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'Machines made of words': poets, technology, and the mediation of subjectivity; and, Pomegranate-eater (poems)

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'Machines made of words': poets, technology, and the mediation of subjectivity; and, Pomegranate-eater (poems)

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Content ‘MACHINES MADE OF WORDS’

POETS, TECHNOLOGY, AND THE MEDIATION OF SUBJECTIVITY

AND

POMEGRANATE-EATER (POEMS)

by

Amaranth Borsuk

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE AND CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2010

Copyright 2010 Amaranth Borsuk
ii
DEDICATION

For my parents, Ruth and Sherwin,

with love and admiration.
iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the Graduate School at the University of Southern California
for the Oakley Fellowship that enabled me to complete this dissertation, as well as the
Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing program for the years of support I have
received. My work on H.D. was greatly aided by a summer research fellowship from the
English department, and my research on Cendrars by an international travel grant from
the Graduate School.
I am grateful to Leo Braudy for expanding my intellectual horizons and being an
excellent mentor and friend. Thanks, as well, to the other members of my committee,
whose insights have influenced my scholarly and creative work: Carol Muske-Dukes,
David St. John, and Steve Anderson. Marjorie Perloff was instrumental in shaping my
research on Blaise Cendrars and has been an invaluable supporter and model. Thanks to
my friends Katherine Karlin, Adrienne Walser, Gabriela Jauregui, and Andrew Allport
for being part of my life and for helping me hone this work in various forms.
I cannot adequately thank Susan McCabe for her candor, guidance and
encouragement. Her generosity, “self-out-of-self, / selfless,” is boundless. She has
inspired me more than she knows.
This work would not be possible without the love and support of Sherwin and
Ruth Borsuk and Brad Bouse. Thank you.
iv
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

List of Figures v

Abbreviations vii

Abstract viii

Introduction: Noble Writers: Machine Poetics in the Modern Context 1
I. “A Quickened, Multiplied Consciousness”: The fragmentation of the lyric subject 4
II. “The Human Engine Waits”: Other Approaches to Modernist Technophilia 11
III. “Imaginazione senza fili”: Mapping the Wireless Imagination 17

Chapter 1: “Ma belle machine à écrire”: Blaise Cendrars: Poet and Typewriter 22
I. “Cette main qui doit souffrir”: The machine and the suffering hand 26
II. “Fai[re] suivre jusqu’au bout”: Crossing the line 33
III. “L’œil qu’a ma page”: The visual page and the invisible author 39
IV. “Est-ce que Monsieur Blaise Cendrars est à bord?: A Trans-Atlantic side trip 47
V. Mon corps est d’acier: The collaborative muse 64

Chapter 2: “There have been pictures here”: H.D. and the Projective Medium 67
I. “I could not get rid of the experience by writing about it”: The search for new
technologies of inscription 68
II. “An unusual way to think”: the poet as projectionist 85
III. “A sort of spiritual optical-illusion”: The projective medium in Trilogy 94

Chapter 3: “My mind flies into it through my fingers”: The Poet in the Machine 116
I. “A small (or large) machine made of words”: Toward a Data Poetics 119
II. “A list of compelling, gradually compiling evidence”: Visualizing and
Conceptualizing the Data Cloud 126
III. “The expertise of a secretary crossed with the attitude of a pirate”:
Redefining Inspiration in the Digital Age 139
IV. “I throw it a scrap and it hums”: Tatters of lanaguage 149

Coda 159

Bibliography 160

Appendix A: Pomegranate-Eater 168
v
LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. F.T. Marinetti, Les Mots en liberté futuristes 6

Fig. 2. Blaise Cendrars, Le Panama ou les Aventures de mes Sept Oncles 23

Fig. 3. Portable Remington typewriter 24

Fig. 4. 1920s Erotic postcard featuring a typewriter and her boss 29

Fig. 5. Olivetti M20 typewriter advertisement 30

Fig. 6. Blaise Cendrars on board Le Formose 41

Fig. 7. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Lettre-Océan,” Calligrammes 46

Fig. 8. Blaise Cendrars’ carte de visite 49

Fig. 9. A page from the notebook of Mário de Andrade 49

Fig. 10. Postcard from Cendrars to Andrade 63

Fig. 11. William H. Mumler, “Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of her husband,
President Lincoln” 74

Fig. 12. Spirit photographs made by Ada Emma Deane in the 1920s 76

Fig. 13. Thomas Glendenning-Hamilton, “Mary Marshall producing ectoplasm
bearing the likeness of Arthur Conan Doyle” 81

Fig. 14. André Brouillet, Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière 82

Fig. 15. William J. Crawford, “Close-up of ectoplasm collecting at the feet of the
medium Kathleen Goligher” 83

Fig. 16. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, The medium Eva C. with materialization 84

Fig. 17. A spirit photograph taken by William Hope 86

Fig. 18. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Belshazzar’s Feast 93

Fig. 19. Anonymous, “The ghost of Bernadette Soubirous” 108
vi
Fig. 20. Vannevar Bush, “Supersecretary of the Coming Age” 128

Fig. 21. Yelp’s “Monocle” 129

Fig. 22. Fringe 130

Fig. 23. Liberty Mutual, “Sideswipe” 130

Fig. 24. Ander Monson and Jer Thorpe, “Memory” 141

Fig. 25. Flickr source image for “Memory” 142

Fig. 26. Ander Monson and Jer Thorpe, “Liz, still life...” 146

Fig. 27. Ander Monson and Jer Thorpe, “At the after-party, Crisco...” 147

Fig. 28. Jer Thorpe, “NYTimes: 365/360 - 2009 (in color) 150

Fig. 29. Boris Müller, “Poetry on the Road,” 2003 Poster 152

Fig. 30. Boris Müller, “Poetry on the Road,” 2006 Poster 152

Fig. 31. Boris Müller, “Poetry on the Road,” 2003 Poster detail 152

Fig. 32. Boris Müller, Visualization of “Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im
Havelland” 152

Fig. 33. “Particle tracks, Big European Bubble Chamber” (BEBC), CERN 153
vii
ABBREVIATIONS

CI Craig Dworkin, ed., The Consequence of Innovation: 21
st
Century Poetics (New
York: Roof Books, 2008).

CP Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, Trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).

CU James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, eds., Close Up 1927–1933:
Cinema and Modernism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998).

GFT Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-
Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

HDCP H.D. Collected Poems 1912–1944 (New York: New Directions Books, 1986).

NMP Adalaide Morris and Thom Swiss, eds. New Media Poetics: Contexts,
Technotexts, and Theoretics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

NTV H.D. Notes on thought and Vision (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982).

Sword H.D. The Sword Went Out to Sea (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007).

T H.D. Trilogy (New York: New Directions Books, 1998).

TG H.D. The Gift, Ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
1998).

TTF H.D. Tribute to Freud (New York: New Directions Books, 1984).

TPM Pierre Apraxine, ed. The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2004).

WL T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, Ed.
Michael North (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001).
viii
ABSTRACT

“‘Machines Made of Words’: Poets, Technology, and the Mediation of
Subjectivity” tracks poets’ attempts to re-envision the lyric impulse over the course of the
twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, and demonstrates that inscription technologies have
played a vital role in enabling them to do so. Looking in particular at the use of writing
technologies by modernist poets between the First and Second World Wars, this
dissertation argues that the poetic engagement with machines goes beyond technophilia
to reveal a complex relationship between technology, the body, and constructions of
authorship. By turning to technologies that mediate between the hand and the page,
enhancing and extending their problematic bodies, the poets examined seek to undermine
their own sense of authorship. This mediation paradoxically enables them to take on the
authority necessary to keep writing despite their experience of fragmentation, thus
reaffirming them as poets. Analyses of Blaise Cendrars’ use of the typewriter and H.D.’s
projective mediumship presage digital mediation in contemporary conceptual and digital
poetry by Ara Shirinyan, Ander Monson, Jer Thorpe, and Boris Müller. As we
increasingly experience life within a data cloud, perceiving ourselves to be surrounded by
language and information accessible to those with the proper technologies, the modernist
notion of using machines to channel words from the ether takes on new resonance.
Pomegranate-Eater explores language itself as a medium that often interposes
between the speaker and her meaning. Through interlingual play and an array of
personas, the poems explore how language constructs and deconstructs us, reveling in the
etymologies, homophones, and puns that push language to the boundary of materiality.
1
INTRODUCTION

NOBLE WRITERS: MACHINE POETICS IN THE MODERN CONTEXT

Writing in 1941, with news of the atrocity, pain, and suffering of World War II
penetrating American lives and homes through radio broadcasts and newspapers, Wallace
Stevens attempted to reconcile the role of the American poet in a society under the
intense “pressure of reality.”
1
Because of these modern technologies for disseminating
information, Stevens notes in “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” “there is no
distance. We are intimate with people we have never seen and, unhappily, they are
intimate with us” (653). Faced with a war that threw his faith in history, the present, even
the possibility of a future into question, Stevens turned to modern physics to reconstruct
the position of a poet in a world in turmoil—one from which he or she might resist its
pressure.
Drawing on Henri Bergson’s notion of flux and C.E.M. Joad’s philosophical
speculations, Stevens’ text acknowledges that while the mind tells us the external world
consists of a solid external reality, this illusory fixity belies the vagaries of individual
perspective and the constant activity of subatomic particles too minute for observation.
2

To be part of this fluid world, the poet’s “nobility resolves itself into an enormous
number of vibrations, movements, changes. To fix it is to put an end to it” (664). Stevens’
nobility is an internal force that resists the force of external violence. The poet provides a

1
Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” Wallace Stevens Collected Poetry and
Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997) p. 656.
2
For a detailed analysis of the use of scientific metaphors in American modernist poetry, see Lisa M.
Steinman, Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1987).
2
container for this force, but “his own measure as a poet” is in fact “the measure of his
power to abstract himself” (657). The poet thus becomes an abstract flow of vibrations,
the unfixed center for a swirl of ideas. The term “abstract” refers to both the rejection of
mimesis in favor of abstract forms and to abstraction as removal, a withdrawal of
authoritative presence that characterizes both the poetry and visual art of the modernist
period. From post-impressionism, cubism, and vorticism to transrational and
“impersonal” poetry, poets working between the First and Second World Wars seem
intent on finding ways to abstract the self in order to claim a place for poetry.
As Stevens’ essay suggests, during the modernist period poets’ relationship to
subjectivity and to language itself shifted due to a number of external factors. These
include two massive wars, numerous scientific advances, the rise of technologies for
rapid travel and inscription, the effects of urbanization, and the rise of commodity
culture. Virginia Woolf articulates the shift in writers’ perception of subjective
experience in her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in which she famously claims,
“in or about December 1910 human character changed.”
3
Wherever we date it, it is clear
that artists and writers shared a changing perception of the nature of subjective
experience, which in turn altered the formation of a poetic identity, as it does for Stevens
in his construction of the “noble rider.”
From the modern writer’s perspective, the authority of the nineteenth century had
been grounded in the authenticity of subjective experience, a rejection of the authority
based in rationalism that characterized the Enlightenment. From the Romantic

3
Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” A Woman's Essays (London: Penguin, 1992) p. 70.
3
valorization of the poet’s relationship to the outside world and observation of it through
the Victorian realist novel’s focus on complex characters motivated by experience, the
self is central to nineteenth-century literature. At the turn of the century, however, the
validity of such subjective experience is thrown into question by those scientific theories
Stevens cites as well as Einstein’s theory of relativity and, later, Heisenberg’s uncertainty
principle. Novelists like Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and James Joyce present an
increasing sense that the highly-prized subjectivity of the previous century prevents true
contact with other people, isolating us further within an increasingly atomized culture.
4

Their work bears out Walter Pater’s 1873 assertion that we are each shut in by “a thick
wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from
us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.”
5
Stevens sought to break down
that wall with the violent force of nobility. His ambivalent relationship to the
technologies of his time and his desire to revise the poet’s role due to historical context
reflect a recurring concern among twentieth and twenty-first century poets: how to broach
the rigid “wall of personality” dividing authors and readers in order to claim a place for
poetry in the face of intense pressure.
This book investigates the use of writing technologies by modernist poets
between the First and Second World Wars as an outgrowth of this concern with poetic
abstraction. Through an examination of modernist poets who foreground writing

4
For a detailed investigation of the emphasis on isolation in modern thought, see J. Hillis Miller, The
Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000).
5
Walter Horatio Pater, “Conclusion to ‘The Renaissance’,” Victorian Web,
www.victorianweb.org/authors/pater/renaissance/conclusion.html. The section heading below also comes
from Pater’s conclusion.
4
technologies within their work, I argue that poetic engagement with machines goes
beyond technophilia to reveal a complex relationship between technology, the body, and
constructions of authorship. The poets and the work I examine, that of Swiss legionnaire
Blaise Cendrars and American expatriate Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), come from different
modernisms and emerge at different points in their careers, on different continents, and in
different languages. Yet they share with one another, and with generations of poets who
follow them, a desire to undermine their own sense of authorship by turning to
technologies that mediate between the hand and the page. This mediation paradoxically
enables them to take on the authority necessary to keep writing despite their experience
of fragmentation.

I. “A QUICKENED, MULTIPLIED CONSCIOUSNESS”: THE FRAGMENTATION OF THE
LYRIC SUBJECT

The fracturing of the modern subject of course precedes Stevens’ 1941 essay,
6

and can be traced back to Charles Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863), in
which the poet characterizes the artist as a “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,”
7

reflecting the tumult of the streets around him while losing himself within them. The
crowd of the urban city provides “an immense reservoir of electrical energy” in which the
artist experiences sublimity, not as a Romantic sense of wonder at nature’s grandeur, but

6
For a detailed survey of the way modernist writers and their precursors constructed authorial subjectivity,
see Peter Nicholls’ wonderful Modernisms: A Literary Guide (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1995). For the purposes of this book I outline an abbreviated lineage based on those poets who influenced
Cendrars and H.D. due to their interest in technology and redefinitions of authorship.
7
Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life,” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, Trans.
Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon Press, 2006) p. 10.
5
as a “nervous shock” (8), a “phantasmagoria [...] distilled from nature” (11). This
simultaneously mechanized and highly sensitive individual provides a stark contrast to
the poet envisioned by William Wordsworth—one who reflects on pastoral scenes or
picturesque ruins and composes “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [that
arises...] from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
8
Wordsworth’s Romantic lyric, an
“utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception,
thought, and feeling”
9
implies a unified, rarefied subjectivity that subsequent modernists
would find untenable in a society where neither tranquility nor the individual perspective
providing the font for this overflow could be depended upon.
This mistrust of the lyric persona prompted Stéphane Mallarmé to proclaim a
“Crisis in Poetry” at the end of the nineteenth century and to demand a focus on
language’s musical and visual qualities—a scoring of words on the page. He called for
“la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots,” a relinquishing of
authorial control that would “replace the audible breathing in lyric poetry of old—replace
the poet’s own personal and passionate control of verse.”
10
Mallarmé’s emphasis on
language and the withdrawal of the lyric poet one feels “breathing” down one’s neck
would influence the Futurist poets in Italy and Russia, with their “words in freedom,”
artist’s books and Zaum poems. Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexander Kruchenykh would

8
William Wordsworth, “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Sixth
Edition, Volume 2, Ed. M.H. Abrams (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993) p. 151.
9
M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Seventh Edition (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1999) p. 146.
10
Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Crisis in Poetry,” Modernism: an Anthology of Sources and Documents. Ed.
Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) p.
126.
6
subsequently advocate “the self-sufficient
word,”
11
describing poetry in 1919 as “a
flight from the I.”
12
In 1912 F.T.
Marinetti would also enjoin his Futurist
peers to “destroy the ‘I’ in literature” and
“[r]eplace the psychology of man, now
spent, with a lyrical obsession with
matter.”
13
His “parole in libertà,” or
“words in freedom” use the visual space
of the page to create movement with words, and his “imaginazione senza fili,” or
“wireless imagination” mimics the speed of wireless telegraphy through onomatopoeia,
shape poems, and arithmetical symbols that shift attention away from the speaking
subject and onto the material of language (fig.1). The authenticity of this poetry comes
from its speed—an attempt to approximate the rush of modern consciousness, and
particularly the experience of a country at war, resounding with the “Zang Tumb Tumb”
of exploding shells.
While the European avant-gardes proclaimed a poetics of material language,
invested in the sound of words and their appearance on the page, in 1911 London, T.E.

11
David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexander Kruchenykh, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, “Slap in the
Face of Public Taste,” Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Ed. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2000) p. 230.
12
Velimir Khlebnikov, “Artists of the World!”, Letters and Theoretical Writings, Trans. Paul Schmidt
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) p. 371.
13
Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature,” Selected Poems and Related
Prose, Trans. Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven: Yale University press, 2002) p.
79. The emphasis is Marinetti’s.
Fig. 1. F.T. Marinetti, Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Milan:
Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia, 1919) 101.
7
Hulme would predict a break with the Romantic in his essay “Romanticism and
Classicism,” a major influence on Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists. Hulme famously
characterized Romanticism as “spilt religion”
14
in which the world and the individual
supplant heaven and God, equating the poet with a mystical seer. This worldview makes
humans infinitely perfectible, not limited by their own perspectives. To Hulme, the
resulting “high-falutin’” poetry, drenched in an emotion that clouds accurate
representation, can only be rectified by a return to “accurate, precise and definite
description” (732), a prescription that echoes in Pound’s call for a poetry “austere, direct,
free from emotional slither.”
15
In advocating a return to Classicism, Hulme changed the
image of the poet, asserting that because words’ meanings are unfixed, the poet must
undergo “a terrific struggle with language” (732) in order to express what he or she
means, advocating poetry as labor and not the “spontaneous overflow” Romanticism had
established in readers’ minds.
Another offshoot of the Classicist and Imagist response to Romanticism comes in
the form of T.S. Eliot’s “impersonal theory of poetry,” which he articulates in the well-
known essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919). Drawing on both Baudelaire’s
image of the artist as receiver for the shocks of his environment and the language of
scientific experiment we hear later in Stevens, Eliot delineates the poet as a chemical
medium:
The point of view I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical
theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has,
not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium

14
T.E. Hulme, “Romanticism and Classicism,” Critical Theory Since Plato, Revised ed. Ed. Hazard Adams
(Florida: HBJ, 1992) p. 729.
15
Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1918) p. 12.
8
and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar
and unexpected ways.
16

Eliot’s call for “depersonalization” (762) and a “historical sense” (761) of one’s lineage
provides another means of allowing for the fragmentation of the modern subject—
treating him or her as a chemical “medium” in which experiences are catalyzed. For
Eliot, “‘emotion recollected in tranquility’ is an inexact formula” (764) because
tranquility and a stable perspective have disappeared from the poet’s horizon. His work
consists of “fragments I have shored against my ruins,”
17
a swirl of interpenetrating
voices, languages, spaces, and times more resonant with his experience of urban London
than the hills above Tintern Abbey. The Waste Land’s polyvocality makes it difficult to
locate a lyric speaker at the center of the text. The voice that incants “sweet Thames, run
softly, till I end my song” (11) readily dissolves into the heteroglossic stream. For Eliot,
poetic authority comes from this cobbling together of perspectives—where cockney
ladies at a pub mingle their voices with typists, motorcar rumblings, and Sanskrit
sermons. With omniscience impossible, the poet brings together diverse sources to create
a broader view of the reality he knows lies beyond individual perception.
While these writers are separated by continents and cohorts, their desire to
redefine poetry is in each case partly tied to their embodied experience of daily life—a
life marked by the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. The poets I will explore
in the coming chapters share this troubled sense of the body’s and the poet’s place in a

16
T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Critical Theory Since Plato, Revised ed. Ed. Hazard
Adams (Florida: HBJ, 1992) p. 763.
17
T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land,” The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Michael
North (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001) p. 20. Hereafter WL.
9
society under pressure. While this conundrum could apply to a number of other poets
whose work deals with the modern body—including, among others, Marinetti, Eliot,
Mina Loy, and Gertrude Stein—the particular modernists I examine come together
uniquely because of their experience of their own bodies as disabled or handicapped
according to social norms. Both find themselves grounded in the physical body, Cendrars
as an amputee after the First World War and H.D. as a woman whose bisexuality and
physical and psychological breakdowns during the First and Second World Wars (which
resulted in the miscarriage of her first child and near-fatal double pneumonia during her
second pregnancy) would brand her a “hysteric,” a diagnosis she sought to work through
first with Havelock Ellis and later with Sigmund Freud. Both poets suffered physical
traumas during the First World War that haunted them for the rest of their lives. The
image of the poet as a transcendent spirit, always trying, as Hulme joked, to “fl[y] away
into the circumambient gas” (729) and to “wander lonely as a cloud” would take on a
different meaning in a period in which flight not only was possible, but was beginning to
be marshaled for war. Perhaps for Cendrars and H.D. Romanticism seemed flighty and
idealistic in a way contemporary poets could not afford to be.
At first glance, this pairing might seem odd, given that Cendrars and H.D. are
only two out of a vast number of poets who wrote with and about emerging technologies
between the First and Second World Wars. In a longer study, I would examine other
figures who might also fit into this schema (such as those listed above) and shed new
light on poetry, technology and embodiment, but here I focus on these two figures
precisely because it may seem perverse and unexpected to do so. The differences between
them enable me to demonstrate that technology serves a particular need among poets—a
10
need that transcends context, continent, and constituency. Given the scope of this project
and the vast array of writers engaged with the automobile, radio, phonograph, telegraph,
telephone, camera, typewriter, and the like, I see Cendrars and H.D. as two points along a
continuum that extends to contemporary digital poetry and work that uses networked
computers to mediate between the author and the text.
Although I hoped to select poets as remote from one another as possible, over the
course of my research, I discovered that Cendrars and H.D. had much in common, despite
traveling in quite different literary circles. H.D. was born September 10, 1886, almost
precisely a year before Blaise Cendrars, who was born September 1, 1887. They also died
eight months apart in 1961 (he in January, she in September). Both poets renamed
themselves when they took on their identities as writers: Frédéric Sauser became Blaise
Cendrars while Hilda Doolittle adopted the androgynous initials H.D. Both left their
homes to live abroad and traveled widely during their lifetimes. Both were involved in
experimental film during its early years: Cendrars in France as assistant director on Abel
Gance’s La Roue, and H.D. in Switzerland, where she helped form the film journal Close
Up, and collaborated on films with her lifelong companion Bryher (Winifred Ellerman)
and Kenneth Macpherson. Aside from this trivia, Cendrars and H.D. are most clearly
linked by their preoccupation with the permeability of the body. In their poems, both
resist cohesive corporeality because their lived experience of the body would not support
it.
18

18
Both were also interested in a documentary style of writing that would more readily capture reality: H.D.
as a founding member of the Imagist movement, and Cendrars in the “verbal photograph” poems of
Feuilles de route and Documentaires (originally titled Kodak, 1924). Their desire for greater immediacy
underlies their mutual admiration for film and investment in its potential as a universal language. Given the
11
These poets turn to writing technologies that offer to both supplement the
problematic modern body and eclipse it, an enticing prospect to those wishing to replace
the “audible breathing” of lyric poetry with a silent machine. The works explored here
bracket the modernist period: Cendrars’ Feuilles de Route, written on shipboard during
his travels to South America just after the First World War; and H.D.’s memoir Tribute to
Freud and the poems of Trilogy, written well after her involvement with Imagism and
during World War II, a period of growing military threat in which she and Bryher began
experimenting with spiritualist séance in their London flat. Technology is more than a
metaphor for these poets; it is a catalyst that enables each to deal with the shock and
trauma of war—literally in the case of Cendrars, who lost his right arm in combat, and
psychologically in H.D.’s spiritualist attempts to commune with dead soldiers and lost
friends and relatives. More importantly, these technologies enable them to locate
themselves as poets in a world grown increasingly skeptical of the lyric voice, helping
them to grapple with the slippage between their desire to communicate and their sense of
the futility of describing subjective experience.

