D_ Likes the Brandy; S_ Is Pretty Sure You Spiked It

Both Silliman and Davie believe that pure syntax can serve to power poetry, over and above referentiality or traditional verse techniques (what Davie calls "audible rhthyms of versification" and Silliman calls "formal constraints"). But they seem to diverge when it comes to the goals of this power. For Davie, "poetic syntax" delivers "pleasure." Whatever the five syntactical varieties, the goal is this poetic "pleasure." But what is Silliman's goal?

He likes the idea of foregrounding language, of linguistic machines. Maybe it's innovation or the simpering "revolutionary" spirit of mid twentieth century postmodernism. Like when he talks about Jakobson, he explains modern signifier/signified drop off in a pretty fist-raised, power-to-the-people sort of tone: "..the signifier, freed suddenly from its servitude to an integrating hierarchy of syntactic relations, finds itself drained of any signified" (76). And the Frederic Jameson quote that follows is further in line with rah-rah, down with privileged expression etc. Silliman gets even more blatant when he mentions the "tyranny of the signified" on the last page. Yikes. Hold me. I'm scared.

I think this goal idea is important. When Davie goes to describe the five varieties of syntax, he is trying to figure out what delights him about poetry--he wants poetry to delight him. Silliman, ever the engineer, doesn't privilege his needs, seeks instead to analyze them. But I get the feeling that Silliman's is a pleasure soaked in underdog politics. And I don't mean "political" in the casual sense of the "current political scene," but in a broader reference to how ideologies always try to win out and how things assemble into hierarchies. Even--if I'm allowed to be totally lame--New Sentence implies the glee of revolt. Or, you know, indignant protest.

Why is this important? Well, I'm not sure. Let's think about it. Notice that Davie and Silliman both give early examples of how syntactical tweaks, beyond verbal or logical techniques, can direct feeling.

Davie's example:

Socrates is wise
Wisdom belongs to Socrates

Silliman's example:

Someone called Douglas over.
He was killed by someone called Douglas over in Oakland.

What's the difference between these two examples? First, Davie is quoting I.A. Richards, while Silliman just made his up. But that's not really important. I think the choice of example reflects concern. Unconscious concern. What are we concerned with? What is driving us to puzzle through, to figure things out. What is the urgency? Or is it not like urgency; is it delight? When Davie ponders Socrates, tries to figure out how the different sentences ripple differently, it seems to me like an abstract sort of consideration, planted in the realm of "thought game" and outside, say, modern social concerns. But Silliman's Douglas and Oakland story is violent, even up-to-date, if we consider all the connotations arising from the mention of a city like Oakland. Other examples of this latent concern with, I don't know, poking norms: Silliman's urge to remove the family unit from the Watten example, his disapproval of the arrogance behind a narrative "I," his sneer quotes when referring to "some 'higher order' of meaning." You get the idea.

Is the New Sentence an example of syntax like mathematics? You would think so, what with Silliman whipping up a list of eight qualities that are solely compositional (91). But when I read Carla Harryman or Lyn Hejinian, I get a strong whiff of syntax like music, that swimming through a feeling without describing it, pure feeling translation, unconcerned by definition with making sure the audience knows all the subjects involved, where the feeling comes from, all that. Likewise, the New Sentence could rock the objectivity. The Douglas example, maybe: the (somewhat) innocent Douglas interpellation is suddenly surrounded by all this harsh news, the way gangs (or police) surround a beating victim, the way the media (and we) vulture a subject. Yet I don't think the New Sentence could serve subjective syntax or dramatic syntax: too much reference, too much necessary "I," too much privileged feeling.

Hmm, what about feeling? Davie has a lovely quote from Coleridge about feelings and fleeing. I find the first part of Davie's summary sentence pretty eloquent: "This fleeing in a circle, and being overtaken by the feelings from which the poet flees ... " True stuff there, right? Silliman, in the voice of the engineer, analyzes sentence joints, sentence constructions, yet in the New Sentences of Hejinian, oh wow: how beautifully she winds around feelings, roundabouts feelings, carves the circuits to nab the electricity. Harryman too, in the "For She" poem that Silliman quotes and now I'm going to quote:

"In spite of the cars and the smoke and the many languages, the radio and the appliances, the flat broad buzz of the tracks, the anxiety with which the eyes move to meet the phone and all the arbitrary colors. I am just the same. Unplug the glass, face the docks."

Okay, I would have to carefully suspend my heart to think about that solely in terms of construction. But I suppose we do, sometimes. Right? When we are contracted to build effective electric chairs or cribs? O'Hara, again, with the idea that your feelings for the person shouldn't get in the way of your feelings for the poem. And Davie I imagine in isolation, his cap of brandy, mmmm-ing with great pleasure over some obscure Coleridge poem, eyes deliberately confined to the garden (in that dangerous suburban 1950s way). And here is Silliman, full of political zeal, nothing outside of ideology, digging under revolutionary content and looking for a revolutionary structure, a revolutionary skeleton. Yet trying, almost like Davie, to keep his language neutral, scientific. Since feelings have really loud ideological implications, that means ignoring feelings. Davie, moving his feelings to dusty attics, keeps feelings and ignores ideology.

So I don't quite buy Silliman's assertion, made while quoting Stein's point about emotional paragraphs and non-emotional sentences, that emotions exist only in orders "higher" than the sentence. That he's not concerned with such higher orders. Remember the sneer quotes of "higher meaning?" Makes you wonder. My favorite New Sentence stuff does a hybrid sort of thing: intellectually untangles the tyranny of narrative, unpacks the formal feeling with revolutionary zeal, but actually exposes in its feast of sentence forms and sentence joints a feeling goal. Not a delight goal, definitely a political goal. The way a montage frees you from having to care about a story.

Maybe like a potluck where you don't know what anybody else brought. You are still charged with politics: who am I going to offend if I don't like their pickled beets? But you are also liberating yourself from politics, not fleeing them, but feeling a little more free to announce "I hate these pickled beets and I don't care what that means to my complicated relationship with everybody in the world." You get at the single feelings with more clarity, with more bravado even, aware that you are a flawed and subjective and offensive taster and that everything is charged with connotations, but almost able to get at that pure taste again, where you don't have to worry. And why is a pure taste important? Is that a sophistic goal? I don't know. But something's going on there. I don't think New Sentences, or any syntax like music or mathematics, stays on the level of "cool syntax! new syntax! i like your syntax!" We are wanting something. And maybe, hmm, there is a guilt?