on a hitherto blank page—is conveyed not only by the meanings of the words
but by their visual con¤gurations. In the Levine translation, the emphasis is
on the second syllable of begin, which leads to in and spin, and farther down
the page to ¤nish, ¤ne, line, and so on. The latter are eye rhymes only, sug-
gesting what care is taken to ensure seeing rather than seeing through on the
reader’s part.
Galáxias can thus be regarded as a visual poem—visual, not in the sense
of calligrammatic, as in the case of Apollinaire’s “Il pleut” or Eugen Gom-
ringer’s “Wind,” but in its attention to letters and morphemes as well as
paronomasia and paragram. A series of “exterior monologues” in prose, Ga-
láxias thus points the way from the “prose” of modernists like Joyce and Stein
to the new prose poetry of the late twentieth century. I am thinking less of
the current predilection for fusing prose with pictogram, the alternation of
prose and verse, or the use of typography (different font size, boldface, italics,
lines reversed or upside-down) for “special effects” in the great tradition of
Futurist page design. Such design, as I suggest in Radical Arti¤ce,^25 all too
easily shades into the now familiar formats of advertising, billboard, maga-
zine, and Web page layout. Rather, I want to look at some “limit-texts,” at
“prose poems” that, like the Galáxias, challenge the distinction between po-
etry and prose and emphasize the materiality of the text.
Consider, for example, the seemingly normal “prose” of Rosmarie Wal-
drop’s sequence Lawn of Excluded Middle, published in 1993. Waldrop, her-
self one of the early theorists of Concrete poetry, has experimented with
various verse and prose forms; in Lawn the norm is the short verse para-
graph, one per page. Here is section 3:
I put a ruler in my handbag, having heard men talk about
their sex. Now we have correct measurements and a stick iness
between collar and neck. It is one thing to insert yourself
into a mirror, but quite another to get your image out again and
have your errors pass for objectivity. Vitreous. As in humor.
A change in perspective is caused by the ciliary muscle, but
need not be conciliatory. Still, the eye is a camera, room for
every thing that is to enter, like the cylinder called the
satisfaction of hollow space. Only language grows such
grass-green grass.^26When we look at this block of print, with its justi¤ed left and right margins,
at ¤rst nothing especially stands out except perhaps the ¤rst letter, a boldface
186 Chapter 9