Silences of Formality

McMorris continuedfrom previous page large extent, Waldrop (together with Keith Waldrop) is primarily responsible for having created, through her translations and her press (Burning Deck), an audience for contemporary French experimental poetry in this country. Time does not banalize her prose. The review of Hejinian's combinatorial practice is still a useful template for reading the work of that generation. Anyone looking for a careful survey of the ways poetry might act through its form for a better social engagement—the emphasis here is on the structure of the verbal message rather than its referent or message content—will want to consult the erudite, formally inventive "Alarms and Excursions." And Waldrop's attempt to set limits pertinent to concrete poetry, and to establish key distinctions, still strikes me as one of the most critically astute readings of that genre. If Waldrop has her personal canon, James Scully employs a systematic approach, unfolded from essay to essay. Line Break: Poetry as Social Practice, first published in 1988 and long out ofprint, has been reissued at the instigation ofAdrienne Rich. Political topics of the 1980s float through Scully's pages. Two effects follow: his interventions, at a first encounter; may seem dated (if productively so); and one may also grasp his critical positions through the historical context within which he formulated them. The concerns of the (socialist) left with race and labor , with liberation movements in Central and Latin America and Southern Africa, and with the cultural logic of late capitalism, animate his writing on what art can contribute to social justice—or, in Jameson's phrasing, to the expansion ofthe "realm offreedom" against the "realm of necessity." Scully is a Marxist of Althusserian leanings. Accordingly, he approaches the criticism of poetry as a species of ideological critique. Ifa single precept guides his thinking, it is this: "a poem is not a thing but a practice. A social practice." Everywhere careful to be precise, to separate out, to limit and parse exact denotations, he refines the meaning of his terms through negation. Take a sample from the title essay, "Line Break": a "work" differs from a "text"; "poems are practices, not constructs"; do not mistake versified writing for a poem; "publishing" a book is not the same as "printing" it. By such analytical moves, he seeks to explain how poetry as social practice breaks free from bureaucratized, institutionalized, and rationalized cultural production and reception. Put another way, Scully asserts that "a fully realized poetry consists not of stylistics but of writing. That poetry is a practice. And that, it follows, a fully realized poetry will also be a kind of antipoetry." Not this, but that. And Scully does perform exceptional readings of poetry as "writing" and its opposite, poetry as "social function," by which he means poetry that reinforces bourgeois ideology. Poetry as social function, or functionary, does not act, except in the way that an echo or a mirror may be said to act. Held within the embrace of a dehistoricized stylistics, the reader merely confirms the proper or improper operation of a method. But practice is a gerund—a saying, a writing, rather than speech, or genre. Practice is the author "feeling (producing!) the presence of the reader," who then "is not an object of the text but a subject along with it"—an active subject. Practice demands alertness; it throws the reader off balance, takes startling turns. Perhaps Scully says no more than ostranenie—but he says it thoroughly, convincingly, resolutely, and always with reference to an ideology that practice seeks to evade or disable. Poetry as functionary leaves the reader content with the illusion of art as a timeless world shut off from the social fray—shut off from the realm of specific choices, lived values, conflict, desire, suffering, injustice — and serves to naturalize the existing social order. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938) achieves this quiescence masterfully, and Scully detects and displays its subtle ideological masks. So many aspects to consider! But I will certainly never introduce Auden's famous poem into a classroom without re-reading Scully's essay, "Demagogy in the Musée." One wishes at times Scully were less blandly sententious—"there...