TPRI

The most referenced “early” critical account of N.H. Pritchard’s poetics is Kevin Young’s “Signs of Repression: N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix” published summer 1992 in the Harvard Library Bulletin. Aldon Nielson’s Black Chant (1997) contains sporadic writing on Pritchard. More recently Paul Stephens, David Grundy, Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin, Anthony Reed, and many more have pursued critical writing on Pritchard, from book chapters to blog posts to articles. Nevertheless, a pall of mystery hangs over Pritchard’s career. As every writer is careful to note, Pritchard more or less “disappeared” from the literary scene in the 80s, and by the time Kevin Young published his article in 1992 apparently Pritchard was unable to be tracked down. Pritchard died in 1996.

Readers of Roberto Bolaño might begin to hear the trappings of a Bolaño novel in this odd sequence of events, full of attendant critical overstatement and academic fetishism for a lost writer so profound, so shocking, so experimental that he could have only appeared on the scene as a ghost, haunting what he could never be completely a part of, though was essential for nevertheless. For example, what does the following really mean: “Pritchard was probably the most experimental writer in any of the numerous scenes in which he participated.” If one is going to make such an obviously recuperative, baseless, self-aggrandizing, unscholarly non-claim, it should be done without such embarrassing performative uncertainty. The probably most experimental (?) in any of the “scenes” Pritchard participated in? Not only was Pritchard part of the formative and formidable Umbra group, he taught at The New School and, perhaps more experimentally, at old folks’ homes, and he frequently participated in events among a large group of some of “the most experimental” writers and artists of the late 20th century. The article goes on to say, “In returning to these poems, we must be careful not to reform the forms Pritchard has so carefully deformed, nor to soften their revolutionary edges—all within them that escapes regulation, policing, and capture.” And this written in the famously autonomous zone called…Artforum. On a figure like Pritchard critical vultures cast the entire projective weight of their mercenary mandate for blue-chip CV lines.

Who is such a statement meant to serve other than the heroic critic?

Please, listen, we must not reform what has been so carefully deformed by this as I suggest “probably most experimental poet of the 20th century” (I’m still working on this judgment, but let’s agree to make it, anyway, because honestly it sounds great); however, we must make an exception for some, you know, quite minor reforming, if just in this book review that happens to be published in probably the most famous art magazine there is, a publication that come to think of it will sit very nicely indeed in the public engagement section of my tenure portfolio, and that could not get published should I have taken my own mandate seriously and written something that does not soften the “revolutionary edges” of the poetry.

Let me be clear, Pritchard was part of “scenes” that included Alison Knowles, Adrian Piper, Hannah Weiner, Vito Acconci, Bernadette Meyer, Amiri Baraka, Lorenzo Thomas, Alan Ginsberg, Kamau Brathwaite, Ishmael Reed, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Jerome Rothenberg, Richard Kostelanetz, Chris Kraus, Bob Cobbing, Bill Bisset, Ron Silliman, The Four Horseman (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, & bp Nichol), Vito Acconci, Fluxus, etc. (and these mostly gleaned from the flyer for the 1980 12th International Sound Poetry Festival @ The Kitchen, NYC that Pritchard participated in). To wit, given the members of these scenes, the writer appears to suggest that Pritchard may have been the most experimental writer of the 20th century working in English.

Haven’t we outgrown these tired superlatives?

This is precisely what I mean by the current critical fetishization of N.H. Pritchard, a fetishization that deifies the ghost of a dead author to the “accidental” benefit of the especially discerning professor, while assuring readers that this particular writer’s work is utterly impossible to properly write about (nor should it be), except by me, the only soul capable of truly presenting this work without shearing off its revolutionary edge.

My point is not to lessen our opinion of Pritchard’s radicalism. Obviously, here I am so writing. My point is that this has become bar none the most tired cliché of contemporary literary criticism, especially in “experimental poetics.” Let us be careful not to deradicalize the radical, but let us merely suggest this must be done (by someone, somewhere!), rather than do it ourselves by actually mapping and enacting what it might mean to not simply reform the ecstatically deformed into critical academic prose that also so happens to be precisely the token of value necessary to advance my career. The problem seems obviously materialist insofar as it’s brilliant to present on the unpresentable because it legitimates in advance the “intervention” of your critical inquiry, so therefore works perfectly for an infinity of papers, book reviews, etc., i.e. one can argue endlessly for how one should really be very careful with the work they are simultaneously explicating. It is a stance that readily satisfies all that is necessary to sustain the mercenary “value-creation” of the precarious academic (read: minimum employment requirements), while doing absolutely nothing to make good on the seriousness of the claim being made, beside demonstrating that the selected writer (Pritchard, Brathwaite) was obviously more radical than you are. *Shrug.*

I want to make clear that I’m sensitive to that necessity — the academy is a brutal, close-minded, ultra-hierarchical, highly competitive “marketplace of ideas” where the spoils go to the already nepotistically advantaged and/or those that sufficiently subordinate themselves to this obvious contradiction (and better yet if both). What’s less experimental than an undergrad class at a major elite University?

