word, from the root splei = to splice, split, by way of the Scandinavian and Middle
English [®enderis], meaning bits, fragments, splinters.”
- I owe this insight to a superb essay on Cabbage Gardens by Molly Schwartz-
burg, a PhD candidate at Stanford University. - Ron Silliman, Interview with Vogler and Thomas Marshall, Quarry West 34
(1998): 24–25. - Charles Wright, “Disjecta Membra,” in James Tate, ed., The Best American
Poetry 1997, Series ed., David Lehman (New York: Scribner, 1997), 194. - The ¤rst issue of the little mimeo-journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, ed. Bruce
Andrews and Charles Bernstein, appeared in 1978. Many of the texts in this and sub-
sequent issues have been collected in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, ed. Bruce An-
drews and Charles Bernstein (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984). - Marjorie Perloff, “Dada without Duchamp/Duchamp without Dada: Avant-
Garde Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Stanford Humanities Review 7, no. 1
(1999): 48–78. - The irony is that Eliot was the avowed enemy of the New York Poets; Frank
O’Hara, for example, was given to statements like “Lord! Spare us from any more
Fisher kings!” (see my Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters, 2nd edition, [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998], 25, 9–12). In his recent The Last Avant-Garde: The
Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), David Lehman
tries to revive the case for a distinct New York School, emphasizing the group af¤lia-
tions of Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Kenneth Koch at Harvard, the relations with
painters in New York, and the legacy to the so-called Second Generation of New York
Poets. But the bulk of his book, ironically enough, contains individual chapters on
his chosen four (Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch, James Schuyler), the unanticipated effect
being to stress difference, both in quality and in mode, rather than group allegiance. - For these terms, see Edward Kamau Brathwaite, History of the Voice: The De-
velopment of Nation Language in Anglophone Caribbean Poetry (London: New Beacon
Books, 1984), 13 and passim; Elaine Savory, “Wordsongs & Wordwounds/Homecoming:
Kamau Brathwaite’s Barabajan Poems,” World Literature Today: Kamau Brathwaite
Special Issue, vol. 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 750–57.
Chapter 8
- Robert Sheppard, Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry, 1978–1997 (Exe-
ter, UK: Stride, 1999). - Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 238. - L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, was
a mimeograph magazine, whose ¤rst issue appeared in spring 1978. This, ¤rst edited
by Robert Grenier and then by Barrett Watten, began publication in 1971; Hills, edited
by Bob Perelman, began in 1973. Frank Davey’s Open Letter, published in Toronto,
was founded in 1972. These foundational journals as well as such projects as Lyn
288 Notes to Pages 149–157