Admittedly, this post is something of a detour from Brathwaite, but I don’t think it is unrelated. Indeed, my thinking about Brathwaite led me to some of these thoughts on Susan Howe, and their practices can be fruitfully read together, I think. I am indebted without the possibility of repayment to Amanda Hurtado for her stimulating thinking on materialist poetics that led to these thoughts.
from “Anacrusis,” by Myung Mi Kim:
Before this talk bearing the title ANACRUSIS, I would presence the talk that cannot be delivered, the talk that seeks to dislocate (or dispense) formulations. If the talk cannot or does not declare its “point,”(its exchange value), is it relegated to being unrecognizable?
I am the perpetual foreigner at the door of the demand to specify the purpose of the talk (what is it good for?). How to evoke a poetics that does not capitulate to terms sanctioned and policed by the prevailing, dominant discourses invested in the “point of the talk.” It is not the certitude of truth-content but its permeations that attract, avulse, and engender acts of speaking. The talk, if in relation to the task of writing, cannot proceed by argument; it proceeds by enactment–the something made and the process of something being made.
Perhaps I am proposing this occasion as one in which poetics may be addressed as chiasmatic–where the rehearsals of the bound and the radicalizing constantly circulate.
I will be using the following as my definition of caesura:
Howe’s “definition” of caesura comes from Reuven Tsur’s, Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorial Information in Poetry (John Benjamins Publishing, 2012). (For the purposes of this discussion, I must strategically ignore the other texts included in the poem.) For the middle “lines” of this poem, Howe has sliced a Xeroxed bit of Tsur’s essay “Metaphor and Figure-ground Relationship” and sandwiched it between several other textual bits (a horizontal sliver at the top, a vertical bit below that positioned perpendicular to the rest of the texts, and a another horizontal slice at the base of the configuration). Note the open parenthesis acting as a caesura between “mid-word” and “or less” that draws our attention to some chiasmatic sonics: “word” and “or,” “curs” and “crit,” and the irregular repetition of “mid,” rendering it a line with (at least) three middles, as if forever in between figure and ground. Tsur summarizes his essay as follows: “…figure-ground relationship is an important element of the way we organize reality in our awareness, including works of art.” Tsur argues that “poets may rely on our habitual figure-ground organizations in extralinguistic reality, and exploit our habitual figure-ground organizations in extralinguistic reality, and exploit our flexibility in shifting attention from one aspect to another so as to achieve certain poetic effects by inducing us to reverse the habitual figure-ground relationships.” Caesura is conventionally understood as a rhythmic (and sometimes punctuated) space/time in the rhythm of metrical poetry, a space that divides discrete phrases. Or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, “In English prosody: a pause or breathing-place about the middle of a metrical line, generally indicated by a pause in the sense.” In English, this space was formalized for centuries (though not as stringently as the French Alexandrine) in the hemistitched pentameter line, such as in Alexander Pope’s: “To err is human; || to forgive, divine,” where the two vertical bars represent the caesural rhythmic and semantic spacetime following the two halves of the hemistitch. In Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy the concept of the caesura is central. It marks the emergence of the polis from bare life, that is, the initial politico-ontological division, as well as the law’s sovereign power to determinate identity, such as the identity of the state or a given life’s inclusion or exclusion from the law. In this sense, caesura, and its evolution, should not be taken lightly. Susan Howe’s infastructuralist manifestation of ceasure, discussed below, should be read in conjunction with these politico-ontological stakes, as Howe’s work is always particularly attuned to the inclusion and/or exclusion of peoples, lands, histories, and literature’s in history’s writing.
