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Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

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Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

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Content Reclaiming the Book-Object: Appropriated Texts in 21 st Century Poetry Genevieve Kaplan University of Southern California Kaplan 2 Table of Contents List of Figures 3 Introduction: Claiming the Book-Object 4 Reading THE MS OF M Y KIN: Janet Holmes and Emily Dickinson 20 Revisioning the Ultimate Source Text: Contemporary Appropriations 48 of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Coda: “Destroying” the Text to Create the Poem 74 (aviary) 99 Works Cited 172 Additional Bibliography 178 Kaplan 3 List of Figures Fig. 1 Interior page, Tom Phillips’s A Humument 4 Fig. 2 Interior page, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow 5 Fig. 3 Front Cover, E.M.M.’s A Little White Shadow 11 Fig. 4 Front Cover, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow 11 Fig. 5 W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document , p.85 13 Fig. 6 Tom Phillip’s A Humument, p. 85 Version 02 13 Fig. 7 Tom Phillip’s A Humument, p. 85 Version III 14 Fig. 8 Tom Phillip’s A Humument, p. 85 Version 01 15 Fig. 9 Front Cover, Janet Holmes’s THE MS OF M Y KIN 23 Fig. 10 Back Cover, Janet Holmes’s THE MS OF M Y KIN 24 Fig. 11 p. 90, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition 26 Fig. 12 p. 1 THE MS OF M Y KIN 26 Fig. 13 Dickinson’s “After great pain” 38 Fig. 14 Holmes’s “a feeling” 38 Fig. 15 Thorpe’s 1609 Title page 53 Fig. 16 Interior page, Shake-speare’s Sonnets 53 Fig. 17 Benson’s 1640 Frontispiece 55 Fig. 18 Interior page, Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare, Gent. 56 Fig. 19 Front Cover, [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG 61 Fig. 20 Front Cover, The Constellated Sonnets 61 Fig. 21 Front Cover, Nets 61 Fig. 22 Front Cover, Sonnagrams 1-20 61 Fig. 23 Front Cover, The Others Raisd in Me 62 Fig. 24 Front Cover, Sonnet 56 62 Fig. 25 Bervin’s Sonnet 134 70 Fig. 26 Inner back cover of Sonnet 56 72 Fig. 27 Chapter 9 Layout, The Others Raisd in Me 73 Fig. 28 Ronald Johnson’s copy of Milton 78 Fig. 29 Front Cover, Radi Os (2005) 78 Fig. 30 Front Cover, E.M.M.’s A Little White Shadow 80 Fig. 31 Front Cover, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow 80 Fig. 32 p. 26 of the 2006 and 1889 volumes of A Little White Shadow 80 Fig. 33 Nets, Sonnet 2 82 Fig. 34 Dog Ear, Plate VI, Fallout 82 Fig. 35 Standing flag form, In your neighborhood 88 Fig. 36 Flags lying flat, In your neighborhood 89 Fig. 37 Sample page spread, In your neighborhood 90 Fig. 38 Standing book, Alice’s Alphabet 94 Fig. 39 Top view, Alice’s Alphabet 94 Kaplan 4 Introduction: Claiming the Book-Object Certainly a beautiful object can draw us in. Beautiful books, too, coffee-table books or collections of matching leather-bound titles with gold-leafed pages, are produced to be visually admired rather than read. But books to be read, volumes of contemporary poetry for example, are seldom examined according to their visual and tactile merits. This is unfortunate as these elements often do contribute to a work’s literary value. In the field of contemporary poetry and poetics, the field my scholarship engages, there now exists a proliferation of texts perched on the edge between literature and art, books of poetry with visual elements integral to the reading experience. In particular, the recent profusion of literary collections that use means of erasure or editing to appropriate, revise, or re-present a previously existing book into a new volume of poetry is an ideal place to begin such investigations. Visual-literary texts published and re-published in the last decade include Ronald Johnson’s radi os (1977 / 2005), a poetic erasure of Milton’s Paradise Lost (vol1); Tom Phillips’s art book A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1980 / 2005), which consists of painted-over pages of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (see fig. 1); Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), a grayscale revision of Shakespeare’s sonnets; Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow (2006), a tiny volume of whited-over text from Fig. 1. Interior Page. Tom Phillips’ A Humument, “Page 12 Version 04-birthday,” A Humument Gallery, Humument.com, 2012, Web, 15 March 2013 http://gallery.humument.com/page012- birthday Kaplan 5 the 19 th century novella of the same name (see fig. 2); Janet Holmes’s Emily Dickinson erasures in THE MS OF M Y KIN (2009); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010), a die-cut novel from Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles; Holly Melgard’s revision of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans (2012); and Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (2012), an erasure of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. These are just a few of the books currently available. What is so compelling about these texts, in addition to their authors’ insistence on their material nature, is their breadth and depth: authors from differing backgrounds and publishing histories here perform a wide range of appropriative procedures; presses based in the United States and Europe publish and promote (and sell enough copies for reprints and editions) these books; and a new active audience, beyond solely poets or literary readers, has emerged. When we read a book, we certainly read its intended literary content, but we must also remember to read its context. All elements—not only the language written on the pages, but the cover images, text stock, publisher information, promotional materials—come together to reveal the circumstances of the enclosed text, and sometimes, these features form a text unto themselves. 21 st century appropriated books demonstrate a new enactment of both writer-ship and reader-ship by integrating concrete and visual aspects of the book into the process of literary composition. Critical investigations into the field of appropriative work are already being undertaken, such as Marjorie Perloff’s writings in Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in Fig. 2. Interior page. Mary Ruefle, A Little White Shadow (Seattle: Wave Books, 2006) 9. Print. Kaplan 6 the New Century (2010), where today’s appropriative current is traced back to modernist tendencies, and Vanessa Place’s and Robert Fitterman’s Notes on Conceptualisms (2009), which champions and justifies similar recent trends. My work here, however, seeks to make a clear connection between the work of not-writing—using found language, excavating source texts, and repurposing canonical books—and the resulting visual and tangible work of the book as object. More specifically, I argue that such visual and aesthetic engagement with the written text becomes a kind of poetry in itself, demonstrating a mass-produced model of the artist book as poetic medium: the visual book written by a poet and mediated through formal publishing channels. We must first consider historical precedent; like these contemporary works, many modernist poetic texts similarly highlight elements of their construction. T.S. Eliot’s 1922 long poem The Waste Land incorporates surprising overheard and idiomatic language, literary allusion, and copious footnotes. In the early twentieth century, Marianne Moore liberally sampled outside sources, from conversations to government pamphlets to well-known literary works, in order to form her own well-wrought and innovative poems. Ezra Pound’s The Cantos (1915-) are rife with fragments, allusions, and quotations, and Louis Zukofsky’s 1926 “Poem beginning ‘The’” explicitly “allows the quotations to succeed in a complete takeover” (Ma 56). A lesser-known work, Blaise Cendrars’s 1924 Kodak (Documentary) takes its language from a single outside text in order to create his resulting book of poems (Padgett “Translator’s” 372). 1 More recent poetic texts, too, often use methods of borrowing, allusion, and appropriation. John Ashbery, a poet who continually explores uses of found language, has worked in the collage form of the cento, publishing “To a Waterfowl” in 1961 and “The Dong 1 Similarly, Cendrars’s 1914 poem “News Flash,” “perhaps the first found poem” (Padgett “Translator’s” 366), is composed from language taken from a Paris newspaper article. Kaplan 7 with the Luminous Nose” in 1998. In Ashbery’s 1962 book The Tennis Court Oath, he extensively samples a single source text in “Europe” (64-85), his long poem “partly composed of phrases taken more or less at random from William LeQueux's 1917 children's book Beryl of the Biplane, which Ashbery had found at a quayside bookstall in Paris” (Rubinstein). While Ashbery does not broadcast these source materials in “Europe,” instances of strange spacing and punctuation indicate to readers that words or phrases are likely missing and that language might be coming from elsewhere. Too, the poem offers self-reflexive commentary. “The surgeon must operate” (65), Ashbery writes, “try to piece together the secret message contained in today’s paper” (71). Using found texts in The Tennis Court Oath was not only central to Ashbery’s poetics, but also a considered decision; he felt incorporating outside language allowed his poems to achieve “‘a greater, more complete kind of realism’” (quoted in Longenbach 93). Ashbery’s extensive incorporation and acceptance of source materials in poetry likely allowed for similar compositional tactics by other contemporary poets. Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty (1987) constantly circles around myths and Biblical tales, and poems with titles “Self- Portrait as the Gesture Between Them [Adam and Eve],” “Orpheus and Eurydice,” “Self-Portrait as Apollo and Daphne,” and “Self-Portrait as Demeter and Persephone,” are explicitly referential, as are Graham’s mentions of real people and places: St. Theresa of Avila (55), Jackson Pollock (81), or “the church / of Santa Chiara / de Montefalco” (37) in Italy. In her 2001 book Cascadia, Brenda Hillman uses direct quotation, citation, allusion and other modes of borrowing as she proceeds in a poetic writing-through of the state of California. Her “The Shirley Poem” includes direct quotations sourced from The Shirley Letters, Being Letters Written in 1851-1852 from the California Mines (77), and the poem “Styrofoam Cup,” including lines like “thou still unravished” (1) and “thou unravished unbride” (4), is both an allusion to and a Kaplan 8 rewriting of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Susan Howe’s The Midnight adds even more layers; the 2003 volume combines research and introspection, merging poetry, prose, image in a citational and unconventional memoir. Howe’s poems quote Shakespeare, Henry James, encyclopedia entries, dictionary definitions, and other sources: “Malachy Postlethwayt,” Howe writes in a poem, “defines calamanco as ‘a woolen / stuff manufactured in Brabant / in Flanders’” (37). In a later poem, the author clarifies her writing strategy: “I am assembling materials” (85). As these selections demonstrate, incorporative, allusive and appropriative strategies have long been foregrounded by well-known poets and subsequently accepted by readers. Sourcing language from existing texts here becomes just one more “form” of writing or one more method of generative constraint, natural and purposeful rather than foreign or strange. The current crop of poetic appropriations, then, might be considered just the latest iteration of literary allusion. However, the appropriative books I choose to explore here take notions of borrowed language, quotation, and constructedness to a new, fundamentally material, level, both in their single-minded approach to appropriation and their special emphasis on presentation and acknowledgement of source materials. These publications are distinctive not only in method but also in scope; each is a book that rewrites an earlier book-length work. In addition to having poetic content, the books these authors produce, which contain not a single line written by the author him or herself, often are presented as artistically-rendered, inviting objects. Their texts work in a variety of modes, and can be read as poems, as art, as sociology, and as history; my investigations explore their modes of composition, use of source texts, physical presentation, and reception in order to determine how works of this nature can and should best be read. The new altered, erased, or otherwise Kaplan 9 manipulated book may offer one initial reading but reveals more depth with each subsequent interaction. Importantly, the books I discuss here, carved from literature, remain literature. It is helpful to use the criticism of related subjects to help us read and frame contemporary appropriated poetic compositions. In Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Kenneth Goldsmith contends that “uncreative writing” like that found in appropriative books is “truly populist.” He explains, “Because …uncreative writing makes its intentions clear from the outset, telling you exactly what it is before you read it, there’s no way that you can’t understand it” (100). In Goldsmith’s argument, once readers understand the authorial concept—I used language from this source, I worked according to this principle, etc.— there’s little need to read the resulting text, and little interpretation to perform. Goldsmith’s assertions that compositional labor is potentially more important than readership of the resulting text are compelling, but I disagree that the concept of the book or the compositional work of deleting or retyping source text is the most significant part of the action. Goldsmith does not count on readers’ participation, but we should. In the books I am most interested in, the author’s work of arranging or deleting necessitates additional—not lessened—levels of readerly interaction. Perhaps counter to Goldsmith’s (and Place’s and Fitterman’s) ideas, which center around re-casting non-literary texts as poetic objects, poets who revise or re-compose canonical texts are almost anti-populist: readers might immediately grasp the compositional idea, but unless they are Dickinson or Shakespeare scholars they may not get the entire experience, which often includes a deeply layered reading of the source text. Hearing it generally described, readers might be tempted to dismiss the entire field of appropriated poetry—after all, are not the author’s words the basic element of his or her work? Yet appropriated poetics asks to be read differently than other poetic writing. Instead of focusing Kaplan 10 the reading of a poem on its content, these wholly borrowed texts insist on a more encompassing response of research and assessment. The book is no longer just a collection of poems, it is a project inextricably linked with its predecessors. Including texts from other sources is one way to ensure that poetic work remains “a physical movement forever in progress,” according to critic Ming Qian Ma (46). Appropriating language and content is one way to reject closure in a poem, a goal of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement of the 1960s and 70s. Even more broadly, appropriation may be the next obvious step in poetic progress. Poet and critic Charles Bernstein explains that “the idea of appropriating language from other written sources [should be considered] as basic an activity to writing as memory or overhearing or describing” and predicts that “As writing focuses…more on types of styles and vocabulary and argument, part of the investigation, of the work, requires using other texts as material to incorporate into a poem” (393, italics mine). If we regard imitation, derivation, and reproduction as key elements of appropriated texts, their current incarnation in the 21 st century cannot be considered particularly groundbreaking. However, the extent to which contemporary appropriations borrow from source texts is truly staggering. In the selections I examine, 100% of the poetic language in a given book is taken from a single source text and re-framed to form a new book of contemporary poetry. What is even more distinctive to current citational work is not only the extent of the appropriative act but also the emphasis on its physical medium. We might look at Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), which provides a way to discuss the larger questions of what such book-length appropriated texts are doing. Here, while Benjamin explores the advent of literal reproduction—the dissemination of texts to the masses, the reproducing of live events in film—a discussion of textual appropriation, too, could benefit from an examination Kaplan 11 through the lens of reproduction. According to Benjamin, even beyond providing a means of physical dissemination, “technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself” (“The Work” II). 2 The same is true of appropriated literary texts, at least to some extent. Mary Ruefle’s version of A Little White Shadow, for example, makes elements of Emily Malbone Morgan’s original 1889 text (of the same title) available to those who do not have access to this rare and elusive book (see fig. 3 and fig. 4). 3 Ruefle’s poetry, too, has a different audience than Morgan’s prose; Ruefle brings selections of Morgan’s story to a contemporary audience who would otherwise be less than 2 Perloff, too, connects the work of borrowed language in poetry to the acceptance of similar appropriative work in the visual arts. She “thinks of Duchamp, whose entire oeuvre consists of ‘copies’ and found materials; of Christian Boltanski, whose ‘artworks’ treated photographs of his actual childhood classmates; or the carefully staged auto- images of Cindy Sherman” (Perloff Unoriginal 23). 3 According to the WorldCat Database, there are six “Libraries worldwide that own item” (First Search). Fig. 4. Mary Ruefle, A Little White Shadow (Seattle: Wave Books, 2006). Fig. 3. E.M.M, A Little White Shadow (Hartford: Brown & Gross, 1889). Kaplan 12 interested in an inspirational Victorian book. Ronald Johnson and Jen Bervin select canonical texts from which to scuplt their own poems; in such cases, prior knowledge of the originals (by Milton and Shakespeare) may well be assumed. However, the notion of creating a different audience still holds true—readers of contemporary experimental or avant-garde poetry might not also be Classics scholars—and the charting of these new texts may reveal something of a Venn Diagram where the smallest field is the one of overlapping readership. I am intrigued by the way current acts of literary appropriation often work to make the source text once again unique—to share one individual’s perspective (often through a plurality of copies) of the known book or source text. 4 Contemporary appropriated books achieve a surprising degree of originality and uniqueness in a time of extreme production and easy dissemination. By highlighting or selecting particular elements of the source text, as Jen Bervin does with Shakespeare’s Sonnets to create her own book Nets, or as Ronald Johnson excavates the language in radi os from Milton’s Paradise Lost, these contemporary authors offer a unique literary revision of a canonical work. Tom Phillips’s artfully rendered A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel takes into account the popularity (and the availability of multiple source copies) of the original 1892 text, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, by creating many distinctive, though reproducible, copies in response, thus making Mallock’s single text (albeit contained in a multitude of physical book copies) into a series of unique readings. Phillips explains that even in the process of composition, “some texts have taken years to reach a definitive state, usually because such a rich set of alternatives was present on a single page…. In order to prove (to myself) the inexhaustibility of even a single page I started a set of variations of page 85: I have already made over twenty” (“Introduction”) (see figs. 5-8). In each case, the reader is not 4 Benjamin famously suggests, “By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence” (“The Work” II). Kaplan 13 subjected to a mere copy or reproduction of the original, but is invited into one reader’s—a singular—experience of the text. Current examples of appropriation take the act of reproduction out of the realm of utilitarian enterprise and turn it into a thoughtfully designed, often attractively executed, art form. Benjamin’s anxiety that all reproduction will eventually result in a “decay of the aura” (“The Work” III), a change in our perception of the original work, 5 is important to consider here. Accepting a “likeness” (“The Work” III) in lieu of an original object is one more step toward diminishing the necessity of and reason for distinctive works of art, after all. 5 Benjamin mentions, somewhat disparagingly, the Dadaists and their “’word salad’” poems which “intended and achieved…a relentless destruction of the aura of their creations” (XIV). These Dada poems, though, were the result of a purposefully arbitrary combination of source texts, which is very different from the present-day appropriative works that focus on and intentionally explore a single source text. Fig. 5. W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document. “Page 85 Version 00,” A Humument Gallery, A Humument Gallery, Humument.com, 2012, Web, 2 June 2013, http://gallery.humument.com/v00-085. Fig. 6. Tom Phillips, “Page 85 Version 02,” A Humument Gallery, A Humument Gallery, Humument.com, 2012, Web, 2 June 2013, http://gallery.humument.com/v02-085. Kaplan 14 Although Benjamin does not specifically direct his discussion toward the book-object, 6 could we not imagine that appropriation done well (done artfully), acting to reframe the original text, is one way to revive aspects of that lost aura? To again reveal the core of an art that previously existed? The current book-length appropriative works I explore do move toward deliberately seeking the lost essence of the book. Some of these texts lean so heavily on their source texts, and present their work so meticulously, that they may begin to rekindle the aura that has been diminished by so much haphazard reproduction. If what “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art” (“The Work” II), these books are working to reinscribe such an aura through a re-presentation of the texts. The 21 st century appropriated texts foregrounded here are not unfeeling randomizations of their source language; rather, they often include visual design elements that aim to embellish or replicate the original’s content. Many of these current authors take pains to create a new book object that is appealing for its appearance in addition to its written content. In fact, selections from many of these new volumes have been displayed as visual art in gallery settings. 7 Benjamin explains that “to pry an object from its shell [is] to destroy its aura” (“The 6 Betty Bright explains “his thoughts about books and aura remain ambiguous at best. These questions point out a paradox of the artist’s book. In multiple, it supports the ideals of Benjamin’s belief in unfettered access to mass art forms. But in reading a book, its status alters into one of a personal, auratic object of cult value” (113). 7 For Phillips, “The original manuscript was completed in the autumn of 1973 and was shown within days of that event, in its entirety, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts” (Phillips “Introduction”), and Ruefle’s “work in "A Little White Shadow" [was] featured in an exhibit of poetry as visual art at the Wright Exhibition Space, 407 Dexter Fig. 7. Tom Phillips, “A Humument Page 85 Variation III, IV;” Flowers Gallery, 2013., Web, 15 March 2013 http://pinterest.com/pin/4444490569459853 95/. Kaplan 15 Work” III), and while some examples of altered or appropriated texts may fall prey to an apparently haphazard destruction, in appropriated book-length works the object remains within its “shell,” and the authors succeed in emphasizing and recreating the aura of the original text, placing it now in the context of the new millennium. The advent and influence of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement laid a clear foundation for the acceptance and proliferation of appropriated book-length texts. The general qualities of language poetry—a focus on the word as a material for work, an emphasis on the construction of the text, and weight given to the performative act of reading the text—link it to more explicitly appropriated literature. Language poets foreground the compositional process of writing, and may privilege it over other content elements. In “The Rejection of Closure,” Lyn Hejinian speaks of an “‘open text’ [which], by definition, is open to the world and particularly to Ave., Seattle” in 2006 (Freeman). Even further, a selection from Bervin’s book was shown as a broadside in “a small wooden frame” at the 2004 AWP conference (Metres). Fig. 8. Tom Phillips, “Page 85 Version 01,” A Humument Gallery, A Humument Gallery, Humument.com, 2012, Web, 2 June 2013, http://gallery.humument.com/v01-085. Kaplan 16 the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader….The ‘open text’ often emphasizes or foregrounds process…” (43). Though Hejinian is not talking about appropriated works specifically, her idea of the “open text” can easily be applied. Certainly one central aspect of appropriated texts is that the reader is the writer (and vice versa); reading and writing are given equal weight and at times may be viewed as the same act. For example, who might we say is the true author of Janet Holmes’s THE MS OF MY KIN, which takes all of its literary content from Emily Dickinson’s poetry—Holmes or Dickinson? Is the act Holmes undertakes in creating her book, which carves words and phrases out of Dickinson’s poems to form new work, that of reading Dickinson or of writing new poetry? Also important to a discussion of appropriated writing is Hejinian’s understanding of the construction of poetic work: “by emphasizing its writtenness, its literariness, the [language] poem calls attention to the complexity of its constructedness” (329). Again, like L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E work, appropriated texts often highlight their use of materials and do not bother to deny that that are “made.” In many senses, language poetry is producing work similar to and following a process like that of appropriated poems—it is only the found materials which differ. As Perloff notes in Unoriginal Genius, one hindrance to the acceptance of contemporary appropriated poetry is that “the demand for original expression dies hard: we expect our poets to produce words, phrases, images, and ironic locution that we have never heard before” (23). Perloff’s observation, which also refers back to Pound’s dictum and the battle cry of the Modernists, “make it new”…, is apt; as readers, we want the poet to surprise us and demonstrate a new way of understanding the world. The interesting question for me, in terms of such un- written texts, is not where did such poetry come from, but how can this poetry—using old language, by being the impersonal result of not writing—connect to the reader in new ways? One Kaplan 17 answer is because of the book form it inhabits. If “Uncreative writing…claim[s] that one way of treating language is materially…” (Uncreative 34), and “new meaning is created by repurposing preexisting texts. In order to work with text in this way, words must first be rendered opaque and material” (Uncreative 35-36), as Goldsmith says, and so the words themselves must become the object in question. Too, Jerome McGann suggests that “The object of poetry is to display the textual condition….poetical texts operate to display their own practices, to put them forward as the subject of attention…. [to] turn readers back upon themselves, make them attentive to what they must be doing when they read” (The Textual, 10-11). Where can personality reside in new appropriated literature? In the selection, in the presentation, and in the final physical object. As I cannot explore all texts in this genre—it seems a new one appears every day—, I focus my studies on two very different canonical appropriations. First, Janet Holmes’s erasures of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War era poems in THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman 2009) and second, the recent group of book-length erasures and reworkings of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by poets including Jen Bervin (2004), Paul Hoover (2009), and Gregory Betts (2009). While I am not a Dickinson or Shakespeare scholar, I explore these new works as a curious reader, someone well-versed in contemporary poetics, book arts, and literary publishing. What I am most interested in uncovering is an exploration of how these texts and book-objects function as contemporary works of poetry, how they enact a certain type of poetics, and how the current proliferation of such texts reveals a shift in both writerly and readerly interest. Each of these texts emphasizes and celebrates its use of source material in compelling ways, and taken together they may provide a snapshot of the current appropriative movement. * Kaplan 18 My first chapter, “Reading THE MS OF M Y KIN: Janet Holmes and Emily Dickinson,” explores Janet Holmes’s poetic erasure of Emily Dickinson’s Civil War era poems. THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman 2009) probes connections between the two authors’ work and creates resonances between the Civil War and the more recent U.S. military action in Afghanistan. “This World /// baffles —,” Holmes writes, “Men / of // Faith slip — and / see / Evidence ////////// in / lies —” (98) from Dickinson’s poems numbered 373 and 374. 