Poetic Machinations: Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form

By Michael Golston

The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive, imbuing their form with as much meaning as their content. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought.

Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind postwar American poetry's avant-garde achievements.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Aug 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9780231538633

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POETIC MACHINATIONS

POETIC MACHINATIONS

allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form

Michael Golston

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York      Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright © 2015

Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made to reprint the following: Excerpt from John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath, © 1962 by John Ashbery. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.

From a Photograph. By George Oppen, from New Collected Poems, copyright © 1962 by George Oppen. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

The Red Wheelbarrow. By William Carlos Williams, from The Collected Poems: vol. 1: 1909–1939, copyright © 1938 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

Excerpt. By Susan Howe, from Pierce-Arrow, copyright © 1999 by Susan Howe. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Exerpts from Lorine Niedecker, Collected Works, copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.

All Louis Zukofsky material copyright © Paul Zukofsky; the material may not reproduced, quoted, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit and specific permission of the copyright holder. Reprinted by permission of New Directions and Wesleyan University Press.

A version of chapter 1 was published as Petalbent Devils: Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, and the Surrealist Praying Mantis, Modernism/Modernity 13, no. 2 (2006): 325–347. Copyright © 2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by The Johns Hopkins University Press.

A version of chapter 2 was published as At Clark Coolidge: Allegory and the Early Works, American Literary History 13, no. 2 (2001): 295–316.

Part of chapter 3 was published as Mobilizing Forms: Lyric, Scrolling Device, and Assembly Lines in P. Inman’s ‘nimr,’ in Mark Jeffries, ed., New Definitions of Lyric: Theory, Technology, and Culture, 3–15 (Levittown, Pa.: Garland, 1998).

Special thanks to

Peter Inman, for permission to quote from Think of One, copyright © 1986.

Myung Mi Kim, for permission to quote from Dura, copyright © 1998.

Craig Dworkin, for permission to quote from Strand, copyright © 2005.

Charles Bernstein, for permission to quote from A Poetics, copyright © 1992.

Clark Coolidge, for permission to quote from Own Face, copyright © 1978; Polaroid © 1975; Quartz Hearts, copyright © 1978; Smithsonian Depositions/Subject to a Film, copyright © 1980; Space, copyright © 1970; The Maintains, copyright © 1974.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Golston, Michael.

Poetic machinations : allegory, surrealism, and postmodern poetic form / Michael Golston.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16430-6 (cloth : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53863-3 (ebook)

1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.   2. Allegory.   3. Surrealism (Literature)   4. Poetics.   I. Title.

PS323.5.G65 2015

811'.509—dc23

2014045626

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Cover Design: Jennifer Heuer

This one’s for Cork.

Self-portrait, by the author’s father, Lawrence (Tuck) Golston (1940)

CONTENTS

Polemical Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment

1. Entomologies: Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker

2. Epistemologies: Clark Coolidge

3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S: Peter Inman, Myung Mi Kim, Lyn Hejinian

4. Semiologies: Susan Howe

5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism

Notes

Works Cited

Index

POLEMICAL PREFACE

The great misunderstandings. Yes. That’s a whole history of art, isn’t it?

—Clark Coolidge, An Interview with Clark Coolidge

This book sets out to describe a line or, perhaps more accurately, a practice of postmodern American poetry that I maintain is fundamentally allegorical and that early on finds its inspiration in certain aspects of surrealism, to which it later maintains varying degrees of affiliation. The trope plays a key role in American avant-garde poetry in nearly every decade from the 1930s to the present, and poets as distant in time and style as the objectivist Lorine Niedecker, the language writer Lyn Hejinian, and the conceptualist Craig Dworkin can, I argue, be classified as allegorists. During this same ninety-year period, allegory also consistently appears in critical discussions and period histories: it is alternately pronounced the armature of modernism (Walter Benjamin, Angus Fletcher); the characteristic signature of postmodernism (Fredric Jameson, Craig Owens); and the principal mode of a kind of post-postmodernism (Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place). Every time a new direction in poetry is announced or discerned over the past hundred years, the trope is invoked: some configuration, whether critical or creative, of the literary avant-garde periodically declares allegory its principal mark of difference.