In poetry, caesuras often provide a chiasmatic mid-line turn (“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure,” Byron, Don Juan) or, as in the Pope above, a grammatical repetition. The caesura helps define and/or trouble the figure-ground relation insofar as it foregrounds (i.e. figures) phrases, metrical patterns, and other units of the line, even the sense of the line (and our awareness of it), while also suggesting and regulating, in part by interrupting (and/or being part of) the ground of rhythmic patterning, grammatical structures, subject/object relations, images, etc. a poem plays across and makes. In the Byron line, for example, in the first instance pleasure is collected under the set of sins, as if pleasure were the figure and sin the ground on which it sits. After the caesura, the phrase is reversed and repeated, chiasmatically folded, so that sin becomes a term (at least sometimes) in the set of pleasures, where now sin is a figure sitting on the ground of pleasure. On the one hand caesurae are discrepant spaces of differentiation, and on the other they are relational, harmonic spaces, where beginnings and endings (and middles) are joined in concordance. While Tsur argues that prosodic features of poetry, such as the caesura, can use our habitual organization of “extralinguistic realities” to produce certain poetic effects, effects that might eventuate a shift in our organization of figure-ground relation and/or any aspect of “extralinguistic reality,” as demonstrated in Byron above, Howe’s poetic intervention radicalizes Tsur’s thinking by applying caesura literally to the organization of reality itself, opening an indeterminate aperture onto the threshold between the linguistic and extralinguistic. In the case of the Howe poem from Concordance, this linguistic/extralinguistic threshold also plays along another axis a little closer to home: the poetic and the critical, given that the cut itself is appropriated from a work of poetry criticism. Appropriation in general, such as in Duchamp’s readymades, always plays with the conceptual autonomy of art, as it morphs the social codes of a given object into the “art code.” In the case of textual appropriation the effect is even more complex (a complexity further troped on by Howe in her appropriative iteration of a work of poetics), in part because language itself is already defined by its iterability. As Judith Goldman explains,
“An appropriative work is a copy of a text-in-context: a mode of self-reflexive quotation whose “citational poetics”…involves investment in and displacement of indexical markers of its former identity in a new performance of the text…what an appropriative work cites is (some part of) the larger social assemblage in which that text has been enunciated
as speech act…
Most importantly, however, a work of citational literature is its own speech act: it is a strategically altered iteration that reflexively cites that prior text-as-field but also necessarily appears as a displacement of it, as its own enunciative assemblage. Regardless of its literal representation of that former context or which parts of it seem to matter, citational literature performs quotation as palimpsest. In citing the text-as-context, these works trope on the culture of fragmentation and toxic implicature, the embeddedness of context in text.” (Agon, 136).
While Goldman’s text explicitly refers to conceptual writing, this theorization is apt to describe Howe’s work, and will also be useful later in discussion of Brathwaite, especially Goldman’s development of the idea that conceptual writing (and/or some forms of citational literature) can weaponize the situational context, and therefore textual body, of a given iterative utterance, wielding the language like a gun against its original discursive situation, and against what she calls “toxic implicature,” or the way that discourse can “naturally” include unstated premises, or enthymemes, that are racist but unspoken. She writes,
“To live in a 21st-century society of ubiquitous computing, of digitally networked sociality is to live in conditions of toxic implicature. The weaponized enthymeme” (Agon, 88).
Such a condition of toxic implicature, unfortunately, is not unique to the 21st century, though it might be exacerbated by the trillions of enthymemic assumptions made at 3/4 the speed of light by computational apparatuses. Brathwaite’s SxVx can certainly be said to be commenting on such a condition of toxic implicature, where the unstated premises of the literary culture are, blatantly, according to him, Caribbean=hardly existent. The ironic counter-strategy of the SxVx is, in part, to weaponize Brathwaite’s own previously published poems, redoubling down on the already oppressive conditions against the subaltern. Brathwaite’s Sycorax Video-Style, though not “conceptual writing,” is often precisely “citational literature” as Goldman defines it: “works based on a single, pre-existing text.” The trick with Brathwaite, of course, is that that pre-existing text, unlike most works of conceptual writing, was written by the same author that re-mediates, and/or re-contextualizes it. But the SxVx, similar to works of conceptual writing, aims precisely to, “attend to the text it annexes in terms of the materia and presentation of its words, its physical medium and graphical interface, the social-material network and techniques of its production, dissemination, and consumption including its existence as a commodity in a market, its authorship, the rhetorical directives and assumptions encoded within it, its institutional settings, its social identity and use, its historical moment, the affect it carries or generates.”
Indeed, the SxVx, as Brathwaite sometimes explains it, is meant to inflict violence on the entire situation of global publishing. In an interview with Nathaniel Mackey he avers, “Publishing nowadays is always an act of terror.”
