“To try to unify the style of work around this notion of self is to take the writing to
be not only reductively autobiographical in trying to de¤ne the sound of me but also
to accept that the creation of a persona is somehow central to writing poetry” (407).
And again, “It’s a mistake, I think, to posit the self as the primary organizing feature
of writing.”
- See, for example, Steve McCaffery, “Nothing Is Forgotten but the Talk of How
to Talk: An Interview by Andrew Payne” (1984), in North of Intention: Critical Writ-
ings, 1973–1986 (New York: Roof Books, 1986), 111–12, where McCaffery dismisses early
experiments in sound poetry as bedeviled by the “dominant my tholog y of Origin: a
privileging of the pre-linguistic, child-sound, the Rousseauist dream of immediate-
intuitive communication, all of which tended to a reinscription of a supposed pre-
symbolic order in a present, self-authenticating instant.”
And cf. Michael Davidson, “ ‘Hey Man, My Wave!’: The Authority of Private Lan-
guage,” in Poetics Journal 6: “Marginality: Public and Private Language,” ed. Barrett
Watten and Lyn Hejinian (1986): 33–45. “The ideal of subjectivity itself,” writes
Davidson, “is not so much the source as the product of speci¤c sociohistorical struc-
tures. The subject upon which the lyric impulse is based, rather than being able to
generate its own language of the heart, is also constituted within a world of public
discourse. The lyric ‘I’ emerges as a positional relation. Its subjectivity is made pos-
sible by a linguistic and ultimately social structure in which ‘I’ speaks” (41).
For comparable statements by women poets, see the section “Poetics and Expo-
sition” in Mary Margaret Sloan, ed., Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative
Writing by Women (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, 1998). Rosmarie Waldrop, for
example, dismisses the Romantic notion that “the poem is an epiphany inside the
poet’s mind and then ‘expressed’ by choosing the right words.” Rather, “The poem is
not ‘expression,’ but a cognitive process that, to some extent, changes me” (609–10). - Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author” (1968), in Image, Music, Text
(New York: Farrar, Straus, 1968), 142, 145–47, my emphasis. And cf. “From Speech to
Writing” (1974), in The Grain of the Voice: Interviews 1962–1980/Roland Barthes, trans.
Linda Coverdale (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1985), 3–7. - Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Foucault, Language, Counter-
Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977),
116, 124, 138. - Fredric Jameson, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Postmodernism; or,
the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 11. - See “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Lef t Review 146 (July–
August 1984): 53–92. - Ron Silliman, et al., “Aesthetic Tendency and the Politics of Poetry: A Mani-
festo,” Social Text 19/20 (fall 1988): 264. - See New Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Mod-
ern and Postmodern Poetry, ed. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, 2 vols. (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995, 1998).
Notes to Pages 130–132 285