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TB'ADITION
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Edted, with an introduction, by Richard Kostelanetz

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No poet, no artiil of any art, has his complete meanng alone. His sgnificance, his appreciation b the appreciation of hs relation to the dead poets and artbts. you cannot ualue him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison. afiong the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. . . . The existing monuments form an ideal order among themseloes, zhich is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before the new work arrues; for order to persist after the supensention of nouelty, the whole existing order must be, if ez:er so slightly, altered; and so the relations, proportons, ualues of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is conforfiity between the old and the new. Whoeuer has approued thb idea of order ot' the form of European or English literature will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present s drected by the past. Henri Peyre, The Failures of Criticbm (1967) No totalitarian regime has eoer tolerated the atsant-garde, uhateuer the latter's overt politics be, or whether the regime uses the slogans of the
rght or the left.
Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form:

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Answer to Critics" (1977)

Published 7982by Prometheus Books 700 East Amherst, Buffalo, New York 14215

If we were talkng about modern panting, you wouldn't throw Burchfield or Grant Wood at me and erpect a serious discusson. And my point is that modemism in poetry has to be dbcussed at its extremesjust as it does in painting-othenoise you can't know if you'oe gotten past it, Ieome Rothenberg, in an interview (1975)

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Copyright a 1982 by Richard Kostelanetz All rights reserved

Library of Congress Catalog Number B1-BJ34

ISBN 0-87975-173-8

Literatu re-Transparent and Opaq ue

lan Wallace

Language is liquid. It does not provide the shape of its own contintr. Litt'r ature gives language "something to say," a shape, a content whcrein Iir,s tlrt, power to tease. The power of literature as a creative activity has trailition.rlly treated language as a transparent medium so that the content is rcvc.rlt,tl irr .r direct reading of "what is said." Recent movements in literature, concr(,t(, lxx,t y explicitly, treat language as an opaque medium, which throws contcnt [r.rr k irrttr the realm of literature as "something to say" rather than "what is sicl." A sr,n.,r. of historical context will clarify the rationale of this redirection. From the Dark Ages to the Renaissance, the tradition of literaturt' tlr.rt Ir,rrl passed through Greek and Roman culture had almost disappcarcrl. Notlrirri was said because there was nothing to say. Following the "dumb" cult.rrt' ol tlrt. Middle Ages, in which the human voice was muted by powerful notiors ol cosmic truth, the Renaissance rediscovered the world, men and litcraturt'. Surl denly there was a great deal to say. For the past five hundred years literature has released the pent-up irrhilri tions and emotions of the medieval experience. But in filling up the vacuurrr ol experience in the medieval mind, literature since the Renaissance has exh.rustt',1 that power of raison d'tre which depended upon a vacuum of expericn<t'. Gorged with experience, the "something to say" given by literature is rr,, longer needed, or rather, the preservation and accumulation of "great workr;" renders contemporary works into pathetic clichs of greatness. An evcn nlor r, tragic condition-the rare works of contemporary genius that do exist, thosr, that do have something to say, are powerless to affect the dominating forccs of
Reprinted by permission of the author.

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The Auant-Garde Traditon in Lterature

Ian

Wallace

343

our society, which are not spiritual or of the imagination, but rather are technological and economic. So now we have nothing to say. That this is true is indicated by the fact that when literature does maintain an attemPt to say something of importance, it inevitably talks about its own emptiness. But literature, whose reputation has been solidly entrenched for hundreds of years, continues as a creative activity by the sheer force of its own momentum. The life of literature that does last is not found in the energy of content, of that "something to say" served by transparent language, but instead by the changing outward shape of language itself. The power and meaning of creative speech is redirected from the sense of verbalization to the vehicle of verbalization. This redirection of expressive speech from the sense of content to the qualities of form is the main characteristic of modernism in all of the creative arts' Modernism implies a superfluity which has long been accepted by the visual arts, music and dance, but for good reason has been resisted by literature and theater. Situated within a literary format and literature as a creative activity, concrete poetry plays a special role in the modernization of literature, a role that becomes more important as the power of rhetoric becomes exhausted. Modernism strikes a fateful blow at a good many of the basic assumptions and conventions of literatue. First, the emphasis upon manipulation of exteritr form rather than central content involves a superficiality of passion and a lack of commitment to "rhetoric of significance" and "greater understandings," The enormous self-respect and sense of tradition that literature has maintained for itself is threatened by a movement which, though intellectually shallow, draws its virility from a sense of "newness," liberty and a certain revolutionary flair. The solid, responsible respectability of literature is challenged; the platform of literary intelligence, that exclusiveness of profound thought which literature has held out over the other arts for so long, now becomes all-too-easily embarrassed by tentative but energetic modes of innovative exploration and
experiment. There is also the serious problem of the questionable ability of language as we know it to be trasferred from a transparent to an opaque medium. The concrete poet prefers or needs to reveal his intentions through a manipulation of the language as material rather than through thoughts or images. Language as material is opaque. In this sense, words become sequences of letters rather than meanings, syntax becomes a condition of iconographical density, the "neamess of points" in the topological sense, rather than a chain of meanings which complete a thought. "Reading" opaque language involves a direct perceptual recognition of the body, the physicality, the format of the iconography. Conventional language is transparent, The reader does not see the iconography of transparent language, there is no delay between the recognition of the word and the chain of meanings and associations it brings. Meanings which do not involve a delay are meanings which are taken for granted. Opacity, involving delay, brings both instability and openness to the meaning.

The outlines of opaque literature, concrete poetry, are blurred, out-of-focus, or else the circumscription of the symbol is so sharp that there is no other meaning than the shape and context of the symbol itself; its permutations through space implying concepts or ideas about the act of eading in its own

right instead of as a function of understanding. In the concrete poem, the iconographical structure of the page or the field of visualization has its own material integrity. Modernism, implying perpetual newness, affects only this outward, exteriorized material integrity, changing the shape of the periphery, leaving the center dry. In contrast, conventional literature. releasing power from the central meaning, maintains appearances and evolves at the core. Unfortunately, the central meanings and impulses of conventional literature have lost their power to challenge the imagination in an era charged with powerful electronic media whose effects are most strongly felt in the appearance of things and our emotional identifications with these
apPearances.

As content-with its descriptive and intellectual precision-is debilitated,

the poet loosens himself from his traditional social role as moralizer and purveyor of the passions. Instead of applying his sensitivities and attitudes to his poetry by talking about things, he makes things talk about themseives. Instead of describing feeling, he creates an aura of feeling, or non-feeling. Instead of pursuing grand themes beyond the measure of man, he contemplates the absurd, the inane and the ironical. He mutters freely and disguises genius with invention. There is nothing which indicates creative sterility more clearly than the pretense of sincerity; and when man's will to understand exceeds his capabilities of understanding, sincerity must be taken for granted. The creative impulse of poetry or literature in general need not be proved by sincerity or 'greater understandings"; for its effect, impressive or not, is measured only by the fact that the imagination is alive. The creative activity of literature now concentrates not upon explaining and expressing to men those "greater understandings," but rather it is used as a means of locating the human consciousness in space and time; and culture, the creative arts, now competes with science to provide the totems of our awareness deserted by religion. A metaphor: in the vast emptiness of the Australian desert, aboriginal man locates his center with a single pole, thrust into the earth. Thus the poem, concrete.