my exchange with Ron Silliman, “What/Person: From an Exchange.” In this complex exchange, (published in the Poetics Journal),8 I was answering Silliman’s position that women, gays, and minorities tend to write “conventional narrative” in that they have to “tell their stories,” arising from their social conditions; whereas white heterosexual male writers (he says) are in a position to experiment formally.
The passage that Perelman quoted from my response to Silliman implies that I simply ‘favor’ “narrative” (whatever that is); that is, it reverses, erases the argument I was making by quoting a tiny passage out of context.
A person describing a creationist view that all minute events and phenomena are in God’s eye or plan beforehand—so evolution cannot exist or occur—nothing is occurring first or apart from the plan—no actions are later events; astonished, I made the remark, “This is completely alien to poetry.” Alien to observation, and also to action.
There is no cause or effect—the moment of occurrence doesn’t exist either—in that the present moment is disjunction per se only (Nāgārjunian logic, which is early Zen, rendering modern physics?). All times (past, present, and future) are occurring at the same time separately as that disjunctive space or moment (rendition of Dōgen’s and Einstein’s sense of being as time). So occurrence is not hierarchically ordered. (These views of time and being are also [elsewhere] articulated as socially shared experiences.)
The language that is ‘experimentally’ based corresponds to people’s experience; as the act of ‘one’s’ experiencing; and (though not widely disseminated, thus not part of ‘communal’ experience) it is not an ‘elite’ language.
Doctrine doesn’t reflect ‘our’/their experience; is alien to it.
The contradictory, problematic factor is in divorcing ‘experience’ from ‘non-referential’ writing (originally with radical intention); a separation that sometimes simply stems from an attitude that ‘experience’ is lowly (that is, from snobbery and also regard for authority as opposed to demonstration).
One point I made to Silliman in the exchange was that the form of one’s articulation may be a reconstituting of the general social narrative, may be a radical change in expression arising from one’s separation from social convention.
Silliman’s position was negating the factor of the individual’s articulation as motions/shape in syntax being a radical change in thought.
In the early eighties, Silliman, in conversation and talks in San Francisco, urged poets to write syntax that was paragraphs without line breaks, paratactic, described as a communal, non-individualistic expression. The syntax has a recognizable sound pattern (which is what poetic syntaxes are, as from other periods, say languages called Beat or New York School). In the same spirit in that period, Bob Perelman stated, during a talk given by Michael Palmer on autobiography, that the erotic was not to enter into writing, the erotic was a form of ego to be stricken or omitted from writing. (At the time, this was related to a Marxist-based conception of writing that should be egoless: ‘non-narrative’ is not ‘self-expression’—that’s an action.)9
Roughly, paratactic syntax is juxtaposition to each other of ‘unrelated,’ which itself becomes a form of relation, statements or questions in one paragraph—a series of such leaps in continuing paragraphs or lines. A single statement is potentially examined or refuted by being in a series of such single ‘unrelated’ statements. This is a form of ‘not holding onto a thought.’ However, I think in order for the structure not to be deterministic, one would have to transgress the entirety—(as reader or writer) not be ‘inside’ the statements or questions having to respond to them. Either power or critique of it occurring as poetic syntax (of the time), ‘one’ must continually instigate—that is, one will write outside a ‘given’ syntax; not being defined by social articulation in any instant as syntactically.
There is no way in which women can apprehend conservative social articulation if they write uniform syntax (dictated by men) that excises the erotic.
One could not be separating the event—from/as thought (or apprehension).
Recently a man giving a (literary) talk showed slides of a ‘pin-up girl’—interpreting the past to make the point that he thought she had a lot of “autonomy.” The subject (pin-up girl10) has no writing ‘as poetry’/expression that’s its writing—and she’s ‘in’ the past. Granting those in the past, in their erotic being, “autonomy.”
Present as disjunct per se only—that space/time cannot be his narrative—or one’s. Event is between. One has to modify one’s tone if one is a woman to be heard as saying anything.
“To change without belief is anarchistic as instinct pricks from the Latin (stinguere), no law but that the absence of law is the resistance of love instinct with tact like the expression of this thought.”11
Assessing relations of power between people—such as that say based in gender—merely becomes the articulating of those relations, as oneself having power. One would have to disrupt in writing one’s own articulation of power at all.
A communal syntax being community could have occurred in an instant. When it occurs again, it isn’t in the same syntax?
Format (when experiment becomes format) is not articulating occurrence (events/thought). It cannot, inherently. That is, those experimenting formally (as per Silliman’s description) by accepting polemic directive are per se not practicing experiment—in that they are divorced from the live gesture?
The very nature of descriptive language is ‘other’ than the subject. What Giorgio Agamben identifies (locating it in infancy) as a silent pre-language state is going on at all times in one simultaneously ‘alongside’ one’s language apprehension.12
(“Experiment”—not as itself a brand of writing or as ‘unfinished’ ‘attempts’ rather than the ‘finished product’—but as ‘scientific experiment’: to find out what something is, or to find out what’s happening.)
In the view (such as in Anne Waldman’s statements13) that (which is the real) poetry is “speech,” there’s a sense of “speech” (spoken is social, convention of ‘conversation’?)—that is not “thought” [interior], is not ‘felt spatially / such as correspondences in the limbs.’ Tonal is considered thus as ranges of speaking voice or breath.
Yet poets have been writing other tones—that are in the written text only—tones not occurring as speaking. These are ‘sounded’ silently, spatially—a separation; between ‘one’ and ‘social’? Or separation between ‘one’ and ‘correspondences in the limbs’—and night. (As if a butterfly and the butterfly motion of a swimmer.)
We’ve mutated and become ventriloquists who speak ‘inner’ unspoken ‘movements’ and various types of speech at the same time.
I was interested in a syntax whose very mode of observation was to reveal its structure; that is, its subject and its mode are subjectivity being observation. Since it is itself subjective the viewpoint is ‘without basis.’ It removes its own basis, that of exterior authority, as a critique of itself.
As an example, sentences that are single, dual, or multiple clauses are only intonations, dislocating their ‘interior’ and ‘exterior’ subject—by one’s ‘interior’ intonation and ‘exterior’ reference being the same (being a clause of the sentence, dissonant notes played at the
