Longer Views: Extended Essays

by Samuel R. Delany

  Ad postquam ad navem desaendimus, et mare,

  Navem quidem primum deduximus in mare divum,

  Et malu posuims et vela in navi nigra . . .

  Where the Greek begins “Autar epei . . .” (literally “But then,” instead of the “But when . . .” that A. T. Murray settled on for the 1919 standard Loeb translation [quoted below the Greek], or the “At length we were at the shore . . .” that T. E. Lawrence gives us in his 1935 translation), Divus wrote “Ad postquam . . .”—literally “But after-that. . .” The problem with the English is that “Autar” is not just any old “But.” For that, the Greeks used “alla.” Rather it is an emphatic “but”—a bit more like “but also.” Also, it has a bit of the thrust of the Italian “pertanto” (literally “but-so-much,” which usually comes out in English as “But of course”). This accounts for the “But’s,” the “At long last’s,” and the “Finally’s” various translators have used to commence this passage.

  Nevertheless, Pound was intrigued by the notion that what he took to be the most ancient poetic material in the poem (and thus some of the most ancient literary material in the West) began with a connective—and an emphatic connective at that—which might well be taken as joining it to prior material even older still, though now lost.

  This, at any rate, was the spirit in which Pound began his own great serial composition poem, The Cantos, with his own translation of Divus’s translation of Homer’s account of Odysseus’s trip to northern Cimmeria, where gaped the gate of hell:

  And then went down to the ship,

  Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and

  We set up mast and sail on that swart ship,

  Bore sheep aboard her, and our own bodies also,

  Heavy with weeping . . .

  But T. E. Lawrence had a different and deprecating view of “Lambda”: “Book XI, the Underworld, verges toward ‘terribilitá’—yet runs instead to the seed of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing. The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his faithful translators.” Yet Lawrence’s Homer is one that most of us, scholar or general reader, probably have a bit of trouble recognizing, at least in some of its aspects: “a bookworm, no longer young, living far from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic. Married but not exclusively, a dog-lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired. Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of The Iliad, with limited sensuous range but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures. A lover of old bric-a-brac, though as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott. . . He is all adrift when it comes to fighting and had not seen deaths in battle.” El ’Awrence had, of course, both seen and dealt out many.

  But it’s probable that a young rural Texan, reading in The Odyssey as a teenager, sometime during the mid-twenties, had very much the same feelings about “Lambda” that Pound had picked up; for it was frozen, ice-and fog-bound Cimmeria that young Robert E. Howard, in the tiny town of Cross Plains, Texas, chose to make the home of his barbarian hero, Conan—who through his adventures is tormented by various and sundry supernatural escapees from just those gaping gates near Conan’s place of birth.

  And the same emphatic copula which, for Pound, connected The Cantos to something even more primal and proto- than the oldest poetic stuff of the Greeks, still, today, provides the various practitioners of the genre Howard initiated, “sword and sorcery” (Fritz Leiber’s term for it), with a connection between the prehistoric and history itself.

  43. The discursive model through which we perceive the characteristic works of High Modernism—from The Waste Land and Ulysses to The Cantos and Zukofsky’s “A” and H. D.’s Helen in Egypt, from David Jones’s In Parentheses and The Anathēmata to Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems and Robert Duncan’s The Structure of Rime and Passages—is that of a foreground work of more or less surface incoherence—narrative, rhetorical, and thematic—behind which stands a huge, and hugely unified, background armamentarium of esoteric historical and esthetic knowledge, which the text connects with through a series of allusions and relations that organize that armamentarium as well as give it its unity.

  The educated reading such texts request is always a virtual one. Even somebody who is richly familiar with the commentaries and who has studied both sources and text can only hold onto fragments of both background and foreground, and then only for a more or less limited time.

  What has happened, of course, is that eventually poets—if not other readers as well—have noted that, with or without access to the background armamentarium, there is nevertheless an experience of reading these texts. And numerous poets of the last forty years—if not, indeed, the last hundred—have tried to estheticize this affect directly.

