Abstract
In “Language, Poetry, Realism,” the introduction to his pathbreaking anthology of contemporary American poetry entitled In the American Tree (1984), Ron Silliman writes: “Much, perhaps too much, has been made of the critique of reference and normative syntax inherent in the work of many of the writers here, without acknowledging the degree to which this critique is itself situated within the larger question of what, in the last part of the twentieth century, it means to be human.”1 Leaving aside any millennial implications in this, Silliman alerts us to the whole issue of the ethical, an issue that has effectively been skewed by the attention to the death of, the absence of, or the failure of referentiality in a good deal of recent poetry. A great deal of emphasis in the reception of contemporary poetry has fallen on its linguistic games, its lack of referentiality, and “the play of the signifier,” with its shift from metaphor to metonymy. And indeed, in Silliman’s explanation of the formal strategies adopted by these American poets, one can easily skip over these words, buried as they are in a larger narrative about the advent of “Language” poetry. Yet it is not an isolated example: Elsewhere in the same introduction, Silliman states that “[Greeley and Eigner] ... offered important models of rigorous and honest practice,”2 and commenting on the ethical stance of the participants in writing and reading, he says: “In turn, the poet must be responsible for everything. A parallel demand is made of each reader” (my italics).3
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Notes
Ron Silliman, “Language, Poetry, Realism,” In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1984), xix.
David Antin, “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry,” Boundary 2 1 (Fall 1972): 98–133.
For example, see Plato, Timaeus trans. and ed. Rev. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (1929; London: Heinemann, 1966), 23b, 75e, 89d
Plato, Laws trans. and ed. Rev. R G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library (London: Heinemann, 1952), 716d, 8706, where the brightest and the best as a form of good is frequently a phrase used by Athenians as a way of distinguishing themselves.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, Fragments (1977; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990).
Geoffrey Galt Harpham, “Ethics,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study; eds. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 389.
Martin Jay, “Mimesis and Mimetology,” The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 32.
William Carlos Williams, Imaginations ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 105, 120–21.
Elizabeth Grosz, “Judaism and Exile: The Ethics of Otherness,” in Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location, eds. Erica Carter, James Donald, and Judith Squires (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), 69.
Ezra Pound, Guide to Kulchur (1938; London: Peter Owen, 1960).
See Susan Handelman, “Greek Philosophy and the Overcoming of the Word,” Works and Days 1 (1980): 45–69;
Susan Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Schalem, and Levinas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1991);
Lev Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem, trans. Bernard Martin (Athens, OH: University of Ohio Press, 1966);
David Stern, “Moses-cide: Midrash and Contemporary Literary Criticism,” Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History 4.2 (1984): 193–213;
Elisa New, “Pharaoh’s Birthstool: Deconstruction and Midrash,” Sub Stance 17.3 (1988): 26–36.
Rüdiger Bubner, Modern German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 181.
Mark Scroggins, Upper Limit Music: The Writing of Louis Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 1.
A list of these books would include Peter Quartermain’s Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofiky to Susan Howe (Cambridge, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992)
Bob Perelman’s The Trouble with Genius: Reading Pound, Joyce, Stein, and Zukofiky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
Sandra Kumamoto Stanley’s Louis Zukofiky and the Transformation of a Modern American Poetics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)
Bruce Comens’ Apocalypse and After: Modern Strategy and Postmodern Tactics in Pound, Williams and Zukofiky (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995)
Luke Carson’s Depression and Consumption in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofiky and Ezra Pound (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds., The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999).
Mark Scroggins’ Louis Zukofiky and the Poetry of Knowledge (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998) usefully develops a range of ideas, such as the Jewish and political contexts of “Poem Beginning The’,” the musical structures of Ä,“the philosophical underpinnings of Zukofsky’s epistemology, and his influence on the ” Language poets, which dovetail with examinations my own Ph.D. thesis sought to broach in 1992, examinations that formed the initial research basis for this present book.
See Tim Woods, “Poetics and Politics in the Writings of Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson, and the ‘Language’ Poets,” Ph.D., University of Southampton, England, 1992.
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© 2002 Tim Woods
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Woods, T. (2002). Introduction: Ethics and Objectivist Poetics. In: The Poetics of the Limit. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-03920-0_1
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