boundary 2 current issue

American Poetry After 1975: Editor's Note

Bernstein, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

Bios / The Logosphere / The Finite-Made Evolver Space

Rosenberg, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

This piece is an essay describing my precompositional "semantic method" and placing my poetics in the context of prior poetries, such as Projective Verse. It was originally written for the conference "BIOS: The Poetics of Life in Digital Media," held at the University of West Virginia, Morgantown, September 15-17, 2006. When I present this piece in a performance context, it is simultaneous with a kind of multimedia slide show illustrating some of the text materials and text operations discussed.

Eclogues

Gizzi, P. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:00 PST

Two Dots Over a Vowel

Bok, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Current writers among the avant-garde have begun to subvert the romantic bastions of sublime creativity and eminent authorship by adopting both piracy and parody as sovereign, aesthetic values. Such exponents of what critics have now dubbed "conceptual literature" disavow the lyrical mandate of self-conscious self-assertion in order to explore the readymade potential of the "uncreative." They resort to a diverse variety of antiexpressive, antidiscursive strategies (including the use of forced rules, random words, copied texts, boring ideas, and even cyborg tools), doing so in order to erase any artistic evidence of "lyric style." Such writers call into question the concepts of both "intentionality" and "expressiveness" in literature. They constrain the cognitive functions of the self on behalf of other aesthetic functions in the text (be these functions automatic, mannerist, or aleatoric in their conceptualization). Such writers have thereby expanded the concept of writing beyond the formal limits of any expressive intentions, doing so in order to conceive of, hitherto, inconceivable preconditions for the act of writing itself.

Docents of Discourse: The Logic of Dispersed Sites

Shaw, L. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay proposes a revision of the dominant critical vocabulary for site-based practices in contemporary art and poetry through a critical engagement with the work of art historian Miwon Kwon. Focusing on recent art and poetry that sites itself not in relation to physical places but instead in relation to "discourses" (like anthropology or archaeology), the essay contests Kwon's arguments that artists like Mark Dion and Renée Green relativize artistic practice in relation to other disciplines and that their work breaks with the concerns of art history. Demonstrating instead how they recode disciplinary boundaries and modes of authority, I show how such new and expanded models of contextualization became central to the history of site-specific art since the 1960s, once the concept of site began to organize not only literal sculptural objects but the notion of an artistic context (both synchronic and diachronic) more generally. Without acknowledging the contingency inescapable in such modes of contextualization, art historians have presented the discursive site as a stable and authoritative frame. To address this problem, the essay then turns to a range of site-based contemporary poetries (Flarf, Rob Fitterman, Lisa Robertson) in which "discourses" (of Web commerce, nationalism, and urbanism, among others) function similarly as sites. But rather than merely assert such sites as stable frames of reference, contemporary poetry tends, often perversely and playfully, to anatomize the legibility of these very frames. They thus call our attention to what might count as the raw materials, scales, and intertextual logic or coherence of a discursive site.

Rakim's Performativity

Morris, T. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Rakim's Performativity" considers the influence and relevance of pioneering Rapper Rakim's influential track "Follow the Leader" through the lens of J. L. Austin's theory of performativity presented in his philosophical work How to Do Things with Words. The author reflects on Rakim's writing and performance as an MC by referencing performance studies theoretical frameworks from Erving Goffman, Martin Heidegger, and African American cultural iconography. Morris emphasizes Austin's constructed dichotomy in the first half of How to Do Things and his more expansive framing later in the book, and applies both overarching breakdowns to Rakim's work. This article not only praises one of Hip Hop's most important writers and utterers, it also seeks to affirm Austin's theoretical applicability through an unconventional lens. The twenty-page article is divided into four sections: a preface that outlines the context in which Rakim's work was heard by the author; section 1, "Follow Him into a Flow," which contrasts Rakim's work with that of other Rappers at the time the track was released; section 2, "Austinian Performativity," which diagrams Rakim's lyrics in the context of Austin's constative and performative distinctions, among other philosophical references; and section 3, which emphasizes the applicability of Rakim's work to Austin's three locutionary delineations. In addition to analyzing Rakim's iconic lyrics, Morris conveys a poetic and cultural nostalgia for the cultural time frame that epitomized Rakim's work (known as the "Golden Age of Hip Hop") as well as a deep affection for J. L. Austin's theory as an infinitely applicable and a fundamentally democratic ethos.