8 As Holmes’s new volume relies solely upon Emily Dickinson’s language to construct a type of post-9/11 political protest, the voices of both authors—Holmes and Dickinson—are undermined and re-created; here neither woman is fully allowed her speech. Careful analysis of the appearance, procedure, literary content, and reception of the 21st century book highlights the multi-layered readings created as Holmes erases and highlights select words and phrases from her canonical source text. Pairing Dickinson research with strategies of conceptual reading reveals the intricacies of poetic influence, authorship, and readership; I find that Holmes’s volume, though not-written, ultimately demonstrates the same characteristics as much contemporary poetry. Chapter 2, “Revising the Ultimate Source Text: Contemporary Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” looks to the multiple appropriation, erasure, and literary manipulation projects that have spun from the source text of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Beginning with a discussion of The Sonnets’s fraught publishing history, I then turn my attention to recent book- length projects that rely on that source language to create new poems. Examining a collection of texts including Stephen Ratcliffe’s where late the sweet [BIRDS SANG] (1989), Chris Piuma’s The Constellated Sonnets (1995), Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), K. Silem Mohammad’s Sonnagrams 1-20 (2009), Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me (2009), and Paul Hoover’s Sonnet 56 (2011), I take special care to include discussion of visual presentation, framing, and project 8 “This World is not conclusion” and “It will be summer – eventually” (Franklin 171). Kaplan 19 descriptions as well as the text-work itself. When we experience the book as a unit—of reference, of writing, of collection—, and when we are able to look upon and compare differing volumes of such books, we begin to understand not only the complexities of the process of not- writing, but also what presenting modified canonical source texts as one’s own might contribute to the field of contemporary poetry and poetics. A third chapter, “‘Destroying’ the Text to Create the Poem,” considers appropriated and altered texts from a visual perspective, examining artists’ books like Erica Baum’s Dog Ear (2011) and books of “poetry” like Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow (2009). Such tactile and visually compelling appropriated texts demand that I combine book arts and visual media scholarship with a reading of these new literary versions. Too, I discuss my own experiences in book-making, examining how a poem is composed when a book is made (In your neighborhood), how literature evolves when removed from a source volume (Alice’s Alphabet), or how the conceptual work of text alteration allows for the poem/book to progress ((aviary)). While my own appropriated and altered texts avoid physically changing the source text, the relationships between source materials and final selections are integral to the success of the new volume. In particular in my work in (aviary), the book-length collection of poetry that makes up the creative portion of my dissertation, my own composed poems gain additional charge from the accompanying permutated and modified versions of Mina Loy’s prose poem “Ladies in an Aviary” which occur at intervals in the book. Kaplan 20 Reading THE MS OF M Y KIN: Janet Holmes & Emily Dickinson Janet Holmes’s selection of Emily Dickinson’s lines “If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine –” for her book’s epigraph offers an immediate justification and contextualization of the contemporary author’s methodology and content—her book THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman 2009) is, after all, composed solely of lines from Dickinson’s poems. In this new text, a literary erasure, Holmes accepts Dickinson’s offer to “try” writing in another voice. However, as THE MS OF M Y KIN erases language from another author’s poems in order to form a politically- tinged response to the post 9/11 conflict between the US and the Middle East, Holmes deviates from expected methods of poetic composition. Holmes explains that it is difficult to find a voice that can stand up to the politics of the moment, so she opts for an alternative method of composition—composition by erasure, by editing: she takes Emily Dickinson’s poems for her source text, deletes selected words, phrases, and letters, and presents the remaining language in a new volume of contemporary poetry. As an explicitly referential, canonically-oriented book of poems that aggressively questions present-day foreign policy decisions, THE MS OF M Y KIN confronts readers on many levels; Holmes’s work in this volume is complex and requires a more expansive and participatory type of reading than readers might initially expect. The conceptual nature of Holmes’s book—specifically, her complete dependence on an outside source text and the subsequent assertion that emotionally charged matters of war or politics cannot be adequately addressed by using one’s own voice—makes it especially relevant as a contemporary poetic project. Holmes reminds readers, “I owe the project [of the book] to the invitation of its epigraph” (“Note on”), so that the pencil-less “it” inhabiting the epigraph acts as an emotional core of the Kaplan 21 text. This disembodied “it,” the author who is a thing but not an “I,” highlights the inherent tension between writing and not writing, the problem of composing a book that contains only someone else’s words, and the difficulty in responding to a distant war that is not fully defined. Holmes’s conundrum—and the ostensible impetus for her erasure project—is that she wants to take a stand against the post- 9/11 political climate but finds her own words inadequate for addressing the present situation. In an interview, Holmes explains: “I’ve made [Emily Dickinson’s Civil War era poems] into poems about the start of the Iraq war—really the only way I could get my head around writing about this tragedy” (McClellan). By making Dickinson’s language her mouthpiece in THE MS OF M Y KIN, readers are propelled into the past of Dickinson’s poems at the same time that Holmes offers a reading of the cultural present. But Holmes’s project, she emphasizes, is not an imposition; by offering a “pencil” to a voiceless writer, Dickinson’s invitational epigraph implies acceptance of such multi-voiced composition. After all, when Holmes strips down Dickinson’s poems to reveal new smaller, sparer poems within, she does not turn readers from the original text but encourages them to seek it out; Holmes’s work in THE MS, with its continual acknowledgement of source materials—through language, content, and presentation—invites readers to participate in, make connections with, and interrogate the resulting text. At the beginning of her book, Holmes clarifies its connection with Dickinson’s work: “These poems are erased from Emily Dickinson’s poems of 1861 and 1862, the first years of the United States Civil War” (“Note on”). But Holmes’s explicit erasure goes beyond mere poetic allusion; she isn’t only asking for readers to recognize and appreciate phrases from Dickinson’s poems or wanting them to remember Dickinson’s life or work as they read, she is emphasizing that without Dickinson’s contribution, these poems wouldn’t—and couldn’t—exist. Even before Kaplan 22 the poems begin, their context and source materials are acknowledged through the epigraph of the book, though the “Note on the Text” that begins the volume, and through the visual presentation of the book-object itself. Holmes’s unambiguous framing—of both the source text and the current war that inspires the book—asks readers faced with new volume of THE MS OF M Y KIN to engage with its originary materials as well as its mode of composition. In every aspect, Holmes’s book telegraphs an unambiguous desire to deviate from traditional literary composition as well as a willingness to explore what the simultaneous work of poetic composition and editing can uncover. * Because of Holmes’s insistence on the connection between her volume and Dickinson’s writing, an assertion that is reflected in the appearance of the work on many levels, we might begin by reading the actual object of Holmes’s book. Published by Shearsman Books, the volume is a fairly average size of 5½ x 8 5/8 inches and boasts a full-cover glossy cover. The cover consists mainly of the letters making up the title, illustrating the book’s contents visually. THE MS OF M Y KIN is printed in large black block letters a little over one inch tall, while paler traces of the title of the source text – THE POEMS OF EMILY DICKINSON – are present in the background (see fig. 9). Though we might be inclined to see Holmes’s title as the more privileged due to its bolder and more immediately legible typeface, a subtle layering of the light and dark letters makes Holmes’s selected letters and her source text alternately dominant. The title design on the book’s spine, too, draws Fig. 9. Front Cover. Janet Holmes, THE MS OF M Y KIN (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009) Print. Kaplan 23 attention to the source text: Holmes’s title is printed in a bold brown sans-serif font one-quarter inch tall, while the intervening letters of the source title—“POE” “E” “IL” “DIC” and “SON”— are printed in a smaller (less than one-eighth inch tall) black serif font. 9 Through its very design the book is revealed to be two simultaneous objects; it is both a book of poems by Janet Holmes and a container for poems by Emily Dickinson. The images selected for the back cover highlight this duality as well. Here, a sepia-toned portrait photograph of Emily Dickinson, approximately 1 x 2 inches, is vertically cropped to reveal only the left side of the poet’s face, then repeated twenty-nine times to fill in the back cover (see fig. 10). A similar image of Janet Holmes (of the same size and printed in grayscale) appears once in the lower right corner of the back cover; however, this image portrays the right half of Holmes’s face. If we put the two portraits together on their joining edge, the nose, we’d create one entire woman, surrounded by twenty-eight cropped-faces of Dickinson. However, this back cover places the images of Holmes and Dickinson so that their shoulders, rather than their faces are touching, ensuring that they remain always two separate halves, and may never come together as a single whole. Unlike the front cover of the book, here Dickinson’s authorial presence is clearly emphasized over Holmes’s. Examining the wrappings that surround the text reveals critical insight into the nature and content of the project it 9 The difference in font style on the spine is worth noting, too—the sans-serif font selected for Holmes’s title may indicate the contemporary character of her book, while the serif font used to note Dickinson’s source material evokes its historical nature. Fig. 10. Back Cover. Janet Holmes, THE MS OF M Y KIN (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009) Print. Kaplan 24 contains; all visual aspects of the volume reinforce the idea that THE MS OF M Y KIN does not belong solely to Holmes, the “author” of the book. In addition to reading visual elements on the cover of the book, we may look to the presentation of the poems contained within. Holmes identifies The Poems of Emily Dickinson Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, as her particular source text (“Note on the Text”) and aims to preserve the shape and language of the original Dickinson poems beneath her own revisions. She explains her process in more depth on the Shearsman Books website; “in my typescripts…I actually type in the poem and then ‘color’ the erased words white. They’re there, but they don’t show up when printed” (“Janet”). Although we can’t necessarily tell by looking at the final product, both texts are present in Holmes’s writing process. As we examine the book itself, however, it becomes clear that Holmes’s work is not a traditional erasure of the source text: Holmes does not physically alter a volume of Dickinson’s poems; her erasure is virtual as she works on a computer screen rather than a book object. Holmes’s choice to erase Dickinson’s work by first creating—re-typing—it, rather than beginning with a physical copy of her poems and doctoring actual pages, is an important distinction. Such emphasis on language over page reveals a preference for content over form, while at the same time offering unlimited possibilities for authorial revision, because the original is never lost. Holmes’s method illustrates an unaggressive type of erasure: as Holmes’s process is one of editing, of picking out certain words or letters, no text is ever destroyed, it is only created. Holmes begins THE MS OF M Y KIN starting on page ninety of the Franklin edition (see fig. 11) of The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition (Belknap Press, 1998). 10 Taking her epigraph from the top of this page, Holmes moves to Dickinson’s second poem of 1861, #185 10 I turn to the Belknap Press Franklin edition of Dickinson’s poems because Holmes mentions in her “Note on the Text” that her poem titles refer to “the Franklin numbers of the erased poems.” Too, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition is specified on the interior title/acknowledgements page. Kaplan 25 (“A Wife – at Daybreak – I shall be – ”), as the starting point for her own poetic volume. This page is a logical beginning given Holmes’s project, as Franklin arranges Dickinson’s poems by their date of composition; Dickinson’s poems of 1861 start here. However, comparing these two volumes of Dickinson’s poems—Franklin’s and Holmes’s—we become aware of more evidence that keeps Holmes’s version a virtual erasure. Distancing Holmes’s 2009 book from the Franklin source volume, the new publishers do not mimic the appearance of the 1998 book visually, replicating neither the design nor typeface of the pages. Turning to the first poem in Holmes’s book (see fig. 12), we find that Franklin’s spaces between Dickinson’s poems #185 and #186 are not preserved, and neither is the placement of these poems on the page. In the Franklin representation, each of Dickinson’s poems is numbered (rather than titled) along the left margin; Fig. 11. Franklin Edition p.90. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition. R.W. Franklin, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 90. Print. Fig. 12. Holmes’s first poem. Janet Holmes, THE MS OF M Y KIN (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009) 1. Print. Kaplan 26 extra spaces indicate breaks between poems, and line numbers appear in the right margin of each page. On Franklin’s page ninety, three poems appear; two blank spaces occur between poems #184 and #185, between #185 and #186, and between #186 and #187. While this spacing and textual placement is not reflected in Holmes’s book, some aspects of Dickinson’s poems as they are presented in Franklin’s volume stay the same. The capitalization, as it looks in the Franklin edition, and the use of dashes, appear in Holmes’s book as well. 11 Further, Holmes mimics Dickinson’s spelling oddities in her new text. For example, in Franklin’s #343 “When we stand on the tops of Things” (154), Dickinson writes “mirrorrs on the scene” (line 3). In Holmes’s “1862.19 (342-347)” we see the same misspelling of “mirrorrs” (line 3, p.79). Again we see evidence that, rather than using the page, the physical appearance of the poem, as the source of poetic erasure, Holmes uses the language of the poem, re-writing and re-formatting Dickinson’s poems as she composes. 12 Ultimately, Holmes emphasizes the text of the poems, as opposed to the act of editing or writing, focusing readers on the content of the literature rather than its history, editionality, or presentation. Holmes’s decision to use the language, rather than the page, as a source text for her poems becomes particularly relevant when we compare THE MS to its appropriative predecessors. Earlier books of literary or visual erasure, including Tom Phillips’s seminal work A Humument: a treated Victorian novel (1980), often preserve aspects of the original book as an object in its own right. In A Humument, Phillips physically alters each page in W.H. Mallock’s A 11 However, the dashes throughout THE MS OF M Y KIN are en dashes (shorter) while those in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition, are em dashes (longer). Regardless, the fact that Holmes follows Franklin’s capitalization and punctuation choices is of some import as not all volumes of Dickinson’s poetry adhere to the same editorial decisions—these instances link Holmes’s MS specifically to Franklin’s edition of Dickinson’s poems. 12 While this could be a decision on the publisher’s (not Holmes’s) part, Holmes’s Dickinson poems, when published individually in journals, share the characteristics of formatting that make them differ from Franklin’s edition. In all publicly available forms, Holmes’s compositions are content and language erasures, rather than visual erasures, of the Franklin source volume. Kaplan 27 Human Document (1892) by painting, drawing, and collaging to obscure or reveal the words beneath. The first edition of Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (Sand Dollar Press, 1977), too, is a literary erasure that references the original book object—a specific edition of Paradise Lost— even as it focuses on a linguistic, rather than visual, erasure. In his revision of Milton, Johnson preserves the line breaks, pagination, and spacing of the original work. In a curious slippage with Milton’s original volume, readers find an anomaly on the unnumbered fourth page of section 011. The running header on this page reads “RADI OST” (instead of “RADI OS” like the rest of the Sand Dollar edition). Since the “text facsimile is from the 1892 (Cromwell) edition of Milton” (back end sheet), the extra “T” in the header offers up the possibility that Sand Dollar actually set type replicating the whole of the Cromwell edition, then blanking out the text Johnson indicated, emphasizing the source volume as an object of importance. In her discussion of A Humument, Heather McHugh writes, “The whole elaborate concentricity of Phillips’s enterprise relies on rich senses of time: the readers we are have to recognize the reader he is (both of Mallock and himself, both of present self and of past ones…). The daily fluctuations of pride and humiliation, avidity and despair, ravenousness and resignation are recorded, page by page, as the book progresses” (73). Because these projects begin with a fixed source text, we are able to witness the creative act at the very moment of creation; we see not only the final version of the poem but what was not selected for inclusion on the page. But Holmes’s project is different—though it begins with a single source text, the Dickinson poems she uses are not truly “fixed.” We may witness this author’s creative act, but Holmes does not share a single moment of creation with her readers. Working from the language of the poem rather than the page of the book object, Holmes emphasizes the craft and literariness—rather than the artfulness or immediacy—of the project. Kaplan 28 Too, Holmes’s decision to work from source language instead of source object implicitly acknowledges the problems of locating a fair copy of Dickinson’s poems, many of which exhibit their own textual instability. As Dickinson’s practice of writing, revising, and copying poems by hand onto scraps of paper, letters, and bound fascicles continued throughout her life, few “final versions” are undisputed. Dickinson herself creates variants of her own poems as she revises so, significantly, there often is no clearly privileged final version. Marta Werner explains that “Dickinson’s crossing and re-crossing of her poem manuscripts show us that poems are articulated in a space that has no intention to maintain original integrity” (“Writing’s Other” 206). Too, Cristanne Miller suggests in Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century, that because Dickinson “knew that all authors who published or circulated work in any form submitted it to the possibility of unsupervised revision or editing as well as reprinting: this was a fact of her age” (181), specificity in format or even occasional word choice may not have been of primary importance. As Dickinson herself was not overtly interested in creating or publishing a fair copy of her oeuvre, 13 none exists. Miller’s argument that Dickinson is a poet of the ear rather than of the page is helpful here; as a poet working within a soundscape rather than confined by a page, this lack of insistence on the poet’s part in leaving behind a fair copy is not so surprising. The numerous printed volumes of Dickinson’s poetry currently available exhibit variations in diction, selection, organization, or editing, reminding us of the relative difficulty of making a determination of Dickinson’s final intentions for a poem. The proliferation of books of Dickinson’s work is astounding; a search on Amazon.com lists 785 results (“Emily Dickinson 13 “Whereas in 1980 the Dickinson poem was regarded as at least relatively stable and entirely iconoclastic in having been bound into handsewn manuscript booklets…, it is now known to be unstable in primary ways and to have taken popular and common form: handsewn manuscripts and private portfolios were typical ways of stabilizing, collecting, or presenting writing of various kinds…” (Miller, Reading in Time 17). Kaplan 29 poems”) while the Los Angeles Public library system lists over 40 different volumes of Emily Dickinson’s poems (“Search was: Emily Dickinson”). Franklin’s Reading Edition, Holmes’s choice for a source text, tries to accurately capture Dickinson’s intent. 14 The editor explains how he deals with the difficulty of locating a fair copy while collecting Dickinson’s work: “About three fourths of the poems exist in a single source. For the rest, with from two to seven sources, the policy has been to choose the latest version of the entire poem” (6), although there are certainly exceptions. Appendices detail the variants for Dickinson’s poems, and facsimile copies of these versions are available to readers in the Belknap Press three-volume edition. While Holmes is likely more committed to and interested in the nuances of her selected source text than the casual reader of Emily Dickinson’s poems would be, she is primarily a poet, not a Dickinson scholar. Holmes’s choice of Franklin’s volume, the most accessible book that ostensibly presents the most accurate collection possible, as a source text signals to readers that the contemporary author recognizes something of the instability of her undertaking. Holmes’s decision to focus on the language—rather than the physical object—of Dickinson’s poems nods to the questionable nature of historical editing practices of the original writing. The facts of the source text’s instability, Dickinson’s own collection of variants, and the difficult nature of accurately presenting the poet’s work to contemporary readers, allow Holmes a way into her 21 st Century project. As our understanding of Dickinson’s work is so ever-changing, it becomes less disconcerting than readers might initially imagine to enact one more edition of it, as Holmes does. THE MS behaves in some ways like a new edited version of Dickinson, as Holmes’s performance is more technically that of editor, rather than of composer or writer. 14 Though Franklin still takes some liberties, and this edition is not necessarily definitive. Certainly his facsimile edition (1981) is truer to Dickinson’s drafts—though out of reach of most reading audiences, because of its cost--, and a new reading edition, better reflecting Dickinson’s own organization and practices (edited by Miller) is forthcoming from Harvard UP. Kaplan 30 Beyond visually referencing the source text by preserving punctuation and capitalization, as well as leaving blank spaces to signify Dickinson’s omitted language, Holmes frames her erasure project by including explanatory notes at the beginning and end of the book, and by revealing information about her poetic process and product in interviews and essays. Inside THE MS OF M Y KIN, Holmes acknowledges both Dickinson’s source material and Franklin’s book through the individual titles she selects for the poems. Holmes writes, “Each poem of mine is titled by the year in which Dickinson composed the original(s), its order in the current sequence, and (in parentheses), the Franklin number of the erased poem” (“Note on”). Thus, Holmes’s first poem is titled “1861.1 (185-186),” letting readers know—without needing to look to Dickinson’s or Franklin’s texts—that Dickinson’s original poem was written in the year 1861, it is the first poem in Holmes’s book, and Holmes’s poem corresponds to Dickinson’s poems numbered 185 and 186 in the Franklin edition. While this titling procedure nods to Dickinson’s own decision to leave poems untitled, 15 casual readers would likely be unable to guess, for example, that Dickinson’s well-known poem beginning “Because I could not stop for Death – ” (Franklin 219) is contained within Holmes’s “1862.63 (477-481),” which begins “Adamant // put / agonizing terms /// down” (159). At times this odd referentiality does offer readers the pleasure of surprising recognition—for example, without necessarily knowing that we are about to encounter Dickinson’s poem “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers – ” (Franklin #314), we discover as we turn Holmes’s pages that “‘Hope’ is the / tune without the // Bird” (61)—, but Holmes’s titles ultimately highlight the dual nature of her new MS as a whole, rather than point to the interplay between specific poems and the Dickinson source work. 15 In editions and volumes of Dickinson’s poetry, individual poems are generally referred to by number (as in the Franklin edition), or identified by first line. Kaplan 31 While Dickinson is the immediate referent for Holmes’s new book, we find Holmes’s titles more dependent on Franklin’s particular edition than they are on Dickinson’s actual poems, closely connecting the specific Franklin volume with Holmes’s own reading and writing process. Even more significant, as readers continue examining the surrounding materials of the book, it becomes clear that Holmes’s poems, beyond being the result of an erasure project, are politically and emotionally motivated by the events surrounding 9/11 and the involvement of the United States in the resulting military conflict. In the “notes” section at the end of THE MS OF M Y KIN, the author writes, “People and events referenced in the poems, and occasional speakers of the poems, include those piloting aircraft on 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush; Osama Bin Laden…” (169), explicitly linking the new poetic project with the contemporary political landscape. Not only does Holmes plainly claim that her book is a response to the events and aftermath of 9/11, this claim implies that Dickinson’s poems, written a century and a half earlier, resonate with contemporary matters of American foreign policy and social upheaval. Of course, as soon as 9/11 is mentioned, it threatens to overshadow other aspects of Holmes’s text, including her reliance on Dickinson’s language. Perhaps it is not so curious, then, that the note mentioning 9/11 is saved for the end of the volume rather than foregrounded like other conceptual aspects of Holmes’s project. The tension created surrounding questions of authorship and wartime connections is one of the most salient features of THE MS OF M Y KIN. Holmes continually declines to declare herself sole creator of the volume; in case we missed the visual clues of the book object, she clarifies in writing, “The voice [in these poems] is neither Dickinson’s nor my own: it is a third thing I use to unloose my anger” (“Journal”). Holmes’s reference to “it” here, the “voice” which writes or speaks these poems, turns readers back to the “it” of the book’s epigraph, the writer Kaplan 32 unable to compose. Holmes has determined that the form of poetic erasure—with its emphasis on referentiality and slippage of content and context—is the most effective means of generating political critique, perhaps because of the impersonal quality that comes from such borrowing. The continual removal of Dickinson’s original language is one more embodiment of the paralysis that results from bearing witness to violence. Erasure, which offers subtraction rather than addition, calls attention to the real-life destruction that is action and aftermath of war. Keeping her own authorial voice out of the book, Holmes depersonalizes the work and lets the resulting poems stand on their own power. 16 Holmes’s project argues that voiceless writing, in particular breaking down or into the literary canon, is first a relevant undertaking, and second an effective method of protest. Becoming voiceless, removing or pushing aside the self, is key to confronting and participating in the occasion of Holmes’s book. * We begin our investigation of the literary content in THE MS OF MY KIN with the very first poem in the book, which initiates the relationship between Holmes’s writings and their original texts. Dickinson’s poem “A Wife – at Daybreak I shall be – ” is the primary source for Holmes’s first poem “1861.1 (185-186)” (see Fig. 11 and Fig. 12). 17 Dickinson’s poem is a first- person lyric, told by a female narrator who “fumbles” (line 10) at the prospect of “soon…be[ing] a Child – no more” (line 11). One critic describes the narration as the voice of “the expectant bride on the eve of her wedding” (Reynolds 130), a clear but rather simplified reading that heavily depends on two lines of the poem: “At Midnight – I am yet a Maid - / How short it takes 16 It might be argued that by using Dickinson’s voice to articulate criticisms and expressions of loss, Holmes’s work is lent some degree of gravitas that would otherwise be missing. However, it is important to remember that Holmes herself is not a voiceless poet. As publisher of Ashahta Press, a relatively large poetry press, faculty member in the MFA program at Boise State University, and author of multiple full-length collections, Holmes wields certain power in the contemporary poetry community. 17 Holmes often combines multiple of Dickinson’s poems into a single new poem, blurring the boundaries between them. Here, the first nine lines of Holmes’s poem come from Dickinson’s #185; the final line is taken from #186. Kaplan 33 to make it Bride – ” (lines 3-4). Others offer a more complicated interpretation; Elizabeth Buzzelli considers Dickinson’s poem through a religious lens, understanding the transition that will occur in the “Daybreak” of the poem as one “of Emily herself as she moves from existence only in the physical world to a coexistence with God” (38). 18 Certainly the poem’s references to the metaphysical properties of “The Angels” (line 8) lead readers to an understanding that when the poet writes “Eternity – I’m coming – Sir - / Master – I’ve seen the Face – before” (lines 12- 13) at the end of the poem, marriage ceases to be much more than a helpful metaphor. Notably absent from the poem itself, as well as from critical responses to it, is explicit mention of the Civil War that is the backdrop to Dickinson’s life during this time period and as well as the content Holmes insists upon in her new book. The language in Dickinson’s poem #185 that could be specifically allusive to field combat does not, in fact, refer to any battlefield scenario when considered in context. 19 In “A Wife – at Daybreak,” the “flag” in line 2 belongs to “Sunrise” (line 2), after all, and is queried after longingly: “Sunrise - Hast Thou a Flag for me?” (line 2). Buzzelli characterizes this flag as conveying “the sense of jubilation and oneness with nature” (37) so it is neither an admission of defeat nor a mark of conquest. The “Victory” (line 6), too, to be gained in the poem is heavenly rather than earthly, as the conflict here is internal and consists 18 Buzzelli’s reading is convincing, and she acknowledges the mystery that permeates Dickinson’s poem (“It is about nothing and it is about everything” (38)) as well as its themes. 19 It may be relevant, however, to refer to Elizabeth Phillips’s observation, in Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance, that “Like many of Dickinson’s poems, those that record her responses to the Civil War cannot always be identified in relation to the sources which moved her to write them….” (59). David Porter, too, proposes that there is “sharp disjunction in her poetry between the interiors of poems, that is, the poetics, and the exteriors where one seeks the actual referents. Which poems refer to real lovers, to the Civil War that touched every household in her most creative years…? Much more significant…are the interiors where syntactical mysteries, untraceable references, and stunning lexical creations prompt an intellectual, emotional, and sign-tracing agility in the reader….” (184). It is unclear if Dickinson is evoking her literal surroundings in this particular poem, and looking for temporal or physical referents may not be the best way into this poem, or in other of Dickinson’s verses. Of course Dickinson’s Civil War era poems do not respond to our contemporary political situation, but they do act as a relevant historical echo to Holmes’s 21 st century situation. In My Wars are Laid Away in Books, Alfred Habeggar describes Dickinson’s poems of the era as demonstrating “a great and classic descent into a personal inferno” bordered by “the staggering disaster [of the Civil War] in the distance” (400). Too, Habeggar describes Dickinson’s attitude toward the war surrounding her as “a mixture of disdain and respect” (401), an attitude very like Holmes’s own about the 9/11 conflict. Kaplan 34 of the speaker coming to terms with the progression of her life, not necessarily challenging a landscape of war and destruction. Holmes’s rendition of Dickinson’s poem #185 is evocative in an entirely different manner. In Holmes’s version, “Sunrise” is no longer personified and instead indicates time and location, grounding the reader at the beginning of the poem. The “Flag” in Holmes’s opening phrase, “at / Sunrise a Flag” (lines 1-2) is not almost-longingly sought after; it is straight- forwardly placed into an otherwise vacant landscape. Given the lack of specific referent in this poem and the political context Holmes has established as the genesis of her book, the flag here almost immediately conjures images of the American flag. As we continue reading “How short it takes to make // Victory” (lines 3-4), we understand Holmes’s flag signifies a position of strength, that it indicates how the “Country” (line 10)—perhaps too easily and quickly—has won “Victory” (line 4). Holmes’s poem continues, finger-pointing at “them” (line 5), they who “bustle” (line 6) and “fumble at Prayer // coming / before // The Country” (lines 7-10). Due to the minimal nature of Holmes’s writing and the lack of specific references within the poem, each of the selected words accumulates more and more meaning. Instead of the internal poem of thoughtful transitioning Dickinson composed, the same text is reestablished by Holmes’s hand as an impersonal and politically-tinged observational critique. In this, the first poem of the volume, the poet appears to be poking fun at then-President George W. Bush and his poor oratory skills while simultaneously expressing dissatisfaction at the seeming thoughtlessness of our nation’s response to confrontation. Dickinson’s “I”, the personal link connecting broad ideas of “Victory,” “Future,” and “Eternity” in “A Wife – at Daybreak,” is suppressed in Holmes’s Kaplan 35 version, making the poem about “The Country” rather than an individual. 