II. “THE HUMAN ENGINE WAITS”
19
: OTHER APPROACHES TO MODERNIST
TECHNOPHILIA

A number of scholars have explored the fascination technology held for writers
and the public at large in the early twentieth century. Most of these studies situate writers

imperfections of the human perceptual apparatus and the social construction of the subject, film appeared to
them to provide a better representation of the world and its objects than language.
19
WL p. 12.
12
in a society that has turned to technology to counteract a sense of political, social, and
physical instability. Cecelia Ticchi’s Shifting Gears, for example, offers a complex
analysis of the “machine-age consciousness”
20
that led American poets, fiction writers,
and artists to seek a connection between their work and the architectural and
technological innovations they saw around them. In response to what Robert Herrick,
drawing on Bergson, called the “unstable flux” (Qtd. Ticchi 43) of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, she argues, the engineer emerged as a new American hero,
symbolizing efficiency, intellect, and ingenuity. Although the engineer embodied stability
and progress, modern writers were divided in their response to the figure, some decrying
the hubris of human attempts to dominate nature, and others lauding the engineering feats
that allowed architects to span rivers with suspension bridges and scale heights with the
steel skyscrapers that came to embody modernity. Ticchi suggests this “gear and girder”
aesthetics of architecture and social thought led modernist writers to see their endeavor as
the arrangement of a system of prefabricated parts, rather than the creation of a unified
work of art that springs whole from the creative mind, a perspective encouraging collage,
polyphony, juxtaposition, and compression. In this way, their work becomes similar to
that of a designer or engineer, rather than a Romantic lyric poet. It is a poetry in which, as
William Carlos Williams put it, “there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is
redundant” (Qtd. Ticchi 266), a poetry of interlocking, economical pieces rather than one
guided by a vision of organic wholeness.
This emphasis on a streamlined, efficient poetics recurs in Lisa Steinman’s Made

20
Cecelia Ticchi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, and Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1987) p. 18.
13
in America, which suggests that the American modernist poets adopted technological
metaphors in order to create a place for creative work in a world that valued pragmatism
and science over other modes of knowing and being. Steinman examines the scientific
and technological metaphors used by Williams, Stevens, and Marianne Moore, and reads
them as a defense of poetry against the consumerist expectations of foreign audiences and
the indifference of domestic readers. To demonstrate poetry’s value, she argues, “the
objectivity of science was called on to validate the apparent subjectivity with which
poetry seemed to be concerned” (62). Thus, both Steinman and Ticchi see the
technological metaphor as poets’ recourse against accusations they harbored an
anachronistic lyric subjectivity.
The impact of an aesthetics of efficiency on the modernist subject is extended by
Tim Armstrong, whose phenomenological study Modernism, Technology, and the Body
addresses the engineering of the modern person. He situates modernist writing within an
atmosphere of anxiety about the place of the body amid rapid social and technological
change. Responding to cultural anxieties over waste and disequilibrium, a number of
movements arose in the first decades of the twentieth century that aimed to control the
body, from the use of the electric chair to punish criminals, to Frank Gilbreth’s studies of
bodily motion for “scientific management,” to Fletcherist theories aimed at improving
digestion, to the advent of operations that could improve a man’s sexual response or
change an individual’s sex entirely. Armstrong places the bodies of poets and artists
themselves within this matrix, examining Ezra Pound’s metaphorical surgery on Eliot’s
Waste Land, W.B. Yeats’s literal Steinach operation to restore virility in 1934 (at age 69),
Mina Loy’s facial augmentation exercises, and other interventions into the body of the
14
poet and text. Modernity, he argues, “brings both fragmentation and augmentation of the
body in relation to technology; it offers the body as lack, at the same time as it offers
technological compensation.”
21
Thus, in many cases he sees technology as a prosthetic,
extending the body’s abilities, while also suggesting those abilities are no longer
sufficient.
This project departs from those of Ticchi, Steinman, and Armstrong in that it
specifically asks why poets are drawn to technology, what it does for them, and how it
inflects their work, their self-image, and ultimately even their bodies. More than the way
a mechanical metaphor might have validated Cendrars’s and H.D.’s writing, I ask what
these technologies enabled them to do and how they changed their poetics in response. In
addition, I connect modernist mediation with contemporary technology, an approach that
allows me to look at these figures along a continuum of twentieth and twenty-first
century writers invested in re-envisioning the lyric impulse. This book turns specifically
to materialist analysis and phenomenology, the notion from Maurice Merleau-Ponty that
bodies and the perceptual apparatus inflect our conscious experience of the world, in
order to interrogate the way the body of the text, the poet’s body, and, by extension, the
“scene of writing” are altered by their chosen technologies.
The typewriter and camera do indeed act as extensions of the body for Cendrars
and H.D., as Armstrong suggests technologies of the period functioned, but they are also
treated as collaborators, enabling the poets in part to displace some authorial intent onto
an outside source. Cendrars’s poems praise his portable typewriter’s beauty: both in its

21
Tim Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body: A Cultural Study (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1998) p. 3.
15
streamlined profile and in the precise way it enables him to control the shape of words on
the page. As he types, the poems explain, not only does the machine enable his injured
hands to keep up with his ideas, the sound of the Remington’s keys actually stimulates
his creation and alters the thoughts he puts to paper. The speed of the typewriter changes
the style of his poems as well, leading to lines that run on without punctuation,
onomatopoeic language, and reportage-like descriptions of shipboard life. The typewriter
enables Cendrars to follow through on Mallarmé’s edict of poetic disappearance and
focus on language. It also licenses him to incorporate Futurist techniques into his poems
without aligning himself with the group, whose glorification of war and aggression he
distrusted. Although he felt the appeal of Futurism’s mandates, Cendrars would not be
conscripted by any group after the war. He crafted a more fluid identity as a lone poet
crossing and re-crossing the equator on shipboard, forging ties in Europe and South
America, and refusing to limit his writing to a set of precepts.
For H.D., the ghostly photographic visions described in her Tribute to Freud and
Trilogy both allow her to have a transcendent experience to write about and provide an
external source for that visionary experience. The camera-as-prosthetic enables her to see
things beyond human vision and position herself as a poetic clairvoyant channeling words
from the ether, turning the poet herself into a kind of camera for materializing images. In
Cinematic Modernism, Susan McCabe suggests H.D. used Freud’s psychoanalytic
theories and the medium of film to refashion ideas of the body, and particularly the
“hysteric body” on which psychiatry and psychoanalysis focused its treatments of women
in the period. It seems that in spiritualism H.D. found another way to evacuate the
hysteric body and to heal a psyche rent by news of Nazi atrocities and by the very real
16
danger of living in London during the Blitz. In order to write through this period, H.D.
needed something to believe in and some sense that her work had a purpose. Spirit
photography gives her the metaphor and technique of double exposure, or “super-
imposition,” that allows her to make connections between the unstable present of war-
torn England and a Classical past in which humans survived similar traumas, providing
hope for the future. With the failure of the material world, she sought supernatural
comfort; spirit photography enabled her to have visionary experiences that remain
grounded in concrete images, thus satisfying Hulme’s demand for precision while
fulfilling her own desire for transcendence.
Building on Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of the impact of turn-of-the-century
inscription technologies on conceptions of subjectivity, time, and authorship, the chapters
that follow explore the role the typewriter and camera play specifically in poetic work.
Kittler connects the phenomenological experience of writing with the inscription of a
“trace” of the author. Though we now take it for granted, the pen itself is a technology
that mediates between the writer and the page, and, like the typewriter, it once shifted our
conception of authenticity and poetic authority because, as Kittler notes, “handwriting
alone could guarantee the perfect securing of traces.”
22
The late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, however, saw the development of three major media technologies
that would supersede handwriting in encoding this trace: the phonograph, film, and
typewriter. With these new devices, ostensibly, comes the loss of the Romantic
association of the “trace” with the idea that the poet’s own hand has inscribed his or her

22
Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) p. 9; Hereafter abbreviated GFT.
17
words onto the page. The meaning of the marks and their relationship to a living body,
one assumes, must change given this remediation, particularly in a time of bodily
instability due to war trauma, travel, and Taylorist, Fletcherist, and Fordian emphasis on
physical efficiency and control.
This project pairs the concrete technology of the portable typewriter with the
necessarily more ethereal technology of the spirit photograph in order to subvert the
tendency to reduce these preoccupations to mere technophilia. I also wish to avoid the
technological determinism to which some of Kittler’s work falls prey. Instead of
assuming that the adoption of technology leads to changes in poetry, or that technology
drives our changed perceptions of subjectivity and writing, each chapter considers these
elements in a dialogic relation impacted by social construction and the specific
preoccupations of each poet. As our discourse networks shift and the technologies by
which we create, store, and transmit information change, poets continue to look to them.
Why are tools like the typewriter, camera, and networked computer, which distance the
poet’s body from the page on which it once left traces, useful, and even necessary, in the
face of a changing sense of subjectivity, authorship, and lyricism?

III. “IMAGINAZIONE SENZA FILI”
23
: MAPPING THE WIRELESS IMAGINATION

While much has been written on the role of technology in defining the modernist
moment, relatively little work has been done on the use of specific technologies in both
the composition and content of poetry. I am interested in the ways the use of the

23
Marinetti, p. 87.
18
typewriter and projective spirit medium in both the method and subject matter of their
poetry enables Cendrars and H.D. to re-envision and reconfigure the “scene of writing,”
or the image of the author at work described or implied by the text, for a world in which
neither the poet’s (perhaps amputated) hand nor his or her (potentially en-tranced) body
can be taken for granted as the source of words on the page. Cendrars and H.D. must
adapt their work to suit their modern identities as international travelers, realists,
survivors, and, ultimately, poets whose writing no longer emerges from “emotion
recollected in tranquility.” They reach out to technologies of inscription that enhance and
extend the body, treating these machines as collaborators rather than tools in an attempt
to ground their poems in the material world and to divert attention away from their own
authorial “breathing.” While they may question lyric subjectivity, however, Cendrars and
H.D. do not entirely annul or even reject it. Often in their work, foregrounding the
machine brings the poet back into focus, alerting us to the scene in which the work is
composed, and thus to the body of the poet him or herself, seated before the page,
simultaneously reaffirming his or her presence and control even as he or she seeks to
occlude it.
This book is divided into three chapters, which represent the start of what I hope
will be a broader consideration of the relation between technology, the body, and poetic
subjectivity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In the first chapter I examine
Blaise Cendrars’ 1924 collection Feuilles de route, considering the poet’s use of the
typewriter, with its jazz-like sounds, to stimulate his creative process and assist him in
overcoming the loss of his arm in the Great War. I also place these poems in the context
of Brazilian modernismo, which forms the backdrop for the work’s composition, in
19
particular comparing Cendrars’ Remington pieces with those of his Brazilian confrere
Mário de Andrade. Despite Feuilles de route’s praise of the portable typewriter, by 1951
Cendrars would deny its influence. This ambivalent relationship reflects the conflict
between his desire to transfer authorship to the machine and the lyric reinscription that
occurs when the reader’s attention is drawn to the act of typing itself and thus to the man
behind the keyboard.
The second chapter examines two texts H.D. wrote in the midst of the 1944
London Blitz—Tribute to Freud, a memoir of her 1933 analysis, and Trilogy, a book of
poems—placing a series of ghostly photographic visions described in both books in the
context of her concurrent immersion in spiritualism. I argue that H.D. uses these images
to style herself as a psychic medium who can project images directly onto the page from
a higher source, bypassing the bisexual body Freud had labeled “hysteric.” Drawing on
the spiritualist discourse that ascribed scientific truth to spirit photographs and
manifestations, the figure of the projective medium provides H.D. with external evidence
of visionary experience. However, like Cendrars’ typewriter jazz, this attempt at
concealment allows the self to return phantasmally in the reaffirmation of poetic vision it
implies. It enables H.D. to continue writing at a time when it seems to her that “poets are
useless.”
These modernist mediations presage those of contemporary poets who have
turned to digital technologies for both the writing and dissemination of their work online.
Just as technology enabled modern poets to alter the page of the text, recreate the scene
of writing, and inscribe their own writing body into it, I argue that new media enable
contemporary poets to reconfigure authorship and inspiration for the age of digital
20
reproduction and information saturation. The third chapter opens out onto this data cloud.
As we increasingly perceive ourselves to be surrounded by language and information to
which the proper technologies (a GPS tracker, an iPhone, or an e-book reader, for
example) allow us access, the modernist notion of using machines to channel words from
the ether takes on a new resonance. I look to conceptual poetry and electronic literature
by Ara Shirinyan, Ander Monson, Jer Thorpe, and Boris Müller as one approach of
contemporary poets to digital technologies, examining work in print and online that
frames poems as fields of data to be permuted by both author and reader. I contend that
by treating the poem as a shifting network of information on which readers can
collaborate, these works use digital media to displace lyric subjectivity and mark poets’
attempt to free themselves from the perceived tyranny of inspiration and artistic
mysticism.
This project tracks poets’ attempts to re-envision the lyric impulse over the course
of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, and demonstrates that inscription
technologies have played a vital role in enabling them to do so. In my analysis of these
texts, I complicate the idea that modernist poets use technology as a mere metaphor,
providing a historical context for the devices they used and placing them within a lineage
of poets attempting to define the source of their craft. I examine both the
phenomenological experience of writing with machines and the way the poet’s embodied
experience of using them alters the poems and the poet’s sense of self. By linking the use
of technology to poets’ attempts to evade authorial control of the text, rather than to an
attempt to claim mastery over it, I argue that these devices provide poets with a new way
of finding (and writing about) inspiration, thus reaffirming themselves as writers in an
21
age when lyric subjectivity has fallen out of fashion. In this project, I attempt to open my
subject outward and look back at the same time. I do not mean to suggest that our current
digital moment represents the apotheosis of modernist impulses or that the desublimation
of writing by modernists falls somehow short of that by writers today. I hope that by
exploring the relationship of poets to mediated writing across different traditions and in
different modernisms, I have begun to trace out threads for other scholars to pursue in
both the material and thematic impact of technology on poetics. There are still further
intersections to discover among modernist writers, and as scholars pursue the relationship
between poets and technology further, I hope they will see modernist technophilia in a
new way.
22
CHAPTER 1

“MA BELLE MACHINE À ÉCRIRE”
24
: BLAISE CENDRARS: POET AND
TYPEWRITER

In 1917, little more than a year after he returned from the French front to a Paris
transformed by World War I, Blaise Cendrars composed a prose poem that encapsulates
his ambivalent relationship with modern technology.
25
“Profond aujourd’hui” (“Profound
Today”), a sequence of images depicting the contemporary metropolis, juxtaposes the
human, the animal, and the machine, eliding the boundaries between them. In this
turbulent landscape, “locomotives rear and steamships whinny on the water. Never will a
typewriter commit an etymological spelling error, but the man of intellect stammers,
chews his words, and breaks his teeth on antique consonants.”
26
This arresting opening,
which treats the mechanized world as a menagerie of mystical beasts, both beautiful and
destructive, establishes Cendrars’s fascination with technologies of writing and travel, an
obsession that connects him with F.T. Marinetti and the Italian Futurists. Although
Cendrars was not himself a Futurist, his work epitomizes what Marjorie Perloff calls “the
Futurist Moment,” a period of creative rupture in which artists in all media sought to
break with the past and forge new styles more appropriate to a contemporary society on

24
Blaise Cendrars, Complete Poems, trans. Ron Padgett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) p.
307; hereafter abbreviated CP. All further quotations from Cendrars’s poetry are taken from this edition
and appear in the text in parentheses. I rely on this edition for the French as well, which is copyright
Éditions Denoël 1947. All translations are Padgett’s, unless otherwise indicated. When no page number is
given, the translation is my own.
25
An early version of this chapter appeared in Writing Technologies 2.1 (2008). An archive of back issues
can be found at www.ntu.ac.uk/writing_technologies/.
26
Blaise Cendrars, Modernities and Other Writings, ed. Monique Chefdor, trans. Esther Allen (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1992) p. 3.
23
the verge of technological and political upheaval.
27
Cendrars’s choice of the railroad
train, steamship, and typewriter as starting points in his appraisal of the period reflects the
centrality of these three modern machines to his writing.
The train first appears in Cendrars’s work before the war in the long narrative
poem La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, in which the speaker
travels to and from France by Trans-Siberian Express, and then in Le Panama ou Les
Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles, a text that includes train route maps and an advertisement
from the Denver, Colorado chamber of commerce (Fig. 2). After the war, when Cendrars
befriended Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade, he forged a relationship with the South

27
Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). For more on the
avant-guerre “romance of the machine,” see Perloff’s chapter, “The Great War and the European avant-
garde,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, ed. Vincent Sherry (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Fig. 2. Blaise Cendrars, Le Panama ou les Aventures de mes Sept Oncles (Paris: Éditions de la Sirène, 1918) 30-31.
24
American avant-garde and traveled to Brazil by steamship several times, in the process
composing a series of travel poems he would publish in 1924 as Feuilles de Route.
28

These poems treat his experience both on shipboard and on land, illuminating not only
the experience of travel in the 1920s, but the experience of a traveling writer, one beset
with unfinished projects and the sense that, as he writes, “I don’t have a minute to lose”
(CP 184).
In these poems, the typewriter
alluded to in “Profond aujourd’hui” not
only makes an appearance, it plays a key
role in several poems about the act of
writing. In the early poem “Bagage,”
Cendrars lists the belongings he has
taken with him for the trip to South
America, including: the manuscripts of
the novels Moravagine and Le Plan de
l’Aiguille, which he claims he must finish before they dock; a large dictionary; “Ma
Remington portable dernier modèle”
29
(CP 316); and several kilos of blank paper,
perhaps to feed into that “latest model Remington” (Fig. 3). Although his admiration for
the device, which he refers to in several poems as “ma belle machine à écrire,” or “my

28
Much has been written regarding Cendrars’s relationship with Brazilian writers. For the purposes of this
paper, I bring them up only to establish the inspiration for the Feuilles de Route, which I believe merit
closer study than they have received. A lineage might be traced, however from Cendrars through Oswald
De Andrade to the Noigandres poets he inspired, progenitors of the “Concrete Poetry” movement of the
1950s.
29
According to his daughter Miriam, Cendrars purchased the typewriter especially for the trip. Miriam
Cendrars, “Départ,” Brésil: L’Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars (Paris: L’Harmattan: 1998) p. 12.
Fig. 3. Portable Remington typewriter: likely the model Cendrars
carried aboard Le Formose. Image: Richard Milton, The Portable
Typewriters Website, www.portabletypewriters.co.uk.
25
beautiful typewriter,” is evident throughout the Feuilles, by 1951 Cendrars would deny
having been influenced by the “machine” at all. Questioned by an interviewer about the
impact of material comforts like the telephone, television, radio, and typewriter on his
work, Cendrars replies, “Tout ça, c’est rigolo! Ce sont ‘les petits accessoires de la vie
moderne.’ Mais on peut fort bien s’en passer.”
30
His claim that he could easily do without
these “little accessories of modern life” may reflect the extent to which the typewriter’s
novelty had worn off by that period, a decade in which the device had become
ubiquitous. Perhaps at a time when Cendrars was no longer writing poetry, but working
on novels and journalism, he wanted to distance himself from his earlier engagement with
the machine that was once so central to his poetics for fear of being thought a slave to
technophilic fads. He was, after all, a writer dedicated to the idea of craft, emotion, and
inspiration. As he wrote to his friends and collaborators Sonia and Robert Delaunay in
1914, criticizing Guillaume Apollinaire’s calligrammes, the scientific precision of his
typographic experiments endangered the poems by making them “du raisonement et non
de la sensibilité”;
31
“reason and not sensitivity.” Perhaps Cendrars wished to avoid such
critiques of his own work.
While much has been written on Cendrars’s relationship with trains and travel,
32

little has been said regarding the role of the typewriter in his work, in part because the

30
“All that, it’s funny! They are ‘the little accessories of modern life.’ But one can very well do without
them.” Richard Hughes, ed., Dites-Nous Monsieur Blaise Cendrars … (Lausanne: Éditions Rencontre,
1969) p. 114.
31
Qtd. in Luce Briche, Blaise Cendrars et le Livre (Paris: Éditions L’improviste, 2005) p. 183.
32
See especially Kimberley Healey’s The Modernist Traveler: French Detours, 1900–1930 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2003), in which she discuses the impact of changed perceptions of time on
Cendrars and Paul Morand, among others.
26
Feuilles de Route, as Monique Chefdor has noted, are written “in a style that defies all
critical commentary by its utter candor and simplicity …a travel diary.”
33
She reads the
poems as reveling in the subjective sensual experience of the journey, “in contrast with
the harrowing plunge into the divided consciousness of the age which [Cendrars] was
dramatizing at the time in his major prose works.”
34
Although these poems are indeed
written with the clarity of a “travel diary,” Cendrars’s foregrounding of the typewriter
and the act of writing within them provides more than simply a record of his daily
activities. By encoding the act of transcription within the poems themselves, these works
foreground the act of writing and the materiality of the page. Teasing out the relationship
between typewriter and poet reveals a poetics as complex and, like the “consciousness”
Chefdor finds in his prose work, “divided” as it initially seems clear.

I. “CETTE MAIN QUI DOIT SOUFFRIR”
35
: THE MACHINE AND THE SUFFERING HAND

The typewriter would have served a highly practical purpose for Cendrars after
the war in which he lost his right arm to combat. The phantom limb continued to hurt for
many years after the war, recurring as an image of loss throughout his work. The poem
“Orion,” which appears toward the beginning of the Feuilles, finds the poet stargazing at
the constellation he calls his own because “Elle a la forme d’une main” (CP 317). This

33
Monique Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980) p. 58. Jay Bochner analyzes the
poems as “verbal photographs,” a term Cendrars himself used to describe them, in Blaise Cendrars:
Discovery and Re-creation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) p. 131.
34
Monique Chefdor, introduction to Blaise Cendrars, Complete Postcards from the Americas: Poems of
Road and Sea, by Blaise Cendrars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) p. 39.
35
CP 317.
27
group of stars “in the form of a hand” (CP 159) becomes an emblem for his own, pierced
as it is, from his angle on deck, by the sharp point of the mast: “Le grand mât perce la
paume de cette main qui doit souffrir / Comme ma main coupée me fait souffrir percée
qu’elle est par un dard continuel” (CP 317). The stigmata evoked by this palm-piercing
mast suggests he wore his “continual stabbing pain” (CP 159) as a badge of honor,
though it plagued him throughout his journey. While Cendrars learned to write with his
left hand shortly after the amputation, as Jay Bochner notes, his penmanship is so visibly
different one can easily date his post-war writing by it. In an unaddressed and unsent
letter written during his recovery, Cendrars jests, “J’ai le bras droit amputé. Cela me
rajeunit jusqu’au barbouillage,”
36
mocking the way his amputation has “rejuvenated him
as far as scribbling,” an image that suggests both a reduction of his writing ability and a
renewed love (re-juvenation—a return to juvenility, to childhood) of messiness. With his
reduced dexterity, the typewriter would have provided Cendrars a means of writing
swiftly and clearly, enabling him to use both his able hand and his hook at the
keyboard.
37
It would also speed up his one-handed writing process because of the keys’
simultaneous inscription of entire letters as opposed to the several strokes required to
make each character when writing longhand. Cendrars’s claim in “Lettre,” one of the
early poems in Feuilles de Route, “Ma Remington est belle pourtant / Je l’aime beaucoup
et travaille bien / Mon écriture est nette et claire” (CP 307); “But my Remington is

36
“I have my right arm amputated. It has rejuvenated me as far as scribbling.” Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars, p.
59
37
John Dos Passos describes Cendrars’s agility with his hook in The Best of Times. Discussing a visit to
Monpazier in 1929, he notes, “It was hairraising to spin with him around the mountain roads. He steered
with one hand and changed gears on his little French car with his hook. [...] Cendrars took every curve on
two wheels” (qtd Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars, p. 71).
28
beautiful / I really love it and the work goes well / My writing is sharp and clear” (CP
143), foregrounds the utility of the machine in terms of visual clarity. Cendrars’s
“barbouillage” gives way to neat and natty text.
Early typewriters were in fact developed to assist the disabled, with prototypes of
the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth century often manufactured and marketed
explicitly to the blind or deaf.
38
These early models were clumsy and slow, and it was not
until Christopher Latham Sholes sold his patent for a writing machine modeled on the
piano’s system of hammers to E. Remington and Sons in 1873 that speed was finally
achieved. The development of the typewriter was facilitated by the American Civil War,
as the post-war slump left Remington with unused manufacturing capacity that could be
turned toward the new machine. The linking and tripping mechanisms were an easy
extension of arms manufacture and with this partnership, as Friedrich Kittler points out,
“the typewriter became a discursive machine gun.”
39
The interlinking of these
technologies brings new meaning to Dadaist Richard Huelsenbech’s professed desire “to
make literature with a gun in [his] pocket.”
40
The “belle machine à écrire” enabled
writers of the period “to make literature” with guns on their desks.

38
For a history of the typewriter and its impact on gender relations, authorship, and referentiality see
Kittler. For a historical account that includes much information on the marketing, sale, and mechanics of
typewriters, see Bruce Bliven, The Wonderful Writing Machine (New York: Random House, 1954). Darren
Wershler-Henry incorporates this historical material into an analysis of the cultural mystification of the
machine in The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).
39
Kittler, GFT, p. 191.
40
Quoted in Perloff, “Great War,” p. 143. For an analysis of the joint ascension of the typewriter and the
gun in America, see Barry Sanders, “Bang the Keys Swiftly: Typewriters and their Discontents,” Cabinet
Magazine 8 (2002), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/8/keys.php [accessed 3 May 2010].
29
While he evidently appreciated the
clarity and speed of the machine, Cendrars
may well have adopted the romantic epithet
above as an allusion to the popular use of
the term “typewriter” to refer to both the
machine and its female operator.
41
The
entry of women into the office setting as
typists gave rise to much humor regarding
dalliances between the boss and his
secretary that drew on this multivalent word
(Fig. 4). In his history of the typewriter,
Bruce Bliven cites an American cartoon in
which two men in an office eye a
Remington model 4, one of them offering,
“What a pretty typewriter you have!” and the other replying, “Pretty! She’s angelic. Why,
man, when that girl taps off an ordinary letter on that dusty old machine, you’d think you
were listening to a symphony from Beethoven.”
42
Of course, Cendrars’s machine was
indeed “belle.” As the first portable typewriter with a complete 4-tier keyboard, “the
latest model” portable Remington in 1924 accommodated all of the functionality of a

41
Of course, the French for typist is dactylo, not machine à écrire, but Cendrars certainly would have been
aware that the position was most often filled by women, thus his “beautiful” writing machine becomes a
kind of muse or assistant figure without the intervention of the dactylo.
42
Bliven, p. 73. Paul Robert chronicles similar depictions of women in Sexy Legs and Typewriters: Women
In Office-Related Advertising, Humor, Glamour And Erotica (Netherlands: The Virtual Typewriter
Museum, 2003). He maintains The Typewriter Museum website, http://www.typewritermuseum.org, which
includes an array of images from the book.
Fig. 4. 1920s Erotic postcard featuring a typewriter and her
boss at an Underwood machine. Collection of Paul Robert,
The Typewriter Museum.
30
full-sized typewriter in a sleek black three-inch-high frame that echoed the modern lines
of the art deco age.
43

The beauty and speed of Cendrars’s machine link it closely with the train he used
in La Prose du Transsibérien as a model for the simultaneity of modern life, in which, as
Perloff notes, “to be, figuratively speaking, in two places at once now became a
possibility.”
44
For Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni, simultaneism was “the synthesis of
what one remembers and of what one sees,”
45
a
temporal proximity of present and past. Cendrars
incorporates simultaneity into the Prose du
Transsibérien, as Perloff has noted, through
juxtaposition with the abstract, brightly-hued
artwork of Sonia Delaunay, which was meant to
be viewed concurrently with the text, but also
through the “spatial and temporal distortions” of
present and past, Russia and Paris.
46
In his desire
to reflect the abrupt pace and fragmentation of

43
Richard Milton, “Remington,” The Portable Typewriter Website, http://www.portabletypewriters.co.uk/
[accessed 11 April 2010].
44
Perloff, Futurist Moment, p. 14. Interestingly, an advertisement for the Olivetti typewriter printed in 1920
highlights the connection between the typewriter and the train. It features a dramatic race between the two
modern marvels in which the typewriter glides along a track of its own beside the train, sparks flying from
the rails on which it glides and sheets of white paper trailing from the carriage as the bright new machine
outpaces its blurred and straining forbear. The image can be found in Kittler, GFT, p. 197 (Fig. 5).
45
Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brain et al. (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001)
p. 47.
46
Perloff, Futurist Moment, p. 9.
Fig. 5. Olivetti M20 typewriter advertisement,
Ernesto Pirovano, 1920, Italy.
31
modern experience, the typewriter seems to supplant the train in Cendrars’s world of
metaphors, a shift that not only alters the subject matter, but also the style of his writing,
which moves from the Whitmanesque long free-verse lines of the Prose to the brief,
unpunctuated present tense observations of the Feuilles (Fig. 5). Perhaps the change in
Cendrars’s work is indicative of what he wanted to accomplish in his poetry—a type of
simultaneous subjectivity the typewriter enabled rather than enforced. With the
typewriter, the merger of memory and vision, thought and word occurs immediately on
the page—it is implicit in the act of inscription itself. The poet is no longer a spectator
buffeted through time and space by the technology of modernity; he controls it, able to
put each thought to paper as it comes to him, rendering the experience of travel with
unprecedented immediacy.
The poems of Feuilles de Route are mostly short descriptions of places and
people, culled from Cendrars’s several journeys between South America and France.
Divided into three parts, “The Formosa,” “São Paulo,” and “III,” these works reflect three
stages of a journey, from departure to return, and were published in three installments
between 1924 and 1928. Cendrars described the poems as postcards he sent or intended
to send to friends, though several exceed traditional postcard length. This lineage,
whether real or imaginary, accounts for the starkness and intimacy of the poems, which
are at the same time distant and personal, like postcards, written often as a formality more
to inform our loved ones that we are thinking of them than to really reveal something of
what we have seen. The Feuilles rely on a present-tense narration of travel, their speaker
delivering a commentary, moment-by-moment, on shipboard life. Thus, the longer poem
“A Bord du Formose” begins:
32
Le ciel est noir strié de bandes lépreuses
L’eau est noire
Les étoiles grandissent encore et fondent comme des cierges larmoyants
Voici ce qui se passe à bord (CP 310)

[The sky is dark streaked with leprous bands
The water is dark
The stars grow even larger and melt like weeping tapers
Here’s what’s happening on board] (CP 148)

Cendrars goes on to describe the different activities of the various ethnic groups on the
ship, who have each claimed a different portion of the vessel: the Jews on the deck “are
huddled together,” the Portuguese dance in the deckhouse, and “very clean and carefully
combed German emigrants sing severe hymns and sentimental songs” on the sterncastle
(CP 149). In describing these groups by ethnicity, the speaker takes his place as an
observer and outsider. Although he himself is an immigrant—born in Switzerland, having
adopted France, and en route to Brazil—his brief descriptions become a kind of inside
joke with the letter’s recipient, a bit of long-distance gossip about the other passengers.
He catalogues their movements with a lighthearted reverence, and the juxtaposition of all
of these activities creates an unnatural simultaneity in which the author seems to be
everywhere at once—on the open deck, in the deckhouse, in the salon, the smoking
lounge, and even the pantry. Most perplexing of all, he is also seated before his page,
composing the letter that contains these descriptions.
While one might explain away this paradox as a fiction, or perhaps as the
recollection of the writer having wandered around the ship before retiring to his quarters
to compose, Cendrars himself offers a justification in the subsequent poem of the
collection, “Lettre-Océan” (“Ocean Letter”). In this brief musing on the nature of
33
shipboard missives, Cendrars asserts, “La lettre-océan n’a pas été inventée pour faire de
la poésie / Mais quand on voyage quand on commerce quand on est à bord quand on
envoie des lettres-océan / On fait de la poésie” (CP 311).
47
While ocean letters may not
have been “invented for poetry,” he claims, the atmosphere surrounding them is one of
poetry. Because they are written as part of the larger experience of travel (as expressed by
the compression of activities on Cendrars’s list, which bleed one into the next without
punctuation), simultaneity itself makes them poetic. The ocean-letter’s ability to encode
the speed and condensation of both travel and thought enables the disembodied reportage
that characterizes the Feuilles de route. In keeping pace with Cendrars’ peripatetic poetic
transmission, the typewritten poem changes the look of his verse.