Before straying too far, we should return to Howe’s text. While not “citational literature,” exactly, Howe works extensively with “textual readymades,” and is certainly a precursor to conceptual writing. Evocatively, the “readymade text” here, Tsur’s essay, is language meant to be commenting on poetry that is now incorporated into poetry, thus demonstrating poetry’s absorbent power. This differending poetics sites the space where the codes called “the critical” and “the poetic” cross, and where the subtle institutional and social structures that proffer these identities operate coextensively in an infra world. In this way, Howe cites the differend (or caesura) itself “between” these codes, thus creating a new site that I refer to as infrastructuralist poetics, a superposition of the critical and the poetic that is also neither. In the poem, we understand the citation both in its “original” identity as obviously “from” a work of criticism, while we recognize, simultaneously, that it is now, also, unassailably, “the poem.” That flickering vacillation is infrastructuralist to the extent that it causes in the reader an indeterminate shuttling back and forth between these codes that eventually becomes so rapid as to create a new image altogether, and image of the relation, that is also an image of that relation’s opacity. That point of relation, or difference, or caesura between the two codes becomes an infrastructuralist relation when its historical contingency and historicity becomes foregrounded, and the works themselves recede into the background, while, of course, infernally mixing them (figure-ground) together. This hypostatized relation, the reader realizes, is their own determination of the poetic and the critical, a determination that is now clearly historicized, if simply by being absolutely confused. This flicker between poetics, aesthetics, and analysis, like three colors of off-white strobing somewhere in a dark room, is finally a failure to determine the undeterminable: the precise point where criticism “becomes” poetry, and vice-versa. Howe, in cutting out the formcontent from one page what will become part of the formcontent of another page (her poem), effectively blasts a hole through criticism as if she stood before it a loaded gun, leaving behind a materially altered page in its wake (shown below).
There is important material signification at work here. Beyond this semiotic flickering code-crossing context creation, by forming her poem out of a “cut” taken from literal material reality (i.e. from Tsur’s book), a “cut” that in its taking and re-using creates another line of reality, Howe opens us to a materialist prosody that is able to retain the linguistic use of the extralinguistic (not unlike the way that Zukofsky often appropriates non-poetic texts in “A” that evince perfect poetic-prosodic qualities that he then situates into larger formal structures of his own devising), while reconfiguring caesura itself as a new rhythm in material reality. In this way, Howe uses Tsur’s critical theory to craft (and reflexively theorize her own craft (where craft becomes a poetic craft (boat) of transit) a poem that extends his theoretical insight about the way poets use extralinguistic habits. The concern here is the ongoing, continuous production of a space that neither poetry nor criticism completely cover, an absolute heterotopic heterological spacetime. It is in this space that poetics, properly, occurs. Howe’s poem tacitly argues (without any such argument), extending Tsur, that not only do poets use our habitual organizations of figure-ground in extralinguistic reality to create poetic effects, but that by doing so, poets also change those prosodic effects themselves, and reality in the process. As Myung Mi Kim reminds us, “the [poem], if in relation to the task of writing, cannot proceed by argument; it proceeds by enactment–the something made and the process of something being made.” Poets can redefine prosodic elements that have become fossils of language (and poetics) by updating their meaning in use, by enacting something made and the process of something being made. Howe’s materialist caesura does this precisely, insisting that caesura might retain relevance beyond its local use to describe a spacetime semi-pause in a hemistitched pentameter line, because the power of its meaning is mutable enough to accommodate her own practice of material caesura, and she makes it so (or, at least, her poem does), while still relating to the practice of caesura overall as a form of rhythmic organization into discrete units, phrases, or measures.
We might call the image above a representation of Howe’s “actual” or “literal” caesura (caes from the Latin “cut”/”hewn”), or we might call it a cannonball tearing through the page. Howe does not “get rid” of the old definition of caesura, rather, she finds within its matrix the etymological means to extend its use up to and including (and looking beyond) her own practice. Poetics, this suggests, reads and enacts, enacts and reads, while, finally, eschewing reading to the higher purpose of a non-readerly genesis of the untheorized, and, finally, the untheorizable. Caesura, the poem suggests, will be defined by its enaction, and not, at least not only, retroactively by discursive prose. This co-dependence should be emphasized, as neither, finally, exists without the other.
The image above shows an intervening rhythm in material reality that is produced by cutting the material page, a literal cutting or hewing of the world that is also symbolic act. It is an “actual” cut in the page, an “actual” “literal” caesura, thus it emphasizes what I’ve been calling the poetic symbolic, or the material ground of all signification. As a meaningful act, it is of the mathematical symbolic, as semantic knowledge. Thus, as I have been arguing, this technique re-writes the mathematical symbolic and poetic symbolic relationship, re-defining a ratio between the knowable and the strictly material (finally, unknowable). It cuts into the rhythmic material reality of Tsur’s text, forever altering its social-historical context, while creating a new text altogether.
