in Leningrad.
Though her comrades in the Language delegation had never before visited
the Soviet Union, Hejinian was by this time already a veteran of three
prior visits to the country and would go on to travel to Russia three more
times in as many years. I remember referringaddressing my mother
to my love affair with Russia, which she misunderstood as my love affair
with a Russian, writes the poet in her collaborative memoir of the Lenin-
grad conference: in the fi rst case ... the emotion is, can I say? exterior,
like being in love with love (Leningrad, 98). Th is transcendental romance
with the idea of Russia has its literary origins not in the novels of Turgenev
or Tolstoy but, rather, in the theoretical work of the Russian Formalists, as
the poet attests in her afterword to Viktor Shklovskys Third Factory:
The story of how the writings of the radical philologists, writers, and critics known
as the Russian Formalists influenced (and at crucial points enlivened) the writings
of the American avant-garde poets known as the Language writers remains largely
untold. (101)10
In the years since the publication of Hejinians commentary on Shklovsky,

scholars have begun to respond to her tacit invitation to tell the story of
how the Russian Formalists influencedand at crucial points enlivened
the writings of the Language school; Jacob Edmonds 2006 essay Lyn
Hejinian and Russian Estrangement, for example, argues that Hejinian
identifies her travels in Russia with Shklovskys concept of ostranenie, or
estrangement (97).11 The critical emphasis on lyric estrangement (or defa-
miliarization) in the poetics of Language writing, however, obscures the
role of Formalist narratological thought in Hejinians literary constructions
of sequence and consequence. In their heterogeneity, their subversive
undercurrents and especially their way of achieving inclusion through
use of digression while simultaneously using digressions as a means of
being pointed, the works of Viktor Shklovsky are so appropriate to our
contemporary situation as to seem to have been written for us, she writes
toward the end of her afterword (Factory, 105). Whether the communal
pronoun that concludes this sentence refers to the Language writers, the
broader field of contemporary American poets, or, even more inclusively
speaking, the imaginary collective gathered under the tribe of modernity,
in Hejinians view this Formalists digressions seem to have been penned
with us in mind.
In 1927, the Russian formalist Vladimir Propp published the twentieth
centurys great work of narratological fatalism, Morphology of the Fairy
Tale.12 According to Propp, there are only thirty-one narrative develop-
ments (in Propps terms, functions) possible within the construction of
fairy tales. These functions include such developments as, The villain
causes harm or injury to a member of a family (designated by the letter
A), The hero and the villain join in direct combat (designation H), The
villain is defeated (designation I), and The hero is married and ascends
the throne (designation W) (3063). Under Propps schema the
sequence of events has its own laws (22); the move from H to I, for
example, cannot logically be reversed as I-H, for this would be to imagine
a sequence in which the villain is already vanquished before his fateful
combat with the hero ever occurs. Thus, Propp adopts a strict abecedarian
paradigm for thinking about narrative sequence: if we designate with the
letter A a function encountered everywhere in fi rst position, and similarly
designate with the letter B the function which (if it is at all present) always
follows A, then all functions known to the tale will arrange themselves
within a single tale, and none will fall out of order (22). By the end of Mor-
phology of the Fairy Tale, Propp arrives at the formal sequence that, in his
view, governs the shape of all fairy tales:
HJIK p Pr - Rs0 L
ABC n DEFG - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -Q Ex TUW

LMJNK p Pr - Rs
(105)
This universal narratological key fulfills Propps promise at the beginning of
his work: this study is accessible to every fancier of the tale, provided he is
willing to follow the writer into the labyrinth of the tales multiformity, which
in the end will become apparent to him as an amazing uniformity (1). From
its outset, then, Propp imagines his own study as a kind of narratological
fairy tale in which the reader of his work, like a child lost in an enchanted
forest, will ultimately emerge from the labyrinth of the tales multiformity
into a new understanding of the amazing order of this fictional world.
Like a postmodern Sister Grimm, Hejinian playfully interrogates
Propps narratological determinism in a series of fractured fairy tales
embedded throughout her oeuvre.13 Skeptical of the axiom that the
sequence of events has its own laws, she rarely misses an opportunity to
break Propps fatalistic rules of abecedarian sequence. In the sixth section
of My Life in the Nineties, for example, we come across a curious ornitho-
logical fairy tale in medias res:
One day the princess stepped across a stream, took up her binoculars, and spotted a
flock of tiny birds, but the light was wrong and they flew away, and whether they were
chicadees [sic] or bushtits she was never sure, although the word no had never
meant anything to her. (53)
Belatedly employing the protocols of fairy tale decorum, Hejinian for-

mally introduces us to the protagonist of this story a few pages afterward:
There once was a beautiful princess whose favorite color was red and she lived in a
dark forest where only the tiniest flowers grew and they were yellow. (56)
Only at the end of the following section of the book do we arrive at the
ever after that concludes this tale:
Th is happened in the blink of an eye, but ever after the princess remembered the
riverits dappled shadows, the weaving of currents of warm water through the cold,
the slowly tumbling rocks in the rills over the shallows. (63)
If the opening move there once was may be designated A, the middle of
the story (one day) would occupy the abecedarian position B, with the
closural ever after falling into narratological place with the nomenclature
C. Thus, the displaced middle of this unruly fairy tale sets into motion a
digressive BAC sequence. Rearranged into a conventional ABC progres-
sion, however, the story of the princess in the forest would read as follows:
There once was a beautiful princess whose favorite color was red and she lived in a
dark forest where only the tiniest flowers grew and they were yellow. One day the
princess stepped across a stream, took up her binoculars, and spotted a flock of tiny
birds, but the light was wrong and they flew away, and whether they were chicadees
or bushtits she was never sure, although the word no had never meant anything to
her. Th is happened in the blink of an eye, but ever after the princess remembered the
riverits dappled shadows, the weaving of currents of warm water through the cold,
the slowly tumbling rocks in the rills over the shallows.
In its original poetic form, this oblique self-portrait recapitulates the digressive
autobiographical armature of My Life in the Nineties as a whole. But extracted
from their original context and assembled into abecedarian order, these nar-
rative functions coalesce into a story about the fugitive nature of perception
(and whether they were chicadees or bushtits she was never sure) and the
consolations of memory (but ever after the princess remembered the
river). In its reconstructed form, this story may display sequence, but it also
quietly disrupts readerly expectations of consequence. (The princesss adven-
ture does not provide dramatic resolution to her entrapment in a forest of
yellow, just as her memory of the river fails to resolve this royal ornithologists
nagging uncertainty regarding the particular species of birds she has espied
on her walk.) Embedding the episodes of this digressive conte within the
story of her life, Hejinian formally disarticulates the fairy tale of Propps abe-
cedarian narratology and, in the process, unsettles the normative logic of con-
sequence that provides a hermeneutical ground for the reception of stories.
Hejinians oeuvre is shot through with such finger exercises in narrative,
although, like many an amateur enthusiast, she rarely plays out these stories to
completion, trailing off more often than not in the middle of things: the ram-
bling old woman never finishes / her stories. It is said that she is postponing her
death. / Could be, writes this poet toward the end of The Fatalist (71). From
Richard Burtons digressive Sultaness to the unsung narrator known as Anon-
ymous to the tick-infested goose who, like an avant-garde version of Charles
Perraults Mere lOye, tells the tale of a man in conversation with the horizon,
Hejinian choreographs an elaborate pageant of storytelling personae through-
out poems such as The Fatalist and A Border Comedy (Border, 35, 54). Indeed,
it sometimes seems as if there were more storytellers than there were stories
in this writers imaginative universe (Life, 27). Perhaps the most enduring (and
endearing) of Hejinians narratorial personae is an amateur novelist who per-
petually premeditates a supreme fiction that never quite seems to take shape:
Certainly Im no novelist but if I were I would

(thats for sure) cast these circles around a troupe of troubled comedians
named Lola de Nova and Relative Inch and Daisy and Martha
and Gus. There would be strangers
too ... (Fatalist, 51)
The margins of Hejinians poetry serve as a working notebook for devising

this carnivalesque novel, a fugitive magnum opus perpetually outlined,
scrapped, and begun over again but fated never to see the light of day. The
poets notes even extend to minutiae of plotting: on page six I will have
tired of being / alone and on page fi fteen Ill buy a goat which I will tether /
on a musty yellow hillside (62), writes Hejinians novelist manqu,
though ultimately she concedes that in all good fiction the emotion
comes fi rst / and the plot is an attempt to derive it from incidents / and
anecdotes and animals and names spun out of awareness (51). Like a Bor-
gesian book of sand, the plot of this fictional novel continually arises and
evanesces before the readers eyes, conjuring up a dizzying calculus of
narrative possibilities.14 While the fairy tale and its circumjacent childrens
genres provide Hejinian with a forum for studying narrative in miniature,
this poets investigations into the intricate logic of plot inevitably advance
her poetic narratology into the more elaborate architectures of sequence
and consequence that fi nd literary expression in the Western novel.
In the inaugural issue of Poetics Journal (the publication that served,
for many years, as the theoretical wing of the Language movement),
Hejinian and her coeditor, Barrett Watten, reprinted a neglected essay by
Viktor Shklovsky called The Plotless Novel.15 Th is strategic editorial
decision demonstrates the Language poets early theoretical investment
in scrutinizing the conventions of novelistic plot. As the penultimate
chapter of Shklovskys Theory of Prosea text that opens with the authors
famous defi nition of poetry as ostranenie and closes with the narratologi-
cal question of what should replace the role of plot in prose? (208)
The Plotless Novel draws closed the logic of a theoretical journey from
poetry to plotlessness. En route, Shklovsky dismantles the abecedarian
model of plot that prevailed within the period to articulate a distinction
that goes on to govern the formal study of narratology over the fi rst half
of the century: the concept of plot (syuzhet) is too often confused with a
description of the events in the novel, with what Id tentatively call the
story line ( fabula). As a matter of fact, though, the story line is nothing
more than material for plot formation (Plotless, 170). If fabula repre-
sents a sequence of events (ABCDEFG) in the world, syuzhet (normally
transliterated sjuzet) signifies the rearrangement of these eventsthrough
devices such as flashbacks and asidesinto the novel order of a reified
literary plot (e.g., CDEABFG).16 Plot, then, is always already digressive
under Shklovkys account. Indeed, Shklovsky equates plot with digres-
sion in the very next sentence of his essay: the plot of Eugene Onegin is
not the love between Eugene and Tatiana but the appropriation of that
story line in the form of digressions that interrupt the text (170). For this
unruly narratologist, every story appropriates the consecutive sequence of
an originary fabula in service of a digressive logic of the sjuzet.17
Disregarding all the modern European novels, ancient Hindu folktales,
classical epics, and contemporary Russian dramas within his cavernous
scholarly library, Shklovsky slyly pulls from his shelves a novel in verse to
exemplify the fabula/sjuzet binary in Plotless Literature. Composed in
what is variously known as the Pushkin sonnet or the Onegin stanza
sonnet-length stanzas in iambic tetrameter with a regular scheme of mas-
culine and feminine (ababeecciddiff ) rhymesthe poetic armature of
Eugene Onegin throws into crisp formal relief the narrative figures for
which it provides a literary ground. In this respect, Eugene Onegin may be
read as an eighteenth-century precursor of modern narratological prac-
tice, carefully mapping out Pushkins authorial negotiations between the
sequential claims of fabula and the digressive demands of sjuzet:
At the beginning of my novel

(see the first fascicle)
I wanted in Albanos manner
a Petersburg ball to describe;
but, by an empty reverie diverted,
I got engrossed in recollecting
the little feet of ladies known to me.
Upon your narrow little tracks,
O little feet, enough roving astray!
With the betrayal of my youth
tis time I grew more sensible,
improved in doings and in diction,
and this fifth fascicle
cleansed from digressions. (222)18
Despite his satirical exhortations to the contraryForward, forward,

my story! (229), Bless my long labor, / O you, Muse of the Epic! / And
having handed me a trusty staff, / let me not wander aslant and askew
(277)Pushkin continually submits to the digressive impulse that, in
Shklovskys view, sponsors the construction of any literary plot. In his
Translators Introduction to Eugene Onegin, no less a narratologist than
Vladimir Nabokov imagines a systematic account of the digressive
complex of devices a writer uses for switching from one subject to another
that shape the sjuzet of Pushkins novel:
If we replace the notions story, character, landscape, recollection, and didactic di-
gression by the letters S, C, L, R, and D, then we can defi ne all types of transition as
more or less distinctly expressed switchings from S to C, from C to S, from S to L,
from S to R, from S to D, from C to D, and so forth, in all possible combinations and
successions, with inner or outer doors and natural or artificial bridges providing pas-
sages from one theme to another. (1819)
Here Nabokov abandons the alphabetical nomenclature (S, C, L, R, and D)
as inadequate to his narratological purposes in mid-sentence, substituting
in its place a more labyrinthine discursive topography of Escher-like inner
and outer doors with artificial and natural bridges that may be arranged in
all possible combinations and successions. To gaze for very long at the
sjuzet of Eugene Onegin is to risk losing ones way in a shifting artifactual
maze. Pushkins verse, moreover, naturalizes this digressive labyrinth: the
natural narrative forms of transition in verse often seem, writes Nabokov,
even more natural than in prose (18). Placing this second natural
under quotes, this perennial literary sophisticate is, of course, skeptical of
any easy opposition between the realms of the natural and the artificial, yet
here the author of Pale Fire testifies to the unique digressive pressure
exerted by poetic forms in constructing a bridge (be it natural or artificial)
between the competing sequential orders of fabula and sjuzet.
One hundred and fi ft y years after Pushkins masterpiece first appeared,
Hejinian publishes her own novel in verse, Oxota, with the wry subtitle A
Short Russian Novel. Loosely modeled on Eugene Onegin, Hejinians literary
experiment is composed of 270 sonnet-length Chapters divided, like
Pushkins poem, into eight Books, though Hejinian (unlike her Russian
precursor) obsessively fractures her avant-garde narrative with the aim of
devising a novel of non-being, a moan of ink (270). At first glance, this
poetic sequence appears to realize Shklovskys narratological dream of a
plotless novel; on entering the world of Oxota, the reader finds nothing in
sequence, nothing in consequence (24). Even the metropolitan order of St.
Petersburg, the novels setting, radically disorients the protagonist and her
companions: We jumped from the sweating busthere were clusters of
buildings in every direction numbered without sequence but after a time we
sorted them out and arrived at Sashas with our bottles of wine (87, empha-
sis added).19 This extended line of poetry, however, outlines an allegory for
reading Hejinians moan of ink. Though the buildings of St. Petersburg are
numbered without sequence, they are numbered nonetheless. By carefully
sorting through these jumbled coordinates, the speaker and her compan-
ions uncover a hidden order within the apparent numerical disorderafter
a time we sorted them outand reach Sashas party in time to contribute
their bottle of wine to the evenings festivities. Oxota, too, invites just such a
sorting process. As Marjorie Perloff has observed, various narratives surface
and resurface, though shuffled into strange sequences, over the course of
this novel in verse (Russian, 3): the growing friendship between Hejinian
and the Russian poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, the ongoing political
drama of glasnost, and a mysterious assault on a painter named Gavronsky
represent only a few of the proliferating subplots that lend the poem its kalei-
doscopic narrative armature.
An anecdote from Hejinians travels in Russia illustrates the role of
sorting in this writers poetic narratology. The anecdote appears both
in Leningrad and in Oxota; though the two texts were published in the
same year, the accounts vary significantly. In the first version, the wife
of the Leningrad conferences organizer tells the visiting Language
poets the story of a colonel who tries to rescue a little girl from an
oncoming train. Zina told an anecdote that was circulating about an
event that had happened on Vasilii Island, where Malii Prospekt and
Shevchenko Street intersect, writes Hejinian, framing the inset
narrative:
A litt le girl was apparently playing on the trolley tracks near the switching rails [A].
The rails switched and seized her foot and she couldnt pull it free [B]. A colonel was
going by and ran over to help her; he was trying but he couldnt get her foot out from
between the rails [C]. Suddenly from behind her he saw a trolley coming around the
corner [D]he was fighting to free the girls foot [E]then at the last minute he
pulled off his greatcoat and threw it over the childs head, to spare her the sight of the
instrument of her death [F]. (Leningrad, 55)
This prose melodrama, with its fatalistic respect for chronological sequence
suddenly from behind her, then at the last minuteapproaches the con-
dition of pure fabula, or story line. In chapter 52 of Oxota, however, this Anna
Karenina in miniature is rearranged into the digressive sequence of a reified
sjuzet within a poetic framework:
And a little girl was playing on Vasilii Island between the

switching rails where Malii Prospekt meets Nalichnaya
Street
Every night the ghosts become more numerous and
violent
Their special interest is in altered states of consciousness and
speech
The rails switched and seized one of her feet
There was a colonel across the metal
It is futile, he said later, to fight against your feet
The colonel was just crossing the street
A man at a window was thinking in his writing light
A life locked in that lookthe colonel with the child
Behind her a trolley turned the corner toward them
speeding in gray light, it was now almost night
The child and the colonel continued their fight. (62)
The geographical displacement of Zinas narrative from the intersection of
Malii Prospekt and Shevchenko Street to the corner of Malii and Nalich-
naya obliquely reflects the relocation of the prose account from Leningrad
into the new formal terrain of this poetic sjuzet. Where the prose fabula
moves directly from the colonels arrival on the scene (A colonel was
going by and ran over to help her; he was trying but he couldnt get her
foot out from between the rails) to the appearance of the fatal trolley
(Suddenly from behind her he saw a trolley coming around the corner)
in a CD progression, the poetic version briefly leaps forward in time to
interject the rueful colonels future commentary on the tragedy (It is
futile, he said later, to fight against your feet) to form a CXD sequence.
The interpolation of elements from a ghost story (Every night the ghosts
become more numerous and violent) and a narrative of literary composi-
tion (A man at a window was thinking in his writing light) represent
further digressions from Zinas abecedarian tale in this poetic account.
Moreover, the poetic sjuzet refuses to arrive at the fatal F of the prose nar-
rative (then at the last minute he pulled off his greatcoat and threw it over
the childs head, to spare her the sight of the instrument of her death),
breaking off instead with a glimmer of hope: the child and the colonel
continued their fight. The sparing of this child in the poetic version of
Zinas anecdote quietly dramatizes the manner in which, for Hejinian, a
poetic sjuzet may avert the fatalism of the rationalizing ambitions of the
story as a literary form within our culture (Border, 53).
In a memorable scene from Leningrad, the Russian poet Dmitri Prigov
buttonholes the Language writer Michael Davidson on Gertsena Street
(which has been torn up for repairs), handing him a small packet contain-
ing fragments of the Russians poems ripped into confett i. Prigov calls
the confett ied poems in packets Coffi ns, Hejinian observes, drawn to
the fatalism of this authorial gesture (46). The Sisyphean prospect of sort-
ing through Prigovs confett i to piece together the poems therein reprises
in miniature the arduous effort required to reconstruct a sequential fabula
from the atomized sjuzet of texts like Oxota. While acknowledging the
astounding narrative economy at work in her writing, Craig Dworkin
counsels readers to resist precisely this temptation to sort obsessively
through Hejinians poetic sjuzets (Penelope, 74). My Life tempts the
reader to indulge in a fantasy of coherence, writes Dworkin in a passage
that applies as well to later books like Oxota, imagining that if all of the
sentences in the book were cut apart, they could be reassembled to form
comprehensible, correct, and conventional narratives (77).20 It may indeed
be possible for all the kings horses and all the kings men to put Oxota back
together again, but this would be to miss the point of Hejinians narratologi-
cal exercise. As in the fractured fairy tale of the princess with the binoculars,
there is no guarantee that, when reassembled into an orderly sequence, this
narrative will meet our expectations of novelistic consequence.
Beyond the obsessive narratological pleasures that sorting through its
sjuzet may afford, Oxota, much like Prigovs confett i-poems, asks not so
much to be read as to be conceptualized. Furthermore, this conceptual
work of Oxota may be described as narratological rather than narrative.
Regarded in this light, Hejinians poem shows how Shklovskys digressive
procedure of sjuzet formation may be repeated ad infi nitum. If a novel
reorganizes the abecedarian sequence of an originary fabula (ABCDEFG)
into the digressive order of a literary sjuzet (CDEABFG), this reified plot
may in turn be reordered into new sequential puzzles (GCFBEDA, DGB-
FAEC, FBECAGD) within the narratological laboratory of Hejinians
poetic consciousness. A narrative poem like Oxota thus defamiliarizes
plot itself. Earlier in this chapter, I quoted the passage in The Plotless Novel
that touches upon Pushkins digressive performance of narrative art: the
plot of Eugene Onegin is not the love between Eugene and Tatiana but the
appropriation of that story line in the form of digressions that interrupt the
text (170). With apologies to Shklovsky, one might say that the plot of
Oxota is not the love affair between Hejinian and the Russian novel but the
appropriation of story itself in the form of digressions that interrupt the text.
Though its subtitle places this literary work under the sign of the Russian
novel, Oxota is, properly speaking, a cold war narrative. Its Russian and
American characters endlessly discuss topics such as the glasnost meta-
phor (127, 236, 272), the problem of Cuba (28), the question of state prop-
aganda (31), and the relative merits of socialist realism in the Soviet Union
versus the bourgeois lyricism of American poetry (15, 75), over countless
bottles of vodka long into the white St. Petersburg night. The elaborate
rearrangement of these cold war topoi into a vexing sjuzet, furthermore,
resembles a form of encryption that formally underscores the mock cloak-
and-dagger ethos pervading this text.21 Indeed, Oxota explicitly frames its
own construction within the historical discourse of cold war paranoia: the
plot thrives / And we conspired a novel with reality writes Hejinian
toward the end of her metaliterary potboiler (284). Toward the beginning
of the text, moreover, Hejinian lays bare what could be called the collabora-
tionistas opposed to the merely collaborativeconstruction of her con-
spiratorial cold war narrative: in the evenings particularly we made notes
and took dictation in anticipation of writing a short Russian novel she
writes in chapter 2 of Oxota, something neither invented nor constructed
but moving through that time as I experienced it (12). The I of time as
I experienced it, along with the singular authorship implied by the solitary
name Lyn Hejinian on the books title page, provides a first-person alias
for the plural circle of collaborators who shape this literary project:
Misha should be a major character in the Russian novel
Sasha, too, and Nadia
You will start with the third chapter, Arkadii said, and the first
sentence must be attributed to Emmanuel Kant as follows:
everything happens so often, that speaking of it makes no
sense
You will meet people accompanying their ghosts, said Alyosha,
and speak with them
Kolya, Shura, Borik, Sveta, Tanya, Natasha, Igor, Vladik, Vanya,
and the other Misha
Zina stood on a chair
Arkadii waved the ghosts aside
There must be a sentence which claims a chapter for itself
And a name at the vanishing point in a persons description. (101)
Though neither chapter 3 nor chapter 1 of Oxota begins with Drago-

moschenkos spurious att ribution to Kant, Hejinian conscientiously
incorporates her various Soviet collaborators as personae within the novel
itself. Dedicated to Zina, the narrative brings its readers onto a fi rst-
name basis with Grisha, Masha, Mitya, Vitya, Kolya, Alyosha, Katya, and
Rosa, to name only a very few of the Russians who, along with Hejinian,
constitute the plural authorwe conspired a novel with realityof this
conspiratorial work.
To pun on the association of plot with collaboration and conspiracy is,
of course, to adopt the language of political intrigue as a way of investigat-
ing the grands rcits that reigned within the period. Like characters in a
John Le Carr novel, the Russian and American protagonists of Oxota
reflect upon their collective emplotment within the master narratives of
the cold war era, suspicious of the fatalistic historical sjuzet that implicates
them all. (Th is skeptical enterprise frames Leningrad as well, which draws
an epigraph from Le Carrs novel The Russia House: I cant do this, Barley
thought. Im not equal to the dimensions (31)). Scholars like Alan Nadel
and Thomas Schaub have proposed various ways of thinking about the
master narratives that defined this period. Writing that the American cold
war is a particularly useful example of the power of large cultural narratives
to unify, codify, and contain ... the personal narratives of its population,
Nadel, for instance, imagines George F. Kennans long telegram as the
genesis of what he calls containment narrative within cold war American
culture (Containment, 15, 4). Schaub, on the other hand, ventures an
account of what he terms the liberal narrative of the cold war, which isnt
simply the fairly repetitive accounts of recent intellectual fellow traveling
among American and Russian writers but concerns instead the elemental
assumptions and structures one finds within them (Fiction, 5). Hejinian,
however, does not propose a name for the mysterious grand rcit that she
seeks to interrogate. Rather, she aims to unsettle the sense of narrativity
that authorizes the fashioning of both liberal narratives and narratives of
containment from the sprawling fabula of global events. Hejinians literary
love affair with Pushkin and the Russian novel in Oxota thus provides a
kind of diplomatic cover for dismantling the fatalistic regimes of sequence
and consequence that underwrite any unfolding narrative of political his-
tory. Poetry, moreover, is the ideal vehicle for this conspiratorial work. In
chapter 264 of Oxota (titled Conspiracy), Hejinian imagines the poem as
a shadowy plot that nevertheless brings a new logic to light: [a] logical
whole, every poem in itself, a conspiracy evolved (284).
In his meticulous study Writers On the Left, Daniel Aaron chronicles
early precursors to the LanguageConsciousnessSociety confer-
ence such as the Second World Plenum of the International Bureau of
Revolutionary Literature, which convened at Kharkov in the late autumn
of 1930 and was attended by an obstreperous delegation of the John Reed
Club (219223). The Language poets rendezvous with Russia thus belongs
to a long succession of American expeditions that have sought to interro-
gate the historical narrative of this countrys sibling rivalry with the Soviet
Union. Th roughout Leningrad, Hejinians fellow Language writers change
the sjuzet of what they view as false American narratives regarding the
cold war, employing the disputative rhetoric of American Marxists such
as Max Eastman and the editors of The New Masses: while it has often
been said that since the purported fall of communism the Soviet Union
has become in reality a collection of Th ird World countries with nuclear
weapons and a subway system, this is an untruth, writes Barrett Watten
in a characteristic passage (23). But on the fi nal page of Leningrad, Michael
Davidson adopts a somewhat different tone in reflecting upon the histori-
cal epilogue to the Language writers expedition to Russia:
In the period since these things have happened, others things have taken place. It is
difficult knowing which tense to use. Institutions have changed their names, and cer-
tain persons no longer remain in power. The Western press likes to speak of unbe-
lievable changes, changes occurring almost daily, but this is to make change
inevitable, the fulfi llment of a design. (151)
The evacuation of proper nouns from this passageInstitutions have

changed their names, and certain persons no longer remain in power
reflects a broad shift in attention from the particular historical contin-
gencies of glasnost, perestroika, Gorbachev, and the Berlin Wall to a more
abstract historiography of change.22 Leningrad is, in the end, an ideological
aubade wherein these poets must bid farewell to their idea of Russia. If the
Language writers project of rewriting history may seem quixotic at times
(Over the years I have conspiredmany plots resulting in no U.S.-Soviet
anthologies, confesses Hejinian in Oxota (37)), Davidsons closing
remarks admit to a radical uncertainty regarding historiography itself. It
is difficult knowing which tense to use (Leningrad, 151). For Hejinian,
changing the sjuzet provides a digressive method for unsett ling even ones
own foregone conclusions about history, narration, and how to negotiate
ones place in the world: The notion of changing ones mind is extremely
important in aesthetics as in ethics observes this impresario of digression
(Language, 4). In the story of Hejinians love affair with Russia, this writer
traverses the middle kingdom of plot only to arrive at a renewed sense of
the difficulty of coming to conclusions about the unending narrative of
history itself.
ENDINGS
From the fi nal couplets of Shakespeares sonnets to T. S. Eliots observa-

tion as the Four Quartets concludes that the end is where we start from
(Eliot, Collected, 199), poets have employed innumerable tactics to fore-
close the fatalism of endings. In an essay titled The Rejection of Closure,
Hejinian joins this venerable company, dreaming of an open text in
which the words and the ideas ... continue beyond the work (Language,
47). Th is postmodern writers approach to endlessness, however, displays
a particular narratological ingenuity. Rather than dramatizing its own
conclusion, an open text, under Hejinians account, arrests its forward
progression by simply stopping: One has simply stopped because one has
run out of units or minutes, and not because a conclusion has been reached
nor everything said (47). Such a singularly unromantic sense of an
ending reverses the traditional narratology of Horatian aesthetics; rather
than beginning in medias res, an open text ends in the middle of things.23
In his essay The Value of Narrativityfrom a collection of essays cited
extensively in Hejinians notes to A Border ComedyHayden White spec-
ulates upon the virtues of simply stopping:
Does the world really present itself to perception in the form of well-made stories,
with central subjects, proper beginnings, middles, and ends, and a coherence that
permits us to see the end in every beginning? Or does it present itself more in
the forms that the annals and chronicle suggest, either as mere sequence without
beginning or end or as sequences of beginnings that only terminate and never
conclude? (23)
Whites historiographical meditations provide Hejinian with a new kind of
model for thinking about literary endings. For White, the most important
structural feature of the annals and chronicle may be found in their
common rejection of closure. Th is refusal to conclude, moreover, is partic-
ularly pronounced in the chronicle form: while annals represent historical
reality as if real events did not display the form of story, the chronicle rep-
resents it as if real events appeared to human consciousness in the form of
unfinished stories (5). If the chronicles sequence of beginnings that only
terminate and never conclude brings to mind the project of The Beginner,
this pattern maps itself onto Hejinians minimalist narratology in My Life
as well: We never wanted more than something beginning worth con-
tinuing which remained unended (99100).24 Like Diderot, who declares,
I dont care for novels, as Jacques the Fatalist draws to a closeinsisting
instead that Im writing a chronicle here (199)Hejinian rejects the
novelistic paradigm in My Life, modeling her most famous work upon the
inconclusive historical narration of the chronicle form.
While contemporary critics like Juliana Spahr read My Life against the
generic conventions of autobiography, andas Craig Dworkin points
outthe fi rst edition of this work entered into literary distribution under
the sign of the novel, the chronicle has been overlooked as a formal model
for Hejinians masterpiece (Spahr, Resignifying, 139; Dworkin, Pene-
lope, 58). Written in the thirty-seventh year of its authors life, the fi rst
edition of My Life is composed of thirty-seven prose poems of thirty-seven
lines each. In an essay called Eight Reasons for Canonizing My Life, Lisa
Samuels describes this formal approach as a motivated proceduralism,
which reflects the arithmetics of autobiography (107). Indeed, few
examples of literary form have so elegantly connected the life of a writer
to the shape of a book.25 Yet the correlation of the number of sentences in
the book with the number of years in Hejinians life does not impose an
autobiographical order upon the strange sequences that pervade this text:
Blue mounds of a cloudless sky. Likewise, Id like a cow. Repose: I had taken a walk
for repose. A natural thing is perpetual activitylove is a good example. Idealism: a)
reason kindly rages b) permanent construction c) the landscape repairs. A word on
the worlds wrinkled tables and brood minerals, perfect roof. A somewhat saltier,
earthier tomato grows there and is more seductive. (Life, 147)
White could be describing the arithmetical shape of this procedural poem

when he observes of the annals and chronicle that the list of times is full,
even if the list of events is not (Narrativity, 8).26 My Life is emphatically
not the story of Hejinians life. Rather, it is a chronicle of her life, for this
unfolding work in progress, unlike the resolved plot of a fi nished story,
refuses to come to a conclusion. The second edition of My Life, composed
when Hejinian was forty-five years old, inserts eight additional sentences
into each of the original editions prose poems while simultaneously add-
ing eight more sections to the overall design of the text, updating the form
of the book to correspond with the continuous present of the authors age
at the time of writing.27 (Even more recently, Hejinian has published My
Life in the Nineties, a sort of literary annex to My Life, which, in the authors
sixtieth year, adds ten prose poemsone for each year of the 90sof
sixty sentences each to what might be called the My Life project). Though
it takes the life and times of a single personrather than an entire
peopleas its subject, the unfolding construction of Hejinians literary
project thus closely parallels the writing of chronicles such as Richerus
History of France, in which, according to White, the account comes down
to the writers own yesterday, adds one more fact to the series ... and then
simply ceases (Narrativity, 17).
Because of its open-ended construction, White imagines the chronicle
as a kind of medieval Language poem, in which all of the normal narrato-
logical expectations of the reader (this reader) remain unfulfi lled. The
work appears to be unfolding a plot but then belies its own appearance by
merely stopping in medias res (17). Indeed, the annals and chronicle
formslike the My Life projectoften appear to disregard our contemporary
expectations of consequence altogether, constructing discursive sequences
where there is no suggestion of a necessary connection between one event
and another:
721. Theudo drove the Saracens out of Acquitaine.