This stance is ideological fodder for neoliberal orthodoxy that relies on myths of the individualist experimentalist (née avant-gardist) tragically lost to history that can only be properly rediscovered by the especially heroic (and radical!) literary critic, myths that primarily serve to justify the extreme individualism and standardization of the current neoliberal academy, and do little toward constructing a mode of poetics and inquiry sufficient not to the lost individual, nor to the academy that can only be receptive of hegemonically pre-determined certificates of value (Artforum, Contemp. Lit), but to the dialectical movement of poetics, historical and present, that offers Pritchard up to us not as the one that got away, but as a node indicative of a collective mass of prismatic experimentalism that rendered pockets of utopia still illuminating our apocalyptic present, despite our contemporary darkness.

Aldon Nielsen writes of a harrowing event that seems to me not to have been focused on enough.

“Depending upon whose account we attend to, Norman Henry Pritchard…either was kidnapped or participated in a feigned kidnapping by his colleagues in the swirl of events that marked the end of Umbra as a functioning workshop group in New York…The uncertainty surrounding these events is ironically reflected in Pritchard’s subsequent abduction, by force or benign neglect, from literary histories and from the anthologized record of African-American writing…When what was then seen as the more “nationalist” wing of the Umbra group “kidnapped” Pritchard, with or without his cooperation, all they apparently wanted was the Umbra bankbook that he held for the group and kept at his parents’ house, where he was living…Askia Muhammed Toure told Oren, “We seized Norman and refused to let him leave because we felt that if we could not be heard democratically then dog gone it the journal would not come out. We were certainly firebrands…We held Norman as hostage, drove with him to Brooklyn to his parents’ home and secured the bankbook and sat on it in order to prevent Umbra from coming out.” This is a fascinating scenario, but probably exaggerated. It would seem highly unlikely that a man taken by force (Oren has been told alternately that a gun or a knife was involved) would enter his parents’ home while the “abductors” waited and then turn over the bankbook.”

How Nielsen comes to this last conclusion completely escapes me. It would seem perfectly natural to me that if one were being held at knife or gun point outside of one’s parents’ house and let in to perform a chore under the threat of one’s life one would carry it out.

“Ishmael Reed, who was reputed to be one of the abductors, has told Oren, “I can’t imagine anyone kidnapping Norman Pritchard. He’s a large fellow, capable of taking care of himself.”

Unfortunately, a bullet does not care much for the size of the man whose skull it enters.

“By whatever means necessary, though, the bankbook was gotten out of Pritchard’s possession, and if Dent’s memory is accurate Reed must have been involved in some way, since it was Reed and “Charmy” Patterson who returned the passbook to Dent after a short period…No one thought to record Pritchard’s own account at that time. Some years later his two major collections were published, The Matrix: Poems, 1860-1970 [sic] and F.BCCHHOOE SS [sic] a year later, he appeared in a remarkable number of anthologies for a poet of his age, including Richard Kostelanetz’s collection of concrete and visual sound texts, Text-Sound Texts (1980), and then he slipped out of sight. It was as if he were not only writing in such a way as to “decompose the reader”…but to decompose himself as a persona as well.”

Nielsen goes on to give a series of close-readings of Pritchard poems.

There are many possible explanations for Pritchard’s “disappearance” and “critical neglect.” One possibility is that, like Lee Lozano, this was a deliberate turning away, one that ought to be respected, a possibility I’ve never seen anyone entertain. Perhaps he wanted to be gone. Another possibility suggested by this narrative is that perhaps the material conditions under which Pritchard lived and practiced became nastily intolerable, even threatening. My friends holding me at gun-point (maybe? as a joke?) might be enough to make me reconsider a thing or two. If there is reason to believe that Pritchard himself for whatever reason might have been “in on the joke” here I’m definitely interested in hearing about that.

But it strikes me that the situation of Pritchard’s “disappearance” might be more complicated than most accounts seem ready to suggest. Is this perhaps a consequence of experimental poetics’ textual focus, a focus that can veer in the direction of an authorless New Criticism? Perhaps instead of assuming critical neglect of Pritchard is the result of some readymade trope generalizable as structural racism, or the result of the work’s difficulty/hermeticism (that has not stopped criticism on any number of other very difficult authors), we might stop a moment to wonder, in what I will say is a nod to Adrian Piper, if perhaps Pritchard is not the victim of a literary culture predicated on the hegemonic value-creation mechanism of academic recuperation, along with a certain turn toward noxious violence against a scapegoat deemed insufficiently “nationalist” and/or political within his circle of friends and colleagues. While Pritchard taught for several periods at several institutions, it would be difficult to classify him as an academic given his lack of published prose. Though he at several points was said to be working on encyclopedic works of prose, whether fiction, history, poetics, or otherwise, a treatise on “The Monophysicity of Form” sounds decidedly Other, and might not have fallen on delighted ears at his various academic jobs. And though he was vocal about the major problem of Western civilization being racism, slavery, and genocide, there is not indication, at least to me, that he was motivated by that fact toward explicit political activism on the level of the “nationalist” violence he may have been the victim of.