II. “FAI[RE] SUIVRE JUSQU’AU BOUT”
48
: CROSSING THE LINE

Not only does the typewriter facilitate his writing, the machine that appears in
these poems seems to be empowered in ways the poet himself is not. In “The Prose of the
Transsiberian,” an early work that reflects its writer’s youth, Cendrars laments his
inability to fully express his emotional and poetic insight. He reminisces, “j’étais déjà si
mauvais poète / Que je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout” (CP 236), or “I was already
such a bad poet / That I didn’t know how to take it all the way” (CP 15). In “Moonlight,”
the fifth poem of Feuilles de Route, however, the poet is finally able to take it “all the
way”:

47
“The ocean letter was not invented for writing poetry / But when you travel when you do business when
you’re on board when you send ocean letters / It’s poetry” (CP 150).
48
CP 307.
34
On tangue on tangue sur le bateau
La lune la lune fait des cercles dans l’eau
Dans le ciel c’est le mât qui fait des cercles
Et désigne toutes les étoiles du doigt

Une jeune Argentine accoudée au bastingage
Rêve à Paris en contemplant les phares qui dessinent la côte de France
Rêve à Paris qu’elle ne connaît qu’à peine et qu’elle regrette déjà
Ces feux tournants fixes doubles colorés à éclipses lui rappellent ceux qu’elle
voyait de sa fenêtre d’hôtel sur les Boulevards et lui promettent un prompt
retour
Elle rêve de revenir bientôt en France et d’habiter Paris
Le bruit de ma machine à écrire l’empêche de mener ce rêve jusqu’au bout
Ma belle machine à écrire qui sonne au bout de chaque ligne et qui est aussi
rapide qu’un jazz
Ma belle machine à écrire qui m’empêche de rêver à babord comme à tribord
Et qui me fait suivre jusqu’au bout une idée
Mon idée (CP 307)

[The ship tangos from side to side
The moon the moon makes circles in the water
As the mast makes circles in the sky
Pointing its finger at the stars

A young girl from Argentina leaning over the rail
Dreams of Paris while gazing on the lighthouses that outline the coast of France
Dreams of Paris which she’s hardly seen and misses already
These turning fixed double colored intermittent lights remind her of the ones she
saw from her window over the Boulevards and which promised her she’d
come back soon
She dreams of going back to France soon and living in Paris
The sound of my typewriter keeps her from going all the way with her dream
My beautiful typewriter that rings at the end of each line and is as fast as jazz
My beautiful typewriter that keeps me from dreaming portside or starboard
And makes me go all the way with an idea
My idea] (CP 143–44)

The music of Cendrars’s “machine,” whose speed and cadence he likens to that of “jazz,”
breaks up dreams and keeps its listeners present. It helps the poet to focus his energies
and marks the ends of lines with a sound that “keeps [him] from dreaming portside or
starboard / and makes [him] go all the way with an idea.” Even the Argentine girl on deck
35
feels the typewriter’s effect, “the sound […] keeps her from going all the way” with her
fantasy of Paris life, its noise at once distracting and riveting, disruptive and productive.
Cendrars revels in the typewriter’s jazz-like speed, which enables the poet’s hands to
keep pace with his thoughts,
49
allowing him to stay in the present transcribing experience
in detail: from the sensation of pitching back and forth on the ship’s deck to the sound of
his fingers at the keys. Through alliteration and anaphora, he “makes circles” on the page,
enacting both the undulation of the ship, which “tangos from side to side” and the theme
and variations of jazz. With its controlled “bruit,” the typewriter becomes an instrument
the poet plays, one that both stimulates and records his thoughts.
50

The jazzy circularity of Cendrars’s language emphasizes the musical qualities of
the typewriter, both in the “circle” images of the moon on the water and the mast in the
sky and in the recurring words and sounds of the first stanza. The repetition of “tangue,”
“lune,” and “cercles,” and the end-rhymes between “bateau” and “eau,” “mât” and
“doigt” lend those first few lines a rocking quality, their tetrapodic meter reminiscent of a
lulling nursery rhyme. The music of the second stanza, however, is more open; the long
lines sped forward by internal rhyme. In particular, Cendrars’s description of the lights of
France, an accumulation of adjectives describing their twinkling, moves through sonic
and visual juxtaposition. One’s ear and eye are drawn from the long vowels and velar
consonants of “fixes […] éclipses” to the succession of labial rhymes “rappellent […]

49
The typewriter’s transcriptive rapidity gave rise to the speed typing craze of the turn of the century, a
vogue for contests, often sponsored by the typewriter manufacturers, in which champions became minor
celebrities and helped to promote the brand of their preferred machine. For a history of such contests, see
Bliven pp. 111–30.
50
One notes that La Prose du Transsibérian is “Dédiée aux musiciens” (CP 236). For a further exploration
of Cendrars’ equation of the typewriter and piano, see Briche.
36
elle […] hôtel,” which are in turn connected by the short “e” to “promettent,” a word that
sets off a series of plosive articulations in “promettent un prompt retour.” The sounds,
like the ship, reel and pitch, propelling language just as the typewriter does. Padgett’s
translation of “tangos” for “tangue” (which more properly means “pitch”) highlights this
back-and-forth motion and suggests the physical exchange between passenger and ship,
writer and machine.
In this poem and in “Écrire,” a poem that appears later in the collection during the
return trip from South America, Cendrars emphasizes the typewriter’s ringing “at the end
of” (CP 186), or “au bout de” (CP 307,CP 334) each line, once again drawing our
attention to the machine’s ability to “take it all the way,” “aller jusqu’au bout” (CP 236)
as he himself could not in the “Prose of the Transsiberian.” The typewriter’s ringing in
turn draws attention to the ends of Cendrars’s own lines, which, though not literally
punctuated, are often accented with sound. End-rhyme, buried rhyme, off-rhyme and
assonance all assert the line as a carefully selected unit, regardless of the temptation to
read through the enjambment and into the next phrase. Thus Cendrars heightens the sense
that even as he foregrounds the typewriter, he also encodes his own artistic intent. We
find “au bout” a tension between the voice of the poet and the typewriter’s belle bell.
Cendrars’s distinction between “dream” and “idea” seems equally important to
understanding the typewriter’s role in his poetics. The young woman cannot pursue her
“dream” of returning to Paris, a presumption based on her romantic notions of a place he
says she barely knows. The typewriter keeps both woman and poet from dreaming,
forcing him to focus on “mon idée,” “my idea.” This brief line that closes the poem
foregrounds the way the typewriter pulls the speaker out of the stranger’s consciousness,
37
which he has presumed to read or to “dream” of. He speaks through the Argentinean girl,
entering her mind through free indirect discourse to assert, “These turning fixed double
colored intermittent lights remind her of the ones she saw from her window over the
Boulevards and which promised her she’d come back soon” (CP 144). This dream is both
her own and Cendrars’s projection, a projection cut short, he says, by “the sound of my
typewriter.” Cendrars speaks both from within and without (literally as well as
figuratively—he is both in his cabin where he can type and outside, where he can gaze up
at the mast and stars), achieving the goal he sets forth in “En Route to Dakar,” in which
he bids adieu to Europe, asserting, “I want to forget everything no longer speak your
languages […] to segment my own self / And become hard as a rock / Drop straight down
/ Sink to the bottom” (CP 147). This request refers obliquely to Rimbaud’s “Bateau Ivre,”
in which the poet pleads, “Ô que ma quille éclate ! Ô que j'aille à la mer,”
51
wishing that
his keel might break and he might sink down into the ocean. In Cendrars’ case, the poet
wants to break himself apart in order to achieve this kind of drowning. Thus the poem
suggests a desire to escape the poet’s own subjectivity, which itself acts as a keel, guiding
the images and lines this way and that.
Perhaps the typewriter allows for this segmented self, its noise affecting both
Cendrars and the woman by keeping them grounded in the present, as “hard” and heavy
as rocks—she unable to “go all the way with her dream,” and he forced to “go all the way
with an idea” (CP 144). The poem reveals a struggle between the poet’s desire to resist
the lyric impulse that would reinscribe a unified subject and his awareness that he cannot

51
Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell and Other Works, Trans. Stanley Appelbaum (New York: Dover,
2003) p. 172.
38
enter into the consciousness of other people.
52
In order to “segment” himself, he moves
between concrete description of the material world (the “on tangue on tangue” that
sonically mimics the pitching of the boat), his perceptions of the other passengers, and his
sense of his own writerly isolation from them, the staccato keystrokes a reminder of his
body’s location within this network of possibilities.
The typewriter, then, triangulates the poet’s experience—intervening both
between him and others, and between him and the page. The result is a fragmented
present of simultaneous, unpunctuated experience. The typewriter enables the poet’s
hands to keep pace with his mind so that he may write, as he claims in “Cabin No. 6,”
“everything that goes through my head” (CP 157), or “tout ce qui me passe par la tête”
(CP 316). However, it also prevents him from becoming lost in the flow of reverie, such
that he quickly revises, “Well not really everything / Because tons of things go through
my head but don’t get out into the cabin” (CP 157). The suggestion that writing or
transcription takes ideas from the poet’s “head” and makes them materially present “[in]
the cabin” suggests a censorial sensory relationship with his belle machine. More than
simply a mechanical muse, it presents its own resistance to the writer’s control. One
wonders to what extent the poet’s selection of ideas is his own, influenced as it is by the
materiality of the type-written page.

52
Marjorie Perloff suggests that the Prose du Transsibérien is “an elaborate montage of sensations, images,
and narrative fragments by means of which the poet tries to keep his ego intact” (Futurist Moment, p. 23).
Jay Bochner sees the Feuilles themselves as segments that blend one into the next like “a verbal
photographic album which, taken in its entirety, has great evocative power” (Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars, p.
134). This series of glimpses into Cendrars’s experience reveal something of him as a writer without ever
providing an all-encompassing view. Perhaps, then, the struggle between fragmentation and the ego
continues in the Feuilles de Route, but the speaker has embraced his own dislocation.
39
III. “L’ŒIL QU’A MA PAGE”
53
: THE VISUAL PAGE AND THE INVISIBLE AUTHOR

Cendrars confronts the paradox of authorial agency in the poem “Lettre,” which
appears early in the collection. Addressing an unknown person (likely his beloved friend
the actress Raymone Duchâteau, who appears in other Feuilles), who has requested he
write to her on his voyage, he mocks gently:
Tu m’as dit si tu m’écris
Ne tape pas tout à la machine
Ajoute une ligne de ta main
Un mot un rien oh pas grand’chose
Oui oui oui oui oui oui oui oui

Ma Remington est belle pourtant
Je l’aime beaucoup et travaille bien
Mon écriture est nette et claire
On voit très bien que c’est moi qui l’ai tapée

Il y a des blancs que je suis seul à savoir faire
Vois donc l’œil qu’a ma page
Pourtant pour te faire plaisir j’ajoute à l’encre
Deux trois mots
Et une grosse tache d’encre
Pour que tu ne puisses pas les lire (CP 307)

[You said to me if you write me
Don’t just use the typewriter
Add a line in your own hand
A word a nothing oh a little something
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes
But my Remington is beautiful
I really love it and the work goes well
My writing is sharp and clear
It’s very easy to see that I did the typing

There are white spaces only I know how to make
See how my page looks
Still to please you I add in ink

53
CP 307.
40
Two three words
And a big blot of ink
So you can’t read them] (CP 143)

The reference to Cendrars’s beautiful Remington here seems calculated to excite jealousy
in his addressee, whom he patronizes slightly with the lilting “[o]ui oui oui oui oui oui
oui oui,” as if to quiet the petulant child who begs for “un mot un rien oh pas
grand’chose.” The teasing tone and the addressee’s request make the poem a comical
love letter, depicting a romantic triangle between Raymone, Cendrars, and the typewriter.
The machine’s metonymic relationship with the sexy typist is here made explicit: in this
case, her very body, mechanized by the metaphor, stands between writer and recipient,
author and page.
The unnamed recipient ostensibly believes the typewriter depersonalizes
Cendrars’s letters, asking for a handwritten line, “une ligne de ta main” (CP 306), to
supplement the typed text. Not only does this complaint reflect the extent to which
typewriters were considered tools of business at the time, it reveals a lyric privileging of
the authorial hand as a synecdochic extension of the psyche. She wants to see his
handwriting to know he has touched the page. One wonders what such devotion to the
“hand” might mean to an author who has lost his own in the service of his adopted
country. The notion of the hand as a mechanism for direct transcription becomes
problematic when the hand is replaced with a hook, itself a metallic, slightly mechanical
object. As Martin Heidegger would note in 1942:
41
Mechanical writing deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and
degrades the word to a means of communication. In addition, mechanical writing
provides this ‘advantage,’ that it conceals the handwriting and thereby the character. The
typewriter makes everyone look the same.
54

That Cendrars would embrace the typewriter as a means of transcription should come as
no surprise then, in that it not only enables him to write more easily by reducing the

54
Martin Heidegger, Parmenides, quoted in Kittler, GFT, p. 199.
Fig. 6. Blaise Cendrars on board Le Formose, January 1924. © Thomas Gilou.
42
burden to his left hand, but also undoes the lyric hierarchy that places the poet above all
others, enabling him or her to speak (and write) from a unified perspective. It effects, as
Friedrich Kittler has pointed out, Mallarmé’s “disparition élocutoire du poète,”
55
a
disappearance or withdrawal of the poetic voice akin to the “segmentation”
56
Cendrars
desired. Instead of driving him to an anti-technological perspective like Heidegger’s, this
instability frees Cendrars, allowing him to float throughout the ship, unfettering him from
the constraints of space and the body (Fig. 6).
However, even in the face of this mechanization that “makes everyone look the
same,” depersonalizing the written word, Cendrars asserts that the typewriter can and
does inscribe some element of himself. On his page, “It’s very easy to see that I did the
typing,” “On voit très bien que c’est moi qui l’ai tapée,” not because of the letters
themselves, but because of the “white spaces” or “blancs” only he knows how to leave.
Interestingly, Cendrars’s poems do not contain lacunae as “des blancs” implies or as
translator Ron Padgett inserts into “You Are More Beautiful Than the Sky and the Sea,”
in which, describing his bath, the speaker claims, “I see the mouth I know / The hand the
leg the the eye / I take a bath and I look” (CP 142), the space perhaps implying that an
inappropriate object of observation has been omitted. In the original French, however, the

55
Kittler, GFT, p. 228. Stéphane Mallarmé called for “la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède
l’initiative aux mots,” or “the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words” in
his 1886–1895 essay “Crisis in Poetry.” See the introduction for the development of this notion by other
modernists.
56
While such an authorial withdrawal does depersonalize the typewritten letter, there is evidence for a
surge in typewritten personal correspondence at the turn of the century and during the First World War.
Kittler notes that in 1916, Kafka relied on typed postcards to communicate with Felice Bauer because they
were “the fastest way of passing through the war censorship between Prague and Berlin, Austria and
Prussia” (GFT 223). For a closer analysis of the impact of the typewriter on “desk couples,” see GFT, pp.
214-31.
43
two “the[s]” abut as “Le l’œil,” the capitalized “Le” seeming to indicate some greater
significance—perhaps his eye is “The” eye, an all-encompassing truth like Wallace
Stevens’ “The the” in “The Man on the Dump.”
57
Regardless of its deeper meaning,
Padgett and Cendrars both invite readers to “look” between the lines, to consider whether
the aura of the poet can be present in the white spaces around words or in his line breaks,
whether negative space can convey its own set of meanings in contradistinction to the
text it surrounds.
Cendrars’s assertion anticipates the vogue for the typewritten word of the mid-
twentieth century, precisely when he himself begins to disclaim the machine’s influence
on his work. His sense that visual arrangement can encode something particular to the
poet is echoed in Charles Olson’s idea of “projective verse,” the notion of “the typewriter
as the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work,”
58
capable of inscribing his
or her “breath” onto the page through the visual arrangement of language. Olson argues,
“For the first time, the poet has the stave and the bar a musician had […] he can, without
the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and
by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his
own work.”
59
Olson’s choice of the homophone “rime” indicates the extent to which he
saw rhyme as a trapping of bygone poetic styles; rhyme for him is rimey, a rusty crust,
perhaps on the hull of an old ship. That rime gives way to a more advanced, free-form

57
In the introduction to Blaise Cendrars, Complete Postcards, Chefdor translates this line, “The hand the
leg the THE EYE” (123), lending emphasis through the upper case.
58
Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” Collected Prose, Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) p. 246.
59
Olson, Collected Prose, p. 245.
44
musical composition with which the poet can record the meter of his or her own voice, a
notion that encapsulates Cendrars’s sense of the typewriter’s “jazz”-like musical force.
Like Cendrars, Olson admires the typewriter’s speed and musicality; he enjoins, “get on
with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, their perceptions, theirs, the
acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen”
(240).
60
His disjointed list echoes Cendrars’ ocean-letter, while the assonance and
repetition remind us of tangoing back and forth on the ship.
Although both poets appreciate the rapidity of the machine, their rationale for
doing so is quite different. Embodiment is not a concern for Olson, who aims to make the
poet even more present through this scoring of the page. He aims to return to the page
“the breathing of the man who writes” (239), which Mallarmé had sucked out of it.
Cendrars’ poems are more conflicted about the necessity of inscribing the poet himself on
the page and instead adopt the machine as an intermediary that both extends and
stimulates the hand’s ability. To make his presence felt, it seems, the poet must merge
with the machine. Cendrars explores this new “segmentation” of self most clearly in the
poem “Écrire” (“Writing”), in which the poet, holed up in his cabin on the return trip
from South America, must veil the mirror “pour ne pas me voir écrire” (CP 334), so that
he won’t have to see himself writing and can focus on his work. The poet describes his
writing method:
Ma machine bat en cadence
Elle sonne au bout de chaque ligne
Les engrenages grasseyent

60
Marjorie Perloff equates the forward-thrusting montage of fragments in La Prose du Transsibérien with
Olson’s directive that each perception must be followed immediately by another (Futurist Moment, p. 23).
45
De temps en temps je me renverse dans mon fauteuil de jonc et je lâche une
grosse bouffée de fumée (CP 334)

[My machine clacks in time
It rings at the end of each line
The gears roll their r’s
From time to time I lean back in my wicker chair and release a big fat puff of
smoke] (CP 186)

The experience of writing here is one in which the poet becomes more mechanical,
puffing away like a smokestack on his cigarette, even as the machine itself becomes more
human: its keys “bat[tent] en cadence,” beat (like a heart) in rhythm, and its gears “roll
their r’s” in the throaty and onomatopoeic “engrenages grasseyent.” Perhaps, then, the
poet and typewriter are complementary voices, the machine preventing him from
pursuing ethereal lines of thought and keeping him grounded in the reality of the
twentieth century.
This relationship is more collaborative than the one Olson describes. The
projective verse poet manipulates the typewriter, which he sees as a tool, a means of
visualizing the poet’s breath. Cendrars, on the other hand, lets his own breath be altered
by the typewriter, lets the machine affect his lines, enabling him to take it “au bout,” to
the end of the line where the carriage rings before returning. That repetition of “oui” in
the fifth line of “Lettre” does not simply patronize the addressee, it also makes the line
ending “ring” or rhyme with the poem’s first line, recalling the typewriter’s presence.
The consonance of dental and plosive sounds in “ne tape pas tout à la machine”
foregrounds the clicking of the keys even in this request for their absence, another
slightly mocking gesture that forces the reader to associate the machine itself with the
creation of the text. We are aware that even as he claims to add “à l’encre / Deux trois
46
mots,” he is typing these words. The ink stain that blots out the handwritten text,
undermining the supremacy of the pen, is nowhere to be found, itself replaced by type in
the poem’s final jest. In part, the relationship between poet and typewriter feels
collaborative because, like Cendrars, the page itself has an “eye.” In “Lettre,” he charges
the poem’s recipient, “Vois donc l’œil qu’a
ma page,” or “see the eye my page has.”
Ron Padgett translates this line “see how my
page looks,” a doubly-loaded phrase that
both draws attention to the “look” of the
page with its typewritten lines and blank
spaces and suggests that the page itself can
look because “[ma page a] l’œil,” has an eye
that is artistic, lively, present au bout every
edge of the poem. The text takes on its
original meaning, becoming “tissue” or
flesh, inscribing the poet’s absent hand back
onto the page and in the process fulfilling
the reader’s desire for “une ligne de ta
main.”
While the Feuilles de Route do not explicitly incorporate visuality, Cendrars’s
contemporaries experimented extensively with the page. From the Futurists’
typographical play and emphasis on the book as art form to Guillaume Apollinaire’s use
of textual arrangement in his Calligrammes (Fig. 7), often cited as precursors to mid-
Fig. 7. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Lettre-Océan,”
Calligrammes (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2004) 58-59.
47
century “concrete poetry,” the avant-gardes of the early twentieth century evinced a
strong interest in the semiotic impact of words’ style and layout.
61
In his essay “L’Esprit
nouveau et les poètes,” published the same year as Cendrars’s “Profond aujourd’hui,”
Apollinaire (not only a fellow poet, but also a legionnaire, friend, and early influence)
discusses the impact of the cinema, phonograph, and airplane on the arts, and calls for
“typographical artifices worked out with great audacity” in order to “mechanize poetry as
the world has been mechanized.” Although the Feuilles de Route eschew typographic
play, Cendrars’s use of the typewriter does seem to be an attempt to find, as Apollinaire
suggests, “a totally new lyricism for these new means of expression which are giving rise
to art.”
62
The self-segmentation and mechanization it allows reflect the fragmentation and
velocity of modern life in a manner as subversive and conflicted as the surreal prose of
“Profond aujourd’hui” or kaleidoscopic lines of La Prose du Transsibérien, despite the
plain-spoken style for which the Feuilles have been overlooked.

IV. “EST-CE QUE MONSIEUR BLAISE CENDRARS EST À BORD?
63
: A TRANS-
ATLANTIC SIDE TRIP

It is impossible to read Cendrars’ Feuilles de route without addressing the context
within which they were written: that liminal space of travel to which the title refers. As

61
On the Futurists, see Johanna Drucker, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 2004).
See also Perloff, Futurist Moment, chapter 3, “Violence and Precision.” For comparisons of Apollinaire
with “concrete poetry,” see Emmett Williams, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (New York: Something
Else Press, 1967) and Mary Ellen Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1968). Also see Kittler, GFT, p. 229.
62
Selected Writings of Guillaume Apollinaire, trans. Roger Shattuck (New York: New Directions, 1971) p.
227.
63
“La Coupée” (CP 321). The line translates, “Is Monsieur Blaise Cendrars on board?” (165).
48
Reto Melchior points out, the title contains several references: to travel notes, roadmaps,
and, perhaps most importantly, an old French military term for marching orders or
mobilization papers.
64
As a former soldier, Cendrars likely intended to pun on the
peacetime mission they reflect: the discovery of the new literary world of Brazil. This
1924 voyage began at the invitation of Paulo Prado, an intellectual and businessman (he
was the son of a coffee magnate) who supported avant-garde writers and artists in São
Paulo and who traveled frequently to Paris to invest in the latest sports cars. Prado had
backed the Week of Modern Art in February 1922, a large-scale art festival celebrating
modern dance, painting, music, and literature that presented an already established and
growing body of work to the citizens of São Paulo. He maintained allegiances with the
leading Brazilian writers, including Oswald de Andrade, Mário de Andrade, and others.
65

Cendrars had met Oswald and his partner, the painter Tarsila do Amaral in 1923, when
she was in Paris studying cubist painting. According to some sources, it was through the
couple that he befriended Prado.
66
The Brazilian enthusiasm for Cendrars’ work and for
all things modern stimulated him to make this journey to what he perceived as a land of
promise where he would tour historic sites, attend Carnival in Rio, give lectures on
modern poetry, and carouse with his new friends (Fig. 8). The first section of Feuilles de

64
Reto Melchior, “Feuilles de route, feuilles de collage,” Brésil: L’Utopialand de Blaise Cendrars (Paris:
L’Harmattan: 1998) p. 314. Melchior’s essay examines several poems that take language from histories of
Brazil to argue that Cendrars saw himself as a transatlantic explorer on the verge of discovery.
65
For a history of the emergence of Brazilian Modernism, see Beatriz Resende, “Brazilian Modernism: The
Canonised Revolition,” in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, Ed.
Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2000). Also see Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey
of Brazilian Writing in the Twentieth Century, Trans. Jack E. Tomlins (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979).
66
See Carrie Noland, “The Metaphysics of Coffee,” Modernism/Modernity 7.3, p. 403. Noland offers a
postcolonial critique of European fetishization of Brazilian culture as a strand of primitivism and places
Cendrars’s relationship with Prado and coffee cultivation within the matrix of nationalism and social
critique of the day.
49
route, Le Formose, is dedicated to “mes bons amis de São Paulo,” “my good friends in
São Paulo” (CP 304, 139) as well as those in Rio (Fig. 9). While the poems were
composed aboard the ship, they bear the imprint of those writers with whom Cendrars
visited and make us wonder what influence Brazilian modernism may have had on his
work.

