capital I, and even this is a well-known print convention. And, as in the case
of normal prose format, we read the text from left to right and from sentence
to sentence to its conclusion. Waldrop’s is not primarily a paragrammatic text
where morphemes or phonemes within a given word split off and form new
constellations, although of course the book’s title is a play on the law of the
excluded middle, the law of formal logic that every thing must be either true
or false, which Waldrop herself rejects as a falsi¤cation of experience.
Language is just as important to Waldrop as it is to Haroldo de Campos,
only for her, as for the Wittgenstein she cites in her “Endpaper,” “Poetry [is]
an alternate, less linear logic.” “Wittgenstein,” she writes, “makes language
with its ambiguities the ground of philosophy. His games are played on the
Lawn of the Excluded Middle,” which “plays with the idea of woman as
the excluded middle.... more particularly, the womb, the empty center of
the woman’s body, the locus of fertility.” Accordingly, the “logic” that gov-
erns Waldrop’s prose poem is absurd in its hyperliteralism. The poet puts a
ruler in her handbag, “having heard men talk about their sex.” “Now,” the
poet notes proudly, “we have correct measurements,” but the “stickiness”
that results seems to be in the wrong place: “between collar and neck.” The
next sentence derives, I would guess, from Wittgenstein’s proposition that “A
picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our lan-
guage.”^27 “It is one thing,” we read, “to insert yourself into a mirror, but quite
another to get your image out again.” One can generate one’s own image
merely by placing oneself in front of a mirror, but of course one can’t “get”
that image “out again” and still have it, for a mirror image obviously has no
life of its own. Then, too, from the woman’s perspective, “to insert yourself ”
is a male prerogative, one that calls into question the woman’s efforts to “get
your image out again” and to “have your errors pass for objectivity.” The
situation, as the next word tells us, is “Vitreous,” as glassy and slippery as the
“grass-green grass”—a phrase defying the rule of logic that an attribute of a
thing can’t be identical to that thing.
“Vitreous. As in humor.” What does that “As” mean? Is humor glassy?
Transparent? Brittle? In Waldrop’s poem, a given phrase or sentence only
seems to “follow” its predecessor, either logically or temporally. Indeed, the
familiarity of the print block on the white page turns out to be as open to
question as is the law of the excluded middle. For one thing, the very ¤xity
of Waldrop’s grid is contradicted by her phrasing, the words, not cut into
syllables at the margin, ¤tting into the con¤ned area only by allowing for un-
even spacing that leaves prominent white gaps. In the prologue to Reluctant
Gravities, Waldrop refers to this practice as “gap gardening which, moved in-
de Campos’s Galáxias and After 187