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Graçia Capinha, a professor at the University of Coimbra, invited me to give a keynote address on “the new poetries” in the summer of 1998. I thought this might be a good occasion to take up the issue of the subject in the Language poetries that had supposedly rejected all notions of individual “voice” in poetry. I revised the paper later that year and it appeared in 1999 in Critical Inquiry. Rereading the essay in 2003, I have a strong sense of the difference four years has already made in the poetic formations in question. 7 Language Poetry and the Lyric Subject Ron Silliman’s Albany, Susan Howe’s Buffalo The “personal” is already a plural condition. Perhaps one feels that it is located somewhere within, somewhere inside the body—in the stomach? the chest? the genitals? the throat? the head? One can look for it and already one is not oneself, one is several, a set of incipiencies, incomplete, coming into view here and there, and subject to dispersal. Lyn Hejinian, “The Person and Description” One of the cardinal principles—perhaps the cardinal principle—of American Language poetics (as of the related current in England, usually labeled “linguistically innovative poetries”)1 has been the dismissal of “voice” as the foundational principle of lyric poetry. In the preface to his anthology In the American Tree (1986), Ron Silliman famously declared that Robert Grenier’s “i hate speech” manifesto, published in the ¤rst issue of the San Francisco journal This (1971), “announced a breach—and a new moment in American writing”—a rejection of “simple ego psychology in which the poetic text represents not a person, but a persona, the human as uni¤ed object. And the reader likewise.”2 From the other coast, Charles Bernstein similarly denounced “voice” as the “privileged structure in the organization and interpretation of poems.”3 And in his early essay “Stray Straws and Straw Men” (1976), Silliman is Bernstein’s Exhibit A for a constructivist poetry, a poetry that undermines the “natural look,” with its “personal subject matter & a®owing syntax.”4 “Ron Silliman,” Bernstein writes, “has consistently written a poetry of visible borders: a poetry of shape”—one that “may discomfort those who want a poetry primarily of personal communication, ®owing freely from the inside with the words of a natural rhythm of life, lived daily” (“Stray Straws” 40–41). And the essay goes on to unmask Of¤cial Verse Culture , with its “sancti¤cation” of “authenticity,” “artlessness,” “spontaneity,” and claim for self-presence, the notion, widely accepted in the poetry of the 1960s, that “The experience is present to me” (41, 42).5 Although Bernstein doesn’t explicitly say so, the critique of voice, selfpresence , and authenticity put forward in Content’s Dream, as well as in such related texts as Ron Silliman’s own The New Sentence (1987) or Steve McCaffery ’s North of Intention (1986),6 must be understood as part of the larger post-structuralist critique of authorship and the humanist subject,a critique that became prominent in the late sixties and reached its height in the United States a decade or so later when the Language movement was coming into its own. It was Roland Barthes, after all, who insisted, in “The Death of the Author” (1968), that writing, far from being the simple and direct expression of interiority, is “the destruction of every voice, every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing.” “Linguistically,” Barthes declared, “the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a ‘subject,’ not a ‘person.’” And he famously concludes: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single “theological ” meaning (the message of the Author-God). . . . The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. The writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original . His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others. . . . Succeeding the Author, the scriptor no longer bears within him passions, humours, feelings, impressions, but rather this immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt: life never does more than imitate the book, and the book itself is only a tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, in...

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