Is our textual obsession and obsession with adjoining individuals to the grand sweep of history causing us to miss something essential about the particular conditions surrounding Pritchard’s disappearance?

“Ornette Coleman said, “New York is now!” A meta-present…total living with the lights on 24 hours a day.” Ishmael Reed, “The Shadow World: New York’s Umbra Workshop & Origins of the Black Arts Movement.”

If I am to continue from the position of an isostatic poetics, what would that mean? How would it look? As the abstract to our panel (A Panel Consisting of Three Anti-Canonistic Poetic Events Undoing the Canon in Transreal Time) suggests, “to retain the power of anti-canonicity requires that we also re-think, or perhaps unthink, our conventional engagement with criticism and its objects, even going so far as to suggest that we dispense with convention altogether.” How does anti-canonical work like Pritchard’s continue, similar to dark matter, to propel the world forward without short-circuiting its radicalism, a radicalism legitimated precisely by its “anti-canonical being,” something I’m beginning to think means something like “obviously influential if unconsciously so.” Everyone knows that something of the bite, violence, and will to power of the avant-garde becomes anesthetic, aestheticized, and neutralized by its admission into The Canon (or even in discussing it at the university); and yet, at the same time, we have all had, for moments impossible to explain, that evental encounter with an irrefutably authentic avant-garde sensation even in the most “inauthentic” context, where across space and time, as though a wormhole had opened if only to take our heads clean off, the atopos / utopos / achronos / uchronos of a disorient(ing) avant-garde spoke from the plane of immanence in a voice as clear and transparent as glare off the surface of an alpine lake. Sometimes we can read one poem twice and the first time it inspires the sense of an avant-garde utopia, and the second time nothing, or, worse, we can’t even find the poem again. One poem, two experiences. Or was there a poem at all? One transformative, the other negative (not occurring). Elsewhere I’ve written: “What is the minimal invariance of a line or poem wherein it retains its identity? I think this is a major question of (at least) 20th ctry. poetics.” If so much of 20th ctry. avant-garde poetics sought readerly “collaboration” as the poem, what happens when that collaboration fails, and/or is exhausted, and or happens once and cannot happen again? Is there there no poem? We so easily take for granted the endless reserve of the poetic artifact, and yet, how do we account for the evaporation of meaning and significance into nothing when the conditions for a collaborative readership have become a poisoned well? If the poem is serious about “the death of the author,” can such a poem tolerate an anhedonic reader? Can a poem be “always avant-garde.” Can a poem actually be avant-garde and then not?

Just as the power a poem might have over us (with us) is not a guarantee, so any interpretation carries nothing with it but a contingent, temporary hermeneutical contract, one that occurs simultaneously with something else: the poem’s ultimate passivity, as Blanchot writes, that cannot be collaborated with — a kind of irreducible powerlessness. When we bring an avant-garde work into conventional understanding, into the profanity of the seminar room for example, we never bring the entire poem; something inappropriable, something completely inalienable, something passive and powerless, remains part of the poem’s topology, so long as we agree a poem has one. Maybe we can think of this as the phantom-limb of avant-garde recuperation. Kevin Young discusses this in relation to Pritchard quite evocatively, “Perhaps all of these creative and critical movements, while operating at the “cutting edge,” sometimes end up amputating the work they try to save.” From this image we have “the body,” the main corpus, or canon, and those “amputated” limbs, parts, authors, and poems so cut. What is “saved” literally cannot tolerate its unseen, “unsavable,” unsalvageable power(lessness): the limb without a body, dead in formaldehyde. This phantom-limb lurks as severed material from the poem but also not totally not the poem. If one had a sufficiently powerful machine, we might trace the influence of this dispersed, spectral, bodiless limb even as “the rest” of the poem seems to be “the powerful parts” that has been saved by whatever discourse backed institution of power has collected it. An isostatic poem and poetics would keep a notion of this phantom as a necessary correlate to the visible “body” of the poem (or corpus/canon). The poem’s isostasy, after all, is not just in the writer/reader relation. A takeaway from this is that there is something that is the poem that is neither author nor reader. This could be thought of as the poem’s technicity (as Brian Kim Stefans might have it), object-status, or externality, even the poem’s (“material”) Being, and it is as necessary to the poetic event as any writerly/readerly collaboration, precisely because the discourse mechanisms of Writer and Reader (What is an Author?) depend on both extramaterial social codes and intramaterial physical structures.