Many histories of Brazilian poetry refer to Cendrars as a kind of patron saint who
inspired these writers to continue the nationalist and technophilic experiments they began
in the 1910s. As his name suggests, “he would fan the fire of the young intellectuals
Fig. 8. Blaise Cendrars’ carte de visite, given
to Mário de Andrade. It reads “From Blaise
Cendrars traveling.” This card and Fig. 8
are both part of the Mário de Andrade
Archive, Institute for Brazilian Studies,
University of São Paulo. Reprinted in A
Imagem de Mário (Rio de Janeiro: Edições
Alumbramento, 1984) 96.
Fig. 9. A page from the notebook of Mário de Andrade
autographed by all of the members of the excursion to Minas
Gerais, 1924. Cendrars has underlined his signature.
50
involved in the Movement” (Resende, 201).
67
Mário de Andrade, one of the first writers
to articulate the themes of Brazilian modernism and theorize its place in relation to
international literary movements, refers to Cendrars as “um dos maiores poetas franceses
de hoje” (“one of the greatest French poets of today”).
68
Andrade’s treatise on modern
poetry, “The slave who is not Isaura,” written in the months following the Week,
provides a survey of international modernism and argues that writers must write for and
of their own era, discarding the trappings of outdated Parnassian literature. Brazilian
“modernismo” thus arose in response to colonialism as a desire for both formal freedom
and national identity. Its writers and artists were influenced by both the European avant-
gardes and their rejection of Portuguese influence.
69
Thus Cendrars’s visit holds a
paradoxical place in Brazilian letters because he represents both an inspiration and an
interloper. As Andrade would put it: “Cendrars m’a donné la connaissance. Et, poéte
français, il m’a libéré de la France”; “Cendrars gave me knowledge. And, a French poet,
he freed me from France.”
70
Cendrars thus inspired these poets to write of and for their
own country, liberating them from foreign influence.
As a result of this fierce desire to reflect contemporary experience, Brazilian
literature of the period is littered with references to “mechanical techniques and

67
The year of his visit, Oswald would publish his “Brazil-wood Poetry Manifesto” (“Manifesto da Poesia
Pau-Brasil”), in which he credits Cendrars with suggesting “you have the train loaded, ready to leave [...]
The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination.” Trans. Stella M.
de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (1986) p. 185.
68
Mário de Andrade, A escrava que não é Isaura, Obras Completas de Mário de Andrade: Obras Imatura
(São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editôria, 1960) p. 213.
69
For more on the formation of Brazilian modernism, see Charles A. Perrone, Seven Faces: Brazilian
Poetry Since modernism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
70
Qtd. Maria Teresa de Freitas and Claude Leroy, “Dernière page de la Genèse,” Brésil: L’Utopialand de
Blaide Cendrars, (Paris: L’Harmattan: 1998) p.19.
51
inventions which [...] represented the point of departure of modernity.”
71
In “Isaura,”
Andrade refers to art as “A MACHINE FOR PRODUCING TUMULT,” reflective of the
dynamism of the modern city (34). Like Jean Epstein’s 1920 treatise “La Poésie
d’aujourdhui,” an influential text that is dedicated to Cendrars, Andrade’s work advocates
speed, simultaneity, precision, and spontaneity. “What we have,” he writes, “is a need for
synthetic speed which relinquishes useless details” (36). This abbreviated poetry must be
“a consequence of electricity, the telegraph, the marine cable, wireless telegraphy, the
railroad, ocean liners, the automobile, the airplane” (36-37). In this technophilia we hear
the echo of Apollinaire’s “Esprit nouveau,” another important influence on Andrade.
72

As Brazilian writers experienced the technological modernization of their country,
the growth of the press and advertising, and the emergence of mechanical reproduction,
many writers sought to reproduce a modern conception of time in their work, which
resulted in an increase in journalistic themes and styles (crônicas, which some authors,
like João do Rio, began to write in verse) in some writers, a photographic sensibility in
others, and a desire to “convey the impression of accelerated time” (60) in others. One of
the technologies at the center of this rapid machine discourse is the typewriter, which
recurs as a topic in both the letters and poems of the period. Flora Süssekind suggests
Brazilian writers initially perceived the device as simply a mechanicals means of
producing a clean copy of manuscript text, but not a method through which new work

71
Wilson Martins, The Modernist Idea: A Critical Survey of Brazilian Writing in the Twentieth Century,
p.30.
72
For an exploration of the influence of French writers on Andrade, see Nites Therezinha Feres’s Mário de
Andrade’s French Readings; Leituras em francês de Mário de Andrade (São Paulo: Instituto de Estudos
Brasil, 1969), and Maria Helena Grembecki’s Mário de Andrade e “L’Esprit Nouveau” (São Paulo:
Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros, 1969).
52
could be written, and thus hesitated to adopt it for composition. As she notes:
Writers seemed to become gradually aware that the substitution of the mechanical
gesture of typing for the act of writing by hand would be followed by an
inevitable confrontation with the various modern artifacts and also by the death of
a view of literature as a kind of highly personalized handicraft.
73

The equation of writing with craftsmanship emerges from Parnassian poetry which, like
Romanticism in Europe, conceived of “lyricism as the expression of [...] a self that
unceasingly confesses or projects itself onto the most varied objects, themes, and
situations” (93). Some writers resisted this change, while others braced themselves for an
attendant shift in lyric subjectivity and let it filter into their writing.
Thus the Brazilian poets encountered a similar shift in their relationship to
authorship and subjectivity as their European counterparts—one colored by their colonial
past and desire to forge a new identity. As Süssekind notes, “Once this [lyric] self [...] is
lost, it becomes necessary to develop new ways of constructing meaning and to test ironic
forms of impersonality, multiplying masks and allowing the juxtaposition or
confrontation of various types of discourses and images” (93). This description of irony,
impersonality, and masking, as well as an emphasis on journalistic language and
photographic reproduction could just as easily apply to Cendrars’ Feuilles de Route as
Brazilian works of the 1920s. The journalistic aspect of Cendrars’ work may be attributed
to the fact that he was hired by several Paris publications to write articles about his trip,
and his interest in photographic reproduction also grows out of his involvement in
filmmaking, which gave him the notion of the image as a universal language. Given that

73
Flora Süssekind, Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique, and Modernization in Brazil
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) p. 14. Süssekind tracks both the adoption of new technologies
by Brazilian writers and the emergence of these technologies as themes in their work.
53
poets on both continents strove for similar effects, one wonders to what extent these
themes bridge modernism’s geographic borders.
The typewriter itself provides a touchstone connecting Cendrars and Mário de
Andrade, the first poet listed after Paul Prado in the dedication of Le Formose. Andrade’s
initial response to his typewriter was one of fear, as he writes to his friend poet Manuel
Bandeira in April of 1925, “so far I feel totally hampered by the fact of writing straight
on the machine. My ideas are frightened away by the noise, I myself feel frightened, I’ve
lost touch with my ideas” (Qtd. Süssekind 104). The notion of having “lost touch”
suggests both the writer’s block Andrade faced when seated at his machine and the more
literal distancing of the hand from the page where it used to “touch” his ideas. Unlike
Cendrars, for whom the hand’s place in the chain of signifiers had already been severed,
Andrade had to break his own habit, his own lyric subjectivity. Later in the same type-
written letter, he tells Manuel that he has named his machine “Manuela [...] an homage to
you,” feminizing this device that both frightens and excites him, just as Cendrars
feminized his belle machine in his love poems to it. Within a few months of this letter,
Andrade would write the poem “Máquina-de-escrever”
74
(“Typewriter”), showcasing his
newfound love of the machine. The poem bears a remarkable number of similarities with
Cendrars’ love poem, which was written in February and published in September of 1924
as part of Le Formose, a volume Andrade would review for the Brazilian journal Estética

74
My argument is complicated by the difficulty of dating this poem. The “Advertencia” or “Notice” that
begins Losango Cáqui (Khaki Lozenge) is dated 1924 and claims the poems were written in 1922. Rubén
Gallo therefore takes 1922 as the date of composition in Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the
Technological Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005) p. 93. However, according to Flora Süssekind, the
poem was composed “around the same time as the letter to Bandeira about the purchase of ‘Manuela’”
(105), which would make more sense given the author’s conflicted relationship to the device, which had
not yet merited the kind of admiration expressed in the poem.
54
3 roughly a year later. The timing of the review and Andrade’s own typewriter poem
suggests he might have intended an homage to the friend with whom he shared a mutual
admiration of the machine.
Rubén Gallo traces Andrade’s passion for typewriting to his connection with the
Mexican Estridentistas, a movement of writers inspired by Italian Futurism to bring the
“strident” noises of modern industry and technology into literature. Manuel Maples Arce
codified the group’s aims in his 1921 “Manifesto of Estridentismo” (published in Spanish
as “Actual no. 1: Hoja de Vanguardia comprimida estridentista”), in which he directly
references Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto, to which he adds “my decisive passion for
typewriters and my effusive love for the literature of classified ads” (Qtd. Gallo 91). This
celebration of modern technologies and abbreviated, utilitarian writing would resonate
with the modernismo of Brazil. Gallo reads Andrade’s 1922 “Máquina de escrever” as an
enactment of estridentismo, one that celebrates cacophony and pays close attention to the
material marks of technology. He introduces the useful term “mechanogenic writing”
(97) to refer to this work that has been shaped by the influence of the machine (in
contrast to “mechanographic writing,” which uses machine for subject matter alone, in
many cases providing backwards-looking texts with an aura of the modern).
Andrade’s poem, like Cendrars’, is decidedly mechanogenic. It begins:
B D G Z, Reminton.
Pra todas as cartas da gente.
Éco mecânico
De sentimentos rapidos batidos.
Pressa, muita pressa.
Duma feita surripiaram a máquina-de-escrever de meu mano.
Isso tambem entra na poesia
Porquê êle não tinha dinheiro pra comprar outra.
Igualdade maquinal,
55
Amor ódio tristeza. . .
E os sorrisos da ironia
Pra todas as cartas da gente. . .
Os malevolos e os presidentes da Republica
Escrevendo com a mesma letra. . .
Igualdade
Liberdade
Fraternité, point.
Unifição de todas as mãos. . .
75

[B D G Z, Reminton.
For all the letters we write.
Mechanical echo
Of fleeting feelings typed into words.
Haste, much haste.
Once someone stole my brother’s typewriter
This must go into verse too
Because he couldn’t afford to buy a new one.
Mechanical equality,
Love hate sadness. . .
And the ironical smiles
For all the letters we write. . .
Evil-doers and Presidents
Writing the same letters. . .
Equality
Liberty
Fraternity, period.
Unification of all hands. . .] (Süssekind 105)

The opening line, “B D G Z, Reminton,” draws our attention immediately to letters
themselves as marks without meaning, the traces of keys that have touched the paper.
Gallo suggests Andrade has misspelled the brand name of his typewriter, Remington, in
order to celebrate the typographical error as an incursion of the machine into the act of
writing. The “g,” he notes, has been pushed out of the word and into the jumble that
opens the poem. Beyond alerting us to the material form of these open signifiers,

75
Mário de Andrade, Poesias Completas (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editôra, 1966) 70. All subsequent
quotations of this poem in Portuguese are taken from this text. I rely on Süssekind and Gallo for the
translations.
56
Andrade’s choice suggests a relationship to the machine as instrument of composition,
not simply a device for transcribing thought or “fleeting feelings.” The first six letters “b,
d, g, z, r, e” could all by typed by the left hand, while the final six “m, i, n, t, o, n,”
(without that intervening “g”) could be tapped out by the right, each hand occupying a
predetermined place at the keys just as they might before a piano, the instrument in which
Andrade took his music degree in 1917. With this double-handedness, the text encodes
Andrade’s typing in its structure, an act directly influenced by his hands’ relation to the
machine. The letters provide a score of the typist’s work, a celebration of the medium
without a message.
This revelry in cacophony or nonsense literalizes Andrade’s celebration of the
machine’s egalitarian accessibility: we all type “com a mesma letra,” “with the same
letters”—the keys indifferent to whether the hands on their surface belong to “evil-doers
[or] Presidents.” The same letters can be used to inscribe “love hate sadness,” rendering
all emotion equivalent through “mechanical equality,” which Andrade demonstrates by
removing punctuation from his lists, just as Cendrars does in the Feuilles. The
“unification of all hands” effected here takes us into the realm of political discourse: the
poem advocates an agenda (to which the French revolutionary slogan points) of
brotherhood that resonates with the poet’s call for a national poetry and rejection of
Portuguese Parnassianism.
This permeable verse has space for all kinds of discourse, from advertising
slogans like “Pra todos as cartas da gente,” “For all the letters we write” (Sussekind 105),
to personal anecdotes. The story of “my brother’s typewriter” seems at first an odd
digression, and Adrade sets it off from the rest of the text as though to imply its
57
parenthetical nature. Yet, the lines themselves explain their own presence: the story
“must go into” the poem precisely because the brother cannot afford a new typewriter.
This sad tale is itself an “Éco mecânico / De sentimentos rapidos batidos,” a “Mechanical
echo / of swiftly typed passions” (Gallo 93). Thus, digressions are welcomed into the
poem because the máquina allows the poet to write with “haste, much haste.” Speed
allows the hands to keep pace with thought, allowing everything that comes into the
poet’s mind to find its place among the ranks on the page and seize hands with its
brothers.
Andrade celebrates the distancing of the hand from the signifier implied by this
equality. The personal poem is rendered impossible by the machine, which creates,
through “mechanical equality,” “ironical smiles / For all the letters we write.” The text,
rendered ironic by the removal of handicraft, takes on a slightly sarcastic tone. The
speaker amplifies his jest in the final stanzas:
Trique. . . Estrago!
É na letra O.
[. . . ]
Não poder contar meu extase
Diante dos teus cabelos fogaréu!

A interjeição saiu com o ponto fora de lugar!
Minha comoção
Se esqueceu de bater o retrocesso.
Ficou um fio
Tal e qual uma lagrima que cai
E o ponto final depois da lagrima.

Porém não tive lagrimas, fiz “Oh!’
Diante dos teus cabellos fogaréu.
A máquina mentiu!
Sabes que sou muito alegre
E gosto de beijar teus olhos matinais.
Até quarta, heim,ll.
58
Bato dois LL minusculos.
E a assinatura manuscrita. (71)

[Tap. . . an accident!
It’s the letter O
[. . . ]
I can’t describe my fascination
Before your fiery red hair!

The exclamation point came out with the period in the wrong place!
What a commotion
I forgot to backspace.
The result was a line
Exactly like a falling tear
And a period after the tear.

But I didn’t shed any tears, I said “Oh!”
Before your fiery red hair.
The typewriter lied!
You know I’m cheerful
and like to kiss your bedroom eyes.
See you on Wednesday,ll.

I typed to lowercase LLs
and add a handwritten signature.] (Gallo, 100)

These stanzas again celebrate the material letter, elaborating the “look” of the page
Cendrars values. Here, the speaker uses typography to tease his poem-letter’s recipient, a
lover perhaps, whose “fiery red hair” sends him into ecstasies for which he has misplaced
the “O” he needs to shout “Oh!” Twice the poet describes a typo we do not see: first the
O that appears by “accident,” then “the exclamation point [...] with the period in the
wrong place.” Like Cendrars’ reference to the blot of ink that mars his signature, these
lines force us to consider the material body of the text and whether meaning inheres in
the letters or the context surrounding them. They suggest that the machine perpetually
intervenes between the writer and his meaning, and thus between him and his lover. The
59
equality with which it renders sadness, hate, and love, letters of condolence and business
memoranda, depersonalizes writing—a fact the writer celebrates in part to tease his lover.
The speaker makes explicit the way the machine stimulates his writing by
incorporating the errors into his text despite their invisibility. The faulty “exclamation,”
which seems to refer to the mark that comes after “teus cabelos fogaréu,” doesn’t appear
on the page, perhaps fixed by typesetters when the book was printed. Yet Andrade not
only describes the error, he riffs on its shape for several lines, teasing his lover that it
looks like “a falling tear,” though he himself “didn’t shed any tears.” He mocks, “the
typewriter lied!” as though to excite her jealousy. Gallo explains the source of this error:
Remingtons produced in the early 1920s lacked an exclamation point key, requiring
writers to use an apostrophe and period to create the character (101). The speaker has
“forgot[ten] to backspace” between the two marks, so they are out of alignment, just as
the letter-writer and recipient are disconnected. With the typewriter between them,
“Todos os amores / Comencando por uns AA que se paracem. . .” (70), “All loves
beginning / with L’s that look just alike. . .” (Süssekind 106) call the writer’s own lines
into question. The reader who wants to find traces of the writer’s self in the text must
accept that mechanical reproduction, in its similitude, demystifies writing. The faulty
exclamation looks to the writer like a teardrop followed by a period, as if the machine
wished to encode sadness over the inability to express the speaker’s “fascination / Before
your fiery red hair!” Even the signature he promises in the last line, like that of Cendrars,
doesn’t appear. All we see are “two lowercase LLs,” as he explains, which stand in for
the slashes that normally indicate the space for a signature in letters of the time (100).
Both the lowercase LLs and the teardrop exclamation are specific realities of writing with
60
the Remington that further emphasize the relationship between writer and machine. At
every turn, the device alters the text put to the page and the writer adapts his hasty poem
to its requirements.
While further research may reveal to a greater extent the mutual influence of
Cendrars and Andrade, one notes the slight difference in their treatment of the machine.
Andrade praises the “Unifição de todas as mãos,” or “unification of all hands,” a phrase
that suggests the beauty of uniform text behind which the writer can disappear once
handwriting no longer exists. Cendrars, however, equated typing with a certain amount of
personal expression—even though he wants to jettison the “ligne de ta main,” for which
he mocks Raymone, he insists that he controls the “white spaces” of the page. Andrade’s
poem uses the white space to a much greater degree than Cendrars’, including
indentations and ellipses that move text around in space. The machine, instead of helping
him “go all the way” with an idea, breaks his ideas apart, distracts him, and takes him on
tangents. Rather than ringing with internal and end-rhyme, his machine provides a variety
of short and long lines held together by repetition. The lines “Pra todas as cartas da
gente...”; “Diante dos teus cabelos fogaréu!”; and “E a assinatura manuscrita” each
appear twice, suggesting a loose structure around which the writer and machine may
play.
These different approaches reveal the importance of embodiment in modernist
writers’ relation to technology. Andrade’s use of the phrase “Unifição de todas as mãos”
calls to mind not only handwriting, but the hand itself as a symbol of brotherhood and
strength. While this is a common revolutionary metaphor, in light of the potential
dialogue between these poems and their poets, it seems a calculated choice. Evidence
61
suggests the two writers discussed Cendrars’ missing hand, and that it was a subject of
interest to Andrade. Shortly after Cendrars arrived in Brazil, in March of 1924, Andrade
published an essay in the art journal Revista do Brasil that gently mocked his friend as
“Blaise Sans-Bras,” a homophonic nickname that pays tribute to the “armless” poet. This
affectionate pun perhaps reveals a rift on some deeper level between these two writers,
one of whom perceived the other as a privileged intruder not unlike the Portuguese
colonizers against whom Brazilian Modernism had taken shape. Andrade writes:
The authorities tried to prevent him from disembarking because of his handicap.
Fortunately for us, a solution was found. But the authorities’ efforts fill me with
sincere pride. After all what benefit do we derive from mutilated men? Brazil
doesn’t need limbless men, Brazil needs arms.
76

Beneath this somewhat sarcastic depiction of governmental ineptitude lies the suggestion
that “limbless men” have nothing to contribute to the modernist movement. The joke
privileges wholeness in terms of both literary perspective and martial prowess.
Some have suggested Andrade bristled at Cendrars’ arrival because of a sense of
competition due to the poet’s influence with Paulo Prado and established friendship with
Oswald, Tarsila, and other modernists. Whether his joke arose from competition or
affection, it stretches the bounds of taste in a way that suggests a certain familiarity. Only
a friend would presume to mock another’s handicap. Cendrars’ missing limb was clearly
a matter the two writers discussed. In a 1927 postcard, Cendrars thanks Andrade for
sending him a copy of his new novel, Amar (Fig. 10). In addition, he thanks him for an

76
Qtd. Jeffrey T. Schnapp and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, “Brazilian Velocities: On Marinetti’s 1926
Trip to South America,” South Central Review 13.2 (1996) 127. The authors use this quotation to
demonstrate Andrade’s dislike for foreign writers, including Marinetti, who visited Brazil in 1926 for a
lecture tour. They argue that this xenophobia arises from Andrade’s sense of self-importance as a founder
of Brazilian Modernism. I read these lines as gently mocking both the government officials and the
potential rival. However, the allusion to Cendrars’ body is suggestive in light of both writers’ affection for
their writing machines.
62
article on the eighteenth-century Brazilian sculptor Alijadinho, who lost both of his hands
to leprosy (his name means “the little cripple”). The full text of the card reads:
Mon cher Mario. J’ai bien reçu votre livre Amar. Merci. Je vais m’amuser à le lire
une heure tous les soirs. Merci de l’article sur l’Aleijadinho. Si vous aves besoin
quelque chose ne vous gênez pas, je suis à votre entière disposition. Ici, à la
Redonne, je suis plus seul et plus loin de tout qu’au fin fond du Brésil. Mes
amitiés à tous, à vous ma main amie. Blaise.
77

It seems the men shared an interest in Alijadinho, who overcame his impairment by
strapping his tools to his stumps; both planned to write articles about the sculptor.
Cendrars’ tone is affectionate—he offers to supply anything Andrade might need, “je suis
à votre entière disposition.” In light of their shared subject matter, Cendrars’ closing,
“Mes amitiés à tous, à vous/ ma main amie”; “My friendship to everyone, and to you my
helping hand” (my emphasis); takes on a greater freight. The phrase “ma main amie,”
while not a traditional letter closure in French, was Cendrars’ frequent expression of both
friendship and self-deprecation. The phrase turns an idiom expressing assistance into an
image of the hand extended in friendship—reminding his recipient that, of course, the
writer only had one hand to extend. The presence of Alijadinho here, coupled with this
friendly signoff, suggests the writers discussed the impact of both handedness and
mechanical mediation on art (the tools attached to the sculptor’s body provide a new
model of intervention between artist and work), a subject Andrade would return to in his
poetic response to Cendrars’ typewriter poem.

77
Marcos Antonio de Moraes, ed., “Tudo EstáTão Bom, Tão Gostoso...”; Postais A Mário de Andrade
(São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1993) p. 103.
63
Andrade’s valorization of the machine’s demystification of writing takes a
different source from that of Cendrars, for whom it offered a very real extension of the
body’s abilities while simultaneously reminding him of his own problematic
embodiment. In the anthologies that include photographs of Cendrars in Brazil, he always
appears without his hook or false arm, his sleeve pinned up so that the viewer is aware of
the missing part. The key to these writers’ relationships to their typewriters lies in their
different embodied experiences: for Cendrars, the machine extends the body’s
relationship to the page while for Andrade it is severed. Mediation in both cases impacts
Fig. 10. Postcard from Cendras to Andrade, 1927. Reproduced in Marcos Antonio
de Moraes, Ed., “Tudo EstáTão Bom, Tão Gostoso...”; Postais A Mário de Andrade
(São Paulo: HUCITEC, 1993) 103.
64
the resulting poems, but the promise of looking like everyone else means something
vastly different for each of these writers.

V. MON CORPS EST D’ACIER
78
: THE COLLABORATIVE MUSE

In his review of “Profond aujourd’hui” for Nord Sud, Pierre Reverdy praises
Cendrars for reflecting the contemporary idiom in which “our brain is a dynamo fitted to
a typewriter” (qtd. BC 64).
79
This merger of human and machine anticipates the
collaborative impact of the typewriter on the Feuilles de Route and the image of the poet
who writes “tout ce qui me passe par la tête,” but does not account for Cendrars’s evident
discomfort at joining the chain of signifiers. Cendrars’s assertion in the piece, “[n]ever
will a typewriter commit an etymological spelling error, but the man of intellect
stammers, chews his words, and breaks his teeth on antique consonants,” implies that
language itself is “antique” in the modern mouth and that the typewriter obviates such
linguistic mastication.
80
While he praises the emerging technological world, he also
expresses a sense of loss in joining it.
81
In attempting to jettison the self, an act that is
both “suicide” and “regicide,” the poet finds he is “impaled on my sensibility,” held back
by an aesthetic sense that doesn’t fit the age. In order to move forward, he says, “I listen

78
“En Route pour Dakar” (CP 309). Padgett translates this line “My body is steel” (147).
79
Quoted in Chefdor, Blaise Cendrars, p. 229.
80
Cendrars, Modernities and Other Writings, p. 3.
81
After all, as he claims in the poem “Misprints” in Feuilles de Route, “Spelling errors and misprints make
me happy / Some days I feel like making them on purpose / That’s cheating / I really love
mispronunciations hesitations of the tongue and the accents of all local dialects” (190). Perhaps Cendrars
loves these errors because they reveal their author as an individual.
65
to the dying music of sentimentality that resonates in my helmet,” abandoning the
romantic lyricism that propelled his early work.
82

Perhaps the music of the typewriter’s “jazz” subsumes that music of
sentimentality, but as freeing as the typewriter is for him, it reveals that he is still impaled
on “my” (individual) sensibility. The pursuit of any idea is the pursuit of “mon idée” (CP
307, my emphasis), no matter whether the poet speaks as himself or another, and the
typewriter still inscribes his presence, even as he strives for the poetic withdrawal of
reportage. The clarity and simplicity of the Feuilles de Route reflect a poet torn between
the impulse to do away with the self, to “become hard as a rock / Drop straight down /
Sink to the bottom” (CP 147), and to make “white spaces” (CP 143) that reveal him even
in his absence. Thus, as the book and voyage close, the poet writes his shortest poem. He
can leave “des blancs” that reveal as much about his concern over authorial identity as
the Prose du Transsibérien’s repeated, self-mocking, “j’étais déjà si mauvais poète / Que
je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout” (CP 236)
83
:

Pourquoi J’écris?

Parce que… (CP 343)

[Why Do I Write?

