Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

wider. For even as students were absorbing Foucault’s “What Is an Author?”
and Barthes’s “The Death of the Author,” Of¤cial Verse Culture, as Bernstein
called it, was spawning poems like the following, which I take from The Mor-
row Anthology of Younger Poets:

Hollandaise

The sauce thickens. I add more butter,

slowly. Sometimes we drank the best wine

while we cooked for friends,

knowing nothing could go wrong,

the souf®é would rise, the custard set,

the cheese be ripe. we imagined

we were reckless but we were just happy,

and good at our work. the cookbook is ¤rm:

it is safer not to go over two ounces

of butter for each egg yolk. I try to describe

to myself how we could have been safer,

what we exceeded. If the sauce “turns”

there are things to be done, steps

to be taken that are not miraculous,

that assume the failed ingredients,

that assume a willing suspension of despair.^10

Here McCaffery’s arrow of reference is ®ying straight into the saucepan,
ready to curdle that hollandaise. The lasting contribution of Language poet-
ics, I would posit, is that at a moment when workshop poetry all across the
United States was wedded to a kind of neo-confessionalist, neo-realist poetic
discourse, a discourse committed to drawing pretentious metaphors about
failed relationships from hollandaise recipes, Language theory reminded us
that poetry is a making [poien], a construction using language, rhythm,
sound, and visual image; that the subject, far from being simply the poet
speaking in his or her natural “voice,” was itself a complex construction; and
that—most important—there was actually something at stake in producing
a body of poems; and that poetic discourse belonged to the same universe as
philosophical and political discourse.
None of this, of course, was all that new, but it was new within the par-
ticular context of “Naked Poetry,” as an important anthology edited by
Robert Mezey and Stephen Berg was called,^11 or vis-à-vis Allen Ginsberg’s
insistence on “First thought, best thought”—a precept Ginsberg fortunately

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