no doubt, were published simply because they were Los Angeles friends), but
with rare exceptions no effort was made to recruit the mainstream. Hickman
never published Derek Walcott or Galway Kinnell, Adrienne Rich or Rita
Dove. Why not? We cannot, alas, ask Hickman himself, and there is no mis-
sion statement to guide us. But I suspect there were three reasons. First, I
imagine the editor felt these other poets got enough of a hearing in the main-
stream press, and if he was to edit and produce a journal, he might as well
introduce lesser-known poets. Secondly, publication of the established poets
would have been too expensive. And thirdly, although there is no Temblor
manifesto, the journal’s unstated aesthetic remained true to what had been
the cornerstone of Language aesthetic—namely, that poetry is more than the
direct voicing of personal feeling and/or didactic statement, that poetry, far
from being transparent, demands indirection and verbal/syntactic deforma-
tions.
Consider, in this connection, Lyn Hejinian’s “Two Stein Talks” in Temblor
#3 (1986).^19 Hejinian makes a strong case for Stein’s brand of “realism” as “the
discovery that language is an order of reality itself and not a mediating
medium—that it is possible and even likely that one can have a confrontation
with a phrase that is as signi¤cant as a confrontation with a tree, chair, cone,
dog, bishop, piano, vineyard, door, or penny” (129). In the course of her talks,
Hejinian shows us how one can analyze such poetic language, how, for ex-
ample, in the ¤rst of the Tender Buttons, “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,”
the ¤rst phrase “A kind in glass and a cousin” “binds carafe with blind phoni-
cally.” As for “blind,” “A carafe is a container, a glass one, which, if ¤lled with
a thick liquid, that is a colored one, might be, so to speak, blind, opaque.” “A
blind glass,” she adds, “might also be a blank mirror, or a draped window—as
my aunt would say, ‘Draw the blinds, it’s dinner time’ ” (132).
The poet’s off hand phrase “as my aunt would say” shows that reading
semiotically rather than referentially, “in” rather than “for,” need not be as
impersonal an activity as it may have looked in its ¤rst incarnation. On the
contrary, after citing Stein’s sentence, “A gap what is a gap when there is not
any meaning in a slice with a hole in it,” Hejinian decides “to quote myself,”
in a stanza that begins “going / by the usual criteria for knowledge / I vowed
not to laugh / but to scatter things” (133). Elsewhere in this issue we have
Susan Howe’s “12 Poems from a Work in Progress,” which begins with a play
on “sitt” / “site”/ “cite,” in keeping with McCaffery’s account of the cipheral
text, and ends with an oblique prayer to “Keep and comfort come / unhook
my father / his nest is in thick of my / work” (27). How does one “unhook”
a father, and why? We never know for sure any more than we can paraphrase
164 Chapter 8