Because…] (CP 200)

82
Cendrars, Modernities and Other Writings, p. 6.
83
“I was already such a bad poet / That I didn’t know how to take it all the way” (p. 15).
66
Cendrars leaves the poem open through these ellipses, implying that he is simultaneously
considering the question and typing his response. The text on the page is still alive,
flexing itself for some coming thought, some idea that hasn’t yet made its way into the
cabin. Because Cendrars refuses to go jusqu’au bout, casting off the bardic role that
causes him such discomfort, it is up to the reader to fill in his blanks.
67
CHAPTER 2

“THERE HAVE BEEN PICTURES HERE”
84
: H.D. AND THE PROJECTIVE MEDIUM

If Cendrars reached outward, or at least arm’s length, to his typewriter, for a
collaborative medium, one might say H.D. reached inward, finding her galvanizing
technology within herself.
85
Writing in the midst of the Blitz in London during the
Second World War, she sought the affirmation that would allow her to continue her
creative work in the face of such large-scale destruction. As she explains of her decision
to write The Gift, the memoir of her Moravian heritage composed during this period,
“That outer threat and constant reminder of death, drove me inward.”
86
But this turning
inward is not simply a revisiting of cherished memories; according to H.D., “the Child
actually returns to that world, she lives actually in those reconstructed scenes, or she
watches them like a moving picture” (192). What sort of technology is this that allows
one to look inside and watch one’s own memories like Eliot’s “nerves in patterns on a
screen?”
87
It is, she writes, a device in which “science and art […] beget a new creative
medium,” one in which the mind becomes a “strange camera obscura” containing
“complicated coils and wheels and springs that are brain-matter or the nerves and living

84
H.D., Tribute to Freud (New York, New Directions Books, 1984) p. 47; hereafter abbreviated TTF.
85
An early version of this chapter appeared in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 10.2, special
issue, H.D. and the Archaeology of Religion: 65-82. It is archived online at www.jcrt.org.
86
H.D., “H.D. by Delia Alton [Notes on Recent Writing],” Iowa Review. 16.3 (1986).
87
T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” Modernism: An Anthology, Ed. Lawrence Rainey
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005) p. 105.
68
tissues of the brain itself.”
88
This apparatus simultaneously absorbs and projects images,
transmits and receives, a pinhole camera and projector in one. H.D.’s pun on medium’s
technological and occult meanings aligns the camera and the clairvoyant as technologies
for raising the dead and alerts us to the technology that would become central to her
literary endeavors of this later period in her career: the projective spirit-medium.
89
The
figure of the medium, capable of materializing visions outside of her body through
“projection,” enables H.D. to synthesize her cinematic and psychoanalytic endeavors to
heal her psychological wounds and defend the status of vision at a time of spiritual crisis.

I. “I COULD NOT GET RID OF THE EXPERIENCE BY WRITING ABOUT IT”
90
: THE SEARCH
FOR NEW TECHNOLOGIES OF INSCRIPTION

It is by no means a stretch to refer to mediumship as a technology—spiritualists
used technological metaphors for the work of mediums from the inception of the
movement, referring to séances as exchanges of energy among those present, which was
channeled by the medium to receive telegraphic messages from the beyond. Even the
communication through a series of raps heard by the Hyde sisters in Rochester, New
York in 1848, often cited as the genesis of the spiritualist movement, could be construed

88
H.D., The Gift: The Complete Text, ed. Jane Augustine (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998) p.
50.
89
Others have written eloquently on H.D.’s immersion in spiritualism and lifelong fascination with
astrology and occultism. This chapter focuses specifically on the idea of the projective or ideoplastic
medium that she gained from spiritualism as a new technology through which she could continue to write.
In addition to the sources cited below, for a look at H.D.’s occultism in the modern context see Cathy Gere,
Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), and Devin
Johnston, Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (Middletown: Wesleyan
University Press, 2002).
90
TTF, p. 40.
69
as a kind of Morse code from the spirit world. Although mediums might be either male or
female, women were thought to be particularly “sensitive” to these vibrations in
spiritualist circles, a sensitivity that led to their championing by spiritualists and to their
branding as hysterics by doctors and psychologists who sought to restrict these excess
energies. H.D. stands at this nexus where psychology, gender, and spiritualism meet,
involved as she was in Freudian psychoanalysis and psychical research, and marked as
she was by her bisexuality and her emotionally tenuous “nervous”
91
state, as her daughter
Perdita called it, which left her susceptible to physical and mental breakdown due to the
strain of both of the World Wars she witnessed. As the spiritualist movement progressed,
so did the metaphors applied to the medium who offered her body as conduit for the
energies of dead spirits desperate to commune with the living—she might be a wireless,
radio, telephone, and eventually even a projector, casting images of and messages from
the dead into the darkened room where her circle of sitters watched and waited, rapt.
92

H.D. was deeply involved in spiritualism during the Second World War, joining
the International Institute for Psychic Investigation in 1941 in order, as she said, to use
their library, and beginning a series of weekly and bi-weekly séances with psychic Arthur
Badhuri and his mother together with her partner Bryher in their Lowndes square flat

91
Perdita Schaffner, “A Sketch of H.D.: The Egyptian Cat,” Signets: Reading H.D., Rachel Blau DuPlessis
and Susan Stanford Friedman, Eds. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990) p. 4.
92
For an excellent exploration of the technological metaphors surrounding mediumship, see Jeffrey
Sconce, “Mediums and Media,” in Technological Visions: The Hopes and Fears that Shape New
Technologies, Ed. Marita Sturken and Douglas Thomas (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). For
further examination of the spectral metaphors surrounding new technologies, see Sconce’s Haunted Media:
Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000). H.D. herself
refers to her solitary séance sessions as “psychic radio-communication” (93) in The Sword Went Out to Sea
and writes of herself as “a connecting wire of psychic communication” (125), demonstrating the extent to
which mediumship licensed a merger of the human and the mechanical for H.D., as for many spiritualists.
70
shortly thereafter. Although she was unable to publish the work that deals directly with
her table-rapping experiments and spiritualist beliefs, The Sword Went Out to Sea, in her
lifetime,
93
her investment in spiritualist thought and activity stimulates and permeates her
writing of the period—a prolific output that includes several volumes of poetry, memoir,
and autobiographical fiction. The book that deals most directly with her interest in
mediumship and spiritualism in the 1940s is actually ostensibly about something else
altogether—her Tribute to Freud, the “memoir” of her 1933 and ’34 analysis written
between September and November of 1944 to commemorate Freud’s death. In Tribute,
one finds metaphors of writing as “projection,” a manifestation of images directly from
the mind of the poet. As an exploration of psychical and visionary giftedness through
projective mediumship, Tribute enables us to see the spiritualist elements at play in
H.D.’s Trilogy, the uplifting war sequence she wrote before, during, and after her
Freudian memoir. Specifically, Tribute to Freud enables H.D. to put her “new creative
medium” into play, redefining the poet as a projector of images and portraying history as
a multiple exposure in which present, past, and future interpenetrate, a perspective that
gave her hope during a time of cultural despair.
H.D. came to Freud to understand the series of visionary experiences she had
between 1919 and 1920 during her recovery from the compounding traumas she
experienced at the end of the First World War. As she explains in Writing on the Wall,

93
The book is, thankfully, now available with an informative introduction by Cynthia Hogue and Julie
Vandevere. See H.D., The Sword Went Out to Sea (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007), hereafter
abbreviated Sword. As the editors note, Sword enables us to see the spiritualist underpinnings of Trilogy,
the prophetic poems H.D. wrote and published during WWII. I argue here that Tribute to Freud, written
concurrently with the spiritualist activities detailed later in Sword and between her composition of the
installments of Trilogy, also reveals the spiritualist leanings of the sequence, particularly in establishing the
projective medium as a central figure in H.D.’s work.
71
the first section of Tribute, “things had happened in my life, pictures, ‘real dreams,’
actual psychic or occult experiences that were superficially, at least, outside the province
of established psychoanalysis” (TTF 39), and she believed that the doctor might be able
to “read her fortune” if she “[lay] the cards on the table” (40). When Bryher found her ill
with double pneumonia, deeply depressed by her brother’s death at the front and her
father’s subsequent death from “shock,” estranged from her husband Richard Aldington,
and pregnant with the child of artist Cecil Gray, she saw to it the poet received medical
care and was restored to health. After the baby, Perdita, was born, Bryher took H.D. to
the Scilly Islands to recover, and there she had what she called her “‘jelly-fish’
experience of double-ego” (116). When the two women traveled to Greece the following
spring, H.D. would have a series of mysterious experiences, beginning with a shipboard
vision of their fellow passenger the archeologist Peter Rodeck pointing out land and a
pod of dolphins on the sea-side of the ship (157). Rodeck would not remember the event,
nor would any of the other passengers be able confirm the strange sights. During their
subsequent stay at the hotel “Belle Venise” on Corfu, H.D. would have her most
unsettling vision of the titular “writing-on-the-wall,” and a few days later, would be, in
her words, “possessed” in a series of “Indian Dance-Pictures” (172) or tableaux vivants.
By the time she began psychoanalysis, more than ten years later, these psychic
experiences haunted her, such that she hoped “to lay, as it were, the ghost” of these
visions to rest (40). H.D. turned to psychoanalysis for a solution at once scientific and
occult, seeking, it seems, both the catharsis of “working through” her traumas and the
“fortune” that would prepare her for the future. She undertook analysis with Freud in
1933 not only with the hope of healing herself from the series of shocks that devastated
72
her at the end of the First World War, but also to prepare herself to heal others as the
specter of another war loomed over Europe.
H.D.’s interest in the occult precedes the active engagements of the 1940s, as
evinced by her Notes on Thought and Vision, composed while she was recovering with
Bryher in the Scilly Islands in 1919. The text foreshadows the sort of mediumship she
would explore later in life, figuring the “jelly-fish experience” as a dissociative visionary
moment in which she felt herself encased in two “lenses” or “bell-jars” (118). Seeing the
world through this “double-lens” (118) that implies sight and insight at once, H.D.
becomes a crystal-ball-turned-projector, “for concentrating and directing pictures from
the world of vision.”
94
This experience suggests to her the possibility of séance for
shocking the world out of its post-war trauma state: “Two or three people, with healthy
bodies and the right sort of receiving brains, could turn the whole tide of human thought,
could direct lightning flashes of electric power to slash across and destroy the world of
dead, murky thought” (NTV 27). The notion that an individual with a “receiving brain,”
95

could clarify and heal the minds of society at large reflects the appeal Spiritualism, like
cinema, had for H.D. as tools for, as Laura Marcus suggests, “bridging national
differences” (CU 104). This receptivity also resonates with her assertion in Tribute to
Freud that a major goal of her analysis was “to fortify and equip myself to face war when
it came, and to help in some subsidiary way, if my training were sufficient and my

94
H.D., Notes on Thought and Vision (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982) p. 50; hereafter abbreviated
NTV.
95
Here H.D. echoes the notion of the spiritualist “sensitive.” As Deborah Blum explains in Ghost Hunters:
William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, the sensitive “claim[s] an unusual
sensitivity to messages from the summerland, the borderland, the spirit world,” liminal spaces resonant
with H.D.’s own preoccupations (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006) p. 19.
73
aptitudes suitable, with war-shocked and war-shattered people” (TTF 93). Her 1944
tribute attempts not only to work through the unfinished analysis, but also to redeem her
Spiritualist beliefs after the passing of the father of modern psychoanalysis. If she can
transform the visions Freud called a “dangerous symptom” into “warnings from another
world” (50), she can assert the power of Spiritualism and stake a claim for a networked
photographic model of mind, one that reflects what Terry Castle calls “the spectralization
or ‘ghostifying’ of mental space” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
96

As the “ghosts” and “visions” mentioned in my brief summary of Tribute suggest,
spiritualism held a strong interest for H.D. during the 1940s, as it did for many
individuals feeling the psychological strain of the Great War, which brought
unprecedented carnage to the forefront of national consciousness. Spiritualism, the belief
that the soul survives the body after death, experienced a surge in popularity during
World War I because it held out the possibility of transcendence at a time when the body
seemed increasingly fragile, threatened as it was by new technologies of control,
communication, and warcraft. The movement began in the United States in the mid-
nineteenth century with a series of strange knockings heard by the Fox sisters in
Hydesville, New York.
97
The sisters, claiming they could communicate with the

96
Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical
Inquiry 15.1 (1988) p. 29. Castle argues that the changing meaning of “phantasmagoria” over the course of
the nineteenth century from a term denoting a magic lantern show featuring ghosts to a psychological
experience of scattered, haunting images reflects a growing sense of the untrustworthiness of the human
mind which, like the magic lantern, creates illusions and projects them on the world. As discussed in my
introduction, this skepticism about the individual mind fueled much modernist fiction, including that of
Woolf, Joyce, and Dos Passos. It also impacted modernist poets by unsettling the privileged position of the
lyric speaker surrounded by a world in flux.

97
Most histories of Spiritualism begin with the Fox sisters, though stories of haunting and uncanny visitors
long precede them. For an engaging account of the origins of Spiritualism and the Society for Psychical
Research (SPR), which was founded to study mediums and occult phenomena, see Blum.
74
knocking spirit, whom they called “split-foot,” quickly became popular entertainers
thanks to P.T. Barnum, but the entertainment value of speaking to and through ghosts at
séances soon gave way to a radical political agenda that advocated communes, women’s
rights, abolition, and temperance reforms.
98
Female mediums, who predominated in the
movement, used their status as passive receivers of messages from the beyond to speak
out on social issues in which they otherwise would have been denied a voice.
Intense interest in Spiritualism followed each war of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, particularly through the
practice of spirit photography,
portraits in which sitters appear
accompanied by ghostly “extras”—
figures, drawings, and sometimes
even writing not present when the
picture was taken. The first of these
images, taken by William Mumler in
Boston in 1861, capitalized on the
hope of grieving Americans who
wanted to believe in the possibility of
contact with their dead brothers, sons,
and fathers. These images played a
central role in helping the nation work

98
Sconce, “Mediums and Media,” p. 62.
Fig. 11. William H. Mumler, “Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of
her husband, President Lincoln,” 1870-75. Collection of the College
of Psychic Studies, London. Reproduced in TPM 26.
75
through its grief, as evinced by Mumler’s most famous image—Mary Todd Lincoln
accompanied by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln (Fig. 11). Spirit photography experienced
a resurgence in Europe after the First World War through the mediums William Hope and
Ada Emma Deane. Deane’s 1924 photograph of dead soldiers hovering over the crowd
during a moment of silence to commemorate Armistice Day appeared in the Daily Sketch,
causing an uproar due to the resemblance of many of the soldiers to contemporary sports
figures
99
—an example of the kind of poor double-exposure that eventually earned spirit
photography a bad reputation among both spiritualists and psychical researchers.
The period leading up to H.D.’s analysis with Freud was a time of great interest
in spirit photography in England: 1918 saw the founding of The Society for the Study of
Supernormal Pictures in London (of which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
100
was Vice
President); in 1920, Doyle published his article on the Cottingley Fairies (photographs of
diminutive winged figures taken by two young women in Yorkshire) in The Strand,
which was followed by his 1922 book arguing for their authenticity, The Coming of the
Fairies; in 1922 The Society for Psychical Research endeavored to monitor and expose
William Hope for doctoring his photographic plates, leading the credulous Doyle to
publish The Case for Spirit Photography in Hope’s defense the following year; and
throughout the twenties and early thirties Ada Emma Deane produced photographs whose
floating heads enveloped in gauzy fabric bore a striking resemblance to period magazine

99
For more on Deane and Hope, see Andreas Fischer, “The Most Disreputable Camera in the World,” in
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); hereafter
abbreviated TPM.
100
Doyle’s interest in Spiritualism dates to the 1880s, but intensifies after the death of his eldest son
Kingsley of pneumonia in 1918.
76
illustrations (Fig. 12). Though skeptics and believers alike repeatedly questioned the
veracity of these photographer/mediums, their images played an important role in uniting
a fragmented society and psyche.
101

The intersection between psychoanalysis, photography, and Spiritualism in the
Modern period merit consideration alongside H.D.’s well-documented cinephilic
endeavors as a member of the POOL
collective and writer for the avant-
garde film journal Close Up.
102
The
visions that form the core of Tribute
to Freud bear striking resemblances
to spirit photographs. In fact, the
cinematic and photographic often go
hand in hand in the mediumistic
metaphor of “projection” H.D. uses
throughout the text, which could
refer just as well to magic lantern
images as to film.
103
As Adalaide Morris has noted, the language of “projection”

101
For more on post-war spirit photography, see Tom Gunning, “Phantom Images and Modern
Manifestations: Spirit Photography, Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photography’s Uncanny,” Fugitive
Images: From Photography to Video. Ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) p.
66.

102
Bryher and H.D. founded the production and publishing company POOL at Bryher’s home in Territet,
Switzerland in 1926 together with her husband Kenneth Macpherson, and their friend Robert Herring. The
group produced three silent films and a monthly journal of film criticism, Close Up.
103
H.D. bought a magic lantern for Perdita in 1928, which she herself enjoyed. In a letter to Bryher that
year, she describes her proficiency with it (using the pet-name “cat” to refer to herself): “The magic lantern
is so that tonight I can slip in little bits of film. I have already peeled and prepared the films for the private
Fig. 12. Spirit photographs made by Ada Emma Deane in the 1920s.
Collection of Cambridge University Library. Reproduced in TPM 84.
77
permeates H.D.’s work, drawing on the word’s cinematic, militaristic, cartographic,
alchemical, and psychoanalytic inflections.
104
The term is useful to H.D., Morris argues,
because “projection is the thrust that bridges two worlds. It is the movement across a
borderline” (413). H.D.’s preoccupation with crossing psychological, generic, and
metaphysical “borderlines”
105
is clear in Tribute to Freud, a text haunted by images, from
the literal “writing on the wall” of H.D.’s Corfu visions to the repeated memories from
her childhood that return as “dream-pictures” (TTF 35). These “pictures” act as a kind of
album of “spirit photographs,” allowing H.D. to materialize memory and history, to make
evidence of her experience by externalizing her visions just as turn of the century
mediums were able to project images of and writings by the dead into physical space and
onto the photographic plate. For H.D., film was “a perfect medium”
106
of which
filmmakers and cinephiles alike must strive to be worthy. This “subtle device for
portraying of the miraculous” (CU 112) had the power to manifest the invisible, whether

show I give one CAT tonight” (qtd. Rachel Connor, H.D. and the Image (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2004) p. 107).
104
See Adalaide Morris, “The Concept of Projection: H.D.’s Visionary Powers,” Contemporary Literature
25.4 (1984) pp. 411-436.
105
A project clarified in the POOL film Borderline in which she plays a hysteric, jealous lover. For analysis
of the film, see Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernism: Modernist Poetry and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005).
106
James Donald, Anne Friedberg and Laura Marcus, eds. Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism,
(New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), hereafter abbreviated CU. Many of H.D.’s essays in Close
Up act as paeans to the power of cinema to speak a universal language and to unite the diverse peoples of
the world. In an essay titled “Restraint,” part two of a series on “Cinema and the Classics,” H.D. writes:
A perfect medium has at last been granted us. Let us be worthy of it. / You and I have got to work.
We have got to begin to care and to care and to care. Man has perfected a means of artistic
expression that, I assure you, would have made Phidias turn in his grave (if he had a grave) with
envy. Light speaks, is pliant, is malleable. Light is our friend and our god. Let us be worthy of it.
(CU, 112)
For more on the connections between cinema and psychoanalysis, see McCabe.
78
by capturing movements too quick for the naked eye, like Edweard Muybridge’s
chronophotography,
107
which demonstrated all the minute gestures that make up a simple
movement, or by tricks that make impossible feats seem simple, as in the films of
Georges Méliès. In this way, film and photography take the spectator “beyond” ordinary
experience into a borderland where anything can happen.
Like many early proponents of film, H.D. and Bryher saw it as a universal
language, embracing the art form for its ability to unite a world divided by national,
geographical, and economic differences.
108
This technological utopianism emerges in two
poems H.D. published in Close Up in 1927, “Projector” and “Projector II (Chang).”
109
In
these poems the projector’s beam becomes “god / and song,” a kind of deity with the
power to unify the divided:
to readjust
all severings
and differings of thought,
all strife and strident bickering
and rest. (HDCP 349)

H.D.’s metaphor, of course, draws on film’s mechanical properties; the seeming merger

107
Walter Benjamin referred to these unacknowledged intermediate states as the “optical unconscious,”
suggesting a psychological repository of images most of us cannot access, much like that of the medium.
See “Little History of Photography,” Selected Writings, 1927-1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge:
Belknap Press, 1999) pp. 511-512.
108
See Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2005) p. 92. The Close Up group resisted sound film because they feared it would restrict
this universality. Laura Marcus argues that this inclination reflects the influence of the populist strain in
American Transcendentalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (CU 103).
109
H.D., Collected Poems 1912-1944 (New York: New Directions Books, 1986); hereafter abbreviated
HDCP. For an examination of the poems’ relationship to H.D.’s writing for POOL, see Charlotte Mandel,
“H.D.'s ‘Projector II’ and Chang, a Film of the Jungle,” The H.D. Newsletter, vol. 1, no. 2: 42-45.
79
of discontinuous frames into a fluid image in “critical flicker fusion.”
110
Yet, on a larger
scale, the poem asserts film’s ability to make whole “all severings,” including those of
the human body and the body politic. In the projector’s beam, she writes:
vision returns
and with new vision
fresh
hope
to the impotent. (HDCP 352)

From early on, then, the projector is associated with the visionary in her work, a medium
both technological and spiritual through which “our spirits walk elsewhere / with
shadow-folk and ghost-beast” (353). The projector wields light as a kind of power or
“gift,” with which he enthralls his subjects and allows a kind of transcendence through
disembodiment, a relinquishing of selfhood in which, she writes, echoing Rimbaud, “you
are other” (358). Film, for H.D. and her cohort, promises escape from the problematic
modern body in a complex merger: both with the other viewers in the darkened theater in
which one “worship[s],” and with the visions on screen that pour on and around one. This
investment in light’s ability to manifest the ineffable and heal the psyche returns in
earnest in H.D.’s work of the 1940s, when she finally has a model for such visionary
activity in the projective medium, a subject to which I will return later in this chapter.
This equation of the technological and occult medium in H.D.’s language is no
coincidence—it permeates the discourse of both cinema and spiritualism of the period,
each of which draws on the spectral implications of images written in light. In Robert
Herring’s 1929 essay, “A New Cinema, Magic and The Avant-Garde” in Close Up, for

110
Garrett Stewart, Between Film and Screen: Modernism’s Photo Synthesis (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999) p. 8.
80
example, he implies that thanks to technological advances, cinema fans may all become
mediums. He writes, “You need not be a chamber to be haunted, nor need you own the
Roxy to let loose the spirit of cinema on yourself,”
111
and suggests one can “hire or buy
or get on the easy system, a projector” to manifest figures in a beam of light. The “spirit”
of cinema permeates not only the room, but the spectator as well, for “by moving your
fingers before the beam, you interrupt them; by walking before it, your body absorbs
them” (54). The projected images can be called up at will to “haunt” one’s walls and
oneself, to be both outside of and “absorbed” by the body in a manner similar to H.D.’s
depiction of light’s healing and occult power in the “Projector” poems.
Although H.D. stopped writing for the journal in December of that year, she
would have been familiar with Herring’s description of film as the product of “magic
fingers writing on the wall,” that can take the form of “an Aaron’s rod flowering on the
wall,” and even “a snake” (54), metaphors strikingly similar to H.D.’s own descriptions
of her visionary experiences in Writing on the Wall and The Flowering of the Rod.
Herring remained close to Bryher and H.D. after Close Up ceased publication, assisting
Bryher as editor of Life and Letters Today, the literary journal she published during
World War II in which H.D.’s Writing on the Wall first appeared. His depiction of the
projector’s beam as fingers that “spread in blessing or convulse in terror […] tap you
lightly or drag you in” (54) refers to the practice of “manifestation séances,” which
became popular at the turn of the century in England. At these gatherings, channeled

111
Herring also draws on Emily Dickinson’s poem #670, which begins “One need not be a Chamber—to be
Haunted— / One need not be a House— / The Brain has Corridors—surpassing / Material Place—” in The
Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976)
p. 333. This allusion nicely connects the mind and the projector as sources of spectral images.
81
spirit energies took shape in slimy, gauze-like strands known as “ectoplasm” that
emerged from the medium’s body in the dark, often containing words and photographs
(Fig. 13) thought to emanate from the spirit world.
112
Several mediums specialized in
manifesting hands, which scientists and
psychical researchers dutifully
fingerprinted and documented in search
of proof of their occult powers.
113
It is
in these projective mediums that H.D.
would find a model for the merger of
her psychoanalytic and cinematic
endeavor to transcend bodily limitations
and to unite a fragmented society.
Both psychoanalysts and
spiritualists turned the camera on the
body of the medium (particularly the
female medium) at the turn of the
twentieth century,
114
the former to codify
and control what were perceived as excess libidinal energies, often labeled “hysteria,”

112
Lawrence Rainey has written on the fascination these séances held for F.T. Marinetti, who draws on
them as a metaphor for externalized will in his “Futurist Manifesto.” See “Taking Dictation: Collage
Poetics, Pathology and Politics.” Modernism/Modernity 5.2 (1998): 123-153.
113
See Pierre Apraxine, “The Margery Case,” in TPM, 217-219.
114
Gunning provides an excellent analysis of the scientific and photographic gaze: “In Your Face:
Physiognomy, Photography, and the Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity 4.1 (1997): 1-
29.

Fig. 13. Thomas Glendenning-Hamilton, “Mary Marshall
producing ectoplasm bearing the likeness of Arthur Conan
Doyle.” University of Manitoba Libraries. Reproduced in TPM
227.
82
and the latter to capture proof that
those very excess energies made
her, like the photographic plate,
“sensitive” to the invisible currents
of the spirit world. Although Freud
studied briefly with Jean-Martin
Charcot,
115
who pioneered the
photography of hysteric patients at the Salpêtrière between 1876 and 1879,
116
he
eventually diverged in his understanding and treatment of hysteria, moving from a visual
to an oral emphasis as he developed “the talking cure,” which shifts the focus from
observable symptoms to the patient’s linguistic associations and personal history.
117

Interestingly, as psychoanalysis moves away from the image, spiritualism and psychical
research move toward it, hoping to find in the photograph evidence to prove or debunk
the survival of the soul after death.