  Their forebear is Gertrude Stein—rather than Pound or Eliot. (The esoteric armamentarium model does not control the way we read, say, the prose in The Making of Americans or Lucy Church Amiably—not to mention in Burroughs’s Naked Lunch or in William T. Vollmann’s You Bright and Risen Angels.) The representational task of such poets, as it is with Stein’s prose, was to generate a representation of thinking, rather than a specific and elaborated intellectual signified—as it still is, largely, in the poets who estheticize the affect without trying to pull together the intellectual background.

  “Obscure” was the word applied to the hugely different Stein and Pound/Eliot/Joyce enterprises—though that Twentieth Century usage marks a major shift in the meaning of the word from its literary usage in the 19th Century.

  A major 19th Century text to be labeled (perjoratively) obscure was Robert Browning’s poem in six Books, Sordello, that figures at the start of Pound’s “Canto II,” much as “Lambda” figures at the start of “Canto I.”

  Sordello is the story of the poetic education of a 13th Century poet (Sordello) who begins as a page in a Mantua castle (with its “. . . maze of corridors contrived for sin, / Dusk-winding stairs, dim galleries . . .”). Some of its lessons parallel the young Browning’s own poetic growth. The situation the poem describes is the Guelph/Ghibellin conflict (Browning’s spelling) between Verona and Ferrara, the Pope and the House of Este (as well as the odd mountain bandit—or “Hill-cat,” Browning’s term), familiar to students of Dante. Today one makes one’s way fairly comfortably through the poem with the footnotes of Pettigrew and Collins in the Penguin edition—footnotes of the sort that one might expect for a well-edited historical reconstruction first published (March 7th) in 1840. The problem is that, to follow the surface story, one needs to know a fair bit of history. (The current Penguin Robert Browning, The Poems goes a good way toward providing us with it.) The problem with the problem, however (and what makes for the poem’s “obscurity”), is that, as one pursues the history on one’s own (as one would have had to do as a contemporary reader of the poem), one discovers now that this character whom history records as a Guelph, Browning portrays as a Ghibellin. Others whom history records as bitterest enemies, Browning portrays as fast friends. And still others who were dead by the time of the events, Browning shows us as alive and kicking. Grandson becomes son. And important historical characters, such as the real Sordello’s light o’ love, Cunizza (“a lusty lady, married five times,” notes editor Pettigrew), get squeezed out of the tale entirely.

  A contemporary audience is likely to read this, in a young poet of 28, as simply his desire to tell whatever he wants to tell—letting history go hang, with perhaps a faint suspicion that a certain laziness as far as keeping on top of such research lies at the bottom of it all. But we would hardly conceive it as a major flaw: certainly it’s offset by the poet’s imagination. But though Pettigrew remarks, “. . . Ezra Pound, who found the poem a model of lucidity, is probably the only person who has ever seriously claimed to have understood Sordello,” the poem’s surface is no more confusing to the contemporary reader than, say, the surface of Keats’s Endymion—and is often a good deal less so. Though what this judgment reflects more than anything, I suspect, is the kind of understanding a contemporary reader, b
rought up on Milton and Spenser on the one hand, and The Cantos and Maximus Poems on the other, now look for, i.e., a discursive difference the beginning of which Pound’s early claim for comprehension signs.

  Victorian readers felt, however, that if you bothered at all with a poem based on history, you should stick to the facts—or, that the alteration of facts should be meaningful, serving lucid, moral, or at any rate clear didactic, ends.

  For the Victorians, Sordello’s obscurity lay not in its surface difficulty, but rather in the impossibility of justifying Browning’s historical deviance. Browning’s obscurity is the opposite of the High Modernists’. His surface is coherent. It was the organization of his intellectual armamentarium that was unbearably murky.

  Although only 157 copies of Sordello were actually sold in the first ten years of the poem’s life, the charge of obscurity—the moral obscurity the clearing up of which would have justified Browning’s historical revisionism—besmirched Browning’s reputation for twenty-odd years after the poem appeared.