At its best, literary criticism enacts and signifies devotion. But such criticism is exceedingly rare, and even still, in truth the best literary criticism exceeds the limits of that staid professional category, entering back into the realm of the poem as though having crossed an irreversible Rubicon.

Poetics operates in this irreversible consequential shadowy meta-present as an alternative, mystical, sacred (non-discourse) simultaneous with its extension in the banal and profane. At its best, Poetics refuses the entire project of canonization, and rejects the argument that canon reform is a necessary tool for just transformation of the world. The practitioner of poetics takes as a risky given that their activity straddles the threshold between the sacred and the profane, and with this risk they abandon the authority vested in the professor (the authority of professionalization, the possibility of a canon) and skate along a thin-as-spring-ice lake of the unknown and the impossible.

Perhaps this goes some way in suggesting how we might follow Pritchard’s anti-canonicity. Not by recuperating the work into the properly sealed package of the formal academic essay, but by emphasizing that part of that sealed package always fails, outdone at every step as it stands in awe before the poem that is before it. The tragedy of the truly irrecuperable is precisely that it must die; importantly, however, it is a death that it can (and will) continue dying across the spectrum of the mortal professional’s alienated body. The irrecuperable scatters its aberrant dust over the profession like a noxious chemical agent.

Consider Pritchard’s own attitude toward “the center” (that we might extrapolate as an attitude toward “the canon” just as easily), while keeping in mind Pritchard’s own heterodox influences (Mallarme, Stein, the pre-Socratics, haiku, African languages, the Caribbean). Of Helen Ellsworth, with whom he lived from 1972-4, and whose son was the publisher of the NYRB, Pritchard notes she “was at the very center of literary life in America. Because there is…no more formidable journal in our country than the New York Review of Books. So I find myself right in the center of literary power. And, quite frankly, I was very much oblivious to it. When I say oblivious, and I was, needless to say, cognizant of it, but it did not affect me. I was very much removed from it. It held…no particular interest for me.” Once again the poet is indifferent, (perhaps the poetic is indifference as such. If, as Gertrude Stein writes, “the difference is spreading,” I’m interested in the poetic not as the spread of difference, but the indifferent force causing that spreading to occur), such that even “the center of literary power” holds “no particular interest” for them. “One must not become enamored with power.” If my thinking about an isostatic poetics continues to retain a purposeful, useful valence, it is as a lens on this indifference to centers (and peripheries); an indifference that instead operates in a force-field of ever-changing tensions, torsions, and isostasies on the precipice of the event, where rather than continually reinscribing hierarchical colonial thought in the form of an impoverished circular neo-Euclidean geometry, we learn to operate in a new isostatic (non)-geometry unafraid to dispense with the tyranny of shapes, even as we might use them to demonstrate the veracity, rigor, and boundless love for the object all poetry retains as its horizon: perfection.

In my previous post I pointed to Pritchard’s poem, “Love,” and attempted to ask questions of it from a distance. At the center of the crux composed of the molecular particles of the poem (letters) there was nothing. And I couldn’t find it. You can’t find love, even if you are looking. You don’t find love, you find yourself in it. My present working hypothesis is that it would not be too far off to assume that what Pritchard means by “the transreal” has something to do with love, and the finding oneself in it, rather than being able to “look for it.” If you are looking for love you are always looking in all the wrong places.

For a moment I will hold on to this absent center, such a cliché feature of post-modernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonialism. “Centers” and “peripheries” are also crucial for thinking through any “canon” of literature; presumably what is part of the canon is “central” to a given discourse’s value structure. One of the operating assumptions of recent work on Pritchard is that he is in essence non-canonical; wildly understudied relative to the merits of the work in question, not precisely fitting into what Kevin Young identifies as the “WHITE concrete poetry” world composed of austere “immediate” abstractions meant to communicate words as things themselves, nor precisely fitting into what Young identifies as the “BLACK concrete,” meaning a poetry concerned primarily with “concrete experience,” what most mean by “lived experience.” So we must be very careful in approaching Pritchard’s work, precisely because it is not yet “canonical”; and yet, we are at a moment where both of his books have now been recently reissued, and no doubt the critical wave will be forthcoming (from Duke University Press, of course…and here I obviously can’t exclude myself). But if there is a value in anti-canonicity, that is, if there is a certain power retained by the non-canonical text precisely because it is in some way inassimilable to any canon, then uncritically forcing Pritchard into the canon seems to risk naively recuperating the work without sufficient devotion. After the long century of poetics, the case of Pritchard offers us an opportunity for us to think differently about how we engage with poetics texts, and even to refuse any normative or conventional way of doing so.

