724 The American Century: Literature since 1945“Language is, first of all, a political question.” That annotation, made in one of the
poems of Ron Silliman, would appear to align him with Andrews or Perelman. It
does, in a way. But Silliman, the author or editor of nearly thirty books, is much
more of an experimentalist, an eccentric inventor of forms. Between 1979 and 2004
he wrote a single poem, The Alphabet. Seeing all his poetry as part of a single poem
or lifework, he has now begun writing a new poem, Universe (2005–), which promises
to be of similar duration and length. His prose poem Tjanting (1981) is written
according to the Fibonacci number sequence, the result being that the number of
sentences in each paragraph equals the number of sentences in the previous two
paragraphs. And his prose poems, in particular, feature what Silliman calls the “new
sentence:” a form intended to frustrate the conventions, and the closure, of both the
poetic line and ordinary prose, as a series of discrete units are accumulated into a
kind of disjunctive verbal mosaic that recalls the writing of Gertrude Stein. Stein is
also an influential presence in the poetry of Michael Davidson (1944–), whose work,
gathered together in volumes like Summer Letters (1977) and Post Hue (1996), maps
out what he has termed “the space occupied by chiasmus” – that is, the rift or rupture
between the world and its articulations in language. Both Carla Harryman and Lyn
Hejinian, on the other hand, gravitate toward forms that, as Harryman has put it,
“distribute narrative rather than deny it.” Hejinian does this, not only in that abruptly
self-reflexive version of autobiography she calls My Life, but also in, say, Oxata:
A Short Russian Novel (1991), a series of “sonnets” through which she creates a
portrait of post-Soviet Russia. And Harryman does it in her often humorously erotic
poetry, collected in such volumes as The Middle (1983) and In the Mode of (1991).
A writer from a slightly earlier generation than most language poets, Hannah
Weiner (1928–1997) has mixed techniques learned from language poetry with more
random elements, automatic writing, in her attempt to capture her own psychic
experiences (Clairvoyant Journal (1978)). A writer from a slightly younger one,
Diane Ward (1956–), owes a debt to Virginia Woolf. In the poems collected in, say,
Relation (1989) and Imaginary Movie (1992), she uses form to generate mood. In her
own words, she puts “things,” “two disparate objects or events” “side by side,” “thereby
creating a third feeling (state) of perception.” What all these poets, despite all their
differences and diversions, have in common is revealed by two other writers
associated with the language movement, Ray Di Palma (1943–) (whose works
include The Jukebox of Memnon (1988)) and Bernadette Mayer (1945–) (a selection
of whose poetry is to be found in A Bernadette Mayer Reader (1992)). “When and
where there / is no such thing / ” writes Di Palma, “the thought walked.” “The best
obfuscation,” Mayer observes, “bewilders old meanings while reflecting or imitating
or creating a structure of beauty that we know.” There have been few more formidable
expressions of a common impulse, a shared motivation, than these two; few more
memorable expressions of that energetic, enigmatic relation between thing and
thought and language that drives all workers in the field of language poetry to write.
Nobody shares that impulse more than those three writers who are, arguably, the
leading exponents of language poetry: Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer (1943–),
and Susan Howe. Along with being the leading theorist of language poetry, BernsteinGGray_c05.indd 724ray_c 05 .indd 724 8 8/1/2011 7:31:41 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 41 PM