Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

Here is the opening:

Begin a f acing

At a pt of motion

How c lose is near to face a face

What makes a face how close too near

Tender nr pace m

Just close enough makes faceless

Too close makes underfaced

Ceci n’est pas une fesse

Past nest urn face

Sees here your passing

This is not a face

Ye s t r a n s c r p t

S easier li this

A face is like a rose

The n fss

correlated to ah yes tt t

waltzing t change

The technique here is not procedural, but “About Face” shares with Oulipo
poetics the desire to decompose words so that their phonemic, morphemic,
and paragrammatic properties emerge. Take the ¤rst line, “Begin a f acing.”
Many poems begin with “begin”—for example, Wallace Stevens’s Notes To-
ward a Supreme Fiction (“Begin, ephebe... ”)—but here the space between
“f ” and “a” that produces “ace” (perhaps an allusion to Tom Raworth’s long
columnar poem by that title) suggests that facing someone or something
is always an interrupted activity, a “point of motion,” as we read in line 2.
Lines 3 and 4 work similarly—the breakup of “close” gives us the very dif-
ferent word “lose,” and central questions about the phrases “face to face” and
“about face” are now posed. Bergvall mimics speech patterns—“Tender nr
pace m”—a line that can be heard as opening with “tender near” or “tender-
ness” but remains visually opaque. This line modulates, in its turn, into the
discriminations of “pace”/“faceless”/“underfaced” and the permutations on
“how close,” “just close,” “too close.”
Sound repetition and permutation, together with various graphic vari-
ants, thus govern meaning in Bergvall’s poem. There are obvious relations to
Language poetry, especially to the work of Charles Bernstein, Steve McCaf-

224 Chapter 11