A History of American Literature

720 The American Century: Literature since 1945

national boundaries with such calculated and consummate skill – and not only

because some of them, at least, cannot or will not shake off their own international

origins. It is also and more fundamentally because – as it has been the peculiar fate

of postmodernism to emphasize – no boundary of any kind is impermeable. No

frame of reference, including the national one, is adequate, absolute, or terminal.

The actuality of words: Postmodern poetry

Internationalism is also a marked feature of the postmodernist impulse in poetry,

especially that form of postmodernism known as language poetry. The antecedents

of the language poets, for instance, include not only American writers like the

Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons, Louis Zukovsky, Laura Riding, and John Ashbery,

but also the James Joyce of Finnegans Wake and the Russian futurist writer Velimir

Khlebnikov, inventor of zaum or “transrational language.” Reflecting on the belief of

one of the leading language poets, Charles Bernstein (1950–), that “poetry, like

philosophy, may be involved with the investigation of phenomena (events, objects,

selves) and human knowledge of them,” those antecedents and influences include a

number of continental philosophers as well. Notable among these, from an earlier

generation, are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno.

Contemporary European poststructuralists have been just as important to the

language poets because they see their project as continuous with that of ideology

critiques and literary theory. To quote Bernstein again, as they see it, “poetics is the

extension of poetry by other means.” And, in constructing a poetic and a poetry, the

language poets have turned to such figures as Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Julia

Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, and Jacques Derrida. What that construction involves is

suggested by one poet who became a point of origin for language poets and, to an

extent, became one of them, Clark Coolidge (1939–). “What I think is that you start

with the materials,” Coolidge explained. “You start with the matter, not with rules.”

“I was really trying to work with the words, look at the words, try to use all their

qualities,” he added of his own work in a collection like Polaroid (1975). “There’s no

question of meaning, in the sense of explaining and understanding the poem.

Hopefully, it’s a unique object, not just an object.”

Language poetry is as various in its manifestations as contemporary sculpture or

photography, but Coolidge is alerting the reader here to one aim all language poets

do have in common. Instead of employing language as a transparent window on

experience, the language poet attends to the material nature of words. He or she

insists on the materiality of the medium used and its distance from whatever we are

inclined to think of as natural or immediate. An analogy might be made with

the sculptor who draws attention to the stone with which he or she is working, its

weight, texture, and cleavage. A more specific comparison might be made with the

famous, frequently reproduced paintings by Magritte of a pipe accompanied by the

words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). In common with Magritte, or

that sculptor, the language poet questions the status of the work being created, and

forces us to question that question. Privileging technique, resisting any temptation

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