20 The situation of Holmes’s poem is a distant and generalized landscape of war presided over by those who “fumble” even when winning. The character in question in Holmes’s poem is not the narrator of the verse but the character of the country. Perhaps the most striking difference we see in Holmes’s poems is in their visual presentation. Opening up Dickinson’s often compressed and metrical verses, Holmes strings her words together loosely on the page. Such a choice, though we know it is predicated on the author’s mode of ghosting out select Dickinson vocabulary, has the effect of slowing the reader down and focusing attention on each word or phrase as a single unit, rather that working in the unit of the line or stanza, as Dickinson so often does. Aloud, Holmes’s poems sound stilted, musical but in a very different way from Dickinson’s. While the form of “A Wife – at Daybreak” which, like Dickinson’s other poems, is distinctively compressed and rhythmic, relying on dashes for punctuation and following a fairly regular rhyme scheme (in this case, roughly aabbaa ccddefe), this structure is not replicated in the new poems Holmes composes. While Holmes often highlights Dickinson’s repetitions and occasionally allows rhyme to remain, she does not work with rhythm in a way that emphasizes Dickinson’s sonic influence. In THE MS OF M Y KIN, a reader is not borne onward by the rhythm of the line; instead, the exercise of reading Holmes’s poems is one of stringing together related fragments. As the blank spaces Holmes emphasizes leave meaning open-ended, they also work to deny a single understanding of the language. In THE MS OF M Y KIN the contemporary author does not add any words, though in earlier published versions, Holmes has made additions to Dickinson’s language. In five poems 20 Overall, Holmes uses first person sparingly throughout the book. Her “Notes” section explains who the “speakers of the poems” (169) are: not the author—Holmes herself—but political and military figures. Most often Holmes keeps her the subjects (and the narration) of her poems either broad and impersonal or specific and political. Kaplan 36 appearing in the online poetry journal Gutcult in 2006, bracketed italics are added to the erasures. In “1861.16 (256-260),” as printed in the magazine, Holmes’s poem ends, “—Nobody / / / / / / admiring / [Nations lie about WMD].” In another example from the Gutcult series, “1861.7 (218-223),” italicized insertions occur throughout the poem rather than just at the end. Here, she writes, “You / / / cheated / grinning / / / / [WMD justification]” and “I / spotted / / / / a little thing — / / / / / [IED].” In these additions to the erased source text, Holmes overtly asserts the link between her own present-day project and its source poems, adding references to current political events and allusions to the post-9/11 US-Afghanistan conflict. In these instances, each insertion of 21 st century military acronyms or political buzzwords displaces Dickinson’s original language and relegates the source poem to secondary status. Consequently, Holmes’s choice to remove that additional language when the poems reach their final bound format reveals a decision to emphasize Dickinson’s original language over any new content. Though Holmes adds her own voice in earlier arrangements of these poems, she takes it away in their final iteration, demonstrating that the work generates more power as the author removes herself further from it. As Holmes’s own language has been excised from the poems in their final form in THE MS OF M Y KIN, readers must understand that while a political slant is one consideration, the author is more invested in exploring the tension that results from offering two versions of one voice, than in forcing a political or cultural commentary. Looking closely at Holmes’s version of one of Dickinson’s more well-known poems provides a better sense of the poets’ interactions (see fig. 13 and fig. 14). Dickinson’s #372 “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” (Franklin 170) becomes Holmes’s “1962.26 (372)” (THE MS 97). In Dickinson’s poem, readers are brought into an exploration of the experience of physical and emotional loss. Alfred Habeggar explains in My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, Kaplan 37 “[b]ereavement had always been a defining experience for [Dickinson]” and that specifically, “her poetry of the early 1860s [shows] a great and classic descent into a personal inferno” (400), themes that resound in “After great pain.” Through thudding descriptions—“The Feet, mechanical, go round” (line 5) and “Quartz contentment, like a stone – // This is the Hour of Lead” (lines 9-10)—Dickinson conveys the actions of the grieving, those metaphorically “Freezing persons” (line 12) who progress from “Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go – ” (line 13). Dickinson’s poem is not specifically personal; declining to chart the path of a single narrator, it ruminates upon the very nature of death and grief, probing its way into an unnamed and unspecified body where “Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs” (line 2) and “The stiff Heart questions” (line 3). Too, the poem describes far more than a bodily decline. Sharon Cameron Fig. 14. Holmes’s “a feeling.” Janet Holmes, THE MS OF M Y KIN (Exeter: Shearsman, 2009) 97. Print. Fig. 13. Dickinson’s “After great pain…” Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Reading Edition. R.W. Franklin, ed. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 170. Print. Kaplan 38 explains, “although the initial images follow upon each other like a death, the second stanza makes clear that death is only an analogy for the body that has lost its spirit” (Lyric Time, 168). 21 The ache in the poem, borne since “‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’” (line 4) and accumulating for some time, cannot ever be healed; the most that can be hoped for is slick, hard “Quartz contentment” (line 9) in the “Hour of Lead” (line 10) when pain by can be numbed—though not removed—by surrendering to “Chill” and “Stupor” (line 13). While we might be inclined to read “After great pain” as a straightforward figurative rendering of grief and loss, Dickinson’s poem resists merely connecting a bodily death to a spiritual one in an act of extended metaphor. Here, because both sides of the potential analogy (the body, and the spirit) are ineffable, neither works to illuminate the other. Instead, they act in tandem, describing “A Wooden way / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –” (lines 6-7), depicting the struggle to compare, convey, and even exist. “Ground” (body) gives way to “Air” (spirit) and becomes ephemeral, but even “Air” is “Wooden” and remains bound by the societal strictures of “Ought.” Instead of rising from the earth, the “Feet” remain “mechanical” (line 5), unable to escape the circling pain. Dickinson’s lines convey both a bodily and spiritual struggle and descent, heightened by the emotional memory of loss, controlled by the bounds of the larger human condition. Holmes’s version of “After great pain, a formal feeling comes –” is sparser. In a severe distillation of Dickinson’s language, only seven words from the source text are selected to remain in the new poem. In “1862.26 (372),” Holmes writes, “a feeling / / / Yesterday / / / Of Ground / / / / / / letting go / —” (97). Unlike its source, Holmes’s poem is neither dense, nor 21 Elsewhere, Cameron emphasizes the ambiguous ending of Dickinson’s poem: “And consider the last line of ‘After great pain, a formal feeling comes—’ (P341): ‘First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—’ with its ambiguity about whether what letting go implies is the ability to feel which would reverse the ‘chill’ and ‘Stupor’ that have preceded it or whether what is oppositely implied by the whole series of nouns are the final stages of the inability to feel that terminate in death” (Choosing 28). Kaplan 39 explanatory, nor image-driven. As she examines “a feeling,” Holmes does not circle and reveal the subject from multiple angles, as Dickinson does. Instead she simplifies, offering a single comparison: “a feeling” was like “Ground / / / / / / letting go.” The “feeling” portrayed is again one of loss, but while in Dickinson’s poem loss becomes a virtual whirlpool, in Holmes’s version the loss is straightforward; it is of one’s footing, of no longer having a place to stand. Like Dickinson’s, Holmes’s poem has no specific narrator; no “I” guides us through, and the “feeling” is not a singular experience but a universal one. Taking Holmes’s pretext for writing THE MS OF M Y KIN, that the poems in her volume result from a struggle to create after the events of 9/11, 22 it becomes apparent that the “feeling….Of Ground / / / / / / letting go” must also refer to these events. It is crucial for readers to determine how best to attribute the “feeling” Holmes describes—does this loss belong the poem’s narrator, or to the collective country? After the terrorist attacks in 2001, the nature of America’s place within global society shifted so that Holmes’s poem gains meaning when we imagine it beginning “[There was] a feeling…” rather than “[I had] a feeling….” Holmes’s implied passive voice means the narrator matters less than the emotion conveyed. The universality of Dickinson’s descriptions is echoed in the universal moment depicted in Holmes’s poem: the “Ground / / / / / / letting go” fails all those who stand upon it. Like Dickinson’s poem, which universalizes and resists being pinned to a specific incident or person, the nature of Holmes’s erasure is that historical and social contextualization allows readers to gain insight. Dickinson’s poem falls into clearer focus when considered against the backdrop of the Civil War, a time of emotional upheaval and loss for Dickinson; in “the battle summer of 1861, …the North was prevailing and everyone in the poet’s 22 Holmes explains, “The poems I wrote in 2002-2003 felt burdened by my own growing depression and anger at the run-up to war, and I turned to favorite poets for solace. In Dickinson I found a poet also dealing with a devastating war” and what “I discovered was a deep sense of collaboration in the process” (“Journal”). Kaplan 40 circle seemed to be losing ground” (Habeggar 431). The “great pain” and “letting go” that occur in Dickinson’s poem take on new dimension, too, when framed by Dickinson’s own personal losses—her heath problems, the loss of close friends and family members—that may have contributed to the emotions of this piece. Similarly, knowing the background that inspired Holmes’s writing—the political and social changes post-9/11 and the “invitation of [Dickinson’s] epigraph” (“Note on”)—helps readers to apply a reading to Holmes’s often disjointed or open-ended poems. A “feeling….Of Ground / / / / / / letting go” is vague, after all, especially when the words are dispersed across the page, as Holmes presents the poem. However, when we connect the “feeling” in the poem to 9/11 and the mood of the country, its meaning becomes more powerful and more emotive. But is Holmes’s poem more than a severe editing and contemporary reframing of Dickinson’s lines? When Holmes re-reads and re-writes Dickinson’s “After great pain,” there is no “pain” (Dickinson’s line 1), no “Nerves” (Dickinson’s line 2), no “stiff Heart” (Dickinson’s line 3), no “Feet” (Dickinson’s line 5); the physical body in Dickinson’s poem has been removed. Under Holmes’s direction the source poem, so loaded with descriptive nouns, 23 is reduced to “a feeling” (line 1) that can only be purely physical. Unlike Dickinson’s “feeling,” which follows indeterminate but “great pain”, Holmes’s “feeling” is clearly defined: it is “Of Ground / / / / / / letting go.” In Dickinson’s poem “persons” (line 12), subjected to the “feeling” (line 1), do the “letting go” (line 13); in Holmes’s version the ground is the agent of release. The elemental aspects in Dickinson’s poem are firm “Quartz” (line 9) and heavy “Lead” (line 10), immovable as “Tombs” (line 2). In Dickinson’s lines, even when “persons” let go, the earth and its elements remain; there is sorrow, clearly, but all is not lost. Holmes, on the other 23 pain, feeling, Nerves, Tombs, Heart, He, Yesterday, Centuries, Feet, way, Ground, Air, Ought, contentment, stone, Hour of Lead, persons, Snow, Chill, Stupor Kaplan 41 hand, presents a complete void. As the ground releases in Holmes’s poem, there is nothing left, nothing to guide a person or offer even “Stupor” (Dickinson line 13); Holmes’s vision is both dark and empty. While the two authors’ poems look quite distinct when compared side-by-side, upon closer inspection it becomes apparent that the authors share some similar compositional tactics. In My Emily Dickinson, Susan Howe notes that “The vital distinction between concealment and revelation is the essence of [Dickinson’s] work” (27) and points out the canonical author’s “brilliant masking and unveiling” (27). As previously noted, Holmes’s poems reveal and obfuscate in a similar manner to Dickinson’s; the tension between the form and content of the erasure, as well as in the tug between explicit and implicit critique, is key to the new poems’ fulfillment. But smaller choices, too, are of great importance. According to Cristanne Miller in Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar, key features of Dickinson’s poetics are compression, disjunction, repetition, and a syntax of omission and inversion. Holmes, even as she is obviously drawing from Dickinson’s language, chooses to highlight methods of compression and repetition. To take “1862.39(144)” (120) for one example, Holmes emphasizes the repetition in the original poem (Dickinson’s #411, “Mine – by the Right of the White Election!”) by choosing to repeat all instances of the word “Mine” (which occurs six times in both poems) in her resulting erasure. While Dickinson’s 9-line, 45 word poem #411 includes more varied vocabulary, Holmes’s 6-line, 10 word version is composed solely of the word “Mine,” some em- dashes, and the phrases “the Election!” (line 1) and “A steal” (line 6). This is an explicit demonstration of repetition and compression by Holmes. Many of Holmes’s odd syntactic choices too, while being necessary byproducts of her erasure method, bring to mind Dickinson’s distinctive linguistic combinations. For example, despite the removal of much of Dickinson’s Kaplan 42 original language, Holmes’s phrases like “Grace — / Outcast — / / / / / parted Rank —” (73) or “this / / / / / / Heart / had not strength to hold —” (51) still evoke the original poet’s distinctive syntactic and sonic organization. While Holmes and Dickinson clearly share some poetic affinities, including strategies of form, language, and emotional expression in responding to political conflict and state-sanctioned violence, Holmes claims the war in a different manner than Dickinson. In an April 1862 letter, Dickinson writes “I had a terror – since September – I could tell to none – and so I sing… because I am afraid” (Johnson, Thomas 172). 24 If Dickinson’s response to profound fear is to “sing,”—to write poems—Holmes’s response to similar emotional turmoil is the opposite: to refrain from writing. Turning to Dickinson as source text offers some safety even as Holmes’s social criticisms can be scathing. In her poem “1862.39 (411)” Holmes channels then-president George W. Bush’s voice in saying “Mine – the Election / Mine / Mine…” and “Mine – A steal!” (120), but uses only selected Dickinson language to imply that Bush “stole” the election that continued his presidency into a second term rather than won the contest outright, Holmes remains distant from the inciting commentary of the poem. 25 By selecting Dickinson’s Civil War era poems as source text, Holmes’s comparison between 9/11 to the Civil War is compelling too, as it evokes comparisons to the partisan split that becomes especially apparent after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Like the North and South split over their firm beliefs during the Civil War, Republicans and Democrats in the United States 24 This line, coming from a letter addressed to T.W. Higginson, seems a potentially more apt invitation for Holmes to take up regarding her erasure project. The “terror –since September” does not link to any one specific instance or moment of the civil war but likely refers to “an emotional disturbance of such magnitude that [Dickinson] feared for her reason” (Johnson 166). However, had Holmes been interested in playing up the linguistic pairing of Dickinson’s “terror – since September” and the September 11 th attacks in New York as the beginning of her own troubling project, it would have been easy enough. 25 Some liberal activists even more explicitly claim the 2004 election was unfairly rigged in favor of the Republican candidate. In a widely circulated article in Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy confidently asserts that “the president's party mounted a massive, coordinated campaign to subvert the will of the people in 2004.” Kaplan 43 demonstrate a stark divide in the 2000s. Holmes’s particular choice of Dickinson, not just any war-era poet but a poet with often indefinite and emotional subject matter, allows for the project of THE MS OF M Y KIN to take on the qualities of an outspoken angry critique as well as a personal emotional release. * Holmes insists upon her “deep reverence for the work of Emily Dickinson” as she desires readers “to experience some resonance between the originals and the erasures” in THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman). Ideally, Holmes would have THE MS OF MY KIN be read as a collaboration between two poets, rather than a revision thrust upon the first poet’s writings, repeatedly clarifying that collaboration, rather than theft or appropriation, is her goal in undertaking this exercise of erasure. While the more dominant movement in contemporary poetry follows an essentially romantic notion, presenting a lyric “I” who progresses through a narrative scene, Holmes’s book breaks apart traditional assumptions of the poetic project 26 ; instead of presenting an independent poetic persona, Holmes explicitly acknowledges her dependence on Dickinson (as both person and poet) in every individual poem. As we read THE MS OF M Y KIN, Holmes posits that we are reading Dickinson’s responses to our twenty-first century conflict as much as we are reading Holmes’s. 27 This imposed tension may make the resulting book something of an affront to traditions of poetry and authorship, but it also offers an opportunity to make new connections and explore the possibilities of such juxtapositions. As they are presented in their 26 I don’t mean to say that Holmes is completely unique in this regard. Certainly many poets are interested in disrupting narrative, and many use techniques of fragmentation, collage, and/or appropriation. However, this is not the dominant mode in contemporary poetry. 27 One reviewer drolly suggests, “It turns out Emily Dickinson is the best correspondent reporting today from Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems she became an expert on asymmetrical warfare when she started sewing those little poetic IEDs and storing them in her trunk. Since she had only her life to give, she found that it was more effective to stockpile homemade bombs made out of paper, ink and thread. Many unsuspecting souls have been wounded by them since” (McDonough). Kaplan 44 given context, Holmes’s poems must be read through the echoes that they offer. 28 Holmes’s book explores the manner in which our culture, our language, and our experiences resonate with Dickinson’s, as well as the ways in which individual poems and erasures can respond to and inform one another. Holmes’s decision to work from a series of Dickinson’s poems, rather than a single poem, or a smaller group of poems, offers an additional way to look for resonance with Dickinson’s work. In Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles, Sharon Cameron argues that Dickinson’s binding of her poems into fascicles changes the way the author intended them to be read. “To see a poem contextualized by a fascicle is sometimes to see that it has an altogether different, rather than only a relationally more complex, meaning when it is read in sequence rather than as an isolated lyric” (32), she explains; a poem cannot be read on its own but should be taken as part of its larger context. Dorothy Huff Oberhaus agrees in Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning that we must read Dickinson’s poems as a group before we can understand them singly. 29 Though Oberhaus focuses her exploration on Dickinson’s 40 th fascicle rather than the fascicles that would include poems Holmes erases, her observations of poetic interdependence are compelling in light of Holmes’s decision to often combine multiple of Dickinson’s poems into a single new poem as well as her choice to create an entire book of the erasures. Holmes’s poems, like Dickinson’s, gain meaning when read as a group; the poems in THE MS OF M Y KIN are always already grouped—first with their source poems, then under the 28 Poet Jack Spicer explains in a 1958 letter to Robin Blaser, “Poems should echo and reecho against each other. They should create resonances. They cannot live alone any more than we can” (Collected Books 61). As if proving his theory, Spicer has already taken his own advice, writing After Lorca (1957), a series that very loosely translates selected poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, appropriating Lorca’s voice through imagined epistolary correspondence. Spicer’s notion of “echo” is quite fitting for the project Holmes overtakes here—Dickinson’s poems are shortened and contorted when presented by Holmes, but they resonate with Dickinson’s original voice. Holmes’s echoes pique our interest through their levels of distortion and offer compelling moments of flickering recognition to readers. 29 She writes, “Understanding F-40 similarly depends upon the reader’s seeing that none of its poems is fully able to stand alone as a self-sufficient, autonomous text….Often a poem introduces a subject that is then explained or further developed in a subsequent poem or poems” (Oberhaus 11). Kaplan 45 umbrellas of appropriation, erasure poetics, conceptual writing, and socio-political response— even before they are collected and bound in book form. As Holmes keeps Dickinson’s poems within their context (each other) and in order (as given by Franklin’s organization), the new edition prods readers to re-consider Dickinson’s poems as a group rather than singly. Bringing all of Dickinson’s poems from the two-year span of 1861 and 1862 to bear on her new compositions in THE MS, Holmes ensures that neither her new poems nor Dickinson’s originals will have to “live alone.” Because Holmes’s poetic act is not one of generation but rather of echo and revelation, her source’s own sense of authority is important to examine. Holmes identifies Dickinson as her “kin” as she is “also dealing with a devastating war” (“Journal”), but the fact that both authors are women who inhabit a landscape bounded by war is only a surface connection. Their use of certain poetic devices, as already noted, and even the distillation and erasure that Holmes forces through her compositional process, reveal a deeper alliance. Susan Howe posits that Dickinson’s poems are clearly inspired by and insinuate themselves with texts like Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh; she explains,“[f]orcing, abbreviating, pushing, padding, subtracting, riddling, interrogating, re-writing, [Dickinson] pulled text from text” (The Birth- 29). It is clear, too, for anyone familiar with Dickinson’s work that her writing is very much a result of her experiences as a reader. 30 While Dickinson’s connections to other authors and other texts are certainly less explicitly imposed than Holmes’s, the knowledge of Dickinson’s poetic participation with other literary texts invites certain sympathy of process when reading of Holmes’s new book. Just as we know that Holmes is a 30 Miller reminds us, “cutting from and marking in books was a widespread cultural practice, not unique to [Dickinson]” (Reading in Time 5) and notes that Dickinson lifts Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s line “A solid thing it was” for use in her own poem (“The Ear is”). In Marta Werner’s Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surfaces of Writing, she does into more detail about the poet’s practice of cutting and excising both her own and others’s texts. Kaplan 46 reader of Dickinson, identifying her as a “favorite poet” (“Journal”), 31 her poems in THE MS reflect the importance of readership upon the act of authorship. Marta Werner reminds us that “Every reader [of Dickinson] is a bibliographer-poet finding his or her own way toward the future by striking out in a different direction through the past. Every reading illuminates the impossibility of a perfect return to a scene of writing, circa 1870” (Emily Dickinson’s Open 6). Holmes’s new volume offers a reader’s response, rather than critical or analytical assessment, to the source text. THE MS is an illumination of Dickinson’s poetry, bringing the source poems once more into the light, reframing and presenting them to a new set of readers. Holmes’s book reveals, in a surprisingly personal way, what elements of the source poems resonate with the contemporary author herself; the resulting poems are homage more than desecration, amplification rather than oppression. THE MS OF M Y KIN ultimately emphasizes the act of erasure as a demonstration of the author’s emotional inability to respond after a national disaster. As much as the volume probes the connections between Holmes and Dickinson, and between the Civil War and the post-9/11 conflict, it also betrays an additional set of contradictions. The questions readers have when faced with such a text—Why would a poet “write” this sort of book? Are acts of erasure/appropriation legitimate poetic projects? Who is the author of this text? How can Emily Dickinson’s poems helpfully contribute to a conversation about contemporary foreign policy?— are never fully answered. But the book’s power lies in its troubling nature. It is because THE MS OF M Y KIN brings up—and declines to answer—so many complex questions about the very nature of its project that this work succeeds. As readers witness the procedures of learning how to voice what cannot be said, as we are able to here, writing becomes about more than mere 31 Holmes’s earlier book F2F (Notre Dame, 2006) takes Dickinson as one subject. In this previous volume “Holmes relates Dickinson’s self-isolation to the writer’s isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading” (“F2F”). Kaplan 47 composition. In the case of Holmes’s Dickinson erasures, the devastating framing power of the turmoil of war offers as an additional level of resonance and relevance for many types of readers. Here, writing becomes a communal performance, and its difficulty is enacted through THE MS with implications not only for those who work in the realm of contemporary poetry or poetics but even in the very idea of the book itself. Kaplan 48 Revisioning the Ultimate Source Text: Contemporary Appropriations of Shakespeare’s Sonnets While new literary appropriations have been constructed from a variety of classic and canonical source texts including Pride and Prejudice, Emily Dickinson’s poems, or Moby Dick, William Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been one of the most popular source texts to excise, edit, and manipulate. From whimsical classroom exercises to rigorous literary projects, a multitude of readers have been inspired to compose their own poems by using Shakespeare’s verses. Most compelling are conceptual and book-length projects that have been not only influenced but in some way generated by the Sonnets, recasting the poems into varied contemporary contexts. Adding to the work of previous decades (by poets like Basil Bunting, 32 George Starbuck (1986), and Steven Ratcliffe (1989)), the past ten years have produced a proliferation of truly ambitious re-presentations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, including long work by Jen Bervin (2004), K. Silem Mohammad (2009), Gregory Betts (2009), and Paul Hoover (2009). These contemporary appropriated books, even while working with the same source text, achieve a surprising degree of originality. By highlighting, selecting, or reconfiguring particular elements of the source text, these authors offer unique literary revisions of Shakespeare’s canonical work. At the same time such contemporary texts offer something new: they demand that current readers return to the source text or book object. Unlike Shakespeare’s original sonnets, the poems offered by these new texts become as much about their enactment—and their visual appearance—as about their 32 In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Helen Vendler disapprovingly mentions an early act of appropriation: Basil Bunting, studying with Ezra Pound, went “through Shakespeare’s Sonnets correcting the inversions, and removing all the ‘superfluous words’” (8) and, Vendler says, “the youthful Bunting enjoyed the literary vandalism of crossing out, with heavy penstrokes…[and] reveled in ‘correcting’ with his loops and arrows, Shakespeare’s old-fashioned syntactic inversions” (9-10). Vendler situates the appropriative tendency (and acceptance of that mode) within the modernist impulse. Kaplan 49 content. We are not only to read the new poem but also to read its predecessor, its history, and the design of the page. *** While Shakespeare’s body of work is well-respected and well-known, his poems and plays are also slippery texts—from the authorship controversies 33 of recent decades to so many adaptations. 34 The question as to whether William Shakespeare is the author of his oeuvre has been analyzed in a variety of popular sources ranging from PBS Frontline’s investigations in The Shakespeare Mystery in 1986 (Sim) to arguments in mock trials (including one before actual Supreme Court Justices at American University in 1987 (“From the”)). While academics agree that Shakespeare is indeed the author of his attributed works, perhaps this questioning of authorship in popular society and on the fringes of academic study has somehow made appropriation of his work more acceptable. The Sonnets’s status as a somewhat contentious text might allow writers to recast this canonical work without confronting the burden of potential desecration too abruptly—if there is no one “true” source text, or Shakespeare’s works may have been actually authored by his sister, or whatever the reigning theory of the time is, it becomes less egregious for a contemporary poet to suggest a new version or manipulation of the poems. The lack of a validated manuscript version of the Sonnets, which allows for such ranging debates on authorship, likely adds to the inconstant qualities of Shakespeare’s writing. Even as Shakespeare’s sonnets are highly available in multiple critical editions and edited volumes, they have also been undergoing constant manipulation in their framing, presentation, and even 33 For further discussion of the authorship question, we might turn The Shakespeare Controversy: An Analysis of the Authorship Theories (2009), where Warren Hope and Kim Holsten offer not only an overview of main elements of this debate but also a comprehensive (80+ page) annotated bibliography tracing its progression. The online Shakespeare Resource Center edited by J. M. Pressley includes links to a variety of both academic and popular examinations of the questions of authorship. 34 See Douglas Lanier’s Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (2002) where he coins the term “Shakespop” in order to fully describe the ubiquity and dissemination of Shakespeare’s plays throughout popular culture and especially well-represented in television and film. Kaplan 50 language. Despite their 15 th century origins, the sonnets remain an accessible and malleable poetry of the everyday, due in part to their canonical status. Because appropriative authors work from an outside text to generate their own poems, that textual selection is one of the first and most important choices to be made. Whether authors know Shakespeare’s literary history in some depth or have only a glancing familiarity with the sonnets, the choice of Shakespeare as poetic source is fraught. As such authors are selecting as their source a work so revered and ubiquitous, the challenge to generate original, unique creative work is perhaps greater. Have not Shakespeare’s sonnets already reached the pinnacle of literary achievement? However, while the source text is canonical and revered, the task of manipulating Shakespeare’s sonnets is not so intimidating; these poems, after all, are always already being appropriated, printed in changing forms and multiple contexts, ranging from anthologies to t- shirts. 35 Contemporary erasures and appropriations though, are making a new literature from the old—new poems out of the old poems. In their act of appropriation, these poets are not displacing Shakespeare from the sonnets, or removing the sonnets from book form, as other popular culture adaptations may; they are enacting a return of poetics to the sonnets. A text that, in some ways, has been reduced to a placeholder for the literary canon is now being returned to literariness, offered to readers as a text to be experienced and read. As we begin to examine the publication of Shakespeare’s sonnets, it is imperative to remember that the book itself, which contemporary society understands as a vehicle for final versions and definitive editions of texts, played a much different role in both the life of the writer and the written work in Shakespeare’s time. The publication history of the sonnets supports my 35 The sonnets are readily accessible to the public; they are examined by advanced as well as casual scholars, and they printed on greeting cards, coffee mugs, and other daily ephemera. Anyone can purchase, for example, a sticker or t-shirt depicting a “word bubble” of text “derived” from Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 online (“Sonnet XVII”); these poems are already in the public sphere, being manipulated and reformed to suit differing contexts and visions. Kaplan 51 assertion that, rather than desecrating or demoting a key literary text, these current poets are extending the discussion of the sonnets as they present them in a new light. As we consider the origins and early presentations of the Sonnets, this historical apparatus finds an echo in today’s appropriative works. A familiarity with early publishing practices may ground our discussion; in Shakespeare’s time, there were no authorial copyrights, and printers did not need authorial consent in order to produce a work. The first known commercial printing—and, subsequently, the definitive edition—of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Thomas Thorpe’s 1609 Quarto of Shake- speares Sonnets, essentially “a poetical pamphlet whose status as a book was ephemeral” (Marotti 157), was likely undertaken without the author’s express consent (see fig. 15 and fig. 16). 36 The first copyrights for authors were not in place until 1709 (Andrews 136), and authors tended to support their art through the patronage system—by finding a supportive patron to whom they might dedicate works in exchange for money. Publishing a book was one more step in declaring allegiance to a patron; in fact, “writers tended to view print as a technology facilitating their exploitation of a patronage system” (Marotti 144) because along with book publication came blank spaces on title and acknowledgement pages that authors might use to ink in dedications, securing funding from multiple patrons. 37 The book itself, which we currently understand as a vehicle for final versions and definitive editions of texts, played a much different role in both the life of the writer and the written work in Shakespeare’s time. 36 Though a printer would not have needed authorial consent, as it wasn’t necessary at the time; “With or without authorial consent, printers could take possession of literary property” (Marotti 143). 