This is not least of all because clearly Pritchard himself held deep ambivalences about the “poetry world” and “art world,” ambivalences that eventually seemed to have led him further down the “mystical” path than the conventionally understood “poetic” path. We, too, should concern ourselves as “critics” with a similar mystical path, wherein, perhaps, we find that our work does not “describe” the qualities of the poem; but rather that criticism itself is part of the poem understood as an ongoing isostatic process.

Discussing his own experience speaking in tongues, Pritchard says in an interview, “Before I’m a poet I’m a mystic. So that these tongues, these voices which are always with me. The ancient. I don’t know where it comes from.” This is a poet that when asked for a definition of poetry responded with “guttural, bestial, primitive grunts and groans.” Pointedly, Susan Howe calls the separation between the poetic and the ordinary “the mystic,” “There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions for poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.” Howe’s version of the mystic separation between the ordinary and the poetic echoes Pritchard’s own understanding of a transcendental, transreal. It is at the transitional place of indifference.

Instead of a center, the mystic, I’m suggesting, along with Howe, is a passage between that is also no passage at all (indifferent); it is the existence of existence, like the existence of the existence of love allegorized by Pritchard’s poem “Love.” The space at the center of love’s crux brings transcendental existence to the poem precisely by filling the poem with nothing to its core. Pritchard’s poetry, like Howe’s, if full of provocative emptiness. Page 134 and 135 of The Matrix, for example, consists of a blank verso and a recto with only a capital “U” in the upper right quadrant of the page, and the page number: “135.” Notably, many pages in The Matrix do not have page numbers on them, presumably because the poem is the entire page, and the convention of page numbering would get in the way of Pritchard’s understanding of “a revolution of the book” he saw himself as helping manifest. For another example, what would be pages 150 and 151 are almost entirely blank, except for lower case “a”s on each page where page numbers otherwise would be. What the relationship is between this alpha-numerical joke (that is also slightly unsettling / unheimlich because they are identical, almost like a variable in place of a page #) and the two pages separated by many more pages consisting of one column of the word “Numbers” repeated down the center I am not ready to say, but certainly they are related.

It is well known, by his own admission, that Mallarmé was a major influence on Pritchard, and given Quentin Meilloussoux’s recent argument about the significance of number in Un coup de dés, The Matrix’s concern with number should not be ignored. I’ve spent some hours attempting various countings in the book: of the number of letters on an entire page, for example, or the number of pages without page numbers. That there is a transbook count occurring in the book at some level I am positive of. Whether it’s a fool’s errand or not to attempt something like Meilloussoux’s investigation into Mallarmé with Pritchard remains an open question for me (and for others, perhaps). I am inclined to believe that no depths are too deep a thought for Pritchard’s poetry, just as the surface of the page can appear to be an infinite depth. Like Susan Howe, I think we need to read Pritchard between the pages, that is, in the “mystical space” on recto/verso sides, as light shines through it to create shapes, thinking of the book as a 3d/4d object (it is) and the poems stacking in ways through that “4th” dimension. These are some of the research trajectories I hope to continue pursuing.

For now, I will close with a thought about the poem “Isostasy.” Isostasy, from the OED, means,

Equilibrium or stability due to equality of pressure; the condition thought to exist within the earth’s crust of approximate hydrostatic equilibrium between portions of different density, the land masses being supported by underlying denser material that yields or flows under their weight and those parts of them that reach to a greater height also extending to a greater depth, any (large) part slowly rising (or falling) if matter is removed from (or added to) its surface.

I think this poem might function as a “key” in the text. Even though The Matrix contains many circles, and circles are formed by an infinite number of points equidistant from a center, it is unclear whether that center “exists” or not. Of course it does on the Cartesian coordinate plane in that particular form of abstraction. But what about the question of whether the center forms the circle or whether the circle produces a center? Is there a center and then a line is drawn around it? Or does one draw the line and that tells you where the center is? I think this is the kind of koan-like thought Pritchard’s circles are meant to induce. That question, I want to suggest, is isostatic.

None of the circles in The Matrix contain a marked center. The closest is the “m” in the poem “@” but, tellingly, that “m” is decidedly not at the center of the circle. However, “Isostasy” does contain a center point at the crossing of the eight o’s (and O’s). We will draw from Euclid here:

“A point is that which has no parts or magnitude.”

