one sense her strategy is perfectly traditional: poetry is, after all, the lan-
guage art, the art that, in Hugh Kenner’s words, “lifts the saying out of the
zone of things said.”^19 Kenner’s reference here is to Williams, who was a mas-
ter of that art, as were, in the next generation, Lorine Niedecker and George
Oppen, and in ours such poets as Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe, Steve
McCaffery, and Tom Raworth—poets not especially given to the use of pro-
cedural methods but always aware, even in their ways of organizing free-
verse units, of the ¤gure sound makes. There are, in other words, serious al-
ternatives to the lineated prose of the Norton poets that do not necessarily
move in the direction of the procedural poetics I have been discussing. It is
patently not a case of either/or.
If the inventions of younger poets like Bök and Bergvall deserve our close
attention, as I have suggested they do, it is because sequences like Eunoia
point us back with special force to a poetic moment that has been largely
displaced by the sonic indifference that characterizes contemporary antholo-
gies, journals, and poetry readings—an indifference that is satis¤ed to pro-
duce poems or, from the reader’s perspective, to call texts poems merely be-
cause they are lineated, never mind the absence of rhy thmic ¤gure, sound
structure, and visual con¤guration. Faced with such prosaic ®atness, it is, in
Bergvall’s words,
Time to keep pple in the drk
Face-wash
In need
Face-grip226 Chapter 11