“The Garden” or Robert Frost’s “Once by the Paci¤c” prevented attention to
textual and materialist poetics.
Ce que dit la poésie ne peut être dit autrement. (“That which poetry says
cannot be said otherwise.”)^21 These are the words not of a New Critic but of
the French poet-mathematician-theorist Jacques Roubaud, one of the found-
ers and most active members of the Oulipo,^22 and they were written for a
roundtable on poetics in 2002. It would be pedantic to detail here the history
of this theory of poetry; suf¤ce it to say that it has its ancestry in Plato and
Longinus, the medieval rhetoricians, the troubadour poets, in Baudelaire and
especially Stephane Mallarmé, whose Crise de vers is perhaps its central docu-
ment. In our century, the key ¤gures are Roman Jakobson, himself a Russian
Futurist poet, and his Formalist circle, whose studies of the “orientation to-
ward the neighboring word” have given us some of the most intriguing essays
on poetics we have.
“Art,” declared Hugh Kenner, a critic no one has ever tried to place in the
New Critical camp, “lifts the saying out of the zone of things said.” The ref-
erence is to Williams (whom the New Critics studiously ignored, their British
counterparts referring to him dismissively as Carlos Williams) in Kenner’s
well-known essay “Something to Say.” And to make his point, he reformats
“The Red Wheel Barrow” in prose:
So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rainwater
beside the white chickens.“Try it over in any voice you like,” notes Kenner, “it is impossible.... To
whom might the sentence be spoken, for what purpose?... Not only is what
the sentence says banal, if you heard someone say it you’d wince. But ham-
mered on the typewriter into a thing made, and this without displacing a
single word except typographically, the sixteen words exist in a different
zone altogether, a zone remote from the world of sayers and sayings” (Home-
made World 60). Or in Charles Bernstein’s words in Arti¤ce of Absorption,
“the poem said any other way is not the poem.”
“While trying to place 1 plane surface / precisely on another plane surface /
you pass through some infra thin moments.” Duchamp, one imagines, would
have understood perfectly Deleuze’s declaration that “on every occasion these
concepts of a pure difference and a complex repetition seemed to connect and
coalesce. The divergence and decentering of difference corresponded closely
to a displacement and a disguising within repetition” (Difference and Repe-
tition xx, emphasis Deleuze’s). Thus there are numbers of versions of Du-
Introduction xxix