Davidson - On the outskirts of form: practicing cultural poetics

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF FORM

ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF FORM

Practicing Cultural Poetics

Michael Davidson

WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY PRESS

MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT

Wesleyan University Press

Middletown CT 06459

www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

2011 Michael Davidson

All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by Katherine B. Kimball

Typeset in Quadraat and Quadraat Sans by

Passumpsic Publishing

Wesleyan University Press is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Davidson, Michael, 1944

On the outskirts of form: practicing cultural poetics / Michael Davidson.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8195-6957-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8195-6958-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8195-7137-3 (e-book)

1. Poetics. 2. PoetryHistory and criticismTheory, etc.

3. Literature, Modern20th centuryHistory and criticism.

4. Literature, Modern21st centuryHistory and criticism. I. Title.

PN 1055. D 38 2011

808.1dc23 2011027298

5 4 3 2 1

This book would not exist without the help of an extensive network of friends, colleagues, editors, and publishersall of whom have generously supported the project of a counter/cultural poetics. Many of the essays in On the Outskirts of Form began as talks or conference papers and subsequently appeared in magazines and journals. My thanks are extended to conference organizers, gallery curators, and publishers for helping to bring these essays to light.

I am especially grateful to a number of friends and colleagues who have been faithful readers and commentators. All these chapters have been aided in one form or another by conversations with Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Palmer, Alan Golding, Lisa Lowe, Susan Kirkpatrick, Rae Armantrout, Peter Nicholls, Peter Middleton, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Dee Morris, Lynn Keller, Charles Bernstein, and Al Gelpi. I want to extend a special thanks to Barrett Watten, who is directly responsible for generating at least three of these chapters and whose advice has influenced many others. I also want to acknowledge the contributions of Bob Perelman and an anonymous reader who reviewed the manuscript for Wesleyan University Press. I have had excellent support from my editor, Suzanna Tamminen, and her colleagues, Parker Smathers and Leslie Starr at Wesleyan, and Lys Weiss and Peter Fong at University Press of New England. Thanks as well to Teddy Cruz for the books wonderful cover image and for our ongoing conversations about living in San Diego, on the outskirts of form.

Chapter 1, On the Outskirts of Form, began as a talk given at the Diasporic Avant-Gardes conference at the University of California, Irvine, in 2004. Thanks to Barrett Watten and Carrie Noland, who curated this event, and to Palgrave MacMillan Press for allowing me to reprint the essay from its volume, Diasporic Avant-Gardes: Experimental Poetics and Cultural Displacement (2009). Another early version of this chapter appeared in Textual Practice 22.4 (winter 2008). Thanks to Peter Nicholls and Routledge Publishers for granting permission to reprint. I was aided in writing this essay by conversations with Cristina Rivera-Garza, Mark Nowak, and Lisa Robertson.

Chapter 2, The Dream of a Public Language, owes its inception to the Authorship and the Turn to Language conference held at the Universitt Tbingen, Germany, in 2005. Thanks to Barrett Watten for coordinating this event. A version of this essay appeared in Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 17 (2007). Thanks to the editor, Mark Nowak, for permission to reprint. I was also aided by conversations with Heriberto Ypez and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, to whom I extend my gratitude.

Life by Water: Lorine Niedecker and Critical Regionalism was delivered as a paper at the Lorine Niedecker Centenary Celebration held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in October of 2003. Thanks are extended to Elizabeth Willis, who coordinated the conference and edited Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (2008), in which the essay subsequently appeared. Permission to reprint is granted by the University of Iowa Press.

I am grateful to Lee Spinks and the University of Edinburgh for inviting me to deliver a lecture, Closed in Glass: Oppens Class Spectacles at the George Oppen: A Centenary Conference, in November 2008. The lecture was subsequently given as a keynote address at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, at the University of Louisville. Thanks to Alan Golding for inviting me to participate.

Archaeologist of Morning: Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Historical Method appeared in English Literary History 47 (1980) and is reprinted courtesy of the editors.

Chapter 6, The Repeated Insistence: Creeleys Rage, was written for a Robert Creeley memorial conference held in Buffalo, New York, October 2006. Thanks to Steve McCaffery for coordinating this event. The essay appeared in Form, Power, and Person in Robert Creeleys Life and Work, edited by Stephen Fredman and Steve McCaffery, University of Iowa Press, 2010. Permission to reprint this essay is granted by the University of Iowa Press.

A Cold War Correspondence: Gender Trouble in the Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov first appeared in Contemporary Literature 45.3 (fall 2004), copyright by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, and is reprinted by permission of University of Wisconsin Press. Special thanks to Al Gelpi for his comments on early drafts of this essay.

Chapter 8, Looking Through Lithium: James Schuyler as Jim the Jerk, was first given as a paper at the Modern Language Associations annual convention, December 2004. I am grateful to Henry Abelove for chairing the panel on James Schuyler and to Eileen Myles, Ron Padgett, Nathan Kernan, Bill Corbett, and Charles North, who helped expand this essay into its current form.

Ekphrasis and the New York School is an expanded version of an essay first printed in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42.1 (fall 1983). Thanks to the editors for permission to reprint.

I am grateful to Abigail Lange, Antoine Caz, Olivier Brossard, and Vincent Broqua, who organized John Ashbery in Paris, an international conference at the Universit Paris Diderot, Institut Charles V, in March 2010, at which I presented The Pleasures of Merely Circulating: John Ashbery and the Jargon of Inauthenticity. Thanks also to John Ashbery and David Kermani, who generously provided commentary on various aspects of the essay.

A shorter version of chapter 11, Struck Against Parenthesis, was given as a paper at the Modern Language Associations annual convention in December 1991, on a panel chaired by Stuart Curran. The essay later appeared in Keats-Shelley Journal XLII (1993), which has granted me permission to reprint. I am grateful to my co-presenter, Michael Palmer, and to Susan Howe for their conversations about this essay.

Chapter 12, Skewed by Design was delivered at the Poetic Function / Soviet Cultural Foundation conference, LanguageConsciousnessSociety: The Problems of Contemporary Culture, in Leningrad, August 1989. The essay subsequently appeared in Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, edited by Christopher Beach (University of Alabama Press, 1998) and was reprinted in