Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde

17. Paradise as Praxis: Bruce Andrews’s Lip Service

Paradise as Praxis Bruce andrews’s Lip Service she had once accused [her husband, Guy pringle,] of considering her feelings less than those of anyone else with whom they came into contact. surprised, he had said: “But you are myself. i don’t need to consider your feelings.” —olivia Manning if there is to be a “we,” it is not one tyrannized into supposed consensus but one founded on interaction. —robert sheppard in what follows i draw quite extensively on two essays by andrews: the title essay of Paradise & Method, in which he discusses the compositional principles and procedures of his nearly 400-page poem Lip Service, and his major but largely neglected essay on sexuality in writing,“Be Careful nowyou Know sugar Melts in Water,”first published in Temblor in 1987.1 Lip Service is a lineby -line re-working and “near-translation” of dante’s Paradiso. a number of readers have found especially the early sections of the poem to be extremely offensive, and it is certainly true that the experience of reading andrews’s poem is remarkably unlike the experience of reading dante’s. the following brief extract, from the seventh part of the sixth section,“Mars,” reworks part of dante’s sixteenth canto. to get more joy out of sex, specify male or female— keep away from clothes, airbrush your vanity obstinately persistent & oblivious to circumstances, oooh oooh oooh, besame mucho delay pride’s quake enhances pubic esplanade. explosive smudge that silk overthrows straight seeking empties with stamina i yet squander—foresworn careful, saboteurishly culling a sexual diversion for the noontime meal but then he said my vagina was too big, taking coke with freon. ovum aura sordid chaise—i like disturbed 246 Bruce andrews’s Lip Service don’t hatch married women are always martyrs in a hurry: i don’t feel selfish about this, this is something coming together between us— exasperating deporting eroticism as decision; i took a shit in the bed . . . dream abruptly ends. oh spring attacking cushion reference— poutless ardor, winter iron spoiler barb buy warmth on margin preferring the mud to the fist, become nobody lye sent us, sully refrigeration open to her then, her—her repeat the frost superb!— (195) all those voices, with the uncertain and shifting phrasal boundaries, the disjointed syntax. and the wit, the humor, the puns. these are all highly problematic : Why do we laugh (if we do), and what at, exactly? the uncertainties of phrasal boundaries profoundly disorient the reader—and what of the pronouns? the“you”and the“i”encountered so often in this poem are who? the self? Men? Women? Can we differentiate with any certainty? George oppen once said that“the‘plain sense’of the poem is the paradise of meaning.”2 But his remark leaves open, of course, the question what exactly “plain sense”might be.What, especially, might the“plain sense”of this poem be, and—which is much more to my purpose here—what is the connection between this poem, in its hellish vision of a world in which the word “love” scarcely appears at all3 and in which no one is beloved, and paradise, specifically dante’s Paradiso? Lip Service is an extremely problematic text.not least among the problems is that of intelligibility—“plain sense”; closely connected to it is the problem of voice. overall, like the work collected in Give Em Enough Rope (1987) and I Don’t Have Any Paper So Shut Up (or, Social Romanticism) (1992), there is a truculent in-your-face quality to Lip Service, which draws on many voices to sound its disposition. the poem contests the protocols of readership. if Lip Service is, like dante’s Paradiso, a portrayal of the Beloved,then that portrayal of the Beloved is pretty horrific. one reason why the Paradiso informs and models this text is because—in andrews’s words—his own poem seeks to map and contest “sense in a particular present (of ‘late capitalism’) where sexuality figures so prominently in a near-totalizing machine of social discourse”(“Be Careful”125),and to this end his poem“reverberates with the romance and utopia-saturated materials” (“paradise” 251) of dante’s poem. the portrayal of the Beloved in Lip Service runs savagely counter to the myth Bruce andrews’s Lip Service 247 of women and sexuality purveyed in the market place and the entertainment industry (to say nothing of the...