37 Even further than offering funding, the patron may also act as security for the poem itself. Marotti explains, “the poem is presented as literarily incomplete until it is perfected by the patron, who clothes its nakedness with the ‘good conceit’ of a receptive reading” (146). Kaplan 52 Readers in Elizabethan England had dissimilar functions as well; a reader who accumulated a physical book copy likely did not read passively and then place the book on his shelf. Owning a book was both a prestigious undertaking and a participatory investment. Many citizens could read, 38 but because book ownership was relatively rare, readers’ interactions with the text-object were necessarily more intimate. In “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” Arthur F. Marotti explains, “those into whose hands texts came could, in a real sense, ‘own’ 38 “Shakespeare’s England…was a population so avid for learning of every kind” (Grafton 64), and literacy levels were quite high. For more, see Anthony Grafton’s essay “Education and Apprenticeship” in William Shakespeare Vol. 1: His World p. 55-65. Fig. 15. Thorpe’s 1609 Title Page. William Shakespeare, Shakes-peare’s sonnets. Neuer before imprinted. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Web. 2 June 2013 http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/4kq p92. Fig. 16. Interior page. William Shakespeare, Shakes-peare’s sonnets. Neuer before imprinted. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Web. 2 June 2013 http://luna.folger.edu/luna/servlet/s/894a o3. Kaplan 53 them: they could collect, alter, and transmit them. Recipients could treat lyric poems, for example, as prized possessions, could revise, expand, or answer them with poems of their own, and could decide to share them…” (143). Also compelling is the phenomenon of the “table- book” (Marotti 147), in which the book object is a vetted and authored text at the same time that it includes blank pages in which the reader may write. 39 These evidences of reading as a participatory act are crucial to note in light of contemporary literary responses to the sonnets, in which texts including Jen Bervin’s poetic doubling in Nets (2004) or Stephen Radcliffe’s literary erasure in [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (1989) could be understood as extending Elizabethan practices of reading, celebrating and fully interacting with the published text. Partially due to the differences in opportunities for publication and expectations for participatory reading, the Sonnets have a complex publication history—there are no manuscript copies in circulation, so no verifiable fair copy of the source text exists. Marotti explains how Shakespeare’s sonnets varied with each subsequent edition; “These poems, like folk ballads, might have had a kind of composite or communal authorship, creatively appropriated by someone or some persons other than Shakespeare, traveling through the memories and pens of others” (152), he says, “their texts open to deliberate and accidental alteration” (152). More precisely, the first two widely-read volumes containing the sonnets were inconsistent. The Passionate Pilgrim, an anthology published in 1599 and edited by William Jaggard, includes a few poems by Shakespeare, but these are combined with lines and poems by other poets (Marotti 39 See more discussion of the “table-book” and its relationship to Shakespeare & his Sonnets 77 and 122 in Arthur F. Marotti’s “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property.” In his Note 19: “Margaret Crum, ‘Notes on the Physical Characteristics of Some Manuscripts of the Poems of Donne and Henry King,’ The Library, 4th ser., 16 (1961): 121, quotes from the Henry King poem inscribed in the table-book given to a lady in which the poet invited her to become ‘both the Scribe and Author’—that is, both to copy verse into the volume and to compose her own in it” (168). Kaplan 54 153). 40 John Benson’s Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent (1640) reordered and titled the poems of the 1609 quarto. 41 Perhaps most importantly, this later edition’s goal was “making all of Shakespeare’s works available to the book-buying public” (Marotti 159); as Benson desired accessibility, “[h]e creatively exercised his prerogatives as an editor to produce a poetical anthology that was, in effect, a new literary artifact” (Marotti 161). Benson does not merely edit Shakespeare’s poems to present them in this new edition; he renders them practically unrecognizable, 42 making Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent effectively the first book- length literary appropriation of Shakespeare’s sonnets (see fig. 17 and fig. 18). 43 40 Marotti reminds us that “Although…Jaggard deceptively presents the whole collection of verse as the work of a single author, what he was doing in printing the Shakepeare poems and mixing them with the verse of other writers was quite legitimate” (153). 41 Marotti explains, “in the context of the more liberal practices of the early stages of the print era, his edition looks less like a felonious assault on the Shakespearean canon….Benson was free to take possession of the text of Shakespeare’s Sonnets for publication and to arrange the poems as he saw fit. Not only was he well within the rights as a publisher, but he was also exercising the kind of creative control over acquired text that collectors, editors, and printers had in this period” (158). 42 “[H]e freely appropriated the texts to rewrite them…just as he created new conflated poems out of separately numbered sonnets from Thorpe’s quarto” (Marotti 161). 43 One important difference between this and 21st century appropriations of the sonnets is authorial intention; Benson neither claimed authorship nor set out to “write” new poems. His goals were only accessibility and marketability, and Benson’s appropriation was not a creative act. Fig. 17. Benson’s 1640 Frontispiece. William Shakespeare, poems. vvritten by Wil. Shakes- peare. Gent. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Web. 2 June 2013http://luna.folger.edu/l una/servlet/s/6o4k8b. Kaplan 55 The transmission and dissemination of Shakespeare’s Sonnets was not at all unique in his era—though it is in ours. Our current system of poetic publication, where publication is most often pursued by the poet and vetted by small press editors or esteemed judges, runs so counter to the Elizabethan patronage system that the 15 th century process can appear quite incorrect. In almost all contemporary contexts, it would seem at the very least surprising and more likely unethical for a publisher to take such liberties without express permission from the author, or for readers to edit or modify a published text. Shakespeare and his contemporaries, though, would recognize that editions, deletions, and reframings meant that a text was being read and the author’s name gaining recognition. Through this type of participatory reading, publishing, and editing, the author himself is not losing anything; he is only earning readership. Extending the publication arc of the sonnets, then, books of poetry like Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 (2009), “creatively misread” the sonnets and bring elements of Shakespeare’s source text to a new type of readership. At the same time, such volumes redefine our contemporary understanding of poetics and the act of writing. These new collections, though Fig. 18. Interior page. William Shakespeare, poems. vvritten by Wil. Shakes-peare. Gent. Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Image Collection. Web. 2 June 2013 http://luna.folger.edu/luna/se rvlet/s/si4ddv Kaplan 56 their authors work with or through language written by another author, are not collaborative; when faced with such a text, we are moved to ask, then: what is an author? What is a book (if a book is not something an author has written)? In addition to revisiting a canonical author, contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare are revisiting a canonical form. The Shakespearean sonnet is not only one of the most well- known poetic forms, it is also one of the most rigorous, composed in iambic pentameter and following a set rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The subject matter of the Shakespearean sonnet is often underscored by the argument or image of its final couplet. However, the contemporary sonnet is often practiced more loosely both in form and content. Many sonneteers now take liberties with meter or do away with rhyme entirely; in Ron Padgett’s Handbook of Poetic Forms he defines a sonnet not by its rhyme or meter but as “a fourteen-line poem” (189) and doesn’t even begin to enter into a discussion of rhyme until the fifth paragraph of his entry. In The Making of a Poem Mark Strand and Eavan Boland explain that while “Contemporary poets…have continued to be drawn to the sonnet [,…] few modern poets have been willing to commit themselves to the major, architectural sequences of a Petrarch or a Shakespeare. Instead the sonnet…has become a part of speech,” perhaps retaining only “a fossil of its former life” (58). In the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms, J.A. Cuddon explains describes how “the ‘narrow room of the sonnet’ has been adapted to a remarkable variety of experiment and development and an astonishing range of feelings and themes. [It has] apparently limitless inherent possibilities” (Cuddon 848). 44 Contemporary appropriations of Shakespeare’s sonnets 44 And, in the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetic Terms, T.V.F. Brogan notes the shifting work of the sonnet form, which has broadened to include almost any subject and mood, even though the main line of development has remained remarkably stable. Structurally, even within the traditional patterns, the s. has reflected the principal influences evident in modern poetry as a whole: the sprung rhythm (q.v.) of Hopkins and free- verse (q.v.) innovations have frequently led to less metronomic movement within the iambic norm; Kaplan 57 might result from a shifting of tradition, but they only further manipulate a form that has constantly been manipulated; in doing so, they remain “sonnets.” Chris Piuma’s The Constellated Sonnets do have fourteen lines, and K. Silem Mohammad’s Sonnagrams follow traditional sonnet meter and rhyme scheme. On the other hand, the contemporary appropriative process, as it results from the change of traditional source material, is always more indicative of rejecting form than following it. Mining the selected source text, these poems do not so much compose new, formal verses as excavate distended and fragmented lyrics from the choicest parts of a literary source. These new appropriations, in their work of editing, remixing, or deleting, demonstrate an unusual sort of writerly action. By highlighting the act of choosing not to write, these books lead readers toward a more conceptual discussion. Defining conceptual literary work, Kenneth Goldsmith explains, “Conceptual writing treats words as material objects, not simply carriers of meaning” (quoted in Sanders) and specifies that “Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good” (“Paragraphs on”). Although these books aren’t “conceptual writing” per se, they share some of its qualities: not-writing, framing, and an emphasis on idea as much as content. As conceptual art and conceptual literature have enjoyed emerging popularity in the past decade, the work of these sonnet appropriations can be read as an extension, too, of this field. From Marjorie Perloff’s explorations in Unoriginal Genius to Kenneth Goldsmith’s teaching proposals in Uncreative Writing and Vanessa Place’s aggressive conceptual projects, 45 such work is constantly being both performed and examined. Perloff finds the roots of sourced poems—as alternatives to exact rhymes have replenished the stock of rhyme-pairs and have sophisticated acoustic relationships; and a more natural idiom has removed much of the artificiality that had long been a burden. This adaptability within a tradition of eight centuries' standing suggests that there will be no diminution of interest in and use of the form in the foreseeable future…. 45 I think here of Place’s critical work in Notes on Conceptualisms (with Robert Fitterman, 2009) and her poetic trilogy Statement of Facts, Statement of the Case, and Argument (forthcoming). The trilogy is composed of court documents and evidence from rape cases from the author’s work representing sexual offenders; listeners “find [the experience of hearing Place read from these texts] extremely disturbing on multiple levels” (“How to do silence”). Kaplan 58 well as the literary acceptance of such acts—in modernism, an era notorious for literary density and difficulty. In these more recent enactments, though, literary experimentation is not elitist in the same way. Discussing a found poem in a recent issue of Poetry magazine, 46 Goldsmith explains, “uncreative writing is truly populist. Because …uncreative writing makes its intentions clear from the outset, telling you exactly what it is before you read it, there’s no way that you can’t understand it” (Uncreative 100). Goldsmith argues, “we could easily throw the book away and carry on with a discussion, a move uncreative writing applauds: the book is a platform to leap off into thought. We move from assuming a readership to embracing a thinkership” (Goldsmith Uncreative 100). 47 While the erasures and appropriations I examine here don’t fully function as “conceptual writing,”—they do, after all, also ask at some point to also be read—it is relevant to frame them with conceptual writing because of their simultaneous rise in popularity as well as their objective similarities. Looking at sonnet appropriations and permutations through the lens of conceptual writing allows readers to move beyond literary analysis and interpretation to also assess the ideas and presentations of the volumes. An inclusion of concept allows for a fuller discussion; we are compelled to ask: does each element of the book come together to make the volume a success? *** The books I examine here, Stephen Ratcliffe’s where late the sweet [BIRDS SANG] (O Books, 1989); Chris Piuma’s The Constellated Sonnets (self-published, 1995); Jen Bervin’s Nets (Wave Books, 2004); K. Silem Mohammad’s Sonnagrams 1-20 (Slack Buddha Press, 2009); Gregory Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me (Pedlar Press, 2009); and Paul Hoover’s Sonnet 56 (Les 46 July/Aug 2009 47 In his introduction to Notes on Conceptualisms, Robert Fitterman agrees: “Conceptual Writing, in fact, might be defined not by the strategies used but by the expectation of the readership or thinkership” (10). So, whether erasure is conceptual or not “Depends on the end result, we agreed, more than the writing strategy itself” (9); if “the poet [is] employing this technique to reach for a larger idea outside of the text” (9). Kaplan 59 Figues, 2011), share a sense of prolonged engagement with and manipulation of the source text of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Each goes beyond “composing” a single sonnet or small group of poems; in fact, many set out to erase or manipulate the entire collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets to form a new volume of poetry. While varying in process and produce, they share similar appropriative depth and demonstrate a determined acceptance of the literary merit of not-writing. Each of these authors takes his or her work to an extreme; as each poet “writes” an entire book engaging someone else’s language, these projects move beyond exercise to become implicit manifestos of contemporary writing. While I do not mean to suggest the titles I examine compose a complete list of sonnet manipulations, 48 this proliferation of re-creations and re- presentations of Shakespeare’s sonnets is imperative to take into consideration. As a group, they offer readers a chance to understand the scope and merit demonstrated through the literary art of appropriating, erasing, or otherwise treating source texts (see figs. 19-24). 48 I omit, for example, George Starbuck’s “Space-Saver Sonnets” in The Essential Shakespeare, Volume XII (Bits Press, 1986), a tiny pamphlet of witty little retellings, coy summaries of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The “Space-Saver Sonnets” compliments Starbucks’s larger Shakespeare-compression project The Essential Shakespeare, which includes poems from other Shakespearean source texts, like “Richard the Third in a Fourth of a Second”. Not solely taking text from, or performing an erasure of Shakespeare’s work, Starbuck performs a longer, sustained engagement with Shakespearean sources. Through his seemingly flippant revisionings, Starbuck succeeds in critiquing and reframing his source and offering Shakespeare’s sonnets to contemporary readers in quick, accessible, sound-bite versions. For example, in “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing,” Starbuck’s version of Sonnet 130 titled, the poet writes, “Yes, / Per- / fes- / ser, // snow / no / doubt / out- / does // her / et- / cet- / er- / as.” Additional texts worth briefly mentioning are Gary Baldwin’s Servants of Dust: Shakespeare Sonnets 1-20 (No Press 2010), where Baldwin erases all Shakespeare’s text and leaves only the punctuation of each sonnet remaining on the page, and the forthcoming collection The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books 2012) edited by Paul Legault, whose book of accessible one-liners, The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to- English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems (McSweeney’s 2012), has put him firmly on the conceptual map. The Sonnets takes as its cover image a scan of the 1609 quarto, emphasizing its appropriative nature before the volume is even opened up. There are also other less-substantive projects, as well as multiple allusion-based sonnet texts that don’t step so firmly into the realm of appropriative writing, that will not be investigated here. Kaplan 60 Fig. 19. Stephen Ratcliffe, [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG (Oakland: O Books, 1989) Print. Fig. 20. Chris Piuma, The Constellated Sonnets, 1995, Web, 23 July 2012 http://www.flim.com/pdf/c hris_piuma_constellated_s onnets.pdf. Fig. 21. Jen Bervin, Nets (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2004) Print. Fig. 22. K. Silem Mohammad, Sonnagrams 1-20 (Cincinnati: Slack Buddha Press, 2009) Print. Kaplan 61 These contemporary experiments, appropriations, and erasures exaggerate their reliance on the pre-existing literary text of Shakespeare’s sonnets to reveal a shift in acceptable strategies of poetic composition and authorship. As these recent texts demonstrate poetic revisionings of a canonical literary work—work done by not actually writing but rather by re-framing or re- presenting existing phrases, words, and letters—these projects encourage readers to recognize that what might appear to be poetic play or experimental exercise can actually develop into a worthwhile and legitimate poetic act. Reading these new works, we reconsider our framework for understanding poetic product and process: the poem is not only the accumulation of words on the page; the poem is also, necessarily, the project. The book, too, is no longer just the object that contains these poems. Here, the book is the source text (Shakespeare’s sonnets), the procedure Fig. 23. Gregory Betts, The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2009) Print. Fig. 23. Paul Hoover, Sonnet 56 (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2011) Print. Kaplan 62 (erasure, epigram, chance operations, etc.), the project justification, the visual appearance of the volume, and, finally, the grouping of the poems themselves. The poetry within these volumes often subverts traditional reader expectations. It does not always have a clear narrator or speaker, it may rely on an imposed framing, and it is rarely discreet. In Piuma’s series of terse erasures guided by the rolling of dice, 49 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), becomes “I ? / and : / May, / And : / too , / often ; / from , / nature’s ; / fade / owest; / shade, / time : / So , / So .” (19). In contrast, Mohammad’s Sonnet 18, “Held, Le Flesh Lengthens; Undertook, Le Flesh Holds; Feed Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me, Me!,” is composed with the help of an online anagram generator and bears little resemblance to Shakespeare’s original, beginning, “Shallow, mascara-hustling cameraman, / Does your tyrannosaurus masturbate? / (As long as I can get this bitch to scan, / I don’t care what it says—I’m running late.).” 50 Hoover’s “Ghazal,” one of the many variations he enacts of Sonnet 56 (“Sweet love, renew thy force, be it not said”), permutates Shakespeare’s initial language to read “Sweet love, renew your force. Don’t let it be said / You left my bed hungry, using words like appetite” (25, lines 1-2); “Blank Verse” offers “A cadence. Both of us hold a key to that sweet / Room” (72, lines 1-2). Betts’s book of misreadings of Sonnet 150 (“O, from what power hast thou this powerful might”) includes visual work like “Progressive Vowel Charts” (91-96) and an instance of mathematical equation (“I Dos: A Love Poem” (157)) to 49 Piuma clarifies, “I randomly selected the words. (Rolling a d10; if a 6 came up, using the sixth word, and if there was no sixth word in that line, rerolling)” (“The Constellated”). This prescribed method is, in this case, a more satisfying compositional mode than purposeful selection; the author explains that “there was a second sequence that I started, The Collected Sonnets, which was going to feature words that I intentionally selected, but those were so much more boring” (“The Constellated”). 50 Similar in tone, the third stanza of Mohammad’s version of Sonnet 150 (“Mm, Mm! Mom Whacked Whatever VW, Wherever (Heh Heh)”) reads The Hare Krishna elf who shits his tights Will never hack it as a true aesthete, Or overcome his phobia of heights To ovulate at twenty thousand feet. (“searching for ‘sonnagrams’”) Kaplan 63 complement his written poems, which are often succinct; “29. Swan Song” is three lines in length: “startle / me / immortal” (55), and “46” consists of a single line: “Hamlet: Get thee to a nunnery!” (79). Bervin demonstrates how she “prick’d [words] out for pleasure” (in Sonnet 20) as she composes “count the /// trees // green all girded up in sheaves” out of Sonnet 12 (“When do I count the clock that tells the time”) and “I have seen roses / no such roses” in her erasure of Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”). In Ratcliffe’s [where sweet the late] BIRDS SANG, Sonnet 25 (“Let those who are in favor with their stars”) begins “star / on / whom / Unlooked for / air leaves / the sun’s eye / buried” (13, lines 1-7); his equally elliptical erasure of Sonnet 109 (“O, never say that I was false of heart”) reads, “say that / absences seemed / easy / which in / love / return again / exchanged / water / in / kinds of blood / stained / for / nothing this wide / rose” (55). Because we are offered the opportunity to experience and compare so many different distillations and appropriations of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we might look to this wide-ranging collection to reveal the larger nature of appropriative poetics. Taken as a group, aspects of these works collect, foregrounding certain themes and preoccupations. Many of these volumes explicitly acknowledge the most frequent criticism of this type of project: that appropriation is not real poetic work. Some authors specifically address their contributions to the projects or use extensive notes to dispute such claims of simplicity or ease. Mohammed writes in an online interview that he began his project of Sonnagrams as something he could “toss off really quickly” but immediately clarifies that composition “didn’t go that quickly” (quoted in Degnan). Justifying his use of an anagram generator, Mohammad reminds readers that his texts are still “written” by the poet: “I…use the technology of the Internet, an anagram generator, as a device to break down my text, to tenderize it, to make it ready for me to sculpt. But it left the composing Kaplan 64 up to me. It left it to me to make the decisions about measure and meter and rhyme and word choice….all the syntax, all the shaping of it into a verse, was left for me” (quoted in Degnan). Framing devices used by the authors in interviews, manifestos, notes and addendums influence how readers receive the work, especially as such explanations are often included within the volumes themselves, alongside the appropriated poems. Bervin uses an inside title page to dedicate her book “For Will—Hold me to my name” and Hoover’s volume is prefaced by a four- page critical introduction in which Ian Monk emphasizes the formal aspects of the endeavor of Sonnet 56, calling the work “a potent reflection on the relationship between poetic form and content” 51 (Hoover xiii). These situating gestures frequently request for the subsequent (or preceding) work to be taken seriously, to be read as serious work rather than dismissed as play. Appropriative authors, understandably, are interested in giving readers some guidance into what their work is and how it might be approached or responded to. From Betts’s very clear explanation that “the poems in this book were uncovered by crossing out words or letters in William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 150” (7) to Hoover’s definition of book as “writing exercise” (64) and Bervin’s more figurative description of “I stripped Shakespeare’s sonnets bare” (“Working Note”), we get the sense it is not uncommon to include such clarifications. But such notes and asides contained in these volumes often go beyond the technical or procedural. In his poem “Preface” 52 Hoover acknowledges “The author of Sonnet 56 has long been known for his uses of 51 Monk explains, “What Hoover succeeds in doing by adopting this approach [of writing versions of s56 in a range of forms] is to present us with another important insight: there is no poetry without form and a failure to think this point through simply leads poets to adopt the prevailing forms used in their place and time while mistaking them for something natural and inevitable” (xiii). 52 “Preface” is a three page poem; in addition to giving something of his own poetic biography, Hoover uses the poem to go into some depth on poet (and co-worker) Maxine Chernoff and the “Chicago Imagists,” whose “poetics is published here for the first time” (64) as a six-point credo which includes points like, “2. Images are not ‘things,’ but forces of knowledge and feeling,” and “4. The world is full of things but devoid of poetic images. They exist only in our minds, in the form of language” (64). The list only superficially relates to Hoover’s more procedural statements at the end of the page, but when we get to his final line “Nature has forms, but culture is replete with them” (unpacked further in Ian Monk’s introduction to Sonnet 56), readers begin to see how the struggle between Kaplan 65 irony” (62), offers “[n]umerous examples of the author’s wit” (62), and spells out that ultimately “The author wants transparency through the veil of wonder, opacity with a miner’s lamp. Indeed, the negotiation of such polarities defines his career as a poet” (63). Here, Hoover relies on his “authority” (having “long been known,” he must be worth knowing now) and suggests a tone the book is striving for (“irony,” “wit,” a “veil of wonder”) to invite readers in. Even further, if we don’t like the work Sonnet 56 is doing, Hoover seems to suggest, it may be because we just don’t “get” it. 53 In contrast, as Bervin explains in her “Working Note” that “When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against this palimpsest,” she anticipates potential arguments against her project—if no one can write poems without including “the history of poetry,” “pre-inscribed,” then her work in Nets should not be construed as a negative source-text thievery; instead, her implicit argument is that erasure methods like the one used in Nets visually acknowledge what is always going on every poetic process. These volumes describe what is contained within, but they also instruct how to respond: with openness, with wonder, with a sense of literary history. Such discussions continue outside of the text-volume as well, in accompanying interviews, websites, or even manifestoes. As Betts subtitles The Others Raisd in Me “a plunderverse project,” readers are nudged to examine Betts’s online “Plunderverse Manifesto” 54 where he justifies the merit of such “work.” Here, he explains the necessity of not-writing, saying, “We are born into language, but a language not our own,” and “we can only speak in a nature and culture, thing and image, is played out in Hoover’s formal experiments in Sonnet 56, in his “one poem and fifty-six rewrites” (xiii). 53 The inclusion of Monk’s testimony as a formal and critical introduction, too, adds an additional level of positive reinforcement for Hoover’s project. 54 “Plunderverse limits its own expression to the source text, but attempts a genuine, divergent expression through the selection, deletion or contortion of it,” and “Plunderverse is a compositional method of producing poems from other texts. The process amounts to an extreme edit of a source text, striking out the vast majority of words. The product is a stand-alone poem – built from the (acknowledged) source text, but functionally stand-alone” (“Plunderverse: A Cartographic Manifesto”). The Others Raisd in Me is one demonstration of the activity of Plunderverse. Kaplan 66 language not our own” (“Plunderverse”); Betts goes on to compare projects like his Shakespeare erasures to conceptual predecessors (he cites Georges Bataille, Jackson MacLow, the myth of Narcissus and Echo, Oulipo, found poetries, and the creation of language itself), ultimately claiming Plunderverse as the superior manifestation. 55 A key element of Betts’s procedure is that the process is not the end result—the poems explore “possibilities of speaking” and, as such, desire to be read, not merely procedurally understood (“Plunderverse”). Betts’s larger frame of the manifesto is a useful accompaniment as it offers insight not only into procedure but also to his authorial desires for the work’s reception. Piuma uses a different tactic to set his erasure The Constellated Sonnets apart; he introduces his project on his blog by emphasizing its completeness and accessibility. Recognizing that he is the not first to perform an erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, he writes before linking readers to his online book, “None of us…did all 154 sonnets, but I came closest” 56 (“The Constellated”) and notes “mine is the only manuscript that you can download in its entirety” (“The Constellated”). These seemingly minor notes broadcast concerns of comprehensiveness and accessibility that reveal the larger anxieties of such a project; if the author neither wrote nor selected the language of the poems, readers might wonder what his creative contribution is. In Piuma’s case, apprehensions about the artistic merit of the words on the page are bypassed in favor of justifying the fact of its very existence. While 55 Plunderverse, he says, “makes use of the wealth and waste of language by exploiting the unattended information in a source text. It makes connections and variations of a previous author’s words to create a different poem from the original piece. But, whereas found poetry and the like celebrate the random connections discovered by abstract rules or unconventional readings of source texts, delighting in the dissolution of communication and the disjunctive semantic fragments that survive, plunderverse celebrates the possibilities of speaking through source texts” (“Plunderverse”). Betts writes an intelligent and interesting history here, drawing useful connections, but his argument that “Plunderverse” is more successful than similar operations that happen not to be called “plunderverse” is ultimately unconvincing. 56 Piuma is close but ultimately incorrect in this assertion. Ratcliffe writes through all 154 sonnets in [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG, although he doesn’t broadcast this fact anywhere. Bervin, though Nets appears complete on first glance, omits an alarming number of source sonnets and never mentions their absence. Although she claims to “use /// the whole” (134), Bervin “writes” only 60 out of 154 available sonnets, omitting sonnets 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 17, 19, 25, 30, 31, 32, 36, 37, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 48, 50, 51, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 62, 65, 66, 67, 70-92, 94, 100- 115, 118-121, 123, 123, 125, 131, 132, 133, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, and 151-154. Kaplan 67 anyone could have completed a similar erasure, the fact remains—the fact that Piuma stresses— he actually did. For Piuma, conceiving the project, enacting it, and making it accessible completes the creative act. The potential skepticism of readers, even readers who are well-versed in the wide- ranging work of contemporary poetry, is a true concern for the authors of erasure projects and procedural poetics. We find this unease reflected not only in framing devices and introductions but also in self-referential poetic content, like Hoover’s poem in the form of a “Preface.” These explicitly or implicitly self-referential poems acknowledge or draw attention to the project’s/author’s aims, highlighting the artistry of selection or procedure. Bervin’s distillation of sonnet 150, the final poem in Nets, reads “that bright / becoming of things / in the very refuse / such strength,” reminding readers that though she may be culling “refuse,” her poetic selections are “bright” and show “strength.” Alternately, she may be intending “refuse” as a verb, showing there is “strength” in “refusing” to “become”—in refusing to write a poem. If we take “refuse” more literally as a “re-fusing” of two or more disparate parts together, Bervin’s act becomes one of rejoining elements of Shakespeare’s original sonnet 150 that were always there. It turns out that in “O, from what power hast thou this powerful might” the poem about “that bright / becoming of things” has always been waiting; Bervin’s act is to highlight this connection. The multiple ways of reading Bervin’s selections are part of what makes Nets successful—using fragmented forms require readers to acknowledge the entirety of her processes and the possibilities of her products. A preoccupation with procedure is evident in many of these works. Betts’s poems, while including variety in subject matter, 57 also reveal modes of self-consciousness. His poem “31” 57 In addition to his hockey musings in chapter 7, Betts examines the worlds of science fiction in chapter 14; in “135” he writes “Still Shatner / smiles / the future” (205), and in “142.” “cyborgs are / finally / irreducible” (212). Kaplan 68 reads “spring / winter / fall / summer // the order / undid” (61), reminding readers of his project to “misread” (7) and re-order Shakespeare’s sonnet, and to show us something new in the process of such un-doing. In “18” when Betts writes, “there is no / discounted / letter” (40), we are referred back to the larger project—how could one compose one hundred and fifty new poems out of a single fourteen-line sonnet, after all, without making each letter count? Too, Ratcliffe’s fixation on the “present-absent” (23), the “sometime absent” (21) and “everything / but / present” (8) runs through [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG, prompting readers to recall not only the source text the author began with but the long gap between the 17 th century publication of the sonnets and Ratcliffe’s erasures of them in the late 20 th century. As his poems examine “a / new / eye, unused / in / long since / vanished sight” (15) or note “a / thousand / from the book / forgot” (13), they evoke the author’s procedure as he brings “a / new / eye” to show us how to read “the book / forgot.” The poems here, as they are “found / Of others’ voices” (56), evoke the plurality of possibilities of composition—if there is one way to erase a sonnet, there are “a / thousand” (13) ways. 58 The often-cryptic nature of erasure poems—they are fragment, after all—that allows for multiple readings is a strength of such work, making book such as Bervin’s Nets and Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG nuanced and particularly rewarding to read poetically. 