Unoriginal Genius

Appropriately, Marjorie Perloff begins her new book on citational poetics by citing the poet Edgell Rickword's objections to Eliot's use of citation in The Waste Land. The basis of Rickword's critique: citation is not poetry. Citation, however, helped Eliot express the historical sense that is simultaneously "what makes a writer traditional" and "what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his contemporaneity." Such informed contemporaneity was crucial; after all, Eliot asserts, "novelty is better than repetition."1 But what if novelty is constituted by repetition, by the re-presentation of language from some source other than the writer him- or herself? Conversely, what if repetition—not in the Eliotic sense of "imitation" but, rather, the literal repetition of already produced text—is used to question novelty, or originality, as a literary value?Perloff's project is to explore the relationship between novelty and repetition or, in her own terms, to disarticulate the concepts "original" and "genius." If "citationality, with its dialectic of removal and graft, disjunction and conjunction, its interpenetration of origin and destruction, is central to twenty-first century poetics" (17), Perloff analyzes some of its contemporary forms and constructs at least a partial lineage for it. She works through a range of writers rethinking "originality" as she also considers why contemporary cultural conditions especially invite such rethinking: the citational poetics of Benjamin's Arcades Project, Brazilian concretism's visual rereading of certain modernisms and its anticipation of the digital, Charles Bernstein's "reading" of Benjamin through Oulipian constraints in Shadowtime, modes of documentary in Susan Howe's The Midnight, the multilingualism and translational poetics of Yoko Tawada and Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith's "uncreative writing."The precursors are Benjamin's great assemblage in The Arcades Project, concrete poetry, and, implicitly, Oulipo. If one approaches Benjamin as a poet, as Perloff comes close to doing, and reads The Arcades Project (75 percent of which is citation) for "its literary appeal" (28), it emerges as "a poetic text that is paradigmatic for our own poetics" (43). What is to me one limitation of The Arcades Project—it strikes me as more interesting at the methodological than at the phrasal level—is perhaps precisely the point: it models the possible literary uses of unoriginal language. Meanwhile, if The Arcades Project prefigures a contemporary citational poetics, Brazilian concrete poetry at last finds its appropriate medium in the digital environment, so that "this particular poetic movement is only now, half a century after its inception, coming into its own" (75). Perloff's fascinating and instructive mini-history of concrete poetry usefully distinguishes kinds of concretism internationally and presents the movement, especially in its Brazilian manifestation in the work of the de Campos brothers, as an arrière-garde less engaged in discovery than in recovery or "transcreation," the reading in concretist terms of underacknowledged experimental modernist texts. At the same time, concrete poetry can be credited with a discovery in emphasizing "the transformation of materiality itself" (68). It is concretism's prophetic emphasis on visual materiality as anticipating the digital—something adumbrated similarly in work such as Brian Kim Stefans's Fashionable Noise and Chris Funkhouser's Prehistoric Digital Poetics—that gives this chapter, which otherwise attends relatively little to the book's dominant themes of citation and constraint, its place in the argument.An arrière-garde embraces its downplaying of originality, and the term enables a fruitful comparison and contrast between Brazilian concrete poetry and French Oulipo. Oulipo rejects received definitions of creativity through its use of the (often mathematical) constraint and the dissolving of authorship: products "are attributed to the group" (80). Charles Bernstein's Shadowtime, his libretto for Brian Ferneyhough's opera on Benjamin, represents an "improbable fusion of Oulipo constraint, concretism, and citationality" (84) that speaks to some of the fissures in Benjamin's thinking about history and language, and between his personal and public lives. Libretto, Perloff rightly suggests, is hardly an adequate term: Bernstein's "poem including history" and biography is at once an "homage and elegy, lyric and critical essay" (98), that "uses citation to measure, evaluate, and critique the all-consuming citationality of [its] protagonist" (97).Though somewhat differently, citation and found text also drive Susan Howe's The Midnight. Here Perloff's (and Howe's) key term is documentary or documentation rather than citation, its use and effects measured by contrast to the lyric moments with which it is juxtaposed as it becomes a means for Howe both to write about her