This claim immediately calls for qualification: American avant-garde writers have more often than not condemned allegory as artificial, antique, formalist, reactionary, painterly, European, or otherwise degraded. The most familiar branches of experimental or innovative poetry in America—that is, those deriving from Ezra Pound and imagism or from the early William Carlos Williams or from objectivist, Black Mountain, Beat, or language poetics, to mention only a few—are not in any overt sense allegorical. Not coincidentally, these movements are also generally not friendly to surrealism.¹ The matter is complicated by the fact that allegory has never entirely lost its early affiliations with surrealism, although the philosophical entanglements of the two are problematical: they share certain formal strategies, but not all surrealism is allegorical, not all allegory surreal. The ongoing dynamic between the rhetorical trope and the art movement is part of what I deal with in this book.

The trajectory I trace goes like this: carried to American shores along with surrealism during the early 1930s, allegory is embraced for a time by Lorine Niedecker and then largely dropped until rediscovered by John Ashbery in the late 1950s. Clark Coolidge picks up the impulse in the 1960s, and it travels on to certain of the language poets in the 1970s and 1980s and into the works of writers such as Susan Howe and Myung Mi Kim in the 1980s and 1990s, after which it winds up informing present-day conceptualist poetics.² Along this nearly hundred-year journey, as I said, allegory simultaneously becomes the subject of a great deal of critical consideration—attaining a structuralist cast at midcentury, allegory develops into an important term for deconstructive semiotics and as a means for critics to angle back to writers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, Walter Benjamin, and Roman Jakobson, and it ultimately evolves into a principle concept in discussions of postmodernism and post-structuralism.³ Often described and even used without being named, allegory accrues to itself a number of postmodern myths. For instance, a common conceit in the critical literature concerning allegory is that somehow the social, political, and cultural circumstances of a given historical period account for the period’s proclivity for (or its allergy to) the trope; the scholar uses the absence or presence of allegory in the literature of a given period as a kind of critical thermometer for determining the pitch of the fever, so to speak, of the cultural moment. This is already central to Benjamin’s idea of allegory as the armature of particular period aesthetics such as the baroque as well as to Jameson’s notion of the Westin Bonadventure Hotel as an architectural analogon for the postmodern subject’s inability to navigate decentered global political environments. According to Stephen Greenblatt, One discovers that allegory arises in periods of loss, periods in which a once powerful theological, political, or familial authority is threatened with effacement (1981b, viii); or, as Deborah Madsen puts it, echoing an older modernist formulation, allegory registers a dissociation of sensibility (1996, 126), appearing, for instance, as the individual genius valued by Romanticism gives way to the culturally constituted discursive subject prized by poststructuralism (123). Generally speaking, she says, allegory is conceived as a way of registering the fact of crisis (119).

Critics thus often strike a moralizing note, construing history as a tragic narrative of ongoing loss while mourning the passing of a mythic time when language supposedly had more power. Maureen Quilligan writes that allegory as a form responds to the linguistic conditions of a culture (1979, 19): due, she says, to the context of a renewed concern for language and its special potencies . . . we have regained not only our ability to read allegory, but an ability to write it (204), and she goes on to declare that allegory will flourish in a culture that grants to language its previous potency to construct reality (236). But was language previously—or for that matter ever—more potent? And did we at some point really lose our ability to read and write allegorically? At this late date, there is something quaint about the idea that language constructs reality or that it has levels of potency that change from one historical period to another or that a literary trope could have much to do with such momentous circumstances. Sayre Greenfield goes so far as to claim that allegory, as one of the most complex and indirect forms of reading, reveals the limits of how we think (1998, 154).

This last statement raises many questions. What exactly are the limits of my thinking? How would I know when I have reached them? What if there are no limits to thinking? Why should there be? Do all people in every culture fall into allegorizing at the limits of their thinking? How can we know? As it turns out, no one has proven that different languages limit thinking in different ways or, for that matter, that they limit thinking whatsoever or that language in any meaningful way constructs reality or that particular languages have anything to do with particular cultures—that, indeed, language has anything at all to do with culture—or that specific languages carry specific politics or worldviews or epistemologies. The bulk of theoretical and experimental work done in linguistics over the past half-century suggests otherwise. Language, it turns out, is finally not destiny: Swahili is just as elastic and dynamic as German or Maori or Chinese—and vice versa. No worldview is built into the grammar of Hopi. A speaker of Ebonics is neither incapable of saying or thinking things that a speaker of standard English might say or think, nor can she say or think things that a native speaker of Nahuatl can’t say or think. To hold otherwise is not only to ignore decades of scientific research but also to entertain a discredited linguistic essentialism every bit as pernicious as the old racial and cultural essentialisms that everyone in the humanities has worked so hard over the past fifty years to discredit and disavow.