59 There is never only one possibility for interpretation; Ratcliffe explains in his essay “Writing 58 While Ratcliffe chooses not to include an introduction, afterword, or note on the text within [where late that sweet] BIRDS SANG, his essays and critical work, like those in Listening to Reading, are evidence of the author’s engagements not only with Shakespeare’s sonnets but with the larger issues relevant to this type of participatory writing. 59 Piuma’s e-book is a sonnet erasure as well, but because he doesn’t actively engage in the act of selection, instead using random methods, a self-reflexive reading is often unsatisfying. Though “whose / tillage ?” (III), he questions in his erasure of sonnet 3 and writes, “on ; / art; / draw” (XXIV) and “The ! / , record , / of , / Show , / Since ! / what / composed” (LIX), the fragmentation in this volume is too extreme. The visual aspects of his work, that he saves the original sonnet punctuation, make the poems more pleasurable when read visually—not as lines that follow one another, but as clouds of words. Looking at Piuma’s sonnets, we are most aware of what is visually missing, not only the words but the text-block that makes up the sonnet form. Kaplan 69 [Echoes] Writing” that poetic work that draws from source texts has “less to do with personal expression than with an arrangement of materials in the medium in ways that resonate with the multiple harmonies (or dissonances) made apparent to the writer engaged in the act of composition” (47). The poems in Nets and [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG show readers the process and product of erasure, as well as the struggle behind creating this type of “work.” As the authors call into question their own works’ legitimacy, even as they are composing the poems, their honesty and self-criticism draws us in. If Ratcliffe writes that his poems are “new / at first” (60), “not / built up / novel, nothing” (62), coming from a “form / too / simple / spent?” (63), we too begin to question them. Ultimately, Ratcliffe decides “the / form / stands” (63); that form is complete even though it uses only found language. Near the end of [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG in the erasure of sonnet 150, he dares readers to contradict: “say I / take? / think on the / all / that / do / I not / present” (75). Bervin reminds herself, in her lifting of sonnet 95, to “heed this privilege / The hardest knife,” noting that even cutting language, carving a new poem from an older one, is a “privilege” and not a right, drawing attention to the act of excising. Her gentleness is reflected in the layout of the volume: though Bervin “knife[s]” (95) and shears (68) his work, she is careful not to mutilate Shakespeare’s poems. As his original lines are given in a gray typeface, too, backing her selected words, she does not actually remove the bard’s language from the page (see fig. 25). Too, the narrator of Nets is Fig. 25. Bervin's Sonnet 134. Nets (Brooklyn: Ugly Ducking, 2004) Print. Kaplan 70 self-conscious of her own poetic status. She notes, “I //////// use /// the whole, and yet I am not” (134) “Will” (135) out of Sonnets 134 and 135. But, by continuing through the volume, we find first the acknowledgment of the problematic nature of the erasure project—“I am not” (134) “Will” (135)—and, second, a quest for recognized authorship—“Will” (135), “hold me / to // my name” (136). 60 Both Ratcliffe and Bervin recognize the complexities of “taking” and “using” language from another source but want readers to “think on the / all” (Ratcliffe 75) and “hold me / to // my name” (Bervin 136). These new volumes are more than plagiarized poems or lazy compositions—they do the mental work of poetic process, and they ask to be read as such. Using “the whole” of a source text and acknowledging the challenging of that choice, each of these authors makes a new “whole” that extends, complements, and problematizes the undertaken project. When we remember to experience the book as a unit, these projects gain in strength. The poems combine across pages in compelling and useful ways, and emerging themes of erasure and procedure broaden the scope of our reading experience. Because, as Jerome McGann argues in The Textual Condition, a text is “an interactive locus of complex feedback operations” (12), we must look beyond the discrete poem to the book as a whole to better understand the work. McGann explains, “[w]e must attend to the textual materials which are not regularly studied by those interested in ‘poetry’: to typefaces, bindings, book prices, page format, and all those textual phenomena usually regarded as (at best) peripheral to ‘poetry’ or ‘the text as such” (13). 61 These 60 These lines also become the book’s dedication: “For Will—hold me to my name.” In Bervin’s call to Shakespeare the contemporary author could have easily selected “thy” from line 13 of sonnet 136 instead of “my” from line 14, asking the canonical author to “hold me / to // thy /name” instead. Perhaps the decision reveals that the appropriative writer’s loyalties ultimately lie with the self; in not-writing the goal is to compose a poem for the contemporary self to be proud of, rather than to pay homage to or accurately represent an other author’s voice. 61 “All books are visual….All books are tactile and spatial as well – their physicality is fundamental to their meaning” (197) writes Johanna Drucker in “The Book as a Visual Form.” While Drucker is leading up to a discussion of artists’ books that can be “read” even as they may not have text in them, the line of reasoning can be Kaplan 71 contemporary erasures and appropriations are published by small and independent presses, and the relatively small print runs of these books allows for more detailed and precise engagement with visual elements of production. Reading such texts, we see a presentation of the poems, but we also often find an understanding of the project or the nature of erasure reflected in production decisions. Bervin’s publisher, Ugly Duckling Presse, makes a tactile little pocket-sized volume out of Nets; letter-pressing the cover and including Shakespeare’s language in gray alongside Bervin’s selected black- lettered words, the poems are printed on one side of the page only and page numbers are omitted for a streamlined presentation, privileging the art of composition over unnecessary ornament. Hoover’s Sonnet 56, published by small Los Angeles press Les Figues, follows the basic design of other books in their TrenchArt: Maneuvers Series (tall and narrow, 4¼ x 9¼”) but adds a special element: the text of Shakespeare’s sonnet 56 fills the inside of the French-fold front and back covers in a large 62 gray sans serif typeface, effectively encasing all Hoover’s forms and adaptations within Shakespeare’s language (see fig. 26). Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me, too, is a tactile, pebble-papered pocket-sized book with heavy laid paper pages. As the extended to a discussion of any book—we are always reading the book as an object, even if we are not conscious of such an act. 62 This typeface grows larger and taller as the poem progresses, beginning at a height of ¼ inch for a lowercase letter on the inner front cover and ending with a ½ inch height at the lower back cover. Fig. 26. Inner back cover of Sonnet 56. (Los Angeles: Les Figues, 2009) Print. Kaplan 72 poems within are separated into chapters by lines of Shakespeare’s sonnet 150 running across the gutter of the book, Betts’s compositions are conspicuously overwhelmed by Shakespeare’s bolded language; lest a reader get lost in the contemporary author’s erasures, roughly every fifteen pages the reader is pinned down again by a line from Shakespeare (see fig. 27). Similarly, Ratcliffe’s crayoned-over sonnet on the front and back covers of [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG shows readers the nature of the project while sandwiching it between Shakespeare’s language. Slack Buddha Press’s image of Shakespeare’s head floating like a fetus in a grayscale sonogram print for the cover of Mohammad’s Sonnagrams 1-20 puns on the nature of the sonnet project—as if Mohammad’s wacky sonnagrams were birthed by some combination of the 15th and 21st centuries. An emphasis on book design that informs content (Ratcliffe, Mohammad, Hoover), foregrounds the process of poem-making (Bervin, Betts, Ratcliffe), and invites readers in with its tactile qualities (Bervin, Betts) inspires readers to think not only of the poems as discrete pieces of writing but also of the book as a thing, as an object to be understood and admired. As these visual elements highlight qualities of the book-as-object, these books invite a return to the elusive textual magic of the bound volumes of Shakespeare’s time. Exaggerating presentational qualities and physical aspects of book-ness usually taken for granted, these texts first reinforce Fig. 27. Chapter 9 layout, The Others Raisd in Me (Toronto: Pedlar Press, 2009) Print. Kaplan 73 that acts of manipulation, appropriation, and fuzzy authorship are legitimate and relevant parts of the contemporary reading experience. A return to the book means that not only might readers turn to Shakespeare’s original source text to inform our understanding of the new poems, we should also return to often forgotten elements of reading. These new erasures and appropriations, when most successful, embody a reading process that activates all elements of a text, from language to concept to history to design. When viewed from our contemporary perspective, the features of these books remind us how careful curation can resonate to create not only a volume of poetry but an embodiment of a poetics. Kaplan 74 Coda: “Destroying” the Text to Create the Poem In a concurrent act of destruction and creation, contemporary poets/book-artists turn to source texts as fodder to generate new poetic compositions. Beyond considering language as material for creative work, here we witness an act where the entirety of the original book object—its appearance, size, color, binding, presentation, contents, and actual words—becomes the source text for a new creative act. We see this genre borne out in a multitude of recent examples, ranging from an implicit homage toward the author or original poem to more explicit (and sometimes deviant) scannings or type-settings of the altered source-book. Literary appropriations essentially begin with Tom Phillips’s 1970 art book A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel—a text which has been continually updated and published in multiple editions 63 and is now available in its entirety for viewing online. 64 Contemporary poets have begun to add more language-oriented perspectives to the work of visually altered texts. In these most recent incarnations, the book and the page become a physical medium for art-making, and the poem becomes a destructive-creative force, often displaying self-awareness of its own composition. Such manipulations may re-charge the work of source volumes or authors, bringing older or obscured literature to contemporary readers, who will respond to and experience these changed texts in new ways. While poetic appropriated books are not always artist’s books per se, it is helpful to consider discussions of contemporary artists’ books in order to better understand the genre to which these new texts belong. In No Longer Innocent: Book Art in America 1960-1980 (2005), Betty Bright defines “An artist’s book [as] a book made by an artist…. Every aspect of the 63 Phillips began the project of A Humument in 1966; the 5 th edition (2012) is the most recent available. 64 At http://humument.com/. Kaplan 75 book—from content to materials to format—must respond to the intent of the artist and cohere into a work that is set in motion with a reader’s touch” (3). Poet and book artist Johanna Drucker’s definition is broader: “an artist’s book is a book created as an original work of art, rather than a reproduction of a preexisting work. And also,…it is a book which integrates the formal means of its realization and production with its thematic or aesthetic issues” (The Century 2) and leaves some room for my present discussion. Visual and conceptual projects like Marcel Duchamp’s 1919 “Unhappy Readymade,” a geometry book hung “by strings on the balcony of his apartment in the rue Condamine; the wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear out the pages” (quoted in Cabanne 61) may have more in common with current appropriated books than some poetic work. The looser definition of an artist’s book “which is a record of its own making” (Drucker The Century 191) may be a more apt descriptor for the texts I consider. Phillips’s A Humument, physical copies of which are now housed at The Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, may in fact “[epitomize] the very best and most beautiful of visual poetic artist books of the 20th and 21st century” (“Visual Poetic”); no matter one’s background or interest in art, the pages of a Humument are impressive. The artist’s ability to depict his process and project on every page, as well as illuminate the text with color and image, is striking. But more than the final product(s) itself, Phillips’s constant and evolving artistic process is well worth exploring. The author explains, “The original copy of A Human Document that I started out with in 1966 was worked on without destroying any of its pages…. Unlike this integral and somewhat fragile version the revised pages have been worked on using one side only mounted on acid-free paper to make them not only more durable but easily framable” (“Introduction to”). The book as an object is obviously important to Phillips, and his own work’s Kaplan 76 simultaneous status as framable visual art and readable bound book is a key element in its subsequent and incessant editionality: By 1973 I had worked every page…Seeing the book shown as a whole and in this state being issued in the loose sheets of Ian Tyson’s Tetrad Press edition gave me some satisfaction, but the feeling that I could fail better began to nag. The first bound trade edition…marked the end of a dormant period. The book had become a book again and in its turn a suitable case for treatment. (“Introduction to”) That Phillips, a visual artist, finds pleasure when the book becomes a book again shows the importance of the book as an object in its own right, as opposed to a loose series of visual images. A return to the book—the book as form, the book as historical document, the book as physical object—brings creative inspiration. Just as Phillips physically altered pages from source copies of W.H. Mallock’s 1892 novel A Human Document by painting, collaging, and drawing over them to create his own Humument, others engage in more explicitly “poetic” work through similar actions. In radi os (1977, 2005), Ronald Johnson’s erasure of Paradise Lost, the author begins with a physical treatment of the source text, blacking out Milton’s language and allowing only selected words and letters to remain. This evidence of Johnson’s physical alteration is not obvious in the two small press publications of Johnson’s work, a 1977 publication by Sand Dollar Press and a 2005 reissue by Flood Editions; in these printed volumes the blacked-out words and letters of Johnson’s draft are signified by empty space rather than visually inked over. However, indications of continued attention to the physical source text remain, especially in the 1977 Sand Dollar Press edition. While this volume’s back end sheet states that the “text facsimile is from the 1892 (Cromwell) edition of Milton,” according to literary executor Peter O’Leary “the text consists of a razored copy of the 1892 edition [Johnson] used for his initial crossing-out. You can Kaplan 77 even see razor marks on some of the pages” (“Saturday, March 29, 2003). 65 When we note that on one page of Sand Dollar’s radi os the running header reads “RADI OST,” instead of “RADI OS” 66 —revealing the original header PARADISE LOST—, it becomes clear that the specific 1892 edition, in appearance as well as content, is integral to Johnson’s compositional work in radi os and to the presentation of the subsequent book (see fig. 28 and fig. 29). An even more explicitly physical book alteration, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow, in which source text from an obscure novella is whited out in order to reveal a new book of poems, was published by Wave Books in 2006. Already relatively well-known as a poet, 65 Though the 2005 edition notes, “Radi os was originally published by Sand Dollar Books in Berkeley, California. The plates for that edition were created in facsimile from The Poetical Works of John Milton” (“A Note”), further muddying the waters of process. 66 This occurs once in the text, on the unnumbered fourth page of section 011. Fig. 29. Front Cover. radi os (Chicago: Flood Editions, 2005) Print. Fig. 28. Ronald Johnson’s copy of Milton. Poets.org., The Academy of American Poets, 10 Aug. 2012, Web, 2 July 2013 http://poets.org.tumblr.com/post/29126891240/myimagin arybroolyn-ronald-johnsons-copy-of Kaplan 78 Ruefle’s publication of A Little White Shadow asks us to re-imagine her as a visual artist. Wave Books classifies her text as an “art book,” describing Ruefle’s process as “selectively painting” rather than composing (Wave). Too, excerpts of the project were exhibited in an art gallery as “visual art” in 2006 (Freeman). The book itself is a tiny, slender volume, sleek with faux- yellowed covers and interior pages; inside prose blocks are painted over with correction fluid to reveal phrases and words, often combining to form cryptic sentences. Certainly the object Ruefle has made is compelling because of its appearance, but its lack of explanation also draws readers in. When I first encountered the volume, I was intrigued by the notion that perhaps Ruefle had made the whole thing up—that is, written a long prose piece, attributed it to an imaginary author, and then doctored the pages of that invented piece in order to make poetry. I was wrong. A Little White Shadow, it turns out, is a book replicating—and containing—another book. The title pages and acknowledgements are simultaneously Ruefle’s and not; one interior page lists “Copyright © 2006 by Mary Ruefle” while the facing page reads “Copyrighted by E. M. M. / April, 1889.” 67 The production process for Wave’s 2005 A Little White Shadow must have included dismantling Ruefle’s painted and stickered bound volume of E. M. M.’s prose, scanning pages of the unbound book to form the new text (see figs. 30-32). A Little White Shadow is just one of many poetic/visual texts Ruefle has created through the process of erasure, but it is the only one readily available for purchase. The others are “old, friable, one-of-kind things” and may be viewed only on Ruefle’s website (“statement/books”). 67 A little research uncovers that E. M. M. is Emily Malbone Morgan, a writer and philanthropist who wrote and self-published the novella A Little White Shadow, a Christian-themed inspirational tale of a young heiress summering in Italy, to raise money “for the Benefit of a Summer Home / for Working Girls.” Morgan’s book was a success, as “[o]f the first edition of 500 copies only about 100 are left” mere “weeks” after publication (“A Little White Shadow”), and a third edition was released in 1890. Now, fewer than ten catalogued copies of E. M. M.’s work remain (First Search), and we likely know much more about the content and origins of her source text than Ruefle does. Kaplan 79 Other recent authors use similar procedures, though they may not physically alter a specific source volume in their course of poetic production. Aspects of the materiality and appearance of the source text on the page are often carefully preserved, however, as contemporary poets select letters and words to create new poetic work. In her book-length erasure of Emily Dickinson’s poems, THE MS OF M Y KIN (Shearsman 2009), Janet Holmes mimics the spacing of Dickinson’s poems and lines as presented in her source text, The Poems of Emily Dickinson, reading edition (Belknap Press, 1998) edited by R. W. Franklin. Holmes acknowledges both Dickinson’s work and Franklin’s specific edition in her new volume as “[e]ach poem…is titled by the year in which Dickinson composed the original(s), its order in the current sequence, and (in parentheses), the Franklin number of the erased poem” (“Note on the Text”). Holmes’s first poem is titled “1861.1 (185-186),” letting readers know—without needing to look to Dickinson’s or Franklin’s texts—that Dickinson’s original poem was written in the year 1861, it is the first poem in Holmes’s book, and Holmes’s poem corresponds to Dickinson’s poems numbered 185 and 186 in the Franklin edition. Beyond using framing mechanisms that point back to the source text(s), Holmes emphasizes a close allegiance to Dickinson’s original Fig. 31. Front Cover. A Little White Shadow (New York: Wave, 2006) Print. Fig. 32. Page 26. E.M.M., A Little White Shadow (Hartford: Brown & Gross, 1889) 26. Print. / Mary Ruefle A Little White Shadow (New York: Wave, 2006) 26. Print. Fig. 31. Front Cover. E.M.M., A Little White Shadow (Hartford: Brown & Gross, 1889) Print. Kaplan 80 language when she explains her poetic process on the Shearsman Books website: “in my typescripts…I actually type in the poem and then ‘color’ the erased words white. They’re there, but they don’t show up when printed” (“Janet”). Even as the 1998 Belknap Press edition is not physically represented in Holmes’s volume, that particular source is always present in Holmes’s THE MS OF M Y KIN. Visual texts that lean heavily on the source language and/or text object go beyond the work of alteration or poetic appropriation to present a collaboration with, and visual preservation of, source material. Jen Bervin emphasizes visual appearance in Nets, a book of poetic erasures of Shakespeare’s sonnets first published in 2004 (Ugly Duckling Presse). In this volume, Bervin composes new poems using only language from Shakespeare’s sonnets; Bervin’s work is represented in black ink while Shakespeare’s words are included on the same page in a gray typeface, encouraging a simultaneous double-reading of the new and old poems (see fig. 33). Also notable is Erica Baum’s recent collection Dog Ear (2011), a series of folded and squared pages selected from a variety of source volumes, scanned and bound into book form (see fig. 34). The new book contains only this series of high-resolution scans of the folded-over pages, 68 and the poetry here resides in Baum’s presentation of the fascinating junctures found by dog-earing the corners of already-written and already-printed language. Baum’s work, too, elevates the status of anonymous yellowed pages of prose from trade paperbacks, inviting us to experience these texts closely and carefully. By neglecting to write a single word, these poets use the art of selection to return readers to thinking of the book as an object, and the page as a poetic text in and of itself. 68 Well, and an introduction by Kenneth Goldsmith and an afterward by Béatrice Gross. These short essays frame Baum’s work as conceptual, visual, and poetic, emphasizing how her procedural processes make the work succeed. Kaplan 81 The act of destroying or altering a physical object—whether pulling from discarded books or canonical texts—to aid in or allow for poetic composition is a compelling, and often disturbing, notion. For writers, poets, artists, and bibliophiles, such acts may feel simultaneously disloyal and liberating. Roland Barthes advocates an understanding of the physical and conceptual text through study and fragmentation of it in The Pleasure of the Text (1975). Barthes refers to the pleasures he experiences reading the work of the Marquis de Sade to better understand how we enjoy disjunction: Two edges are created: an obedient, conformist, plagiarizing edge (the language is copied from its canonical state, as it has been established by schooling, good usage, literature, culture) and another edge, mobile, blank (ready to assume any contours), which is never anything but the site of its effect: the place where the death of language is glimpsed. These two edges, the compromise they bring about, are necessary. Neither culture nor its destruction is erotic; it is the seam between them, the fault, the flaw, which becomes so. (6-7) In contemporary works, the new text created by the appropriative act highlights that “seam” that Barthes finds so erotic. The eroticism Barthes suggests exists in the “seam” between two literary Fig. 33. Nets, sonnet 2. Jen Bervin, Nets (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2004) Print. Fig. 34. Plate VI, Fallout. Erica Baum, Dog Ear (Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling, 2011) Print. Kaplan 82 works may also explain readers’ attraction to these appropriated objects—they seem so ethically wrong but at the same time are so conceptually, visually, and physically appealing. The understanding of a literary text that reveals only pieces of an original as a point of taunting eroticism “where the garment gapes” (Barthes 9) is not limited to Barthes. Craig Dworkin too, in Reading the Illegible (2003), notices how “censoring marks keep open a space in which the work cleaves between two moments of composition, and they establish a second system of signification, a competing semiotic regime, within the field of the text” (143). Johanna Drucker explains that “it is this relationship of overlay and latency, of invention and constraint, which gives the transformed book its tension” (The Century 110). Even beyond discussions of a physical boundary (the gutter of the book, or the act of painting over the original text to create the “new” version), Barthes’s notion of a canonical edge meeting up with an unstable process of re-visioning is particularly apt in a discussion of current appropriative and citational literature, as many of these appropriative works draw on known source texts (Milton, Shakespeare, Dickinson) for their content. Even more importantly, Barthes refers to the text as “a fetish object” (27); the writerly goal, according to Barthes, might be “materializing the pleasure of the text, in making the text an object of pleasure like the others” (58). Phillips’s A Humument “materializes” notably, as his paintings and drawing on the pages of the mass-market novel work to turn it into an object more material than literary. Barthes explains, “The fetishist would be matched with the divided-up text, the singling out of quotations, formulae, turns of phrase, with the pleasure of the word” (63), and we can see the point borne out in Bervin’s Nets, when she writes how, “adding nothing” she “prick’d [words] out for pleasure” (20, italics mine). To take Barthes’s notions to an extreme, we might connect his assertion that “The writer is someone who plays with his mother’s body…:in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or in order to dismember it, Kaplan 83 to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body” (37) to Holmes’s work in THE MS OF M Y KIN, where the author identifies Dickinson as her “kin” in the title, then proceeds to play with, and even dismember, her text. Tension aside, the notion of fetishism may be taking the book-as-object notion a bit too far from the argument I want to make. What these books do is subvert our expectations—about a book, and more importantly, about a book of poetry—and offer readers an experience they had not expected when first confronting the book. Just as “Many artists' books…require that readers resist the relentless forward march of linear reading and let themselves succumb to the differing tempos of oscillatory reading and random reading, even in what appear to be conventional contexts within the book,” (Phillpot 7), so too do these new books of poetry disrupt the traditional reading process. Reading a book like Dog Ear, for example, we can receive the words on the page in different ways. We might read “Fallout” by following the lines “thing else with / known limit / fallout from / cooling / lovely / ruin.” But we might also interrupt that linearity by reading around the bend of the page: “thing else with i/n mattresses on / known limits /d) and there- / fallout from.” Too, reading these pages must be a poetic as well as visual experience; Baum’s book contains language that moves in a way that it can’t be anything but a poem. The repeating “l” sounds that guide us from “limit” “fallout” to “cooling / lovely” as well as the emphasis on the “o” make the poem a soundscape as well as a visual experience. More obviously poetic—as it is carved from canonical verse—, in Bervin’s Nets at the same time that “a weed of small worth / ask[s] ///////// to be new made” in black typeface we read Shakespeare’s grayscale Sonnet 2. While our inclination is to read linearly, in such appropriated texts we are continually interrupted by the structure, appearance, or conflict of the presentation of the book. Kaplan 84 While writers and readers and bookmakers may venerate the book-as-object, the nature of these affections may make the act of literary composition that much more intimidating. If a book is such an exquisite object, how could we deign to write or otherwise create one, after all? I find it difficult to physically modify books, especially literary ones; I tend to avoid writing in them or folding pages as if I could somehow damage the text, hurt the author, or affront the literary community by taking what is, in actuality, an insignificant action. We can see this hesitation is my images of Ruefle’s and E.M.M.’s texts—I prop the volumes open with a hand instead of flattening them in a scanner (see fig. 32); I am so determined to keep the books and their bindings intact that the image quality suffers. When I look at Baum’s Dog Ear I find the images of folded pages lovely, but I cringe a little thinking about that very real crease on a real page of what used to be a real book, the fold that can never be erased. The workshop adage “kill your darlings”—the notion that we cannot be freed to fully compose until we move past the useless hierarchies that are holding us back—may be apt; if the “darling” is the book, obscuring, deleting, or painting source material may allow the author to get on with the work of creating. Viewed in this way, textual manipulations become less akin to destruction and more like release: by physically altering or repurposing the source text, we are finally allowed to create. I might soothe myself by remembering that such source books can never truly be killed. Shakespeare’s sonnets, although altered in one version, still remain whole in another. Even Ruefle’s white-out of the rare novella, while appearing destructive, takes nothing away from that original book object—there are still available copies, and the original volume doctored by Ruefle remains, just covered over. We must be mindful, though. Treatments and manipulations of source materials may permit authors to generate work while aligning with and exploring their predecessors, offering a Kaplan 85 wonderful and fulfilling language game for aspiring and practicing poets. However, appropriations and erasures cannot avoid implicitly critiquing the book as an object and/or the author as a figure. Ronald Johnson describes the evolution of his text-work with radi os, saying, “I went to the bookstore and bought Paradise Lost [sic]. And I started crossing out. I got about halfway through it, kind of as a joke. But I decided you don't tamper with Milton to be funny. You have to be serious” (O’Leary). When we require ourselves as writers, readers, and artists, to be serious about the book—the object, the language, the appearance, the history, the literary content, the smell and weight and heft of it—we will allow ourselves finally to experience its work, and allow ourselves to see what it could be. In “Reading Artists’ Books” Clive Phillpot explains, “there are elements in the amalgam of parts which comprise the book, normally subject to unconscious or peripheral reading, that artists can invest with a more positive role. Therefore expanded reading can fruitfully include the conscious reading of the texture of the page, a heightened awareness of the edge of the page, and the reading of margins and spaces” (Phillpot 7). In the creation of new, appropriated poetic texts, writers take on the role of reader in Phillpot’s description; experiencing a heighted awareness of the parts of the book and being open to reading non-linearly, they conceptualize a new way to come at the work of writing. This moment—when we recognize the book as a fully authored and fully made object, and when we recognize that we cannot destroy it—we begin to know our own power. Our agency is as readers and writers and builders, not as destroyers. Notions of the “seam,” the “gap,” the “doubled” writing, the “erotic” destruction of objects are worthwhile but, more importantly for writers and bookmakers is getting to the point where that seam, that view is visible. Once we reach the place where two parts meet—the reader and the writer, the page and the eye, the old and the new—we can begin to see past it. Away from the page and toward the Kaplan 86 book. It may be that beginning from source language allows us to reach that seam more quickly. Rather than wrestle incessantly with the page or the poem, we can make the book, or allow the book to be made. In her essay “Self-Reflexivity in Book Form,” Drucker describes the artist book more precisely as a form [that] comes into being through an exploration of production means, rather than being conceived of in advance and merely executed by a printer or binder. Many artists’ books include some aspect of this attitude, though the concept of a book which is a record of its own making has, in some part, to involve the artist in the final printing as well as the writing or design. (The Century 191) While I would not identify myself technically as a book artist, I have extensive experience exploring and composing through the medium of the book as both author and small-press publisher. Moreover, my experience as a poet and scholar has allowed me a unique perspective from which to investigate the relationship between the artist book and the appropriated book of poetry. Having now undertaken multiple projects informed by and relying upon outside literary texts, I hope that a discussion of my own practice of these genres will allow readers to become familiar with the work that goes into creating a book-object, offering a different perspective on and better understanding of poetic books of made through acts of erasure, appropriation, or other modifications of sourced texts. *** 1. The Book Which Allows the Poem: In your neighborhood (2009) Kaplan 87 In your neighborhood (2009) was created as a direct result of the “Chapbooks and Artist’s Books” course 69 in Fall 2009. Motivated by binding structures studied over the course of the semester, I was intrigued by the possibilities for multiple readings that occur in the flag-book; in this structure, each leaf is made up of a series of “flags,” short pages which can fall either forward or backward as a result of opening or closing the book at different intervals (see fig. 35). 