Versus Seamlessness: Architectonics of Pseudocomplicity in Tan Lin's Ambient Poetics

Scappettone, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This article examines the critical ruptures and dilutions of a contemporary "ambient poetic"—a tendency in sonic, visual, and textual arts to aspire toward an atmospheric condition—through analysis of Tan Lin's verse architectonics across book and digital media. Setting the assertions of Lin's works against his multigeneric poetry's effects, the essay tests their seeming complicity with a late-capitalist ambience that Rem Koolhaas has identified as "Junkspace": seamless and stupefying coagulation of the disjointed landscape left over by modernization. Lin's boring or "relaxing," absorptive reading environments aim to dampen the shocks associated with both modernist fractures and postmodern counter-absorptive verse, canceling themselves out as they release the reader/spectator into a state of distraction. However, their reception by a reader trained to forge connections and to follow narrative trajectories produces a more disquieting condition. The seam of the book in BlipSoak01, the lacunae between flashing terms onscreen in "Dub Version V.01," the page enjoined to have turned before one's arrival in the volume Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary compel readers to link the texts' feeds and bits, grappling in turn with what is missing from them. Those immersed in Lin's hyperdemocratically sampled lines and narrative emanations find themselves falling adrift of the dictates of outmoded form; as such, their inattention is experienced as historically subject—the outcome of annihilated figures and grounds.

Hypermnesia

Dworkin, C. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Hypermnesia" sketches the historical, theoretical, and technological contexts for the Eclipse archive of radical poetry (http://english.utah.edu/eclipse). Engaging Jacques Derrida's argument in Mal d'archive, the essay posits the archive as a species of gift and teases out the contradiction at the heart of all digital archives: on the one hand, the dream of lossless reproduction; on the other hand, the distorting and degrading compression necessary for communicating between networked machines. Through close bibliographic readings of poems by Lyn Hejinian, Lorenzo Thomas, Tina Darragh, and Charles Bernstein, the essay further argues for the importance of material specificity to literary critical analyses, demonstrating that the material substrates of poetry and its modes of production—from typeface and ink type to binding and paper stock—are an inherent and inextricable aspect of the printed poem's meaning.

Poetry Animal

Skinner, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

For William Carlos Williams, poetry was a war machine, a "small (or large) machine made of words." If the war is a human war on other species, do poetry machines become poetry animals? Can we read Christopher Dewdney's "Permugenesis," Marianne Moore's "An Octopus," or Francis Ponge's "Notes Toward a Shell" as recombinant textual animals? Attention to intimate form locates structures of feeling in procedures that distribute agency. Jonathan Skinner's warbler poems ("Magnolia," "Northern Parula," "Myrtle") compose with field-based constraints to make poetry an instrument of perception and interspecies research, a "singing with," not just about or like, the nonhuman animal. The infrahuman sounds of Lila Zemborain's jellyfish ("Mauve Sea Orchids") or the revolving phonemes of Emily Dickinson's hummingbird ("A route of evanescence") organize perception and citation along indeterminate somatic pathways, where deep listening operates a reading machine. Faced with an age of extinction, remembering Cecilia Vicuña's and Antonin Artaud's call for a poetics of volatile agency and of bodily change, let us write island preserves of animality into the subject.

Poetry animals are "thoughts on things," like the plumage of Lorine Niedecker's "Mergansers," that "fold unfold / above the river beds." In voicing the meandering pitches of Maggie O'Sullivan's "Starlings," do we undergo kinship with animals? Poetry animals lose sight of teleology and move with periodic, inhuman intensities, allowing foreign organizations into the sphere of the human nervous system. To locate their "animalady," poets might become reading and writing machines, to deconstruct the singular animal and listen as human animals.

A Liquid Hand Blossoms

Rapaport, H. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay speaks to two New Critical taboos generally held by literary critics, whatever their training. The first concerns the poet's use of a preestablished referent that functions as a sentimental attachment that carries the poem along. This is usually considered a form of cheating, a loading of the dice. The second taboo concerns the poet's tossing "sweet nothings" into a poem, delicious turns of phrase that don't mean anything.

Again, critical readers generally take this to be a cheat. My article explores why readers of poetry should be more open to the sentimental attachment and the sweet nothing, given how central they are to poetry. This article is a short section from a book I'm working on that is composed of many short pieces on all manner of topics that concern contemporary poetry.

In Barry Bonds I See the Future of Poetry

Goldsmith, K. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Barry Bonds is not only the future of athletics, but he's also emblematic of the future of poetry. More machine than man, chemically enhanced, Bonds is our first mainstream posthuman public figure. Bonds's milestone signifies an end to the humanist discourse; he is a martyr for the future.

Disabled Texts and the Threat of Hannah Weiner

McSweeney, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This paper considers Hannah Weiner's collage practice as a species of bricolage in keeping with early twentieth-century practitioners such as Tzara and Schwitters. In operating in this disparaged modality and refusing the closure of conventional able-bodied texts, Weiner's work may thus be construed as a "disabled text."

Grammar Trouble

Reed, B. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

In recent years, scholars have begun declaring obsolete the old post-World War II opposition in U.S. poetry between avant-garde and mainstream poetics. This article responds that the celebrated new "hybrid style" in fact represents a new normative consensus against which future avant-gardes will define themselves. After examining a typical "hybrid" poem, the essay proceeds to discuss Craig Dworkin's Parse (2008), a sample of twenty-first century "conceptual poetics." Dworkin suggests that the U.S. avant-garde, in its next phase, will aggressively target educational methods and institutions as part of a larger radical challenge to the contemporary routinization of intellectual labor.