The notion that allegory crops up only during periods of cultural crisis is equally untenable—What hard evidence do we have for this assertion? One should probably not extrapolate from the formal structure of a literary trope to a given historical period’s sociopolitical circumstances; this relationship might be the biggest myth of all in the modernist postbag (see, for example, Ezra Pound on the thickness of line in painting as an analogon of a culture’s tolerance of usury, which he goes on to describe as a hormone that can infect an entire civilization) as well as in the postmodernist post office (Is there finally any real difference between Pound’s hormonal analysis and Jameson’s fable about his uneasiness in an edgy new hotel lobby?). Homology itself is grounded on the flimsiest of logical pretenses, the constructing of analogies: it is no wonder that surrealism and allegory are the tikis guarding the structuralist longhouse. One comes away from the literature on allegory distressed by the sheer insouciance with which untested and untestable pronouncements about cognition, language, history, and culture get made.

The philosophical excesses of postmodernism are too well known at this point to require any systematic treatment, and at any rate this is not my purpose here. Many grand and ultimately unsupportable claims about allegory were made during the past fifty years, during which time the trope took on transcendental dimensions, explaining everything from the dynamics of money to the structure of language and the nature of consciousness itself. In other words, the term allegory has ended up a key word in the catalog of the pieties of postmodernism, which has become its own weird old arcade, dusty shops full of the twentieth century’s intellectual Kewpie dolls and the dented helmets of the war before the (culture) war before last, all of it awaiting the demolition team from the latest boulevards project. But I am less interested here in what is true or false regarding theories of allegory and language than in the ways that the philosophical fictions of a period enable, compel, or reflect a shift in poetic sensibilities. No serious person today believes that the dialects of rural people are nearer to the language of the heart and therefore a more fit medium for expressing human sentiments than are the dialects of urban people, but we know that a branch of romantic poetry was founded on just this bad premise. Likewise, the myths of linguistic determinism or the hundred Eskimo words for snow or the homological structure of human societies or the mirror stage of child development at one point made possible—and to some extent still do—certain developments in American poetry and poetics. The truth-value of these claims and theories—all of them discredited long ago, though they are still current in English departments across the land—is not what is at stake here. What is of interest is the literature that they made possible.

For the purposes of the present study, then, I take—under consideration—contemporary theories of allegory as seriously as they were taken a quarter of a century ago in order to think about a historical shift in the nature and function of poetic form. I go over what is no doubt familiar ground to some people—if there is a certain nuts-and-bolts quality to what follows, it is because the topic of allegory has largely faded from contemporary scholars’ BlackBerry screens and disciplinary journals: there is these days a whiff of the archaic and the esoteric about an issue that was once, allegorically speaking, burning. However, what I say about contemporary poetry in this book has not, to my knowledge, been said before, which, I hope, is its real contribution. All but two of the eight poets I have chosen to discuss are still alive and writing (Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky died in 1970 and 1978 respectively). All of them, with the exception of Zukofsky, write a poetry of formal allegory that is signally unlike any poetry written before. The chronological anomaly here is Niedecker, whose work from the early 1930s, derived directly from her encounters with surrealism, was a precursor of—albeit not an influence on—the later poems I treat in this book.

I came upon the topic for this study as I was finishing my previous book, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (2008), the final chapter of which examines the triadic stanza and the variable foot of W. C. Williams’s late poetry. Beginning in the late 1940s, Williams begins arranging much of his poetry, including large sections of Paterson, into roughly identical stanzas, each comprising three regularly staggered free-verse lines. Some critics have complained about the seeming randomness of this stanza, seeing it as marking a decline of formal integrity and purpose in Williams’s poetry, but what struck me about it was precisely its arbitrariness: Williams suggests in a number of places that the stanza signifies relativity, for him the primary condition of modern American life—and although this relativity might be easy to see in the variability of the variable foot, nowhere does he speak of the rationale behind his three staggered lines. It is as if his decision to cast his poetry into triads was as relative or arbitrary as any other choice might have been.⁴ But, more to the point, I came to realize that in these poems form works allegorically: the triadic stanza and the relative foot themselves imply another set of actions, circumstances, or principles, whether found in another text or perceived at large, to quote the definition of allegory in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Allegory 1993, 32). In an abrupt departure from any previous mode of modernist poesis, Williams begins in the late 1940s to work out a distinctly postmodern poetics—a poetics based on the arbitrary relation of content to form in the service of an allegorical impulse, as Craig Owens’s (1992) felicitous phrase puts it. This is the formal shift in poetry after 1950 that I trace in this book.