70 While I had poems and drafts and projects in-progress of my own available to use as language for the project, I was not inclined to use my own text for the book; because the flag structure allows for multiple narratives, I wanted to make the book free from preconceived notions of how the poem should progress. I selected a short story “Neighborhood,” which features a couple feeling unsettled in a new home, recovering from a burglary, and disagreeing with their lecherous landlord, to use as my source text. Having the text already-written—and, 69 English 599, at the University of Southern California; I co-taught the class with fellow graduate student Amaranth Borsuk and instructor-of-record Joseph Dane. 70 In the flag book, “rows of flags attached to opposing sides of each of the spine’s ‘mountain’ folds allow the artist to fragment and layer a number of complementary or contrasting images and narratives” (Hanmer). Fig. 35. Standing flag form, In your neighborhood. Genevieve Kaplan, 2009, Limited Edition Artist Book, Author’s Personal Collection. Kaplan 88 more importantly, written by someone else—made the subsequent creation of the book about the process of selecting and unfolding rather than composing. Rather than following the plot-line, I arranged the story’s text in a way that made the most sense for the new flag book structure. I chose to omit characters (the police, the landlord, the neighbor) from the story “Neighborhood,” leaving only two: “they”--“he” and “his wife.” The resulting book In your neighborhood is no longer “Neighborhood,” it is a series of moments and images that occur. To further this type of open reading, I removed capital letters and final punctuation when I adapted the source language to my book—making sure that no one definitive sentence or sentence structure could be formed. I was interested in visually replicating the “Neighborhood” in book form, and I took photographs of houses on local streets to use as the background for each page of text in the new volume. Grounding the fragmented language with grayscale photographic images of houses makes the “neighborhood” in the title(s) more tangible; also, as the house-fronts are each divided into three segments and flip from page to page, readers are reminded that the poem included in the book, too, is not rigid (see fig. 36 and fig. 37). Fig. 36. Flags lying flat. In your neighborhood. Genevieve Kaplan, 2009, Limited Edition Artist Book, Author’s Personal Collection. Kaplan 89 Even the starting point for In your neighborhood is not static. Opened traditionally, the book begins when “they awake”; when the book is pulled flat, the poem begins when “the walls are closer, / the ceiling lower.” The first is more narrative; “they awake” and readers see what surrounds them: the plants and man-made intrusions of the landscape. The second is more fragmented, beginning with an image (“the walls,” “the ceiling”) rather than an action (“they awake”), and this version includes the reader in the second stanza (“In your / neighborhood // they decide”) only to shift to third person as the page ends; in this entrance into the volume, readers must bring a little more to bear in order to progress through the book. 71 The source text, Sean Bernard’s short story “Neighborhood,” begins differently too; his first line reads, “First night, middle night, new abode, they awaken in disconnection” (1). In my use of the story I not 71 Depending on the way the volume is opened, the first three stanzas/flags may read they awake in or the walls are closer disconnection the ceiling lower there’s an attention In your to landscaping, dry neighborhood climate plants, lantana, poppy, they decide they succulent must visit the sea a lone pink flamingo is ironic Fig. 37. Sample page spread. In your neighborhood. Genevieve Kaplan, 2009, Limited Edition Artist Book, Author’s Personal Collection. Kaplan 90 only fragment and rearrange, I do some editing too: I don’t like the word “abode” (I think it’s maybe off-putting, literary-cutesy, especially to begin a book with), so I omit it. There are two endings 72 to In your neighborhood as well; both, with their notions of a happily-ever-after that will occur “always” despite any surroundings, mark a dramatic shift from the sentiment of the source text. “Neighborhood” ends on a sour-er note: “This…is the way to deal with the unhappy – being unhappy yourself. What a world” (11). The new book In your neighborhood is neither a reading of “Neighborhood” nor a retelling of it; instead, its aim is to select, edit, and re-present the scenery of the “Neighborhood” to create a new reading experience. One potential interpretation of the new project could be that I took a disturbing short story about an unhappy couple and spun it into something incessantly positive. When I go into Bernard’s “Neighborhood,” I make it a place where the couple will “laugh, always,” “forever, today, / yesterday.” But this is not the reading that I’m after. My book ultimately is not a recasting of the story—it is an object altogether different from it, and while knowing the narrative of the source text, or the relationship between me (the co-author of In your neighborhood) and my husband (the author of “Neighborhood”) may add interest to the volume, the new neighborhood is its own distinctive work, one that couldn’t exist without any of the elements that went into it creation: the source text, its flag-book form, or my distillation. 72 The endings may read: they walk away, or they embrace and quickly, down he tosses the box to the sofa and sea to constant sea, they’re laughing and forever, today, and smiling yesterday, he and his wife would sea to constant sea, laugh, always and forever, today, yesterday, he even here, in and his wife would this neighborhood laugh, always Kaplan 91 2. The Book Which creates the Poem: Alice’s Alphabet (2010) This project is two-fold: first, the creation of two long poems, composed entirely of lines from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; then the binding of these poems into book form. In this project, my initial consideration was of the source text. Responding to the call for submissions to the 2010 USC Libraries Wonderland Awards, I knew my project must somehow stem from Lewis Carroll. 73 The work of poetic indexing in found poetry and Oulipian procedures, memories of a poetry reading performed by Joshua Clover 74 where he read from the index of his book of poetry as if it were a poem, 75 and An Index to “In Memoriam” (1826) compiled by Lewis Carroll, at the University of Southern California Library’s special collections, influenced the Alice book. I was intrigued in particular by diminutive size of An Index as well as its existence as a separate, hardcover book; the Index does not include Tennyson’s poem, only a subject listing and partial lines from the work. Though I did not literally make an index of Carroll’s story, I used the idea of alphabetical and subject organization to create a new work. I chose the main character of Alice as my subject, and in the first poem, Alice’s Alphabet: An Explanation, I selected all the sentences from my copy of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland that began with the word “Alice” as my source material. I started this exercise thinking by highlighting descriptions of Alice, readers might gain insight into her character, but I became equally interested in what the sentences themselves were doing once removed them from their context. In the process of alphabetization, two particularly interesting results emerged. First, when read aloud, these sentences place emphasis on sound and 73 In his 1991 introduction to the Oulipo Compendium, Jacques Roubaud cites Lewis Carroll as a “’master’ of Oulipo” and a “great anticipatory plagiarist” (40), making Carroll a particularly apt choice for my own “plagiarism.” 74 at AWP 2004, I believe. 75 More recently, Peter Gizzi’s Ode: Salute to the New York School, “an abecedarian cento of New York School poems” (Lettermachine) was published to some acclaim. The abecedarian form, where a book is organized by the letters of the alphabet (like a children’s book: a is for apple, etc.) is relatively common in book arts, too, as a straightforward organizing factor. Kaplan 92 language rather than on meaning and order (as Carroll does in much of his writing), heightening poetic attributes—the first page progresses through the phrases “Alice caught the baby,” “Alice considered a little,” “Alice could see,” and “Alice crouched down,” for example—rather than emphasizing narrative or interpretation. Second, that my constraint-based poem is not without meaning. Alice’s thoughtfulness and puzzlement are key elements of Alice’s Alphabet: An Explanation, and we can see these themes repeated as my version of Carroll’s story begins with Alice “begin[ning] to feel very uneasy” and ends with her going “timidly up to the door, and knock[ing].” In the next poem, Alice’s Alphabet: Alice Explains, I selected all the sentences from Carroll’s book when Alice herself is speaking, sentences that began with “I.” I had in mind to explore whether Carroll’s third-person descriptions of the girl were different from when he allows her to think or speak aloud in first-person. I used the same alphabetical organization in Alice’s Alphabet: Alice Explains so comparisons between the two could easily be made. In this version, I found that Alice does appear somewhat stronger, as many of her sentences are exclamations. She begins the poem in anger, shouting “I advise you to leave off this minute!” and ends aggressively too, with “I think I can kick a little!” I notice, ultimately, that the Alice speaking in Alice’s Alphabet: Alice Explains is more assertive and confident than the “timid” and “uneasy” Alice described in Alice’s Alphabet: An Explanation. The next step of my project was to best present these explorations. In his 1991 introduction to the Oulipo Compendium, Jacques Roubaud offers a suggested “law” of Oulipo: “‘[a] text written according to a constraint describes the constraint’” (Mathews 42), which Drucker eerily echoes as she describes “a book which is a record of its own making.” I have ultimately tried to illustrate these concepts through my Alice work, making my source text, concept, and constraint reflected in every aspect of the book’s appearance and manner. The Kaplan 93 alphabetic ordering of the sentences evokes something of a children’s primer, and I decided to further highlight this quality—as well as the description of my selected constraint—by titling my works “Alice’s Alphabet.” For the book-object of Alice’s Alphabet, I chose a 3½ by 5½ inch size, 76 which is visually appealing and easy to hold but doesn’t have the heft to attempt to take the place of the source text, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. In addition, while I wanted to present these poems as little books—just as the Index is its own book—, I didn’t necessarily want to privilege one book over the other, nor did I want to combine them into a single volume. I chose the dos-à-dos form, two books bound back-to-back so that they share the same cover but can be opened with equal ease from either end (see fig. 38 and fig. 39). The dos- à-dos seemed a particularly apt choice as each poem presents a different take on—and in this case, different excerpts of—the same story. 76 Again, I went back to the Index to “In Memoriam” when considering the size and presentation of my final project. The Index is fairly small, approximately 4 x 6¾ inches, which I thought was comfortable to hold while still marking the text as slightly “other” or “lesser”—the Index may be a book unto itself, but is not a whole, full-sized text- object; it is an accompaniment. Fig. 38. Standing book, Alice’s Alphabet. Genevieve Kaplan; 2010; Limited Edition Artist Book; G. Edward Cassady, M.D., and Margaret Elizabeth Cassady, R.N., Lewis Carroll Collection; Doheny Library, University of Southern California; Los Angeles, CA. Fig. 39. Top View, Alice’s Alphabet. Genevieve Kaplan; 2010; Limited Edition Artist Book; Artist’s Private Collection; La Verne, CA. Kaplan 94 3. The Poem Which Allows for the Book: (aviary) In (aviary), a book-length collection of poetry, fifty-two of my own poems are complimented by permutations and modifications of Mina Loy’s short prose poem “Ladies in an Aviary.” (aviary) is composed of four sections: two using Loy’s prose poem as a compositional aide, and two without. In the Loy-influenced sections, eleven poems are made up solely from Loy’s language; another eighteen take their titles from phrases occurring in Loy’s poem. Early on in my process of conceptualizing and drafting (aviary), 77 “Ladies in an Aviary” suggested itself to me as an organizing principle, as a happy coincidence, as a difficult imagination, as a devastating image. Loy’s description of women whose “breasts are pouting” (line 1), posing as prize birds inside a cage, watched by onlookers, and waiting for men to select and adorn them, as “love…’tis a woman’s whole existence” (line 12) resonated with the themes of enclosure and identification with the natural world that I had been working through so far in (aviary). Loy’s language echoed “the predatory (preliminary) / birds” and “the servile / mode” (2) I had already begun writing about, as well as the “sleek / furtive wing that flies near…to taunt, to get caught” (6). Too, this outside source added a more explicit tension of gender and sexuality—the voyeurism that turns a little ugly when pushed. As gardens and natural enclosures—the location of all the poems in (aviary)—are frequently considered feminine or feminized spaces, I appreciated that Loy’s poem, with its “sugar of fictitious values” (line 5) and its “nasty sweep of feathers” (line 16), added both recognition and scathing assessment of such a space. I use two main methods to incorporate language from “Ladies in an Aviary” into my volume of poetry, both at the compositional level. I select phrases from Loy’s poem as titles for 77 I had drafted out ten or fifteen poems, which I was thinking of as a set. But it wasn’t until I read Loy’s prose poem that I began to consider extending the project to something book-length. It is safe to say that I wouldn’t have written (aviary) if not for Loy’s poem. Kaplan 95 my own pieces; the first sentence of her prose poem, “They are so lovely and they cannot get out,” becomes the title of my poem on p.21 of (aviary). Subsequent sentences, “Their breasts are pouting as they trail their lacy bustles among the azaleas. Dispelling the shadows of their lashes in starry veneration, they lift that flat look at the naïve to the man who brings sugar to the cage,” become my titles “They trail there, they trail” (56), “Dispelling the shadows” (57), and “That flat look at the naïve” (22). These titles were selected early on in the drafting process, and Loy’s language directly inspired all of the poems they entitle. However, not every word of Loy’s “Ladies…” is represented through my titles, 78 or in the poems that make up the book. This purposeful ambiguity has its precedent: Loy’s “Ladies in an Aviary” is itself an amalgamation of Loy fragments found in the archives at the Beinecke Library. Editor Roger L. Conover explains that “Ladies” ‘is improvised from unpublished notes, prose fragments, or drafts found in M.L.’s folders. Title and arrangements are the editor’s” (329). 79 The entirety of Loy’s (or Conover’s) prose poem is not represented in my (aviary) and could not be reconstructed from its fragments. The second mode used to incorporate “Ladies in an Aviary” into my volume is that of erasing, alphabetizing, re-arranging, and otherwise permutating Loy’s language to create new poems. The titles of these poems are derived from erasures or manipulations of Loy’s own title, and I place these titles in parentheses to indicate their separate source materials. The first in this series, “(Ladies in an aviary),” begins: “a flat lovely sugar trail / a flock lump sugar tremor / a flutter man sugar up / a folded, man, sweep us” (lines 1-4, 19). This poem was composed by alphabetizing all the words in “Ladies…”, making four columns of the alphabetized language, 78 Admittedly, while each one of Loy’s sentences is represented in my titling procedure, I modified and omitted some phrases or words; in my poem title “They trail there, they trail,” for example, I use repetition to make Loy’s line “they trail their lacy bustles” more open-ended. 79 Ladies in an Aviary” is included in the section “Ready Mades,” (311-322) in the 1982 Jargon Society copy of The Lost Lunar Baedeker. My research has not found “Ladies in an Aviary” published elsewhere, with the 1982 collection marking its only appearance as a poem by Mina Loy. Too, it is not the only collaged text that Conover “collected”; the section “Ready Mades” (311-322) includes six “improvised” compositions (329). Kaplan 96 and reading across the columns. A later poem, “(vary)” (26), uses a similar permutation, working through the poem alphabetically beginning with “aviary” (line 1) and ending with “sugar” (lines 25-26). The poem begins: “aviary // burns, bustles // clouds, cries, curves” (lines 1-3) and ends “satin, satisfied, sedately / settle, shadows // sugar, sugar, sugar / sugar” (lines 23-26). With this method I am able to highlight certain elements of Loy’s composition, like the repeated use of the word “sugar” which appears four times in the source text. Similarly, words that hold their own on a line take on more weight: “diamond” (line 4), “if” (line 12), “inquire” (line 13), and “naïve” (line 18). When Loy’s “man who / brings sugar to the cage” (lines 3-4) becomes my “man, man, massive” (line 17), the man takes on figurative weight, becomes imposing, and in juxtaposition with the previous line “love, lovely, lump” (16), sexual. In other Loy-languaged poems in this book I continue using methods of repetition and variation—“(ladies vary)” (58)—and selected omission—“(ladies)” (30) and “(in aviary)” (33)—, as well as erasure procedures reminiscent of Janet Holmes’s 80 in “(lies in an aviary)” (63) and “(dies an aviary)” (66). *** The experience of creating these very different collections—In your neighborhood, Alice’s Alphabet, and (aviary)—under the influence of such varied source material has unquestionably been an integral component not only of my poetics but to my critical development as well. Participating in the blurring between process and product and between reader and writer has allowed an understanding of the appropriative mode from both ends of the spectrum. As a writer, I found I was guiding the writing (the process of selection) at the same 80 I color unselected text white to preserve the spacing of the original. Kaplan 97 time the source language was guiding me, often leading me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated. Both the book-as-object and the poem-as-sourced-material necessarily delay and obscure the source text, adding tension—the struggle to comprehend, the pleasure of repetition and recognition—to what might be otherwise innocuous language. And because book-making (and in these cases, poem-making) is the tangible byproduct of the simultaneous acts of reading as writing and writing as reading, each subsequent reader is invited not only to observe the processes of arranging, making, and writing but also to potentially participate in it. Appropriated poetic book-objects demystify writing as a series of choices: we can see what was selected at the same time we might see what was left behind, putting a different type of pressure on the writer, who is always aware of what she is doing, and now also always aware that the reader can see it. The aspiration for these projects is to write something moving, compelling, and emotionally driven—as with any literary endeavor—but here the writerly objective must also be to do justice to the source text, make its use worth while. The creative book-work I have completed here is very “of the moment,” participating in larger themes of 21 st century textual-poetic interest. As contemporary books of poetry so frequently reveal and highlight a dependence upon and interaction with source materials—as evidenced not only by the volumes of poetic book-objects I have discussed previously but also by non-visual textual manipulations like Paul Legault’s The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems (McSweeney’s 2012), Jill Magi’s Slot (Ugly Duckling, 2011), Srinkanth Reddy’s Voyager (UC Press, 2011), or Christian Hawkey’s Ventrakl (Ugly Duckling, 2010)—this reliance becomes not only a compositional device but also a framing mechanism for readers. The success of these volumes, and many others, lies in their ability to invite an audience to slip between the pleasure of reading and the Kaplan 98 invitation of creative arrangement and de-composition. Dworkin’s assertion that by “Keeping both the source and derivative simultaneously in view, and making visible the traces of that doubled presence, the treated text is less a parasite on its source than a pair of sights” (136) is quite compelling—it elevates the concept of the appropriated book or sourced poem to both active participant in and worthwhile contribution to the larger literary landscape. Kaplan 99 (aviary) Kaplan 100 Contents The birds had taken over 1 A swift (quick) justice 2 Apart from its pleas 3 Night birds (over night earth) 4 If they want to feed, it is theirs 5 To keep them in the dirt is by design 6 Each day (a new needle on the gravel) 7 Wall-climber, ducker-underer 8 Or everything’s washed away 9 Thin-hipped they arrive 10 Part of this season 11 So they’ve left, though nothing’s fallen 12 The birds browner, the sky bluer, the branches 13 Sifting through the air (motes, sinking down) 14 The pattern of their beating wings 15 I’m there the moment it begins 16 In the morning, a different feeling 17 The windows, the fence 18 *** (ladies in an aviary) 19 They are so lovely and they cannot get out 21 That flat look at the naïve 22 (in an aviary) 23 It is so sweet this sugar, the sugar 25 (vary) 26 A flutter of modest aspiration 27 (ladies) 28 Shift up and down the wires (that close them in) 29 Holding the sugar higher 30 (in aviary) 31 Waiting, with wings 32 Kaplan 101 The great strong man 33 (ladies a a a) 34 More glistening than gas 35 (a vary) 36 A tremor of ribbon 37 It is very wistfully that they recompose 38 *** Different (comma) difficult 39 And 40 Because I wanted to be on the path 41 If anyone is to ask 42 In the fog, the world 43 You who wouldn’t survive, otherwise 44 Reliving below and above 45 Maybe next week, maybe the week after 46 (I’m) seated, or imagining 47 Testing, or the group of them 48 Of the tree in the path 49 Up the tree or down the tree 50 There has been a storm 51 (Cage) (tree-cage) 52 Found out, acted upon 53 *** To accumulate the muddy tone 54 (ladies vary) 55 They trail there, they trail 56 Dispelling the shadows 57 (a a aviary) 58 What would you like us to be 59 (lies in an aviary) 60 As if on clouds, waiting 61 Here is love 62 (dies an aviary) 63 Kaplan 102 A light as forgotten (to us) 64 Their impatience—to be satisfied 65 *** Kaplan 103 The birds had taken over and that was enough pleasant talk a little chirp, there a peck and a scattering of seed and they get smarter by the hour, defined by the sun and the shadow the leaves that appear on the dead-looking tree the breeze that flicks the branches the setting sun the at-last-unforeseen black wing of the bird searching under the elevated joint of the fence the angle of the earth that is summer, is spring. is one moment left, one dream-world in slanted shade one swipe of light in the eyes, one place for birds to assemble, to trim the branches. an upset of the flock and a new one settles, talks back, is a clear day, or a sign that evens out, an assertion from the next mile over the birds are prone to jostling and feed extravagantly 1 Kaplan 104 A swift (quick) justice the birds in the yard swooped up by the other birds in the yard. the predatory (preliminary) birds. a cache of feathers rusting alongside the bicycle a thump in the outer foyer what they did was wrong, no doubt and where, and how. and the kind of flapping, which shouts—I won’t be fooled again. this was one last time that I tried. one brush over the fence—I could hear you sweeping. the servile mode of it. (to say I’m home alone)—the drifting touch of it, impulsive lift of it. each one we remember. (each light wing, approached and approaching) the thought I was about to have (that one). you. here. the branches rushing wildly. and over the fence. and beyond the next fence. and even the concrete fence (the certain word for it), beyond that, where some of us live, beforehand unafraid and that is almost enough 2 Kaplan 105 Apart from its pleas enough the night, the low murmurs that rise out and up. there aren’t many words fresh leaves, the dirt outside the fence, dug from underneath. the horn and the lights at night, the moon and the heat of it. and accurate disturbing calm. I shared with you then? or I shared with the tree, the hearth held for me. at night a pause and a cry a skinny back. a loaded leaf. it’s that place that wanders and calls out. it’s that scrawny bird which wanders, scrapes, and calls out and the lot of it cools who will hold out, having recently arrived, having sat on the stoop with the bird, left the bird alone on the stoop, and turned out the light 3 Kaplan 106 Night birds (over night earth) they root through the dirt spreading what seed was there around the day long, enough for the night not to pass talons catching it and (defeated) above the clinging rosemary. the night moment as I put things together as a rash or I ask for the dilemma to resolve the distinct chirp of one song the early moon I know the procession by its sound the warbler, this season the breezes too ash and seed at their feet the evening spread out we say they are strangers 4 Kaplan 107 If they want to feed, it is theirs if the moths get into it, then everyone eats the morning coming, its clouds (the one bird bigger than the morning) but the smoke settles in and we’re breathing the birds and I, and the house in the room, in the day on the raised surface that is mine daring, persistent, not about to panic— might we, for their heckling and grousing, their caterwauling slid between the door and the doorjamb and the sill they babble on, lay claim to the branches pick at the mess of seed on the ground 5 Kaplan 108 To keep them in the dirt is by design a scattering the leaves (like footsteps), the way I had envisioned, I wouldn’t be able to bite, underserved (and gnawing), the chicken flapping on the roof, calling down to me, not about to be alone at this (or actually paralyzed by its motion). the sky turns white as if (as if a blind) we could crouch and hide. peek out from (the breeze) the mess of branches. it’s a sleek furtive wing that flies near. it wants to taunt, to get caught you’re from a far-off place, according to your eyes and you’ll never be able to name all the birds here crumb of sunlight through the fence-slat and push of dust against the patio. which is where we’re at? sullen desert? as big a yard as we could want? something near us taking place? not about to let go? for this day to be shorter than the rest. this this day to be easier and far enough from what suffers us 6 Kaplan 109 Each day (a new needle on the gravel) the largest bird is the one to return, brown over white rocks, beak up over the branches (I find some loose feathers there). too bad the evening can’t support it (a happiness gesture, sounds that spill out all together) often we can’t smell the sea here, often enough the tops of the mountains appear. each morning I peek out to see who is there. which legs under the edge of the fence, whose throat sounds, whose sad life. I don’t think the birds notice. I don’t expect they remember one day to the next, one bird gone after they know where to go, but what, what, often too tight in the head, not enough room between the eyes. the shadows the tree, the low chirp, it would do to make things happen, the air and the thick of it, we’re equally tired, too unamused to look out for beauty, to see something in destruction (a mining operation, a man-made pit—out, out) unpeaceful falling, asleep even, at the time when it mattered 7 Kaplan 110 Wall-climber, ducker-underer today does not reveal any difference, any motive in the afternoon, the sparking of a plan, we call to complain, we push our faces through, we sit in the crest of the sunlight, we hold on to the fix in the air, we listen for it I’m all too close to stopping to listen the hush beyond the fence it’s full of webs it’s a voice, after all there’s a body there. there’s the thing I want, the there, there. you hear it too, you’ve got a broom. you claim you’ll take care of it, cricket in your hand, bird on your shoulder, a regular man, a tall solid man. and I know it’s yours, too 8 Kaplan 111 Or everything’s washed away we look, but there’s nothing past the slats even the growl is gone, the net. the next time a drop doesn’t hesitate but falls (against it all). the tree drapes over the edge of the fence. it reaches the crest of the roof I think it holds the birds. (for the danger is under the overhang, in the window, near the glass in the scatter of debris and how one leaf straddles the fence line. how it’s on both sides. and is the thick of it.) there’s no use for the fruit, none for the leaves (other, none other) as the birds decline as they come and go in the powerless evening, adjusting and reforming from all the way above 9 Kaplan 112 Thin-hipped they arrive a skittering across the roof, the wind and the needles fall, the piles against the corners, the fence attracts (confines them after all). as part of the slip (from it), as the gesturing downward, crumbling, the movement against the tree shakes, the leaf dwindle, the house. (admired but chased is tricky, and the cat dashes for our door) the moon (the fragment there) stands it well enough, but the birds think it is night (they hide), they refuse to make their noises. they decide against it, and that they must return. that they must attract. (and that they must eat. flight blind, they come for the sound, talon-tipped.) those details and their lost subjects. their movements layered through the glass, the glass (that is their houses). built in many locations, for many sets of eyes. and if one walks in, one risks it. one is tall enough, but one can’t reach. one stands on the brick. one stretches up. one shifts its arch over the leaves (one sees a pattern there), one tries the branches shock in the moonlight, and the tree leafs down, and it’s evening and it’s quiet and one tried. and one sat down. and one watched 10 Kaplan 113 Part of this season the birds ignore such goings-on, their interest is in leaves, the branches, the color of the sky each night, I think there’s a sound (there is and there’s not. and there is) and there isn’t some play. the concrete sky, the cement of the ground it’s all one structure. and it holds together. we hear the metallic tap of their beaks the clink a foot makes along the edge, around the edge of the ring. it’s too still, in the vein of the sun, it highlights only a dry leaf, and another dry leaf and another. you read it in the way the tree leans toward us, how the smaller tree fruits but doesn’t ripen, how the