  When, with the popularity of his later poetic collections, such as Dramatis Personae (1864) and the four-volume Ring and the Book (1868–69: i.e., the same years as Les Misérables and 20,000 lieues sous la mer. . .), attention turned back to Browning’s earlier work and “what it meant.” At that point, Browning made the famous quip that eventually would become enough a part of general literary folklore so that, some years before I entered high school, my father (no great reader, he) would quote it regularly and repeatedly to me, with a chuckle, as a warning against esthetic obscurity of any sort—and its wages—in the usual, if, in his case, gentle, bourgeois attack on abstraction in art and poetic difficulty (which for him included e. e. cummings just as much as T. S. Eliot). Browning had said: “When I first wrote Sordello, only God and I knew what it meant. Today, only God knows”—a judgment most late Twentieth-Century readers find wildly over the mark, unless we reawaken a fine understanding of the Victorian context.

  “Sordello” (with quotes, i.e., the poem’s title) is a metonym for its topic: “the education of a poet.” And Sordello (without the quotes, i.e., the character) is a metonym for the character of the poet so educated. Read in this way, the obscurity (in the contemporary sense) of the opening tercet of Pound’s “Canto II” diminishes significantly:

  Hang it all, Robert Browning,

  There can be but one “Sordello.”

  But Sordello, and my Sordello?

  Hang it all, Robert Browning, there can be but one “poetic education.” But what about the poetic character so educated—and my poetic character so educated? Certainly this is a reasonable enough question for a poet who’s just finished contemplating the “most ancient poetic material” in the West—before Pound (who allegedly began writing this Canto sitting on the steps of a Venice Cathedral, looking out over the waters) let his thoughts return by way of the historical Sordels and the Chinese artist So-shu and Helen/Eleanor/eleptolis (destroyer of cities) back to Odysseus and the hell-spawned tale of high-born Tyro, the first queen the Traveler spoke with after receiving a truly extraordinary guilt trip from his mother, Anticleia.

  Queen Tyro loved the river god of the Enipus, till the ocean god Poseidon grew jealous, disguised himself as the lesser god, her lover, and struck her with a tidal wave while he held her in his arms: and she bore him two sons, Pelias and Nelias . . .

  Most poets who write what can be called by today’s meaning “obscure poems” are generally still in thrall to the subject. The problem with such poetry—the currently “obscure,” as it clings to the subject—is that much of it, beyond a certain level, is unjudgeable as well as dull.

  A poet such as Silliman, however, beginning with his commitment to the sentence/writing/prose, as well as to what he calls “the materiality of the signifier,” manages to put a torque on a good deal of his work that orients it toward the object—which, for me as an sf writer, committed to my own object critique, reinvests it with a whole range of interest and intensity.

  44. Often it’s been observed: Writing is largely habit. Paradoxically, not writing can also be a habit. The writer who, again and again, must defer or delay getting to pen, paper, or processor finally develops mental habits of deferment and delay. A good percent of what passes for “writer’s block” is simply the habit of not writing, gotten out of hand and reaching the level of addiction—possibly because of pleasurable feedback, such as concern and attention from others over the problem or even through good feelings about the things accomplished instead.

  Thomas Disch’s cure for writer’s block at the Clarion Workshop was simply to insist that no other student communicate with the “blocked” student in any way, or even acknowledge his/her existence, until she or he had written a story.

  As a technique, it was devastatingly effective—usually succeeding within twenty-four hours.

  45. ABC, the first, gray, paper-covered chapbook of The Alphabet, was published by Tuumba Press in October, 1983. It consists of three parts, “Albany,” “Blue,” and “Carbon.”

  “Albany”’ opening evokes a verbal arena between essay and narrative; yet the fragmentedness of the first sentence with the third’s non-sequitur creates narrative and argumentative dislocations—even if sentences two, four, and five alone almost cohere:

  If the function of writing is “to express the world.” My father withheld child support, forcing my mother to live with her parents, my brother and I to be raised together in a small room. Grandfather called them niggers. I can’t afford an automobile. Far across the calm bay stood a complex of long yellow buildings, a prison . . .

