Pius Servien rightly distinguished two languages: the language of sci-
ence, dominated by the symbol of Equality, in which each term may
be replaced by others, and lyrical language, in which every term is ir-
replaceable and can only be repeated. Repetition can always be “repre-
sented” as extreme resemblance or perfect equivalence, but the fact that
one can pass by degrees from one thing to another does not prevent
their being different in kind. (Difference and Repetition 2)“Lyrical language [is that] in which every term is irreplaceable and can only
be repeated”: if this sounds like Archibald MacLeish’s notorious Ars Poetica,
with its injunction that “A poem should not mean, / but be,” or like Cleanth
Brooks’s “heresy of paraphrase,” perhaps it is time for some differential read-
ing of the critics as well as the poets.
Academic criticism today, unfamiliar as it generally is with the actual
practice of the scorned and fabled New Criticism, has often taken the posi-
tion that the emphasis on the materiality of the text—its actual language,
syntax, use of white space, and typographical elements, as theorized by such
poet-theorists as Charles Bernstein and Steve McCaffery—is no more than
an updated version of the old Brooks-and-Warren poetic. Thus Jennifer
Ashton, in a review essay on recent studies of modernism, cites Charles Bern-
stein’s statement that “the poem said any other way is not the poem” as a
signal instance of “the New Critical heresy,” for, so she claims, Bernstein’s
view, like Lyn Hejinian’s rejection of closure, makes it impossible to interpret
a given poem; one can only “experience” it.^19
Such critique—and it persists in English departments—cries out for a bit
of differential reading. For one thing, those big words—experience and inter-
pretation, like autonomy and materiality—are never de¤ned. Ashton refers
brie®y to Fredric Jameson’s diagnosis of the “failure” of “postmodernism”
to practice “historical critique” (“Modernism’s ‘New’ Literalism” 382), but
then again, what is the difference between their “postmodernism” and, say,
Charles Olson’s or Frank O’Hara’s—the poetic mode of an earlier generation
to be found in such anthologies as Donald Allen’s The Postmoderns?^20
Indeed, Bernstein’s “The poem said any other way is not the poem” is
not, in fact, a Brooksian formulation. For Brooks, as I noted earlier, the lan-
guage of poetry is equivalent to the language of paradox, and a given poem’s
central paradox, expressed metaphorically, must permeate the entire poem
and give it an ordered, centered structure. The role of sound, syntax, visual
layout—these are aspects of the “saying another way” that Brooks didn’t es-
pecially consider. Indeed, the very anthologizing of, say, Andrew Marvell’s
xxviii Introduction