metal glints stirring spokes and dust and I listen for what’s coming. I hope to improve the brick. I hope not to lose sight of the fence I think I’ll be able to hold it again if I look closely 11 Kaplan 114 So they’ve left, though nothing’s fallen I’d situate it here. I’d go and calm with it though the air is changed, and the windows must stay shut we find an infestation in the shed we want to sleep and stretch and gawk it out, I’d want the roof and the tree and the way to overlook the deep sea of it, even so far away we want to see and we want the sun. it’s dark next door and it’s dark beyond the fence and the wall is cool to the touch metal underneath the paint, we’re peering at them and we’re scaring up the mounds and we’re waiting for the squirrel and the tubers, the poppies, the petals that won’t ever be 12 Kaplan 115 The birds browner, the sky bluer, the branches we’d guess it from the way the leaves shifted—something off about the weather. the birds browner, sky bluer, branches crossing all at odd angles. the leaves pushed to the side, the affected piles (and the rush of wind, a deep breath, in the distance) don’t hold it over them. look at the ground and there, which is dirt, are the shot seeds. the arm almost touches the rail of the roof. someone sent it—it arrived so we watched—so we took it. down, past the sweep of the broom. organized in such a manner—one close angle, then one far, and one disputed. a leaf hanging bitterly if not pushed to the ground. but cause to lean? never, never obvious 13 Kaplan 116 Sifting through the air (motes, sinking down) the dark reflects, lets them become their opposite. a light flashes by, a bird in the evening, a leaf hanging by one stem. (what kind of bird whose neck rests near its shoulders, what kind of ground-pecking grouse?) sifting the seeds and kernels through the fallen leaves. wandering down among them. o the lights of the sky o the calm above the roof. o in the latest gesture (o forgiveness o understanding.) we wait for the sun the course of light, the placement of your face near the glass. or the carcasses littering (o’er) the sill. as close as anyone is the outline of the lifetime of the fence the silhouette reaching like fingernails in the (darkening) sky. sly hands of the neighbors, drifting nothing but unkempt leaves against the sky. I don’t know what sparks there (in my eye, or past it), I don’t know the stripe is the same, the scalloped edges, fine-features, faces bland or their faces out of the dark shifting shifting away at the break of it. the smaller flying bodies (or I’d never say they’d influence me (unduly)) 14 Kaplan 117 The pattern of their beating wings the instinct is to hurry as the light fades which is the pattern of their beating the pattern (the arc) left behind by its beating its proud head. it watches and it’s shunned (it leaps but can’t fly) (footsteps and they all flew). one poses on each branch, one keeps its feet 15 Kaplan 118 I’m there the moment it begins we could still and watch it o and there and quiet we could shift and listen to the picking, the feet and the beak and the will. five rise and fly off over. the yard, the branch the callous living they do. the scenic expectation, the calming of the sky and the reach of the twigs above their heads. they pick they pick they shuffle they get chirped off or let loose from the yard it is night falling it is from outside, it is the yowl of the (keening) animal beyond the fence, looking in, gazing through it is the undeveloped (dead) the lost there, the desire against the fence, beneath the tree. we were all struggling we were looking for something together. an evening, a holding a tree top, a vantage point (to better understand the workings of the system). to see the dark to hear within it, to watch what passes (and not be too terribly disappointed to have missed it, to have missed our chance), to not be angry against it 16 Kaplan 119 In the morning, a different feeling (softness?) with one drop on the tip of each branch and small growing things beneath. shush of water in the (somewhat distant) streets breath of it up and over the fence but still a still leaf. one (almost) hazardous chirp. time that goes by in the (breast) of the bird to see what he’ll find (or if he’ll return) in the clasp of weather (a storm a morning), the diminished sodden flight in the gray, of the bells in the distance of the tiny bird itself on the horizontal branch (of the fenceline that is the horizon) or humor here in the damp field, the damp tree the one bird of the morning, the soft sound (surrounded by gray, steeped in the branches) out the window, beyond the door the quiet bird, the rain bird, the sun bird peeks out not aloft, attracts, pulls tight and then releases. drift by the kitchen, patter at the pane. the sound glides along with the noise of the train. nowhere is silence, abstract, something small footsteps. roof prattle. a morning call 17 Kaplan 120 The windows, the fence if I hadn’t been able to begin it, if the springtime hadn’t come, the shoots hadn’t put us to it—secret digging in the garden, down upon wings, creating the new undergrowth. the notion, listen: a siren astride the bare branch. a reflection off the web along the fence, the one smudge that glistens. home the last place, the fenced place, we let ourselves suffer its motion, out of it, near the holding line, the sun creeping, the shade. the lure of the soft petal, a bird that stays, enough of the bud, the branch to root. smooth versus dirt, landing versus taking flight. the windows aren’t enough. the fence surrounds the yard and is too tall. (the drainpipe stopped, even.) rivals, these branches allowed their reach, animals their roam. what of the distance, only rooftops, treetops, fortressed out, undebatable, taunting limbs (and limping.) 18 Kaplan 121 *** Kaplan 122 (ladies in an aviary) a flat lovely sugar trail a flock lump sugar tremor a flutter man sugar up a folded, man, sweep us a for massive sweet us a forgotten modest tassels values a fringe. more than veneration a frosted naïve that very agitate gas nasty that visitor among get of that waiting an glistening of the what and globes of the while and great of the who and groups of the whole and hands, of the wings and here of the wires “angels,” higher. of the wistfully are his of the with are holding of the with as hour-glass on the woman’s as if on the would as impatience on the you as in on the as in out. their as in out their aspiration, in poufs, their at in pouting their aviary in. recompose their azaleas. in relief. their be?” inquire replies, their be inquisitive retiring. them breasts into ribbon, these brings is rise there burns is ruffles they bustles is running they cage. is satin they cannot is satisfied; they close it sedately they clouds, it settle they cries it shadows this curves it shift this diamond lacy so throws dispelling ladies so ’tis down lashes solitaires to eat ladies, soul to existence. lift star to feathers light starry to 19 Kaplan 123 fictitious like strong to figures look sugar to fingers love, sugar to 20 Kaplan 124 They are so lovely and they cannot get out similarly, the light fades, thickens, and the moon twice as big. if there are bars, if the key is lost the sky is not affected. (this, a world where women watch women, there are cages, creatures). as a last night, final evening, or dusk in the mist (of all fortune, rings shining there, dressed improperly after all, in un-serious shoes) before the park closes, we’re no longer welcome, I pretend to pass along, to gather slowly, to walk the parking lot toward my own, watching similarly the bed creaks. the tree blossoms, the radishes twice their size. a bare skill to begin: women and their children, a rake and a hoe. loose rattlings of the daylight, an afternoon in spades. the bird turns on its own, the ground beneath is moving. subtle ways the shade extends, the minimum of (a human being) the smallest gesture of (nature) inverted in springtime the wet rocks, the hose that goes on, the house butted up to a buzzing garden. what shade of blue? which brown? how to get outside enough to see myself looking in? 21 Kaplan 125 That flat look at the naïve and the gathering around was (the wires), the spit on the ground, the fence so tall (the way it is) and now encloses. as they look but don’t want to show as their friends arrive. as a group of them gathers squatting, rolling. so unbeautiful. not so left behind, the lot, the fortunate sunset (how) (at that hour). and would it matter, the dirt for growing, the asphalt for heating up. not so threatening, young man, the almost-shade of the wisp-fence. in the not-quite of evening. spinning (but controlled. departing with a close eye) a stained fabric. a single-file walk (I follow behind. I look down) (evenly) to the car. flat plane of a hand, outrageous calm, smooth growth of the concrete. the fence stakes taller even than the tallest broadest one. wires so thin they could be cut (they could be cut) with what we brought 22 Kaplan 126 (in an aviary) ladies in of feathers an aviary “angels,” as their visitor inquisitive they are so, replies, ladies lovely and holding the running to they cannot sugar higher. eat out of his get out. and a flock hands their of satin agitate these breasts are curves settle tassels of the pouting as on poufs, as soul in their they trail if on clouds, impatience their lacy waiting, to be bustles with wings satisfied among the sedately and it is very azaleas. folded, for a wistfully dispelling diamond star that they the shadows to rise in a recompose of their massive their ruffles lashes in a fringe. on retiring starry veneration, “here is they lift that love,” cries flat look at the great the naïve to strong man the man who “’tis a bring sugar woman’s to the cage whole existence.” it is so sweet and this this sugar, lump of fictitious more values. glistening 23 Kaplan 127 than the gas “What in groups of would you frosted like us to globes as it be?” they burns with a inquire in a light as flutter of forgotten to modest us as the aspiration, hour-glass while the figures it solitaires on throws into their fingers relief shift up and they are so down the there is a lovely and wires that tremor of they cannot close them ribbon, a get out in. nasty sweep their breasts are curves settle tassels of the pouting as on poufs, as soul in their they trail if on clouds, impatience their lacy waiting, to be 24 Kaplan 128 It is so sweet this sugar, the sugar and it meant something and it meant something to me soothing in the springtime though the seeds eaten and it meant something and it meant something, something in the springtime, through the seeds, prowling out the night time windows open, sash ajar, novices out (outshone) the bars, the slats not so far away as we would like. soft (no). a hiss to the monument of dusk coming quickly. how ought I introduce it? how might it to me? soft time of the world, soft hour of the hard night 25 Kaplan 129 (vary) aviary burns, bustles clouds, cries, curves diamond eat, existence feathers, fictitious, figures fingers, flat, flock flutter forgotten, fringe, frosted glistening, globes, great groups if inquire lacy, ladies, lashes ladies, lift love, lovely, lump man, man, massive naïve poufs, pouting recompose, relief, replies retiring, ribbon, rise ruffles, running satin, satisfied, sedately settle, shadows sugar, sugar, sugar sugar 26 Kaplan 130 A flutter of modest aspiration as I thought I could pick it up, thought I could pick some up, watched the birds hop through the wide wire of the fence, happily, like it was nothing watch the weeds grow in their rows, watch the stalks thicken, the calls over the next fence, childish coos, the parking lot separating us (up), the squirrel there, the children in a line, the bird posing with its feet on the wire, the sun, happily. as if to own a word, as if to live off the land as if to shake it down, reach in through the bent wires and ease up a leaf, (adjust) a stem (of a vegetable), to be seen from the porch across the way, to hear the voices carry through (angry), through. as if I could pick them up, as if I had brought my gloves, if the key opened the other door, if the pile of dead leaves was more than for (mulch). and sending messages into the upper air. and waiting for them to drift back down. because that’s the morning and the afternoon of it. the memorization of that (cut sea), the memorial of that day, the grass dug up, the site fenced off but unprotected, that similar duty of my hands my feet. the same sea I wandered through, the same lot and I wouldn’t know what to teach them, and I wouldn’t be able to want to be seen, and I’d reach for the bird to tell it, wait, I dreamt (it for) you 27 Kaplan 131 (ladies) they are so lovely and their breasts are pouting among the azaleas. dispelling the shadows they lift that flat look who brings sugar—it is so sweet they inquire while their fingers shift up and down and this lump of sugar burns with a light it throws into relief 28 Kaplan 132 Shift up and down the wires (that close them in) mountain green, meadow green, antique green which is the hedge which is not the fence which is where we walk which is where we must stay out. that which is the wind, that which fades. the tree an arch of the sky (to) the sky. as leaves fall. as branches crack (the wind). and down and a small tail showing through the tall grass. (because there’s a joke, there’s a man) in the jungle green, the jungle brown. the muddle yellow. the leaves are loud. and someone always sneaking up from behind. the depression (in) the ground, seated in this new place which green was what I heard out in the yard. the fracture of a branch or step. small movement of the night, glancing toward the laundromat, the cartridge, electric types of noises through the foliage, and someone coming closer, some movement not so distant. as the order is the thing, the archiving of the thing, the crickets and their pledges in the lost circle of black-green. jungle there, at the shape of it, for the shape near the trunk and the dirt of it. seemingly lost or broken fast (to be unrecognizable), the main thing is to take the time not near enough a breeze. or a tree motion, the night which shadows on and (lingers) on 29 Kaplan 133 Holding the sugar higher the white reaching-up in the breeze, tiny hummingbird near the purples, for the bees to take, to grasp the sun (to shake it off), skittish by the passing of an orange machine, the greens hazing for what sounds here, for not a love not, as someone is always stepping. the bird comes back, the bee, the voices come along. am I alone here? no. (and the longer, the less so) the handkerchief flitting there, the surrender so the animal sounds, the machine, the human silence comes, they veer right or left (the wrong way), they find the dead end, the fence, the no-trespassing yard. and the wires so tall, crossed only by (birds) and they’ve stopped because they’re so turned because of the spider webbing the slats of the bench (and the machine doesn’t care there, the sugar-field (beneath the squirrel-tree), all upturned saucers, all (church-going) bonnets, all the very hat upon my head, taller than my very shoulders. so the wrestling in the branches shifts their upright stance, (earthly) stoicism, their moon- gesture in the sunshine. the footfalls, the leaves on the ground, the machine choking up the path. the steps downward, cut into the hill and angled purposefully. and I am surrounded) 30 Kaplan 134 (in aviary) they they cannot get out their they trail their lacy bustles the shadows of their lashes lift that flat look at who brings sugar to the sweet this sugar, the sugar would you like us to a flutter of modest aspiration, their fingers shift up and close them in. “angels” their sugar higher. and a flock on poufs, as if on sedately folded, for a diamond a massive fringe. “here is strong man,” ’tis a woman’s lump of sugar is more in groups of frosted globes a light as forgotten to figures it throws into relief. of ribbon, a nasty sweep ladies, running to eat out these tassels of the soul be satisfied; and it is recompose their ruffles on retiring 31 Kaplan 135 Waiting, with wings as there is clearly something in the undergrowth moving in the tree, the chortle the caw. thrush of a bump up from behind (as the woodland settles). the dirt grinds, the mud does not reflect some voices, some of these branches breaking, if I wait. what is less empty streambed (barrel cactus), squirrel in the tree and if they win? (if the spot is not mine, after all on the path up the hill. someone wins. someone’s voice rattles deep in the throat) someone climbs. the light of the page burns, so blurs, so is heavy on the eyes—vapor in the air never aids for adjustment, hurrying along opening up to the heat (of the day) (of the afternoon) we feel it in every direction, even shy lift of the hair, shy pushing it out of the eyes (as there’s something about being alone. some shout about it, from afar, or not so far away). tiny orange-striped white flower on the low bush, something to the effect of which, which forms the effect of, a single blossom at the top of the stalk: mustard, sagebrush, squat palm (in the foothill woodlands, the oak forest) 32 Kaplan 136 The great strong man under the tallest tree, inside the largest forest. with a halo of nets in the clearing, from the path (from the stand), our surrounds around us. despite what we read, the fences, the beautiful shade, the cracks wide enough to squeeze through. (the ever-widening holes. we could gaze there forever) will benefit from some time away perhaps, drinking in the green and brown so nothing would be stronger then, broader than, the selection (of trees) we see here, no pity. no passing without looking up. no silence from the stream. and the movement in the trees, the rustle in the ground, picking up the (nails. the strewn things) and so I would begin to disappear the angles lit-up and the fence poles (arms) (abutting our very site. what we’ve determined is common ground) in the place we’ve sent ourselves (to grow a little older in), to peer from, the waiting room (abounding with gnats. the flit of the moth and the mosquito) forgot to be shameful. forgot to hide since we see through to sky all here together, tree, they could see us 33 Kaplan 137 (ladies a a a) cannot as the lashes flat man (who brings sugar to the cage.) the (sugar of fictitious values.) be?” modest fingers (that close them in.) sugar curves clouds, a massive (fringe.) strong And glistening frosted light hour-glass (figures it throws into relief.) a ladies, hands, in it their (ruffles on retiring.) and Their they among shadows starry flat to sugar (to the cage.) this fictitious (values.) us in aspiration, their down them (in.) holding a settle on sedately star massive (fringe.) the a this more in as light as throws (into relief.) of of running his of impatience it they (recompose their ruffles on retiring.) so they out. are they lacy the the their starry lift look naïve man sugar (to the cage.) so sugar, of (fictitious values.) you to inquire flutter aspiration, solitaires fingers and wires them (in.) visitor the And of settle as clouds wings for star in (fringe.) love,” great “’tis whole this sugar glistening gas of as with as us hour-glass throws (into relief.) a ribbon sweep as running out hands, tassels soul impatience satisfied; is that their (retiring.) out. lacy their look (sugar to the cage.) of (fictitious values.) inquire solitaires wires (that close them in.) And as for (a diamond star to rise in a massive fringe.) “’tis sugar of as (throws into relief.) sweep out soul is (retiring.) 34 Kaplan 138 More glistening than the gas the fog banks here and makes the trees unsteady. knots in each branch or the leaves intertwine, with tendrils aiming up the rough bark toward the opening (oblong, smoothed in, for bees) to move things along (past the distant voices, through the slats of the bench here) the missing thread, pole lopped off and left its gaping rung to be overtaken (swallowed) by the garden. not down the ravine but in a (windswept) clearing, coast oak, gray squirrel, competent weeds (a buzzing up in the trees and from the bush behind, a twirling ratchet to cut us off from the fence, dissuade us from entering the (beyond) (around the corner)) the fence with barbs, signs, and there’s something picking invisibly through the bark on the ground behind the looseness of the green (pointing upwards) (the dropped lily). as if the gray is everywhere reflected from the ground (the dirt) the leaves and the motions gone behind. the step alongside (out from the path), the movement below where the road goes outside this curve. see—a silver of bark littering (with its sweet-smelling ashes) the tossed rocks (pointing) through the gestures of spent leaves in the wind, the tree tipped but still growing against the ground (the wall it forms) 35 Kaplan 139 (a vary) They they cannot they trail among the azaleas. their lashes they lift that flat look at the naïve to thman to the cage It is so sweet sugar, the sugar of fictitious values. “What would you like us to be?” they flutter of modest aspiration, while the solitaires on their fingers shift up and down the wires that close them in. “ “Here is love,” And more glistening than the gas in groups of frosted globes as it burns as the hour-glass throws into relief There is a tremor of feathers as inquisitive ladies, running to eat out of his hands, ag in their impatience they recompose their ruffles on retiring. 36 Kaplan 140 A tremor of ribbon the creek brushing past or the rocks that surround it, the path wavering up the low hill, dotted (strewn, bent) with dry leaves in the slight wind that comes to turn the trees, show them off, lean them down. the bench from which to observe, the spinning leaf the wandering hair, the shudder from above (against the click of the mechanical, the chains strung up together, married, like people do) the sign which informs, the letters to reveal us—each lift in the rock a purposeful (irony) a faceless opening. the net under the grass (to catch us if we shift about) (empty streambed, useless container, rainwater collector) as the voice moves along down the path, stop and sway, pause and look, point on a favorite so unapologetic. rhododendron! (the type of shout that travels) the poem that stabs despite inaction, that pauses to pose in silhouette and bounds forward, body like a bending river, body is a short-haired animal and uncomfortable in being so observed 37 Kaplan 141 It is very wistfully that they recompose though not the bees and the grasshoppers (small ones here), though not in the shade. they’ve tried all the routes, (lusted) after hummingbirds, were bored by the rocks (again and again). for who could not suppose to come (the ratio of it all, the water filtering in (through the dirt on the leaves)) and the (lone) bee (tumbling) over pine needles arranged across the dust—just so the slow progress and the false entrapment, the same day of last week, the same day of tomorrow, the false wildness, and then, when I turn my head away (after the certain things we need, the water, the angles of a shadow). and so I (we, they) was not alone, without children, without having to stop and duck and point here is the tiny school, the miniature library, the leaves that shine in the sun and fold up in the shade. I couldn’t stand to look at them blowing with the wind, wavering there, one leg propped against the other (four freckles on the knee), so enclosed in this single space—I think someone else would want to see (come in?) what is most important beneath the sky, on the gravel, where there is so little happening. which could take hours (defined by monkey-flower, hanging by a birds-nest thread) and not enough to be dreamt about, or spoken to (or spoken of) in that slow voice 38 Kaplan 142 *** Kaplan 143 Different (comma) difficult but the angle is difficult, the way the water falls in mists, and the groups going past or each wearing hats and spinning in the rain. and the water is adjusted and a man goes out alone and each structure is a new informed place and the tree has been trimmed (topped off) and some of its branches yellowed. so what will be done there. and the bench on display and the way (the dragonflies are), the cedar of the tree aching, in fact, the (frolic of the) water and the past coming on by (with maps, and they don’t know where they’re going) so that path is sunny and damp at the same time. so that patch has dried up and that arc of water keeps moving in circles (spinning), showing off. it’s not hard to appreciate the scene, the way everything surrounds it. (you can’t plan your life around the paths. you can’t.) (and you can’t see how it could have gone differently. these meadows. these fields. these treed pastures. the clicking motion of above them) (do I want to enter the building?) can I predict which drop, which mist will develop? I say the forest. I say the trees are here, and I with them. I say if it’s developed (the development) too far along there it is. (there is my pasture). (I call out, alone, to be sure) 39 Kaplan 144 And if there’s a distinctive pattern, the olive-glossiness of the leaves (and the sun’s reflection in them, in the afternoon), the reasons why I chose you (beautiful one), and (emotional) being charged. the aspect of (the skin, the leaves) the changing day, the passing cars, the where in the afternoon 40 Kaplan 145 Because I wanted to be on the path I saw something there in the brush (and hoped it would come back, pacing), what hops in the dry-leaf-ground-cover, simple branches perpendicular from the ground (wanting something, sunlight on this dim day) and I want to see what lives among them, for it to be revealed (do I hear it coming? if I am still enough). before, exactly, the leaves drop one or two from above. the blooms (over- blown) cast out. a bird makes it happen, a squirrel, hum of the bees (should I leave?) sudden. up high. near the fruit. and a general rattling, a combined dropping, kneeling shifting (reclining, breaking) as the sun moves about if you look at it. it moves—if you look at it it falls. dear treed terrarium, tiny (domed) world—something moved inside, moved below, anyone who’s listening would know it’s there (searching) about, unquiet like the blue bird we saw once, rare (in our own piece of land, our real country) everywhere, on each branch on every fencepost, cantilevered, and about to return (again) 41 Kaplan 146 If anyone is to ask we cross a road, we cross a street, we’ve been let out of doors and are happy enough—can anyone tell (tell me, tell me not to go alone, to keep my hands ready) where? it all sounds like something alive, the trees and the cat and the breeze, and already the leaves (that we would like to eat) are drooping, folding in the failed outdoors, the day that begins in a mist settled under the high sun. the vibrations of the building (a distant croak? an outside beetle) near the back of my neck, which feels rough. what we want to know is to ask, a soothing way to a (single) answer, not bursting up into the sky or rattling the tops off the fence posts to be for longing, for a generous fund, forgotten in the low bushes (re-released, scratched out), only by the bird (whose face we recognize, who has come home many times, with its small head). the mistakes can come (we don’t want left, we want to crease them over, fold into the perfect five-pointed-star of ideal angled beauty) and circle the puddle around the drain if they’ll ask them to you, your name, your work, how often we may visit the future, if invited, already, to fill those gaps 42 Kaplan 147 In the fog, the world o green leaves that fade and shrink, the world I could imagine, the water there, near the depression of the path, the sadness of the speaker, when squirrels and other birds disrupt the leaves. the water moves in circular motions, each falling heavily, a blue-blanketed carriage rolls by—because who will know when I look up, when I might be moved to look up again—the shudderings there, the nearing. find me the way to the water—the hose the faucet, the line—and shut off these fidgetings. you take the sentimentality out, you fake the aching watching, you prefer jealousy over water’s soft flow, the determined movement of machines and we’re left in the leaf-mulch, with the smallest flying bugs and the droppings of the unfortunate animal, while past the hedge the ladies in white hats collect plant trimmings—into their pop-up laundry hampers—cooing over butterflies and the low, cool breeze and, tapped into the role of politeness, look sneakily over the ends of the hill to see exactly—precisely— how the water falls below it 43 Kaplan 148 You who wouldn’t survive, otherwise plant the tree that wouldn’t survive, and wonder since you’ve wandered so far from it, what you can tell from rooftops and fencelines, manipulated cedars, small-blooming grasses (mustards) in the slow wind, against the sky. what a wonder isn’t. and it’s so dry—(unless you water the tree) the human backed up right (up) to it. not enough shadow, we think, weeds are growing in, skittering happily across (a parasite tree, growth upon a growth) and anywhere we decide to sit would be good (enough) no. did you see someone? did you hear? (mockingbird. slim- feathered tree). the green cart in secret by the manzanita leaves that hide the path, the road, leafmeal. striking too soon in the distance. behind my right shoulder, a branch falling, tree lifting, the crack of midafternoon with the shadows (jostling, maneuvering) about. flirting bee. (tumbled butterfly) white-lipped. the calm-enough forest. the quiet-enough perch (you couldn’t have found it. sometimes, what crawls there. what scatters). oh the purples, o the yellows, entire nuts in the scat, the scat, the scat itself. the colors of this week. the dirt road of day, bent neck, helpful map, the lost (location). sentimental you? my habit formed sufficiently that (I get swarmed, lightly) 44 Kaplan 149 Reliving below and above always a thing moving: animals, wind, manzanita, stream (which should not be so, dry stream, snow run-off, traipsing along), always, the sound of the machines, the birds. lone limb or clear sky, rocks of many sizes. ready for discovery, following a trail, the wind blows so, I wonder when (someone will come) if I am here moving along (or in the silence before a step, before taking a step). and the path blocked off from traffic, a trail so those voices carry—to see something (droll), to see the place askew, switchbacks on the low ground (I’ve gone there, heard those bees—that humming uncovering, sound alighting beneath the trees, on that turn against the cliff). you ask when we’ll go if we live, so in the broad leaves, in the pine-needled (ponderosa) in low agave… the leaves on the land decompose: their veins show through, they look torn, they turn to dirt. elements fall apart and in the afternoon heat, droop, to the ground, hang (with shouts across them, or the trill of the animal draping over) in the breeze unrelievable, in slow motion (in the lake mirage. and the dust that kicks up) (the voices, steps without a vantage point) below 45 Kaplan 150 Maybe next week, maybe the week after the meadow wrapped in plastic, some place I hadn’t known, maybe an insect (animal) peeking out from under. a leaf spinning on a web, simple in the air, even among those bees, so many on the blue flowers, behind them, over the light (and hairy) moss. on a shining rock, ants astride the path, the hose, the seeing that occurs (because I’m here. because birds’ voices travel) in the always accidental discovery (the bee that has discovered me). gooseberry? mountain mahogany? voices out and up behind them? most likely not 46 Kaplan 151 (I’m) seated, or imagining the clicking wire, the cricket (who escapes. who gets caught) preparing for some ceremony under the white tent, in the tall grass, determined by the gravel-tossed plastic sheeting, actually (within the short-logged fence. the pre-planned benches) unable to distinguish music from wind, what comes on from beyond. seated, or imagining (imaginary) that one (if not the other) will end, will move along, has gone now. the gravel path gives enough (soft for prints, slogging through, as ocean is related to pine, that strong determined smell). of course there’s sun here. it’s been made. the chirping developed and admired. placed, seeking its own disturbance, its method my entry (and the twig falls. the loped ear droops) 47 Kaplan 152 Testing, or the group of them hidden beneath the brim, something pokes from the path slightly dangerous. these shaped twigs which only grow unsightly, testing the mud, if the group of them forward, forward forward enough. one leaf turned orange, mountainous air, the waterfall they speak of bedded down (near) the lawn. deserving the perfect crown, the beautiful hat, the pool of bent reeds—don’t forget, along the sculpted hedges the heads reflecting left and tilting up (I haven’t been here before), and they’re coming, the helicopters, retreating (the pack birds) to the next shady layabout, clear from the voices, near the dry leaves (I wouldn’t ask you to forget me, a letter could be distraction for the scraping that occurs) and the new green tops, fresh for fall 48 Kaplan 153 Of the tree in the path you can’t be alone in the garden, either with your cane, your easel, with your hose (flitting to the sound of the freeway kneeling the birds in the grass, darkly looking at your hobbies), too heavy for the weather the local (culture), something to be done to the trees, dear sunken trucks, as if you’re somewhere else (you’ve lost the entrance) shaded beneath planks like a liquid among the roots. the last gasp of the trail the path, the number of women here, that you couldn’t help but know. act, drag, the casting of the wind (too delicate, dear) to rustle much of such a tree 49 Kaplan 154 Up the tree or down the tree running along the wire, the fence through the leaves on the ground (a dry crunch, a deep pleasure). night comes, along after the day and the weather is back again, the hum of distance, and who needs what I’ll send them to, or when, in the open field, where the animals are small and mild, natural. they flirt with me after all, admiring my hair and my boundaries and my tired age in my head, and all around it, the gentle shaking, there, down from the limbs, on the soil, the ground in the path where it smells like peaches, green curry, spicy bay. I haven’t made one, I never found one, I sat still all day and tried not to let anyone see in the heart (of the space) of the clearing, the slight wind that stalls just nearby, there 50 Kaplan 155 There has been a storm along the path of the-place-I-hadn’t- gone-to (arrived at) before, or the birds that lead me to the-spot-that-didn’t- exist before, near that patch of (the land of) dormant flowers, the way to fill my days, the red shooting-stars and the quaint leaves. it’s clear there has been a storm, the kind that blows fall back to summer again in the palms splayed along (along) the ground or the sun out above or the mess beside the treeline (treeline) so pleased to recover here, looking happily to the slight(ly) breezes in the rabbit-brush, the naturalistic recreation of an afternoon slipping the length of, about to spear (appear) me from the down the path—I hear it 51 Kaplan 156 (cage) (tree-cage) the light-headedness of those darting beneath the tree (cage) (tree-cage), the quail rustling, the jutting the yellow leaf to signal the beginning of the turning, the motion about to arrive (I read this I sat in the shadow.) 