722. Great crops.
723.
724.
725. Saracens came for the first time.
726.
727.
728.
729.
730.
731. Blessed Bede, the presbyter, died. (Narrativity, 7)
Are the great crops of A.D. 722 a consequence of Theudos victory over
the Saracens? Or does this harvest somehow cause the anachronistic ar-
rival of the Saracens for the fi rst time in A.D. 725, four years after their
expulsion? Th is passage from the Annals of Saint Gall presents the modern
reader with a sequence pried loose from the logic of consequence. Any
number of unrelated events, from the birth of a prince to a calamitous
flood to the opening of a new trade route, could be recorded within the
blank numerical spaces between the arrival of the Saracens and the death
of Bede. My Life, too, couches its digressive sequences within an open
armature of years. However this postmodern chronicle liberates its years
from chronological order as well, for Hejinian freely moves backward and
forward in time as the poem unfolds. Instead of following the thread of
an original calendar, in relation to which one would establish the chro-
nology of successive or simultaneous events, that of short or lasting pro-
cesses, that of a momentary or permanent phenomena, Foucault writes
of the archaeological method, one tries to show how it is possible for
there to be succession, and at what different levels distinct successions are
to be found (Archaeology, 169). My Life conducts just such an archae-
ology of the poets life within a shift ing matrix of inconclusive narratives.
Instead of following the thread of an original calendar, Hejinian asks
how it is possible for there to be succession, and at what different levels
distinct successions are to be found throughout this open-ended literary
archaeology of herself.
To forego the sense of an ending is, in Hejinians view, to elude the abec-
edarian logic of consequence. An open-ended sequence has no final term
and therefore no teleological end by which one might retrospectively
judge the consequentiality (or inconsequentiality) of its earlier elements.
Thus, so long as each element in an open-ended sequence falls under some
broadly imaginable categorythings that happened in medieval France,
for example, or things within the purview of a poets consciousnessthey
will, albeit loosely, fit together. In an interview with Dubravka Djuric,
Hejinian discusses the relationship between open-endedness and the open-
ing up of multiple logics within a poem:
Poetry is an ongoing project; it must be so if it is to be accurate to the world. Long forms

of any kind, and serial forms in particular, emphasize this fact. Serial forms also permit
one to take the fullest possible advantage of the numerous logics operative in language.
These logics provide us with ways of moving from one place to another, they make the
connections or linkages that in turn create pathways of thinking, forming patterns of
meaning (and sometimes of meanings excess, incoherence). (Language, 167)
In the mathematics of Hejinians literary universe, the name for an

open-ended sequence is a series. 28 To better understand the difference
between sequence and series in this writers poetic consciousness,
however, it may be useful to revisit the parable that opened this chapter.
The ABCs that so unsett le Diderots litt le boy in the laundry follow the
fi xed logic of sequence; the child refuses to say A because this would
oblige him, once he has submitted himself to this abecedarian order, to
utter the B that logically follows. But if the litt le boy were to follow the
letter A with the number 2 and then with a symbol like #, he would be
constructing what Hejinian calls a series rather than a sequence. Each
element in the series recasts all the other elements, writes the poet
(Language, 168). In the series A2#, for example, the abecedarian logic of
the ABCs is displaced by the numerical logic of counting, which is in
turn subsumed under a tertiary logic dictated by the typographical sym-
bols available to users of a keyboard. (That the # symbol superintends
the number 3 on the standard English keyboard shows how a hidden
logicA122#3 may underlie an apparently arbitrary series). In The Ar-
chaeology of Knowledge, Foucault describes the role of context in distin-
guishing a meaningful series from other groupings of elements: the
keyboard of a typewriter is not a statement, but the same series of letters,
A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the al-
phabetical order adopted by French typewriters (86). The various ele-
ments of a series may initially appear to be random or disorderedA2#,
for example, or AZERTbut when regarded from an archaeological
perspective, every series makes a meaningful statement about order
itself. As a figure of order, the series makes available a digressive, shift ing
logic that eludes the fatalism of consequence in literary writing, for, as
Hejinian observes, the terms of the series are in perpetual relative dis-
placement (Language, 167).
Perpetual relative displacement could serve as a heraldic motto for
Hejinians literary coat of arms. The most moving passages in this writers
work take the fullest possible advantage of the numerous logics operative
in language to construct a digressive, open-ended chronicle of the poets
imaginative life. Indeed, her adoption of the chronicle form for life writ-
ing sets into motion the dialectic of personal and historical narration that
propels Hejinians fi nest autobiographical work. In the third section of My
Life in the Nineties, for example, Hejinian weaves into her poem the brief
chronicle of a summer expedition north of the Arctic Circle. The poet sub-
tly frames her account within the grand historical narrative of regime
change in the aftermath of the cold war:
Along the border between fields of sunflowers turning, where only two years earlier
guards had been posted to keep people in, now guards from the other side were
posted to keep them out. We rowed out on the lake to the island in the midnight light,
the water dark, cold, smooth, glowing. We stood on the deck in the Arctic looking
northa work of links and circles. We hiked through the pastel air over the tundra,
mosquitoes leapt, lighter and lighter, more and more happy, on into the pale night at
the edge of which the sun floated. (3031)
The collective rotation of heliotropes in the fields reflects, in miniature,
the cyclical changing of the guard in a land shaped by successive political
revolutions. If the abecedarian march of historical progress seems curi-
ously suspended in this scene, the poets paratactic chronicling of memo-
rieswe rowed, we stood, we hikedsuspends sequential
storytelling in a narratological limbo as well. (We do not know if the
rowing chronologically preceded the hiking, for example, or whether the
standing followed the rowing.) Yet for Hejinian this purgatorial region of
midnight light near the worlds end, where the sun hovers continuously
at the horizons periphery, is a paradiso in disguise. In a wailful choir the
small gnats mourn / Among the river-sallows, borne aloft / Or sinking as
the light wind lives or dies, writes Keats in his elegiac ode to times pas-
sage (To Autumn, Keats, 325); Hejinians irrepressible mosquitoes, on
the other hand, leap lighter and lighter, more and more happy, on into
the pale night of this frozen paradise (Nineties, 31).29 Hejinians Arctic
reveries, however, quickly give way to a new interrogative logic in this
serial text:
Why not remember sleeps as well as dreams. Why not write with unbounded identity
and geographical fluidity. Sentence by sentence, all these exertions (looping, jutting, and
providing pleasure from numerous sources), these judgments and extensions, whose
curves often repeat themselves, form a whole which, despite momentary pauses, is
unbroken by the angles, shadows, and impeding particles included. (Nineties, 3132)
This speaker deftly digresses from her memories of the Arctic to the question
of memory itself; if psychoanalysis counsels us to chronicle our dreams, then
the poet suggests that the night-work of sleep warrants memorialization as
well. And for the author of serial texts such as Writing Is an Aid to Memory,
the subject of memory naturally leads in turn to the question of writing.30
Sentence by sentence, Hejinians chronicle incorporates travelogue, rev-
eries on psychoanalysis, and ars poetica within a whole which, despite
momentary pauses, is unbroken. The poem arrives at a natural stopping
point at this self-reflexive caesura, yet the serial form of My Life in the
Nineties requires three more sentences to fi ll out its formal design of
judgments and extensions:
But years are not pauses, not roses, and who, I asked, was the nations President the
year Herman Melville wrote Moby-Dick . I dont remember, someone says, but she
means she does not know, she feels no gap haunted by the rhythm of a name she cant
quite say, the want she feels isnt supplied with a name but instead is a wanting to
know, so she looks it up, next time Ill remember, she vows, but a year later she didnt.
There is no deeper secret to immortality than having lived. (Nineties, 32)
What Are Years, asks Marianne Moore in the title poem of her 1941
collection (Poems, 237). If years are neither the pauses nor the roses of the
Steinian phrase that superintends the opening of My LifeA pause, a
rose, something on paper (7)perhaps they may at least provide coordi-
nates for orienting oneself within the ongoing chronicles of American
literary and political history. Yet Hejinians interlocutor is at a loss to
recall that Millard Fillmore, among the most forgettable of U.S. presi-
dents, governed the nation in the year of Moby-Dick s composition.
(Indeed, the epistemological drama in this passage illustrates the ephem-
erality of the historical as opposed to the literary chronicle in the pro-
tagonists consciousness). At the end of What Are Years Moore writes
that Th is is mortality, / Th is is eternity (Poems, 237). Hejinian too fi nds
solace in the equation of ending with endlessness, employing the most
reified form of the verb to live (the perfect gerundive) as an index of life
everlasting.
The epiphanic ending of this section of My Life in the Nineties suggests
that The Rejection of Closure might well be retitled The Repression of
Closure. Throughout Hejinians work, the conventions of poetic closure
recur again and again with a rhapsodic vengeance. In My Life, the sheer
beauty of this poets farewell gestures testifies to a subconscious invest-
ment in the poetics of conclusion, as evidenced by the musicality of her
final lines: for you, forsythia. The grass in my glass (95); her terminal
acknowledgment of fatalistic consequence: I, with crashing consequity,
waited, wanting to have experienced many, many things (57); or even the
arrival of a prophetic voice at the point of closure: at the very end, pre-
dicts Hejinian at the end of the penultimate section of the book, the
objective world will withdraw as the handblades approach (160). These
conclusions do not simply stop in the middle of things. Saturated in autho-
rial intention, their endings reify closure itself. Indeed, what might be
regarded as a surreptitious fetishization of closure surfaces throughout
Hejinians work. In The Fatalista text profoundly concerned with end-
ings of all sortsone early section concludes with a meditation on the
afterlife:
... And if there is an afterlife

it is going to be damned crowded. How would I find
Diderot among all the other people (and creatures) that have
ever lived
and died and now go on living in the afterlifecavemen
and pharaohs and George Eliot and Captain Kidd
and Captain Cook and miners wives and vintners
and Napoleon? I probably wouldnt even be able to find my own father. (26)
Well aware that death has undone so many, Hejinians speaker is unsure
whether this damned crowded afterlife will feel like a heaven or a hell.
Though she initially imagines seeking out her literary master, Diderot, the
passage shades into an elegiac acknowledgment that, even in the afterlife,
her own father most likely will remain lost to her. Like the apocalyptic
mode discussed by Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, the elegiac
register provides a powerful instance of poetic closure in the Western lit-
erary tradition precisely because it thematizes ending in its most irreme-
diable form. 31 While ostensibly resisting closure, then, Hejinians lyrical
endings frequently testify to the difficulty of merely stopping the act of
literary composition for a writer of such irrepressible vitality.
Hejinians work ultimately suggests that all poems display a narratological
aspect. This is because the study of beginnings and endings is embedded
deeply within the structures of poetic form itself. Nowhere is this more evident
than in the fundamental unit of poetic composition, the line. To the end of the
line / To begin again / Setting the spirit to the next word to appear, writes
Hejinian, foregrounding the ceaseless procedure of beginning and ending that
accompanies the making of every poem (Border, 40). A Border Comedy is full
of such observations on the narratology inscribed within any line: Thats how
we got here / From there / Narrative requires change and the direct reading of
many thoughts (67). Indeed, Hejinians poetic narratology sometimes even
assumes dimensions of caricature, in floating, single-word lines such as:
Narration (81)
or:
Plot (85)
In these narratological miniatures, an abstract narrative (or, in the latter

case, a plot) begins and ends within the space of a one-word line. Th is
story could be Anna Karenina, or it could be an anecdote about a litt le girl
playing on the trolley tracks. Poetry, then, provides an ideal forum for
studying storytelling because poetic form dramatizes the problems of
beginning and ending that perpetually haunt all narration regardless of
scope or subject matter. Furthermore, this process may be reversed; prose
can provide a medium for the examination of poetic form as well. In My
Life, Hejinian writes:
Minute discriminations release poetic rather than cerebral effects. Listen to the sweet
sound / Of life death bound. Realism, if it addresses the real, is inexhaustible. (144)
The poetic lines embedded within this prose passage encapsulate the
entirety of the My Life project within a single couplet; every reader of
My Life listens to the sweet sound of life death bound. Captured within
the medium of prose, the closed form of this rhymed couplet on mor-
tality underscores a structural fatalism embedded deeply within Eng-
lish prosody. In the following section of the book, Hejinians examination
of the dialectic between poetry and prose comes full circle, as the writer
returns this couplet to the medium of prose: Of course, this is a poem,
that model of inquiry. Of death life bound (149). Though the music of
sound drops out of the equation in this fi nal iteration of the trope of
mortality, poetry is once again figured as an idealized model of inquiry
into the mysterious logic of lifes progression from beginning to end.
In his article Telling Stories Again: On the Replenishment of Narra-
tive in the Postmodernist Long Poem, Brian McHale argues that Hejin-
ian participatesalong with such surprising fellow travelers as James
Merrill, Paul Muldoon, Edward Dorn, and Kenneth Kochin the recov-
ery of narrative forms within postwar English-language poetry (253255).
It would be misleading, however, to describe Hejinian as a narrative poet.
Though she does sometimes experiment with narration by practicing
weak narrativity, by telling stories weakly in McHales formulation
(260), the diversity and abundance of nonnarrative modes within her
writing renders narrative poetry a somewhat weak description of this
writers work. Likewise, Hejinian cannot be described as a scholarly nar-
ratologist in any meaningful sense. While her critical prose has been
known to touch upon narratological questionsnarration, the unfolding
of things, occurs in time, and the term reminds us that there are many
forms, qualities, and experiences of the time in which things unfold (Lan-
guage,169)it is impossible to extrapolate any sort of formal narratologi-
cal system from these occasional observations. Neither a narrative poet
nor a prose narratologist, Hejinian invents a new kind of genrethe nar-
ratological poemwithin contemporary American poetics. If a narrative
poem tells a story, a narratological poem tells us something about the way
stories are told. While Hejinians work at times seems to be the storage of
a thousand stories (Border, 33), this postmodern Scheherazade draws
from her marvelous archive of narratives to dismantle the literary arma-
ture of beginnings, middles, and endings upon which storytelling itself is
founded. No other living writer has so deliberately and painstakingly con-
ceptualized poetry as a forum for reflection upon the invisible realities /
Between beginning and end and the real plot lying between (Border, 12).
Questions of narrative are often relegated to the margins in writing
about poetry. Oddly enough, however, Hejinians adumbration of the
narratological elements within poetry resonates with R. P. Blackmurs
observation that plot, the structure or frame of it, is the greatest non-
poetic agent in poetry; and it must be welded (not riveted) into the
poem (Gesture, 363). Investigating the curious sjuzets of the fairy tale
and the novel, Hejinian unearths a poetics of narration as well, resulting
in poems that display an unusual (sometimes maddening) structural
complexity and depth. Narrative may not in fact be peripheral to poetry
but, rather, welded to it. The best poems, moreover, evade the abecedar-
ian fatalism that looms over Diderots parable of the litt le boy in the laun-
dry. Like a modern-day philosophe, Hejinian contributes her literary
entries to
... realitys encyclopedia

which has political and subversive undercurrents
and achieves inclusion by digressing and digresses
so as to go from place to place making references
that become more and more pointed. It cant be mapped... (Fatalist, 2728)
The political and subversive undercurrents of this writers digressive

negotiations with narrative form may be traced to Hejinians love affair
with Russia. Th rough her interrogation of the grands rcits of the cold war
era, this poet extends the uses of digression from literary narration into
the fields of history and politics as well. If Scheherazades narrative
detours prolong her life, they also have practical consequences for the
good of the state: Scheherazade told her instructive tales to the governor
and after that he governed better (Nineties, 48). Drawing upon the
open-ended historical form of the chronicle to underwrite her ongoing
autobiographical project, Hejinian ultimately discovers that digression
may put multiple orders into playfrom the personal to the political
within a diverse yet unified account of experience. A poem like My Life
shows its readers that ones life, like the world stage, is a theater fi lled with
transitions (Life, 14).
Theoretically speaking, Hejinians exploration of serial forms aligns her
literary project with Foucaults intensive critique of continuity and succes-
sion in modern historiography. In the opening pages of The Archaeology of
Knowledge, this philosopher of change describes a fundamental shift in our
way of thinking about the historical order of things:
In its traditional form, history proper was concerned to define relations (of simple
causality, of circular determination, of antagonism, of expression) between facts or dated
events: the series being known, it was simply a question of defining the position of each
element in relation to the other elements in the series. The problem now is to constitute
series: to define the elements proper to each series, to fix its boundaries, to reveal its own
specific type of relations, to formulate its laws, and, beyond this, to describe the relations
between different series. (78)
Serial poems like A Border Comedy dramatize precisely such Foucauldian
questionshow does one fi x the boundaries of a series? or formulate its
laws?only to conclude with an infi nitive injunction to crave the var-
ious (97). Over the course of their extensive investigations into the
regimes of sequence and consequence, furthermore, both the poet and
the theorist discover that fatalism is no simple matter. For Foucault, as for
Hejinian, accession to any abecedarian disciplinary order is the mark of
what might be called a vulgar fatalism. But the philosophical cultivation
of amor fati may make it possible to discern the series of series nesting
within our various accounts of the world, for, as Hejinian writes, fate sees
things in all their relations (Beginner, 38). If critics like Frank Lentricchia
remand Foucault to the prison-house of theoretical fatalism, as I argue in
the introduction to this book, such judgments may rest upon a conflation
of the object of this historians study with his theoretical agenda. Foucault
works on abecedarian order, not for it. Indeed, Foucault himself favors a
label that is etymologically antithetical tothough philosophically con-
sonant withfatalism for his archaeological enterprise. If, by substituting
the analysis of rarity for the search for totalities, the description of rela-
tions of exteriority for the theme of the transcendental foundation, the
analysis of accumulations for the quest of the origin, he writes in The
Archaeology of Knowledge, one is a positivist, then I am quite happy to be
one (125). Positivism and fatalism are subtly different ways of character-
izing the empirical aspects of an archaeological inquiry into historical
change. Against those who consider his work to be symptomatic of a vulgar
fatalism, Foucaults happy adoption of the positivist mantle allows this
theorist to assert some measure of affective control over his own method
of inquiry.
Hejinians recuperation of fatalism for literary practice is every bit as
canny as Foucaults happy appropriation of positivism to describe his
archaeological method. Her identification with Diderots fatalist allows
her to interrogate the master narratives of modern political history under
the cover of a poetic investigation into eighteenth-century literary proto-
cols of sequence and consequence. Moreover, her adoption of digressive
fatalism as a subjectival position illuminates the importance of changing
the subject in the literary construction of identity within modern American
poetry. It is to this question that I turn in the following chapter. From Walt
Whitman to Frank OHara, a wayward lineage of American poets has
embraced digression as a method for literary self-invention over the
course of a long twentieth century. Where I have examined a single
poemThe Pangolinand an individual poetHejinianas exem-
plars of a digressive method in the preceding chapters of this book, I will
now widen the aperture of analysis to consider the digressive poetics of
identity across a broader historical span. I am not in the least unhappy
about the fact that ... I have used the term positivity to designate from afar
the tangled mass that I was trying to unravel, writes Foucault in his apo-
logia for archaeological positivism (Archaeology, 125). Whitman, OHara,
and the New York School of painters and poets constitute a historical
positivity writ small in the literary annals of digression. Before turning to
the digressive poetics of identity in these artists work, however, I will first
situate this positivity in relation to the discourse of self-fashioning under
the Enlightenment.
CHAP TER 4
Digression Personied
Whitman, the New York School, and the Drift of Poetry
Marry. Library erected. Manner of conducting the Project. Its plan and Utility. Children. Almanack.
the Use I made of it. Great Industry. Constant Study. Fathers Remark and Advice upon Diligence.
Carolina Partnership. Learn French and German. Journey to Boston after 10 years. Affection of my
Brother. His Death and leaving me his Son. Art of Virtue.
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
T he outline to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin presents its

reader with a blueprint for the orderly and deliberate construction
of a rational identity upon the unruly terrain of a New World. In Frank-
lins schema, marriage, Great Industry, savvy business partnerships,
Constant Study, fatherhood, and the authors famous experiment in the
Art of Virtue are carefully assembled like so many units of masonry
within a deliberate architectural design. Yet this idealized blueprint for
the autobiography, like the arrangement of moral values into a chart for
self-examination in Franklins Art of Virtue experiment, also effaces
the disorderly and unmanageable aspects of self-invention in the period.1
It comes as no surprise, then, that Franklins difficulty in ordering his
inner life and social affairs (a difficulty noted by John Adams during
their joint diplomatic mission to France in 1778) very nearly brings Poor
Richards early experiment in moral perfectionism to an abrupt end: my
Scheme of Order, gave me the most Trouble, confesses the author (Auto-
biography, 74). Th is Article therefore cost me so much painful Attention
and my Faults in it vexd me so much, and I made so litt le Progress in
Amendment, and had such frequent Relapses, that I was almost ready to give
up the Attempt, and content myself with a faulty Character in that respect
(74). Here, the constitutional language of Article and Amendment
shows how both the formation of a governing authority and the construc-
tion of individual character share a common vocabulary within the period.
Franklins autobiography thus provides an exemplary text for examining
the discourse of identity within the broader historical context of eigh-
teenth-century American society. If a fugitive dream of order authorizes
Franklins Enlightenment program of moral advancement and social pro-
gress, the Autobiographyin its rational outline, its schematic approach to
moral perfection, and the purposeful march of its prosereflects a fragile
poetics of order that imagines a framework for self-invention in early
American writing.
Franklins rage for order drives the project of constructing a represent-
ative, exemplary, and, above all else, public identity in the mercurial social
world of an emerging nation. Addressing his son toward the beginning of
this exercise in public self-fashioning, Franklin reproves himself for his
occasional lapses in orderly exposition: by my rambling Digressions I
perceive myself to be grown old. I usd to write more methodically.But
one does not dress for private Company as for a public Ball (Autobiogra-
phy, 89). For Franklin, digression is the rhetorical index of a self in disar-
ray. While permissible in the privacy of ones home, aleatory speech
reveals a self en dshabill and therefore unpresentable within the ball-
room decorum of public affairs. In the pages that follow, I will propose
that the private Company of modern poetry affords a discursive forum
for this otherwise unpresentable digressive self in American writing.
From Walt Whitmans rambling poetic declarations of independence to
the digressive talk of New York School writing in the postwar Manhattan
art world, American poets have cultivated our capacity to change the
subject as a literary prerequisite for self-invention under modernity. In
their critique of rationalist or linear models of self-presentation, these
American writers share a wayward rhetorical methodology with one of
Franklins historical contemporaries across the Atlantic:
Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine; they are the life, the soul of reading;
take them out of this book for instance, you might as well take the book along
with them; one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to
the writer; he steps forth like a bridegroom, bids All hail; brings in variety, and
forbids the appetite to fail. (Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 58)
Digression is nothing if not a highly contested figure under the poetics of

Enlightenment. Lawrence Sternes encomium on this trope rebuts Franklins
relegation of digression to the private chambers of ones dotage in the
Autobiography; clothed in the motley apparel of his discursive detours,
Tristram Shandy steps forth like a bridegroom and bids All hail to his
reading public. The same could be said for the author of Leaves of Grass.
For Sterne, as for the speaker of OHaras Collected Poems, there simply is
no text of the self without the sine qua non of digressions: take them out
of this book and you might as well take the book along with them.
Though it would be difficult indeed to trace a historical line of descent
or, for that matter, of dissentconnecting The Autobiography of Benjamin
Franklin with poetic works like Leaves of Grass and Lunch Poems, these
texts all participate in an ongoing conversation about the discourse of
identity in American literary culture. Rather than imagining this conver-
sation in terms of lineage, tradition, influence, or rivalry, it may be produc-
tive to read these authors within a Foucauldian relation of positivity to
one another. Franklin, Whitman, and OHara are three among so many
authors who know or do not know one another, criticize one another,
invalidate one another, pillage one another, meet without knowing it and
obstinately intersect their unique discourses in a web of which they are
not the masters, of which they cannot see the whole, and of whose breadth
they have a very inadequate idea, in this theorists formulation (Foucault,
Archaeology, 126). Without presuming to see the whole discursive web
enveloping such a far-flung constellation of writers, one may nonetheless
discern what Foucault calls the form of positivity which frames their
literary investigations into the question of identity:
All these various figures and individuals do not communicate solely by the logical
succession of propositions that they advance, nor by the recurrence of themes, nor by
the obstinacy of a meaning transmitted, forgotten, and rediscovered. They communi-
cate by the form of positivity of their discourse, or more exactly, this form of posi-
tivity ... defi nes a field in which formal identities, thematic continuities, translations
of concepts, and polemical interchanges may be deployed. (126)
Foucaults concept of positivity emerges from an extended investigation

into the history of ideas. Natural history in the eighteenth century consti-
tutes one positivity within his archaeological enterprise, as do penal policies
in the modern era and sexual politics in antiquity. But poets, too, may compose
positivities in miniature, with their own formal identities, thematic continui-
ties, translations of concepts, and polemical interchanges. The idea of a
positivity, then, allows one to draw connections between different oeuvres,
dispersed books, that whole mass of texts that belong to a single discursive
formation without arguing for any particular model of literary patrimony
or influence (126). The literary positivity that I propose to examine in this
chapter extends from Franklins orderly exposition of an eighteenth-cen-
tury American identity through Whitmans songs of a digressive self to
the conversational poetics of personhood in New York School writing of
DIGR ESSION PER SON I FI ED [ 97 ]

the late twentieth century. While they adopt different working models of
subjectivitywhether in the form of Whitmans drift ing selves or
OHaras talkative personsthese authors meet without knowing it in a
digressive positivity that informs the discursive formation of identity
within modern American writing.
THE DRIFT OF POETRY
A book I have made, announces Whitman in the 1865 Leaves of Grass,

the words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing (Leaves, 175).2
Perhaps because of its appearance in the minor lyric Shut Not Your
Doors (one of the understudied prefatory poems that make up the In-
scriptions sequence in this edition), Whitmans extraordinary claim and
its theoretical repercussions have been overlooked within our current
critical discourse on American poetics. The words of my book nothing?
For the self-proclaimed architect of a new American literary style to dis-
miss the elaborate linguistic surface of his work in this manner might seem
to partake of the casual ethos of paradoxDo I contradict myself? / Very
well then I contradict myself (Song of Myself, Leaves, 246)which
underwrites Whitmans verse from the outset. From Horace to the New
Criticism, two thousand years of literary theory have emphatically defi ned
poetry as the form of discourse in which wordstheir selection, arrange-
ment, connotations, and texturesare every thing. To replace language
with an extraliterary notion of its drift in our working models of poetry
and poetics would be a provocation indeed. Thus far, the few critics to
have registered Whitmans concept of what could be called the drift of
poetry have done so within a poststructuralist context of skepticism re-
garding the capacity of poems to do things with words: He can only
follow the drift of this signifier into dissolution and inexpressibility,
writes Jon Rosenblatt in a remark that seems emblematic of this approach
(Body, 107). 3 Yet Whitmans notion of poetic drift has continued to res-
onate with American poets well into the twentieth century, from the ra-
diant gist of William Carlos Williamss Paterson to the implicit
questionget my drift?which grounds the Beat aesthetic in the post-
war period. In the following pages, I will outline a critical approach
toward reading the drift of Whitmans poetry, showing how this writer
inaugurates a digressive model for the literary invention of a modern
American self.
To drift, in the common intransitive sense of the word, is to be driven
along, to gradually deviate from a position or course, to move passively
or aimlessly; be brought involuntarily or imperceptibly into a condition, a
way of life, etc., and to come, go, or move in a casual or aimless manner
as defi ned by the Oxford English Dictionary. Here, each sense of drift illus-
trates some aspect of Whitmans work; the digressive, casual nature of
drift ing provides an alternative to the ethos of drive and advancement
that ordinarily frames our reception of this putative poet of progress.
Many scholars have noted that Whitman advocates the purposeful, delib-
erate (even imperialistic) advancement of American civilization: His
supreme power and unending procession come to symbolize an impe-
rial policy, writes Betsy Erkkila in her reading of Song of Myself, for
example (Political, 113). Indeed, in a parenthetical aside from I Sing the
Body Electric, this doctrine of unrelenting progress even extends to the
heavens: All is a procession, / The universe is a procession with measured
and perfect motion (Leaves, 255). Yet, as early as A Song for Occupa-
tions, Whitmans cosmology is equally governed by the casual laws of
drift ing and floating: The sun and stars that float in the open air, / The
apple-shaped earth and we upon it, surely the drift of them is something
grand (357; emphasis added). The poems of the Sea-Drift sequence, with
their flotsam and jetsam, floating vessels, and littoral vistas, further illus-
trate this inclination toward drift ing within Whitmans conception of the
natural world:
We, capricious, brought hither we know not whence, spread out before you,
You up there walking or sitting,
Whoever you are, we too lie in drifts at your feet. (396)
These closing lines of As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life represent Whit-
man and his poems, drifted at random like a blossom on a wave, in terms
of extreme passivity and submission: we too lie in drifts at your feet.
(Even the confident, purposeful guide of Song of Myself ends his utter-
ance underfoot: If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles
(247)). For every section, or cluster, of Leaves of Grass organized under
the rubric of purposeful advancementthe visions of progress in Birds
of Passage, the inexorable military campaigns of Drum-Tapsthere is
counterpoised a sequence that addresses the passive, drift ing aspects of
experiencethe rhapsodic surrender of Sea-Drift, the aleatory retro-
spections of Autumn Rivulets.
In lieu of a cultural poetics of progress, drift ing offers a wayward model
of the individuals passage toward geographical, social, or theological des-
tination in American transcendentalist writing. Whitman is not alone in
exploring what Eric Wilson describes as the nomadic pleasures of mov-
ing with no end in mind, taking pleasure in merely circulating in the lit-
erature of the period (Rhizomes, 1). As he prepares to embark upon the

drift ing narrative of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau,
for instance, composes a meditative rhapsody upon the flowing surface to
which he will soon surrender his person:
I had often stood on the banks of the Concord, watching the lapse of the current, an
emblem of all progress, following the same law with the system, with time, and all
that is made ... the shining pebbles, not yet anxious to better their condition, the
chips and weeds, and occasional logs and stems of trees, that floated past, fulfi lling
their fate, were objects of singular interest to me, and at last I resolved to launch
myself on its bosom, and float whither it would bear me. (1213)
For the lapse of the current to serve as an emblem of all progress illustrates
the drifters paradox of passively floating toward the telos of destination in
Thoreaus text. (In Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, the mysterious sensation of
effortless motion overtakes Whitman as his vessel approaches the busy
metropolis of Manhattan: I stood yet was hurried (Leaves, 309)). Further-
more, for Thoreau on his boat, driftingthough submissive to a natural
orderprovides a strategy for active withdrawal from the ongoing projects
of social progress within the political order of the period; Linck C. Johnson
notes how the drift ing narratology of A Week on the Concord and Merri-
mack Rivers opens up a discursive space for Thoreaus digressive jeremiads
on educational institutions, organized religion, and governmental policy
toward the Indians (85122). In the literary imagination of nineteenth-
century America, drifters like Huck Finn on his raft, Thoreau in his
floating pulpit, or Whitman on his ferry (along with related figures such as
Bartleby, with his uncooperative I would prefer not to) show how idle-
ness and passivity may signify ones self-removal from larger collective
exercises of power.
A flamboyant posture of indifference provides the theatrical expression
for this drifting, passive undercurrent in Whitmans work. While various
schools of criticism have recruited Whitman as a writer of (political, homo-
social, or avant-garde) commitment, such interpretations neglect or even
elide the indifferent, casual postureI lean and loafe at my easestruck
by the poet at the outset of Song of Myself (Leaves, 188). Dating from D.
H. Lawrences description of Leaves of Grass as the unrestful, ungraspable
poetry of the sheer present, Whitman scholarship has generally overlooked
the ways this poetry of athleticism and drive is shot through with a studied
indifference as well.4 Indeed, Whitmans cultivated carelessness can even
manifest itself as a nonchalance regarding the future of his literary style.
Echoing the sentiment of Shut Not Your Doors, in canto 47 of Song of
Myself Whitman again declares his disregard for the poetic idiom that he
labored for so long to develop: he most honors my style who learns under

it to destroy the teacher (242). While scholars such as Ezra Greenspan
have documented Whitmans energetic promotion of Leaves of Grass among
the nineteenth-century American reading public (Reading, 153174), this
promotional project is, in fact, shadowed by an inward demotion of the act
of reading within the imaginative world of the poems. In Whoever You
Are Now Holding Me in Hand, for instance, the poet suggests that reading
his text may not be necessary to honor its intent:
... if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,

Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried
eternally ...
.........................................................
For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it ... (Leaves, 271; emphasis added)
Like a good luck charm, a lovers locket, or a crucifix worn around the neck,
this artifact fulfills its purpose by merely circulating while pressed against
the body of its possessor; if we take Whitman at his word in this passage, we
need not even open Leaves of Grass to satisfy the authors conditions for
literary reception. Throughout this volumeas in the final canto of Song
of the Open Road, when the poet urges us to leave the book on the shelf
unopend!Whitman encourages his readership to discard or disregard
his text (307). This demotion of close reading in Leaves of Grass completes
the curious logic set into motion by the valorization of drift over words
in Whitmans theory of poetry.
Starting from Paumanok, Whitmans poem of literary beginnings, pro-
vides a useful case study for examining just what form a work that priori-
tizes the drift of poetry over its own words might assume. Continually
directing the reader to look beyond its own linguistic surface, the tenor of
this early poem is promissory; in section 12 of Starting from Paumanok,
for instance, the subject of the text is Whitmans future, unwritten verse:
I will make the songs of passion to give them their way,

And your songs outlawd offenders, for I scan you with
kindred eyes, and carry you with me the same as any.
I will make the true poem of riches,

To earn for the body and the mind whatever adheres and
goes forward and is not dropt by death ...(183; emphasis added)

Whitmans poems repeatedly defer the actual fashioning of this imagined
text. Rather than singing the songs of passion, outlaws, and riches, Whitman
tenders a series of promissory notes for future utterance on these subjects.
Indeed, Whitmans elaborate poetics of deferral frequently makes this
writer resemble a bard of procrastination. While the poet opens his Song
of the Open Road resolving to whimper no more, postpone no more
(297), the poem ends before the true journey can ever actually begin:
Allons! the road is before us! // ... will you come travel with me? (307).
Similarly, the Children of Adam poems promise an erotic encounter whose
deferral is apparent in the very titles of One Hour to Madness and Joy
and A Woman Waits for Me. The Song of the Answerer promises philo-
sophical answers that remain undelivered within the text. And A Promise
to California is not a poem of travel but rather of travel planning. Perhaps
the most dramatic example of this habit of deferral in Whitman can be
viewed in the narratological structure of By Blue Ontarios Shore, which
ends with an invocationthe trope of poetic beginnings: Bards of the
great Idea! bards of the peaceful inventions! (for the war, the war is over!) /
Yet bards of latent armies, a million soldiers waiting ever-ready, / Bards
with songs as from burning coals of the lightnings forkd stripes! / Ample
Ohios, Kanadas bardsbards of California! inland bardsbards of the
war! / You by my charm I invoke (483; emphasis added).
Starting from Paumanok provides a particularly useful text for
reflecting upon Whitmans promissory art because, in this poem, the
sequence of promises maps out the entire ambit of this writers future lit-
erary production. In the following passage, for example, we watch Whit-
man outline a comprehensive agenda for his projected literary career:
I will eff use egotism and show it underlying all, and I will
be the bard of personality,
And I will show of male and female that either is but the
equal of the other,
And sexual organs and acts! do you concentrate in me, for I
am determind to tell you with courageous clear voice
to prove you illustrious,
And I will show that there is no imperfection in the present,
and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may
be turnd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful
than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events
are compact,

And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles,
each as profound as any.(Leaves, 183; emphasis added)
Effusing, showing, telling, proving, and the artisanal practice of threading

mobilize a spectrum of verbal strategies for poetic making in this passage.
Rather than formally realizing this projected literary work, however, the
stylized linguistic surface of Starting from Paumanok reflects the complex
verbal textures of premeditation and resolution that precede composition.
(In section 6, the promissory verbs are: [I will] make, acknowledge,
trail, put, report, sing, show, let, lift, give and write). Map-
ping out the drift of his hitherto unwritten poem, Whitman even goes on to
demarcate the negative imaginative space (or series of poetic refusals) that
provides a ground for the idealized figure of this literary fantasy:
I will not make poems with reference to parts,

But I will make poems, songs, thoughts, with reference to
ensemble,
And I will not sing with reference to a day, but with
reference to all days,
And I will not make a poem nor the least part of a poem but
has reference to the soul,
Because having lookd at the objects of the universe, I find
there is no one nor any particle of one but has reference
to the soul.(183; emphasis added)
Whitmans promissory verbs proliferate throughout a text that provides

the program (I will, I will not), or charter, for a future literary perfor-
mance.5 We can imagine the drift of this poemit will be passionate,
heedless of the law, egotistical, both masculine and feminine, scatological,
apologistic for the order of things, in love with death, holistic, historical,
and concerned with the soulbut to say that Starting from Paumanok
(or Song of Myself, or Passage to India) reifies that dream-text would
be to overlook the promissory tropes that so thoroughly inform Whitmans
poetics.6
Like the colonial charters granted by the British government to its
North American sett lers, Whitmans poetry draws up an agreement of
the privileges, liberties, and restrictionsI will, I will notthat
devolve upon any citizen of his literary republic. (Indeed, one interpreter
has even imagined Leaves of Grass as a sort of shadow-constitution that
continues the unfi nished work of the original political charter of the
United States (Larson, Consensus, 729)). But the charter is not the only
metaphor for Whitmans poetry. In the fragmentary notes toward a

Primer of Words that Whitman left unpublished during his lifetime, he
calls for a great dictionary of the future to satisfy Americas need for a
far more complete dictionary to be writtenand the grammar boldly
compelled to serve the real genius beneath our speech (Whitman, Com-
plete, 13, 24).7 Like Noah Webster, whose American dictionary and
Grammatical Institute of the English Language (which featured a speller, a
grammar, and an introductory reader) had shaped the cultural produc-
tion of a prior generation of Americans, Whitman turns to the lexicon
and the grammar as ways of imagining his own literary project. As Wai
Chee Dimock observes, Leaves of Grass is perhaps as close as any poetry
can get to being a generative grammar (Syntax, 70). 8 Taken to the min-
iaturists dimension of typography, one further figure for Whitmans
generative text is that of a printers type. In the late lyric, A Font of
Type, the poet imagines the printers type as a reservoir of possibilities,
a latent mine full of unlaunchd voices (614)a description that
could apply equally well to the promissory speaker at the heart of Leaves
of Grass. No stranger to the printing trade, Whitman appositionally asso-
ciates the American self with the uncircumscribed possibilities stored
within a printers type in Song of the Broad-Axe as well: The loose drift
of character, the inkling through random types (Leaves, 332; emphasis
added). The printing press, with its potential to produce texts on various,
even random, subjectsalong with its indifferent, mechanical refusal
to favor any one topic or perspective over anotherprovides an image
for Whitmans own democratizing att itude toward subject matter: all
the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any
(Leaves 183).
The charter, the lexicon, and the printing press secure a horizon of pos-
sibilities for the nineteenth-century American self without committ ing
that individual to any single, governing subject of study, labor, devotion,
or utterance. In American culture of the period, the figure of the drifter
(unconfi ned by a single trade or place of residence) testifies to the degree
of liberty available within this chartered world, and within the realm of
poetic utterance Leaves of Grass furnishes a broad spectrum of possible
subjects for the drift ing self to explore as well. If the historical Whitman
drifts from one occupation to another (printer, journalist, teacher, nurse)
across the landscape of nineteenth-century America, in Song of Myself
we watch a speaking subject assume and discard various social roles like a
child playing make-believe: I am a free companion, I am the hounded
slave, I am the mashd fi reman with breast-bone broken, I am an old
artillerist (225226). In such passages, Whitmans speaker resembles
digression personified. For this poet, the self does not dwell in the contin-
gent and provisional roles of companion, slave, wounded rescuer, or aging

warrior but, rather, in the digressive facultythe loose drift of charac-
terwhich allows his literary speaker to slip effortlessly from one iden-
tity to the next.
A century after Whitmans original poetic charter, another Manhatt an
poet celebrates precisely this digressive faculty in a poem called In Mem-
ory of My Feelings: Grace / to be born and live as variously as possible
(OHara, Collected, 256). Honoring Whitmans style (while striving under
it to destroy the teacher), Frank OHara, too, documents the fugitive drift
of identity in American writing:
... I am a baboon eating a banana

I am a dictator looking at his wife I am a doctor eating a child
and the childs mother smiling I am a Chinaman climbing a mountain
I am a child smelling his fathers underwear I am an Indian
sleeping on a scalp
and my pony is stamping in the birches,
and Ive just caught sight of the Nia, the Pinta and the Santa Maria.
What land is this, so free? (In Memory of My Feelings,
Collected, 256)
While Whitman establishes a literary charter for exploring various subjects

in his drifting declarations of poetic independence, OHara puts this
digressive liberty into rhapsodic practice. Fashioning a literary identity
from what Whitman once called the loose drift of character, OHara dis-
covers a new kind of digressive autobiographyone modeled after the
drift of metropolitan conversation in the postwar Manhattan art world.
The poetics of digression in American self-invention can be traced in the
passage from Whitmans drift ing self to OHaras metropolitan, talkative
persons, but, fi rst, it will be necessary to consider the place of conversa-
tion itself within the democratic poetics of American writing.
THE DRIFT OF CONVERSATION
In the spring of 1819, immersed in the project of what were to become the
great odes, Keats stumbled across Coleridge conversing with a friend on
the road toward Highgate. Writing to his brother George and his sister-in-law
Georgina Keats a few days after this encounter, Keats offers a remarkable
account of the drift of Coleridges conversation:
... He broached a thousand thingslet me see if I can give you a listNightingales,

Poetryon Poetical SensationMetaphysicsDifferent genera and species of

DreamsNightmarea dream accompanied by a sense of touchsingle and dou-
ble touchA dream relatedFirst and second consciousnessthe difference
explained between will and Volitionso m[an]y metaphysicians from a want of
smoking the second consciousnessMonstersthe KrakenMermaids
Southey believes in themSoutheys belief too much dilutedA Ghost story
Good morningI heard his voice as it came towards meI heard it as he moved
awayI had heard it all the intervalif it may be called so. (24 FebApril 1819,
Letters 89)
Keatss bemused gloss reads like the index to a marvelous encyclopedic

fantasia.9 Ranging from nightingales to ghost stories (with excursions
into metaphysics, mermaids, nightmares, and beyond), Coleridges self-
presentation to the younger poet exemplifies the digressive poetics of con-
versation. No unified or totalizing subject governs Coleridges mercurial
imagination as he speaks; rather, it is his dazzling ability to digress from
one esoteric topic to the next that impresses Keats with the force of this
literary elder statesmans person. In digressing, in dilating, in passing
from subject to subject, he appeared to me to float in air, to slide on ice,
writes Hazlitt of his fi rst conversation with the poet (qtd. Armour and
Howes, Coleridge, 246). To paraphrase Whitman, the words of this con-
versation are nothingthe drift of it, everything. At the same time, how-
ever, Coleridges digressive self-presentation effaces the other persons
within this speakers purview.10 Keats notes this aspect of Coleridges talk
in representing the older poets conversation as monologue: I heard his
voice as it came towards meI heard it as he moved awayI had heard it
all the interval. Like his conversation-poems, which either discreetly
remove the addressee from the scene of poetic utterance (as in Th is Lime-
Tree Bower, My Prison) or elect to address a prelinguistic individual (the
cradled infant of Frost at Midnight), Coleridges talk stages a scene of
conversation-as-monologue.11 Th is silencing of the listener reflects not
only the epistemological orientation of British Romanticism (with its
turn to solitude and inwardness) but also a broader historical bias of the
English lyric toward private experience; both Coleridges conversations
and his conversation-poems transfer colloquy from the social world to the
solitary precincts of the inner life.
Turning once again to Franklins autobiography, we may consider the
role of a more democratic conversational ethostalk that involves both
speaking and listening to another individualin American literary self-
fashioning. Th roughout the Autobiography, the worth of individuals is
measured by their capacity to engage in enlightened talk (19, 35, 38, 41,
45). The fi rst part of Franklins narrative documents its protagonists cul-
tivation of the conversational skills that will eventually bear him to

international prominence as a professional, representative talker (i.e., a
political ambassador). From the early educational conversations at his
fathers table (At his Table he likd to have as often as he could, some sen-
sible Friend or Neighbour, to converse with, and always took care to start
some ingenious or useful topic for Discourse, which might tend to improve
the Minds of his Children (8)) to the secret conversational lyceum of the
Junto (and here too we acquired better Habits of Conversation (49)) to
Franklins establishment of the subscription libraries which have
improvd the general Conversation of the Americans (57) in the fledgling
nation, democratic talk advances the principles of reason and progress in
Franklins narrative. Yet, while egalitarian, conversation is also curiously
impersonal in the Autobiography. Speech between individuals takes the
literary form of indirect discourse in this text; Franklin rarely quotes his
interlocutors directly, thereby effacing the imprint of personality that
colors spoken dialogue. The orderly tenor of conversation in the Autobiog-
raphy, then, suggests a rationalists fantasy of democratic exchange, in
which the purpose of talk may be anatomized or enumerated in pragmatic
terms: to inform, to be informd, to please, or to persuade (14).
Two hundred years later, Franklin makes a cameo appearance onstage
to parody this Enlightenment ideal of rational conversation in Frank
OHaras historical verse-drama, A Century:
Benjamin Franklin:
When to the pressures of the past
I summon up my legislative powers,
I nvisage lands in which the jujubes last
and drop upon the people from gay towers.
Talking with Alexander Hamilton at night,
whether alive or dead, in subtle sance,
we settled upon a ruse, a sequinned blight,
to keep the golden maize crop in abeyance. (Amorous, 6667; emphasis added)
Here, Franklins conversation is placed under the shadow of early American

realpolitik (we settled upon a ruse ... / to keep the golden maize crop in abey-
ance), queer innuendo (gay towers superintend the nocturnal colloquy
between these speakers), and esoteric ritual (the conversation is compared
to a subtle sance). In this theatrical vignette, OHara delivers a fl ippant
critique of normative conversational decorum via the flamboyant speech
of a campy Founding Father. Roughly a hundred years after Bigelows
publication of the complete Autobiography in English, A Century illumi-
nates the historical gulf between Franklins rational, impersonal, and
pragmatic approach to conversation and the passionate, deep gossip

Allen Ginsberg once celebrated in his elegy for chattering Frank (Gins-
berg, City Midnight Junk Strains, Collected, 465467). Our exemplary
poet of friendship and intersubjectivity, OHara constructs a new style of
conversation-poem that reflects the intimate textures of social exchange
within the poetics of late twentieth-century American culture.12 Yet, from
its inception, scholarship on this poet has glossed over OHaras conversa-
tional poetics, divorcing talk from critical topics such as his theoretical
engagement with visual art of the period: in the fi rst major study of this
writers work, Poet among Painters, Marjorie Perloff briefly notes OHaras
projection of a lyric I engaged in what looks like live talkintimate,
familiar, expressive; real conversation that seems purely personal before
advising readers not to regard his work as just good casual talk (2627).
In the following pages, I will propose that the burning conversation of
OHaras work explores the democratic, public role of casual talk as a mod-
ern strategy for self-fashioning in the post-war Manhattan art world
(With Barbara at Larrs, Collected, 228). Moreover, I will suggest that
OHaras relationship to critical topoi such as ekphrasis and pictorial ab-
straction are best understood in light of the authors conversational po-
etics. Th is chatt y poet would take issue with the dismissive just in
Perloff s notion of just good casual talk; for OHara, even the most trivial
persiflage contributes a litt le supper-club conversation for the mill of the
gods (Rhapsody, Collected, 326).13
One of the aims of this book thus far has been to show how twentieth-
century American writers such as Marianne Moore and Lyn Hejinian
might be viewed productively for critical practice as archaeological poets.
Like Foucault in The Order of Things, Moore investigates the archive of
natural history as a prelude to reflecting upon mans place in the world, and
Hejinian undertakes an archaeology of order throughout a lifetime of writ-
ing as well, though this self-proclaimed fatalist takes narration and history,
rather than knowledge, as the object of her literary studies. For such poets,
digression provides a discursive method for examining the ideas of order
that shape the archives and metanarratives they have inherited. Reading
OHara, too, as an archaeological poet may shed critical light upon this
writers poetics. Indeed, OHaras Collected Poems can be read as an inten-
sive literary archaeology of the digressive art of conversation in postwar
American culture. This literary project converges in unexpected ways with
Foucaults theoretical enterprise in The Archaeology of Knowledge as well.
Early in his methodological treatise, Foucault advocates a new approach to
the analysis of speaking subjectivity:
In the proposed [archaeological] analysis, instead of referring back to the synthesis or

the unifying function of a subject, the various enunciative modalities manifest his

dispersion. To the various states, the various sites, the various positions that he can
occupy or be given when making a discourse. To the discontinuity of the planes from
which he speaks. (54)
Foucaults italics in this passage underscore his emphatic negation of the

singular articles that grammatically determine sovereign models of speak-
ing subjectivity. While the dispersed and discontinuous clinical discourse
of physicians in the medical sciences provides the occasion for Foucaults
reflection on speakerly modalities here, ordinary conversation, too, repeat-
edly figures in the theorists analysis of enunciation (98, 100, 101). By fram-
ing poetic utterance within the kinetic social exchange of conversation,
OHara refuses to make poetry from the synthesis or the unifying function
of a subject. His literary archaeology of conversation thus unsett les the
sovereign, solitary model of poetic enunciation that rose to prominence
under the name of confessional verse within the cultural milieu of postwar
American poetry. If confession became nearly synonymous with the work
of lyric within this period, as Alan Williamson argues in Introspection and
Contemporary Poetry, OHaras intersubjective conversation-poems consti-
tute a thoroughgoing critique of the synthesis or the unifying function of a
subject that underwrites the literary sensibility of confession itself.
OHaras extensive poetic study of conversation reprises, in miniature,
a history of the conversation-poem in the Western literary tradition.
While we often think of spoken dialogue as woven into the discursive fab-
ric of drama and the novel, poets, too, have frequently explored scenes of
conversation as a way of staging poetic enunciation, from the quarrelling
goatherds of Virgils Eclogues to Berrymans repartee with the ghastly
Mr. Bones. Entering into an irreverent dialogue with the poetry of dia-
logue, then, OHaras early poem Two Shepherds, A Novel lampoons
the garrulous goatherds of the classical eclogue through its earthy
exchange between two rural youths:
Here he comes now, the big prick-with-ears,

with his pansy smile as if hed just shit
his pants. Throw a rock at him, pitch!
The suns going down, isnt it? You
wont be able to see him in a minute.
The sun went down and the boys played on,
each in his own tender and delightful way.
When I saw your sister, I admit it,
I said to myself, What boobs! Jesus,
kid, do you ever get any idea how

she grew them? What it takes, I mean,
special food or something?... (Collected, 103)
So, running as fast as ever they could, writes the narrator of this ribald
poetic bildungsroman, they snatched at conversations (104).14 Quickly
abandoning the dialogue between these juvenile delinquents, however,
OHaras digressive eclogue swerves into a poetic archaeology of conversa-
tion in early America:
... They were already part of our colonys

prehistory, a type of embroidered sampler
quite new in conception and execution. To
the petit point of the French had been addended [sic]
what I can only term a larger licentiousness,
it may have been the feeding! and our Dutch
neatness of proverbiality had lent orgiastic screams-
while-running a sweet reasonableness which
became characteristic of shepherds everywhere.
They were Big Business! But to hear them talk
youd think theyd never gotten off the streets.
There were always blue skies, rotten apples,
the savor of geranium cunts, midnight snacks of
milk and powdered cheese, to foster their running
commentary, which became ultimately philosophical. (104105)
OHara situates his study of American conversation at the threshold of the

nations historicitythe poems exemplary speakers were already part of
our colonys / prehistoryby examining the intersection of a French petit
point and a Dutch neatness of proverbiality in our emerging colonial
idiom. Like a Foucauldian archaeologist, however, the speaker of this poem
complicates any general account of the transnational origins of an American
dialect by introducing additional planes of analysis, from the role of desires
larger licentiousness to the influence of Big Business on his comical
shepherds discourse. Colonialism, sexuality, and capital may provide a
broad framework for understanding the development of an American con-
versational style in this poem, but even these factors are further complicated
by additional considerations such as diet (it may have been the feeding!)
and the sociological influence of street life on the formation of a historical
vernacular. If, as Foucault argues toward the end of The Archaeology of
Knowledge, his method is an attempt to reveal discursive practices in their
complexity and density (209), the speaker of OHaras poem shows himself
to be an exemplary archaeologist of American conversation in this text.

The discursive inquiry of Two Shepherds, A Novel concludes with the
suggestion that even casual talk is ultimately philosophical. Like thought
experiments in the philosophy of language, OHaras early eclogues test
the epistemological boundaries of conversational intelligibility itself. In
Very Rainy Light, An Eclogue, for example, a loquacious Daphnis utters
sweet postmodernist nothings to his beloved Chloe:
D: The whistle of your gaze cuts across

my hair like spurs. Youre the big
breeze in halflight, dont think I
dont know it. At dawn when Im milking
the aphids I hear your stomach
coming up like thunder. Oh baby.
C: Onto what Nizhni sifts, ja ja,
the appealing moo? (Collected, 135136)
Texts like Very Rainy Light, An Eclogue mobilize the poetic non
sequiturs of the French avant-garde to suggest that human exchange fol-
lows the digressive dream logic of surrealism or Dadaism rather than
Franklins rationalist design. (In describing the collaborative project of
the Surrealists cadavres exquis, Andr Breton remarks upon the power
of drift in these texts which cannot be engendered by a single mind
(qtd. Caws, Manifesto, 290)). Chloes reply to her lovers cryptic seduc-
tion yields one of the most unexpected enunciations in OHaras oeu-
vre. Though they may initially appear to display neither rhyme nor
reason, however, the aleatory exchanges of OHaras early eclogues cov-
ertly explore the dynamics that govern the call and response of speech
acts in spoken dialogue. I shall leave a jar of powdered coffee / on your
tongue. Be wakefully mine, proposes OHaras Chloe. O joy! O joy!
todays the day, eh? replies Daphnis, fulfilling the discursive requirements
for acceptance of Chloes invitation, even as this illocutionary exchange
quickly blurs into the inscrutable music of Dada: Ive quit pictures for
the grassy knolls / of knees and the apple of your nut. / No more greys
for me! You. Artichoke (Collected, 136). The nonsensical linguistic sur-
faces of early eclogues like A Pastoral Dialogue and Very Rainy Light,
An Eclogue conceal and, at the same time, make possible OHaras
playful examination of the rules that determine the sequencing of
speech acts within the poetics of conversation. Framing these dialogues
within the classical genre of pastoral, moreover, OHara subtly suggests
that such sequences of digressive locutions may shed light on the ori-
gins of poetry itself.

In the second phase of his literary experiments in conversation,
OHara abandons the ancient genre of eclogue in favor of a modern-
day novelistic realism. As a result, the early sequences of digressive
speech acts give way to more normative protocols of conversational
exchange in these later texts. OHaras most famous conversation-
poem, A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island, exempli-
fies this turn to novelistic realism in the poets representation of casual
talk. While A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island
retains the magical scenario of early conversation-poems such as Ter-
restrial Cuckoo, OHaras colloquy with the sun abandons the curious
non sequiturs of the comic pastorals to adopt the rational contours of
novelistic dialogue:
The Sun woke me this morning loud

and clear, saying Hey! Ive been
trying to wake you up for fifteen
minutes. Dont be so rude, you are
only the second poet Ive ever chosen
to speak to personally
so why
arent you more attentive? If I could
burn you through the window I would
to wake you up. I cant hang around
here all day.
Sorry, Sun, I stayed
up late last night talking to Hal. (Collected, 306)
This New York School Ode on Indolence transports its reader to what
Kenneth Koch has described as OHaras world of conversation (qtd.
Lehman, Last, 182). Like Keatswho addresses birds, urns, and even ab-
stractions in the odesOHara speaks to the things of the world, but in
OHaras poetry things talk back.15 Here, the classical scene of poetic elec-
tion, or vocation (in which Apollo the sun god literally calls upon a po-
etic initiate) takes place within the demotic medium of everyday speech:
you are / only the second poet Ive ever chosen / to speak to personally,
says this cartoon Phoebus. OHaras excuse for having neglected his artis-
tic calling is, unsurprisingly, the earthly distraction of intimate talk.
Sorry Sun, replies the poet, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal. The
world of A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island is a world satu-
rated in conversation: with Hal (before the poem begins), with the sun
(during the poem), and with the mysterious, metaphysical they who will
come calling upon the poet on some future date (after the poem ends).

While much of A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island is
devoted to the monologue of the suns ars poeticadont worry about
your lineage / poetic or natural, always embrace things, people earth /
sky stars, as I do (Collected, 307)this avuncular advice is also punctu-
ated by novelistic exchanges of dialogue:
When I woke up Mayakovsky he was

a lot more prompt the Sun said
petulantly. Most people are up
already waiting to see if Im going
to put in an appearance.
I tried
to apologize I missed you yesterday.
Thats better he said. I didnt
know youd come out. You may be
wondering why Ive come so close?
Yes I said beginning to feel hot
wondering if maybe he wasnt burning me
anyway... . (306)
What writers of fiction would refer to as dialogue-tags (... the Sun said
petulantly, or ... I said beginning to feel hot) frame the representa-
tion of casual talk within the armature of novelistic realism in this text.
Brad Gooch points out the influence of Ronald Firbanks novels, with
their aristocratic badinage, on OHaras poetics (City, 137138),16 and
projects such as Ashbery and Schuylers collaborative novel, A Nest of
Ninnies, highlight the New York Schools enduring fascination with the
ways conversation enters into representation within the social world of
prose fiction. But OHara quickly discovers that the eloquent literary
personae of narrative art are too fluent by far. If the digressive speech
acts of the early pastorals construct a caricature of conversations unin-
telligibility, the shapely sentences uttered by the novelistic interlocutors
in OHaras later poems conjure up a fragile fantasy of dialogic order.
Th at / is your inclination, known in the heavens / and you should fol-
low it to hell, if / necessary, which I doubt, counsels OHaras sun in a
quasi-Miltonic style that falsifies the haphazard and inconclusive gram-
matical structure of ordinary speech (Collected, 307). Just as he had for-
saken the genre of eclogue, OHara ultimately abandons the novelistic
paradigm, too, as a framework for the representation of casual talk. The
very artfulness of Apollos solar sentences in A True Account of Talk-
ing to the Sun at Fire Island spells out their inadequacy as registers of
everyday human speech.

OHaras ongoing attempts to replicate the mercurial designs of casual
talk within poetic form seem, at times, as quixotic as Wyatts desire to cap-
ture desire itself: since in a net I seek to hold the wind. On what grounds
may one judge the authenticity of any literary mimesis of something so
ineffable as ordinary conversation? Fortunately for OHaras interpret-
ers, in the 1970s the sociolinguists Jan Svartvik and Randolph Quirk
compiled A Corpus of English Conversation, a remarkable archive of con-
versational transcripts that illustrate the mutable architectures of listen-
ing, response, and interruption that structure personal communication.
These transcripts provide a useful forum for studying the morphology of
conversation:
a: ... I dont really KNOW that Im going to be a vast

amount of HELP to youI was INTERESTED in your
ADVERTISEMENT and and ... mmmm ... but I gather
youre AFTER an enormous amount of INFORMATION
and I dont REALLY know that Ive gotYOU know
whether WHAT Ive got is of any HELP I mean its really
for you to DECIDEREALLY ...
b: mmmmm ... what we have been desperately short of is
the most intimate kind of writing and speaking ...
a: Yes.
b: the kind of things that one can allow oneself to say I
dont mean merely the subject matter because the subject
matter is of no particular concern to us. (Corpus, 408409)
Th is exchange, between a tentative subject (A) and a reassuring researcher

(B), shows how Svartvik and Quirks investigations into the most intimate
kind of writing and speaking disregard subject matter entirely: the subject
matter is of no particular concern to us. The researchers indifference
toward subject matter arises from the emphatic formalism of her method,
and OHara, in his later work, is no less concerned with reproducing the
morphology of talk as a social form. Indeed, the exchange between A and
B shares a curious prosody with any number of passages from a late
OHara text:
I dont think
Popeye is strictly Faulkners property, do you? do
John Crowe and Allen T.? pass the noodles ...
......................................................
BUT on the sunny
side, that photograph of us came out something

cavelike and classical, flat as a platypuss kisser
(rigorous), but with a mysterious CHARGE as we sat
in the Georges de la Tour Room waiting to see Mia
Slavenska
did you ever have a Bar Mitzvah? I had a perfectly
agonizing Confirmation ...
............................................................
... whew! I needed a push!
hey! halt! (I mean) stop! hurry up! the corner
of Madison and 57th is a very confusing place!
(Muy Bien, Collected, 414)
What really makes me happy is when something just falls into place as if it
were a conversation or something, says the poet of his method in a late
interview (qtd. Smith, Hyperscapes, 145). The formal innovation of OHaras
late poetrywith its emphatic typography (BUT on the sunny / side),
parenthetical asides (flat as a platypuss kisser / (rigorous), but with a mys-
terious CHARGE), and interruptive caesurae (do / John Crowe and
Allen T.? pass the noodles)reflects a new mode of literary attention to
the unruly contours of casual talk. The unexpected speech acts of the comic
pastorals and the periodic sentences of the novelistic lyrics give way to an
unstable form of utterance that eludes easy categorization in this final phase
of OHaras conversational art. Indeed, Foucaults negative description of
what he calls the statement provides as useful an account of this curious
mode of enunciation as any: We must not seek in the statement a unit that
is either long or short, strongly and weakly structured, but one that is caught
up, like the others, in a logical, grammatical, locutory nexus (Archaeology,
86). OHaras late conversation-poems finally suggest that casual talk is
made up not of simple speech acts or sentences but, rather, of something
resembling enunciative statements that arise and evanesce throughout
the digressive course of spoken communication.
In the chapter of The Archaeology of Knowledge titled Defining the State-
ment, Foucault introduces this elusive figure by telling us what it is not:
one finds statements lacking in legitimate propositional structure; one
finds statements where one cannot recognize a sentence; one finds more
statements than one can isolate speech acts (84). Neither a logical propo-
sition, a grammatical sentence, nor a speech act, the statement is more
tenuous, less charged with determinations, less strongly structured, more
omnipresent, too, than all these figures (84). Foucaults negative defini-
tion of the statement lends this figure both its flexibility as a tool for discur-
sive analysis and, also, its perplexing vagueness. (Contemporary critical
practice has found relatively little use for the statement among the various

terms in Foucaults elaborate theoretical lexicon). But OHaras literary
research shows that conversation is nothing if not a sequence of enunciative
statements. In his conversation-poems, as in everyday talk itself, one con-
tinually finds statements lacking in legitimate propositional structure (ja
ja), statements where one cannot recognize a sentence (You. Artichoke.)
and statements that do not map readily onto the locutionary protocols of
Austinian speech acts (Oh baby). Moreover, thinking about OHaras
conversation-poems as sequences of statements allows us to read these
texts as markers of a speakers particular subject position:
If a proposition, a sentence, a group of signs can be called statement, it is not there-

fore because, one day, someone happened to speak them or put them into some con-
crete form of writing; it is because the position of the subject can be assigned. To describe
a formulation qua statement does not consist in analyzing the relations between the
author and what he says (or wanted to say, or said without wanting to); but in deter-
mining what position can and must be occupied by any individual if he is to be the subject
of it. (Foucault, Archeaology, 95; emphasis added)
To read one of OHaras conversation-poems is to study the literary enun-

ciation of a particular personwith his specific biography and poetic
agendabut it is also to ascertain what position can and must be occupied
by any individual if he is to be the subject of it. Th is is because the analysis
of statements requires us to subordinate questions of meaning and inten-
tion to position the speaker within the discursive formation that gives rise
to an enunciation (7981). OHaras conversation-poems not only record
casual talk but also allow us to imagine ourselves as participants in the
particular social forms of speech memorialized in The Collected Poems.
Indeed, this may account for OHaras appeal to readers of such varying
literary and political sensibilities. Reading his late conversation-poems,
any individual can picture herself in the enviable subject position of
Frank OHara carrying on with others.
Taking his own garrulous persona as the subject of his literary
researchIt is the law of my own voice I shall investigate (Homosexu-
ality, Collected, 182)OHara conducts his archaeological fieldwork in
the glamorous milieu of the postwar Manhattan art world: bohemian
mixers at the Sidney Janis gallery, black-tie events at the Museum of Mod-
ern Art and Lincoln Center, Kenward Elmslies glittering cocktail parties,
late-night drinks with the painters at the ramshackle Cedar. Indeed, at
times OHara seems to stand (with martini in hand) at the buzzing center
of this elaborate socius. It was almost impossible for anyone to see him
alone, recalls Ashbery of a poet whose most delicate and intimate friend-
ships often resembled a highly theatricalized public performance in the

kaleidoscopic lumber-room of the New York social scene (qtd. OHara,
Collected, x). OHaras late poetry provides us with an anthology of the
metropolitan conversations that provided an ideal social form for the
positioning of this gregarious subject. Poems such as Biotherm (For Bill
Berkson), for instance, reconstruct the festive nimbus of talk at a typical
Manhattan gathering:
actually I want to hear more about your family

yes you get the beer
I am actually thinking about how much I love Lena Horne
I never intended to go to New Hampshire without you
you know theres an interesting divinity in Rarotonga that looks sort of
like you (Collected, 446)
The lines drift across the page as overheard human speech drift s across
our hearing, observes Ashbery of Pierre Reverdys prosody, in a remark
that beautifully captures the drift of Biotherm as well (qtd. Lehman,
Last, 149). Though the poems title parenthetically indicates that it is
for Bill Berkson, the proliferation of an unspecified second-person pro-
noun here allows OHara to speak to multiple individuals while simulta-
neously masking the texts promiscuity of address. (This habitual evacuation
of the pronouns particularity in OHaras late work permits the reader to
imagine herself in the subject positions of the various poems addressees as
well). OHaras speaker draws one you into closer intimacyactually I
want to hear more about your familywhile dismissing anotheryes
you get the beerwithin a single, staggered line.17 True to the Personist
credo that you just go on your nerve (Collected, 498), OHara gracefully
negotiates multiple addressees (from the dismissed to the seduced), topics
(from Lena Horne to Raratonga), and speech acts (from question to com-
mand) within a dizzying cascade of enunciative statements that secures this
speakers position as an interesting person. Along the way, we discover
that metropolitan conversation is the most digressive of social forms. Like
the gossip columns and socialites memoirs of the Eisenhower era, OHaras
late poetry transcribes and memorializes the ephemeral repartee of the
postwar Manhattan art world. But the metropolitan conversations of the
Collected Poems also document a modern, highly digressive strategy for
positioning the subject within the cultural poetics of late twentieth-cen-
tury America.
If metropolitan conversation provides a method for positioning oneself
within society in the period, the deep gossip at the heart of this social
form consolidates a larger collective identity as well. In her study of gossip

and the novel, Patricia Meyer Spacks describes the uses of rumor in the
formation of a social order: always the group, whatever its size, defi nes
itself in opposition to others: the subjects of its talk (Gossip, 226). During
the belle epoque of the New York School, participation in gossip signified
ones membership among a particular coterie of artists, intellectuals, and
socialites who defi ned their group in relation or opposition to various
other circles (such as Warhols entourage at the Knitt ing Factory, the
poets of the Black Mountain School, or the Beat Movements unruly
vanguard).18 OHara and company literally rehearsed and staged the
distinction between those who stood inside versus outside their social
group in what the poet referred to as our great collaborative play Ken-
neth Koch, a Tragedy, which cannot be printed because it is so fi lled with
50s art gossip that everyone would sue us (Standing , 172). OHaras
joke about the plays samizdat status subtly dissociates his coterie not
only from other artistic circles but also from society at large
everyone. As Lytle Shaw points out, what gets called coterie writing
might best be understood as a critique of literatures frequent rhetoric of
universality (Coterie, 5). Moreover, this critique is not restricted to the
field of literature. Reminiscing about his circles golden age, John Ashbery
recalls:
Most conversations are dominated by chance, darting from one topic to another even
when they seem most deliberate, but it seems that ours, mine and my friends at the
time, were even more disjunct than most, as if we were trying to turn the non sequi-
tur into an art form. (qtd. Rivers, Drawings, 8)
The New York School is not only a literary movement. It is a lifestyle as

well. Th is social circles highly stylized manner of speech reifies conver-
sational digressionturning it into an art formto entrench the
division between their coterie and bourgeois society. Shaws suggestion
that we shift the idea of coterie away from its more normative sense of a
sociological entity toward that of a social rhetoric helps us to under-
stand the role of metropolitan conversation in the discursive position-
ing of this particular socius (Coterie, 37). The social rhetoric of the New
York School is, above all, a rhetoric of digression.19 How I hate subject
matter! writes OHara in the poem To Hell with It (Collected, 275).
Th is sort of militant irreverence toward subject matter in both art and
social life serves as a rhetorical badge of membership in the poets digres-
sive coterie.
In Ashberys play The Heroes, a Theseus transported from the classical
world to the Hamptons recalls overhearing two people converse through
the window of a stopped train:

For fi fteen minutes I watched them. I had no idea what their relation was. I could form
no idea of their conversation. They might have been speaking words of love, or plan-
ning a murder, or quarrelling about their in-laws. Yet just from watching them talk,
even though I could hear nothing, I feel like I know those people better than anyone
in the world. (qtd. Lehman, Last, 101; emphasis added)
For this voyeur, knowledge of other persons is acquired not by listening to

the argument of their discourse but by attending to the sensuous surface
of their talk; Theseus watchesbut he does not hearthe couples con-
versation. Again and again throughout their writings, the members of the
New York School celebrate the generalized faculty of speech above any
particular subject of discourse. Th is surface att itude toward conversation
continues Whitmans poetic policy of disregarding the inner content of
other peoples talk: Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or
lecture, not even the best, / Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvd
voice (Song of Myself, Leaves, 192; emphasis added).20 In OHaras
work, however, the militant trivialization of subject matterto be idio-
matic in a vacuum, / it is a shining thing! (Poem, Collected, 282)
inevitably leads to the apotheosis of subjectless talk, or chit-chat.
Indeed, OHara voices his fear of this outcome to a chatt y poetics when
he complains that his recent poems have merely been blabbing along
chicly in an early letter to Ashbery (qtd. Gooch, City, 370). In its most
degraded version, subjectless talk enters into representation as caricature
in OHaras work:
yak yak
thats an amusing thought
how can anyone be more amusing than oneself
how can anyone fail to be (Yesterday Down at the Canal, Collected, 430)
The flattened-out, subjectless caricature of human utterance, yak yak,

here and in texts such as Biotherm (for Bill Berkson), signifies this invet-
erate partygoers momentary exhaustion by metropolitan conversation
(438). Moreover, this exhaustion is accompanied by a breakdown of the
speakers capacity for social judgment: how can anyone be more amusing
than oneself / how can anyone fail to be. If the New York Schools con-
versational digressions isolate this coterie from mainstream American
society of the period, their digressive tactics may ultimately culminate in
a miasmic democratization of all conversational topicsand, by exten-
sion, of all personsas more or less merely amusing. Even as he culti-
vates a subjectless poetics of digression, then, OHara acknowledges the
perils of speaking with no purpose in mind.

ABSTRACTION
OHaras interpreters have tended to gloss over the poetics of metropolitan

conversation in this writers work, as if it were merely so much blabbing
and yakking. Yet the digressive art of conversation is, for OHara, closely
related to the aesthetic movement he labored to promotenamely, picto-
rial abstraction. A painting by an artist such as Jackson Pollock (with its
digressive lines, multidirectional openness, surprising colors, aleatory ges-
tures, and ripostes to bourgeois convention) resembles, in many respects,
a flow chart of the metropolitan conversations that such an image would
have superintended during the gallery openings and cocktail parties of the
postwar Manhattan art world. New York School poetry is about chatt y
abstraction, says the poet Eileen Myles, and the very formulation chatt y
abstraction emblematizes an intimate metonymic relation between di-
gressive repartee and the abolition of subject matter in pictorial art of the
period (qtd. Lehman, Last, 368). Indeed, the abstract painters of the New
York School were not to be outdone by their comrades (the subjectless
poets) in cultivating a digressive manner of speech; Franz Klines conver-
sation, for instance, ranks with Coleridges rambling self-presentations in
waywardness and discursivity: Famous for his monologues . . . Kline
moved from discussing dissection of Gericaults horses to imitations of
Mae West and W.C. Fields to the trading of baseball statistics (Gooch,
City, 205). In such a milieu, art and conversation overlap and even come to
resemble two aspects of a single endeavor, as Ashbery notes in his reminis-
cence of the painter Larry Rivers:
There were usually a few peoplesometimes quite a fewaround the apartment

while he was workingchildren, relatives, girl friends, baby-sitters, fellow artists
and the work would be conducted in the midst of a general cacophony, including con-
sultations with Berdie, his mother-in-law, over that nights supper menu. Th e strokes
got laid down like bursts of talk, sometimes simultaneous with them. (qtd. Rivers,
Drawings, 8)
The title of the monograph from which these reflections are taken, Draw-
ings and Digressions, illustrates once again the intimate association between
pictorial aesthetics and subjectless talk in the chatt y abstraction of the
period. Just as Riverss draftsmanship displays a digressive aspect, the talk
also moves by slashing indirection, observes Ashbery. The drawing and
the talking, even at their most idle and indiscreet ... go together for me
(Drawings, 10). If liberation from subject matter is the common aim of
these aesthetic (the drawing) and social (the talking) practices, the
canvases of a painter like Jackson Pollock and the conversation-poems of a

writer like OHara represent two converging angles of approach toward a
single aesthetic problemhow to construct a text without a subject?
which vexed representation within the period.
In OHaras oeuvre, the genre of ekphrasis provides an ideal forum for
investigating the intersection of pictorial and literary subjectlessness.
OHaras most popular ekphrastic poem, Why I Am Not a Painter, is
about the importance of not having a subject, observes Barbara Guest
(qtd. Lehman, Last, 344). The subject doesnt matter. Thats straight out
of Abstract Expressionism (344). Sardonically inserting the negation
doesnt into the midst of the phrase subject matter, Guests remark
reflects the New York Schools irreverence toward governing subjects in
both painting and poetry of the period. Indeed, the title of OHaras most
neglected poem about visual art, Digression on Number 1, 1948, equates
ekphrasis with digression itself. This literary digression on a picture by
Pollock opens with a meditation on the optimal conditions for seeing:
I am ill today but I am not

too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.
A fine day for seeing. (Collected, 260)
From its outset, the poem registers a peculiar uneasiness on the part of the
speakera vague discomfort that filters into the realm of epistemology due
to OHaras lineation (I am ill today but I am not) and immediate self-con-
tradiction (I am not ill at all). This uncertainty even extends from the
inwardness of the poets bodyam I ill or not?to the ambient environs of
the climate, which is perfect while yet being warm for winter and cold for
fall. It is a mark of OHaras irrepressible appetite for art that the poet declares
this a fine day for seeing, venturing forth to indulge in ekphrastic looking:
I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Mir, and I see the sea by Lger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner,
a little table by Picasso, pink. (260)
From the passive verbs (I am, it is) and general unease of OHaras
workday existence, the speaker crosses into the active verbs (I see) and

imaginative sanctuary of his idyllic lunch hour. In the museums modern
art gallery, the muted monosyllabic signifiers of the poems opening
stanza now erupt into the richly textured polysyllabics of European
art: ceramics by Mir, complicated Metzingers, an awakening by
Brauner, and the Picasso. Indeed, the invigorating company of art
even comes to resemble the lively company of persons in this passage; the
connoisseurs convention of referring to paintings by artists like Jean
Metzinger as light, complicated Metzingers (as if the paintings them-
selves were living members of the Metzinger family) quietly transfers per-
sonhood from the artist to her works through a metonymic sleight of
hand.
The avant-garde European company of Mirs, Lgers, Metzingers, and
Picassos, however, fails to revive this weary viewers flagging spirits;
OHaras speaker lapses once again into fatigue (and an uneasy uncer-
tainty regarding his own fatigue) when he leaves this room of the gallery
behind at the stanza break: I am tired today but I am not / too tired. I am
not tired at all (260). The only truly invigorating ekphrastic encounter of
the poem will take place once OHara advances to the American wing of
this poetic gallery, to stand before the native abstraction of Pollocks
Number 1, 1948:
There is the Pollock, white, harm

will not fall, his perfect hand
and the many short voyages. Theyll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see. (260)
Th is gallerygoers encounter with Number 1 restores to OHara an inter-

nal equilibrium only intuited in the poems earlier gestures of statement
and counterstatement (I am, I am not). Progressing from the passively
voiced uncertainty of its opening lines to the confident authority of the
poems future indicativesharm / will not fall, Theyll / never fence
the silver rangethe speaker of Digression on Number 1, 1948 testifies
to the galvanizing effect of Pollocks abstraction Th is new confidence sta-
bilizes and regulates the music of the poem as well, in the measured iambs
of theyll / nver fnce the slver rnge. / Strs are ut and thre is sa /
enugh. Where the poem had previously dramatized a series of transitive
acts of lookingI see ceramics, I see the seawe now fi nd that gazing at

Pollocks abstract image fi nally liberates perception from subject matter
altogether. As if in a formal afterthought, the poem ultimately foregrounds
the intransitive, generalized faculty of vision in its concluding (and most
compressed) sentence: I see.
If Western writers chronically suffer from what W. J. T. Mitchell calls
ekphrastic anxiety, this intransitive ending of OHaras literary digres-
sion has occasioned ekphrastic disappointment on the part of some read-
ers. Whatever satisfactions the painting gives the poet, or the poem gives
a reader, writes Willard Spiegelman, a genuinely full or even partial
vision of the painting is not among them (See, 130). In Spiegelmans view,
OHara falls silent before Number 1, 1948 because abstraction itself
renders this poet (and many others) speechless:
The universal silence of painting, which has traditionally inspired poets to speech
and made them envious, seems to become paradoxically more silent still in the case
of the nonrepresentational and the meaningless. Or, rather, poets themselves have
been by and large silent on the subject. (129)
Spiegelmans dialectic of silence and speech emerges from a tradition of

ekphrastic theory that, as Jean Hagstrum points out, begins with Plu-
tarchs citation of the poet Simonides, who reputedly said that paint-
ing is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture (Sister, 10). But
Digression on Number 1 repudiates Simonides theorem, subtly inti-
mating that Pollocks painting, at least, is far from mute. The I see
which concludes this poem may be read both as the verb of ekphrasis
liberated from its grammatical object and, at the same time, as the
speech act of conversational acknowledgment. Quietly invoking this
second sense of the phrase I see, OHara suggests that Pollocks
meaningless image has been speaking to him all along. Digression
on Number 1 thus reinvents the trope of prosopopoeia, which lies at
the heart of ekphrastic art. We do well to remember the root meaning
of ekphrasis: speaking out or telling in full, writes James Heffernan
at the outset of his study Museum of Words: to recall this root is to rec-
ognize that . . . ekphrasis entails prosopopoeia, or the rhetorical tech-
nique of envoicing a silent object (6). Under Heffernans account,
poets traditionally speak on behalf of paintings in ekphrastic texts. But
while many poets do indeed ventriloquize art objects through proso-
popoeiaKeats, for example, grandly informs us of both what we
know on earth and everything that we need to know through the
mouthpiece of his Grecian urnOHara declines to speak for
Pollocks abstraction. Instead, OHara registers the images considera-
ble eloquence by simply listening to the painting. Without presuming to

envoice Number 1, 1948, the conclusion of this poem dramatizes the
act of listening to a speaking picture that has nothing to say and is
saying it, emphatically, through abstraction. OHaras conversation
with art in Digression on Number 1 thus closes in a rapprochement
Do you see? Yes, I seewith the subjectless text.
In OHaras world of conversation, the poet numbers among his inti-
mate friends a diverse company of individuals, from witt y Manhattan
socialites to the dazzling sun overhead to the abstract paintings that he
loves so well. Th is garrulous personage even accords his inanimate inter-
locutors the same imaginative courtesy that most people ordinarily
reserve for their fellow human beings:
Perhaps the most remarkable work of 1950, from a technical standpoint, is the
Number 29. A painting-collage of oil, wire-mesh, pebbles and shells composed on
glass, it is majestic and does not depend on novelty for its effect. It is unique in that it
is a masterpiece seen front or back, and even more extraordinary in that it is the same
masterpiece from opposite sides of viewing. What an amazing identity Number 29
must have!like that of a human being. (OHara, Pollock , 26)
Though its progenitor, Pollock, bestows upon Number 29 the most

impersonal name imaginable, one can sense OHaras longing to enter
into a conversation with this artifact, to encounter the pictures amaz-
ing personality. Just under the surface of OHaras art criticism, then,
runs a meditation on the mystery of identity. More specifically, the
founder of literary Personism builds upon and revises the philosophical
category of the person as it has been conceptualized by a tradition of
thinkers including John Locke, who separates the idea of man from that
of a person in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (343). Today,
philosophers debate the personhood of computational machines and
animals, while modern legal thought commonly admits nonhuman enti-
ties such as corporationsand various other concerned and accountable
bodiesinto the community of persons. (Conversely, certain classes of
human beings such as children are denied the status of legal persons).
Determining who or what should be included within the contemporary
commonwealth of persons can be difficult indeed. In his essay on The
Concept of a Person, however, Charles Taylor seeks to ground our defi-
nition of personhood in terms that would appeal to a conversationalist
like OHara: A person is a being who can be addressed, and who can
reply. Let us call a being of this kind a respondent (Agency, 97). Within
Taylors philosophical anthropology, the question of what motivates a
respondent to make a replymotives being either performative or affec-
tive under this accountis crucial in determining whether that being

qualifies as a person, with all the attendant rights and obligations. But
OHara seems uninterested in retrospectively ascertaining what has
motivated any particular response in his literary account of personhood.
Instead, he seeks to make a preliminary identification of those things
including mute thingscapable of inviting a response from us in the
world. Thus, paintings like Number 29, 1950 (with its identity like that of
a human being) or Number 1, 1949 (which elicits the conversational
response I see from its viewer) are respondents of a peculiar sort.
OHara pictures these images as respondents even as he deliberately
avoids representing their enunciations. Such abstract persons test the
limits of any respondent theory of identity because they enter into a dia-
logic relation with their viewer without exhibiting any discernible dis-
cursive motive. To count as a personor, better, as an interesting
personin OHaras world of conversation, one must above all else avoid
subjection to subject matter. Thus, nowhere does OHara refer to still
lifes, landscapes, or even portraits as persons in his work. Th is abstract
personist will only confer identity upon subjectless images in the repub-
lic of art.
Selves, subjects, and persons each invoke different orders of inter-
pretation and value as signifiers of identity. Readers who regard poems
as documents of selfhood frequently incline toward an expressive
model of poetry, with the attendant critical vocabulary of interiority
and confessionalism. On the other hand, readers who view poems as
markers of subjectivity have tended to place a greater emphasis upon
the external influences that shape literary production, such as political
power and social history, substituting for the genre of lyric a discourse
of textuality. Over the past few decades, much of our scholarship on
poetry has been shaped by the critical contretemps between advocates
of the self and partisans of the subject as ways of thinking about iden-
titywith subjectivity steadily gaining critical prestige as the more
favored term in literary studies. More recently, however, scholars like
Sharon Cameron and Oren Izenberg have sought to ground their criti-
cal practice in the philosophical category of the person rather than the
historical subject:
If subjects (as poems conceive them) are understood to possess qualities (voices, his-
tories, features, bodies, genders, att achments, as well as rights and obligations, etc.),
the persons intended by the poetic principle are defi ned by their possession of value
the sheer potential to be integrated into whatever social system. (Being , 23)
Izenbergs working taxonomy of identity distinguishes a poetics that

explores the particular qualities of individual subjectstheir voices,

for example, or their historiesfrom one that foregrounds the more
abstract form of value inherent in persons as such. Though it remains
to be seen whether theories of personhood will supplant subjectivity as
a framework for investigating the curious dialectic that emerges
between poems and individuals, the self, the subject, and the person
represent three successive figurations of identity within modern crit-
ical practice. Moreover, the competing claims of interiority, historicity,
and abstraction that attach to each of these figures of identity exert
their own formal pressures upon the utterance and inscription of poets
themselves. The unified narratives of self hood in confessional poetry,
the fractured texts of the avant-gardist subject, and the digressive con-
versations of OHaras metropolitan persons thus give shape to three
grand ramifications within the family tree of twentieth-century Amer-
ican writing.
Over recent years, the critical trajectory from examinations of the self
to theories of personhood within contemporary literary studies recapitu-
lates the historical progression from Whitmans drift ing selves to
OHaras digressive persons. As I argue in the introduction to this book,
however, one must not overlook the part played by the Foucauldian sub-
ject within the unfolding story of critical discourse on twentieth-century
American poetry. Indeed, our scholarly fascination with the subject as
a figure of identity may have obscured the poetics of subject matter as a
question for contemporary critical practice. Yet the poetry of digression
has provided a literary method for changing the subject ever since Whit-
mans declarations of discursive independence. I escapd being a Poet,
most probably a very bad one, writes the methodical Franklin to his son,
but as Prose Writing has been of great Use to me in the Course of my
Life, and was a principal Means of my Advancement, I shall tell you how
in such a Situation I acquird what litt le Ability I have in that Way (Auto-
biography, 11). American poets from Whitman to OHara have eschewed
Franklins prosaic means of advancement, electing instead to map out
the less traveled (and more scenic) byways of poetic identity. If the liter-
ary charter of Leaves of Grass secures for future poets of the nation an
inalienable right to digress, OHara lives out his poetic forebears dream
of liberty in the pursuit of chatt iness. While it is true that blabbing along
chicly may fail to sustain a universal social order, the metropolitan con-
versation of OHara and his coterie speaks volumes about the aesthetics
of subjectlessness within the particular precincts of the postwar Manhat-
tan art world. If the underlying subject of abstract expressionism is, in
Barbara Guests phrase, not having a subject, the canvases of a Pollock
or a Motherwell visually illustrate the very problem that the New York
School poets continuously address within the medium of language.

Representation without a subject is not only a pictorial or a poetic ideal
but a social and, perhaps, a political one as well. The poems of the New
York School imagine what a person might be in the abstract, freed from
the constraints of subject matter, and they discover that this peculiar sort
of individual might even resemble a work of artone worth engaging in
conversation.

CHAP TER 5
New Digressions
John Ashbery and the Changing Subjects
of the Twenty-First Century
D riven from his house by mysterious stones thrown in the night, the
exiled and embittered Jean-Jacques Rousseauhis books and his
bride left behindfound a momentary haven on the picturesque le St.
Pierre in the Lake of Bienne during his fugitive years abroad. Inspired by
the tale of a German scholar who had composed a voluminous treatise on
the rind of a lemon, Rousseau devoted his mornings to examining through
a magnifying glass the lichens, flowers, and grasses that fi lled each square
of the imaginary grid that he had, like an amateur cartographer, superim-
posed upon his Edenic refuge. Remembering his sojourn on St. Pierre a
decade later in the Fift h Promenade of his Homeric peripeteia, Reveries
of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau describes his afternoon fl ights from this
botanical preoccupation:
I would slip away and go throw myself alone into a boat that I rowed to the middle of
the lake when the water was calm; and there, stretching myself out full-length in the
boat, my eyes turned to heaven, I let myself slowly drift back and forth with the water,
sometimes for several hours, plunged in a thousand confused, but delightful, reveries
which, even without having any well-determined or constant object, were in my
opinion a hundred times preferable to the sweetest things I had found in what are
called the pleasures of life. (66)
Rousseaus boat provides a curious vehicle of escape from his island

escape. Freed from his earthly focus on the flora of St. Pierre, the wan-
derer turns his eyes skyward to drift through digressive reveries with no
distinct or permanent subject. Within the ambulatory framework of Rev-
eries of the Solitary Walker, these floating excursions deconstruct the poet-
ics of promenade as a proto-Romantic imaginative practice. When I
walk, concedes Jeff rey C. Robinson in the introduction to his study The
Walk: Notes on a Romantic Image, my mind does not flow like a stream
(5). Compared with the idle pleasures of merely floating recumbent with
ones eyes fi xed on the heavens, even Rousseaus famous perambulations
assume an aspect of pedestrian discipline. Step by step, the ten textual
walks of Reveries of the Solitary Walker circuitously progress toward the
promised land of self-vindicationa journey begun with The Confessions
in 1770 and continued six years later in Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques
though death overtakes the disgraced author before he arrives at the end
of this unfi nished works fi nal promenade. It comes as no surprise, then,
that Rousseau, when recalling his years of wandering in the proverbial
desert of exile, regards his precious few hours afloat as a hundred times
preferable to the sweetest things I had found in what are called the pleas-
ures of life afoot (66).
Rousseau is, of course, widely regarded as the author of a peripatetic
poetics that underwrites the rambling Romanticism of writers like John
Clare in the following century. Critical studies such as Celeste Langans
Romantic Vagrancy and Toby Beniss Romanticism on the Road have exam-
ined the Romantic critique of Enlightenment models of progress within
the period, reading the cultural practice of walking as a method for inter-
rogating industrialization, the legislation of the rural landscape, and class
mobility in nineteenth-century British society. Th is critical investigation
into the Romantic poetics of walking has come to inform the reception of
twentieth-century American poetry as well. Roger Gilberts Walks in the
World: Representation and Experience in Modern American Poetry, for
example, conducts an extensive review of the ways poets from Robert
Frost to John Ashbery explore peripeteia within the philosophical pur-
view of American pragmatism.1 In his readings of texts such as Stevenss
An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, Elizabeth Bishops The End of
March, and A. R. Ammonss Corsons Inlet, Gilbert proposes that the
walk offers a figure for poesis itself in modern American verse. For Gilbert,
Rousseaus Reveries of the Solitary Walker represents the Romantic culmi-
nation of the belief that philosophical reflection fi nds its ideal occasion in
the walk, epitomizing a ruminative ethos that authorizes the literary per-
ambulations of this Enlightenment thinkers modern successors (Walks,
10). But Rousseaus drift ing rowboat, its oars laid aside, represents an even
more leisurely mode of imaginative conveyance than the promenade,
affording his solitary walker a respite from the arduous pursuit of social
critique and self-defense. The scholarly fascination with Rousseauian
N E W DIGR ESSIONS [ 129 ]

peripeteia, then, has obscured a more digressive and wayward poetics of
merely floating in our contemporary critical understanding of modern
American writing.
Walks in the World concludes with a virtuosic reading of John Ash-
berys peripatetic poem The Th ief of Poetry. In Gilberts view, the soli-
tary practices of walking in the world and reading a poem converge in
this remarkable work: Ashbery redefi nes the [peripatetic] occasion as
both text and experience; in effect he learns to read his walk instead of
simply taking it (259). To imagine a walk as a poem, under this account,
allows the poet to redeem experience from the undertow of temporality.
If the walk is itself a poem rather than a transient occasion, writes Gil-
bert, then it is no longer hopelessly lost (259). In his digressive master-
piece Flow Chart, however, Ashbery himself proposes an amusing
alternative to journeying on foot through the selva oscura of human
experience:
... I had to find a way out of the woods.

Now, in some cases, this is easyyou just walk straight along a road and
pretty soon
youre out of the woods and there are suburban backlots. In my case,
though, it wasnt that simple, though it wasnt extraordinarily demanding
eitherI
just lay down in a boat and slept, Lady-of-Shalott style. (133)
In this litt le allegory, Ashbery rejects the vigorous Wordsworthian poet-

ics of walking in favor of a more recumbent postmodern sensibility.
Thus, the Lady of Shalott , who passively floats downriver in a vessel
metonymically inscribed with her nameand round about the prow
she wrote / The Lady of Shalott, in Tennysons version (Major, 24)
provides a campy figure for Ashbery himself. For this meandering writer,
the solitary walker advances all too purposefully toward the most unpo-
etical of destinations, striding straight along a road that leads to bleak
suburban backlots on the outskirts of a modern metropolis. Unlike his
chatt y Manhatt anite friend OHara, Ashbery fashions his identity in
opposition to the socius: soon I was gliding among you, our floating
subject continues, taking notes on your conversations and otherwise
making a pest of myself. / I pretended to be angry when onlookers jeered
and cows mooed and even the heralds told me to shut up, / yet at bottom
I was indifferent (Flow, 133). Noting the conversation of others from
the seclusion of his litt le shallop, this outsider relishes his self-removal
from social life so thoroughly that he can only feign perturbationI

pretended to be angry ... yet at bottom I was indifferent (133)at his
outcast state. Exploring a solitary strain within the digressive social
poetics of New York School writing, then, Ashbery reflects upon the
moving surface of the contemporary with no other company than his
digressive craft .
The Enlightenment blueprint of Rousseaus litt le rowboat undergoes
endless variation in the postmodern shipyard of Ashberys literary con-
sciousness. To compile an exhaustive archive of the imaginary vessels
mobilized by this poet would be to rival Homers sonorous catalog of
ships in The Iliad: the lam barge of Daff y Duck in Hollywood, the
pleasure craft from All Kinds of Caresses, the cruise ship on which
Fascicle is set, the blossoming boat on page 28 of Flow Chart, the gam-
bling ship from The Village of Sleep, the packet boat into which the
poet drunkenly steps in the opening poem of Self-Portrait in a Convex
Mirror, the hotel boats from The Business of Falling Asleep, and the
eponymous vessels of Pleasure Boats, April Galleons, and Houseboat
Days comprise only a fraction of this writers imaginative armada. And,
though boating may be Ashberys preferred method of travel, his drift-
ing personae rarely hesitate to make use of any number of other floating
conveyances, from inner tubes to icebergs to the poets beloved hot air
balloons. You could step up / Into the litt le balloon carriage and be
conducted / To the core of bland festival light, writes this author in As
We Know: and you mustnt forget you can sleep there (The Preludes,
91). 2 The genial reminder that we can indeed sleep aboard this floating
carriagelike the speaker of Flow Chart who, Lady-of-Shalott style,
naps while a dinghy conveys his dreaming body through a dark wood
illustrates Ashberys desire to share with the reader his sense of utter
ease and surrender while adrift . At times, it seems like this poet has
always already been happily afloat since time immemorial. In Can You
Hear, Bird?, for instance, Ashbery playfully assumes the Old Testament
identity of a famous newbornme, Moses on my litt le raftborne
through the Biblical reeds (The Captive Sense, 108). From the Lady of
Shalotts litt le bark to the infant Mosess raft to the mysterious ark, qui-
etly constructed over the course of Girls on the Run, which future gen-
erations will live in, and thank us for (4, 54), the horizon of Ashberys
oeuvre is dotted with a motley flotilla of literary vessels upon whose
decks the poet stages the Gilbert and Sullivan operett a of his imagina-
tive life.
Anyone who has relinquished paddle or oar to float idly downstream
will remember the inverted phenomenology of sensing that the surround-
ing world, rather than ones drift ing self, is in motion. Our journey / flows

past us like ice chunks, observes the speaker of Flow Chart, maybe it is
we that are stationary (35). Th is is Ashberys favorite optical illusion. 3
But tricks of perception, for the postmodern prestidigitator, always unlock
the door to hidden realities. Like Whitmans ferry passenger, who marvels
that I stood yet was hurried (Leaves, 309), Ashberys speakers repeat-
edly discover that simply to stay in place is to be, in some metaphysical
sense, cast adrift.4 In As We Know, for example, this imaginative ship-
wright sets his literary vessels afloat not on the waterways of the external
world but, rather, on the swift ly coursing medium of inwardness itself:
We are afloat
On our dreams as on a barge made of ice,
Shot through with questions and fissures of starlight
That keep us awake, thinking about the dreams
As they are happening. (82)
In this passage, Ashbery elaborates Prosperos valedictory thesis that we

are such stuff / As dreams are made on into a beautiful and haunting
image for what might be called the interiorization of drifting. But it is a
nascent social scienceand not the art of poetrythat provides the
most enduring image for the inward migration of floating in American
intellectual life. In The Principles of Psychology, William James famously
argues against the artifactual models for consciousness that reigned in his
day, proposing instead a metaphor for interiority derived from the natural
world:
Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as
chain or train do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the fi rst instance. It is
nothing jointed; it flows. A river or a stream are the metaphors by which it is most
naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of
consciousness, or of subjective life. (239)
Within late nineteenth-century American culture, the rhyming figures

of constraint (chain) and conveyance (train) fail to describe thought
fitly, under Jamess account. No image has so altered the course of
American writing on consciousness as this thinkers fiat that we should
hereafter imagine our subjective life as a river flowing inside every per-
son. If, as James holds, it is just this free water of consciousness that
psychologists resolutely overlook in the period, poets like Ashbery
carry on the cultural work of bringing this swift fugitive surface into lin-
guistic representation in the twentieth century (Principles, 255). 5 Cast-
ing for consciousness like an angler throughout his literary career,