But this classical definition is not enough. The isostasy of the Earth is an internal equilibrium state that is also in flux. Isostasy is a metastability, not a number, and not a point. While the spherical(ish) shape of the Earth might suggest a center, in fact what it suggests more accurately is a physical zone of metastable invariance. Something like a matrix. It is worth, then, thinking of David Hilbert’s redefinition of Euclid’s elements. Hilbert’s definitions are famously not quite definitional. They are far more relational that Euclid’s austere, but beautiful, proclamations. “A line is breadthless length.” Indeed, Hilbert doesn’t even define points and lines. Rather, they emerge conterminously: “For every two points, there exists a line that contains them.” Here, then, we don’t need to know what points are…if we’ve got two of them, there’s something called a line that contains them.

What I am suggesting is that Pritchard might be guiding us toward an isostatic poetics, unconcerned with centers, not just because of the well theorized post-colonial notion of cultural centers and exploited/recuperated peripheries, but because it is a more scientific poetic understanding of the present, and, perhaps, the transreal potential latent in all definitions. If we understand definitions not as prescriptive acts but as emergent phenomena appearing, always in flux, as the ongoing, continuing result of a word’s use (or a poem’s) and its infinite non-uses, we will have gotten closer to the kind of transreality I think Pritchard advocates for — an ultimate contingency, at least at the level of the social, if not at the transcendental, transreal non-point where dreams and reality mix.

“The only thing I say I know,” Socrates tells us in the Symposium, “is the art of love (ta erôtika).” The Stanford Encycl. of Philosophy interprets this as a subtle play on words because erôtika and erôtan (to ask) sound etymologically connected, so “he knows about the art of love in that–but just insofar as–he knows how to converse elenctically.” The interrogative Socratic Method refutes and proves by making space (or simply drawing us to space with question), not by offering proof, not by force, and not by logic. While proof and logic might occur in the elenchus, it is the emptiness of aporia (puzzlement) that finally is the way to knowledge, a way that proceeds dialectically, without end, in the realm of endlessness. To know, first one must pass through this aporatic disaster, where all orientations dissolve into confusion, especially our most sacred a priori senses of self, time, and space. We don’t possess knowledge, only barriers to our access. Love is the only thing Socrates knows. This coming from the man who when on trial and with his life on the line claimed to know nothing. Love’s disruption is the topological flipside of nothing. If Socrates knows anything, it is only one thing (love) or no thing, love or nothing, one or zero (1, 0; 1 + 0 = 1). This zero is not the zero of the number line, but the zero of multiplicity, in Badiou’s sense. While this One is not The One in Badiou’s sense, rather, it is the Spinozistic One substance, the plane of immanence. Here, now, on the plane of immanence, you need nothing to know love. It does not want. It is the only food that satisfies the elenchic hunger. It is when it is. It cannot be mistaken, but it also cannot be known, because it is knowledge, so it repels any representative description, hence why we’re always trying and failing. And asking. It is the only thing Socrates knows.

We can only dream love, while love dreams us.

In the dream, contingency rules, and the laws of the universe do not hold. Later we know the dream as dream, but in the dream, we know it as reality. In the same way that we irrefutably know love, we know the dream is a dream, precisely because we know it is not reality, but did not know that in the dream. It is the accursed share of experience, even though it is experience. It is in this way that dreams and love transgress reality by being reality. Only the dream is a contingent reality, while love is real reality. Both are forms of knowledge. The former is negative knowledge, insofar as what we know about the dream is that it is not reality, while the later is positive knowledge, insofar as love never wavers from being. We don’t have love. Like being in a dream, we are in love. It is non-negotiable, like being underwater. So coming into knowledge, whether dream-negative knowledge or love-positive knowledge, requires disruption of the brink between dream and reality, past and future, here and there. To know love we know nothing, and keep knowing it. To know the dream is to know it is not. If what we experience becomes understood as a dream, it has been disoriented. If what we dream becomes reality, it requires, also, a reorientation. If it didn’t, then you would already know. Poetry, like love, is engaged in this disorienting practice and method. Knowing is, finally, the removal of barriers to the knowable, not a construction project. What we might think of as the basic difference between aletheia and veritas.

Do I know that? No.

By simply placing erôs and erôtan together in the paranomosaic pun, Socrates makes a negative argument about the space between them. Whether or not they are “actually” etymologically connected, they irrefutably double each in their first three letters. While erôs closes with its sibilant hiss, erôtan adds a syllable that begins with the hard tap of the tongue against the roof of the mouth, finishing off what “s” began, bringing us to the first aperture (“A”), then settling us down on the softer version of the air-blown tapped t: the soft n of pressing one’s tongue against the hard palate. The sequential short and long syllables of erôs double this opening spacemaking as a simple, atomic rhythmic unit: short, long; unstress, stress, an originary iamb.

erôs, iamb.

erôs, erôtan.

To continue the poem of love we must continue to ask.