Presumably, to create her poem, Howe has Xeroxed or printed this page from Tsur’s book and cut around the space that is in my image left in relief. This quadrilateral space (a kind of trapezoid) is a literal caesura, leaving behind the poem:
Howe’s caesura emphasizes the slashing of the inverted mark (as “slash” is literally slashed by her cut). Too, any reader of Howe will be sensitive to “marks” and “mark-making,” even, perhaps, this negative mark. As any caesura does, this one emphasizes the phrases dividing the line “(marked by a slas) || l ending or phrase / ending: when it o || phrase), it is “over- / ridden,” generating, “__…”ern. In the present…” There is so much to read here that we might become dizzy even trying. Note, just to begin, that the conventional orthography for a caesura is a double vertical bar “||”. To quote the text I might indicate the caesura “I|,” then the cut “d” as “|”, writing (as I do above), “II |,” so that my own transcription suggests the beginning of another caesura. Howe has included the “).” in her poem, leaving behind open space on the page where there were once two successive punctuation marks signaling closure. All of Howe’s text collages create such “negative marks,” and these negative markings are worth further poetic study, not least because there are, if inversely, part of the poem. If the critic might have thought that their object of study was Howe’s poem, it is clear that such a thinking is deeply inadequate (or at least merely anacrusitical), as the poem has caused the necessity of this investigation, and leaves all explorations of the poem, finally, insufficient. Put differently, we cannot say that Howe’s poem begins and ends with the collage on the page published in Concordance; rather, its beginning and ending is surrounded by a caesural anacrusis, a concept I will return to below. It carefully anticipates my reading, and draws me into its meaning-making agenda, opening itself up (anacrusis) to the interrupted rhythm I will bring to it (caesura). That our readings themselves should be considered extraparapoetic caesural intervals is one of the grounds of infrastructuralist poetics. Howe throws the limits of paratextuality out the door, instituting, instead, an infinite anacrusis, where each reading must become like that preliminary, uncounted unstressed non-metrical word or syllable that remains part of the “lift” of a line, but does not “count” in its meter (one definition of anacrusis). An anacrusitical reading is the only (in)adequate poetics. Each reading is nothing more than a slight aperture onto a univocal and porous reality. The poems are pinholes of weak messianism anticipating my resurrection of the dead text as the birth of a shift in becoming; a faint, weak, ecliptic anacrusis that is also the condition for opening.
We might now have two poems (columns on either side of the material ceasura):
1) “(marked by a slash / ending: when it o / ridden,” generating”
2) “| ending or phrase / phrase), it is “over- / ern. In the present”
In the present, to be in the present, to be, to be being, there is non-being, the yet-to-be, becoming; the “in the present” is, sometimes, “over – / ern”(ed) (“vertical bar” ending or phrase phrase); o ridden,” generating…a caesura can also mark the space between an invocation, as in the opening of the Iliad:
μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ || Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος
Sing, o goddess || the rage of Achilles, the son of Peleus.
Reading the generative ruins Howe makes in her sources would institute an entire new literary history, a history that might completely re-think the antinomies of progress (see: Ray Brassier: Final Repression: Adorno and Marcuse on the Antinomy of Progress). From Anacrusis, by Myung Mi Kim:
“Allowing for the floating materiality of matter that “does not fit” or “is not part of a metrical pattern” asks urgent questions about the terms under which ideas of the metrical pattern (that is, ideas of authority and maintenance of the superstructures that support these mechanisms) emerge and are validated. What is under consideration: the poem as investigation, the poem as action–the poem embodying points along a fragmentary axis that factor in, layer in, and cross fields of meaning, elaborating and multiplying the means of sense making. To encounter and to problematize the political and economical terms that function to determine and codify legibility. Say: a poetics through which to come into legibility without delimiting the range of what is possible to be uttered.
[…]
To unravel and at the same moment more vigilantly wend through the rhythms, speeches, dictions, deformations, and cadences presenced in the poem.
[…]
The poem undertakes the task of deciphering and embodying a “particularizable” prosody of one’s living.
[…]
The poem may be said to reside in disrupted, dilated, circulatory spaces, and it is the means by which one translates and notates this provisional location that evokes, prompts, and demonstrates agency–the ear by which the measure by which the prosody by which to calibrate a poetics that augments the liberatory potential of writing, the storehouse of the human–“
I am here with the means by which [this] one translates and notates this provisional location that evokes, prompts, and demonstrates agency.