As I was preparing this manuscript, a colleague advised me to take the word allegory out of the title; he warned me that academic readers would have a bad taste left in their mouths from their encounters with the topic in graduate school. This may be true; the term does have a certain staleness about it: after all, it was practically designed to induce academic melancholy. But as I demonstrate here, the use of allegorical form is one of the major strategies of postwar American poetic writing, and the trope is very much alive and kicking in American poetry at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making, so the list of people I feel I should acknowledge stretches to the crack of doom; for the sake of brevity, I will mention only a few by name. First, of my many friends and colleagues at Columbia University, without whose excellent companionship and awesome intellectual acumen I would surely be lost, I single out Brent Edwards and Jean Howard, who provided sharp and insightful readings of early versions of the manuscript, as well as Molly Murray, James Shapiro, and Sarah Cole for their ongoing support, both institutional and personal. Junior professors—you know who you are—rock! Michael Taussig, with whom I cotaught a graduate seminar on the dialectical image, has been an inspiring interlocutor and all around mate. I would also like to thank my brilliant Columbia students, graduate and undergraduate, former and present, who have contributed more than they can know to what appears in this book.

Over the years, I have floated many of my ideas about allegory and poetic form in sundry conferences, talks, and casual conversations with a host of brilliant critics, friends, and scholars: in particular the New Mexico crowd—Craig Dworkin, Anne Jamison, Stephanie Sobelle, Ondrea Ackerman, Matt Hofer, Scarlett Higgins, J. B. Bryan, and John Tritica—but also Brian Reed, Paul Grimstad, James Livingston, Ursula Heise, Andrew Schelling, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Peter Nicholls. My two best New York City buds, Bruce Andrews and Paul Stephens, have been constant companions and excellent partners in crime; they are constantly pushing my envelope. I owe an incalculable debt to Marjorie Perloff, who was and continues to be an inspiration and a model; the earliest pieces I wrote for the book—the chapters on Louis Zukofsky, Clark Coolidge, and Peter Inman—were originally conceived and written under her expert guidance. I also thank my Columbia University Press editor, Philip Leventhal, whose infinite patience and good will I fear I nearly exhausted.

Portions of this study were composed at the New York Public Library, where I had the good fortune to be a fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers during the fall of 2009 and the spring of 2010. Huge thanks to Jean Strouse and her excellent staff as well as love and gratitude to the intrepid crew of fellows with whom I bunked for the best year our lives in Room 225. I also thank Kornelia Freytag of Ruhr Universität Bochum, the University of Pennsylvania Poetics Colloquium, Elisabeth Frost of Fordham University, and the Poetry and Philosophy Symposium at New York University for opportunities to present portions of this work in public.

Finally, I thank my family—my wife, Cherrymae; our daughter, Azara; our son, Chris—for their patience and love. You are an inspiring bunch and literally the lights of my life.

Introduction

Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment

Some thirty years ago the art critic Craig Owens pronounced that postmodernist art may in fact be identified by a single, coherent impulse (1992, 58), and although this statement may now strike us as naive, many of Owens’s contemporaries more or less agreed with him. The alleged perpetrator of the new and disconcerting sensibility in the arts was the allegorical impulse, which for a time during the 1980s and 1990s took center stage in critical debates about postmodernism. Allegory, it turned out, was more than just an antiquated poetic trope, dismissed by Goethe and Coleridge and laid to rest by the romantic sentimental lyric and the modernist machine made of words. It had instead become the cutting tool of the cultural edge, its formal disjunctions and the semiotic arbitrariness at its core perfect analogues for the alienation and crises of late-capitalist culture. Fueled by the newly translated books of Walter Benjamin and the gasoline of DeManian deconstruction, everything from the commodity fetish to subjectivity itself, from the rhetorical modes of critical interpretation to the basic configuration of the linguistic sign, was declared allegorical—and hence hollow, contingent, and arbitrary. The sense of melancholy was palpable; the Modern Language Association has never fully recovered.

Indeed, 1980 was a banner year for the study of allegory in American art and literary criticism, and it marks roughly the midpoint of the period covered by this book, which examines the theory and practice of allegory in American poetry and poetic form between 1930 and the present. Both Owens’s essay The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism and Joel Fineman’s essay The Structure of Allegorical Desire appeared that year in the spring issue (number 12) of the art critical journal October (which also ran an obituary for Roland Barthes). Along with several other important works, these two essays consolidated an interest in the study of allegory in American scholarship that had been building gradually since the early 1970s.¹ The trope had received a certain amount of scholarly attention earlier—notably in Angus Fletcher’s encyclopedic Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (1964); Edwin Honig’s Dark Conceit: The Making of Allegory (1966); and Paul de Man’s revolutionary essay The Rhetoric of Temporality (1969)—but the year 1972 marked the beginning of a renewed interest in all things allegorical. Robert Murray Davis’s introduction to a symposium on allegory in modern fiction in the December issue of the journal Genre that year is at once wryly apologetic and forward looking:

The usefulness of a symposium on allegory in the modern novel is clearly indicated by the very process of assembling material for it. Many scholars mentioned as possible contributors answered that they know nothing about the topic; one or two added with humility or its counterfeit that they were not intelligent enough to understand the subject, let alone write about it. Many others were not approached because their public views on allegory closely resemble those of Alice’s Pigeon towards serpents: alarm, despondency, and the strong implication that if the word and the thing do exist, they would not in a well-ordered universe.

(1972, iii)

Gayatri Spivak’s essay in the same journal, Thoughts on the Principle of Allegory, points out that contemporary American scholarship on the subject lagged behind its European counterpart:

Contemporary European criticism has witnessed the renovation of the term allegory. Walter Benjamin began it unwittingly in his now-famous monograph Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [translated as The Origin of German Tragic Drama]. The new trend in Western European literary criticism gradually recognized allegory as an authentic voice of literary expression, regardless of historical period. The old trend—a discrediting of allegory associated with Goethe, Blake, Coleridge, Yeats—was reversed. The energy of that reversal impinges upon literary criticism in the United States at present. Pedagogy, however, still undertakes the nineteenth-century dismissal of allegory, while medievalist and Renaissance scholarship presents an historical enthusiasm for allegory that remains a specialists’ joy; and experts in contemporary literature exclaim over the resurgence of allegory in Kafka, Beckett, Borges, Barth without questioning its nature. Within this generally retrospective scene, some American critics, notably Paul de Man, Morton W. Bloomfield, Robert Scholes, share the energy of the renovation of allegory as a term of general critical theory.

(1972, 327)

American criticism in the early 1970s was indeed just beginning to be impinged on by a recent European renovation of allegory (although Benjamin’s Trauerspiel would have to wait until 1977 to appear in English). By 1972, as Davis puts it, an increasing number of students of modern fiction and of allegory, most notably Edwin Honig and Angus Fletcher, would agree with Professor Spivak that, ‘Like point of view, allegory should be one of the global terms of the rhetoric of fiction’ (1972, iii). My study charts the reversal that Spivak describes, but it examines its Benjaminian energy for the rhetoric of poetry rather than of fiction. My project, to state it plainly, is to examine the allegorical impulse in American poetic form after World War II.

The presiding spirit of the new allegory studies represented by Fineman’s and Owens’s articles is Roman Jakobson (who died two years after these articles were published, in 1982), whose work became increasingly visible during the decade. The year 1980 also saw the publication in the small San Francisco Bay Area journal Hills of Barrett Watten’s essay Russian Formalism (reprinted in Watten 1985), which, although obscure at the time, signaled a growing interest in Russian and Prague school formalism and constructivism among members of the emerging American poetic avant-garde later known as the language poets. For Watten and other writers such as Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian, formalist and constructivist models became means for breaking away from what many poets felt at the time to be a generalized, restrictive, and unadventurous lyric mode that had gradually come to dominate in American poetry over the previous quarter-century. And although my study is by no means exclusively devoted to language poetry, it acknowledges the movement’s importance to developments in American poetry and poetics over the past thirty years.² The upshot is that by 1980 Russian formalism, in particular Jakobson’s work, had become familiar to the American poetry public and important to working poets. Jakobson is a major figure in Watten’s 1985 collection of essays Total Syntax, and in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2003), Watten argues for the continuing relevance of formalist and constructivist practices in contemporary American poetry.³

But poetic models derived from Russian and Prague school linguistics were not the only literary exotica showing up on American shores at the time; the year 1981 saw the publication of Marjorie Perloff’s The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. This book’s first chapter begins with four epigraphs, including the following by Barthes: Modern poetry, that which stems not from Baudelaire but from Rimbaud . . . destroyed relationships in language and reduced discourse to words as static things. . . . In it, Nature becomes a fragmented space, made of objects solitary and terrible, because the links between them are only potential (3). Hence, the onset of Perloff’s decades-long tracing of an indeterminate mode of poetics from Rimbaud to the language poets and beyond. In 1986, Perloff published The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, a book in which she refined her earlier conclusions regarding what she calls the poetry of ‘the other tradition’ by examining the legacies of European futurism; this study begins with Blaise Cendrars and ends with Roland Barthes and Robert