This simple polysemic (non) placement suggests the space between erôs and erôtan does not exist, then it obviously exists, then it does not exist, then it obviously exists. Stuck in the crux of polysemy’s evocation of the dream/reality topology (in a dream one body can be multiple people, like we can endlessly unfold meanings in words; while in reality, stitched into a sentence, a word has a specific meaning). Socrates places (topos) love (erôs) so as to call forth another word that becomes present in absence, hence doing the job of love. We don’t have love, we are in it, so we cannot know it, we must love it while never knowing all of it. The beloved is this: what we care for while letting being be. What we love. The elenchus is an indirect method that always works because it takes you nowhere. To attain knowledge one must be indirected, disoriented, perhaps even nailed to the crux of love and helplessly spun. Knowledge undoes convention and ideology. It does not do. So love and knowledge are inextricably bound.

Ask me, ask me, ask me
Ask me, ask me, ask me
Because if it’s not love
Then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
The bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb
Will bring us together

This research blog is toward an upcoming conference presentation convened by TPRI at Experimental Writing in English (1945-2000). The conference has been organized by Hannah Van Hove and Tessel Veneboer, and includes keynotes by Anthony Reed and Georgina Colby.

Here I will present the abstract of the panel and presentations. The panel includes presentations by Brent X., Simon Eales, and Amanda Hurtado that each, in their way, challenge canonicity, and the canon-producing discursive zone of literary criticism.

A Panel Consisting of Three Anti-Canonistic Poetic Events: Undoing the Canon in Transreal Time

This panel proposes three unconventional ways of approaching anti-canonicity at the level of scholarly form, poetic engagement, movement, and making. With an eye toward scholarship, poetics, poetry, and poems in the sense of ποιητής (maker), we would like to suggest that to retain the power of anti-canonicity requires that we also re-think, or perhaps unthink, our conventional engagement with criticism and its objects, even going so far as to suggest that we dispense with convention altogether. One of the problems with any “canon” is the way the concept attempts to falsely fix what constitutes not just “the history” of poetic lineage(s), leading to oppressive and exclusionary historicities, but also the ways that canons attempt to arrest the poetic object itself, reducing it to a bounded “thing” with determined, agreed-upon qualities they are thought to possess that we go on to describe (lines, rhymes, meters, forms), rather than as ongoing processes that in our engagement with them we intervene in and co-create in critical/poetic acts. We suggest that retaining the subversive potential latent in a politics of anti-canonicity might be achieved not just by the important work of representing key texts that can be considered anti-canonical and describing their “qualities,” but that staying true to a politics of anti-canonicity might require shifting our understanding of what constitutes literary critical objects and our methods altogether. Perhaps we must understand that criticism itself is poetics. That is to say, rather than fixing representative works into a canon, anti-canonicity could be the ongoing generation of a contingent definition (and undefining) of what poetry and poetics is, as a non-teleological processural research program that cares for while inventing poetic events. These three presentations self-reflexively engage the form of the conference presentation and question what constitutes sufficient poetic objects of study. We hope to demonstrate a rigorous, scholarly, anti-canonical, heterogeneous mode of production in the spirit of anti-canonicity.

Retaining Anti-Canonicity Against the Critical Final Word: N.H. Pritchard, Republication, and Infrastructuralist Video Poetic Criticism

Brent Cox, University at Buffalo

N.H. Pritchard’s The Matrix and EECCHHOOEESS have recently been republished in 

the United States by Ugly Ducking Presse, DABA Press, and Primary Information, constituting an anti-canonical event par excellence, because these publications are meant, in part, to point out the serious critical lacuna in “the canon” (both poetic and critical) surrounding these incredible works of visually inflected poetry. While recent critical work by Anthony Reed and Craig Dworkin, among others, have stressed the import of Pritchard’s work to experimental and innovative poetic history, and have rightly urged that we must take this work into account, Pritchard remains, in no uncertain terms, “anti-canonical.” Here, though, a difficulty emerges. On the one hand, we must engage with this work. On the other hand, one of the powers of Pritchard’s work is that it stands as a challenge to the canon’s ability to formulate an adequate history without reproducing those oppressive structural conditions from which it emerges; in this case, one of the reasons Pritchard’s work remains anti-canonical is its powerful indictment of the United States’ racist regime, down to what is permitted into the canon of “experimental literature.”

My question is: how do we discuss this work without neutralizing its power? How do we allow it to retain the power of its piercing anti-canonicity without being submitted to hegemony’s oppressive regime? We might put this same question into conversation with the recently published Women in Concrete Poetry 1959-1979, ed. Alex Balgiu and Mónica de la Torre, a gathering of republications that we might justly call an anti-canonical anthology. Using my ongoing development of a “video-poetic infrastructuralist style,” in this presentation I will argue that if we are to change the canon, and understand the power of anti-canonicity, we must also change our modes of engagement with the works that we study. Taking seriously Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “interstanding,” my video-oriented presentation will combine animation, video, conventional scholarly prose, and poetic-image-making to provide readings of N.H. Pritchard’s work in relation to his notion of transrealism, while tacitly arguing for a poetics of ongoing interdependent development against any literary critical final word.

