From a hermeneutic perspective, this is no doubt the case. But even Der-
rida, posing the question “Are there signatures?” responds, “Yes, of course,
every day. Effects of signature are the most common thing in the world” (20).
And he ends his essay with the “counterfeit” signature “J. Derrida” (21). The
implication is that however conscious we must be of the basic instability of
a given signature, in practice we do take signatures seriously as markers of a
particular individual, a cultural practice, an historical period, a national for-
mation, a convention, and so on. Indeed, if our purpose is to understand spe-
ci¤c writing practices, individual as well as generic, we can hardly avoid not-
ing their individual stamp or mark of authorship. The Bilbao-Guggenheim
Museum, for example, may bear witness to any number of postmodern ar-
chitectural traits (and some modernist ones as well: witness the building’s
Frank Lloyd Wright allusions), but its indelible signature is that of its highly
individual architect, Frank Gehry.
This brings me back to the question of the subject in the ostensibly “de-
authorized” poetry of the Language school. In what follows, I want to look
at signatures in two poetic texts, both of them written by what are nomi-
nally Language poets and both charting, in very speci¤c ways, the geography
of childhood. The ¤rst is Ron Silliman’s own “Albany,” the second, Susan
Howe’s Frame Structures.^19
“Signatures of All Things I Am Here to Read”
“Albany” is a long prose paragraph made up of one hundred “New Sen-
tences,” to use Ron Silliman’s own term, de¤ned in a now well-known (and
hotly debated) essay by that name. The “new sentence” is conceived as an
independent unit, neither causally nor temporally related to the sentences
that precede and follow it. Like a line in poetry, its length is operative and its
meaning depends on the larger paragraph as organizing system.^20 Here, for
example, are the ¤rst twenty sentences of “Albany”:
If the function of writing is to “express the world.” My father with-
held child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my
brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called
them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay
stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison. A line is the distance
between. They circled the seafood restaurant, singing “We shall not be
moved.” My turn to cook. It was hard to adjust my sleeping to those
hours when the sun was up. The event was nothing like their report of
it. How concerned was I over her failure to have orgasms? Mondale’sSilliman’s Albany, Howe’s Buffalo 137