xxxii
introduction
In this rewritten structure—new, alarming, and fascinating—all the possi-
bilities of verse and thought are called upon, not by the poet-writer but
almost by the poem itself.
It would be relatively easy to draw comparisons between the works of
contemporary French-language poets represented here and those of their
American counterparts of roughly the same ideological and formal out-
look (the philosophical and morally oriented brilliance of John Ashbery;
the ‘‘deep image’’ poetics of Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin and the richly
cosmopolitan style of Richard Howard, John Hollander, and James Mer-
rill; the language poetry of Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews, Clark Coolidge,
Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, and so on). Knowing that such com-
parisons are at once alluring and deceptive, I prefer to leave them to the
reader. About his own work John Ashbery once said, ‘‘I thought that if I
could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came
to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.’’∞≤ The same
might be said about my own stages of deliberation on the subject of
comparisons.
Spatiality
Perhaps no text is more crucial to our understanding of contem-
porary poetry than Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice).
Published in 1897 and rediscovered by the Cubists and André Gide in 1914,
it was revolutionary in its use of typographical space. It is the starting
point of what today is widely practiced as both concrete and visual poetry.
In Mallarmé’s extraordinary poem, empty or white space (blanc in both
senses) is as important as space occupied by the printed word, presence
and absence thereby having been placed on equal footing. Type organizes
itself on the page ideogrammatically. Lines are di√erentially measured
depending on their role in relation to the poem’s overarching theme of
shipwreck; the whole poem moves downward on the page to its doom on
dry land—‘‘no place but place’’ itself—and to the conclusion that every
thought projects its own throw of the dice, takes its own chance.
When Mallarmé first showed part of his Coup de dés to Paul Valéry, his
friend is reported to have burst into tears because he understood at once
that everything had been changed by this revolutionary event of poetry
and art. Jacques Donguy says in his essay ‘‘Cyberpoésie’’ that Mallarmé’s
epic poem ‘‘is the emblematic work of the twentieth century, its portico,
and symbolizes the Macluhan-ian ‘shipwreck’ of the Gutenberg galaxy.
For this text is the graph of a shipwreck, written ‘from the bottom of a
shipwreck,’ and ends on the notion of chance, that Cage was later to
systematize.’’∞≥ In the same essay, Donguy then looks back to Kurt Schwit-