The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten

(16). But the notion of poetic vocabulary moves beyond the expressivist uses of much open work (as, for example, in the process poetics of New American poets such as Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, whose work depends on open horizons of meaning) in granting a predetermined, objectified language an autonomous existence whose ultimate meaning will be engaged but not determined by the poet. If the consequences of Coleridge’s notion of poetic diction were great for the development of a pedagogy of practical criticism, the methodological stakes of poetic vocabulary, seen as a paradigm for making meaning, may turn out to be equally so. A new ethics of meaning, which combines the interpretive openness of open form with the preexisting objectification of a fixed vocabulary, leads to a result that is not reducible to the suspension of authorial intention in procedural form.

      Language poet Kit Robinson’s The Dolch Stanzas, published by This Press in 1976, is a clear example of the project of making a poetic text from a preexisting poetic vocabulary. Stanzas comprises a sequence of twenty-two poems in short-lined tercets; its formal procedures, in other words, are relatively consistent but not entirely rule-governed. It is based on the Dolch Basic Sight Word List, a vocabulary for sight comprehension at the second-grade reading level, but again Robinson does not adhere to poetic vocabulary in a rule-governed way. From this list of about two hundred words, and allowing himself poetic license in selectively augmenting it, he explores possibilities of a language-based poetic argument where meaning effects are constructed in the poem’s interpretation:

      XII

      how did these

      get here I wonder

      what’s small always does

      now come away

      said a piece of one

      once to please

      upon that best

      and warm hold

      I will become only

      and not take of

      what’s given

      together or not

      but come back

      said the one

      take a look at these

      XIII

      you stop only

      to go

      hard

      against black wood

      pull it down

      into the cold saw

      and get that

      going again

      which is sharp

      so to cut out so much crap that’s put up with

      make this out

      as just like always

      and you’ll walk to help²⁰

      Given that Robinson is using a reduced vocabulary of two hundred words appropriate to a second-grade reading level, it is surprising that so many divergent semantic frames can be set off against one another in these poems. This effect points out again BASIC’s failure to restrict meaning to combinations of the most common words, as these words are the most polysemous. Polysemy, thus, is the key to Robinson’s attack on normative poetic diction. If one were to play Coleridge to Robinson’s Wordsworth, one might begin by criticizing his ambiguation of the common language of everyday speech — as in “so to cut out / so much crap / that’s put up with” — through the disjunct frames of experimental poetry. But it is precisely Robinson’s point that he can locate such private embedded semantics and culturally dissonant idiom chunks within the normative semantics of a second-grade reader. Robinson’s work is a demonstration of a theory of meaning that begins with the way poetic vocabulary at once constructs and interprets interlocking frames of language and experience. As can be seen in how meaning is made in the poem, such a pre-given vocabulary brings its own semantic preconditions, even as it engages interpretive frames that can only be read through the total form of the poem. Basic assumptions about person, agency, and event are involved at the Dolch lexical level — “how did these / get here I wonder,” the poem asks, anchoring vocabulary in deixis and thus establishing a world that assumes speaker, hearer, and reference in contexts built out from their irreducible identities. “What’s small always does,” on the other hand, demands difficult, high-end processing to reconcile disjunct and competing interpretive frames.²¹ Robinson’s point is to show how the use of poetic vocabulary engages conflicts between inherent presuppositions of language (both its own and those of interpreters). Objectivist assumptions, which ground meaning in reference to the world outside and which relate the self-evidence of objects to the practical task of learning to read, provide only one scenario among many. Robinson seems to comment on the limits of ostensive definition in a line such as: “but come back / said the one / take a look at these,” which offers a reductive schema of communicative action where the self-evidence of pointing to things is parodied as it becomes a source of comedic effects in the poem’s hypertrophic sequence of interpretive frames.²²

      3. Kit Robinson, front cover, The Dolch Stanzas (San Francisco: This Press, 1976).

      It is equally up to the reader to “make this out / as just like always / and you’ll walk to help,” assuming a competence in decoding poetic vocabulary that may be identical to its prior inculcation — or not. The possibility of the failure of communication is equally being taken into account. Idiomatic constructions cluster around word-to-word frame shifts in the poem’s syntactic chain, and these are thematically engaged as meaning effects that may not be entirely warranted even as they are pushed into the foreground. Thus the “meaning effect” of the woman’s profile on the cover of the This Press edition (fig. 3) reveals a superimposition of illicit interpretive frames onto rationalized diction. At the moment of the poem’s original composition, likewise, Robinson may not have meant to invoke the visual hypertext of a help menu as we “walk to help,” but it may be engaged later in the open-ended construction of just what such a metaleptic help could mean — a reference to what could be seen as part of the computer desktop we refer to for help but which at the time could be understood as making a plea for understanding or, more particularly, as asking for help to decode the poem. In this sense, the language of the poem does not predict all experiential frames brought to it: The Dolch Stanzas is both an essay on and experiment in making meaning out of language that unfolds in subsequent historical horizons. The use of poetic vocabulary is a device to create new meaning, not stabilize it, that has ethical consequences — showing how an action can be taken whose horizons are provisional even as it constructs new meanings. Robinson’s poems celebrate the constructive possibilities of a moment of epistemological doubt in the meaning of words — in a way that is open to linguistic and cultural change.

       COLERIDGE’S DESYNONYMY

      The constructive use of uncertainty in the Language School evokes similar — if more global, less local — processes at work in the expansion of poetic vocabulary in the romantic period. This expansion of language, an historical entailment of the creation of new meaning, was both source and consequence of the instability of the romantic subject, perhaps never more evident than in the forms as well as arguments of Coleridge’s oeuvre — from the gaps between poetic works to his continual accounting for linguistic detail in the notebooks to the “failed” construction of the Biographia.²³ A key passage from the Biographias chapter 13 registers simultaneous processes of expansion and contraction at work, which we may interpret in terms of language and poetic form:

      Grant me a nature having two contrary forces, the one of which tends to expand infinitely, while the other strives to apprehend or find itself in this infinity, and I will cause the world of intelligences with the whole system of their representations to rise up before