The Language of Inquiry

Language and “Paradise”

Language and “Paradise” The Guard, the last publication in the Tuumba chapbook series, appeared in September 1984, a year after my first visit to the Soviet Union and my first meeting with the poet Arkadii Dragomoshchenko (to whom The Guard is dedicated).1 “Language and ‘Paradise,’” a purported exegesis of portions of that work, was written a year later, after a second, much longer visit to the USSR. There is, then, a Russian context for these two related works— a context which is more fully developed, of course, in my “short Russian novel” Oxota. And the figure of the guard(ian) has an identity in this context as well as in the one I explain in the essay. (The figure, both as border guard and as interloper, reappears to play a complex role in A Border Comedy and makes an appearance also in Sight.).2 The Russian context was not only experiential. My involvement with Russian Formalist theory is clear from the references in the essay to writings by Osip Brik and by Yurii Tynianov (I had read Tynianov’s The Problem of Verse Language while stranded in the Intourist waiting room at Moscow’s Sheremetova Airport for 26 hours). Perhaps it is also evident in some of the strategies I use—the delaying of coherence, for example, which results from 59 the paratactic and “plotless” structure of the essay. The notion of delayed coherence was inspired in large part by the essay by Viktor Shklovsky that Barrett Watten and I published in the first issue of Poetics Journal,3 though the term is my own. “Language and ‘Paradise’” was originally written for presentation at the New Poetics Colloquium organized by the Kootenay School of Writing (Vancouver, British Columbia), in June 1985. It was subsequently published in Line: A Journal of Contemporary Writing and its Modernist Sources, no. 6 (Fall 1985). My writings have almost never taken form as single, independent entities. When I finished The Guard, I began a notebook project intended to produce or invent an exegesis, amplification, and adjustment to the poem—an extension of its trajectory. The notebook is labeled “Language and ‘Paradise,’” which are the last two words of the poem. In this notebook, I’ve been writing a commentary on the poem, addressing it sentence by sentence. The decision to examine the poem at the level of the sentence rather than the line was not arbitrary. It is primarily at the level of the sentence, in the moves from one to the next, that the themes of the poem develop; it is at the level of the sentences that one can follow the prevailing current. But this isn’t to dismiss the effect of the line (and the line break) on these sentences (and occasionally in the notebook I have focused my attention on those portions of sentences which make a line). The dynamic of the line is different from that of the sentence, and the interplay between the two produces countercurrents, eddies, backwaters, and swirls. The sentence and the line have different ways of bringing meaning into view. 60 / The Language of Inquiry The situation of The Guard is a phenomenological one, an unstable situation involving perceiver, perception (or perceiving), perceived, and the various meanings of their interrelationships, which are not at all mild. By “the perceived,” I mean not only objects , but also events, emotions, ideas, and the various interconnections that bind them within the world. I assume the reality of everything. Thus, if I can say that the poem includes the perceived , it may include sentences, for example, about desire, various domestic and professional events, political opinion, and the fear of death, as well as a good deal of description. In perception, since I am thinking about a poem, I locate (just as I in fact experience) the site of the perceiving in language itself. It is here that the interplay between line and sentence is the most important. As I see it, and this is partially in retrospect (which I mention because I want to make it clear that I learned most of these things by writing the poem, not in preparation for it, and that this perceiving from within the writing is a central element of my practical as well as my theoretical poetics; it provides me with the necessity for writing), if the sentence represents the entirety of a perception , a complete thought, then the...