Ashbery extends and elaborates upon the metaphor set afloat by James in
the field of psychology nearly a century earlier (Harbor Activities,
Hotel, 150).
Of course, to imagine that brook, creek, or rill might provide a figure for
identity is to willfully court that most dclass of literary blunders, the
pathetic fallacy. Under the sign of an urbane irony, however, the New York
School poets repeatedly flirt with this poetic fallacy through their fanciful
figures of personification. If OHara cannot resist personifying the abstrac-
tions that he so energetically curated in the galleries of the Museum of
Modern Art, the old farm boy Ashbery invests the streams that run through
his work with what James calls subjective life. Egad, / Trixie, the water can
speak! Like a boy / it speaks, the poet playfully alerts his companions on
the surreal inner-tube journey of The Burden of the Park (Wakefulness,
19). Though Ruskin may write of Kingsleys restless waters that the foam is
not cruel, neither does it crawl (Painters, 166), in this poem Ashbery finds
fellowship with the avuncular Great Array River, which, like Wordsworths
tutelary Derwent, prepares its literary pupil for the hardships ahead: and
the current murmured to us to mind your back / for another day (Wakeful-
ness, 19). The poem Myrtle from the collection And the Stars Were Shining
provides what might be the most memorable incursion into the pathetic
fallacy in Ashberys work:
How funny your name would be

if you could follow it back to where
the first person thought of saying it,
naming himself that, or maybe
some other persons thought of it
and named that person. It would
be like following a river to its source,
which would be impossible. Rivers have no source.
They just automatically appear at a place
where they get wider, and soon a real
river comes along, with fish and debris,
regal as you please ... (65)
Though it would indeed be comic to witness some primitive forefather

initially naming himself Myrtle, Ashberys litt le joke on the gendering of
names quickly gives way to a sly profundity via the threefold invocation of
the philosophical category of the person in the poems opening sentence.
(Ordinarily one would write some other people thought of it rather than
some other persons thought of it). Indeed, the most colorful verb in this
text reflects Ashberys underlying concern with the nature of identity:

... and someone
has already given it a name: St. Benno
(saints are popular for this purpose) or, or
some other name, the name of his
long-lost girlfriend, who comes
at long last to impersonate that river
on a stage, her voice clanking
like its bed, her clothing of sand
and pasted paper, a piece of real technology,
while all along she is thinking, I can
do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
(Stars, 65; emphasis added)
To name a body of water after the patron saint of anglers(St. Benno is

commonly pictured holding a fi sh in his hand)is to confer some small
degree of personhood to its inhuman flux. But to convincingly imper-
sonate a river, one must more wholeheartedly subscribe to the fiction
that streams are people too. Cycling through the full complement of sub-
jective att itudes, Myrtle opens with a second-person addressHow
funny your name would bebefore digressing into a third-person
na rrativeand someone has already given it a nameonly to discover
its perspectival resting place in a theatricalized scene of fi rst-person
identification with a river. Costumed in the materials of riverbed (sand)
and literary composition (paper), the protagonist of this drama
declaims her clanking utterance while inwardly reflecting in stream-of-
consciousness monosyllabics upon the existential predicament she
shares with all water: I can do what I want to do. But I want to stay here.
Though the flowing contours of consciousness remain hidden from view,
writers from Heraclitus to Ashbery have long studied rivers as a surrogate
for the mind in the world. Perhaps the most assiduous pupil of rivers in mod-
ern poetry, Gerard Manley Hopkins, continually revisits this topography of
transition to examine the intersection of consciousness and creation:
Oct. 20Laus Deothe river today and yesterday. Yesterday it was a sallow glassy
gold at Hodder Roughs and by watching hard the banks began to sail upstream, the
scaping unfolded, the river was all in tumult but not running, only the lateral motions
were perceived, and the curls of froth where the waves overlap shaped and turned
easily and idly.I meant to have written more... . (Reader, 44)
Framed by the Laus Deo of Christian praise, Hopkinss journal entry

exemplifies the natural prayer of the soul. (The passive construction were
perceived illustrates the suppression of Hopkins perceiving ego in this

passage). Fixing his gaze on the Hodders glassy gold surface, the earlier poet
delights in what will one day become Ashberys pet mirage: by watching
hard the banks began to sail upstream. They may seem to be worlds apart,
but these two writers partake of a riverine fellowship: Just because the river
looks like its flowing backwards / Doesnt mean that motion doesnt mean
something, / That its incorrect as a metaphor, writes Ashbery the post-
modern skeptic, defending Hopkinss Laus Deo in the secular language of
meaning and metaphor (When half the time they dont know themselves,
April, 9). The historical distance that separates these writers is thus bridged
by the timeless river today and yesterday of Hopkinss account. If the Jes-
uit poet documents the lavish baroque surface of the burly water-backs
which heave after heave kept tumbling up from the broken foam and their
plump heap turning open in ropes of velvet on the Hodder (Reader, 44),
Ashbery, too, will record the marvelously sensuous surfaces of rivers: the
swiftly flowing / current is like green cream, like baize unfit for fulling
(Hotel, 78). The gorgeous materiality of such thick descriptions reflects the
rich literary material inscribed within running waters ephemeral figure.
Ending his remarkable spiritual exercise with an admission of failureI
meant to have written more (Reader, 44)Hopkins indicates the inex-
haustibility of the river as an imaginative topos within Western poetics.
For classical authors, as well as for Catherine of Siena, Spenser, Dray-
ton, and Milton, the river was a place in which to locate ideas about history,
time, and the nature of mans relation to the world, writes Wyman
Herendeen in his study From Landscape to Literature: The River and the
Myth of Geography (12). Throughout the history of Western poetics, knowl-
edge of rivers signifies not only an understanding of interiority, but, through
a curious synecdoche, a comprehensive grasp of global geography as well.
In Book IV of The Faerie Queene, Spenser demonstrates his encyclopedic
knowledge of rivers in an epithalamium for the Thames and the Medway:
And after [Nereus] the famous riuers came,

Which doe the earth enrich and beautifie:
The fertile Nile, which creatures new doth frame;
Long Rhodanus, whose sourse springs from the skie;
Faire Ister, flowing from the mountaines hie;
Diuine Scamander, purpled yet with blood
Of Greekes and Trojans, which therein did die;
Pactolus glistring with his golden flood,
And Tygris fierce, whose streames of none may be withstood.
Great Ganges, and immortall Euphrates,
Deepe Indus, and Maeander intricate,

Slow Peneus, and tempestuous Phasides,
Swift Rhene, and Alpheus still immaculate:
Oraxes, feared for great Cyrus fate;
Tybris, renowmed for the Romaines fame,
Rich Oranochy, though but knowen late;
And that huge riuer, which doth beare his name
Of warlike Amazons, which doe possesse the same. (141)
Mapping the major rivers known to the early modern world, Spensers
catalog provides an index of methods for constructing an archive of
knowledge within the period. From the Renaissance humanism implicit
in the use of the Latin name Ister for the Danube to the assimilation of
New World riverssuch as the Oronoco, though but knowen late, and
that huge riuer, the Amazondiscovered during the Age of Explora-
tion, Spensers wedding retinue provides an occasion for the virtuosic per-
formance of authorial knowledge. Atlas in hand, Ashbery constructs a
postmodern version of this catalog in one of his more audacious early
poems, from the collection Rivers and Mountains:
Far from the Rappahannock, the silent

Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagaras welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudsons
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained within steep banks. (Mooring, 173)
Unlike Spensers literary excursusembedded within the ongoing romance

of Florimell and Marinellno framing story provides an occasion for the
wholly decontextualized catalog of rivers titled Into the Dusk-Charged Air.
Ashberys poem is simply a river of rivers. But how can a poem hold even one
river within its prosodic form, let alone a compendium of waterways? Even
the epic poet Spenser expresses anxiety regarding this question: How can
they all in this so narrow verse / Contayned be, and in small compasse hild?
(Faerie, 140).6 For Ashbery, this formal anxiety becomes most apparent in
relation to the problem of textual closure. To impose a sense of an ending
upon Into the Dusk-Charged Air, the poet must exhort the rivers that course

through his catalog to cease motion: Let the Brazos / Freeze solid! And the
Wabash turn to a leaden / Cinder of ice! The Maran is too tepid, we must /
Find a way to freeze it hard (Mooring, 176). From the exclamatory jussives of
prayer (Let the Brazos / Freeze solid!) to the first-person plural imperative
of collective emergency (we must / Find a way), Ashbery dramatizes the
threat to literary shapeliness posed by his endlessly propulsive subject. By its
end, the poem achieves only a precarious terminal equilibrium in which the /
Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice and the Ardche glistens feebly
through the freezing rain (177). Like a river, the poem can slow to a stop
only when it freezes over. In this respect, the literary experiment of Into the
Dusk-Charged Air concludes with a surprisingly conservative alignment of
content with form. This river of rivers grows increasingly mimetic of a river as
it draws toward closure.
In a litt le poem called The Template from his recent collection Where
Shall I Wander, Ashbery wryly relates a Borgesian parable regarding the
mysterious palimpsest upon which all poetry is inscribed: [the template]
was always there, its existence seldom / questioned or suspected. The
poets of the future / would avoid it, as we had (52). As one might expect
from such an accomplished illusionist, Ashbery reveals precious litt le
about this magical template over the course of the poem. We only learn
that it / was like the Amazon, but on a much smaller scale (52). Con-
tracting an entire ars poetica into the compass of a single sentence, Ash-
bery thus proposes that the ideal poem should resemble a tropical river in
miniature. If, as Herendeen observes, with increasing frequency in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the river dictated the shape of whole
works or principal parts of them (Landscape, 12), Ashbery quietly revives
this bygone tradition within the realm of contemporary American litera-
ture. Indeed, the very title of a volume such as Flow Chart highlights the
riverine narratology of the digressive epic it superintends. In this estuarial
text, the river provides a figure not only for individual works of art but also
for poesis itself:
And the river threaded its way as best it could through sharp obstacles and
was sometimes not there
and was triumphal for a few moments at the end. I put my youth and
middle age into it,
and what else? Whatever happened to be around, at a given moment, for
that is the best
we have. (Flow, 9697)
By simply replacing river with poem in this passage, we discover a

narratological template for the meandering and elusive yet ultimately

jubilant Ashberian text: And the poem threaded its way as best it could
through sharp obstacles and was sometimes not there / and was triumphal
for a few minutes at the end. (Though various critics have argued that
Ashbery writes against triumphalist modes of closure, the incandescent
ending of Flow Chart itself belies any critical generalizations of this sort).7
More importantly, we learn here that this writers relationship to the river
of poetry is sacrificial in nature. Ashbery offers poesis his youth, his mid-
dle age, and whatever else happens to be around precisely because these
things are the best we have. Th is may be as close as Ashbery ever comes
to adopting a religious att itude within his work. Thus, the deities memori-
alized by Flow Chart are the classical offspring of Oceanus and Tethys:
Sad grows the river god as he oars past us / downstream without our
knowing him, writes the poet at the outset of his digressive masterpiece,
in an invocation that shades into an elegy on behalf of the forgotten divin-
ities of the stream (3).8
The story of modern verse may be told through a series of images for liter-
ary enunciation. M.H. Abrams documented the historical progression from
the faithful mirror of mimesis to the incandescent lamp in our evolving con-
ceptions of the English lyric, and, satisfied with neither mirror nor lamp,
William Carlos Williams famously added the modernist machine to the ico-
nography of American poetry in the early twentieth century. Postmodern-
ism, however, has yet to coin a master image for the poem of our time. This
figurative lacuna may reflect contemporary scholars failure to name post-
modernity as anything other than the aftermath of the modern. Or perhaps
we dwell in an era in which such images for writing proliferatelike the
labyrinths, masks, optical lenses, mines, and wells of Foucaults monograph
on Raymond Rousselmaking it difficult to select only one objective cor-
relative for poetry itself.9 In either case, Ashberys river occupies a curious
position within the dynastic succession of mirror, lamp, and machine in our
critical understanding of the poetic object. Unlike those earlier artifactual
models, the river is not a human invention but, rather, something that exists
independently of our design. (Not only does the river provide an alternative
to images for poetry drawn from man-made commodities like the mirror or
the machine; it also eludes classification among those figures derived from
human practices, like Gilberts notion of the poem as a solitary walk). As an
image for poetry, the river belongs to a family of metaphors drawn from the
natural world, like Whitmans leaves of grass or Goethes trees. But the river
is, in a sense, more abstract than the organic models of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuriesits serpentine form less anthropomorphic than a
tree, its surface less stable than the grass underfoot. An elusive figure, the
river entails no fixed idea of art, for such a fugitive muse asks only that the
poet perpetually change literary course in midstream.

Like a postmodern version of Ovids serpentine River Meander, Ash-
berys poetry threads its changing course through the three kingdoms
covered by this study of digression: the archive, historiography, and sub-
jectivity. Marianne Mooreof whom Ashbery once wrote, I am tempted
simply to call her our greatest modern poet (Ashbery, Prose, 108)
would have delighted in the encyclopedic catalog of rivers indexed in
Into the Dusk-Charged Air. Likewise, Hejinianwhose collection, The
Fatalist, Ashbery recently endorsed for its sumptuously tallied, tabu-
lated, and illuminated chronicling of an elusive whatever10 would
approve the riverine narratology revealed in The Template and put into
practice in texts such as Flow Chart. And of course, no participant in the
New York Schools effervescent literary charades would have so relished
Ashberys theatricalized impersonation of rivers as the impish founder of
Personism, Frank OHara. The river of Ashberys poetry thus traverses the
Foucauldian topoi of knowledge, history, and identity, quietly yet irrevoca-
bly changing our understanding of these subjects along its digressive
course.11 But this study opened with the question of aesthetics, so it seems
somehow appropriate to conclude my discussion of Ashberys wandering
work with an ars poetica culled from this writers own ongoing reflections
on rivers:
River Cento
Floating heart, why wander on senselessly?

To praise this, blame that,
Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where
We must stay, in motion.
It rolls from view, like a river which is never really there
because of moving on someplace,
A wide way of evading,
But it is hard, this not knowing which direction to take,
only knowing that you are moving in one,
Which brings me to my original argument.
Ah, what was the argument?
The real time of water gives you little wiggling room.
The center keeps collapsing and re-forming.
It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses

Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this.12
NEW DIGRESSIONS
John Ashbery is everywhere, ramifying, still, writes the poet and lit-
erary critic Stephen Burt in a popular fi n de sicle essay on new directions
in American poetry (Elliptical, 345346). Titled The Elliptical Poets,
this article ventures a name for a contemporary generation of younger
American poets writing in the wake of Ashberys digressive oeuvre:
Elliptical poets are always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-
unfolded backstory... . Ellipticists seek the authority of the rebellious; they want to
challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about
what belongs in a poem or what matters in life, and to do so while meeting traditional
lyric goals. (346)
Burts article has provoked some debate over whether such a description
offers sufficient literary-historical specificity or explanatory value.13 Poets
from Sappho to Anne Carson have, after all, sought to challenge their
readers, violate decorum, and surprise or explode assumptions about
what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life, all while meeting tradi-
tional lyric goals. But Burt himself observes, in a postscript to his essay,
that the term ellipticism aims to describe an emerging set of styles, a fam-
ily-resemblance notion, a nebula of habits and preoccupations rather
than inaugurating a literary movement like Language writing or new for-
malism (354). Ultimately, The Elliptical Poets has litt le to do with liter-
ary sociology and everything to do with fi nding the most apt adjective to
trace the indirect linearity of innovative writing in our new millennium.
Digression, it seems, is encoded within the literary unconscious of a new
generation of contemporary critics as well as artists.
In the preceding chapters of this book, I have touched upon the influence
of various Enlightenment figures on a digressive company of twentieth-
century American poets who profess an array of literary creeds and styles.
But influence, which, as Foucault points out in the Archaeology of Knowl-
edge, provides a support of too magical a kind to be amenable to analysis
(21), may be too strong a word for the elliptical affi liations that arise
among such a historically remote and diverse constellation of authors.
Nonetheless, I will elaborate upon this nonlinear lineage in the following
pages by considering some ways writers like Moore, Hejinian, and OHara

have inflected the digressive imagination of a new generation of practic-
ing American poets. From Robyn Schiff s intricate syllabics on a curious
litt le fi nch to Juliana Spahrs geopolitical jeremiad on the open-ended his-
torical chronicle of the news to Joshua Beckman and Matt hew Rohrers
genial performance of a new kind of collaborative conversation-poem,
these voices from a new millennium extend the digressive enterprise of
the twentieth century into our continuous present.
In a 1967 article on Marianne Moores Complete Poems for the New York
Review of Books, Ashbery ingenuously asks, Is she not a sort of Mary Pop-
pins of poetry? before proceeding to dismantle this view of the poet, not-
ing that Moores literary mannerisms are not the manners of a governess,
whether endowed with magic powers or not (Prose, 109, 111). Yet Moore
has served as The Perfect Nanny to a continuing succession of writers,
from Elizabeth Bishop to the new formalists to the contemporary American
poet Robyn Schiff. Schiff s debut collection, Worth, is a virtuosic twenty-
first century sequel to Moores Observations, both reinscribing and interro-
gating this modernists fascination with the worlds of haute couture, literary
form, and natural history. Worth s literary debt to Moore is nowhere more
apparent than in the poem Vampire Finch, whose opening lines might
easily have been uttered by the digressive lecturer of The Pangolin:
Roosting in a crater with one

red foot on either side of her stony egg,
the red-footed booby endures the finch
feeding on her tail in which the
finch has inserted its intravenous
bill to drink the blood. The red-footed booby
knows what happens if she steps
from duty to shoo the finch. The

finchs bill the ages perfect with use will
pierce the egg with one thrust and leave the egg,
should someone come along, fit to
paint an easter meditation upon
that can never spoil... . (Vampire Finch, Worth, 38)
Just as Schiff s finch relies upon a nesting mother to sustain itself, Vampire
Finch derives its formal armature from Moores patented syllabics.
Indeed, the subtle and sardonic Moore would have raised an eyebrow at
the oblique fable of literary ethics concealed within her postmodern
pupils self-conscious account of parasitism in the natural world: in this
homage, a young protge feeds upon the lifeblood of her literary elder,

gently caricatured in the form of a stoical booby. Threading its elaborate
dependent clauses through the embroidery pattern of Moores stanzaic
structures, Vampire Finch explores the various forms dependence may
take, from the finchs Darwinian parasitism to the vampiric need that drives
humans to commit atrocities on every conceivable scale to Schiff s own
anxiety of influence with regard to her literary reliance upon a Modernist
precursor. An endangered species, the vampire finch itself occupies a pre-
carious position in an ongoing drama of ecological interdependence that
may very well end, irrevocably, in extinction.14 The list of birds that provides
a title for each poem in the third section of WorthVampire Finch, Vest-
Pocket Finch, St. Lucia Finch, Devil Finch, Woodpecker Finch, and
the aptly named Goodbye Finchthus registers this poets anxiety
regarding the vanishing biodiversity of our planet. While the idealizing
genre of fable grants Moores creaturely specimens a literary asylum from
this evolutionary drama, Schiff s fabulous finches are implicated within the
fatalistic master narrative of Darwinian descent and extinction ab ovo.
Like her literary governess, Schiff embeds interdisciplinary digressions
throughout her natural history lessons, nimbly turning from the veiled
fable of the vampire fi nch to a worldly aside on the Japanese practice of
eggshell lacquer: A lacquer developed / by the Japanese who had / no
easter, also uses egg / shell and no egg (Worth, 38). In Marianne Moore
and China: Orientalism and a Writing of America, Cynthia Stamy observes
that Moores fascination with East Asian artifacts can be seen as an
attempt to interpret America through a poetic reconciliation with an alien
world and its curiosities (164). Schiff, however, updates Moores Ameri-
canist Orientalism for a postnational millennium. Nesting within Schiff s
digression on East Asian culture, one discovers an inlaid treatise not on
America but rather on aesthetics itself:
... Cracked beyond recognition,

the fragments are inlaid so as to seem one
continuous flat surface of
a tabletop on which one writing home
never knows one leans ones elbows on that which
stood balanced alone on its
smallest point, vernal equinox
momentarily drawing the whole egg up... . (Vampire Finch,
Worth, 38)
Schiff s lineation displays remarkable nuance in this miniature ars poetica.

If disjunctive modernists like Eliot and Pound have portrayed a split subject

cracked beyond recognition, Schiff s digressive speaker marvels at a lesser
known techn by which the fragments may be inlaid so as to seem one,
unifiedas the succeeding line elaboratesinto a continuous flat sur-
face that figures this writers digressive ethos of postmodernity. Where a
sentimental nature poet might simply elegize the evacuation (and ensuing
obliteration) of the incubating egg that opens this text, Schiff views the re-
ification of this organic form as a sacrificial procedure in the establishment
of a ground for writing itself: the red-footed boobys egg is proleptically
stony, as if fated never to hatch. The flat continuous surface of Schiff s egg-
shell tabletop thus furnishes a foundation for one writing home, sustaining
a connection to ones point of origin in this poem of incessant departures.
Eliots Fisher King may desperately shore discursive fragments against his
ruins, but Schiff s digressive speaker discovers a new use for fragments that,
seamlessly reassembled into the smooth inlaid surface of the writing table,
underwrite future literary production.
Following further digressions on Michelangelos Piet and Bram Stokers
Dracula among various other topics, the speaker of Vampire Finch returns
six intricate stanzas later to the field of natural history, though by now the
ornithological specimen that lends its name to this poem has been left far
behind: more beautiful / than the flower petal in the / prismatic bubble the
male fly brings the / female, the empty bubble he sometimes brings / instead
(Worth, 40). This little polemic on the aesthetics of the natural world figured
in the mating rituals of an aquatic fly, however, merely provides a pretext for
the digressive crescendo that closes Schiff s mercurial text:
... Revolving in the
glassy glare like a globe Vermeer

would dangle, it would make you sick to see things
as fast as they happen like locking your
gaze on a passing train you have
to look away. Loeb did when Leopold
practiced passing ransom from the 3 oclock.
He looked away from train to
cigar box to marsh grass searching
for the empty box which would contain ransom
if this wasnt practice. Leopold knew
a good place to hide the body
from his days of bird-watching where the train
cut through the still marsh and From the air vents we
could see civilians laughing. (40)

The rigorous and deliberate grammar of this masterfully enjambed poem
begins to pull apart at the seams as Schiff s speaker fi xes her gaze on Ver-
meers whirling globe, a figure for the turning world: it would make you
sick to see things / as fast as they happen [for it would be] like locking your /
gaze on a passing train [until] you have / to look away. This phenomenologi-
cal vertigo quickly finds its historical embodiment in the nausea experi-
enced by Richard Loeb during rehearsals for a perfect crime whose
consequences (played out in an anti-Semitic Trial of the Century) will
outrun his vampiric expectations. Ultimately, the train racing through
these accelerating digressions carries with it the freight of the Holocaust as
well, for the poem ends not with a return to Darwins vampire finch but
rather with Moshe Garbarzs nightmarish account of the view from inside
the cattle car bearing him toward Auschwitz.15 Thus, Vermeers spinning
globe, confounding our faculties of perception, prefigures the nausea of
history that overtakes Schiff s speaker by the conclusion of Vampire
Finch. Indeed, the underlying historiographical project of this poem lies
in Schiff s effort to keep pace with things / as fast as they happen to render
an accurate transcription of how one thing leads, fatefully, to another.
The millenarian anxieties that trouble the speaker of Worth break
out into a full-blown poetics of paranoia in Schiff s next collection,
Revolver: My mask aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / my lungs,
writes the poet in H5N1, a hypochondriacs revision of Keatss address
to the nightingale, as though the inhale/exhale valve / I tightened to
fi lter the avian strain / excludes bacteria blood needs to have (50). Th is
craft y adoption of a hysterical posture provides Schiff with both a liter-
ary persona and a protective mask that fi lters the contagious spread of
paranoiac associations throughout the digressive investigations of
Revolver. The fi nal poem in this volume, Project Paperclip, derives its
title from the code name for the recruitment of Nazi engineers of the
V-2 Bomber into the American space program, exposing a shadowy
connection between American astronauts assembling prefabricated
joinery / of a botany lab in zero gravity (59) and the prisoners at Buch-
enwald who turned V-2 / diagrams drawn by Von Braun / into the real
thing (67). Toward the end of this relentlessly associative poem, Schiff
reveals her own authorial position within the texts network of histori-
cal, ecological, formal, and domestic consequence:
... I began containing
Starry Sky Beetles in boxes of 42 syllables each

to honor my mothers birth in 1942,
three days after the B-29 Superfortress

flew
for the first
time ( Japan was built of sticks),
but I say goodbye in 42 for each call Tom Ford fielded on
September 11, 2001 for the Yves Saint
Laurent purple peasant blouse. (Project Paperclip, Revolver, 67)
In Schiff s account of the poems construction, we learn that Project

Paperclip originated as a zoological exhibit of invasive Asian beetles
framed within Moores syllabic stanzas. But this eccentric birthday
present for a child of the Holocaust ultimately digresses into a catalogue
of purchase orders for a haute couture blouse on the morning of the
Twin Towers destruction: The New York store wasnt open to the
public yet / but in the back room 42 calls came through / for a silk
peasant blouse that throws its purple // silk light back at the moon it
came from, calls / which I shall account for backward in the manner / I
count myself down to sleep ... (67). The formal armature of forty-two
syllables per stanza, itself derived from the historical date of her moth-
ers birth, offers Schiff a curious numerological association with the
tally of orders to Yves Saint Laurent on the morning of 9/11. Moores
rigorous syllabics thus provide a numerical key to the wildly associative
logic of Schiff s poem. Counting backward from forty-two in the
manner / I count myself down to sleep (67), the insomniac speaker of
Revolver seeks to put her digressive consciousness to rest through this
ritualized reckoning.
Like the countdown to a rocket launch or a bombs detonation, Schiff s
backward counting lends the closing pages of Project Paperclip their sense
of simultaneous anticipation and dread. 42: / from a woman on the roof,
writes the poet, setting into motion her aggressively enjambed litany of the
indifferent and the oblivious, 41: // from he who saw the first plane hit but
boarded / the subway anyway and sat in darkness / with an inkling ... (67
68). This putative reconstruction of the mornings callers to Yves Saint Lau-
rent, however, rapidly digresses into an index of Schiff s literary imagination:
... va banque; vacancy; vaccination;

vacillation; vacuum;
the visionary; the vale; vagary; Vanity Fair;

vampires; the vault; the volume;
the video cassette; the view from Greenpoint;
the vote; a vein in line at the blood bank

following around the corner; the vow;
the viff; the vig; the veer; the veer again;
the vulture... . (68)
Unlike Moore, who uses the index both as a prelude and as an appendix to
her literary compositions, Schiff embeds her index to Revolver within the
text of Project Paperclip itself. To subpoena the forty-two individuals
who disregarded history in their pursuit of personal style on the morning
of 9/11 entails, for this self-aware aesthete, a thorough accounting of her
own literary conscience as well. Project Paperclip thus veers from its
blacklist of conspicuous consumers into an elegiac roster of those who were
themselves consumed in the wreckage of the days terrorist attacks7:
from the cockpit; 6: from the fi re; / 5: on the elevator, between floors
stuck but with a signalonly to veer again into a fi nal confession that
the fi rst call came from me (69). In her digressive reckoning of things /
as fast as they happen, Schiff ultimately counts herself among the tally of
the indifferent and the doomed. With breathtaking velocity, then, the
countdown that concludes Project Paperclip registers the bewildering
personal and world-historical ramifications that accompany the hijacked
planes as they speed toward their targets. Schiff s accelerating digressions
furnish this writer with a strategy for elaborating upon Moores poetics
while also giving form to the inchoate tragedy of a new millennium.
Oh this endless twentieth century. // Oh endless. // Oh century. //
Oh when will it end, writes Juliana Spahr midway through her post-9/11
jeremiad, Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to March 27, 2003,
lamenting the absence of closure to a long twentieth century thateven
when viewed retrospectivelyrefuses to end (Connection, 37). In this
long poem, Spahr, who has hailed My Life as one of the most powerful
works of the late twentieth century, employs Hejinians chronicle form to
investigate the open-ended historical narrative in which she finds herself
unwillingly emplotted. Here, humanitys collective ongoing chronicle
commonly known as the newsprovides Spahr with a kind of Sortes Vergil-
ianae for envisaging the denouement of this unfolding story. On November
30, 2002, when I realized that it was most likely that the United States would
invade Iraq again, I began to sort through the news in the hope of understanding
how this would happen, writes the poet in an italicized prefatory note to this
text (Connection, 13). But the narratological practice of sorting investigated
by Hejinian in poems like Oxota only yields frustration for a writer who finds
even the fabula of her own local history to be utterly perplexing:
How can we be true to one another with histories of place so deep,

so layered we cant begin to sort through it here in the middle of

the Pacific with its own deep unsortable history?
I left our small apartment that is perched at the side of a dormant
volcano that goes miles down to the ocean floor, perched on layer
after layer of exploding history. (Connection, 50; emphasis added)
Writing from her home in Hawaii, Spahr fi nds that even this apparently
idyllic island is deeply implicated within a history of colonial conquest
and continuing militarism: I had to think about what I was connected with,
what I was complicit with, as I lived off the fat of the military-industrial com-
plex on a small island, she goes on to remark in this preface (13).16 Even
the timeless Pacific, which encircles Spahrs tropical paradise, is here
imagined as a tempestuous reservoir of deep unsortable history. Com-
posed as a serial epistle to her plural beloveds during the months lead-
ing up to the second American invasion of Iraq, Poem Written from
November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003 chronicles Spahrs difficulties in
sorting out the consequences of an exploding history that refuses to
pause for literary retrospection: Th is is the stuff of the everyday in this
world. // In this never-ending twentieth-century world (57).17
If sorting through the bewildering chronicle of the news fails to
offer Spahr an understanding of current eventsI thought that by watch-
ing the news more seriously I could be a little less naive, writes the poet, but
I gained no sophisticated understanding as I wrote these poemsshe may
at least orient herself by considering her own geographical position
within this global narrative: I had to think about my intimacy with things
I would rather not be intimate with even as (because?) I was very far away
from all those things geographically. This feeling made lyricwith its atten-
tion to connection, with its dwelling on the beloved and on the afarsuddenly
somewhat poignant, somewhat apt, even somewhat more useful than I usually
find it (Connection, 13). Spahrs parenthetical intimation that Hawaiis
geographical isolation paradoxically sanctions her attention to connec-
tion, rewritten in a less tentative syntax, might read thus: Because I was
very far away from all those things geographically, I had to think about my
intimacy with things I would rather not be intimate with. This sense of con-
nection made lyric provides Spahr with an emotional (poignant), cogni-
tive (apt), and practical (useful) response to the current events scrolling
down her computer screen. Writing of the green parrots clamoring over her
rooftop at dawn, Spahr establishes a surprising literary connection between
domestic life and the remote world of foreign affairs:
When I speak of the parrots I speak of all that we wake to this morning, the Dow
slipping yet still ending in a positive mood yesterday, Mission Control, the stalled
railcar in space, George Harrisons extra-large will, Hare Krishnas, the city of Man,

the city of Danane and the Movement for Justice and Peace and the Ivorian Popular
Movement for the Great West, homelessness and failed coups, few leads in the
bombing in Kenya. (Poem, Connection, 15)
Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003 is constructed as
a series of variations on this digressive theme. Changing the subject of her
utterance from the parrots overhead to the anthropomorphized fi nancial
markets of late capitalism, humanitys efforts to colonize outer space,
celebrity gossip, the commodification of ancient religion, and Africas
political turmoil, Spahr continually reminds us of her subject matters
digressive instability: when I speak of your skins, I speak of newspaper
headlines in other countries and different newspaper headlines here
(Connection, 20); when I speak of our time together, I speak also of the
new theories of the development of the cell from iron sulfide, formed at
the bottom of the oceans (32); when we spoke of birds and their bowers
and their habits of nest we also spoke of the Israeli military bulldozer that
ran over Rachel Corrie, the mysterious flu that appeared in Hong Kong
and had spread by morning to other parts of Asia, Elizabeth Smarts
return, and Zoran Djindjics death (66).
In the discourse of formal logic, this rhetorical rule of Poem Written
from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003 when I speak of A, I speak
also of Bfi nds its expression via the concept of entailment. Entail-
ment governs relations in which to speak of one subject is also, always
already, to be speaking of another subject. In a radically interconnected
world where one cannot discuss birds and bowers without also referring
to current events in the Gaza Strip, Hong Kong, Salt Lake City, and
Belgrade, a logic of entailment underwrites all utterance. Indeed, the
digressive undertow of this globalizing logic ultimately renders it
impossible for Spahrs speaker to adhere to her intended literary genre:
I mean to speak of beds and bowers, writes the poet, and all I speak of
is Barghoutis call for a change of leadership and the strike in Venezuela
against Chavez and the sixty-six ships on the fleet of shame (Connec-
tion, 28). From the abortive erotic pastoralthe beds and bowers
interred within this text, however, a muted yet curiously Whitmanic
epic arises:
I speak of those dead in other parts of the world who go unreported.

