Face to Face with the Blues

There is nothing surprising in the ambiguities attendant upon that most familiar of multifaceted words, face. It can be an action, as when we face facts, face up to a looming threat, or, in a sublime irony for music lovers, when we are forced finally to face the music. More often, it falls into another tense. We have a face off, we have a face down, we demand face time, we have, indeed, a face-to-face. We put on a brave face. We worry about losing face. We save face. We make up our face to face the day. Every blessed morning we make up our minds to face up to the challenges of the day.

On the facing pages of Ed Roberson's "Blues: In the Face Of," the type face streams before us from the boldface of the roman numerals marking this poem's place in the sequence of the poet's book Atmosphere Conditions, to the dangling preposition that marks our turning from title to first stanza, the punctuating first puzzle of the poem. That initial stanza looks like nothing so much as William Carlos Williams's late period variable feet stepping in neat triads across the white face of the page. But that stanza ends in the face of closing quotes, marks that have no precedent on the page. The Spanish language has the virtue of letting readers know in advance, via the inverted interrogative mark or exclamation mark, how the line is to be inflected. English has no such niceties, but it does generally adhere to the practice of placing opening quotation marks so that a reader knows the words have their origin elsewhere; they stream from some other face, some other outcrop. But not in this poem. The first line commences in ellipses, so we know something has been elided, but it remains impossible in this printing to know if it is the opening quote marks themselves that have abdicated, or if the title is itself a part of the quotation. So our opening reading is:

Blues: In the face of

         … condescending                     notions of immediatist                                nonreflective blackness."

(Roberson 78)

In my own reproduction of these lines here, meaning here on my page, I follow, of course, the format of the Modern Language Association, reproducing this title and the poem's first stanza adhering as closely as possible to the way they appear on Roberson's precedent page. So I have added no quotation marks of my own, which means that my first copy-editor will probably pause over that first set of closing quotation marks wondering whether, despite my own opening, I may not have made some mistake in transcription. Were I only quoting two lines of the poem, I would be expected by MLA to open with quotation marks of my own, alter Roberson's double to single quotes, and then close with double quote marks of my own, by which time we may all have forgotten the other opening puzzle here, the colon in the poem's title. Scholars are accustomed to colons. We generously offer them up in the titles of nearly every conference paper, journal article, and book. Those of us who scruple about such things as MLA format know that a colon is often used to separate our own introductory words from the matter of a quotation. Absent opening quote marks in this instance, it is impossible to tell if the word "Blues," which I now ensconce in quotation marks, is Roberson's own word, for which the following words are some mode of expansion, or if "Blues," the word that is, not the Blues themselves, is part of the quoted matter of Roberson's work.

So who is being quoted? What and how does it matter who the author is? Is Roberson, having placed the words into his poem, the author of them as well? How responsible are we for the things we choose to quote? What becomes of appeals to authorial intention when we face a case such as this, in which we cannot really tell, absent a friendly note from the poet...