115
Charcot makes an explicit connection between hysteria and Spiritualism in an 1888 lecture in which he
suggests that séances and occult books that “stimulate the imagination” will induce hysteria in people
predisposed to it. See “Hysteria and Spiritism,” Medical and Surgical Reporter 59.3 (July 1888): 65-68.
Pierre Janet also considered mediums “simply hysterics.” See Rainey, “Taking Dictation,” 131.
116
Freud hung a lithograph of André Brouillet’s painting Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière over the
couch in his study when he settled in London (Fig. 14), though whether the image was there during H.D.’s
sessions in Vienna is uncertain. H.D. notes, however, that a photograph of Charcot watched over Freud in
his office. Brouillet’s image depicts one of Charcot’s theatrical “Tuesday lessons” in which a hysteric
patient has collapsed into the arms of a sympathetic male doctor, her blouse pulled down to expose her
shoulders and décolletage, her eyes closed and head tossed back as her arms and hands contort in pronation
and Charcot continues to calmly address a room full of male spectators. Two female nurses hover at the
edge of the frame, almost cut out of the image, their concerned stares directing our own glance to the bare
chest and parted lips of the patient, Blanche Wittman.
117
For more on this transition, see Gunning (1997) and Peter Brooks, Body Work: Objects of Desire in
Modern Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Fig. 14. André Brouillet, Une Leçon Clinique à la Salpêtrière, 1887.
83
Both spiritualism and science relied on the status of the photograph as “index,” a
writing of light onto the photographic plate or film, to provide visual evidence of
intangible phenomena. Early spirit photographers like Mumler claimed they had no
control over the image on the plate, but simply allowed light to do its work, thus evading
prosecution.
118
Believers hypothesized the ghostly “extras” in their photographs were
projections of remembered images of the dead onto plates, either by the medium, the
sitter, or spirits wanting to demonstrate their presence (TPM 139). This interpretation
helped explain why images of “extras” often appeared to be duplicates of existing
photographs, paintings, or illustrations. The spirits used familiar images to make their
presence known, to “materialize” themselves, thus participating in the uncanny economy
of repetition by adding another layer of doubling to the spirit photograph.
As photographers like Mumler in Boston and Buguet in France were increasingly
exposed as frauds selling double-exposures, both
spiritualists and skeptical organizations like the
Society for Psychical Research turned to the medium
herself for evidence of her powers. Increasing
emphasis was placed on manifestation séances,
producing highly eroticized images in which
materializations pour from the medium’s mouth, navel,
and often from under her skirts (Fig. 15). This process
turns the medium into a camera herself: as Gunning

118
Gunning (1995) pp. 48-51.
Fig. 15. William J. Crawford, “Close-up of
ectoplasm collecting at the feet of the
medium Kathleen Goigher,” 1920.
Collection of the American Society for
Psychical Research. Reproduced TPM 215.
84
notes, “the human body behaves like an uncanny photomat, dispensing images from its
orifices” (1995, 58). Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, noted doctor and sexologist,
suggested the images produced at the séances he
photographed emerged from the medium’s
“subliminal consciousness,”
119
materialized
images from her own mind or those of other
participants in the séance. His theory not only
plays with the popular conception of
photography as a form of writing that
communicates directly with the mind through the
eye,
120
it also enables him to brush off the fact
that the medium he photographed for four years,
Eva C., often manifested seemingly two-
dimensional images that look in the photographs
like cardboard cut-outs and magazine covers (Fig. 16). Thus spirit photographs could
both be and record “ideoplasty,” to use Schrenck-Notzing’s term (qtd. TPM 178), a
materialization of thought.
121

119
Andreas Fischer, “‘The Reciprocal Adaptation of Optics and Phenomena’: The photographic recording
of materializations,” TPM, p. 178.
120
North, p. 5.
121
H.D.’s interest in Camille Flammarion, astronomer and founder of the Societé Astronomique de France,
provides strong evidence for her interest in mediumship from a scientific perspective. She began reading
his work as early as 1910, much to her father’s chagrin, according to Barbara Guest (25). The Gift opens
with a quote from his Death and its Mystery that foregrounds the passivity of the medium and the
connection between vision and photography: “The brain comes into play, yes, but it is only the tool…the
telephone is not the person speaking over it. The dark room is not the photograph” (qtd. TG 33). Not only
was Flammarion an astronomer, he was deeply interested in spiritualism, and when he met the popular
Fig. 16. Albert von Schrenck-Notzing, the medium
Eva C with materialization, November 22, 1911.
Intitut für Grenzebiete der Psychologie und
Psychohygiene. Reproduced TPM 194.
85
II. “AN UNUSUAL WAY TO THINK”
122
: THE POET AS PROJECTIONIST

H.D.’s Corfu visions, as described in Tribute to Freud, resemble spirit
photographs both in their visual content and ideoplastic function. She is explicit about the
mediumistic quality of these images, deeming them akin to “a sort of halfway state
between ordinary dream and the vision of those who, for lack of a more definite term, we
must call psychics or clairvoyants” (TTF 41). H.D. describes the “wall” on which these
visions appear as a “black-board (or light board) or screen” (55), three surfaces in one, a
“black-board” like the kind used for mediumistic slate-writing, a “light board” against
which slides or transparencies can be viewed, and a “screen” on which images and films
can be projected. The illuminated images against this dark screen are fixed by her rapt
gaze; they are “light-pictures,” written by light like the spirit photographs.
123
Although
she initially mistakes the images for shadows cast by the trees outside her window, once
the first picture resolves itself, she deciphers a “stencil or stamp,” “a silhouette cut of
light, not shadow, and so impersonal it might have been anyone, of almost any country”
(45). The only feature she can make out is a “visored cap,” which tells her the silhouette
is a “soldier or airman,” familiar, yet “unidentified.” This face is reminiscent of the type

medium Eusapia Palladino in 1897 he undertook a study of her manifestation and levitation phenomena,
photographs of which he reproduced in his book Mysterious Psychic Forces in 1909 and referred to in
Death and Its Mystery. In The Sword Went Out to Sea, written in 1947, Delia Alton claims to have read
Flammarion’s “ouija board and table-rapping analysis,” which had the greatest impact on her of all the
books she borrowed from Stanford House.
122
TTF, p.47.
123
As Eduardo Cadava has eloquently written of photographic indexicality and spectrality, “Photography is
nothing else than a writing of light, a script of light, what Talbot elsewhere called ‘the pencil of nature.’ Its
citational character tells us as well that history is sealed within the movement of language. This is why
photography requires that we think about the impact of history on language: there is no word or image that
is not haunted by history.” See Words of Light; Theses on the Photography of History (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1997) p. xvii.
86
of photographic “extra,” for which William Hope was known, in which the luminous face
of a spirit appears in a dark portion of a sitter’s photograph (Fig. 17). Members of the
Society for Psychical Research, seeking to expose Hope as a trickster, noted the odd
circularity of the faces, and eventually traced them to a tool they called a “ghost stamp,” a
tube with a slide on the end that, when a flashlight was shone through it during the sitting
(while the photographer was safely hidden under the camera’s hood), would leave an
image on the negative (TPM 74-75). The vagueness of H.D.’s airman’s features enables
her to identify him multiply—to relate him
to her “dead brother” or a “lost friend,”
though she can’t be sure which.
Nevertheless, she has a strong feeling that
the image is “somebody”—the same will
to believe that provided spirit
photographers with supporters even after
their devices were exposed.
As in the spirit photographs of the
early twentieth century, H.D. is unsure of
the source of these images, which she
likens to “formal patterns stamped on
picture cards” (TTF 45), a kind of Tarot or
ESP deck consisting of a goblet, a tripod or spirit-lamp, and, later, a ladder and serpentine
“S,” occult symbols reminiscent of the spirit writing or drawing that appears around the
figures in some photographs. These visions are all products of H.D.’s “crystal-gazing
Fig. 17. A spirit photograph taken by William Hope, n.d.
Collection of the National Media Museum.
87
stare at the wall,” (47) a look both into and through crystal that recalls her bell-jar
experience in Notes on Thought and Vision.
124
Not only does she gaze at the images as
though in a crystal ball, her gaze seems to produce them as through a lens, such that she
is afraid if she looks away “the pictures will fade out” (49), no longer illuminated by the
vision of her projective gaze. She claims she is uncertain whether the ghostly “hand or
person” writing these images on the wall comes from, as she says, “my own subconscious
mind, or whether they are projected from outside” (46), whether she is responsible or the
spirits themselves make contact with the “sensitive” medium of the “light board,”
equivocations that belie her sense of her own visionary powers. Despite her professed
doubts, she refers to these “projected pictures” as “an unusual way to think” (47), making
the “writing-on-the-wall” a kind of externalized thinking or “ideoplasm,” and recasting
the scene of writing as a manifestation séance.
The act of “projection” in the Corfu visions, then, provides both the
materialization of thought and a (spirit) photographic record. H.D. notes the latent pun in
the image of the tripod or “spirit-lamp”—a portable stove used, as she says, “when we
boil water for that extra sustaining cup of tea upstairs in our room” (46). H.D. recognizes
in the “spirit-lamp” a “shortcut” for her own visionary role in which “the objects are
projected outward from my own brain” (46). The spirit-lamp burns volatile spirits, but
also potentially acts as a kind of magic lantern that throws “spirits” onto the walls of the
room. Not only does the lamp provide the kind of pun on which Freudian analysis

124
Jean Gallagher suggests this “rapt, undistracted gaze,” which appears frequently in H.D.’s work of the
1920s, reflects “the literally entrancing effects of lesbian desire” and a rejection of the “narcissistic”
qualities attributed to it by psychoanalysis. See “H.D.’s Distractions: Cinematic Stasis and Lesbian Desire,”
Modernism/modernity 9.3 (2002) p. 409. A further connection might be made with H.D.’s mirror-dream,
reported in Advent, in which her mother brings her a mirror from H.D.’s childhood on which she had
painted narcissus flowers (TTF 151).
88
thrives, it brings Bryher, the other half of that “we,” into the frame of this visionary
moment. As many scholars have noted, Bryher plays a central role in H.D.’s vision;
without her, the poet says, “I couldn’t go on” (48). The tripod introduces her into the
scene and provides a network of visual metaphors for her life with H.D. As Susan
McCabe has noted, the three-legged “tripod” of the spirit-lamp alludes to both the
Delphic oracle, H.D.’s overt visionary self-image, and the camera tripod, at the top of
which perches a container for light, be it a motion picture or a still camera (McCabe 137).
Most interestingly, the tripod also recalls the three-legged oak William Morris table on
which H.D. and Bryher conducted their séances at the time she was writing Tribute.
125

The table would become increasingly important to HD in 1944 and 1945, when she began
table-rapping on her own after attending a lecture by Lord Hugh Dowding, the Royal Air
Force commander and psychical researcher who advocated the idea of past lives and the
possibility of communicating with spirits who have progressed beyond this world as a
kind of comfort during war time. Air Chief Marshal Dowding, credited with winning the
Battle of Britain against the German Luftwaffe, claimed to receive messages from R.A.F.
pilots lost in battle offering assurances that they lived happily on in another dimension.
H.D.’s private séances, described in Majic Ring and The Sword Went Out to Sea, led to
her own series of conversations with a group of spirits she referred to as the “RAF boys,”
Royal Air Force pilots whose messages, she believed, included the coordinates for atomic
bomb sites about which they wished to warn the living.
126
This tripod, then, is a locus for

125
See PR 173, and Sword essay, 348.
126
H.D. spent several years attempting to become part of Dowding’s circle and corresponded with him
about her own R.A.F. messages to no avail. Dowding would recur as a fictionalized character in several
later works as both a thwarted lover and intellectual detractor. For more on Dowding’s role in H.D.s life,
89
her spiritualist, cinematic, and poetic praxis, a network of activities facilitated by Bryher.
One might say Bryher herself haunts this text—she stands at so many of the nodes.
127

Like the kindred “receiving” minds in H.D.’s Notes on Thought and Vision, H.D.
and Bryher share the Corfu vision as a kind of two-person séance. Bryher “carries on the
‘reading’” (56) when H.D. can no longer sustain her trance-like gaze. After the first
succession of images drawn by a ghostly “moving finger” (52), H.D.’s vision culminates
in a “moving picture” (55) of a winged figure seen from behind progressing through a
field of tent-like triangles. For H.D. this figure, which she calls “Niké, Victory,” is the
climax of the vision, the point at which she can look away, having seen an image of the
end of war, a picture, she believes, of herself “in another, winged dimension” (56).
128
Yet
even as H.D. stops projecting the image and drops her trance-like stare, Bryher carries on
the séance without her to reveal the complete picture—a circular disk in which the sun

see Susan Stanford Friedman, Psyche Reborn: the Emergence of H.D. (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1981), and Barbara Guest, Herself Defined: The Poet H.D. and Her World (New York: Doubleday,
1984). Also see Cynthia Hogue and Julie Vandivere’s introduction to H.D.’s Sword. Jane Augustine’s
forthcoming The Poet and the Airman should offer much insight into their stormy relationship and H.D.’s
spiritualist activities.

127
In Cinematic Modernism, Susan McCabe notes that part of H.D.’s project in Tribute to Freud is to
“connect psychoanalysis with cinema” in a way that allows for the articulation of queer desire by “blur[ing]
the boundaries between the hysteric and the visionary” (217). The femme fatale McCabe discusses behaves
much like the medium, who also “put on a mask of womanliness or femininity as a defense to avert the
anxiety and retribution feared by men,” to apply Joan Rivièré’s formulation (qtd. McCabe 218). McCabe
further explores the concept of cinematic “projection” as a means of achieving “the hysteric’s bisexual
fantasy of being both active and passive” (49). One might argue, then, that the “ghost” haunting H.D. and
Tribute to Freud is the specter of same-sex desire associated with the Corfu images (and with Freud’s
dismissal of them as “dangerous symptom”). Jean Gallagher explores the connection between the trance-
like stare and lesbian desire in H.D.’s contributions to Close Up and Borderline in “H.D.’s Distractions.”
She comes close to, but does not explicitly articulate the mediumistic qualities of this gaze.
128
Pictures of a nude H.D. playing the role of Athena Niké appear in the H.D. scrapbook at the Beinecke
library. Taken by Bryher on their trip to Carmel, California with Helen Wolle Doolittle in 1920 and
collaged into Greek settings by Kenneth Macpherson, who was both Bryher’s husband and H.D.’s lover for
a time, the photos establish H.D.’s belief in this “winged dimension” from an early point. For a wonderful
exploration of the images in the scrapbook, see Diana Collecott, “Images at the Crossroads: the “H.D.
Scrapbook,” in H.D. Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King, (Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1986).
90
god “was reaching out to draw the image of a woman (my Niké) into the sun beside him”
(58). In this “reading,” the final image of the Corfu vision is a double exposure created
jointly by Bryher and H.D. While H.D. thinks she has seen the spirit manifestation, only
when her own projection “cut[s] out” does “the explosion [take] place” (56), a blast
reminiscent of both the threat of nuclear war and the camera’s flashbulb, an explosion
that exposes the film to a second set of eyes. With Bryher’s contribution, the “extra” truly
appears, in this case as a circular spirit figure reaching out to the portrait’s subject, a
figure of peace and hope reminiscent of those post-war double exposures in which loved
ones are depicted watching over their survivors.
129

Ultimately, it seems, Freud failed to tell H.D.’s “fortune,” to fully understand the
import of these “pictures” and writing on the wall, discounting them as symptoms of her
“desire for union with [her] mother” (44) and rejecting any occult potential they may
have had. In Advent, the selection of journal entries from her analysis that form the
second part of Tribute, when H.D. wishes she had an artist’s rendering of the Corfu
visions in order to show them to Freud, he responds, “There would be value in the
pictures only if you yourself drew them” (173). This suggestion that the images must
come from H.D.’s own hand (and not some secondary or ghostly one) reinforces Freud’s
emphasis on reading the language of the image—in order to discern the connections
between the image-content and H.D.’s hidden desires, the artifact, like a linguistic free-
association, must be her own. However, this suggestion, like H.D.’s visions, “can be read
in two ways” (51), and alternately might provide the impetus behind the spirit

129
See the image of Mary Todd Lincoln and Abraham Lincoln above.
91
photographs throughout the book: a call for evidence, for a physical manifestation of
those ethereal visions only she and Bryher witnessed. To believe them, Freud, too, must
see them, must be faced with an ideoplastic trace. In a sense, H.D.’s projections are a
compromise between the desire for visionary experience and the need for tangible
evidence—a means of illustrating the text without actually illustrating it.
In Tribute to Freud, H.D. captures the Corfu visions and memories from her
childhood as “projections” or “dream-pictures,” “transparencies, set before candles in a
dark room” (29), an album of double-exposed spirit photographs that allow her to
materialize memory, vision, and Freud himself. This new “perfect medium” is herself
projective, able to externalize the contents of the mind, and to “manifest” vision as
“writing on the wall” —a powerful metaphor for poetic vocation. Such ideoplasty makes
objects of subjective experience, satisfying both Freud’s desire for what H.D. calls the
“accumulated data of scientific observation” (77) and her own belief in the prophetic
value of poetry. Positioning herself as a “projector” of images from a supernatural source
enables H.D. to displace her poetic authority just as female mediums at the turn of the
century used their apparently passive position to hold forth on women’s suffrage,
prostitution, and other subjects on which their opinions would have been pushed aside
had they not come from an unknown (and often male) ethereal source.
Yet this fascinating attempt at self-occlusion paradoxically brings the poet herself
back into view, reaffirming her visionary status and bodily presence much as her POOL
films brought her image to the screen.
130
If H.D. is the medium/projector casting her

130
Rachel Connor suggests H.D.’s depiction of visionary experience positions her as a “seer” in an attempt
to evade the appraising gaze of psychoanalysis, heteronormativity, and modern life. She considers this
92
images, then the page itself becomes the wall on which we can read her writing;
somewhere overhead, her light reaches out with ghostly hands for the page. We must be
aware of H.D. standing over our shoulder, not just because she writes in first person, but
because of the phenomenological consequences of her technological metamorphosis. As
in her projector poems, we feel the poet’s own light “unrecorded grace / over / and under
/ and through us.”
131
We must also recall the source of H.D.’s name for these visions
(which was also the title under which her Tribute was first published), The Writing on the
Wall: the Biblical story of Belshazzar’s feast in which the Babylonian king lets his party
guests drink out of sacred vessels sacked from Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. During
the feast, a disembodied hand appears, writing a coded message on the wall that, when
translated by Daniel, foretells Belshazzar’s doom (Fig. 18). Because of Belshazzar’s
disrespect, he is weighed in the scales and found wanting, and in due course Belshazzar
dies that night. The hand is as important to the vision as the cryptic message it leaves.
Like the medium’s ectoplasmic manifestations, it makes the supernatural material in a
way that cannot be ignored.

visuality part of a “preoccupation with interiority that characterizes modernism: a preoccupation that
opposes those technologies designed to bring more and more of the body into view” (14). While Connor’s
thorough analysis of the visual and visionary in H.D.’s work is exemplary, the images in Tribute to Freud
seem to me to court the gaze as often as they push it away, creating a space for the “hysteric” body in art
and culture.
131
HDCP, p. 350.
93

This physiological emphasis alters the scene of writing traditionally associated
with high modernism—that of the poet laboring over verse and engaged in what T.E.
Hulme famously called “a terrific struggle with language.”
132
In Tribute to Freud, H.D.
repeatedly halts the narrative to bring the reader directly into her London apartment in the
midst of the Blitz, after Freud’s death and a decade beyond her analysis with him.
Describing the “theme” of psychoanalysis, she notes, “I write the word and wonder why I
write it” (TTF 82), and often, it seems to her that one of these strange words, like the
writing on the wall, simply “wrote itself” (92). H.D. reformulates her poetic role as that
of a woman possessed, “impelled (almost compelled) to copy this out” (105), as she tells
us when quoting Matthew Arnold’s sonnet to Shakespeare, extending her mediumship to

132
Hulme, p. 732.

Fig. 18. Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Belshazzar’s Feast, 1635. National Gallery
of London. Source: Artchive.com.
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the act of writing her tribute. In this way, even the language of the text is haunted. These
self-referential moments force us to see H.D. at her writing desk, bent over the page we
are reading. We not only feel the projector at our backs, we also stand in its way, as
Herring says, “absorbing” the image. H.D. thus achieves a simultaneous self-inscription
alongside the passivity the text implies. Like the mediums before her, she belies her own
agency in order to take on an active social role. She positions the book as a “tribute” to
her mentor, rather than an argument with him or a tribute to herself and her own creative
vision.
The receptive and projective medium, then, is useful for H.D. because it allows
her to become a kind of camera for materializing thought, image, and vision. Her
materializations inaugurate a new scene of disembodied light-writing in which
unforeseen images develop. Through the medium, H.D. makes her memories and dreams
part of an “illuminated manuscript” (TTF 92)—as she says of one dream—ancient texts
with ornate lettering and illustrations, but also “illuminated,” lit, like the writing on the
wall, a manuscript of luminous pictures whose “leitmotiv” is light itself.

III. “A SORT OF SPIRITUAL OPTICAL-ILLUSION”
133
: THE PROJECTIVE MEDIUM IN
TRILOGY

How would this “new creative medium,” used with great effect to render her
“dangerous symptom” into visionary evidence, manifest itself in H.D.’s poetry, the
medium she helped revolutionize as a founder of the Imagist movement three decades

133
H.D., Trilogy (New York: New Directions Books, 1998) p. 165; hereafter abbreviated T.
95
earlier? The idea of the projective medium inaugurated in Tribute to Freud seems to have
opened the floodgates of poetry for H.D.,
134
who had previously been caught in a dry
spell, turning to memoir because, as she writes in Tribute, “I am no longer interested in a
poem once it is written, projected, or materialized. There is a feeling that it is only part of
myself there” (TTF 149). This fascinating confession reveals the extent to which she saw
her writing process as one of mediumistic “projection,” of “materializing” ghosts in an
attempt to communicate some aspect of her mind and her self. It seems the fractured,
web-like ego and the network of present and past selves in which she believed can’t be
manifest—or can only be partially materialized—by poetry. The status of the photograph
as scientific trace, or light-writing, makes projection an ideal form for her, one that
allows such permeability while grounding it in visual, and therefore verifiable, fact. As
Morris has noted, projection finds its corollary in Pound’s phanopoeia, the “casting of
images upon the visual imagination.”
135
In her formulation, “a thing in the world projects
its essence onto the poet’s consciousness; the poet imprints the image, or record of the
thing, in a poem; and the poem, in turn, projects the image onto the reader’s
consciousness” (Morris, 416). The image here is particular, “crystalline” in H.D.’s terms,
and in its specificity it escapes the “emotional slither” of Romantic subjectivity (at least
for Pound and Hulme, Imagism’s vocal theorists). But what if the poet could project
images of objects not of this world, objects that suggest spiritual hope and salvation to a

134
As Jane Augustine notes, one of the greatest impacts of spiritualism on H.D. was that it “induced her to
write a great deal,” including the prodigious output of 1944, which includes “some of her finest and most
accessible work by general consensus—The Gift; the second and third books of Trilogy, originally called
The War Trilogy; and ‘The Writing on the Wall,’ later the first part of Tribute to Freud.” See Jane
Augustine, “Preliminary Comments on the Meaning of H.D.’s The Sword Went Out to Sea,” Sagetrieb,
15:1&2, p. 127.
135
Ezra Pound, “How to Read,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968) p. 25.
96
society whose religious faith has been deeply shaken? The rather un-particular and non-
material would then be rendered concrete and objective in a kind of phanopoeia based
not on sight, but insight.
Projective mediumship allows H.D. to return to the image, central to her early
poetics, and satisfy the Poundian dictum of “direct treatment of the thing,”
136
a poetry of
objects external to the self, without adopting the privileged Romantic perspective that
traditionally separates the poet from those objects.
137
The world never looked that simply
Cartesian to H.D., who in her earliest poems writes of a speaker “caught in the drift,”
138

like the rose that blooms by the sea, and “scattered / like the hot shriveled seeds” (HDCP
10) of the trees on her garden path. In the poems of Sea Garden (1916) she presents a
speaker permeable to the world around her, inhabiting liminal spaces and uncomfortable
in sheltered gardens. Her opening up of the self as a projector of images from outside
sources is in part a continuation of this early unbinding in which thought and the material
world are allowed to interpenetrate.
The medium-as-medium enables H.D. to combine her urge for Romantic
inspiration with her rejection of subjective wholeness due to the traumas of war and
modernity more generally. By allowing her to inhabit the borderline between the spirit
world and the material world, mediumship enables H.D. to mediate subjective

136
Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect,” Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968) p. 3.
137
Devin Johnston argues that Trilogy uses telepathy to forge intersubjective connection with its readers.
The occult’s capacity for crossing borderlines enables more complex, permeable relationships with others,
as Johnston argues, but I look specifically to the projective element of Trilogy to consider the ways H.D.’s
technological mediation does and does not de-emphasize the individual self in favor of temporal and
personal interpenetration.
138
HDCP, 5.
97
experience—to write at a time in which the self threatens to scatter and shatter, caught in
the drift of a war bringing air raids, black-outs, ration cards, and collateral damage into
Londoners’ daily lives, as well as images of death and destruction into their homes in
newspapers, radio broadcasts, and letters. To write through this period, H.D. needed
something to believe in and some sense that her work had purpose. As she notes in the
autobiographical novel The Sword Went Out to Sea, written just three years after The
Writing on the Wall, “Our material foundations were being undermined. At such a time,
we need a surer certainty of heaven” (Sword 130). Spirit photography gives her the
metaphor and technique of double exposure, or “super-imposition,” that allows her to
make connections between the unstable present of war-torn England and a Classical past
in which humans survived similar traumas, providing hope for the future. “The Walls Do
Not Fall,” the first of the three long poems that comprise H.D.’s Trilogy, begins with a
defense against those who accuse, “how can you scratch out / indelible ink of the
palimpsest / of past misadventure?” (T 6). Not only is it impossible to remove that
“indelible ink,” as her detractors suggest, the poem goes on to demonstrate that any
attempt to do so controverts the hope implicit in the palimpsest’s very existence, the idea
that just as “past misadventures” have been overcome, as the folktale of King Solomon’s
ring tells us, this too will pass. The double exposure becomes another iteration of the
“palimpsest” metaphor that recurs throughout H.D.’s work, figuring life itself as a tablet
incompletely erased and reused such that images are created one atop the next—a multi-
layered text over which we continue to write. Projection, however, allows H.D. to forge
connections between present and past without erasing that past, preserving the network in
which she finds solace. It enables her to layer self upon self, time upon time, and
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civilization upon civilization in a series of multiple exposures. With the failure of the
material world, H.D. sought supernatural comfort; spirit photography enabled her to have
visionary experiences that remain grounded in concrete images, thus satisfying the
Imagist demand for precision while fulfilling her own desire for transcendence.
In considering the role of projective mediumship in her poetry, however, one
can’t ignore H.D.’s disavowal of the technology of spirit photography (reminiscent of
Cendrars’s rejection of the typewriter) in that same novel, The Sword Went Out to Sea, in
which the protagonist, Delia, claims of her research at Stanford House,
139
“I rejected the
volumes devoted to spirit photography and found the ‘spirit’ photographs not only
patently faked, but inartistic to a degree and in the worst of taste” (Sword 129). Her
denial of spirit photography reflects a perspective common in the 1940s after a number of
high-profile public refutations of the technique. However, H.D.’s chief complaint is the
“inartistic” quality of the images, suggesting perhaps that her own double-exposed
visions or “picture-writing” (131) attempt to add an element of artistry to the
technology—to blur, as she hoped, “science and art” as she did in her avant-garde films.
As a filmmaker, she had firsthand experience with techniques of super-imposition and
quick cutting, which she and Bryher used in a memorable scene from Borderline in
which H.D.’s Astrid directs a jealously burning gaze at her departing lover, projecting a
hallucinatory image of his mistress onto the side of his closed suitcase, a final insult that
sends her into a hysteric fit. H.D.’s interest at Walton House, as evinced by her
fascination with Camille Flammarion, among whose works she found “the most scientific