I speak of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly wings and hurricanes.
I speak of one hundred and fifty people sheltering at the Catholic Mission in the city of Man.
I speak of a diverted Ethiopian airliner, US att acks on Iraqi air defense sites, and
warnings not to visit Yemen. (Connection, 20)

Substituting for the anaphoric I sing of poems such as I Sing the Body
Electric a more subdued refrain of I speak, Spahr revises Whitmans exu-
berant poetics within a darkening twenty-first century context of geopoliti-
cal entailments.18 The literary project of Poem Written from November 30,
2002 to March 27, 2003and of the aptly titled collection, This Connection
of Everything with Lungs, which houses itassociates the butterflys wing
not only with hurricanes but with hijackings, military strikes, and interna-
tional travel advisories as well. The meteorologists butterfly effect (I speak
of boundaries and connections, locals and globals, butterfly wings and
hurricanes) thus provides Spahr with an apt metaphor for her global poet-
ics of entailment in this highly digressive work.
Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March 27, 2003 resembles, in
many ways, the continuously updated weather maps and online news
feeds available to contemporary consumers of electronic media. Scanning
the headlines every few minutes on the computer screen and on the tele-
vision screen (Connection, 33), Spahr obsessively maps a network of con-
nections between distant regions of the planet in the digressive literary
geography of this text. Such a cartographic enterprise would be impossi-
ble without the advent of new information technologies: when I speak of
the curves of your cheeks, their soft down, their cell after cell, their smooth-
ness, their even color, I speak of the NASA launch and the child Net safety
law and Native Linux pSeries Server (3132). However, the mapping of
entailments across the globe is not merely an exercise of the Linux servers
technological capabilities. In an earlier collection with the memorable title
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, Spahr had proposed that the story of we is the
story of what is crooked / and loving that crooked (80). If the bewilder-
ing proliferation of entailments wrought by globalization today make it
difficult to imagine the collective story of we as anything resembling the
proverbial straight story of simpler times, Spahrs digressive art examines
the story of what is crooked to take a fi rst step toward loving that
crooked. Furthermore, the double meaning of the word crooked fore-
grounds the moral difficulty of embracing any such story. Our collective
entailment within the ramifying narrative of modernity implicates us,
this poet intimates, in the corruption and fraudthe crookedness
which make of modern life a hardship for so many. Finding a way to love
that crooked, then, remains an ongoing ethical challenge for we who
debate the records / and histories and offer our input and / retellings to
make the swirl (81).
Faced with a labyrinthine political history and a perplexing globalized
present, both Schiff and Spahr cultivate new modalities of literary digres-
sion as a method for making sense of our complex world. But the poetics
of digression continues to unfold on a more local scale in the twenty-fi rst

century as well. On a sunny afternoon late in July 2002, two young poets
lounged on a rock amid the joggers, roller skaters, and metropolitan
flaneurs of New Yorks Central Park and recorded their impressions of the
pageantry parading before them:
A flag unknown to us walks past. We talk into our microphone about what is impor-
tant about this flag. Central Park is confusing. Flags often unknown to us walk past.
We notice different things. Sometimes. Sometimes we converge. These birds peck-
ing. Horses carrying tourists. Sunlight. Bellies with adornments. We enjoy New
York. We enjoy narratives. Space-age experiments. Industrious modes of alienation
trouble us. We respond bilingually. (Beckman and Rohrer, Nice Hat. Thanks., 63)
Perfectly content to leave the alien flag that opens their idyll unattached to
any particular nation or cause, Joshua Beckman and Matt hew Rohrer
quickly turn their collective attention to the apolitical pleasures of the
scene at hand: These birds pecking. Horses carrying tourists. Sunlight.
Bellies with adornments. We enjoy New York. But the apparent simplicity
of Beckman and Rohrers utterance is belied by the elaborate composi-
tional method underlying this text, for A Note on Process is actually
constructed through a painstaking form of dialogic improvisation
wherein each poet speaks one (and only one) word in response to a word
previously spoken by his partner.19 Thus, Beckman and Rohrers literary
answer to modernitys industrious modes of alienation is quite literally
bilingual, or uttered by two different tongues: Lets explain something
about something: fi rst I say something and then he says something (63).
Like OHara, these twenty-fi rst century New York poets model their text
upon the social form of conversation, though A Note on Process con-
strues the ultimate claim of personismthe poem is at last between two
persons instead of two pages (OHara, Collected, 499)within a prelim-
inary framework of poetic composition rather than the ex post facto con-
text of literary reception. 20
A Note on Process provides the afterword to a series of dialogic
improvisations composed by Beckman and Rohrer over the course of a
single year, but the poems testify to a long-standing literary friendship
that continues to this day. Curiously, these texts frequently efface their
own collaborative origins, as in the poem Jangling, with its emphatically
singular fi rst-person opening:
Money cannot find me.

I try to be reasonable but money is horridly banal.
Money, blow and blow is what I think about you.
Street urchins make more than me. (Nice, 57, emphasis added)

The playful falsification of lyric voice that underwrites this poem from the
outsethere, two individuals pretend to speak as oneculminates in
the concluding lines coy allusion to the mystery of identity: I know my
own name. / It is something exaggeratedly French (57). Uncomfortable
with academic poststructuralisms Gallic extravagance, Beckman and
Rohrer ultimately prefer to describe their collaborative intersubjectivity
in the homegrown vernacular of American English, observing in A Note on
Process that our method turned us into another guy (64). Yet one
decidedlyand perhaps exaggeratedlyFrench writers late work provides
a particularly useful way of theorizing Beckman and Rohrers intersubjec-
tive persona. The art of living is the art of killing psychology, writes
Foucault, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individuali-
ties, beings, relations, qualities. If one cant manage to do that in ones life,
that life is not worth living (Dits, 1075).21 In the sphere of contemporary
poetics, then, Beckman and Rohrer resurrect the art of living that Foucault
examines in his work on classical antiquity. Killing their individual psy-
chologies by submitt ing to a rigorously collaborative procedure, these
poets explore the possibility of creating with oneself and with others
unnamed individualities or beings(we never do learn the name of their
exaggeratedly French other guy)as well as affective relations and
qualities. Without such intersubjective art, for these consummate poets
of friendship, ones life would not be worth living.
The art of living, under Foucaults account, provided Greek antiquity
with certain formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one
distributed them, in the limits one observed, in the hierarchy one
respected (Sexuality, vol. II, 89). Though he derives this concept from
the analysis of sexual practices between men in the period, Foucault
more broadly seeks to defi ne the conditions in which human beings
problematize what they are, what they do, and the world in which they
live through his theorization of what is alternately translated as the art
of living or the aesthetics of existence (10). Thus, toward the end of his
introduction to the second volume of his History of Sexuality, Foucault
adapts Plutarchs term etho-poetic as a way of framing the texts under
examination in his study (13). Like the classical practitioners of Foucaults
aesthetics of existence, Beckman and Rohrer explore the formal princi-
ples and limits of a homosocial poetics throughout their collaborative
enterprise. Indeed, there is something decidedly queer about the utter-
ance of the other guyboth alter ego and offspringwho grows out of
their literary intimacy. Perpetually distracted by the alternating literary
intentionalities of his collaborative progenitors, this curious speaker per-
petually digresses from one line to the next, as in the ending of the collec-
tions fi nal poem, Falling Bags:

Bags contain everything that they can.
Have you understood?
I have obsessions.
Tomorrow seems distant.
Like three sailboats sailing through three wineglasses.
When summer unpacks for good
were going swimming. (Nice, 60)
The unexpected dilation of subjectivity from the singular I to the plural

we in the last line of the volumes concluding poem subtly discloses the
collaborative construction of Beckman and Rohrers literary persona at
the last possible prosodic moment. If Rimbaud once declared that I is
another, here Rohrer and Beckman suggest that I is collective. Th is
quiet revelation thus participates in the construction of a community, just
as Foucaults art of living enabled certain citizens of classical antiquity to
form elective affi liations in the shared exploration of pleasure and knowl-
edge. In this etho-poetic spirit, Beckman and Rohrer generously include
the reader in their plans to go bathing together on some halcyon day when
summer arrives for good as the poem ends. Like Whitman, who con-
cludes his Song of Myself with the most companionable of gesturesI
stop somewhere waiting for you (Leaves, 247)these writers close their
experiment in poetic collaboration by welcoming us, too, into their lit-
erary fellowship.
Nice Hat. Thanks., the volume that gathers together Beckman and
Rohrers collaborative work, draws its disarming title from the briefest
and most innovativetext in this collection (16). Here, Beckman and
Rohrer construct a minimalist conversation poem that advances the tra-
dition of Virgils Eclogues, Coleridges Frost at Midnight, and OHaras
A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island into a new era.
Though it is composed of only three monosyllabic words, this text marks
a tectonic shift in the conversation-poems investigation into the dialectic
between lyric and socius. While classical, Romantic, and New York School
authors had previously conceptualized their conversation poems as the
literary mimesis of social exchange, Rohrer and Beckman compose their
dialogic texts as the performance, rather than the imitation, of conversa-
tion. Nowhere is this performative aspect of Rohrer and Beckmans liter-
ary experiment more apparent than in the compact disc companion to
Nice Hat. Thanks., issued under the title Adventures while Preaching the
Gospel of Beauty.22 Listeners to these recordings join the audiences at the
various bars and bookstores across the United States where Beckman and
Rohrer travelled to purvey their collaborative art of living in the autumn
of 2002. In the audio track titled Hillbillies, for example, we listen as

Beckman and Rohrer improvise upon a literary theme proposed by an
audience member:
beckman: My sister ...

rohrer: is no hillbilly ...
[Audience laughs]
beckman: anymore.
[Audience laughs]
rohrer: Can you believe they built that fence ... [Audience and
poets laugh] ... I think a lot of Bashos poems start like that ...
Can youcan you believe, frog, and all that
beckman: All right, Can you believe they built that fence ...
around the place where all of the hillbillies ...
rohrer: dance?
Rohrers talky digression on Basho illustrates the aleatory influence of a

performative context on literary composition. Diverted by the encour-
aging laughter that signifies the audiences participation in this collabora-
tive performance, Rohrer is unable to resist a chatt y aside that, remarkably,
initiates an entirely new poetic improvisation in the form of a parodic
haiku with the five-syllable opening line, Can you believe, frog. Indeed,
this digressive logic could be repeated indefi nitely, for Rohrer interrupts
his own haiku with yet another conversational aside (and all that ...)
that, in turn, provides the discursive opportunity to embed an entirely new
literary improvisation within this performance, and so on. Only Beck-
mans interruption of Rohrers digressionAll right, Can you believe
they built that fencereturns the poets to their original language game.
Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty is shot through with
asides, interruptions, and literary diversions that illuminate the digres-
sive nature of collaborative performance. The compact disc thus cap-
tures the ramifying contours of what Marjorie Perloff described as
differential poetry, or poetry that does not exist in a single fi xed state
but can vary according to the medium of presentation: printed book,
cyberspace, installation, or oral rendition (qtd. Armand, Contemporary,
33). In print publication, the passage from Hillbillies might look some-
thing like this:
My sister is no hillbilly
anymore. Can you believe

they built that fence
around the place
where all of the hillbillies
dance?
Such a reified presentation, however, obscures the drama of performance

and collaboration that subtends this faux fi rst-person singular poem.
(Rohrers conversational aside on Basho, the audiences laughter, and the
verbal tics of ummm and okay that punctuate the poets dialogue are
only a few of the collaborative elements lost in such a transposition of per-
formance to print). Only a live performance or a recording of their
improvisatory procedure can fully delineate the detours of Beckman and
Rohrers collaborative imagination. Though their sense of the relation-
ship between poetry and politics may seem far removed from Perloff s,
Beckman and Rohrer thus map a highly digressive poetics through their
adventures in differential poetry. En route, the rigorously structured
improvisations of Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures while Preaching the
Gospel of Beauty adapt the classical arts of existenceintentional and
voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct,
but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their sin-
gular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aes-
thetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria (Sexuality, vol. II,
1011)to construct a model of literary fellowship for a new millen-
nium. Transforming their friendship into a work that bears particular aes-
thetic values, these poets fi nd themselves promoting a highly digressive
criteria of literary style. If our signifier for social discourse, conversa-
tion, features at its center the etymological root of the word verse, the
inverse of this relation may be true as well, for Beckman and Rohrers
digressive performances illuminate the collaborative conversation that
lies at the heart of verse itself for such literary company.
In the introductory pages of this study, I proposed that, due to an ongoing

theoretical preoccupation with the poetics of fragmentation and disjunc-
tion, the trope of digression has been largely overlooked within our con-
temporary rhetoric of literary forms. While poets from T. S. Eliot to Clark
Coolidge have painstakingly pried open the fault lines within discourse to
construct a poetry that is, in Peter Quartermains words, free to be inar-
ticulate (Disjunctive, 3), an understudied tradition of American writing
from Whitman through Ashbery has fashioned a more fluent poetics that
mobilizes multiple subjects within a unified field of literary enunciation.
At times, it may seem as if Ashberys work marks out the far frontier of
digression, for it is difficult to imagine a text more serpentine, elusive, and

mercurial than the unruly epic of Flow Chart. Nonetheless, an emerging
generation of younger American poets currently endeavors to extend the
digressive poetics of the twentieth century into a volatile new millennium.
Schiff s accelerating digressions, Spahrs logic of entailment, and the col-
laborative performances of Beckman and Rohrer represent three innova-
tive literary strategies for changing the subject in the unfolding story of
contemporary American literary culture. Elaborating upon the digressive
methods of authors such as Moore, Hejinian, and OHara, these poets carry
on their precursors engagement with the poetics of Enlightenment in the
literary present tense. Together, the successive generations of modern
American writers considered in this study investigate the Foucauldian topoi
of archive, historiography, and subjectivity while refusing to objectify these
subjects of inquiry, for knowledge, history, and identity are themselves the
changing subjects that provide the mercurial matter for a digressive art.
Before closing this book, it may be worthwhile to reflect upon my own
assumptions and priorities as a reader of poetry. Midway through The
Archaeology of Knowledge, Foucault makes a distinction between two kinds
of a priori: the formal and the historical. The formal a priori is one whose
jurisdiction extends without contingence in a Kantian sense, whereas
Foucaults admittedly rather barbarous term of the historical a priori
refers to an a priori not of truths that might never be said, or really given to
experience; but the a priori of a history that is given, since it is that of things
actually said (127128). Though Foucault deploys these terms with regard
to the history of ideas, the study of literature in our time, too, has been
shaped by the dialectic that emerges between the formal and the historical
senses of what is given. One temptation for scholarship, then, might be to
conflate or reconcile these distinct dimensions of analysis too readily:
Nothing, therefore, would be more pleasant, or more inexact, than to conceive of this
historical a priori as a formal a priori that is also endowed with a history: a great,
unmoving, empty figure that irrupted one day on the surface of time, that exercised
over mens thought a tyranny that none could escape, and which then suddenly dis-
appeared in a totally unexpected, totally unprecedented eclipse: a transcendental
syncopation, a play of intermittent forms. (128)
In the study of modern poetry, fragmentation has assumed the status of a

formal a priori that is also endowed with a history. Moreover, we have
outfitted this great, unmoving, empty figure that irrupted one day on the
surface of time with normative theoretical justifications that many poets
today fi nd hard to escape. Here, I do not aim to replace one a priori with
another by suggesting that digression ought to eclipse fragmentation in
a historical play of intermittent forms. Rather, I hope to have diversified

our critical lexicon by foregrounding an overlooked literary figure that
has flourished alongside the aesthetics of disjunction in modern Ameri-
can poetry. Other figures and tropes might have served this purpose as
well. One could imagine a book on anaphora, for example, that would
examine the work of poets such as Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Koch, and
Kenny Goldsmith, among many others. Studies of this sort would fur-
ther augment our understanding of the ways different kinds of formal a
prioribe they disjunctive, digressive, or anaphoric, to name just a few
possibilitiesintersect with what is given, historically, in the field of
modern American poetry.
To read Marianne Moore, Lyn Hejinian, and Frank OHara as archaeo-
logical poets is not, I hope, to argue that these writers are Foucauldian
theoreticians avant la lett re. Rather, Moores investigations into the dis-
course of knowledge, Hejinians substitution of chronicle for history as a
model for literary narration, and OHaras inquiry into the positioning of
subjects within social exchange all show how poetics and theory alike
have explored a broad spectrum of common concerns in twentieth-
century intellectual culture. At times, the poets in this study arrive at very
different conclusions from those of Foucault with regard to the discursive
formations of knowledge, history, and identity, though they all practice
some variation of an archaeological method in their literary pursuits.
Where Foucault intimates that manthe study of whom is supposed by
the nave to be the oldest investigation since Socratesis probably no
more than a kind of rift in the order of things, for example, Moore con-
cludes The Pangolin with a portrait of man not as disjunction personi-
fied, but, rather, as a figure of transition (Order, xxiii). Elsewhere, the poets
under examination in these pages appear to be in sympathy with Foucaults
theoretical agenda, as we see in OHaras disavowal of sovereign models of
speaking subjectivity through his invention of the metropolitan conversa-
tion-poem. It is difficult to know in advance whether a shared methodol-
ogy will lead both the theorist and the poet to the same destination. In
writing this book, however, I have come to feel that poetry may help us to
consider familiar theoretical positions in a new light. Hejinians literary
recuperation of fatalism as a subjectival att itude, for example, helps us to
see Foucault as more than just a theorist of historical despair. Likewise,
Beckman and Rohrers collaborative etho-poetics shows us what Foucaults
classical aesthetics of existence might look like in exuberant modern
practice. The poets in this study not only change the subject of their own
literary writings; they change our ways of reading as well.

NOTES
CHAPTER 1
1. At first this quote from the house organ looks like an in-house joke, writes Joseph Har-
rington in his essay Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Insurance, but in fact
cemeteries are vulnerable to accidental damage by fire, flood, tornado, or earthquake.
Stevens point, however, is that All-Risk policies do not cover loss due to deterioration or
depreciation; and cemeteries, or at any rate their residents, are beyond the need for that
kind of coverage (100).
2. In Stevenss poem, the moon was always in Scandinavia for one permanent resident of
Norfolk Cemetery. By contrast, the kinetic labor of the darkies and the mutable passion
of the young lovers who rendezvous in this secluded spotHe for her burning breast
and she for his armsmark the subjection of the living to change, and their exclusion
from the cold and fixed socius underfoot (Collected, 92, 93).
3. Indeed, reading this poetry becomes a venture in crystallography in Burnshaws critical
assessment (364365).
4. The final insolence, however, begins with a qualifying clause: For realists, what is is what
should be. Earlier in The Comedian as the Letter C, Stevens had taken pains to distin-
guish his bildungsromans protagonist, Crispin, from a mere pricking realist (Collected,
32). And in an unpublished poem called Anecdote of the Abnormal, Stevens hails
Crispin-valet, Crispin-saint! as The exhausted realist who beholds / His tattered
manikin arise, / Tuck in the straw, / And stalk the skies (551). From the scarecrow
Crispin to the shaken realist of Esthtique du Mal, this propagandist for the imagina-
tion paints the priesthood of the real in an unflattering light.
5. In an early essay on Stevens, Fredric Jameson notes that philosophies of as if are noto-
riously unsatisfying and self-unravelling, arguing that Stevenss own ideology of exis-
tentialist anomie is predicated upon just such a wishful construction (Modernist, 221).
Yet the poet deploys his as if strategically here, in order to highlight the unsatisfying
and self-unravelling nature of any changeless Utopia.
6. Tatlins final thesis reveals the depth of the manifesto genres imbrication within a numer-
ical logic:
The world of numbers, as the nearest to the architectonics of art, gives us: (1) confirma-
tion of the existence of the inventor; (2) a complete organic connection of the individual
with the collective numeral. There is no error in Khlebnikovs example. (1) In a series of
natural numbers, prime numbers, indivisible and non-recurring, are scattered. Each of
these numbers carries with it its new numerical world... . (Tatlin, 238)
7. The philosophical meaning of Kants notion of purposiveness is, of course, subject to
ongoing debate. For the purposes of my discussion, however, it is more important to
historicize this debate than it is to resolve it. As Anthony Savile points out, the interpre-
tation that the beautiful is what looks designed, although not for anything in particular
(Aesthetics, 87) dates to the years of Stevenss formal education within American intellec-
tual life of the period:
The interpretation goes back a long way, and perhaps it is rooted in Kants own footnote
to the summary sentence of 17. In 1892, J.H. Bernard uses the contrast of we judge the
form of the object to be purposive, but cannot explain any purpose served by it (formal
and subjective purposiveness) with we have a definite notion of what it is adapted for
(real and objective). (98)
Saviles disagreement with Bernards fin de sicle interpretation of Kantian purposiveness
provides the philosophical crux of his useful study Kantian Aesthetics Pursued. Though
the meaning of purposiveness remains undecided to this day, the idea that a work of
art ought to look designed, but not for anything in particular enjoyed philosophical
prestige in Stevenss time.
8. Grossmans reading of Kant is based upon a passage from the 1786 essay What Does It
Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?:
In the proper meaning of the word, to orient oneself means to use a given direction
(when we divide the horizon into four of them) in order to find the othersliterally, to
find the sunrise. Now if I see the sun in the sky and know it is now midday, then I know
how to find south, west, north, and east. For this, however, I also need the feeling of a
difference in my own subject, namely, the difference between my right and left hands. I
call this a feeling because these two sides outwardly display no designatable difference in
intuition. (qtd. Grossman, True-Love, 8)
Kants ongoing interest in the problem of handedness, or chirality as it is termed in
the sciences, indicates the importance of this curious problem for the elaboration of his
metaphysical project.
9. To preserve Foucault as a theoretical resource for redeeming the personal subject in
Ariel and the Police, Lentricchia displaces his unease with the poststructuralists fatalism
onto the more proximate target of Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists toward
the end of his chapter on Foucaults Fantasy for Humanists (8896).
10. There are two meanings of the word subject, observes Foucault, subject to some-
one else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience and
self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes
subject to (Beyond, 212). Such formulations contribute to the sense among some
readers that the Foucauldian subject is bound within a historical predicament wherein
power invariably has the last word.
11. Though Jameson takes Lacan as his exemplary theorist of a fractured postmodern
subjectivity here, this account of disjunctive aesthetics applies equally well to an art
created under the sign of Foucauldian subjectivity. The formal symptoms identified
in Postmodernismheterogeneity, fragmentation, and randomnessare not only on
display within a Lacanian pathology but in Foucauldian lyricism (to use Lentricchias
phrase) as well.
12. In an early study of Language writing, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, George
Hartley argues that this movement employs literary fragmentation as a critique of
and Utopian compensation for the reification of language in late capitalism, reclaim-
ing disjunction for a radical political activism (52). More recently, in an essay titled
Restoring China, Rob Halpern foregounds the effacement of the poems publication
history in Jamesons reading of China, observing that Jamesons access to China is not
immediate, but rather mediatedsomething one would expect Jameson the dialectician
[ 158 ] Notes to Pages 1117

to acknowledgeand these mediations cant be separated from the poem without ones
critique falling prey to precisely what Jameson takes issue with: formal disjunction with
the objects social sense (14).
13. Indeed, the fragment has become a kind of fetish-object for both modernist studies and
scholarly work in the field of Romanticism today. Moreover, studies such as Camelia
Eliass The Fragment: Toward a History and Poetics of a Performative Genre seek to histor-
ically extend our sense of the fragment as a figure for art and subjectivity into classical
antiquity as well.
14. The field of disability studies has opened new avenues for thinking about the positive
attributes of such a stuttering poetics. Michael Davidsons Concerto for the Left Hand:
Disability and the Defamiliar Body provides an especially thoughtful examination of
disability aesthetics in the field of modern poetry, inflected by the authors own
experience of hearing impairment (80115).
15. Levin locates this poetics within a philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism
dating to Emersons dictum that Every thing teaches transition. Focusing on thinkers
such as Emerson, John Dewey, George Santayana, and William James, however, this
study largely passes over the particulars of literary form entailed by such a poetics.
Levins chapter on Stein, for example, primarily examines her narrative prose, while his
chapter on Stevens largely passes over the It Must Change cantos of Notes toward a
Supreme Fiction, despite his astute observation that Stevens writes from the leading edge
of unfolding transitions (Transition, 187).
16. Madness is, in Foucaults famous phrase, the absence of the work, writes Gerald Bruns
in his book On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly, confirm-
ing our ongoing critical valorization of disjunction as the literary figure for an aberrant
Foucauldian subjectivity: as we shall see, this absence is not nugatory; it defines a theory
of the incompletion or fragmentariness of the work of art (59).
17. For readers interested in further exploring the psychoanalytic perspective on disjunctive
poetics, the opening chapter of Eynel Wardis Once below a Time: Dylan Thomas, Julia
Kristeva, and Other Speaking Subjects provides a useful overview of some ways the split
subject of Lacan, Klein, and Winnicott may inform the study of modern poetic writing
(334).
18. Perloff also highlights the intersection of Language writing with recent developments in
literary feminism as well as a major shift in the 1990s, when what could loosely be called
a language poetics has come into contact with one of color, in her critical survey, though
these developments belong to an earlier cultural moment of identity politics in academic
scholarship (qtd. Armand, 15, 26). The visual and differential poetics promoted toward
the end of Perloff s article represent the latest iteration of avant-garde writing in this
critics view.
CHAPTER 2
1. For a valuable discussion of Moores relationship with Cornell, see Ellen Levys Criminal
Ingenuity: Moore, Cornell, Ashbery, and the Struggle between the Arts (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 77124. Levys observation that Moore and Cornell came to
conceive of the process of collection not just as a withdrawal from the existing economy
but also as an effort to create an alternative economy illuminates their relationship both
to the circulation of commodities and, as we will see, to the circulation of knowledge as
well (118).
2. Robert Hatt, Moores primary source for information on pangolins, points out that the
difficulty of feeding these animals in captivity makes them one of the greatest of rarities
in zoological gardens (Pangolins, 732). To my knowledge, there is no document of
Moores ever having seen a live pangolin.
Notes to Pages 1732 [ 159 ]

3. Though critics such as Cynthia Stamy have pointed out Moores abiding interest in East
Asian culture, and the poets fascination with Europe is apparent everywhere from her
use of The Illustrated London News to her later translations of La Fontaine, these seem to
me instances of Moores distinctively American cosmpolitanism. Moores sources demon-
strate how material from distant regions is made commonly available within the popular
archives of New York City in the early twentieth century.
4. This rage for order extends to the final stages of preparing a book for publication in
Moores creative process. Cristanne Miller has pointed out that for Observations, Moore
compiled not only Notes; but an extensive Index including entries like Edmund
Burke, business documents, cockroaches, emotionally sensitive, and Congress, Act
of (Authority, 178).
5. On achieving literary celebrity later in life, Moore went on to lecture widely at colleges,
libraries, and museums, thus completing an instructional journey that began with her
attendance as an audience member at such public events (Molesworth, Literary, 234).
6. In his study of instructional modes in American poetry, Willard Spiegelman argues that
the work of Ezra Pound best exemplifies what he considers to be a suppressed didac-
tic strain within modernist poetics (Didactic, 247249); however, I would argue that
Moores instructional verse represents an explicit engagement with didacticism in Anglo-
American modernism.
7. Bernetta Quinn points out that one zoological nickname for the pangolin is dominus
vobiscum, for its uncanny resemblance to a priest at the altar when it assumes a planti-
grade posture with its forelegs outstretched (Armored, 294). If the pangolin can be
pressed into service as a surrogate for humanity, it can do so only through such comical
contortions.
8. While most poets ordinarily reserve their exclamation points to express extraordinary
feeling (cf. Shelleys histrionic I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!), only a speaker
immersed in zoological pursuits could punctuate the meticulous morphological observa-
tion of scale / lapping scale with spruce-cone regularity until they / form the uninter-
rupted central / tail-row with such delight.
9. In The Order of Things, Foucault describes the historical rift between modern and En-
lightenment ways of understanding the natural world as a disparity between two kinds of
epistemological method:
The creation of the vast taxonomic unities (classes and orders) in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was a problem of linguistic patterning: a name had to be found that
would be both general and justified; now, it is a matter of an anatomic disarticulation; the
major functional system has to be isolated; it is now the real divisions of anatomy that
will make it possible to form the great families of living beings. (269)
Under Foucaults account, the natural historian of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies relied primarily upon the taxonomical instrument of language to discover patterns
of classes and orders within the animal and vegetable kingdoms; the modern biologist,
however, utilizes instruments like the scalpel and the probe to examine the various func-
tional systems that came to govern our understanding of life in the nineteenth century
and beyond. Moore and Melville are caught between these two irreconcilable methods
of inquiry into the natural world. As writers, they are restricted to the linguistic pattern-
ing of the literary anatomist; but they desire what Foucault would call a more modern
form of knowledgean anatomic disarticulation of their subjects from the inside out.
10. The movement away from natural history toward a new, pragmatic approach to under-
standing the natural world in American thought is reflected in the young William Jamess
repudiation of his venerable mentor, Louis Agassiz, following their research expedition
to the Amazon river basin (Irmscher, Natural, 236283).

11. In Democracy and Education, Dewey stresses the importance of identification with ones
student: the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its inter-
action with the pupils present needs and capacities (183). Interaction, explanation, and
identification are valued above subject matter throughout Deweys text.
12. While its subject matter is idealized, this art serves a calculated pragmatic function as
well, holding up the church roof over worshippers heads.
13. While she actively engaged in ongoing theoretical debates regarding democratic institu-
tions of learning in texts such as The Student, In the Public Garden, and Values in
Use, Moores poem on the pangolin practically enacts the lesson plan of interdisciplinary
education through its construction of a digressive instructional poetics.
14. Earlier in the text, Moores naturalist had illustrated her zoological observations with
exempla drawn from human culture: the pangolin has the grace of Thomas-of-Leighton
Buzzards wrought-iron vine; rolled into a ball, it is compact like the frill on Gargallos
head of matador. Yet here, human activity is illustrated with examples culled from the
natural world: making paper for his endless stream of documents, man is like the wasp;
transporting goods to and fro, he is like the ant (which, incidentally, serves as food for
the pangolin); exploring his environment, he is like a spider unspooling a length / of web
from bluffs / above a stream. The overall movement of The Pangolin, then, conducts a
subtle and thoroughgoing inversion of exemplaritys grounds over the course of the text.
15. Within the classical tradition of encomiastic writing, Pindars ambivalent Pythian VIII
(as translated by C. M. Bowra) may provide a more valid model for Moores skeptical
anatomy than Sophocless ode:
... mans pleasure is a short time growing
And it falls to the ground
As quickly, when an unlucky twist of thought
Loosens its roots.
Mans life is a day. What is he?
What is he not? A shadow in a dream
Is man ... (236237)
But Pindars expressions of doubt are phrased within a cultural context of panegy-
ric; Moores anatomical text liberates encomium from its ritual contexts, situating
the study of man within what I have called the idealized auditorium of the speakers
imagination.
16. Throughout this abridged essay on man, Moore presents her subject within a neoclassical
poetics of contradiction and paradox: he is unemotional, and all emotion; Not afraid of
anything is he, / and then goes cowering forth; even the encomiastic lines he has everlasting
vigor, / power to grow are immediately followed by the qualifying gesture of though there
are few animals who can make one breathe / faster and make one erecter (Poems, 226).
17. In fact, this being we call human pens his own miniature parody of Moore herself in a
poem within the poem, writing (like the prim, self-protective Moore of to be liked by
you would be a disaster) that Like does not like like that is obnoxious (Poems, 226).
18. The Enlightenment poetics of concision qua legitimation is apparent in the Essays most
debated lineWhatever is, is right (Pope, Essay on Man Epistle I, Major, 280)
which, of course, caused Stanley Burnshaw such consternation in his ideological quarrel
with Wallace Stevens.
19. Moores mockery is balanced by a tenderness toward her subject; while she strips this
hapless figure of humanityreducing man to a mammal deprived of all but a few
hairsshe immediately clothes his serge-clad, strong-shod form to compensate for
this violation. (This passage may offer an oblique portrait of Cornell, who often referred
to his study as a habitat, at work).