Brent Cox is a PhD Candidate in University at Buffalo’s Poetics Program. Work has recently appeared or is forthcoming at the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2020-2 conferences, in P-Queue, and in OEI. He is the recent recipient of a Race and Technology grant from University of Boulder’s Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) to research Kamau Brathwaite’s use of the MAC SE30 computer in creation of his Sycorax Video Style, research that lead to a conference presentation at “What Does the Poem Think?” at University of Cambridge. He helps run Buried Text, a podcast devoted to poetics. Buried Text is part of the Topological Poetics Research Institute (TPRI, www.poeticsinstitute.com). 

email: brentmichaelcox@gmail.com

Susan Howe: A Poetics of Motion and Measure, Material and Media

Amanda Hurtado, University of Boulder

Much has been written about the feminist foundations of Susan Howe’s anti-canonical poetics. Her way of collaging archival materials not only foregrounds the gaps and lacunae of unrecorded histories—most often the voices of women and indigenous American peoples—but also literally shreds the canon. However, less has been written about the significant ways in which her inscriptive tools mediate the historical materials that inspire her. Xerox, scissors, and tape pattern, trim, and refit measures of textual material in a way that literalizes the idea of what poetic measure might mean. Susan Howe has been included in the short-list of major players of the post-modern language poetry movement because of the way she foregrounds the materiality of the work, while also considered a poet in the modernist lineage of Pound, Eliot, and Oppen because of her work’s citational nature. To the lineage of Dickinson and Stein with which Howe herself identifies, I would like to add the Dadaist tradition of collage as another layer to the materialist lineage of Howe’s work, whose poetic styles and formal modes reflect the process of cut and paste composition. Echoing the formal processes of a mode of production becomes central to Howe’s poetics of space and thereby enables a shift from one aspect of measure to another—that is, from poetic measure to material measurement, thus redefining altogether what we might come to study as poetic measure. Her process of splicing creates impossible new spacings, soundings, and perspectives that undo any possibility of a linear canon, and insisting on an anti-canon of simultaneous material multiplicity. By attending to the affordances and limitations of her inscriptive media, (xerox, scissors, and tape), my paper will consider the specifics and particularities of Susan Howe’s poetic process at various points spanning her career.

Amanda Hurtado is a PhD Candidate at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on 20th and 21st century poetry and media poetics. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Washington, Bothell and a BA in English from the University of Utah. She is the author of S ACE P (Timglaset, 2020 & Editions Eclipse, 2014) and CELL (Mono-D Press, 2015).

Making Anti-Canon Poetics Dance: Leslie Scalapino and Choreographic Poetics

Simon Eales, University at Buffalo

This paper, while challenging what an academic conference paper might be, proposes that anti-canonicity is embedded in the choreographic poetics of the transatlantic avant-garde. In order to say as much, the paper defines choreographic poetics not only as an “act of making” at the intersection of dance and poetry, as one might expect, but as “writing that is doing what it says it is doing.” It defines the transatlantic avant-garde as the innovative aesthetic and poetic movement which has developed not only between and including Europe and the Americas as geo-political entities, but also as inextricable from the temporal and historical field demarcated by colonial crossings of the Atlantic ocean. The choreographic and the transatlantic are important to invoke in a discussion of the canon and the possibility of anti-canonicity because of the way that canons condition the body. At the level of the body, canons are designed to carry law/lore and (religious) order from a central locus—one posited as intelligent and/or proper—to alternative zones. Poets I consider deploying a choreographic poetics use it to identify and decondition this canonisation of the body. They also use it to position the Atlantic ocean as a measuring device for the canon’s center-to-limit extension over geographical, political, and cultural space. The paper will focus on examples from the work of Gertrude Stein and Leslie Scalapino, and consider them against a backdrop of work by Jackson Mac Low and St. Augustine. It will take the form of a performed academic paper: read exactly, from memory, accompanied by demonstrative gestures, thus making my own body along with and the conference situation into something like an inscriptive, poetic surface of anti-canonicity.

Simon Eales is a PhD candidate in the Poetics Program at SUNY Buffalo, where he is a Presidential Fellow. He received a B.A. in English Literature and European Studies, and a M.A. in English Literature from the University of Melbourne, Australia, earning the Percival Serle Prize for his Master’s thesis on radical Australian poetry. Simon researches at the intersection of contemporary poetics, bio- and geo-politics, modernist theory, and gender and sexuality studies. He co-organises EcoPoetry Workshop, a poetry and theory residency near Milan, Italy, and co-constitutes Buried Text podcast.