Audio-Ears, perhaps for a new hearing aid or repair of an old one, what does
that signify vis-à-vis thoughts of death and Ireland? Mary Manning’s pur-
pose remains mysterious. But The Midnight itself lifts the saying out of the
zone of things said. For can it be a coincidence that Aer is an anagram for
Ear(s)? Or that Lingus contains the root that gives us linguistic? Then, too,
Aer is a synonym for “air” or song—a language air, so to speak—and as such
it depends, of course, on “Audio Ears.” Maybe Mary Manning Howe’s life
wasn’t such a failure after all. In any case, Howe’s intricate differentials testify
to the Deleuzian “displacement and disguising within repetition” that make
poetic language what it is.
Close reading, especially of the radical differential texts of our time, pro-
vides, we have seen, fewer answers than questions—questions I try to deal
with in the essays in this collection. Why is Eliot’s “Gerontion” such a bril-
liant poem, despite its inclusion of unpleasant anti-Semitic passages, and
what does sound structure have to do with it? How do Pound’s catalogues of
proper names f unct ion in The Cantos, and what does it mean to write a long
poem that is so oddly nominalist? Is Pound’s in fact, as is usually thought, an
“ideogrammic” mode of writing? How does Eugene Jolas’s multilingualism
work, and what developments in later poetry does it anticipate? How does
Haroldo de Campos adapt the lessons of Concrete poetry to the writing of
prose, and how does Joyce’s example in the Wa k e help to create a “concrete
prose” that many contemporary poets are now using? Or again, what hap-
pens when Concrete poetry is related to musical form as in the early work of
Ronald Johnson? Why did Beckett begin to write radio plays in the sixties,
and how do these relate to his work in the theatre on the one hand, and to
the evolution of Hörspiel on the other? What happens when Beckett collabo-
rates with a composer like Morton Feldman? Does the inclusion of music
detract from the power of the language itself? Or enhance it?
The essays on contemporaries raise somewhat broader issues. How do
Language poets, ostensibly committed to the removal of the lyric voice, re-
inscribe the subjectivity of the poet? How does the second generation of
Language poets adapt the lessons of the ¤rst? And how does a “dif¤cult”
Language poet like Rae Armantrout relate to another “dif¤cult”—but much
more celebrated and evidently accessible—poet like Jorie Graham? How does
an epistolary memoir like Tom Raworth’s Letters from Yaddo relate to more
conventional prose poems? How has the example of Oulipo, with its elabo-
rate rules for a poetry of constraints, become prominent in the writing of
younger poet-performers like Christian Bök and Caroline Bergvall? How
does the adoption of constraint differ from the use of conventional metrical
Introduction xxxi