CHAPTER 3
1. Foucault further articulates this disciplinary regime through his remarkable conceptuali-
zation of rank within Enlightenment instructional practice:
In the eighteenth century, rank begins to define the great form of distribution of indi-
viduals in the educational order: rows or ranks of pupils in the class, corridors, court-
yards; rank attributed to each pupil at the end of each task and each examination; the
rank he obtains from week to week, month to month, year to year; an alignment of age
groups, one after another; a succession of subjects taught and questions treated, accord-
ing to an order of increasing difficulty. (Discipline, 146147)
2. Indeed, when Diderot writes that it must by obvious by now that Im not writing a
novel early in his subversive text (Jacques, 12), his protestation serves only to under-
score the authors intimate agon with novelistic form.
3. Hejinians fascination with problems of logic and sequence even extends to the Latin no-
menclature used in the classical philosophy of causation: the non sequitur is something
(which does not follow), the nihil sequitur is nothing (which follows), writes Hejinian in
My Life in the Nineties. Things are all causes and their ever-changing interconnection is
what we term destiny (5152).
4. Hejinians interpreters have also foregrounded the politics of gender in works such as
My Life: Juliana Spahr, for example, situates Hejinians text within a radical tradition of
womens writing alongside texts such as Hannah Weiners Clairvoyant Journal, Johanna
Druckers History of the/My World, and Susan Howes My Emily Dickinson (Resignify-
ing, 140), and Craig Dworkin reads My Life against the tradition, almost exclusively
practiced by women, of the nineteenth-century pieced quilt (Penelope, 59). Such inter-
pretations have often brilliantly illuminated the role of gender and sexuality in Hejin-
ians poetics. But I propose to set aside such questions in this essay to honor Hejinians
wishhowever provisional, problematic, or self-contradictory it may befor us to read
her work at least occasionally in an androgynous fashion: as such, a person on paper, I
am androgynous (Life, 150).
5. Some examples of studies of endings include Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek
and Latin Literature, by Deborah H. Roberts, Francis M. Dunn, and Don Fowler; Chaucers
Open Books: Resistance to Closure in Medieval Discourse, edited by Rosmarie P. McGerr;
Dislocating the End: Climax, Closure, and the Invention of Genre, by Alan Rosen; Dramatic
Closure: Reading the End, by June Schlueter,; Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and
Narrative Closure, edited by Alison Booth; Loose Ends: Closure and Crisis in the American
Social Text, by Russell J. Reising; and The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema, by
Richard Neupert, to name only a very few. This cottage industry has even spawned a sub-
genre of studies on poetic endings, from Barbara Herrnstein-Smiths Poetic Closure: A Study
of How Poems End to Timothy Bahtis Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in West-
ern Poetry to John Emil Vincents Queer Lyrics: Difficulty and Closure in American Poetry.
6. Said goes on to make a further distinction between real transitive beginnings and
fictional transitive beginnings, but these refinements do not alter the general structure
of his thought on intransitive beginnings (Beginnings, 50).
7. This cosmogenic aspect of The Beginner returns later in the poem, when the speaker
paraphrases the Russian poet Alexei Parshchikovs primer for amateur photographers:
with the aperture the photographer separates dark from light as if, Alexei Parshchikov
says, choosing between good and evil (33).
8. We have no particular end or plan, asserts the speaker of the poem (Beginner, 12). This
avoidance of teleology traps Hejinian in what might be called a beginners paradox: the
beginner wants a raison dtre so that beginning wont seem pointless, she writes, but
the beginner has to begin before a raison dtre can appear (17).

9. It is worth mentioning, however, that beginning never occurs within the future tense
within this poem, devoted as it is to the belatedness of any beginning: now long past
beginning, as a long term beginner, I begin // Again (Nineties, 81).
10. In the brief literary history of the Language movement that follows, Hejinian draws several
parallels between the Language writers and the formalist group Opoyazparallels she
underscores through the quiet employment of rhetorical parallelisms: the Russian group
developed in the context of the Russian revolution, for instance, while the American
movement developed in the context of the Vietnam War; frustrated by the academic con-
servatism of the university and responsive to the revolutionary intellectual radicalism of the
period, the Russian movement shares a grammar of alienation with the American group,
who were frustrated (and even enraged) by pervasive political hypocrisy and the atrocities
resulting from racism, sexism, classism, and (ultimately) capitalism (Factory, 101).
11. Hejinian herself emphasizes this association, writing in The Language of Inquiry that
ostranenie is an essential literary effect, a defining feature of the poetic (which plays, by
the way, a central role in fiction as well as in verse) (301).
12. I refer to this work as Morphology of the Fairy Tale rather than the more common
Morphology of the Folktale because, as Alan Dundes points out in his introduction to the
1968 American Folklore Society edition of Propps text, the English title Morphology of
the Folktale is misleading. Propp limits his analysis to only one kind of folktale, that is, to
fairy tales (Morphology, xiv).
13. In A Border Comedy, we find, among many others, the tale of a girl who could ride birds
(26), the story of a prince and a turtle (4849), the story of the father who punished
his daughter for being lazy because he didnt understand her kind of work, (53), and a
tale of a helpful horse / In which a magic man of iron is found in a river and confined by
a tyrant to prison (138). Indeed, this text does not confine itself to the genre of the fairy
tale; the poem is also shot through with imaginary fables from the days of old, when
horses spoke Greek and Latin and asses made syllogisms (70).
14. In one version, Hejinians fictional novel may play upon the conventions of autobiog-
raphy (the novel will conjure up a family I never had), while another version might
feature a narratological protagonist (my character can proceed without any more name
than that of a beginner), but all the while this unwritten text remains anchored within
the imaginary realm of potential literature (Nineties, 70, 83).
15. Hejinian underscores the importance of this editorial decision in her afterword to Third
Factory:
Plotless Literature, a chapter of Shklovskys Theory of Prose, stood as the first essay in
the first issue of Poetics Journal ( January, 1982), initiating (and, in some sense, initialing)
the publication in which many of the central essays of the Language writing movement
first appeared. (102)
The trope of initialing implies Shklovskys coauthorship or editorial approval of the
contents of Poetics Journal. Hejinian thus places this theoretical organ of the Language
movement under the sign of Russian formalism from the outset.
16. The fabula/sjuzet opposition has been rephrased as a binary of histoire versus rcit in the
French structuralist tradition and, in English semiotic analysis, as a distinction between
story and discourse, but regardless of nomenclature the distinction has presided over
narrative analysis in both European and American postwar literary studies up to the
present (Brooks, Plot, 13).
17. Throughout Theory of Prose, Shklovsky gravitates toward the digressive nature of sjuzet as
opposed to the sequential progression of fabula, even confessing in his chapter on Cer-
vantes that I am already beginning to feel the influence of this novel: Im allowing myself
to be sidetracked by episode after episode, forgetting the main thrust of the essay (89).

18. Although it sacrifices rhyme in favor of a more faithful word-by-word rendition of Push-
kins original, I cite Nabokovs translation of Eugene Onegin because of this translators
incomparable narratological sense of the text.
19. The disorienting topography of St. Petersburg enters into literary representation in Lenin-
grad as well: On the streets where there are few signs, none of the conventional markers
divide the economy among its partsthere are only numbered doors the people disap-
pear into and issue from (7071).
20. Yet the sense of a unified plot still casts a shadow over all of Hejinians work. For every
poststructuralist broadside against plot as a literary principle in Oxotaalls again plotless,
as it should be (279)there is counterpoised an intuition of a vast encompassing sjuzet
long trajectories of plot design the teacup from its continuity (286)in which we are all
imbricated. Rather than discarding plot entirely (as Shklovsky does by the end of his Theory
of Prose), Hejinian broadens sjuzet to encompass the sprawling and bewildering sequences
of events from whose tempests ultimately emerge the porcelain perfection of the teacup.
21. Indeed, Hejinian finds herself in numerous scenes that resemble those of a spy novel
throughout her work. In Leningrad, she describes an expedition to a Soviet junkyard that
could equally well provide a setting for a clandestine encounter in a work by Ian Fleming:
I had also visited a graveyard of monuments, past a glade in a park where men were play-
ing chess and illegally gambling, near Boris Ostanins flat, in an area resembling a parks
department maintenance yard surrounded by a high gray fence. By climbing a heap of
broken concrete rubble we could look over the fence at the necropolis, where among
birch trees rested some dryads, assorted damaged nymphets, male and female hero
workers whose tools had been lost, three corroded Gargarins, a pile of life-sized heads
of Stalin, and seventeen extended right arms and pointing forefingers of Lenin lying in a
row. I felt both impious and paranoidthe high fence and warning signs meant that this
wasnt an unsecret necropolis. (119)
22. Davidsons contradictory butwhich seeks to deny the inevitability of change
betrays a nostalgia, however, for fixed beliefs regarding the Soviet Union and its place
in the narrative of history.
23. Hejinians rejection of closure extends from her writing to her reading practice as well.
The Tractatuss apparent terminus, she writes of the dramatic philosophical conclusion
to Wittgensteins work, seemed as I considered it transitional (Nineties, 10).
24. Simply stopping, moreover, assumes an ethical dimension in Hejinians literary imagina-
tion. To shut down literary utterance prior to any sort of thematic resolution is, in this
writers view, to avoid the coercive, epiphanic mode in some contemporary lyric poetry
that can serve as a negative model, with its smug pretension to universality and its
tendency to cast the poet as guardian to Truth (Language, 4041). While her polemical
claim may seem somewhat strained (Hejinians spirited call to abolish closure is, after all,
every bit as coercive as the siren song of an epiphanic mode), the narratological ideal of a
poem that simply stops bears notable repercussions for contemporary criticism.
25. In this respect, My Life enters into a dialogue with the project of American autobiograph-
ical poetics initiated by Whitman in Song of Myself. (Whitmans practice of enlarging
Leaves of Grass throughout his lifetime parallels the growth of My Life as well). Yet, as I
will show, while the content of My Life may be autobiographical in many places, the text
as a whole remains framed within the formal armature of chronicle.
26. The annalist would have felt little of the anxiety that the modern scholar feels when
confronted with what appear to be gaps, discontinuities, and lack of causal connections
between the events recorded in the text, writes White (Narrativity, 9). The modern
scholar seeks fullness and continuity in an order of events; the annalist has both in the
sequence of the years (9).

27. I could feed those extra words into the sentence already there, rather than make a new
one for them, make place in the given space, and that would be the same thing, making
more sense, writes Hejinian, thematizing her own compositional process within the text
itself (Life, 126).
28. Recent scholarship on experimental American poetics has investigated seriality as a
strategy for organizing the contemporary long poem. Joseph Conte in particular has
articulated the relationship between seriality and closure: the series remains essentially
and deliberately incomplete (Seriality, 37).
29. The author of a poem titled Happily does not use this affective term lightly. Hejinians
more and more happy mosquitoes share in the more happy love! more happy, happy
love! of Keatss lovers suspended on their urn (Ode on a Grecian Urn, Keats, 289).
Happiness, like the commonplace, has no plot, writes Hejinian in The Language of
Inquiry: In this respect, it is unlike unhappiness, and unlike the bad things (evil, pain,
injustice, etc.) that cause unhappiness, since unhappiness is a marked condition, firmly
attached to plots (that of good vs. evil, of love and loss, etc.) (371).
30. The paratactic logic of chronicle rhetorically fortifies this continuity, as we move from
we rowed, we stood, and we hiked to the parallel constructions of why not remem-
ber and why not write.
31. In My Life and My Life in the Nineties, Hejinian once again adopts the guise of a modern-
day Scheherazade. Like the stories of the viziers daughter, each installment of Hejinians
poem marks a momentary stay against fate. If The Book of One Thousand and One Nights
happily ends before the death of its protagonist, however, Hejinian builds a more severe
and uncompromising fatalism into the formal armature of her text. As this chronicle
unfolds, the open form of each edition approaches a fated threshold beyond which no
further sentences will be added to the tally of its authors years.
CHAPTER 4
1. P. M. Zall notes Franklins omissions and digressions from the historical record in the
narrative organization of the Autobiography (3542).
2. Unless otherwise noted, all citations from Whitmans poetry are drawn from the
18911892 death-bed edition of Leaves of Grass, edited by Justin Kaplan.
3. Viewing the chaff, straw, splinters of wood, weeds, and the sea-gluten, / Scum, scales
from shining rocks, leaves of salt-lettuce, left by the tide, Whitman, too, shares in this
doubt, writing in As I Ebbd with the Ocean of Life that I too but signify at the utmost
a little washd up drift (Leaves, 394). Yet even in this poems most unsettling image of
failure and ruin, the bubbles which emerge from the lips of Whitmans imagined corpse
exhibit the aestheticized iridescences of literary utterance: see, from my dead lips the
ooze exuding at last, / See, the prismatic colors glistening and rolling (396).
4. Wai Chee Dimock is a notable exception. In her essay Whitman, Syntax, and Political
Theory, Dimock observes that this poets leveling, paratactic syntax has the uncanny
effect of making all eventualities equally indifferent, both in the sense that none is
distinguishable from the others, and in the sense that none is preferred to the others
(78). While Dimock focuses on Whitmans indifference toward the possible outcomes
of identity, I emphasize a very different kind of indifferenceWhitmans nonchalance
regarding the fate of his own textin this chapter.
5. To read Whitmans poetry as a charter for future poems may resolve a recent critical
impasse in theorizing Leaves of Grass. On one hand, interpreters such as C. Carol Hollis
argue that Whitmans work is essentially oral and performative in nature; in the other
camp, a study such as Ezra Greenspans Walt Whitman and the American Reader empha-
sizes the textuality of Whitmans poetry in relation to nineteenth-century American print
culture. Whitman, however, would have been indifferent to this debate. Writing and talk

do not prove me, claims the poet in Song of Myself (Leaves, 214; emphasis added),
refuting the textual and oral-performative methodologies in a single breath. For this
poet, only the imaginary poems of the future will prove his work.
6. Whitman continues this promissory project throughout Leaves of Grass. From the litany of I
will make in For You O Democracy and the I will [penetrate, make, confront, know, see]
of By Blue Ontarios Shore to the compact which seals Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, this poet
wagers that his reader will value the projected drift of his poetry over its reified, textual form:
We understand then do we not?

What I promisd without mentioning it, have you not accepted?
What the study could not teachwhat the preaching could not
accomplish is accomplishd, is it not? (312; emphasis added)
7. In Walt Whitmans Native Representations, Ed Folsom locates Whitmans lexicographical

project in relation to the war of the dictionaries in the period; Folsoms discussion,
however, focuses on the cultural retrospection of lexicographyits etymological
inquiries into the history of wordsinstead of exploring the prospective aspect of Whit-
mans language project (2124).
8. In A New Theory for American Poetry, Angus Fletcher argues that Whitmans idiosyncratic
sense of grammar, in its repetitive employment of appositional clauses that successively
edge the poetry farther and farther away from its original subject matter, is in itself
digressive (101110).
9. The difference in content between Keatss glosswith its catalog of dreams, monsters,
and ghostsand Franklins outline to the Autobiographywith its business partner-
ships and methodical social advancementillustrates the distance between not only
the worlds of British romanticism and early American literary culture but also between
lyrical and rationalist modes of self-construction.
10. Among this poets historical interlocutors, Emerson and Carlyle also register their disap-
pointment with Coleridges tendency to soliloquize rather than converse (Armour and
Howes, Coleridge, 109121, 207210).
11. In a sense, Coleridge plays the role of the night-wandering man who filled all things
with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow
throughout these poetic conversations. While only the poem from which this passage is
taken, The Nightingale, was subtitled A Conversation Poem at the time of publica-
tion, I refer to Frost at Midnight and This Lime Tree Bower as members of this po-
etic family because of the texts broad prosodic, structural, and epistemological affinities.
12. Even Whitman, the self-styled poet of camaraderie and rough banter, displays a marked
indifference toward the discourse of others in the imagined social world of his poetry. I
have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and end, he writes,
though he declines to participate in the talkers exchange of ideas: while they discuss I
am silent, and go bathe and admire myself (Leaves 189, 190). This tendency to neglect
the discourse of other persons tends to hollow out the conversational paradigm in Whit-
mans poetry addressed to a you.
13. It comes as no surprise that this voluptuary skeptic should write a Metaphysical Poem
that takes the form of a conversational exchange:
When do you want to go

Im not sure I want to go there
where do you want to go
any place
I think Id fall apart any place else
well Ill go if you really want to

I dont particularly care
but youll fall apart any place else
I can just go home
I dont really mind going there
but I dont want to force you to go there
you wont be forcing me Id just as soon
I wouldnt be able to stay long anyway
maybe we could go somewhere nearer ... (Collected, 434435)
There is no metaphysics in Metaphysical Poem, or, rather, the only metaphysics
available to OHara is a tacit one which casts its shadow over the Beckett-like dialogue
between two desperate persons.
14. At first, it may seem as if these salacious adolescents are engaged in the nearly infinite
task of tellingtelling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might
concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts, which, in the
first volume of Foucaults History of Sexuality, characterizes the confessional turn within
modern subjectivity (20). Indeed, from Hazel Smiths Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank
OHara: Difference/Homosexuality/Topography to Michael Davidsons Guys Like Us: Citing
Masculinity in Cold War Poetics to Alice C. Parkers The Exploration of the Secret Smile: the
Language of Art and of Homosexuality in Frank OHaras Poetry, many of OHaras most
sympathetic interpreters have foregrounded the subject of sexuality in their interpretations
of this poets work. But to read Two Shepherds, A Novel or, more broadly speaking,
OHaras literary oeuvre, as being about sex is, in a sense, to force this poet into the role
of a confessing subject, condemned to the Sisyphean task of passing everything having
to do with sex through the endless mill of speech (Foucault, History, 21). Such a critical
predilection runs the risk of reducing the reading of OHaras poetry to the sort of ritual-
ized extraction of truth described by Foucaultthe confession is a ritual of discourse in
which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement (61)thereby effacing the
plurality of subjects covered by this poet in his intersubjective literary conversations.
15. Keatss urn, of course, finally declares to mankind that Beauty is truth, truth beauty, but
this is hardly the kind of extended, democratic, and intimate exchange represented in
OHaras conversation with the sun.
16. Firbanks Vainglory, a novel composed primarily of conversational exchanges, was
particularly important to OHara. The opening of the eighth chapter is representative of
Firbanks conversational style:
How fond I am of this sleepy magic place!
In town, Mrs. Shamefoot said, the trees so seldom forget themselves into expressive
shapes.
Well ... You havent answered my question yet.
Because I dont know!
Lord Blueharnis looked bored.
Is it grey, Lady Castleyard wondered, chiming in, or white; or would it be blue?
She settled herself reposefully, as if for ever.
That Sacharissa style, Atalanta remarked, bending forward, of rolling your hair is so
enslaving.
I wish you would not look down my neck like an archer of Carpaccio.
Tell me what youre guessing.
The colour of the cuckoos egg... .
If I recollect, its a mystic medley of mauves.
Mrs. Shamefoot prepared to rise. We shall get appendicitis, she exclaimed, if we sit
here long. (Vainglory, 73)

17. As the poem circulates, writes Lytle Shaw, the second person becomes less and less of
a secure reception context (Coterie, 79).
18. Gooch chronicles various episodes in which OHara distanced himself socially from
these various groups; at the same time, his biography illuminates the provisional nature
of OHaras aesthetic alliances. At various points in his career, OHara wavered between
courting and rejecting various figures such as Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac of the
Beats, Warhol and his fellow pop artists, and Robert Duncan of the Black Mountain
School (City, 319321, 322323, 395396).
19. Critics like Hazel Smith, who argue that a queer poetics governs and dictates OHaras lit-
erary style, overlook the fact that this digressive mode is available to writers and speakers
of any gender or sexuality. Membership in the New York School is contingent not upon
sexual politics but rather upon subscription to an aesthetic (and an ethos) of digression.
20. Pleasd with the quakeress as she puts off her bonnet and talks melodiously, Whitman
acknowledges the womans cadence while disregarding the subject of her discourse.
Pleasd with the earnest words of the sweating Methodist preacher, he neglects the
theological argument of the sermon, basing his impression of the ministers earnest
discourse not upon his words, but, rather, upon the sweating which signifies the
exertion of his orating body (Song of Myself, Leaves, 222). Throughout Leaves of Grass,
Whitman hears, or acknowledges, the discourse of others without actually listening to,
or interpreting, what they have to say.
CHAPTER 5
1. Though he rarely refers directly to thinkers like Dewey or James in this work, Gilberts
recurring emphasis on terms like consciousness and experience in his readings of American
poetry strongly color his analysis in a pragmatist light.
2. Other balloon journeys can be found in Your Name Herewhose speaker will be
leaving at some point / in a hot-air balloon painted voluminous colors (The Dons
Bequest 115)and in The Mooring of Starting Out:
... The balloons
Drift thoughtfully over the land, not exactly commenting on it;
These are the range of the poets experience. He can hide in trees
Like a hamadryad, but wisely prefers not to, letting the balloons
Idle him out of existence... . (The Skaters, Mooring, 200)
3. Indeed, Gilbert notes how Ashbery pictures the world as moving by in procession while
he himself remains stationary in the pedestrian poem Grand Galop, highlighting the
poets recumbent sensibility even in poems of walking: this almost Einsteinian reversal
of the walks usual vector betrays the profound sense of passivity that informs Ashberys
vision of experience (Walks, 241).
4. Later in Flow Chart, Ashbery watches his life float by once again: can I go home now?
But I know deep in my heart of hearts I never will, will never want to, / that is, because
Ive too much respect for the junk we call living / that keeps passing by (213). The
phrase the junk we call living, it is worth noting, also conceals a pun on the flat-
bottomed Chinese sailing vessel, adding yet another boat to Ashberys ongoing catalog
of ships.
5. If to hold fast and observe the transitive parts of thoughts stream be so hard, writes
James, then the great blunder to which all schools are liable must be the failure to
register them, and the undue emphasizing of the more substantive parts of the stream
(Principles, 244). As I will argue, poets like Ashbery take up Jamess challenge to hold
fast and observe the transitive parts of consciousness through the close observation of
rivers in the natural world.

6. I have excerpted here only a small fraction of Spensers list of rivers, which runs to over
three hundred lines. But the previously featured passages map a geography shared by
Into the Dusk-Charged Air and The Faerie Queene, extending from the Nile/Nilus to
the Danube/Ister to the Tiber/Tybris.
7. In his essay on Ashberys queering of closure, John Emil Vincent writes that the end of A
Nest of Ninnies represents a frustration of closure because the novels final word, foehn,
requires readers to resort to the dictionary (173). But in an interview cited by Vincent,
Ashbery himself says that I liked the idea that people, if they bothered to, would have to
open up the dictionary to find out what the last word in the novel meant. Theyd be closing
one book and opening another (Stitt, 367). In Ashberys literary imagination, the ideal
reader would not be frustrated by this ending. Rather, she would be delighted by the met-
aliterary gesture of closing one book only to open the lexicon that gives rise to all books.
8. In Hotel Lautramont, Ashbery adopts the role of a priest who warns his reader: You
must go down / to the shore of the steeply flowing river and assuage / whatever they call
gods there (That You Tell, 142). And beyond the river trope, this poets worship of
floating phenomena extends to the failed orison in Chinese Whispers: Window reflected
in the bubble, / how often Ive tried to pray to you, / but your sphere would have nothing
of it (In the Time of Pussy Willows, 35).
9. Foucaults little-studied early book on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, compulsively
reiterates the proliferation of figures for poesis in modern theory. Here, Roussels intricate
work is repeatedly likened to the labyrinth of the volumes title (16, 82, 89, 130), but
his metagrams also resemble a self-manufacturing version of Williamss modernist
machines: fabricated from language, the machines are this act of fabrication; they
originate within themselves; between their tubes, their arms, their cogwheels, their
metal constructions, they enclose the process in which they are contained (Death,
6667). Unable to decide upon a single master image for this writers work, Foucault
assigns to each individual text within Roussels oeuvre its own distinctive metaphor: the
tropological space of La Doublure is analogous to the idea of a mask (20); La Vue, Le
Concert, and La Source are all likened to a lens containing a miniature landscape whose
dimensions are not reducible to its setting (101); the language of Impressions dAfrique
is compared to the lettering on an old billiard tables cushions (32); and Nouvelles Im-
pressions dAfrique is serially described as an eclipse (140), a gigantic Noahs ark (149),
a rhyming dictionary (150), a mine (154155), and, of course, a labyrinth (130). Yet
even the labyrinth, the machine, the mask, the lens, the billiard table, the eclipse, the ark,
the dictionary, and the mine cannot do justice to Roussels poetics in Foucaults critical
imagination. The inadequacy of any single metaphor for a poem, let alone for poetry
itself, leads Foucault to recombine these images into curious hybrid figures, such as the
labyrinth that leads to a Minotaur which is a mirror (96), the well that is at the same
time a mine and a forge (103), or any product of the Rousselian process which binds
together within its blinding crystal, in its endless weaving, and in the depth of the mine,
both fire and water, language and death (7475). Indeed, Ashbery is not immune to the
metaphorical contagion of Foucaults multiplying figures for poetry. What [Roussel]
leaves us with is a body of work that is like the perfectly preserved temple of a cult which
has disappeared without a trace, writes Ashbery in the postscript to Foucaults mono-
graph, or a complicated set of tools whose use cannot be discovered (Death, 202).
10. Ashberys endorsement is drawn from the back cover of the 2003 Omnidawn edition of
Hejinians collection.
11. Among Foucaults theoretical interests and investments, Ashberys relationship to the
question of history may seem the least immediately evident to readers of his work. As
Jeff Staiger argues in an illuminating essay titled The Hitherside of History, however,
Ashbery repeatedly asks himself how one places oneself in historical time (80).

Staigers Hegelian reading elucidates the ways Ashberys poem The System in particular
relates his personal reflections on progress to a collective sense of historical progress
within this writers digressive poetics (80).
12. The lines of this cento are drawn from the following sources:
Floating heart, why / wander on senselessly? (Business Personals, Houseboat, 18)
To praise this, blame that,
Leads one subtly away from the beginning, where
We must stay, in motion (Houseboat Days, Houseboat, 39).
It rolls from view, like a river which is never really there because
of moving on someplace (The New Spirit, Mooring, 316),
A wide way / of evading (Railroad Bridge, April, 31),
But it is hard, this not knowing which direction to take, only
knowing that you are moving in one (The New Spirit, Mooring, 326),
Which brings me to my original argument.
Ah, what was the argument? (Oh Evenings, Chinese, 64)
The real time of water gives you little wiggling room (Disclaimer, Chinese, 6).
[T]he center / keeps collapsing and re-forming (River, Self-Portrait, 41).
It too is flowing, fleeting;
It is a picture of flowing, scenery, though living, mortal,
Over which an abstract action is laid out in blunt,
Harsh strokes. And to ask more than this
Is to become the tossing reeds of that slow,
Powerful stream, the trailing grasses
Playfully tugged at, but to participate in the action
No more than this (Syringa, Houseboat, 70).
13. Even C. D. Wright, one of the poets described as elliptical in Burts article, expresses
her discomfort with the label in an interview with Kent Johnson: Regarding the
elliptical business, Im less enthusiastic. But I do think it is a stab at authentication of
poets who dont belong to a team and whose work is reluctant to be either excluded or
subsumed by one or the other, yet has sympathetic concerns to certain strains and not to
others (Untranslatable, n. pag.).
14. Numbered among Darwins finches, this bird belongs to the famous Geospiza family
whose variform beaks are memorialized in The Voyage of the Beagle.
15. Ceding the poem to the voice of another at the moment of closure, Schiff seals her trib-
ute to The Pangolinwhich also ends in a quotationwith this citational gesture.
16. Spahrs repeated use of the phrase military-industrial complex throughout this textin
which the military-industrial complex enters our bedroom at night (Poem, Connection,
63)quietly denotes her uneasiness with the vexing complexity of her own historical situa-
tion.
17. The difficulty of sorting out ones place within the unfolding sjuzet of the news is appar-
ent in the opening of Spahrs entry of January 28, 2003:
Yesterday the UN report on weapons inspections was released.
Today Israel votes and the death toll rises.
Four have died in clashes in the West Bank town of Jenin.
Yesterday, three died in an explosion at a Gaza City house.
Since last Monday US troops have surrounded eighty Afghans
and killed eighteen.
Protests against the French continue in the Ivory Coast.
Nothing makes any sense today beloveds.

I wake up to a beautiful, clear day.
A slight breeze blows off the Pacific.
It is morning and it is amazing in its simple morningness. (Poem, Connection, 48)
Spahrs choice of the word amazing to close this series of sentences is deliberate, for the
speaker of this poem truly is amazed by the complex maze of sequence and consequence
in which she finds herself lost.
18. In this world, the only figures capable of song are the parrots nesting outside the poets
bedroom window. Yet, toward the end of Poem Written from November 30, 2002 to March
27, 2003, even this inhuman melody is stained by the geopolitical drama haunting
Spahrs consciousness:
When the birds sing outside our window they sing of the end of negotiations with the
UN, of the Dow soaring on confidence of a short war, of how rebel forces in the Central
African Republic have dissolved parliament and suspended the constitution, of the re-
sumption of the trading in oil futures in London after protestors broke into the building
and fights broke out on the trading pit. (Poem, Connection, 68)
The tragic song of the parrots, then, signifies the irrevocable imbrication of birds, too,
within Spahrs geopolitical planetary chronicle.
19. The italicized headnote to A Note on Process reads being an improvised attempt at
disclosure done one word at a time, central park, late july (Nice, 61). Other poems in this
collection are composed by alternating not individual words, but larger sequences of
words instead; in every case, the resulting poems display a highly collaborative texture.
20. Few writers of his generation have so thoroughly integrated the intimate ethos of person-
ism into their own literary practice as Beckman, who, in a lyric from his collection, Shake,
offers his very best impersonation of the New York Schools beloved chatty Frank:
My America is still one overrun with gentle preference
and able give. All week a friendly thorough want
kept washing over mea hamburger, a lecture,
a getting off the phone, that I might someday be a
painter (still), spending money, Dave, the girl
at the Strand, Franz Kline, John reminding me
that some people work way harder than I do. (1819)
Many of OHaras trademark gestures abound in this passage: the wryly proprietary atti-
tude toward the speakers lyric America; the thematization of friendship and desire (a
friendly thorough want); the list of daily activities (a hamburger, a lecture, / a getting
off the phone); the longing to be a painter; the parenthetical shorthand; the inclusion of
the reader among the poets coterie (via the assumption that we, too, are on a first-name
basis with Dave and John); the Manhattan setting (the girl / at the Strand); the
advertisement of abstract expressionists such as Franz Kline; the breezy profession of
indolence. Rohrers work, too, shows the influence of OHara, though his literary debts
to the work of writers such as James Tate and the Slovenian poet Tomaz Salamun are
perhaps more immediately apparent.
21. Lart de vivre, cest de tuer la psychologie, de crer avec soi-mme et avec les autres des
individualits, des tres, des relations, des qualits qui soient innoms. Si on ne peut pas
arriver faire a dans sa vie, elle ne mrite pas dtre vcue.
22. Though OHara proclaims that I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have in Personism,
Beckman and Rohrer draw the title of this CD from Lindsays 1914 travelogue Adven-
tures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty, thus subtly declaring their imaginative indepen-
dence from OHaras dictum of taste (Collected, 498).