139
A fictionalization of the International Institute for Psychic Investigation’s Walton House (named for its
location on Walton Street in London).
99
of these volumes [because of their…] accurately recorded data” (Sword 129), is the
medium herself, the human who creates these projections, adding “art” to the image and
providing evidence for the visionary in manifestations that surpass the power of words.
Trilogy is a book of ghosts and angels, and, like the Caduceus that appears
throughout the poems, its dual purpose is to raise the dead and heal the living. As Aliki
Barnstone notes in her introduction to the text, Trilogy can be read as H.D.'s attempt to
“found a new religion,” as Freud suspected she intended to do, one that offers healing to a
society and psyche devastated by war and one that honors the poet for her ability to heal
the resulting “chasm, schism in consciousness/ [that] must be bridged over” (T 49).
140

Most importantly, the poems reveal, Trilogy attempts to redeem the poet’s art in a time of
crisis when it seems “poets are useless” (T 14), “not only ‘non-utilitarian,’ / we are
pathetic” (T 14). “The Walls Do Not Fall” grapples with the paradox of the lyric poet in a
time of war—the desire to stay relevant and to help in some way while knowing that
language is a limited and imperfect tool. In her recuperation of the poet as a “scribe” and
prophet, H.D. emphasizes the need for a poetry that is not simply about the self, but about
the network of threads that connect individuals across time and space. Her speaker, with
tremendous authority, positions herself as a prophet, like Jonah, who “in my own way

140
Like most of H.D.’s work, this statement can be read in more than one way. Not only does it refer to a
modern subjectivity fragmented by war trauma and a swiftly disintegrating social fabric, but also to what
she perceives as an unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of communication with the dead, i.e. the
technological “miracle” of mediumship. As she writes in The Sword Went Out to Sea:
…[E]ven within my own memory, I have heard people speak of the “miracle” of the telephone.
That “miracle” has been extended and amplified. We have had only recently still further
manifestation of the “miracle,” in radiolocation. New wave-lengths have been recorded and it
seems that we are very near the boundary. But when any question arises, as to rational
communication with the dead, there seems to be a schism in consciousness. (T 128, emphasis
mine)
100
know / that the whale // can not digest me” (T 9), and she instructs all poets to survive as
she has survived the traumas of centuries, closing themselves like a shell and turning
inward as she, herself was driven inward by the war:
be indigestible, hard, ungiving,

so that, living within,
you beget, self-out-of-self,

selfless,
that pearl-of-great-price (T 9)

By self-reflection, the poem suggests, poets achieve “selfless”-ness, crafting the pearl of
poetry as a biological product of self-preservation. H.D. extends this metaphor of selfless
craft by describing the poet as a silk-worm, thriving on destruction to spin beautiful
threads from the “vine-leaf and mulberry” of “calamity” (T 12), which it consumes.
Those gossamer filaments recall the ectoplasmic projections of the medium, who, like
this speaker, is “unrepentant, / for I know how the Lord God / is about to manifest, when
I, / the industrious worm, / spin my own shroud” (T 12). Latent in this image of survival
and transcendence is the image of the medium, “manifest[ing]” in this case the holy spirit
with filaments of ideoplastic silk created as “my own shroud,” thoughts conjured as a
means of both preservation and transformation.
The union of authority and selflessness in the speaker of these poems aligns the
scribe and medium as figures who convey words from a higher source, empowered to
speak deep truths, but passive in their transmission. This power authorizes her to shift
between a number of voices, not simply quoting other texts, but incorporating these
words into her own. In “Tribute to the Angels,” the Egyptian god Sirius interjects
theatrical asides, asking “Sirius: / what mystery is this? (T 56). The apostle John steps in
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to assert “I John saw. I testify” (T 65), recounting moments from the Book of Revelation.
Biblical quotations are interspersed throughout, italicized to emphasize their separateness
from the main voice of the poem, but often incorporated seamlessly into the poet’s
speech, such that she speaks through them and in dialogue with them. After addressing
God in section 4 of “Tribute to the Angels,” to assert that peace will not come in our
lifetime, “not in our time […] / the voice to quell the re-gathering, / thundering storm” (T
66), she seems to respond to herself in section 5, which opens:
Nay—peace be still—
lovest thou not Azrael,

the last and greatest, Death?
lovest not the sun,

The first who giveth life,
Raphael? lovest thou me? (T 67)

These italicized lines quote the words of Jesus, first in the gospel of Mark, where he
calms the sea and wind (that previously unquenchable “thundering storm”) to secure safe
passage for his apostles, and then in his address to Peter in the gospel of John, where
Peter’s faith is tested. The voice here both is and in not the poet/prophet. More than
simply shoring these lines like Eliot’s fragments against her ruin, H.D. incorporates them
into her text as though speaking in tongues.
As such intertextual polyvocality implies, the self in these poems is utterly
diffused. The self is multiple throughout the text. In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” the
speaker describes a war vision of a “presence […] spectrum-blue […] rare as radium” (T
20), whose illuminating x-ray light heals and unites all poets (and spiritualists) as
“companions of the flame” (T 20), worshippers of light reminiscent of the orants in
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H.D.’s “Projector” poems. United by their initiation into this mystery, these poets find
themselves reborn, “dragging the forlorn / husk of self after us” (T 22), a husk described
elsewhere as “my old self, wrapped around me, / […] shroud” (20). The body is simply a
“husk” for self upon self, past and future lives that indicate the soul survives death, as in
spiritualist belief. For H.D., the self is not a cohesive unity but a palimpsest itself. Thus,
the poet boasts she has “Splintered the crystal of identity, / shattered the vessel of
integrity” (T 30), an act that allows figures across history to merge such that “Ra, Osiris,
Amen” (T 25) and “Christos” come together, a lineage she continues to trace in gods and
goddesses throughout Trilogy. Like a palimpsest, the poet “explains symbols of the past /
in to-day’s imagery” (T 29) and, calling on Thoth, “in the light of what went before, /
illuminate[s] what came after” (T 48). Such illumination becomes, in her language, a
form of “spiritual realism,”
141
a phrase that merges her spiritualist and imagist concerns
in the suggestion of a form of “illumination” that unites present and past and in so doing
redeems (even resurrects) humankind from its apparent self-destruction. This light is both
spiritual and real, visionary and evidentiary, as she says in Tribute to Freud, an
“illuminated manuscript.”
The leitmotiv of H.D.’s Tribute seems inescapable in “The Walls Do Not Fall,”
and its association with mediumistic projection and visual evidence presses us to consider
what “spiritual realism” might look like—perhaps a hand writing on a wall? The poem
enacts and describes a methodology of materialization in section 38, in which the poet
once again faces her detractors to defend poetry in a time of war:

141
For an exploration of “spiritual realism” as self-referential exploration of the sacredness of language
itself, see Joseph N. Riddel ,“H. D. and the Poetics of ‘Spiritual Realism,’” Contemporary Literature 10:4,
pp. 447-473.
103
This search for historical parallels,
research into psychic affinities,

has been done to death before,
will be done again;

no comment can alter spiritual realities
(you say) or again,

what new light can you possibly
throw upon them?

my mind (yours),
your way of thought (mine),

each has its peculiar intricate map,
threads weave over and under…” (T 51)

H.D. plays with the line breaks to allow these lines to “face two-ways” (T 5) like Janus,
the lower-case “m” at the start of the line “my mind” encouraging her reader to see it as a
direct response to the question “what new light” before the following lines unsettle the
call-response impulse set up by these couplets. The “mind” itself becomes here a means
of “throw[ing] light,” perhaps through a projector beam or onto a photosensitive plate.
The resulting super-imposed images illuminate the interwoven threads of the poet’s
“intricate map” of history—threads, like the silk-worm medium’s corporeal projections,
woven from thought into ideoplastic presence.
142
The poem models projection even in its
material form, juxtaposing the poet and her interlocutor’s minds through lens-like
parentheses. This double exposure has an interlocking quality reminiscent of H.D. and
Bryher’s collaborative “receiving minds” in Corfu. Each mind is individual in its
mapping of “historical parallels,” but also inseparable from those persons or objects onto

142
In several images of mediums, manifestations appear as knitted yarn, thread, or fabric emerging from
the body, not unlike silkworm thread.
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which it throws its light. H.D.’s claim to authority lies in these differences; her “personal
approach / to the eternal realities” (T 52) enables her to throw “new light” upon them (T
51), to project a healing x-ray and, “in the light of what went before, // illuminate what
came after” (T 48).
The projected double-exposure grants H.D. this healing continuity, a continuity
traced in the linguistic associations and mythic parallels that recur throughout these
poems. Her layering of mythological figures like “Attis-Adonis-Tammuz” (T 135), a
combination of Phrygian, Roman, and Babylonian gods, and “Venus, Aphrodite, Astarte”
(T 73), a lineage of Roman, Greek, and Phoenecian love-goddesses, provide a model for
non-hierarchical palimpsestic projection. Anagram and echo remind us that “Osiris
equates O-Sir-is or O-Sire-is; / Osiris, / the star Sirius” (54), demonstrating the very
instability of language, its polymorphous shifting and interpenetration. This litheness
ensures the triumph of poetry over war through the victory of “Word” over “Sword,” its
“younger brother, the latter-born” (T, 17), because where the sword appears, the word,
too, must always be present. In fact, H.D. gives language itself a projective power, for, as
she writes, addressing the “Sword,” “without idea and the Word’s mediation, / you would
have remained // unmanifest in the dim dimension / where thought dwells” (T 18, my
emphasis). In these lines, H.D. stakes a claim for the projective power of poetry,
outlining the space where phanopoetic and mediumistic projection meet. Language
becomes a “mediat[ing]” technology for the poet, enabling the manifestation of ideas just
as light mediates for the ideoplastic medium. “Word” becomes the medium that enables
the manifestation of the “sword,” the projection of what would otherwise remain “in the
dim dimension / where thought dwells”: the immaterial mind. Like her mythological
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multiple exposures, figures coextensive within the same image, though not the same
historical moment, “word” and “sword” share the same space, like spirit extras within
and alongside the living or visionary projections in the séance room.
As Word’s linguistic ideoplasty suggests, the poetry H.D. champions in Trilogy is
a particularly visible one, a poetry that can “manifest” what would otherwise be relegated
to that “dim dimension” of thought. “Tribute to the Angels,” the second section of
Trilogy, re-formulates the New Testament Book of Revelation to prophesy London’s
resurrection at war’s end. In doing so, it clarifies the ideoplastic function of mediumship
for H.D.: it enables a transcendence of the problematic modern body alongside a more
direct form of poetic communion. Words, it seems, have been fickle; the very
malleability that enables H.D. to forge a network of language and images across time
paradoxically enables language to play tricks on us, such that Venus becomes associated
with “venery” instead of “veneration” (T 74-75) and those who have lost faith in poetry
criticize its “disagreeable, inconsequent syllables, / too malleable, too brittle” (T 44).
Projection addresses the modern crisis of representation against which these dissenters
rail, a crisis which stimulated the work of modernists of every stripe. H.D.’s speaker is
keenly aware of language’s duplicity, but her projective powers enable her to revel in the
slipperiness. She claims, “I know, I feel / the meaning that words hide; // they are
anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes conditioned // to hatch butterflies…” (T 53).
143

143
Her description of language as encrypted suggests not only H.D.’s interest in hieroglyphics, but an
awareness of the role language was at that moment playing on the stage of war. Could she have known the
Germans were using ENIGMA to encrypt their radio transmissions and that British operatives in Bletchley
Park (including her daughter Perdita) were hard at work breaking those codes? She certainly saw herself as
the recipient of coded radio messages from the beyond in her sessions with the “RAF Boys.” H.D.’s
palimpsestic parallels can be considered codes of a sort, as Susan Gubar reframes them, they are “encoded
revisions of male myths” (See “The Echoing Spell of HD’s Trilogy,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 19,
106
Faced with this instability, the poet must learn to harness a more direct representation of
thought, to decipher these codes and show others “the meaning that words hide.”
Language becomes a source text to be translated into vision. When asked to “invent” a
name for the color of an alchemical jewel, the speaker refuses that poetically Adamic
task:
I do not want to name it,
I want to watch its faint

heart-beat, pulse-beat
as it quivers, I do not want

to talk about it,
I want to minimize thought,

concentrate on it
till I shrink,

dematerialize
and am drawn into it. (T 77)

This desire to “dematerialize” recalls Cendrars’s need to “to segment my own self / And
become hard as a rock / Drop straight down / Sink to the bottom” (CP 147). H.D. refuses
to name the image, preferring to become one with it, to channel it through herself rather
than imposing language on it. The poet/seer minimizes her own thought to allow other
thoughts to come through and to read the multiple meanings of words, a task, as she has
said, that can only be undertaken by those willing to “beget, / self-out-of-self.”

No. 2 (Spring, 1978) p. 197). In my brief look at the H.D. files at the Beinecke library, I came across an
entry on the inside cover of H.D.’s address book from the 1946-1959 period that appears to be a code of her
own devising, though I could be entirely mistaken in this wishful thinking. The grid reads:
N E W L u
K ˩ D O V
A T S P 1 ( ˩)
B C F (2) (XYZ)
H 2 M R
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This self-negation enables the two visions that form the core of “Tribute to the
Angels:” the blossoming of a charred tree, which H.D. calls “the flowering of the rood”
(T 70); and a ghostly vision she calls “The Lady,” an angel of peace or Mary figure seen
in tableau on the stairs of her apartment. That flowering rod, an image of regeneration
from ruin, is both an image of Christian resurrection and mediumistic projection,
hearkening back to H.D. and Herring’s manifestos on film. It provides H.D. and the other
poet/spiritualists, the “straggling company of the brush and quill” (T 100), entry into a
disembodied realm, incorporating them into the double exposure of the war-damaged
streets of London:
we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a frame—doorless—

entered a shrine; like a ghost
we entered a house through a wall;

then still not knowing
whether (like the wall)

we were there or not there,
we saw the tree flowering;

it was an ordinary tree
in an old garden-square. (T 83)

This vision, “a sign unto us” (T 82), enables the speaker and her compatriots to move
through the battered landscape, to enter the doorless frame as into a picture where, in a
ghostly double exposure, they may pass through walls (Fig. 19). Like her Corfu visions,
she is not sure “whether (like the wall) // we were there or not-there,” extending the
possibility that the seekers themselves are projections of a kind.

108

Yet despite the mysticism of the scene, the poem asserts this image is no
metaphor, but a physical reality, “it is happening everywhere” (T 84). Paradoxically,
however, art is inadequate to capture this reality, as drawings of the Corfu visions would
have been inadequate to present them to Freud. Instead, H.D. calls upon the reader to see
it for him or herself because “no trick of the pen or brush // could capture that impression;
/ music could do nothing with it” (84). Drawing, painting, and music all pale beside the
reality of this vision. Music, the poem argues, distances us from the materiality of the
scene:
music sets up ladders,
it makes us invisible,

it sets us apart,
it lets us escape;

but from the visible
there is no escape;

there is no escape from the spear
that pierces the heart. (T 86)

Fig. 19. Anonymous, “The ghost of Bernadette Soubirous,” c. 1890. Keith de Lellis
Gallery. Reproduced TPM 64.
109
Music fails to make the reality of war’s destruction present to us, allowing listeners to
forget the very landscape it attempts to represent. The falling rhythms of the first couplet
demonstrate music’s ethereality. The trochaic “music sets up ladders” sonically echoes a
climbing, rung over rung, away from the scene at hand, so that we are set, as the poem
says “apart” from the world around us, subjects of a moral high ground divorced from the
objects we survey. It seems that in the face of large-scale destruction, evidence is again
necessary. When all art fails to represent the traumas of war, H.D. finds that only the
image is inescapable—“from the visible / there is no escape” (T 86). We cannot deny
what we see, these poems say, because when vision is made visible it has an inescapable
material impact—it becomes “the spear that pierces the heart” (86), which the projective
poet wields.
144

Although projection here sounds no different from description, its evidentiary
function serves a vital purpose in altering the reader’s relation to the text. H.D. projects
these visionary images by insisting upon the reader’s own familiarity with them, a move
toward interactivity that forges a phanopoetic connection between the poet’s body and
the reader’s. She cuts off her argument against artistic mediation to suggest “you have
seen for yourself // that burnt-out wood crumbling… / you have seen for yourself” (T

144
The power to hurt the reader in this way is perhaps akin to Roland Barthes’s “punctum,” that element of
the photograph that pierces us vertiginously with a reminder that its subject, now frozen in time, once lived,
breathed, and experienced a world beyond the frame that was as complex as our own and is now
completely closed off to us. This is not only a reminder that others have lived and died, but that even the
rich inner worlds of our friends and loved ones are inaccessible, locked as we each are our in our own
consciousness. For Barthes in Camera Lucida, all photographs are haunted by the fact that the image is a
simulacrum for the person or place that actually stood before the lens. We find in them, “that rather terrible
thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead,” (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981) p. 9.
One could argue that H.D. is calling for a poet who will not let us simply escape the destruction of our
time—we must face it, and this we can do only if forced to look at it in the ghostly evidence of images.
110
84).
145
In this projection, her eyes, which witnessed the event (“my eyes saw” (T 87)),
project it onto the page, her claim “this is the flowering of the rood, / this is the flowering
of the wood” (T 87) acting as both description and reification of the vision through “this,”
a word that shuttles back and forth between the surface of the page and the vision it
describes. From this surface, as in Morris’s explanation, it is projected to the eyes of the
reader who sees simultaneously both the words and the image they describe, forcing us to
the same sort of consciousness of the poet at her page that Tribute to Freud conjures in its
metatextual moments. H.D. insists on the visuality of this vision, asserting its source
outside of herself, “I am sure you see / what I mean” (T 85), even though we come to it
only through her language.
H.D. clarifies the photographic quality of her manifestation in the vision of the
“Lady” who appears at the turn of the stair in her apartment, framed by another empty
doorframe, another borderline space like the portico in which the rood appears. This
figure seems to be a ghost, conjured by kindred minds that, as her dream-companions
speculate, “[act] as a sort of magnet, / that attracts the super-natural” (T 90). Again we are
asked to envision this Mary-figure:
Our lady of the Goldfinch
Our lady of the candelabra,

Our lady of the Pomegranate,
Our Lady of the Chair;

145
Susan Acheson suggests that H.D.’s direct address of her readers in Trilogy implicates us in the
linguistic and physical transformations the poem champions, thus “enabl[ing] a transformation of reading
practice and of vision which inaugurates in the reader the qualities appropriate to the Aquarian age.” “H.D.
and the Age of Aquarius,” Sagetrieb, 15:1&2, p. 139. Acheson explores the liturgical aspect of Trilogy—its
use of ritual to challenge Christian liturgy and establish a gynocentric and open-ended divine. Acheson
reads the flowering rod as a holy sign equivalent to the Eucharist.
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[…]

we have seen her snood
drawn over her hair,

or her face set in profile
with the blue hood and stars; (T 93)

First the litany of icons or Advocations of Mary relates this vision to illustrations or
pictures, a network of matriarchs, but as her projection progresses, these representations
become more abstract and minimal, a cameo, a face reduced to a profile smoothed by a
snood, a kind of ghost stamp with a pale face against a dark sky. H.D.’s litany also refers
to a lineage of portraits “with arrow,” “in fine silks,” “eye-lids half-raised” (T 94), all of
which she asserts, “we see” or “we have seen” (T 93-95). By creating this network of
images, she invites the reader to find them, to seek out “Maria von dem Schnee” (T 96)
and her other apparitions in order to see the multiple exposure in which these many
women come together as “Our Lady universally” (T 102). She even plays out a
conversation between herself and an understanding reader, who sees in the “Lady” an
image of Eve redeeming humankind from original sin, a competent, if limited reading in
which, this speaker says, “I see her as you project her” (T 102), affirming the power of
the medium’s message. H.D. expands this reading, asserting that her vision is “all that
and much more”: not simply Eve, but “Psyche, the butterfly, / out of the cocoon” (T 103).
H.D.’s “Lady” is given the Greek name for both butterfly and soul—the soul freed from
the body as the butterfly is freed from its protective cocoon, woven so carefully in “The
Walls Do Not Fall.” But this psyche is also metonymically the mind, or thought, freed
from words, those “boxes, conditioned to hatch butterflies” (T 53), direct projections
from the camera obscura of the poet’s mind. In these lines she redeems the ability of
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language to project vision, to transmit thought directly to the page. H.D.’s projected
images materialize the ineffable and regenerate language so that it can address a
terrifying reality.
As Jane Augustine has noted, H.D. accepted the theosophical notion that
“Thoughts are things” (Augustine, 130). However, this assertion does not necessarily
mean that language itself is referential, as Augustine has suggested, since words in
Trilogy are “anagrams, cryptograms, / little boxes, conditioned / to hatch butterflies” (T
53), as Janus-faced and poly-directional as dream-symbols. These poems suggest that
through ideoplastic projection thoughts can be put to page without the messy intervention
of a dominating, all-powerful poet whose gaze controls the objects of her world and
divorces herself from them, and who wields a language of fixed meaning and with
solitary message. The possibility of positioning herself as a “projector” of images from a
supernatural source enables H.D. to displace the poetic authority of the lyric speaker and
hold forth all at once. She becomes, in Kenneth Macpherson’s words, “the recording
angel” (TTF 117), an occult figure with a practical purpose: creating a record of her time.
The receptive and projective medium thus merges the acts of projection and recording
such that one can’t be sure what exactly this “angel” registers in her book or on her
screen. The medium herself blurs the boundary between reportage and invention, present
and past, body and ectoplasm, image and ghost. In Advent, H.D. expresses her calling: “I
must find new words as the professor found or coined new words to explain certain as yet
unrecorded states of mind or being” (TTF 145). The resulting pictures provide scientific
backing for her belief in poetry’s importance in the face of lyric and political uncertainty.

113
One might argue that H.D.’s is a pseudo-Keatsian “photographic negative”
capability, a removal of self in which that self is paradoxically still present, like the
reverse image on a photographic plate. This duality of presence and non-presence
develops in the final section of Trilogy, “The Flowering of the Rod,” in which Mary
Magdalene and the Magian Kaspar, fringe characters, are made central to the story of
Jesus’ resurrection.
146
These are characters whose peripheral or borderline status enables
them, like the poet/seer who passes through walls or the medium who is materially
present, but psychologically absent at the séance, to disappear and reappear at will. H.D.
redeems Mary Magdalene, the “unbalanced, neurotic woman” (T 129) who was first to
witness the resurrection, for her other hysteric and mediumistic qualities: “she knew how
to detach herself, / another unforgivable sin, // and when stones were hurled, / she simply
wasn’t there; // she wasn’t there and then she appeared” (T 131). Mary’s lack of shame
becomes her gift; the ability to be there, and yet not there, to transcend her body and her
time to take part in a lineage of “Marys a-plenty” (T 135).
Kaspar, too, during his vision of this lineage with Mary, Eve, and Lilith, a vision
of “Paradise” before Adam and Eve, has negative capability: “his spirit was elsewhere /
and his body functioned, though himself, // he-himself was not there” (T 158). Not only is

146
The abundance of negative phraseology throughout Trilogy, particularly in “The Flowering of the Rod,”
point to another kind of negative capability. H.D.’s is a world in which “it is no madness” to prophesy
civilization’s fall and rebirth, this pattern of death and rebirth is “geometry on the wing, / not patterned,”
“not a heap of skulls” (T 126). She continually defines people and objects in relation to what they are not.
Mary is “not a beautiful woman really” (T 131), an “un-maidenly mermaid” (T 146), her typically hysteric
features of dark eyes, pale skin, and “extraordinary hair” (T 141) more impressive than those that inspired
“some not-inconsiderable poets” (T 134). Similarly, Kaspar is “not an ordinary merchant (T 132), “not an
Arab at all” (T 139), and certainly “not Abraham come again” (T 163). When confronted by Mary he “did
not recognize her” (T 148), “did-not touch her hand” (T 152), and his vision is accompanied by “no word
he had ever heard spoken” (T 156). The accumulated negations serve a mediumistic and literary purpose by
simultaneously conjuring both presence and absence.
114
he disembodied in the vision, he sees it reversed, like a negative, this “picture he saw
clearly / as in a mirror” (T 165) is a vision of “light / reflected from a strand of a woman’s
hair” (T 166), projector-light, perhaps, “enlarged under a sun-glass” (T 155), its beams
concentrated by this lens. His vision, springing from Mary Magdalene’s presence in the
frame of his doorway, a magnification of the light that shines in her hair, mesmerizes him
so that he is unsure “whether it was a sort of spiritual optical-illusion, / or whether he
looked down the deep deep-well / of the so-far unknown / depth of pre-history” (T 165).
Given the spiritualist undercurrents of this work, the vision of historical parallels,
resurrection, and poetic rebirth to which Kaspar, like H.D., is privy, must be both of these
things. It is an optical trick and visual evidence: a photograph of light given to him for
“his innate capacity / for transcribing and translating / the difficult secret symbols”
147
(T
165), and a spiritual projection that emerges from the Magdalene-medium’s magical hair.
The visions of H.D.’s Tribute to Freud and Trilogy are both spiritual and optical, illusion
and reality. They reaffirm her vocation as poet and seer making a “dangerous symptom,”
like Mary’s wantonness, into her gift. In “The Walls Do Not Fall,” she defends herself
against those who question poetry’s relevance:
But we fight for life,
we fight, they say,
for breath,

so what good are your scribblings?
this—we take them with us
beyond death.” (T 17)

147
A poetic capacity akin to H.D.’s ability to “feel / the meaning that words hide” (T 53).
115
With these lines H.D. asserts her belief in transcendence—some place “beyond death”
where language, like the soul, persists and has meaning. Her ability to access this
“beyond” through mediumistic projection and double-exposure ensures her own
transcendence as a writer and as a woman for whom the body (and its “breath”) is a site
of tension and control. The hand responsible for the writing on the wall reminds us of the
meaning of mediation: an intervention or coming between. Like Cendrars, H.D. finds a
technology that removes her hand from the chain of signification and places a ghostly one
in its stead. The medium herself mediates between the poet and the page, lifting words
and images from beyond and projecting them before us. As we shall see, poets have
continued to seek mediums for “transcribing and translating [these] difficult secret
symbols.”
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CHAPTER 3

“MY MIND FLIES INTO IT THROUGH MY FINGERS”
148
: THE POET IN THE
MACHINE

In the summer of 1967, Sherwin Borsuk, a junior at Stuyvesant High School, took
a course in computer programming at NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematics. This
special program introduced high school students to programming using mathematical
puzzles with detailed logic structures. For example, students programmed the computer
to solve “The Knight’s Tour,” a chess problem in which the knight must visit every space
on the board while moving according to the rules of the game. At the time, computers
were not yet widely available. Stuyvesant had a single IBM mini-computer, but, Borsuk
notes, “you couldn’t get at it unless you were a die-hard; it was overwhelmed by
computer nerds.”
149
The Courant Institute, which had received one of the first electronic
computers from the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, had an IBM 7094
mainframe and was in the process of changing over to a CDC 6600.
150
Students learned
to write their programs in flow chart form as a series of statements in FORTRAN IV.
They gave these charts to keypunch operators, who would punch the cards for them,
assemble the stack, and run the program through the computer. The students crossed their
fingers and hoped it would work—sometimes nothing happened at all.

