lent to its referent and the corollary notion that poetry is language that is
somehow extraordinary.^6 The case against transparency, against instrumen-
tal value and straightforward readability was the cornerstone of Russian
Formalist theory as well as of Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism and heteroglos-
sia. In The Noise of Culture, William Paulson has shown that the concept
of poetry as “noise,” as blockage of the normal (transparent) channels of
communication, is a notion that was already central, if intuitively so, for
Romantic theorists.^7 As for Wittgenstein, who refused to distinguish be-
tween ordinary and extraordinary language, ¤nding “ordinary” language
quite “strange” enough, the basic tenet that there are no meanings outside of
language gave McCaffery and his fellow symposiasts license to denounce
what Bernstein called, in “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” the “natural look”
as itself a construction with particular implications. Poetry, Bernstein ar-
gued, is never really “natural” (e.g., “I look straight into my heart & write the
exact words that come from within”); rather, “it emphasizes its medium as
being constructed, rule governed, every where circumscribed by grammar &
syntax, chosen vocabulary: designed, manipulated, picked, programmed, or-
ganized, & so an arti¤ce.”^8
Twenty years after its appearance, we can read “The Politics of the Refer-
ent” symposium as an important statement, reminding readers on the one
hand that poetry has always been “an arti¤ce” and on the other that poetry
cannot be too far out of step with the other discourses—philosophical, po-
litical, cultural—of its own time. By the mid-seventies, let’s recall, these
discourses, as studied on every campus across the United States, had pro-
duced a highly sophisticated and challenging body of texts about the nature
and function of écriture or writing, whether “writing the body” (Cixous and
Iragaray), the position of subjects in particular discourses (Kristeva), the re-
lationship of truth to ¤ction (Todorov, Bakhtin), and so on. I remember
clearly, in those years, walking into St. Mark’s Bookshop in the Bowery and
seeing on the central table the stacks of Barthes’s The Empire of Signs, Der-
rida’s Of Grammatology in the Gayatri Spivak translation, and Michel Fou-
cault’s The Order of Things (1970), which was published not by a university
press but by Random House. These books were selling as if they were popular
novels. At the same time, poetry, insofar as it had become the domain of the
Creative Writing workshop, was no longer the contested site it had been in
the days of Pound, Eliot, and Williams, or even of the “raw versus cooked”
debates of the early sixties. In the seventies, for reasons too complex to go
into here,^9 the production of poetry had become a kind of bland cottage in-
dustry, designed for those whose intellect was not up to reading Barthes or
Foucault or Kristeva. The feeling/intellect split had probably never been
160 Chapter 8