52 Kaplan 157 Found out, acted upon seen from above, seen from that slick crossing, deep in the weedening weeds, sly drama there. so that half are against and there are more coming (and I obscure it like this, and I do) and there is the frame, the photo the picture within, the terrified jumper, holding-to bedding down (the leaves), the morning rush and the small and early afternoon (how will I do it better?). each one pounded atop, each sound hidden within, the small easement (we would say: between the floorboards, among the spun leaves, in the crush of it, the distraction created, small quiet pile) of waiting to be released again, could not frown without, and the rain above, the rain that breeds the secret shadow (swollen, swollen) afraid to appear down near the river (which is actually a rivulet in the path and nothing swims there) and the peach tree and the lost yard of yesterday’s (daydream) cinema. forgetful in the hall under the clutter of branches (the sun, hailing), the scene and a hair that rears and grows, an anemic conclusion on the open plain (that is obscured by trees, and where the sky is also obscured) along of grass, along of sharp weeds and thin sticks along the edge of the circle containing its piece 53 Kaplan 158 I recognized the first turn I had been once before, I recognized the fast road, the quick turns, the delirious after-effects of the curves. the view. the diminished sense of space, the birds that shook apart the trees, the unreason of low agaves creeping across the hills, the movement there. was one of space, of mountain leaves, in fall, a gesture of saddened escape (futile progress, if not for this: the birds). and no one was there—the path was empty, the bench rattled slightly with my arm, there was no conforming to it, there was no sky (beyond the mist, beyond my face bloated big, and the clear windows). everyone saw. there was no one there how many are mine, of the four-to-five leaves left hanging still? you should know (and you should act like it, the birds seem to gesture, I’ve been here all day I live in a house. the moment is mine). the eight left leaves are orange. they are red, they are turning. we’ve stopped (we’ve slowed down, the road shifts, the asphalt creeps, potted). would I call this my house? would I want to wait here? pudgy bird, distracted robin. am I where you wanted to rest? a small thing, but enough unlikely enough, home. dirt and dust (arising) all the way through. no one is here on the ragged enough perch. enough of the way the land works: rises and falls. enough of the unfairness of the roads. your skepticism is available, noted. it’s enough. it is old. (the bypass is headed my way, the rise of the hill there, and the blink of the sky) 54 Kaplan 159 *** Kaplan 160 (ladies vary) they are so lovely and they cannot get out. they are lovely, yet they cannot get out. they are so lovely so they cannot get out. so they are lovely, but they cannot get out. they are lovely, for they cannot get out. they are so lovely, for they cannot get out. but they are so lovely they cannot get out. so they are so lovely, so they cannot get out. they are lovely, or they cannot get out. they are so lovely, and they cannot get out. 55 Kaplan 161 They trail there, they trail it was the one yellow thing in the gray-green world, the one with narrow curling tendrils, the one reaching out, even, the one hummingbird shooting past, knee-height, yellow exactly like (the tree-poppy, a native species), yellow as the robin’s red under- side (reflecting off the soft dirt, soft peat). but not yellow as the leaf there, as twisting as the soft air, the boundless animals over short twigs, picking up the short twigs and carrying them along in their short arms, short beaks. who drift in patterns, in waves of sound, and echoes and cannons of them, the sirens that (in effect) have been surrounded by (the dull roar of yellow) the only lacy thing, the only fine thing, the only petaled thing. the gray path slowly curving to the right, to the left, curving away, the only only soft thing when it is quiet then the birds. (when it is still then the yellow) what’s closer (I have turned in all directions. I have lifted up the leaf, pushed aside the branches, listened to the range, looked for the small birds and the large birds and the soft animals and the hard even off the trail, the rocks. even the pined twigs, browned along the edge, even the distance, the total absence of clouds, the sighing branches, the pleading birds)? what is closer is I am still here 56 Kaplan 162 Dispelling the shadows the bent leaves and simple sun. a slight blush underside the boughs, subtle shading of that flesh. the clouds and the new form of water, ducking past, seeking beneath as if dried flowers on the tips still reach up (as if there’s sun there) to avoid the crowd, to show off, to start up again they are diffused (crushed), hanging there. attracting bees, the consent (of a purposeful language, an aggressive flower, uncontrolled. but wood is always warmer, we (always) know, looking for tracks in the leaves there, compelling movements (in the cool afternoon) (the high-skied shadowless afternoon)), cooing, asking for some treatment yes (yea) for something has come, a low shuffling, the muted voices, they come in a pack, wolves, they descend on the valley, in the garden. trailing a certain smell (of the kind not yet touched). the breezes astound, the lifting types of air they bring, the circular clearing around each tree the untrue fact no one notices: it’s empty. the green bits shooting up are not leaves in the end, are not what we had anticipated if it is the same path, after all, if it is the same tree (the same needles) should we not be sorry? should we not disengage? 57 Kaplan 163 (a a aviary) they, they cannot get out their breasts, they trail among the azaleas their lashes, they lift this sugar, the sugar they inquire, their fingers shift their visitor, this lump of sugar there is a tremor, these tassels, their impatience their recompose, their ruffles 58 Kaplan 164 What would you like us to be lovers? children? tall birds claiming the uppermost branches. the bounty littering the ground. where would you like us to go? how would you like us to attend? (call to ease, a shadow pushing through the blossoms. imagining the path) charming, cheerful, not hanging much on the details (the bird uses its beak to disconnect the flower. the petals flung from the tree) (whole blooms of them, tossing pink to the ground.) (nothing has gotten more beautiful) (unless it’s a secret entrance). (exit.) 59 Kaplan 165 (lies in an aviary) They are so lovely and they cannot get out. Their breasts are pouting as they trail their lacy bustles among the azaleas. Dispelling the shadows of their lashes in starry veneration, they lift that flat look at the naïve to the man who brings sugar to the cage. it is so sweet this sugar, the sugar of fictitious values. “What would you like us to be?” they inquire in a flutter of modest aspiration, while the solitaires on their fingers shift up and down the wires that close them in. a flock of satin curves se ttle on poufs, as if on clouds, waiting, with wings sedately folded, for a diamond star to rise in a massive fringe. a woman’s whole existence 60 Kaplan 166 As if on clouds, waiting voices down the path, in the trees, unconsciousness even clinging to the branches in the chill of them (if you hold the tree, palm up it’s cool and appropriate to touch). the single moment, the moving shade (roving air) as voices glide through, as a face (beckons) at some distance sliding in (abruptly) through the fresh sky (meaty) flowers, dangling bare branches against the green hills, the sloped downfalls, what I will find in the morning, holding till, shrugging off, calling to (we cannot get lost here) (the population abounds) a single shade in the dirt, falling open there upon it tense in the dry leaves, coarse in the long grass (an orange rind, a litter, of opened fruits), a scattering as the clouds did not (did not) come, the sky reflected in the ground, by birds holding out for (sweet olive) afternoon (around the lagoon, the false island) 61 Kaplan 167 Here is love in the street, beneath the tree, upon the sidewalk, in the arms, in the branches between the clouds, in the shade, in the morning, against the curtain, below the sunlight, against the flowers, across the lawn among the blue-pincushions, the biting lilies, the stranded screen, against the rock wall, in the awning beneath the draperies, in the meadow, defying the river in the dust there, in the earth, among the daylight, the ivied leaves, within the boundaries, up the driveway after the culvert, under the shelving, in the garden, at the scenery, in the sunlight, in the breeze, under the blue- spruce, against the fan-palm, in the grove on the path, against the endlines, for an occasion adrift in safety, enclosed in wires, wrapped by fences, inside the park, beyond the entrance in the clearing, in the dry river in the hawk-bleat, in the road, in the density, in the coming-upon-it in the woodland, in the garden, in the cleared land, against the policies in the soil, in the reclaiming, by the water, beyond the watchers, in the care by the entrance, in the thick-of-it, in the bare branches, in the leaves, by the causeway, in the lighting, in the spy glass, in the sanity, in the asking along the road, in the coming in the distance, in the observed, near the maple, beside the sunlight, in the strewn leaves, among the animals, in the night sounds, in the leaving by the open field, in the asking, in the description, in the enclosure, by the deed 62 Kaplan 168 (dies an aviary) they are so lovely and cannot get out. their breasts are pouting as they trail their lacy bustles among the azaleas. Dispelling the shadows of their lashes in starry veneration,they lift that flat look at the naïve to the man who brings sugar to the cage. solitaires on their fingers shift up and down the wires that close them in. “Angels,” their visitor replies, holding the sugar higher. And a flock of satin curves settle on poufs, as if on cloudswaiting with wings sedately folded, for a diamond star to rise in a massive fringe. ,running to eat out of his handsagitate these tassels of the soul in their impatience to be satisfied; and it is very wistfully that they 63 Kaplan 169 A light as forgotten (to us) as gnats flitting in the tall grasses, bolster of the shallow ponds, low breezes among the reeds in the forgotten land. starred aspen, starry, the opening of the meadow: green with wisps looking upwards, reaching for their place (when I’m gone, you’ll need a place to be, who comes too close, who doesn’t know better), the flowers haven’t forced their way up. to touch them, unkind torsos themselves upon the opened wood white trunks, bare—as forgotten as the dried, curled leaf, folded into a shell, curled in the middle, along the ends, folded over. it throws into relief, it does: dark hummingbird among the small yellows, black-winged butterfly in the light garden, helicopter churning above the (leaf meal) (bird step) (grasses) blue-eyed grasses 64 Kaplan 170 Their impatience—to be satisfied with a word, a seed, a mown piece a wallow in soft damp dirt. the bulbs become leaves, the petals the branches, the lip of the fence lifts gently with the breeze, despite the undergrowth, its peckishness, an uncertain future these tassels, small greens, and their impatience. the slow wind in the canyon, startling the fresh leaves, tangle in the river (the canyon, the rocks, the low flitting forms), the lost ocean, the low lands, the river, unnamable houses, unlivable the single leaf sheening, holding forth in the sunlight (a tough departure, a taking-leave-of) cunning. blushed, (the blossoms gone) sidled against and tramped in, to temper growth and leakage and fortune 65 Kaplan 171 *** Kaplan 172 Works Cited "A Little White Shadow." 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Proquest. 12 June 2012. http://libproxy.usc.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/?url=http:// search.proquest.com.libproxy.usc.edu/docview/220187170?accountid=14749 Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture. Oxford UP: New York, 2002. (in Oxford Shakespeare Topics, ed. Peter Holland and Stanley Wells) Legault, Paul. The Emily Dickinson Reader: An English-to-English Translation of Emily Dickinson’s Complete Poems. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2012. Longenbach, James. Modern Poetry After Modernism. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Loy, Mina. The Last Lunar Baedeker. ed. Roger L. Conover. Highlands, NC: The Jargon Society, 1982. Ma, Ming Qian. Poetry as Re-reading: American Avant-Garde Poetry and the Poetics of Counter-Method. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2008. Marotti, Arthur F. “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property.” Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds. Chicago: U of C Press, 1990. p145-173. Mathews, Harry and Alastair Brotchie, eds. Oulipo Compendium. London: Atlas Press, 2005. Magi, Jill. Slot. New York: Ugly Duckling, 2011. McDonough, Mike. “THE MS OF M Y KIN.” Coldfront. 30 Aug 2009. 23 Mar 2011. <http://coldfrontmag.com/reviews/the-ms-of-my-kin>. Kaplan 175 McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web. New York: Palgrave, 2001. ------. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1991. McHugh, Heather. Broken English: Poetry and Partiality. Wesleyan UP, 1993. Melgard, Holly. The Making of Americans. Troll Thread, 2012. http://trollthread.tumblr.com/post/35797600217/holly-melgard-the-making-of-the- americans-troll Metres, Phillip. “Review of Jen Bervin’s Nets.” Jacket 25, Feb 2004. 12 March 2013 http://www.jacketmagazine.com/25/metr-berv.html Miller, Cristanne. Emily Dickinson: A Poet’s Grammar. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987. ------. “‘The Ear is the Last Face’: Reading Dickinson in Lyrical Time.” February 25, 2013. Department of English, Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. University of Southern California. ------. Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century. Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press, 2012. Milton, John. The Poetical Works on John Milton. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Company, 1892. Mohammad, K. Silem. “searching for ‘sonnagrams.” Email to Genevieve Kaplan. June 19, 2012. -----. Sonnagrams 1-20. Cincinnati: Slack Buddha Press, 2009. http://slackbuddha.com/chapbooks/la_perruque/sonnagrams.html -----. “Sonnagrams.” Wag’s Review. Issue 2, 2009. http://www.wagsrevue.com/Issue_2/#/17 Morrison, Yedda. Darkness. Los Angeles: Make Now, 2012. My Imaginary Brooklyn. “Ronald Johnson’s copy of The Poetical Works of John Milton, 1892, which he used to create his Radi os.” Poets.org. 17 March 2013 http://poetsorg.tumblr.com/post/29126891240/myimaginarybrooklyn-ronald-johnsons- copy-of Oberhaus, Dorothy Huff. Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles: Method and Meaning. University Park: Penn State UP, 1995. O'Leary, Peter. "An interview with Ronald Johnson." Chicago Review 42.1 (1996): 32+. Gale Power Search. Web. 28 Nov. 2012. http://go.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA18280009&v=2.1&u= usocal_main&it=r&p=GPS&sw=w Padgett, Ron. “Translator’s Notes on the Poems.” Complete Poems. By Blaise Cendrars. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1992. 355-382. ------. The Teachers & Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1987. Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: U of C Press, 2010. Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. London: Tetrad Press, 1980. ------. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 4 th edition. London: Thames &Hudson, 2005. ------. “Introduction to A HUMUMENT.” 5 th edition, 2012. humument.com. 2012. 19 Nov 2012. http://humument.com/intro.html ------. “Page 12 Version 04-birthday.” A Humument Gallery. Humument.com. 15 March 2013 http://gallery.humument.com/page012-birthday Kaplan 176 ------. “Page 85 Version 01-mallock.” A Humument Gallery. Humument.com 15 March 2013 http://gallery.humument.com/page085-mallock ------. “Page 85 Version 03-thai.” A Humument Gallery. Humument.com 15 March 2013 http://gallery.humument.com/page085-thai ------. “Page 85 Version 04-birthday.” A Humument Gallery. Humument.com 15 March 2013 http://gallery.humument.com/page085-birthday ------. “A Humument P 85 Variation III, IV.” Flowers Gallery. 2013. 15 March 2013 http://pinterest.com/pin/444449056945985395/ Phillpot, Clive. “Reading Artists’ Books.” The Arts of the Book: a Project Devoted to an Appreciation of 20th Century Book Arts (1988). Philadelphia: U of the Arts, 1988. Piuma, Chris. “The Constellated Sonnets.” Buggeryville. April 2008. 23 July 2012. http://buggeryville.blogspot.com/2008/04/constellated-sonnets.html -----. The Constellated Sonnets. 1995. 23 July 2012. http://www.flim.com/pdf/chris_piuma_constellated_sonnets.pdf Place, Vanessa. Statement of Facts. ubu Editions, 2008. http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/place/Unpub_042_Place.pdf Place, Vanessa and Robert Fitterman. Notes on Conceptualisms. Brooklyn: Ugly Duckling. 2009, 2010. “Poetic Form: Sonnet.” Poets.org: From the Academy of American Poets. 2012 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5791 Porter, David. “Searching for Dickinson’s Themes.” The Emily Dickinson Handbook. ed. Gudrun Brabher, Roland Hagenbuchle, and Cristanne Miller. Amherst: U of Massachusetts Press, 1998. 183-196. Pound, Ezra. The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1996. Pressley, J. M. “The Authorship Debate.” Shakespeare Resource Center. May 4 2012. 20 September 2012. http://www.bardweb.net/debates.html Ratcliffe, Stephen. Listening to Reading. Albany: SUNY UP, 2000. ------. [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG. Oakland: O Books, 1989. Reddy, Srinkanth. Voyager. Berkeley: UC Press, 2011. Reynolds, David S. “Emily Dickinson and Popular Culture.” Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Emily Dickinson—New Edition. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Infobase, 2008. Robinson, Elizabeth. “THE MS OF M Y KIN.” Colorado Review: a journal of contemporary literature. Vol 37.3. Fall 2010. 171. Rubinstein, Raphael. “Gathered, Not Made: A Brief History of Appropriative Writing.” UbuWeb Papers. UbuWeb. March/April 1999. 2 May 2013. http://www.ubu.com/papers/rubinstein.html Ruefle, Mary. A Little White Shadow. New York: Wave, 2006. -----. “from A Little White Shadow.” Poetry Foundation.org. 2006. 16 March 2013 http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178610 -----. “On Erasure.” Quarter After Eight: A Journal of Prose and Commentary. 16. Athens, Ohio 2010. 78-84. -----. “statement/books.” MaryRuefle.com. 2012. 21 Nov 2012 http://maryruefle.com/statement_books.html Sanders, Katherine Elaine. “So What Exactly is Conceptual Writing?: An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith.” BOMBLOG. October 2, 2009. 5 Nov 2012 http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=4653 Kaplan 177 “Saturday, March 29, 2003.” Silliman’s Blog. Mar 29 2003. 19 Nov 2012 http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003/03/peter-oleary-adds-some-light-and.html “Search was: Emily Dickinson.” Los Angeles Public Library. City of Los Angeles. 9 May 2011 http://catalog.lapl.org/carlweb/jsp/DoSearch?databaseID=965&index=N&terms=emily% 20dickinson. Sim, Kevin, dir. “The Shakespeare Mystery.” PBS: Frontline. Transcript. April 23 1986. 20 September 2012. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shakespeare/tapes/shakespearescript.html “Sonnet XXIV – Shall I compare thee…? T-Shirt.” RedBubble. 2009. 2 Nov 2012 http://www.redbubble.com/people/wordigrams/works/3572516-sonnet-xviii-shall-i- compare-thee-t- shirt?p=sticker Spicer, Jack. The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Ed. Robin Blaser. Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow, 1980. Starbuck, George. The Works: poems selected from five decades. ed. Kathryn Starbuck and Elizabeth Meese. Foreward by Anthony Hecht. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2003. Strand, Mark and Eavan Boland. The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms. New York: Norton, 2000. Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 1997. “Visual Poetic Artist Books.” Introduction. The Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry. October 2011. 15 Jan 2013 http://ww3.rediscov.com/sacknerarchives/Welcome.aspx Wave Books. “A Little White Shadow.” 10 Oct 2011 http://www.wavepoetry.com/catalog/47-a- little-white-shadow?page=4&by=author. Werner, Marta L. Emily Dickinson’s Open Folios: Scenes of Reading, Surface of Writing. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan Press, 1995. ------. “Writing’s Other Scene: Crossing and Crossing-Out in Emily Dickinson’s Manuscripts.” Text. Vol. 17. 2005: 197-221. Kaplan 178 Additional Bibliography Alpaugh, David. “The New Math of Poetry.” The Chronicle of Higher Education. The Chronicle Review. 21 Feb 2010. 5 May 2010 <http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of- Poetry/64249/>. Bachinsky, Elizabeth. “The Nose To, the Tens No, the Not Ens, the Sent On, the S o n n e t.” Lemon Hound. Ed Sina Queyras. 29 August 2008. 28 July 2012. http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2008/08/elizabeth-bachinsky-reads-k-silem.html Beach, Christopher. “ABC of influence : Ezra Pound and the remaking of American poetic tradition. UC Press, l992. Benjamin, Walter. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Bervin, Jen. “Special Section: Inspiration” Poets and Writers. Jan/Feb 2010. p53-55. “Biography: William Shakespeare.” The Poetry Foundation. 2011. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/william-shakespeare Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1969. -----, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New Haven: Yale UP, 1977. Broqua, Vincent. “Living-with Shakespeare? (Three American experimental poets’ compositions with Shakespeare’s sonnet 130).” Transatlantica. 1/2010. July 20 2012. http://transatlantica.revues.org/4815 -----. “Stephen Ratcliffe’s ‘[where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG’ Or, writing through Shakespeare’s sonnets” Jacket2. 20 Oct 2011. July 20 2012. http://jacket2.org/article/stephen-ratcliffe%E2%80%99s-where-late-sweet-birds-sang Burger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Burroughs, William S. “Interview.” Paris Review Fall 1965, vol 36. <http://www.the parisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/4424>. Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings 1936-1961. Weselyan UP, 1961. -----. Writing Through Finnegan’s Wake. Tulsa: U of Tulsa Monograph, 1978. Campbell, Ken. Father’s Garden. letterpress printed in London, 1989. http://www.brokenrules.co.uk/fathersgarden.html#. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. New York: Carlton House, undated (though leaf inscription is dated1932). ------. Alice’s adventures in Wonderland: in words of one syllable. Saalfield, 1908. Caws, Mary Ann. "Tom Phillips: Treating and Translating." Mosaic [Winnipeg] 34.3 (2001): 19. Academic OneFile. Web. 8 Sept. 2010. http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC- Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=AONE&docId=A78575555&source=g ale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=usocal_main&version=1.0 Clay, Steven and Rodney Phillips. A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980. New York: Granary, 1998. Clock, Cheryl. “Master of the Plunderverse.” The Standard. Welland Tribune. 17 June 2011. http://www.wellandtribune.ca/2011/06/17/master-of-the-plunderverse Dada Companion. “ready-mades catalogue.” Marcel Duchamp. 16 Sept 2010. 16 Sept. 2010. http://www.dada-companion.com/duchamp/readymades_catalogue.php. Kaplan 179 Danley, Susan, ed. Language as Object: Emily Dickinson and Contemporary Art. Amherst, MA: Mead Art Museum / U of M Press, 1997. Diepeveen, Leonard. Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. “Erasures.” Wave Books. 1 Oct 2010 http://www.wavepoetry.com/erasures/. Fitterman, Robert. Rob the Plagiarist. New York: Roof Books, 2009. Frazee, Andy. “’Present-Absent’: The Dependence on/Transcendence of ‘Shakespeare’ in Steven Ratcliffe’s [where late the sweet] BIRDS SANG and Jen Bervin’s Nets.”Jacket. 36, 2008. 12 March 2013 http://jacketmagazine.com/36/frazee-ratcliffe-bervin.shtml Gass, William H. “Tom Phillips: ‘A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel,’ 1973.” Artforum International. 35.3 (1996): 80-82. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 7 Sept. 2010. <http://find.galegroup.com.libproxy.usc.edu/gtx/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC- Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=EAIM&docId=A18963444&source=g ale&srcprod=EAIM&userGroupName=usocal_main&version=1.0>. Goldman, Judith. “Re-thinking ‘Non-retinal Literature’: Citation, ‘Radical Mimesis,’ and Phenomenologies of Reading in Conceptual Writing.” Postmodern Culture. Vol 22, no 1. Sept 2011. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v022/22.1.goldman.html Grabher, Gudrun, Roland Hagenbüchle, and Cristanne Miller, eds. The Emily Dickinson Handbook. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1998. Gregory, Elizabeth. Quotation and Modern American Poetry: “Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads.” Houston: Rice UP, 1996. Hair, Ross. Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry. New York: MacMillan, 2010. Hanmer, Karen. “The Flag Book Bind-O-Rama.” Book Arts Web. July 1 2008. 5 Feb 2013 http://www.philobiblon.com/flagbook/ Harvey, Matthea and Amy Jean Porter. Of Lamb. San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2011. Holbrook, Susan. “A Festival of More.” Influency Salon. Issue 4. Undated. http://influencysalon.ca/essays/festival-more “How to do silence: A conversation with Vanessa Place.” Lemon Hound. July 29, 2010. 2 Feb 2013 http://lemonhound.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-to-do-silence-conversation- with.html Howard, W. Scott. “’roses no such roses’: Jen Bervin's Nets and the Sonnet Tradition from Shakespeare to the Postmoderns.” Double Room #5, Winter/Spring 2005. http://www.webdelsol.com/Double_Room/issue_five/Jen_Bervin.html Hubert, Renée Riese and Judd D. The Cutting Edge of Reading: Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books, 1999. Keller, Lynn. Re-making it new: Contemporary American poetry and the modernist tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987 ------. Thinking Poetry: Readings in Contemporary Women’s Exploratory Poetics. Iowa City, IA: U of Iowa Press, 2010. Kenner, Hugh. The Pound Era. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1971. King, Cynthia Arrieu. “Mary Ruefle. Little White Shadow.” Octopus Magazine. Issue 08. 19 Oct 2009 <http://www.octopusmagazine.com/issue08/reviews/cynthia_arrieu_king_ruefle. htm>. Klima, Stephan. Artists Books: A Critical Survey of the Literature. New York: Granary Books, 1988. Kotz, Liz. Words to be Looked At: Language in 1960s Art. Cambridge: MIT, 2007. Kaplan 180 Lettner, Margot. “A Very Little Book of Verse: Gregory Betts and The Others Raisd in Me.” Influency Salon: Engaging Conversations With Contemporary Canadian Poetry. Issue 4. Dec 2011. July 28 2012. http://influencysalon.ca/measures/very-little-book-verse Lyons, Graham. “Citation as Explanation: Walter Benjamin and Louis Zukofsky, Colporteurs.” Jacket. Late 2008. 21 Oct 2009 <http://jacketmagazine.com/36/lyons-benjamin- zukofsky.shtml>. MacDonald, Travis. “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” Jacket 38, 2009. <http://jacketmagazine.com/38/macdonald-erasure.shtml>. MacLow, Jackson. Barnesbook. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1996. McClennan, Rob. “12 or 20 questions: with Janet Holmes.” 12 or 20 questions. 5 Nov. 2007. May 2 2011. http://12or20questions.blogspot.com/2007/11/12-or-20-questions-with- janet-holmes.html. McDaniel, Ray. “A Little White Shadow, Mary Ruefle.” The “Constant Critic.” March 30, 2006. 19 Oct 2009 <http://www.constantcritic.com/ray_mcdaniel/a_little_white_shadow/>. Moore, Marianne. Becoming Marianne Moore: the early poems 1907-1924 UC Press, 2002. -----. The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore. ed. Patricia C. Willis. New York: Penguin, 1987. -----. Ed. Grace Schulman. The Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Penguin, 2005 Motte, Warren F., translator. Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1986. Mullen, Laura. Dark Archive. Berkeley: U of California Press, 2011. Naik, Gautam. “Search for New Poetics Yields This: ‘Kitty Goes Postal/Wants Pizza: Google- Inspired Verse Gains Respect.” The Wall Street Journal. May 25 2010. 5 Nov 2012 http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575252223568314054.html Park, Ed. “The Connections: A selective history of instant inspiration.” The Village Voice. New York: June 2-8 2004. Vol 49 issue 22. C73. Proquest. http://proquest.umi.com.libproxy.usc.edu/pqdweb?did=649978691&sid=12&Fmt=4&clie ntId=5239&RQT=309&VName=PQD Perloff, Marjorie. 21 st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002. ------. The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1993. ------. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary. Chicago: U of C Press, 1996. Phillips, Elizabeth. Emily Dickinson: Personae and Performance. University Park: Penn State UP, 1988. Phillips, Tom. A humument : supplement I, 6 variations on page 85. London: Tetrad Press, undated. “Publish.” Lulu Enterprises, Inc. 2010. 16 Sept 2010 http://www.lulu.com/publish/. Queyras, Sina. “To Sonnet, To Son-net, Tucson Net.” Harriet. The Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/03/to-sonnet-to-son-net-tuscon-net/ Rasula, Jed. Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2004. Reinfeld, Linda. Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1992. Retallack, Joan. The Poetical Wager. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. Retallack, Joan and Juliana Spahr, eds. Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary. New York: Macmillian, 2006. Rothenberg, Jerome, and Steven Clay, eds. A Book of the Book: Some Works and Projections about the Book and Writing. New York: Granary Books, 2000. Kaplan 181 Saint, Lily. “Make It Do, Make It Now: Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow and Ronald Johnson's Radi os.” Harp & Altar. 19 Oct. 2009. 11 Nov 2009 http://www.harpandaltar.com/interior.php?t=r&i=1&p=10&e=11. Scaife, Jennifer. “Nets.” Indiana Review. Bloomington: Summer 2005, Vol 27 issue 1. 240-242. Schultz, Susan M. A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama Press, 2005. Selinger, Eric. “’I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os. Contemporary Literature. 33.1 (Spring 1992). 46-73. Spahr, Juliana. Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001. Swenson, Cole. Noise that Stays Noise: Essays. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2011. “Trainwreck Press.” ditch, the poetry that matters. 2012. 2 Nov 2012 http://www.ditchpoetry.com/trainwreckpress.htm Vanderborg, Susan. Paratextual Communitites: American Avant-Garde Poetry Since 1950. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. Voyce, Stephen. “Toward an Open Source Poetics: Appropriation, Collaboration, and the Commons.” Criticism. Summer 2011, Vol 53 No. 3. Detroit: Wayne State UP. 2011 p.407-438. Waldrop, Rosemarie. A Key into the Language of America. New York: New Directions, 1994. White, Fred. Approaching Emily Dickinson: Critical Currents and Crosscurrents since 1960. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2008. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Culture and Value. Trans. Peter Winch. Ed. G. H. Von Wright. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1984. -----. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958. 2nd ed. Kaplan 182

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Asset Metadata

Creator Kaplan, Genevieve M. (author)

Core Title Reclaiming the book-object: appropriated texts in 21st century poetry

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 07/15/2015

Defense Date 04/24/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag appropriation,book-arts,conceptual writing,Dickinson,erasure,OAI-PMH Harvest,poetics,poetry,sonnets

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), St. John, David (committee chair), Dane, Joseph A. (committee member), Rosenthal, Margaret (committee member)

Creator Email genevieve.kaplan@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-289263

Unique identifier UC11295453

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Legacy Identifier etd-KaplanGene-1776.pdf

Dmrecord 289263

Document Type Dissertation

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Rights Kaplan, Genevieve M.

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

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