This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

Language obeyed

L A N G U A G E O B E Y E D 14! No word without whir as Mackey puns it, his School ofUdhra spinning a constellation of commensurate identities: His they their we, their he his was but if need be one, selfextinguishing I, neither sham nor excuse yet an alibi, exited, out, else the only where he'd be. Language obeyed Rachel Blau DuPlessis remarks, "Like translations, poems / say the unsayable twice, once to another language." Where types propose a reification of sense (author into authority, logos into lexis), tropes propound an anarchy of sense and sensation, abridgment of book into conjugal detours, hot fertilities; the work of Art to set words jiving breaking into crises —where, in Robert Duncan's practice, "the line / [is] a trial" and "each element a crisis of attention."* The tropes of a text tell tales of how things are turned into * In a late essay,"He Stuttered," Gilles Deleuze also links line to trial, which marks the point at which one becomes a stranger in one's own tongue, aforeigner who makes language convulse—cry, stutter, mumble, whimper, gasp. In the performative mode "the stuttering no longer affects preexisting words, but, rather, itself ushers in the words that it affects" (23). Deleuze's work consistently favorsthe insouciant posture, the looseness and rapidity of the rhizome, always on the move. With Felix Guattari, Deleuze extends the fantasy to a very tropological America, consanguineouswith This Compost. "There is a wholeAmerican'map' in the West, where even the trees form rhizomes. Americareversed the directions: it put its 142 T H I S C O M P O S T words, events into beliefs, and how all are blackened, sealed in the furnace of reduction . The common air includes Events listening to their own tremors, Beings and no more than breath between them, Histories, differences, walls, And the words which bind them no more than "So that," "and" ... As WilliamJames claims in A Pluralistic Universe, "the word 'or' names a genuine reality" (777-78). Of and Or are snails, repeat vegetable lessons, roaring a new will that lifts its horn into the heart of Man. "Language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter." These are the dicta ofa poetics attentive to (and retentive of) crumplings of discourse into folds and redundancies , vulvic recesses and hollows, fluency become granular,textured. Verbalized, vocally strummed. Language, framed by the rivalry oflaw and desire, feeds on its own dispersal into elementary functions and particles ("eye net / / quoin own me"*), liberated into an elegiac plenitude, a funereal measure plying identity into the coign holding the type in place. If "The unconscious is totally unaware of persons as such" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 46), poetry is language becoming unconscious of itself, developing its own propinquity in what Andre Breton memorably called convulsive beauty. Jack Spicer's poetics of disturbance is a lesson in the somnolent helplessness of the will when it lets itself to be animated by linguistic involuntarism in puns and slips of the tongue. Orient in the West, asif it were precisely in Americathat the earth came fall circle; its West is the edge of the East" (A Thousand Plateaus, 19)—Olson's "last first place"—and ouroboros. * In "A"we have presentiments of language as heap; something like the Buddhist concept of skandhas, clusters of sense aggregates and their compound emanations. (The skandhas are: the aggregate of matter, the aggregate of feeling or sensation, the aggregate of perception , the aggregate ofmental formulations, the aggregate ofconsciousness.) Zukofsky is able to practice a very tight, even elliptical, syntactic condensation because he moves over an intuitively familiar array, the poem's own "heaps" or aggregates. L A N G U A G E O B E Y E D 143 For example The poem does not know Who you refers to. Even in the thought of Being, "Our image shrinks to a morpheme, an -ing word. Death / Is an image of syllables." "For the blue wash of sound drawn back to its shores. A shell appears, is rolld under, comes up again the ash Hell shadows, melts and divides into ashand shell from which the grave black tides of hell recede." The ash and shell are siftings, instructions from the inner lava that language mumbles in our heads all the time, a subliminal vocality. Hello and goodbye in some languages are one word. Each exits for the other...