  Anyone who has passed through the Bay Area is likely to think of Alcatraz, sitting out in San Francisco Bay—and someone more familiar with the detailed geography of the environs will know that, from Albany, San Quentin is visible across the water (The “yellow” specifies it; Alcatraz is green) and connect it geographically with Silliman’s title. Readers of Silliman’s Ketjak and Tjanting will also suspect that some formal pattern governs the progression of sentences, even if it is not immediately visible. But even while the reader ponders on formal possibilities, the first sentence-fragment becomes the opening proposition of a grand syllogism, for which every subsequent sentence in the work serves in turn, through an initial implied “Then . . .,” as its inference.

  The Alphabet’s next volume to reach print was Paradise (Burning Deck, Providence, in 1985—the first of Silliman’s poems I read. Its Library of Congress Catalogue Information erroneously gives Silliman’s birth date as 1935; actually he was born in ’46). Then came Lit (Poets and Poets Press, Elmwood, Connecticut, 1987), What (Figures, 1988), and Manifest (Zarstele Press, Leguna, 1990). The sixth volume to appear, Demo to Ink (Chax Press, Tucson, 1992), is relatively thick, the heftiest yet published. With its appearance, the whole Alphabet gains a structural clarity. Demo to Ink contains six parts, “Demo,” “Engines” (in collaboration with Rae Armantraut—joint authorship explaining, perhaps, the single plural among the alphabetic progression of part titles so far), “Force,” “Garfield,” “Hidden,” and “Ink,” continuing and defining the progression begun in the first volume, “Albany,” “Blue,” “Carbon” . . .

  The alphabet is, above all things, an incrementally, incredibly, dazzlingly inventive exploration of possible sentence forms; questions, exhortations, fragments, run-ons . . .

  Its first-level pleasure lies in the energy and inventiveness of precisely that array, stitched through the shocks and thrills of its equally interesting juxtapositions—suggesting a Rhetoric of near-all possible sentential collisions. Nor do the collisions really occur between sentences: most of the time, rather, they occur somewhere in the middle of the next sentence, when, no matter how prepared we are, its first few words have already established continuity with the sentence before: thus, because we cannot predict where semantic dislocation will manifest (and when it happens, it is always already, as it were, over), these juxtapositions remain fresh and are always and endlessly
surprising. But it is these connections—and connections shattered—that are the contemplative objects of Silliman’s work; and it is these objects among the sentential cascade, in their rhythmic explosions across whatever generative structure we can pick up, that make the work more than, and more important than, a simple lyric rhapsody of discrete and sensuous sentences. For a reader open to them, such pleasures are like those of a day at the world’s largest and most exotic zoo, as we move, not from peacock to koala to python to three-toed sloth, but between animals that are always a hybrid of some two.

  Poems suggest a vision of the world. And finally that vision turns around to place its own analytical grid before an image of the self that perceives.

  The world of The Alphabet has a surprising material specificity, a social saturation, and an observational intelligence that is as concerned with the world as it is with the word.

  And the poetic subject of The Alphabet?

  It is not the subject unified by consistent and coherent narrative strategies. It is a subject that is, one suspects in those moments where formal patterns are intuitable, obsessively intrigued by system; but it is still a poetic subject who refuses to present him- or herself as outside history via the move of closing or completing an easily masterable system that, through the obvious gesture of closure, steps beyond historical consideration. It is a subject whose units both of perception and action are perceived as no larger than single sentences—axioms, grasps, insights, seizures, exhortations, visions.

  Silliman’s criticism (e.g., The New Sentence, Roof Books, New York, 1989; or “Canons and Institutions: New Hope for the Disappeared,” in The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy, Charles Bernstein, ed., Roof Books, New York, 1990) tells us that there is nothing passive about such a poetic subject. Indeed, Silliman is the most passionate and persuasive polemicist I know of writing today. If anything, the rigorous anargumentative limits he has set on his poetic enterprise, most forcefully dramatized throughout the thirteen sections I have so far seen of The Alphabet, seems to have provided him with an explosively political arsenal of argumentative material.