The '90s

Spahr, J. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

At a certain moment, a moment that extends from the late '80s to the turn of the twenty-first century, something interesting happens within literature in English: some of the more provocative literatures in English from various literary schools and various national traditions blatantly turn away from standard English in order to say something about English. This article argues that literature in English in the '90s is distinctive for the number of works that turn away from standard English by including other languages and/or are written mainly in the pidgins or creoles that resulted from English-language colonialism. The '90s are a unique moment when writers of disparate aesthetic, political, and philosophical concerns, writers from disparate nations that are united and separated by shared histories of imperialism, and writers with disparate relations to the English language do some really interesting thinking at the same time about what it means to be writing in the English language. This article reads these works in the context of the very public debates about the English language that happen in the '90s in the United States. It examines what this literature of the '90s has to say about globalization and indigenous and immigrant rights through its insistent turn against standard English. And it concludes by looking briefly beyond the '90s at the rise of lyric and plain speech poetries after the U.S. 9/11, which in turn are contested by the turn to appropriation-heavy writings such as Flarf and Conceptual writing.

The Stevens Wars

Filreis, A. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

What reputation and influence has Wallace Stevens had in the years since 1975? The infamous Stevensean disaffection has tended to prohibit definitive legacy, and yet this, in the end, has been productive, forestalling closed arguments among poetics Lefts and Rights, keeping Stevens's work from theoretical alliances until past the point when such would fix its standing in contestations between, for example, theoretical as distinct from historical approaches. To the extent that Stevens can seem anything to anyone, the legacy is of little impact. The many imitations of Stevens's special rhetoric tend to riff on a single poem or idiomatic stance, quick-take attempts at posing in a particular ironic position, one abandoned as quickly as assumed. Among contemporary poets whose own writing contemplates Stevens's overall position, however, a larger pattern does emerge—two Stevenses. First, a meditative Stevens: unagonistic, verbally ruminative, romantic (but called "postromantic"), a repository of human responses, post-Christian yet lyric—a poet whose verse does not make truculent, discordant claims but rather "eke[s] out the mind," forming "the particulars of sounds." Secondly, a languaged Stevens: theoretical, serial, and nonnarrative, metapoetically radical, sometimes satirical (and antinarrative), always obsessive about the state of poetics and insisting on consciousness of the compositional mode as itself a pressure inducing the poem to be composed—a poet whose middle and late seriatic styles befit rather than reject the cyclonic modernist historical modes adopted early and briefly by Eliot, grandly and insistently by Pound, and later by Williams.

Not Ideas about the Bling but the Bling Itself

Gordon, N. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"The Rattle of Statistical Traffic": Citation and Found Text in Susan Howe's The Midnight

Perloff, M. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

This essay studies the particular conjunction of documentation ("hard facts") and highly wrought lyric verse and prose in Susan Howe's book The Midnight, a collage text consisting of historical extracts, archival fragments, biographical information, photographs, drawings, cited poems, folk songs, letters, and the original lyrics of the "Bed Hangings" sequence—the whole designed to create an elegiac memoir of the poet's mother, Mary Manning Howe, that is also an autobiographical account of the poet's own discovery of her vocation and her place in her maternal family history. In Howe's text, various bits of documentary "evidence" jostle and contradict one another, providing a portrait of both mother and daughter as mysterious as it is complex. The seemingly unrelated items begin to coalesce even as the text foregrounds its "textile" production—its awareness of itself as an example of bookmaking. The Midnight is thus a new sort of poem—at once documentary and visionary—whose language play is everywhere charged with meaning.

Lyric Dissent

Willis, E. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

"Lyric Dissent" discusses the social structure and context of lyric address, particularly the lyric's propensity for multiple voicings beyond the personal. Reading the poems of William Carlos Williams in the context of modernism's evolving countertraditions and the violent backdrop of the First and Second World Wars, this essay reconsiders the pressures within lyric poetry to respond to—or reveal—the pressures of global politics on poetry in times of war. How can the labor of a poem be measured against the demands of paid labor and of political action? Can the treatment of such issues suggest a generational coherence within diverse and dissenting practices?

SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS)

Lin, T. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

A "SOFT INDEX (OF repeating PLACES, PEOPLE, AND WORKS)" comprises, hors-texte, a generic document, where the generic is understood to be a frequency of the unpublishable. As anecdote, it forms one of the unwritten limits (i.e., poetry) to the published, on a spectrum that includes an author, bibliographic and textual materials, biographical details, and the scholarly apparatus of a journal, including page references and index. See boundary 2. All poetry herein is the apparatus (ambience) of an index to its publication, i.e., all poetry is generic in its [publishable or unpublishable] outcomes/affects.

After Petrarch (In the Rigging)

Friedlander, B. — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Books Received

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST

Contributors

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:32:01 PST