The Language of Inquiry

If Written Is Writing

If Written Is Writing “If Written Is Writing” was written in 1978, specifically for one of the first issues of Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein’s journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the advent of which seemed to invite (and even demand ) response. Like most of the other poets with whom I was in constant conversation during this time, I felt under increasing pressure to write essays —or, rather, to write thinking: to propose, and especially to involve, poetry with politics and metaphysics. Such a project was very much at odds with commonly held notions of poetry as an unworldly enterprise. The sense of being at odds—the frustration of being misunderstood—contributed to the pressure to write theory. But it was the need to discover relations between writing and the world and to relate those discoveries to others that gave the deeper sense of urgency to the task of writing thinking or theory. What was at stake was the definition of poetry, and that mattered a great deal, but also at stake were the ways we could negotiate reality. The editors of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E proposed that the theory need not be extrinsic to the poetry. They did not require a normalized, expository 25 style.1 In “If Written Is Writing” I undertook an integrated style; it is not inappropriate that it has an underlying anti-idealist theme. The argument would go something like this: reality exists; it is independent of what we think though it is the only thing we can think; we are a part of reality but at the same time consciousness of this fact makes us separate from it; we have a point of reentry (a “centrique happinesse”), which is language, but our reentry is hesitant, provisional, and awkward. It is also a never-ending entry, a process which I may have been equating with life, though if so I did not make that equation explicit; the equation of the process of perpetual reentry with writing, however, is explicit. Though the hesitant, inefficient, and phrase-based style of the work may mimic speech, it is impossible to construe this piece as spoken; it is obviously writing. The writtenness of it was important, since I wanted to propose writing as a material manifestation, an embodiment, of desire for reality. This desire drives us backward into the past as well as forward; that is, the reality we desire precedes us, we remember it. That is what the title “If Written Is Writing” attempts to indicate. I think of you, in English, so frequent, and deserved, and thereby desired, their common practice and continually think of it, who, since the Elizabethans, save Sterne and Joyce, have so trothed language to the imagination, and Melville, of whose Mardi the critics wrote, in 1849, “a tedious, floundering work of uncertain meaning or no meaning at all. A hodgepodge. . . . A story without movement, or proportions, or end . . . or point! An undigested mass of rambling metaphysics.”2 No-one is less negligent than you, to render the difficulties less whether well-protected, in grammar, in which it has been cus26 / The Language of Inquiry tomary to distinguish syntax from accidence, the latter tending to the inflections of words—inflections, or toward itself, a bending in. The choices have always been fashioned and executed from within. Knowing is right and knowing is wrong. Nodding is, or could be, to you. In such are we obsessed with our own lives, which lives being now language, the emphasis has moved. The emphasis is persistently centric, so that where once one sought a vocabulary for ideas, now one seeks ideas for vocabularies. Many are extant. Composition is by. The technique is very cut and the form is very close. Such is surprising even now, if overdue. Now so many years ago Donne wrote, “Some that have deeper digg’d loves Myne than I, / Say, where his centrique happinesse doth lie. . . . ”3 The text is anterior to the composition, though the composition be interior to the text. Such candor is occasionally flirtatious , as candor is nearly always so. When it is trustworthy, love accompanies the lover, and the centric writers reveal their loyalty, a bodily loyalty. Quite partial is necessity, of any text. Marvelous are the dimensions and therefore marveling is understandable— and often understanding. Much else isn’t, but comes, from the de...