boundary 2 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium a special
issue edited by Charles Bernstein volume 26 number 1 spring 1999 Duke
University Press ISSN 0190-3659 281 pages $12


>From the introduction:
Quote Starting in 1997, with the help of several coeditors, I asked poets
from around the world to respond to a series of interrelated questions …
Do you see your work in the context of a national state, or in the context
of international capital, or in some other context (including imaginary or
imagined ones)? Is identity an important issue for your work, and if so, in
what senses? For me, these issues have a specific connection to the
possibilities or impossibilities for poetic language (so often identified
with specific groups, states, or classes): diction, vernacular, dialect,
sound, syntax, and so forth.
… I asked one alternative question:
What do you see as the most urgent, yet insufficiently recognized, or
addressed, issue or issues for poetry and poetics at this moment? Unquote

These open-ended provocations resulted in a substantial resource. There's a
great deal to think about and enjoy over time, but here are some snippets
to be going on with.

Quote I am interested in what confines each generation inside themes,
metaphors, theoretical and stylistic attitudes. I imagine the passion of
the language that is allowed to escape from this. The turbulence that
cracks open history. The desire that consumes the common places. I imagine
the interior urgency that forces the liquidation of an era's truisms.
Unquote Nicole Brossard If this isn't inspiring, I don't know what is.

In a piece which purports to be a description of the experience of standing
at a bus stop, cris cheek seduces the reader into exploring possible ways
in which the text is being constructed, by the writer and the reader. A
kind of Heraclitean exploration in which the reader cannot dip into the
same text twice.

Seeking to learn lessons from the more adventurous spirits in advertising,
Jerome Sala writes
Quote This is the genre of ad that you see more and more of these days
which, in order to sell its products, trashes advertising itself, and its
long history of hype. … one can't help but wonder if there isn't something
poetry could learn from this strategy devised by its prodigal sons and
daughters whom, cultural critics often argue, are squandering the riches of
their verbal inheritance in the foreign land of the commodity - that
barbarian locale to which most poets deny their citizenship). After all,
hasn't there been too much inflated hype about poetry? And haven't its own
promoters, poets and literary theorists been complicit in a sin any
advertising creative director will warn you against - that of the
"overpromise"? Does so much really depend upon a red wheelbarrow? Can it
possibly carry the weight of historical profundity you'd like to place in
it? Unquote. A mini manifesto embodying some of these fiery proposals
follows.

Johanna Drucker has edited a visual poetry section, for which she has
written a very useful introduction. One of these, by Steve McCaffery,
struck me straightaway: a row of 20 a's, typewritten so the line isn't
quite straight, followed by same row overtyped on a row of b's followed by
same row overtyped on a row of c's and so on for 26 rows. The increasing
density of ink is extraordinarily expressive. Contrast this with the
palindromic arrangements of Alexandr Bubnov, formally beautiful in the
fascinatingly lifeless way of a periodic crystal.

Being the responses of poets they sometimes decline the more glacial
academic tones:

Quote Present day manifestations of 'the Russian Avant Garde' seem to
me to be unconscionably conformist in their aspiration, with a ludic aim of
'arranging' a civilized hell. One may be obliged to live in hell but that
doesn't mean one has to accept it as something necessary and indisputable.
Unquote Gennady Aygi

Quote Spanish poetry is characterized by its lack of critical rigor its
inward-looking nature. Cesar A. Molina has described Spanish poets as a
group of whining mourners buried in their own traditionalism & social
neorealism, all the while engaging in endless navel gazing. Manuel Brito

Form and technical questions receive considerable attention.
Quote COLLAGE, its core innovation, foreseen by Lautreamont late in the
previous one. It cut the time lines, taught us a new history, and yet is
also graft, a rearrangement of arborescent structures, trees as always
already roots / trunk / branches, even when cut and rearranged, say
branches / trunk / roots, the heavenly tree grows downward in polarities we
can no longer afford, if we ever could. Unquote Pierre Joris.

Quote The destitution of the essence of poetry largely results from our
excessive attention to the phenomenal part of poetry. And most of us who
are now interested in form have arrived at this interest by way of a
revision of the past, when the content was overemphasized. The art of
poetry, if standing on either side of the extremes, cannot possibly develop
in any significant way. To me, as a poet devoted to the revolution of form,
with mature conditions and enough talent, I would transcend the phenomena
of poetry and march directly toward the essence. Unquote Che Qianzi


Quote By hybridising, I don't mean a mixing, or a production of a
third-party alternative from a set of specific material. A hybrid is not a
possible next stage in a developmental sense, nor a 'dilution' of the
component parts! Nor is it a fusing of traditions. It is, in fact, a
conscious undoing of the codes that constitute all possible readings of a
text. It is a debasement of the lyrical I … It recognises frames for what
they are: empty shells. Unquote John Kinsella

The question of translation is a living presence:
Quote Thinking and translating are for me almost synonymous words.
Unquote Nelson Ascher

Issues of identity and politics recur, an interesting context given by
Robin Blaser.
Quote the serious or ramshackle poet in us hasn't a chance at
being apolitical, even if the elf of his or her language wishes to be.
Unquote

Quote There is another kind of experience I sometimes have when
reading the words of authors who never imagined that someone like me might
be included in the potential audience for their work, as when I read in
Cirlot's Dictionary of Symbols that a "Negro" symbolizes the beast in the
human. When I read words never meant for me, or anyone like me - words that
exclude me, or anyone like me, as a possible reader - then I feel
simultaneously my exclusion and my inclusion as a literate black woman, the
unimagined reader of the text. Unquote Harryette Mullen.

There are some very useful historical surveys, essays and mini-anthologies,
from a wide number of different countries. You'll find some idiosyncratic
(perhaps the least power centred of the 'cracies) pieces which avoid
categorisation

Quote: Nothing for the magician is accidental / All that could possibly
happen to the magical prop is intrinsic to it and knowing "all that" (could
possibly happen) to the prop is what constitutes a magician's knowledge /
The event is the adventure of that moment Unquote Lyn Hejinian

What do you want me to say? It's a huge book and I'll be reading it, with
pleasure, anger and inspiration, for years. I've omitted loads because any
time I've tried to skim through for an overview I keep sinking in one or
other entrancing contribution. Marvelous stuff.

Randolph Healy

Visit the Sound Eye website at:
http://indigo.ie/~tjac/sound_eye_hme.htm



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