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INDEX
Aaron, Daniel, 82 Ariel and the Police (Lentricchia), 1416,

abecedarian sequences, 7274, 80, 8688, 93 158n9
Abrams, M. H., 138 ars poetica, 10, 15
abstraction, 120127 Ars Poetica (Horace), 9
Adams, John, 95 Art of English Poesie (Puttenham), 11
Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Ashbery, John
Beauty (Beckman & Rohrer), 152154, closure and, 136137, 169n7
171n22 on Complete Poems (Moore), 141
After Language Poetry (Perloff ), 2728 on conversations, 118, 120
Agassiz, Louis, 4041, 160n10 Hopkins and, 134135
All-Risk Insurance Policies, 3, 157n1 identity and, 133134
alphabetical order, 6162, 8687 imaginary vessels of, 131
American Progressivism, 3637 on Moore, 139
Ammons, A. R., 29, 129 on Reverdy, 117
amor fati, 26, 93 streams and rivers in work of, 131139,
anatomy of man, 55, 58, 161n15 169n8
And the Stars Were Shining (Ashbery), 133 Ashbery, John: works
Anecdote of the Abnormal (Stevens), And the Stars Were Shining , 133
157n4 April Galleons, 131
Annals of Saint Gall , 8586 As We Know, 132
Antigone (Sophocles), 55 The Burden of the Park, 133
Anxiety of Influence (Bloom), 22 The Business of Falling Asleep, 131
April Galleons (Ashbery), 131 Can You Hear, Bird? 131
a priori, 155 Chinese Whispers, 169n8
Archaeology of Knowledge, The (Foucault) Flow Chart, 130132, 137139, 155,
on archives, 25, 3536, 43, 86 168n4
on continuity and succession, 92 Girls on the Run, 131
on discursive analysis, 110 Grand Galop, 168n3
on discursive unities, 21 The Heroes, 118119
on influence, 140 Hotel Lautramont, 169n8
on positivities, 93 Houseboat Days, 131
on a priori, 155 Into the Dusk-Charged Air, 136137,
on series, 87 139, 169n6
on speaking subjectivity, 108109 Myrtle, 133134
on statements, 115116 A Nest of Ninnies, 113, 169n7
on succession, 64 Pleasure Boats, 131
archives, 25, 3536, 43, 86 Rivers and Mountains, 136
Ashbery, John (continued) casual talk, 108, 113116
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 131 causation, 62, 162n3
The System, 170n11 Caws, Mary Ann, 9
The Template, 137, 139 Cecire, Natalia, 37
The Thief of Poetry, 130 cemeteries, 34, 157n1
The Village of Sleep, 131 Century, A (OHara), 107108
Where Shall I Wander, 137 chattiness, 126
Your Name Here, 168n2 chatty abstraction, 120
As We Know (Ashbery), 132 Children of Adam (Whitman), 102
Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, The China (Perelman), 1718, 158159n12
(Franklin), 9597, 106107, 126, 166n9 Chinese Whispers (Ashbery), 169n8
Aviary (Cornell), 36 chit-chat, 119
chronicle form, 87, 165n30
beauty, 11 closure, 8394, 136137, 162n5, 164n2324,
Barthes, Roland, 5758 169n7
Bataille, Georges, 8 cold war narratives, 8082
Beckman, Joshua, 141, 150154, 171n1920, Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 105106, 120,
171n22 166n11
Beginner, The (Hejinian), 6671, 8486, Collected Poems of Frank OHara, The
162n6, 163n9 (OHara), 27, 97, 108, 116117
beginnings, 6671, 90, 102 collection, economy of, 159n1
Beginnings (Said), 66 Collins, Louise, 36
Being Numerous (Izenberg), 65 Comedian as the Letter C, The (Stevens),
Benis, Toby, 129 157n4
Bernstein, Charles, 1718 Complete Poems (Moore), 53, 141
Bettelheim, Bruno, 69 complexity, 4647
Biotherm (OHara), 117 Concept of a Person, The (Taylor), 124
Bishop, Elizabeth, 129 Concerto for the Left Hand (Davidson),
Blackmur, R. P., 91 159n14
Bloom, Harold, 22 concision, 57, 161n18
Border Comedy, A (Hejinian), 63, 74, 90, 93, confessional verse, 109, 126
163n13 Confessions, The (Rousseau), 129
Brecht, Bertolt, 45 consequence, 6266, 7072, 7475, 8687,
Breton, Andr, 8, 111 93
British Romanticism, 2223, 106, 129, 166n9 containment narratives, 81
Brooklyn Public Library, 36 Conte, Joseph, 165n28
Browne, Thomas, 35 conversation-poems, 26, 106, 108109, 112,
Bruns, Gerald, 159n16 115116, 120121, 152
Burden of the Park, The (Ashbery), 133 conversation
Burnshaw, Stanley, 45, 910, 12 archaeology of, 109
Burt, Stephen, 140, 170n13 art and, 120
Burton, Robert, 35 Ashbery on, 118, 120
Business of Falling Asleep, The (Ashbery), digressive art of, 120
131 drift of, 105119
By Blue Ontarios Shore (Whitman), 102 metropolitan conversation, 117120, 126
morphology of, 114
Camellia Sabina (Moore), 37 OHara and, 113, 124126, 167n15
Cameron, Sharon, 125 prose fiction and, 113
Cantos (Pound), 33, 52 Whitman and, 119, 166n12, 168n20
Can You Hear, Bird? (Ashbery), 131 See also casual talk; chit-chat; subjectless
Carr, John Le, 81 talk
[ 184 ] Index
Conversation with Three Women of New Dundes, Alan, 163n12
England (Stevens), 7 Dworkin, Craig , 1819, 79, 84
copia, 5254, 57
Cornell, Joseph, 3233, 3536, 159n1 Eastman, Max , 82
Corpus of English Conversation, A , 114 eclogues, 113
Corsons Inlet (Ammon), 129 Eclogues (Virgil), 109
coterie writing , 118 Edmond, Jacob, 71
Cotterill, Anne, 52 education, Progressive, 48, 59
Craven, Kenneth, 31 Eight Reasons for Canonizing My Life
Critchley, Simon, 11 (Samuels), 84
Critique of Judgment (Kant), 10 ekphrasis, 108, 121, 123
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (Whitman), 100 ekphrastic anxiety, 123
curiosity, 3240, 5859 Elegy in a Country Churchyard (Stevens),
34
Dada Manifesto (Tzara), 8 Elias, Camelia, 159n13
Davidson, Michael, 71, 159n14 Eliot, T. S., 14, 17, 83, 143
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 54 elliptical poets, 140
Death and the Labyrinth (Foucault), 138, Elliptical Poets, The (Burt), 140, 170n13
169n9 ellipticism (term), 140
De Man, Paul, 53 Ellis Island, 18
Democracy and Education ( J. Dewey), endings, 8394, 136137, 162n5,
4546, 51, 161n11 164n2324, 169n7
Dewey, John, 4546, 49, 51, 161n11 End of the March, The (Bishop), 129
Dewey, Melvil, 36 Engel, Bernard, 38
Dewey Decimal System, 25, 36, 59 Enlightenment, 2124, 31, 3940, 5657,
Dial (magazine), 30 9697, 107, 129, 140, 155, 160n9,
dialogue-tags, 113 161n18, 162n1
didactic poetry, 37, 160n6 entailment, 148149
Diderot, Denis, 6063, 68, 84, 8687, Erasmus, 52
162n2 Erkkila, Betsy, 99
differential poetry, 28, 153 Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Digression in Praise of Digressions (Swift), (Locke), 124
3031 Essay on Man (Pope), 25, 5558, 161n18
Digression on Number 1, 1948 (OHara), estrangement, 71, 163n11
27, 121125 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 7677, 80
Digressive Voices in Early Modern English exemplarity, 5354, 161n14
Literature (Cotterill), 52 explanation, 25, 4546
Dimock, Wai Chee, 104, 165n4 Ezuversity, notion of, 49
disability studies, 159n14
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 1516, fables, 38
6162, 64 fabula, 7577, 7980, 163n1617
disjunction, 1719, 24, 154, 156, 158n11, Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 135136, 169n6
158159n12, 159n16 fairy tales, 6970, 7275, 92, 163n13
Disjunctive Poetics (Quartermain), 18 Falling Bags (Beckman & Rohrer),
Djuric, Dubravka, 86 151152
Dorn, Edward, 91 fatalism, 1617, 20, 25, 59, 6263, 79, 91, 93
Douglass, Frederick, 19 Fatalist, The (Hejinian), 25, 63, 68, 74,
Dragomoshchenko, Arkadii, 7778 8990, 139
Drawings and Digressions (Rivers), 120 Fifth Promenade (Rousseau), 128
drifters, 100, 104 Fillmore, Millard, 89
drifting , 28, 98100, 131133 Filreis, Alan, 12
Index [ 185 ]
finches, 142, 170n14 gender, 162n4
Firbank, Ronald, 113, 167n16 Georgics (Virgil), 37
Fletcher, Angus, 166n8 Gilbert, Robert, 129130, 168n1
Flow Chart (Ashbery), 130132, 137139, Ginsberg, Allen, 108
155, 168n4 Girls on the Run (Ashbery), 131
Folsom, Ed, 166n7 Gooch, Brad, 113, 168n18
Font of Type, A (Whitman), 104 gossip, 117118
Forbes, Deborah, 2223 grace, 38, 4551
Formalist narratology, 7172 Grammatical Institute of the English
Foucault, Michel Language (Webster), 104
on art of living , 24, 151152, 154 Grand Galop (Ashbery), 168n3
on curiosity, 39 Greenblatt, Stephen, 158n9
on discursive order and historical periods, Greenspan, Ezra, 101, 165n5
2122 Grossman, Allen, 13
on Enlightenment, 2223 Guest, Barbara, 121, 126
on heterotopia, 2021
literary criticism and, 1516 H5N1 (Schiff ), 144
modernity and, 23, 59, 62 Hagstrum, Jean, 123
on natural history, 57, 59, 97, 160n9 Halpern, Rob, 158n12
on positivities, 97 handedness, 13, 158n8
on power and discipline, 6162 Happily (Hejinian), 165n29
on rank in instruction, 162n1 Harmonium (Stevens), 4
on subjectivity, 16, 158n10 Harrington, Joseph, 157n1
on writing , 20 Harryman, Carla, 70
Foucault, Michel: works Hartford Agent, 34
The Archaeology of Knowledge (see Hartley, George, 158n12
Archaeology of Knowledge, The Hatt, Robert, 159n1
(Foucault)) Heffernan, James, 123
Death and the Labyrinth, 138, 169n9 Hejinian, Lyn
Discipline and Punish, 1516, 62, 64 archeology and, 64, 8687, 9293, 108
History of Sexuality, 151, 167n14 on causation, 162n3
The Order of Things, 2021, 39, 56, 59, on digressions, 92
160n9 fairy tales and, 69, 7375
What Is an Author? 1920 gender and sexuality in poetics, 162n4
What Is Enlightenment? 24 at LanguageConsciousnessSociety
Four Quartets (Eliot), 14, 83 (conference), 71
Four Quartz Crystal Clocks (Moore), 37 narratorial personae, 74
Fragment, The (Elias), 159n13 Russia and, 71, 78, 92
fragmentation, 1819, 24, 57, 155, 158n12, sequence and consequence and, 6366,
159n13 7172
Frank, Roberta, 49 series and, 92
Franklin, Benjamin, 9597, 106107, 126, on Shklovsky, 71
166n9 Soviet narratological theory and, 26,
free evening lectures, 3637, 160n5 7174
From Landscape to Literature (Herendeen), Hejinian, Lyn: works
135 The Beginner, 6671, 8486, 162n6, 163n9
Frye, Northrop, 3435 A Border Comedy, 63, 74, 90, 93, 163n13
Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Spahr), 149 The Fatalist, 25, 63, 68, 74, 8990, 139
Happily, 165n29
Garbage (Ammon), 29 The Language of Inquiry, 163n11
Gelley, Alexander, 53 Leningrad, 7879, 8183, 164n21
[ 186 ] Index
My Life (see My Life (Hejinian)) Irrational Element of Poetry, The
My Life in the Nineties, 63, 7375, 85, (Stevens), 9
8789, 162n3, 163n14, 165n31 Izenberg, Oren, 65, 125126
Oxota, 26, 7782, 164n1920
The Rejection of Closure, 83 Jacques the Fatalist (Diderot), 6063, 68, 84,
Herendeen, Wyman, 135, 137 8687, 162n2
Heroes, The (Ashbery), 118119 James, William, 28, 132133, 160n10, 168n5
heterotopia, 2021 Jameson, Fredric, 1618, 157n5, 158n11,
Hillbillies (Beckman & Rohrer), 152154 158159n12
History of Sexuality (Foucault), 151, Jangling (Beckman & Rohrer), 150151
167n14 Jerboa, The (Moore), 37
Hitherside of History, The (Staiger), John Reed Club, 82
169170n11
Hobbes, Thomas, 11 Kant, Immanuel, 1014, 81, 155, 157158n7,
Holley, Margaret, 45, 48, 55 158n8
Hollis, Carol C., 165n5 Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Savile), 158n7
Homer, 131 Kaul, Suvir, 22
homosocial poetics, 151 Keats, John, 88, 105106, 112, 123, 165n29,
Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 134135 166n9, 167n15
Horace, 9 Kennan, George F., 8182
Hotel Lautramont (Ashbery), 169n8 Kenneth Koch, a Tragedy (Rivers & OHara),
Houseboat Days (Ashbery), 131 118
Howe, Susan, 18 Kermode, Frank, 90
Hsia Y, 18 Klein, Julie Thompson, 49
Hume, David, 55 Kline, Franz, 120
Koch, Kenneth, 91, 112
identity, 9598, 104105, 117, 124126,
132134, 165n4. See also personhood Lacan, Jacques, 24, 158n11
Iliad, The (Homer), 131 Lake Placid Club, 36, 59
indexes, 33 Langan, Celeste, 129
influence, 140 LanguageConsciousnessSociety
In Memory of My Feelings (OHara), 105 (conference), 71
instruction Language of Inquiry, The (Hejinian), 163n11,
Barthes on, 5758 165n29
curiosity and, 3237 language writers, 6465, 70, 8283, 163n10
John Dewey on, 4546, 49, 54, 161n11 language writing , 2728, 65, 7172, 159n18
explanation and, 4546 Latimer, Ronald Lane, 12
in Jacques the Fatalist, 60 Lawrence, D. H., 100
Moore and, 4546, 54 Leavell, Linda, 38
in The Pangolin, 4546, 4851, 161n13 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 25, 97104, 126,
rank in, 6162, 162n1 164n25, 165n3, 165n5, 166n6, 168n20
interdisciplinarity, 25, 4850, 142 legitimation, 57, 161n18
interiority, 132133, 135 Lehman, David, 2728
Interventions into Modernist Cultures Leningrad (Hejinian), 7879, 8183, 164n21
(Parry), 18 Lentricchia, Frank, 1416, 64, 93, 158n9
In the American Tree (anthology), 64 Leviathan (Hobbes), 11
Into the Dusk-Charged Air (Ashbery), Levin, Jonathan, 19, 159n15
136137, 139, 169n6 lexicography, 104, 166n7
Introspection and Contemporary Poetry liberal narratives, 81
(Williamson), 109 library reform, 36
Irmscher, Christoph, 40 Local Motions (Price), 65
Index [ 187 ]
Locke, John, 124 didactic poetry of, 37, 4849, 58, 160n6
Long, Haniel, 4 digressive copia of her poetry, 5254, 57
Lunch Poems (OHara), 97 fables and, 38
Lyn Hejinian and Russian Estrangement on fashion, 3031
(Edmond), 71 free evening lectures and, 3637, 160n5
lyric sincerity, 23 instruction and, 4546, 54
as Lake Placid Club secretary, 36, 59
Magritte, Ren, 20 as lecturer, 160n5
Making of Americans, The (Stein), 52 modernity and, 45, 5860
Manifesto of Futurism (Marinetti), 8 natural history and, 39, 43, 108, 160n9
manifestos, 810, 157n6 use of syllabic forms, 36
Man on the Dump (Stevens), 17 use of transcription, 30
Marianne Moore and China (Stamy), 142 Moore, Marianne: works
Marinetti, F. T., 8 Camellia Sabina, 37
Marriage (Moore), 3436 Complete Poems, 53, 141
Martin, Taff y, 50 Four Quartz Crystal Clocks, 37
McDonald, Gail, 46, 49 The Jerboa, 37
McGann, Jerome, 27 Marriage, 3436
McHale, Brian, 91 Observations, 160n4
Melnick, David, 65 An Octopus, 37
Melville, Herman, 4142, 160n9 The Pangolin (see Pangolin, The
memory, 88 (Moore))
Merrill, James, 91 Pedantic Literalist, 38
Metaphysical Poem (OHara), 166167n13 The Plumet Basilisk, 4041
Middle, The (Harryman), 70 The Poems of Marianne Moore, 51
middles, 7183 Poetry, 53
Miller, Cristanne, 160n4 Style, 5152
Milton, John, 37 What are Years? 89
Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue (Stevens), 5 Morphology of the Fairy Tale (Propp),
Mitchell, W. J. T., 123 7274, 163n12
Moby-Dick (Melville), 4142 Morse, F. L., 50
Modernism from Right to Left (Filreis), 12 Muldoon, Paul, 91
modernity Museum of Words (Heffernan), 123
Enlightenment and, 22 Myles, Eileen, 120
entailment and, 149 My Life (Hejinian)
Foucault and, 23, 59, 62 as autobiography, 84, 164n25
fragmentation and, 18, 24 conclusions, 89
Moore and, 46, 5860 Dworkin on, 79
scientific writing and, 43 gender in, 162n4
self-invention and, 96 poetic form of, 9091, 165n27, 165n31
social change and, 5 sequencing in, 63, 65, 8486
Moore, Marianne Spahr on, 146
American Orientalism of, 142 My Life in the Nineties (Hejinian), 63, 7375,
archival poems, 3435 85, 8789, 162n3, 163n14, 165n31
archival process, 3236 Myrtle (Ashbery), 133134
Ashbery on, 139
at Brooklyn Public Library, 36 Nabokov, Vladimir, 7677
collection and, 159n1 Nadel, Alan, 81
cosmopolitanism of, 160n3 narrative poems, 91
creative process, 3234, 160n4 narratives, 9192
as Dial editor, 30 narratological poems, 9192
[ 188 ] Index
natural history The Collected Poems of Frank OHara, 27,
curiosity and, 3940 97, 108, 116117
demise of, 4144 Digression on Number 1, 1948, 27, 121125
in 18th & 19th centuries, 3940 In Memory of My Feelings, 105
Foucault on, 56, 59, 97, 160n9 Kenneth Koch, a Tragedy, 118
Moore and, 39, 4344, 108, 160n9 Lunch Poems, 97
in The Pangolin, 3945, 5657, 59 Metaphysical Poem, 166167n13
in Vampire Finch, 142 Personism, 171n22
See also zoology Terrestrial Cuckoo, 112
Nest of Ninnies, A (Ashbery & Schuyler), To Hell with It, 118
113, 169n7 A True Account of Talking to the Sun at
New Deal Modernism (Szalay), 6 Fire Island, 112113
New Masses (magazine), 82 Two Shepherds, A Novel, 109111, 167n14
New Theory for American Poetry, A Very Rainy Light, An Eclogue, 111
(Fletcher), 166n8 Why I Am Not a Painter, 121
New York School, 28, 113, 118120, 168n19 once upon a time trope, 70
Nice Hat. Thanks (Beckman & Rohrer), 152, Onegin stanza, 76
154 One Hour to Madness and Joy (Whitman),
Nightingale, The (Coleridge), 166n11 102
nihil sequitur, 162n3 On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy
non sequitur, 162n3 (Bruns), 159n16
Note on Process, A (Beckman & Rohrer), open-endedness, 86
150151, 171n19 Opoyaz (formalist group), 163n10
Notes on a Supreme Fiction (Stevens), 410, order, 22, 64, 96, 108
1215, 67 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 2021, 39,
Nouvelles Impressions dAfr ique (Rousell), 29 56, 59, 160n9
novelistic realism, 112113 Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An
Number 1, 1948 (Pollock painting), (Stevens), 129
122124 ostranenie, 71, 163n11
Number 1, 1949 (Pollock painting), 125 Otter, Samuel, 4142
Number 26, 1950 (Pollock painting), 125 Ovid, 7
numbers, 8, 157n6 Owls Clover (Stevens), 5
Oxota (Hejinian), 26, 7782, 164n1920
Observations (Moore), 160n4
Octopus, An (Moore), 37 Pangolin, The (Moore)
Ode on a Grecian Urn (Keats), 165n29 anatomy of man in, 55, 161n15
Ode on Indolence (Keats), 112 as archaeological poem, 4344
OHara, Frank curiosities in, 5859
aesthetic alliances, 118, 168n18 exemplarity in, 54, 161n14
archaeological poetics, 110, 116 explanation in, 25
conversation-poems, 109, 112, 115116 grace in, 38, 4551
conversations and, 113, 124126, 167n15 instruction in, 4546, 4851, 161n13
eclogues, 113 natural history in, 3945, 56, 59
ekphrasis and, 108, 121124 stanzaic structure, 42
late poetry of, 117 subject of, 31, 3738, 59
novelistic realism, 112113 pangolins, 32, 38, 159n1, 160n7
pictorial abstraction and, 108 Paradise Lost (Milton), 37
subject matter and, 119 parataxis, 38
OHara, Frank: works Parry, Amie Elizabeth, 1819
Biotherm, 117 Parshchikov, Alexei, 162n6
A Century, 107108 Paterson (Williams), 98
Index [ 189 ]
PCOET (Melnick), 65 Promise to California, A (Whitman), 102
Pedantic Literalist (Moore), 38 Propp, Vladimir, 7274, 163n12
Perelman, Bob, 1718, 158159n12 prosopopoeia, 123
peripeteia, 129130 Proust, Marcel, 19
Perloff, Marjorie, 2728, 77, 108, 153, 159n18 Puchner, Martin, 8
personhood, 65, 124126 purposiveness, 1012, 157158n7
Personism (OHara), 124, 150, 171n20, Pushkin, Alexander, 7677, 80
171n22 Pushkin sonnet, 76
pictorial abstraction, 108, 120 Puttenham, George, 11
Pindar, 161n15 Pythian VIII (Pindar), 161n15
Pleasure Boats (Ashbery), 131
plot, 7576, 163n15, 164n20 Quartermain, Peter, 1819, 154
Plotless Literature (Shklovsky), 76 Quinn, Bernetta, 160n7
Plotless Novel, The (Shklovsky), 75, 80 Quirk, Randolph, 114
Plumet Basilisk, The (Moore), 4041
Poems of Marianne Moore, The (Moore), 51 Reading the Illegible (Dworkin), 1819
Poem Written from November 30, 2002, to realism, novelistic, 112
March 27, 2003 (Spahr), 146149, Rglement pour les coles de la ville de Lyon
170n16, 170171n17 (manual), 6162
Poet among Painters (Perloff ), 108 Rejection of Closure, The (Hejinian), 83
Poetics, A (Bernstein), 1718 Restoring China (Halpern), 158n12
Poetics Journal, 75, 163n15 Reverdy, Pierre, 117
Poetics of Natural History, The (Irmscher), 40 Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Rousseau),
Poetics of Transition (Levin), 19, 159n15 128129
Poetry (Moore), 53 Revolver (Schiff ), 144146
Poetry of the Revolution (Puchner), 8 Rich, Adrienne, 19
Point Is to Change, The (McGann), 27 rivers, 133139, 169n8
Poirier, Richard, 46 Rivers, Larry, 118, 120
Pollack, Jackson, 120, 122124 Rivers and Mountains (Ashbery), 136
Pope, Alexander, 5, 25, 5558, 161n18 Robinson, Jeffrey C., 129
positivism, 93 Rohrer, Matthew, 141, 150155, 171n19, 171n22
positivities, 97 Romance for a Demoiselle Lying in the
postmodernity, 1617, 138 Grass (Stevens), 12
Postmodernsim, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Romanticism, 23, 106, 159n13
Capitalism ( Jameson), 1618, 158n11 Romanticism on the Road (Benis), 129
Pound, Ezra, 33, 49, 52, 160n6 Romantic Vagrancy (Langan), 129
power, 6062 Rosenbaum, Susan B., 2223
Power, its application from the 17th Dynasty Rosenblatt, Jon, 98
to the 20th Century (Morse), 50 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 128129
Pragmatism, American, 129, 159n15 Rousseau Judge of Jean-Jacques (Rousseau),
Price, Larry, 65 129
Primer of Words (Whitman), 104 Roussel, Raymond, 29, 169n9
Principles of Psychology, The ( James), rumor, 118
132133, 168n5 Russia, 71, 78, 8283, 92
printing presses, 104 Russia House, The (Carr), 81
Professing Sincerity (Rosenbaum), 2223
Progressive education, 48, 59 Said, Edward, 66, 162n6
Progressivism, American, 3637 Samuels, Lisa, 84
Project Paperclip (Schiff ), 144146 Santayana, George, 11
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Savile, Anthony, 158n7
(Kant), 1314 Schaub, Thomas, 8182
[ 190 ] Index
Schiff, Robyn, 141146, 155 Steiner, George, 47
Schulman, Grace, 33, 38 Sterne, Lawrence, 9697
Schuyler, James, 113, 169n7 Stevens, Wallace, 4, 6, 1114, 157n5
scientific writing , 43 Stevens, Wallace: works
Second Manifesto (Breton), 8 Anecdote of the Abnormal, 157n4
Second World Plenum of the International The Comedian as the Letter C, 157n4
Bureau of Revolutionary Literature, 82 Conversation with Three Women of New
self-invention, 9596, 105 England, 7
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Ashbery), Elegy in a Country Churchyard, 34
131 Harmonium, 4
self-presentations, 9697, 120 The Irrational Element of Poetry, 9
Sense of an Ending, The (Kermode), 90 Man on the Dump, 17
sequences, 6266, 6972, 7475, 86, 93 Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue, 5
series, 62, 8687, 9293, 165n28 Notes on a Supreme Fiction, 410, 1215, 67
sexuality, 162n4, 167n14 An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, 129
Shake (Beckman), 171n20 Owls Clover, 5
Shaw, Lytle, 118, 168n17 Romance for a Demoiselle Lying in the
Shklovsky, Viktor, 26, 7172, 7576, 80, Grass, 12
163n15, 163n17 Sunday Morning, 4
Shut Not Your Doors (Whitman), 98 Two at Norfolk, 4, 157n2
Silliman, Ron, 65, 71 stream of consciousness, 132134, 168n5
Simonides, 123 streams, 133139. See also rivers
Sinceritys Shadow (Forbes), 2223 Struthers, Ann, 38
sjuzet, 7577, 7980, 8283, 92, 163n1617, Style (Moore), 5152
164n20 subject, 16, 126, 158n10. See also speaking
Smith, Adam, 56 subjectivity
Smith, Hazel, 168n19 subjectlessness, 121, 126
social change, 45 subjectless talk, 119120
Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 49 subject matter, 118119
Song for Occupations, A (Whitman), 99 succession, 64, 66, 86, 92
Song of Myself (Whitman), 99100, 104, Sunday Morning (Stevens), 4
152, 166n5 Svartvik, Jan, 114
Song of Myself (Whitman), 164n25 Swift, Jonathan, 3031, 34, 55
Song of the Answerer (Whitman), 102 syllogism, 65
Song of the Broad Axe (Whitman), 104 System, The (Ashbery), 170n11
Song of the Open Road (Whitman), 101102 Szalay, Michael, 6
Sophocles, 55
Soviet Union, 71, 82 Tatlin, Vladimir, 8, 157n6
Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 118 Taylor, Charles, 124
Spahr, Juliana, 84, 141, 146149, 155, 170n16, Telling Stories Again (McHale), 91
170171n17 Template, The (Ashbery), 137, 139
speaking subjectivity, 108109 Terrell, Carroll F., 33
Spenser, Edmund, 135136, 169n6 Terrestrial Cuckoo (OHara), 112
Spiegelman, Willard, 123, 160n6 Textual Politics and the Language Poets
SSRC (Social Science Research Council), 49 (Hartley), 158n12
Staiger, Jeff, 169170n11 Theory of Prose (Shklovsky), 163n17
Stamy, Cynthia, 142 Thief of Poetry, The (Ashbery), 130
Starting from Paumanok (Whitman), Third Factory (Shklovsky), 7172, 163n15
101103 This Connection of Everything with Lungs
statements, 115116 (Spahr), 146149
Stein, Gertrude, 27, 52, 65 Thoreau, Henry David, 100
Index [ 191 ]
To Autumn (Keats), 88 Whitman, Syntax, and Political Theory
To Hell with It (OHara), 118 (Dimock), 104, 165n4
transcription, 30 Whitman, Walt
Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 55 American imperium of, 12, 99
Tritical Essay upon the Faculties of the conversations and, 119, 166n12, 168n20
Mind (Swift), 55 identity and, 100, 104105, 165n4
True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire promissory art of, 102103
Island, A (OHara), 112113 sense of grammar, 104, 166n8
Two at Norfolk (Stevens), 4, 157n2 use of parataxis, 38
Two Shepherds, A Novel (OHara), Whitman, Walt: works
109111, 167n14 By Blue Ontarios Shore, 102
Tzara, Tristan, 8 Children of Adam, 102
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, 100
universality, 53, 118 A Font of Type, 104
Unruly Examples (Gelley), 53 Leaves of Grass, 25, 97104, 126, 164n25,
Uses of Enchantment, The (Bettelheim), 69 165n3, 165n5, 166n6, 168n20
Utopianism, 12, 157n5 One Hour to Madness and Joy, 102
Primer of Words, 104
Vainglory (Firbank), 167n16 Promise to California, A, 102
Value of Narrativity, The (White), 8384 Shut Not Your Doors, 98
Vampire Finch (Schiff ), 141144 A Song for Occupations, 99
vampire finches, 142, 170n14 Song of Myself, 99100, 104, 152, 166n5
Very Rainy Light, An Eclogue (OHara), 111 Song of Myself, 164n25
View (magazine), 32 Song of the Answerer, 102
Village of Sleep, The (Ashbery), 131 Song of the Broad Axe, 104
Vincent, John Emil, 169n7 Song of the Open Road, 101102
Virgil, 37, 109 Starting from Paumanok, 101103
Whoever You Are Now Holding Me in
Walk, The (Robinson), 129 Hand, 101
walking , 129130 A Woman Waits for Me, 102
Walks in the World (Gilbert), 129130 Whoever You Are Now Holding Me in
Wallace Stevens and the Intricate Evasions Hand (Whitman), 101
of As (Critchley), 11 Why I Am Not a Painter (OHara), 121
Wallace Stevens and the Poetics of National Williams, William Carlos, 98, 138
Insurance (Harrington), 157n1 Williamson, Alan, 109
Walton, Izaak, 35 Wilson, Eric, 99
Walt Whitman and the American Reader Woman Waits for Me, A (Whitman), 102
(Greenspan), 165n5 Worth (Schiff ), 141144
Walt Whitmans Native Representations Wright, C. D., 170n13
(Folsom), 166n7 Writers on the Left (Aaron), 82
Watten, Barrett, 71, 75, 82 writing
Webster, Noah, 104 coterie writing , 118
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Foucault on, 20
A (Thoreau), 100 Language writing, 2728, 65, 7172, 159n18
What are Years? (Moore), 89 scientific writing , 43
What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in
Thinking? (Kant), 158n8 Your Name Here (Ashbery), 168n2
What Is an Author? (Foucault), 1920 Y Kwang-chung , 18
What Is Enlightenment? (Foucault), 24
Where Shall I Wander (Ashbery), 137 zoology, 43. See also natural history
White, Hayden, 8384 Zukofsky, Louis, 18
[ 192 ] Index

Reddy, Srikanth - Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry

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Changing Subjects

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Copyright 2012 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. It Must Change: The Art of Digression in Twentieth-Century

I n the autumn of 1937, a visitor to the offices of the Hartford Accident

[4] Changing Subjects

The thing is dead ... Everything is dead

1. Whatever is is right (Conservative)

From a formal perspective, the progression from a predicate of divine

IT M UST CH A NGE [5]

Th is book is a study of the multifaceted imperative to changethe world,

Thus the constant

In this Heraclitean universe, an old seraph haunts the public gardens in

[6] Changing Subjects

IT M UST CH A NGE [7]

From F.T. Marinett is Manifesto of Futurism on the Fascist Right to Vlad-

[8] Changing Subjects

Theres a meditation there, in which there seems

Evasion, of course, is precisely the charge leveled by Burnshaw against

IT M UST CH A NGE [9]

Anxiety regarding the consequences of digression for the body politic

Lampooning Whitmans invocation of a triumphant American imperium,

A philosophical puzzle subtends, a priori, the manual self-difference that

What he is writing is a kind of pre-poetry, a tentative approach to the poem, an enact-

THE DISJUNCTIVE FALLACY

Lentricchias pugnacious broadside, which sought to redeem the per-

For Foucault undisciplined individuality may be precisely the unintended effect of a

The unruly subject may fi nd cold comfort in such a subterranean

To overlook such differences is, for Bernstein, like failing to distinguish

The theoretical fatalism that Lentricchia and other defenders of personal

Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language,

Foucaults heterotopian gaze rigorously scrutinizes historical, episte-

If the Enlightenment witnessed the consolidation of an orderly discursive

Though I frame the following chapters within a theoretical armature

To Explain Grace Requires

S wifts portrait of a literary hack in the satirical Digression in Praise of

In rebuttal to this image of unruliness and depredation, Moore regularly

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 31 ]

To create an alphabetical index to such a miscellany displays an extraordi-

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 33 ]

He says, What monarch would not blush

Here, Moore arranges various quotations from her private miscellany

While we ordinarily think of an archive as a collection of texts gathered

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 35 ]

THE PANGOLINS CURIOUS TAIL

In contravention of the poems title, Moores most rigorous and sympathetic

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 37 ]

... The giant-pangolin-

contracting nose and eye apertures

As if we had entered the auditorium in medias res during an illustrated

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 39 ]

... the slight lizard that

As by a Chinese brush, eight green

The intelligent student of Natural History is led unconsciously, by the

Both marked by grace and sensation (like the tip of an elephants

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 41 ]

... The giant-pangolin-

versities .. . (Poems, 227)

Every stanza in The Pangolin consists of eleven lines (roughly rhymed

TO E X PL A I N GR ACE R EQU I R ES A CU R IOUS H A N D [ 43 ]

versities. (Poems, 227)