mother (who died in 1999) and her own Irishness and to "take us into the complex world of the Anglo-Irish middle class in the period entre deux guerres" (106). Howe is increasingly discussed as a bibliographer-poet, a poet of the archive, and I am not sure that her visual and textual layering of found materials in The Midnight represents a significant departure either within her own canon or within poetic practice more generally. Nevertheless, as always Perloff is brilliantly useful, informed and convincing in her elucidation of local textual details. And The Midnight does provide substantial warrant for her claim that "only by adopting the language of the library and the database ... can the contemporary poet create what is paradoxically a new poetic sphere" (122), a sphere in which "the sense of the real [is] provided by archival documentation" (101) and in which, "when documentary reaches a certain density, it morphs into its opposite—the hyperreal of 'factual telepathy'" (122).Irish and American family and national histories have always been crucial to Howe, and the stakes of understanding the poetics of such international relationships are ratcheted up in "the global context of shifting national identities [and] large-scale migration from one language community to another" (124). That context informs Perloff's discussion of multilingualism and exophony in Yoko Tawada, the Japanese-born writer who works in her second language of German, and the multilingual French Norwegian writer and artist Caroline Bergvall. Even if the multilingualism of "Pound's protohypertextual" Cantos (128) anticipates something like Bergvall's Say: "Parsley," we see in the newer work a move away from Pound's authoritative control of the languages in question, in the direction of what Bergvall calls on her Web site a decentered "sound-language installation around misshearings [sic] and language conflicts"—mishearings and conflicts that foreground the difficulty of phonetic transcription and of translation; the unstable relationship between seen and heard language; and issues of class, cultural, and racial discrimination. Tawada's exophonic work is written in a German "whose ordinary words, especially proper names, are everywhere measured against their absent Japanese equivalents" (140), even as "the poet's adopted language has no common elements with her mother tongue" (136). With both Tawada and Bergvall, then, Perloff examines the possibilities for poetry thrown up by a language situation of "continuous infiltration and translation" (145).What kinds of poetry might we expect more of in an increasingly globalized, polyglot world? One kind, Perloff suggests, is the conceptual writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, who is earning a considerable reputation as the author of numerous books and co-editor of a recent anthology of conceptual poetry. Perloff lists some representative projects: "Day (2003) is a mechanical transcription of a single day's copy of the New York Times, ... the earlier Fidget documents every move Goldsmith's body made for a twenty-four-hour period, ... Soliloquy records every word Goldsmith uttered for a week in 2000" (149). Or, more precisely, she describes these projects as Goldsmith suggests he would like to have them understood, in his insistence that his "uncreative writing" need only be thought about, not read.However, Perloff reads Goldsmith against his own claims rather than reiterating them as the already adequate account of the work that—in best conceptualist fashion—they teasingly offer themselves to be. Despite his insistence on his texts' routine, boring unreadability, Perloff shows what happens when one does actually read a Goldsmith book, in this case Traffic (which allegedly transcribes twenty-four hours of New York traffic reports). The "seeming precision and documentary veracity of Goldsmith's book" collapse under scrutiny—the narrative "turns out to be wholly implausible" (160) and finally treats traffic as a condition, even something as traditional as a metaphor for "contemporary urban life in all its ritual, boredom, nervousness, frustration, fear, apathy—and also its pleasure" (156). The language may all be recycled, but it is also, Perloff argues, rearranged, the author not yet dead but merely on life support.Regarding both Perloff's authors and her central subject, I'm inclined to adapt D. H. Lawrence's version of Romantic inspiration: "Not I, not I, but the words that blow through me." In 1931 Walter Benjamin comments on Karl Kraus: "So Kraus's achievement exhausts itself at its highest level by making even the newspaper quotable" (qtd. 89). When Goldsmith marks the millennium by transcribing/scanning the New York Times, we realize that again Marjorie Perloff clearly has her finger on the pulse of a significant, if constantly morphing, continuity in the international poetics of the long twentieth century

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