148
Gary Snyder, “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh,” New York Times Blog, Tech Reflections by
John Markoff, January 22, 2010.
149
Conversation with the author, 3/15/2010.
150
According to the blog of programmer Richard Friedman, who worked at the Institute during that time:
http://rchrd.wordpress.com/category/history/page/2/
117
In high school, Borsuk was interested in math because he loved solving puzzles,
but he also loved poetry. He had been reading Yeats, Stevens, Cummings, Williams, and
Whitman that year. Marianne Moore had come to lecture several times at Stuyvesant,
where students called her “the lady with the funny hat.” He thought he might minor in
English when he got to college while completing his pre-med requirements. Given the
opportunity to write his own program for his final project at the Institute, Borsuk
collected a vocabulary of about two thousand words broken down into nouns, adjectives,
verbs, and adverbs. Because the Vietnam War was a palpable concern at the time, he
skewed his lexicon toward military terms and contemporary buzzwords. He then wrote
several sentence structures obeying basic grammatical principles, using FORTRAN IV to
determine what sort of words could logically follow others. A random number generator
would pick words from each category and create a sentence up to ten words long,
outputting two to three thousand lines of political poetry, of which about one third made
sense. Selecting the first five hundred lines as a sample set, he whittled down this output,
choosing lines with an eye toward “internal consistency—an antiwar poem,” and
published the finished product in his high school journal, The Caliper. While the pages of
output are lost, he can quote from memory the lines of the finished poem that surprised
him:
War stings your rotten bombs
The infinity the birth crucifies
Cry about reality where infinity hides.

I make this personal digression because the story has enchanted me ever since I
first heard it. What inspired my father, a radiologist, to use a high-level programming
language on a powerful supercomputer during his summer mathematics course to write
118
poetry of all things? Was he aware that in collaborating with the machine he was falling
into line with the modernist poets who had influenced him? Could he imagine Marianne
Moore pulling strings of words out of her funny hat to write encyclopedic pastiches like
“Marriage” and “The Octopus?”
He was not the first, nor the last person to use computers to write machine
poetry,
151
but his decision to collaborate with a computer still surprises me. My father did
not actually tell me about this poetic experiment until midway through my dissertation-
writing process. In response to my shock, he asked “doesn’t everyone write poetry at that
age?” While many of us write something that looks like poetry in our teenage years, the
fact that he turned this impulse to the technology at hand suggests something more
fundamental about writing: poetry inherently engages the materials with which it is
written, whether those materials are the sonnet form or grammatical constraints applied to
a database. Early computers emerged from military research and played a vital role in the
Second World War and Vietnam. Our machines extend the arm of the military, mediating
between soldiers and the bombs they drop, pilots and the drones they fly. My father’s
metatextual project tried to give the machine a voice—perhaps to make it guilty for its
wartime collaboration.
Between H.D.’s Trilogy and my father’s punchcard poems, poets used any
number of technologies to create new work. From radios to record players, mimeograph

151
Charles O. Hartman outlines a few precursors in his own volume of computer poetry The Virtual Muse
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Also see Katherine Parrish’s essay “How We Became
Automatic Poetry Generators” in Object 10: Cyberpoetics, archived in Ubuweb Documents:
www.ubu.com/papers/object.html. For more recent work, see Gnoetry, a collaborative human-machine
poem project which the creators describe as utilizing existing texts to synthesize language. The creators of
Gnoetry, Eric Elshtain and Jon Trowbridge, maintain a blog, http://gnoetrydaily.wordpress.com/, and
Gnoetry poems are also available at the Beard of Bees online chapbook website,
http://www.beardofbees.com/gnoetry.html.
119
machines to xerox copiers, writers have consistently found ways to use new media for
their messages. It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to cover all such engagements,
though given the chance I would love to write an encyclopedic study of poets and their
devices. In the interest of space, I want to turn to computers and digital media as recent
exempla of the impulse to subvert authorial control that I have been tracking in early and
late modernism.

I. “A SMALL (OR LARGE) MACHINE MADE OF WORDS”
152
: TOWARD A DATA POETICS

This desire to deflect control of the text recurs throughout twentieth century
poetry. A post-World War II genealogy would include Fluxus chance operations and
combinatorics, OuLiPo’s mathematical techniques for producing “potential” literature,
and contemporary Conceptual Writing and Flarf. All of these groups aim to see what
happens when constraints are imposed on the poet—using these techniques to free
themselves from the perceived tyranny of inspiration and artistic mysticism. In Oulipo,
techniques like the lipogram, in which writers must refrain from using one or more letters
of the alphabet, prompt virtuoso wordplay that reflects an authorial prowess born from
restriction. Fluxus presses the technique of permutation to discover that instruction-based
work will yield different results each time it is enacted. Flarf poets cull their poems from
Google search results, revealing a perverse collective unconscious of the internet age and
demonstrating the depths to which poetry can be pushed when using someone else’s
words. And in conceptual poetry, the poet becomes a curator, inviting the reader to

152
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939-1962, Ed. Christopher MacGowan
(New York: New Directions, 2001) p. 54.
120
discover the poetic in the mundane by remediating and recontextualizing existing texts
into book form.
Modernism’s concern with the limits of individual subjectivity remains of central
importance to these poets’ work and identity as writers. Inheritors of Walter Benjamin’s
theories on the destruction of the “aura” of art due to the ease of technological
reproduction, they cannot rely on the text’s “originality” as a mark of their genius.
153

Given poststructuralist theory’s suggestion of a self constructed by social structures,
media, and language, these writers can also no longer presume a stable center from which
to write or a privileged perspective on the world around them. This perspective is, of
course, rooted in modernism; Roland Barthes’ famous 1968 essay “The Death of the
Author,” in fact calls on Mallarmé’s edict about the withdrawal of the author in favor of
language to make his foundational claim that the meaning of a text takes shape in its
reader. Barthes’ author is merely a “scriptor [who] no longer contains passions, moods,
sentiments, impressions, but that immense dictionary from which he draws a writing
which will be incessant,”
154
a redefinition of Eliot’s poet-as-catalyst that, as we shall see,
applies particularly well to conceptual poetry forty years after the essay was written.
Barthes’ vision of text as “a multi-dimensional space [...] a fabric of quotations,
resulting from a thousand sources of culture” (1132) would be realized in the 1980s with
the advent of hypertext and the development of the Internet. The term “hypertext” was
coined in 1965 by computer theorist Theodor H. Nelson to refer to information presented

153
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, Trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968) p. 221.
154
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” reprinted Critical Theory Since Plato, ed. Hazard Adams
(Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992) p. 1132.
121
as a network of linked nodes that can be navigated nonlinearly. This definition, as many
e-literature theorists have noted, could equally be applied to print works like an
encyclopedia or card catalogue; thus many consider hypertext a writing technique
continuous with print literature. The poet and theorist Loss Pequeño Glazier goes so far
as to suggest that hypertext represents “the last stage of print or linear writing, rather than
the first stage of digital or hybrid writing.”
155

A number of writers, particularly fiction writers, were drawn to hypertext in the
late 1980s and early 90s for its overt enactment of the fragmented, nonlinear text.
156
The
Eastgate Systems publishing company facilitated hypertext composition with its
Storyspace software, distributing work by Stuart Moulthrop, Deena Larsen, and others on
diskettes, and later CD. These works allowed readers to choose their own paths through
texts like Afternoon: a story (1987), by Michael Joyce, and Patchwork Girl (1995) by
Shelley Jackson. As Adalaide Morris points out, “hypertext appeared to materialize the
still vibrant post-structuralist dream of processual, dynamic, multiple signifying
structures activated by readers who were not consumers of fixed meanings but producers
of their own compositions.”
157
That is, hypertext provided a model of readerly agency

155
Loss Pequeño Glazier, Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries (Tuscaloosa: The University of
Alabama Press, 2002) p. 169.

156
As Robert Coover wrote in his 1992 New York Times Book Review essay “The End of Books,”
“Hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of
discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author” (24-25). The
most thorough analysis of the deconstructive potential of hypertext can be found in George P. Landow’s
seminal, if outdated Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins university Press, 1992).
157
Adalaide Morris, “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write,” New Media Poetics:
Contexts, Technotexts, and Theoretics, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thom Swiss (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2006) p. 12. Hereafter NMP.
122
that aligned with writers’ rejection of the subject/object relationship between author and
reader (which Barthes broke down in “The Pleasure of the Text”) and desire to distribute
authorship among them.

This democratic potential, while enticing, falls short of its participatory aims. As
many theorists and practitioners have noted, the potential to navigate a text in several
ways does not amount to collaboration, particularly given the limited set of possibilities
offered to the reader by a text that never changes. In the words of media scholar Janet
Murray, “[t]here is a distinction between playing a creative role within an authored
environment and having authorship of the environment itself [...] interactors can only act
within the possibilities that have been established by writing and programming.”
158

Subsequent writers of e-literature have continued to seek means of using computers and
other digital platforms to create work that more adequately reflects their position as
twenty-first century authors.
159
Morris positions these authors at the junction of two
discourses: the nineteenth century lyric that emerges during the rise of the industrial
economy, and the contemporary networked and programmable poem that emerges
alongside the global information economy. In this context, she argues, poets seek to
“‘demythif[y]’ both the romantic Self and the global Internet” and celebrate the
fragmentation and distribution of information (19). In surveying the field of digital
poetry, Morris divides this work into three broad categories: hypertext poems that consist

158
Janet Murray, “Agency,” Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1998) p. 152.
159
N. Katherine Hayles suggests that recent digital literature reflects a new kind of subjectivity in progress,
“characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and non-human actors, and
fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations” (37). She provides a detailed analysis of this
new subjectivity and its phenomenological repercussions in Chapter Two of Electronic Literature: New
Horizons for the Literary (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008).
123
of lexia joined by nodes, dynamic/kinetic poems that may be either interactive or simply
watchable like films, and programmable texts in which the poem is generated in part by
computers (20). The digital poems examined below incorporate aspects of all three to
focus on language itself as data that can be manipulated by both author and reader.
Conceptual poets, like digital writers, have attempted to jettison a model of
authorship they find outmoded and revel in the re-distribution of information. These
writers create works in which the idea behind the production often takes precedence over
the work itself, whether the author has chosen to map out the part of speech for each
word in every sentence of a grammar textbook, like Craig Dworkin’s 2008 Parse, or to
recontextualize legal deposition notes as Facebook status updates like Vanessa Place’s
Statement of Facts. Many of these supposedly boring works are in fact engaging to read
and reward close study with nuances of sound, image, and reference, yet they are not
exactly “original.” They are works that celebrate the destruction of aura; deadpan
remediations that leave meaning open to interpretation. As Kenneth Goldsmith, a key
figure and soi-disant founder of the group, writes in his manifesto “Paragraphs on
Conceptual Writing,”
160
“[t]he idea becomes a machine that makes the text [...] To work
with a plan that is preset is one way of avoiding subjectivity” (139). In order to do so,
these writers “[employ] intentionally self and ego-effacing tactics using uncreativity,
unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, fraud, theft, and falsification as [their] precepts”

160
Open Letter: A Canadian Journal of Writing and Theory 12:7, 2005. Barbara Cole and Lori Emerson,
Eds. Reprinted in The Consequence of Innovation: 21
st
Century Poetics, Ed. Craig Dworkin (New York:
Roof Books, 2008) hereafter CI. The full text of Open Letter 12:7 is available on Goldsmith’s Ubuweb at
www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol.html. I am indebted to Marjorie Perloff for pointing out that this manifesto is
itself a conceptual text. Goldmith has used Sol LeWitt’s 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” as a
template, substituting the word “poetry” for “art” throughout and replacing art references with literary ones
to comical effect. This find-and-replace aesthetic is indicative of the influence of word processing on his
work.
124
(139), removing the self from the text because they too feel they can no longer write in
the Romantic lyric mode.
In “A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation,” Goldsmith defines conceptual
writing as “a poetics of the moment, fusing the avant-garde impulses of the last century
with the technologies of the present, one that proposes an expanded field for 21
st
century
poetry.”
161
His definition suggests the continuity between conceptual writers and those
who came before while emphasizing the role of technology in their approach to meeting
these goals. Certainly word processors have enabled much of Goldsmith’s transcriptive
work, which would have to have been painstakingly retyped if not for the function of
cutting and pasting. Matthew Timmons’s Credit (Los Angeles: Blanc Press, 2009), a
book that includes the full text of twenty-six credit card solicitations, from envelope
come-ons to the finest print, would have been painful to produce if not for optical
character recognition (OCR) built into Adobe Acrobat. Timmons foregrounds the
technology by leaving Acrobat’s transcriptive errors intact—mistakes that make the
reader deeply aware of the use of software to accomplish this eight-hundred-page feat.
The conceptual poetry examined here relies on the internet and computer technology for
its creation, and as such, operates alongside the digital poetry I wish to explore. These
works in different media share certain similarities and interests, which I will unpack in
greater detail below.
That contemporary innovative poets continue to search for ways to redefine their
function through media should come as no surprise. More than ten years ago, media artist

161
Reprinted in CI, p.138.
125
and digital culture theorist Lev Manovich claimed that the modernist period “is more
relevant to new media than any other” because “the avant-garde artists and designers
invented a whole new set of visual and spatial languages and communication techniques
that we still use today”
162
—techniques like the cut-up and a fragmented, cubist
perspective. Manovich argues that while modernists sought new ways to represent the
world as they experienced it, postmodern writers and artists are interested in “accessing
and using in new ways previously accumulated media” (23), an aesthetics facilitated by
digital technologies for retrieving and manipulating information.
While I agree with his premise that a shift has occurred, I want to locate the
impulse for this turn to a poetics of data by articulating examples of it in contemporary
poetry. From the perspective of writers’ attempts to define and justify their function, the
impulse is entirely continuous with that of writers like Blaise Cendrars and H.D., who
used writing technologies to access a world of words they believed surrounded them.
Cendrars’s speedy typing enabled him to seize words faster than the speed of thought, an
unpredictable jazz that was both in him and outside himself, segmenting the writer
function and extending his body’s abilities. H.D.’s projective mediumship, drawing
words from the air, connected her to a spiritual realm that promised survival in the face of
death—survival for the human race and for her own poems. What, then, does mediation
offer contemporary poets in the way of a new scene of writing? Have we reached a realm
in which poems and poets become, as William Carlos Williams wrote in The Wedge
(1944), “machine[s] made of words?”

162
Lev Manovich, “New Media from Borges to HTML,” The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin and
Nick Montfort, Eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) p. 22. Hereafter NMR.
126
II. “A LIST OF COMPELLING, GRADUALLY COMPILING EVIDENCE”
163
: VISUALIZING
AND CONCEPTUALIZING THE DATA CLOUD

In 1945, as H.D. was channeling the voices of R.A.F. pilots at her William Morris
table, American scientist and Director of the Office of Scientific Research and
Development Dr. Vannevar Bush was writing his famous treatise “As We May Think,”
an oft-cited text in which he proposes the first personal data library, called “Memex.” In
describing this hypothetical device, Bush developed the metaphor of the network, the
“intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain” (NMR 44), that would become so
central to digital media, and particularly to hypertext and the Internet. This microfilm
repository was a desk equipped with rear-projection screens on which an individual might
examine whatever books, magazines, photographs, or other media he or she had
requested from the Memex. Here is another version of H.D.’s dual camera obscura /
projector, “an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory” (45) that would enable a
researcher to access entire libraries at the push of a button. Bush and H.D.’s mutual
interest in the task of information aggregation reflects a common concern during the
1940s, which saw the emergence of digital computing. The Colossus computers
developed in 1943 and used by British code breakers at Bletchley park (including H.D.’s
daughter Perdita) became prototypes for the first computers. H.D., while interested in
spiritualism and the analog technologies of film and telegraphy, was thus writing at the
digital turn.

163
Ander Monson, “Index for X and the Origin of Fires,” Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (St. Paul:
Graywolf Press, 2007) p. 57.
127
Also like H.D., Bush sought a meaningful place for members of his profession in
the face of war. His situation was complicated, however, by the fact that he and other
scientists had been instrumental in developing the very weapons responsible for the
military destruction and nuclear devastation that so troubled H.D.. Given this legacy,
information storage and retrieval must have seemed to Bush a benign, even beneficent,
postwar task. Already in 1945, he describes the kind of information saturation with which
we are currently beset: “[t]here is a growing mountain of research. [...] The investigator is
staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions
which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear” (NMR 37).
The Memex would enable researchers to apply code-words to content, thereby connecting
items by association, rather than alphabetically or numerically. The network thus created
would be of greater use than any library or catalogue because data would be organized
intelligently and could even include explanatory annotations made by the researcher on-
screen. The Memex was never built, but we can now organize information based on self-
defined code-words using websites like del.icio.us, Evernote, Zotero, and other
information-gathering and tagging sites, much as Bush predicted.
We are indeed living in a world of data-saturation—a world in which each object
we buy is encoded with a rich history of production and delivery, often traceable by
simply scanning a barcode. We track our own metadata on a daily basis, watching our
location on GPS devices or mobile phones, responding to email, organizing our writing
into folders on our computers for easy access, backing up our files to digital servers
online or hard drives at home, updating our coworkers of our project status through inter-
office microblogging, and updating our friends of personal milestones and daily dramas
128
through social networks. The browsers we use to access the internet keep a record of
every site we visit, and online vendors store our likes and dislikes (as well as those of our
friends and others who share our demographic details) in order to recommend products to
us. We increasingly see ourselves as generators of data who are part of a continually-
flowing datastream or information cloud.
Bush envisioned the role of writers, and particularly scholars, in generating and
collecting data as facilitated by new technologies. He imagines future scientists recording
their observations in both the laboratory and the field with microcamera-embedded
glasses and a remote audio recorder, generating raw data for future examination. The
notion that we might record every experience in order to analyze it later no longer seems
like science fiction when most of us carry tiny cameras and audio recording devices with
us everywhere on our cell phones. In order to facilitate this visual and auditory note-
taking, Bush also hypothesizes a machine that can both transcribe and read back the
“author of the future[’s]” dictation (Fig. 20).
164
Equip this “supersecretary” with a
randomizing algorithm and it begins to sound like
another modernist collaborative muse.

164
According to the caption under this illustration, which appeared in the LIFE magazine reprinting of
Bush’s article, “the machine contemplated here would take dictation, type it automatically, and even talk
back if the author wanted to review what he had just said” (LIFE 114).
Fig. 20. Vannevar Bush, “Supersecretary of the
Coming Age.” LIFE, September 10, 1945, 114.
129
In the poetry of Blaise Cendrars and H.D., writing technologies offer them access
to a world of language outside of themselves: “everything that passes through my cabin”
and “the writing on the wall.” They extend the body’s abilities, as discussed earlier, while
also revising the notion of inspiration by making the source of these words material,
rather than arcane. As we increasingly experience life within the data cloud, perceiving
ourselves as surrounded by language to which the proper technologies allow us access,
the modernist notion of using machines to channel words from the ether takes on new
resonance. For example, a number of publications and programs take advantage of newly
developed augmented reality software, which enables developers to map information
onto three-dimensional space. The iPhone application sponsored by Yelp, a social
network for reviews of local businesses, includes a “monocle” mode that combines
information with the live feed from the phone’s camera, allowing users to locate
restaurants and shops in their immediate area (Fig. 21). These locations are indicated by
floating markers that hover around the sites to which they correspond.
Fig. 21. Yelp’s “Monocle”: an augmented reality application.
130
Our expectation of this kind of mapped
information has become commonplace in the
media as well, with television shows and
advertisers taking advantage of sophisticated
three-dimensional text rendering and animation
to show us information in space. On the para-science TV series Fringe, every location is
described by ominous floating text that helps viewers locate characters within the fast-
paced world of top-secret FBI investigation (Fig. 22). This text is at once informative and
frightening, indicating as it does a mysterious observer tracking events on earth from a
distance.
165
The sinister quality of the data cloud recurs in a Liberty Mutual commercial
created by the Motion Theory advertising agency. In “Sideswipe,” the protagonist, who is
embodied by a first-person camera, exits a house and begins walking down the street,
scanning left and right until he sees a parked car that has been damaged in a hit-and-run
accident, its mirror hanging limply and its door
badly scratched. The camera races toward the
car, accompanied by the sound of frantic
footsteps. Words appear one by one as the
camera pans down the street, “Who could have

165
The framing suggests the viewer of the show is herself this voyeuristic watcher, and, as some viewers
have complained, breaks the fourth wall with a metatextual reference to a world beyond that of the series.
However, the presence of a recurring character known as “the observer,” an alopecia-stricken man in a
mid-century styled gray flannel suit with an inhuman appetite for spicy food, indicates another potential
witness to the space- and time-bending events that often disrupt the lives of the cast. The indifferent way in
which this observer labels what he sees, noting events from spontaneous human combustion to mass
biological warfare impassively in his journal, suggests that whomever is watching does not necessarily
have our best interests at heart.
Fig. 23. Fringe
Fig. 22. Liberty Mutual, “Sideswipe.”
131
done this?” (Fig. 23). Mapped into three dimensional space, these words show the unseen
protagonist’s fears projected directly onto the landscape.
166
Looking back at the
windshield, this person thinks, “Maybe they left a note” but discovers the windshield
bare.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine commercials also emphasize the perils of the data
cloud. In a series of vignettes highlighting the effects of “search overload,” normal
conversations are interrupted when one of the participants responds to an associate’s
query with a litany of irrelevant comments. While the interlocutor in these exchanges
speaks with feeling, the overloaded party responds with a blank stare divorced from the
random results spewing from his or her mouth. When a wife asks “Hey, did you ever find
tickets to Hawaii?”, her husband, flopping down into bed beside her, replies “Hawaii 5-0,
book’em danno, aloha, mele kalikimaka...” a stream of disconnected results that frustrates
and disturbs his partner. The data cloud, this campaign suggests, is too vast and
overwhelming for most of us to navigate on our own. We need Bing to cut through the
excess like a Memex connecting one idea to the next.
Another Bing ad pastiches a series of aborted conversations, reveling in the
associational poetics of inaccurate search results—the advertising world’s version of
Flarf. Passersby are drawn into the network of each exchange, extending the madness
into a cacophony both stunning and creepy in its linguistic scope. In one vignette, a father
and son browse television sets in an appliance store: “So, do we want an LCD or
Plasma?” the father asks, “Plasma is an ionized gas,” the son deadpans. When we return

166
This trend enacts the surreal cityscape envisioned by Blaise Cendrars in his postscript to Jean Epstein’s
La Poésie d’Aujourdui, “La facade des maisons mangées par les lettres. La rue enjambée par le mot”; “the
fronts of buildings eaten by letters. The street spanned by the word” (214).
132
to them later in the ad, a salesman and another customer have inserted themselves into the
conversation offering “plasma cutter,” and “blood plasma,” to which the father barks in
frustration, “no, I need a flat-screen plasma tv!” The difference, it seems, is spreading.
Two nearby security guards are drawn into the flow of language, interjecting “flat
screen,” “silkscreen,” “flatbread,” search results driven no longer by association, but by
sound, the rich rhyme of “flatscreen” and “silkscreen” and the alliteration of “flatscreen”
and “flatbread” enacting a sonic chiasmus at once profound (a silkscreen is literally a
device for repetitive image transfer, but the word itself seems to describe a gossamer veil,
perhaps onto which images might be projected) and comical (dense flatbread, an apparent
non-sequitur, is in fact a near-antonym for the airy silk screen).
This merger of the profound and the ridiculous inherent in the vast stores of
Internet data has become a fount of material for writers of conceptual poetry. Ara
Shirinyan’s Your Country is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana (New York: Futurepoem,
2008), for example, offers an incisive look at international tourism and cultural
stereotyping through the lens of Google search results. Shirinyan produced the book by
searching for the phrase “[country] is great,” taking the CIA’s World Factbook, 2006 as
his source for the names of countries and territories in every permutation from A to G (he
intends to tackle the rest of the alphabet in subsequent books). In his preface, he notes,
“the quotes ensured that I would get any instance of those three words on the internet”
(np), in phrasal order, regardless of punctuation. The resulting poems consist entirely of
the abbreviated previews Google generated for his search results, arranged and lineated,
but unchanged by Shirinyan. Because the adjective “great” can refer to a range of values
including intensity, power, and quality, the constraint yields a wide variety of thoughts
133
and ideas rendered by turns comical and unnerving in juxtaposition. The first poem in the
book, “Afghanistan is Great,” illustrates the array of material turned up:

Afghanistan is great, but much smaller
than previously assumed.

the need for education
in Afghanistan is great
and must be met quickly,

need for food in Afghanistan is great

well-acquainted
with unique problems
facing Afghanistan.

The need for tough, dependable,
locally repairable wheelchairs in Afghanistan is great.

A mountain, An Airplane. Aviation in
Afghanistan is great fun.

Pipeline via Afghanistan is great.

There is no question that Allah’s
knowledge and love of Afghanistan
is great
even as he regrets
the limits of his understanding. (3)

The poem veers from serious commentary on the state of a war-ravaged country in need
of “tough, dependable, / locally repairable wheelchairs,” to the advertisement “Aviation
in / Afghanistan is great fun” (3). In both cases, Shirinyan uses line breaks to subvert the
reader’s expectations. From the vaguely militaristic language of American forces aware
of “unique problems / facing Afghanistan,” one expects the subsequent line to outline the
need for “tough, dependable” soldiers in patriotic response. Instead, we face the grim
reality of the need for medical equipment that can be fixed on-site. In the final stanza, it
134
is not the country that is great, but a much larger force, “Allah’s / knowledge and love of
Afghanistan.” What is it the Islamic deity cannot fully understand? The decontextualized
search result suggests the country itself is the object of his limited knowledge,
understanding, and love. Thus, this opening poem acts as an ars poetica for the book,
informing the reader that while these voices may express both knowledge about and love
for these “great” countries, they will never fully “understand” the places these poems
appear to encapsulate. The name “Afghanistan,” “Bulgaria,” or “Georgia” will always
exceed its web-based definitions, despite their encyclopedic quality. The range of voices
encompassed in the poem mirrors the humorous polyvocality of the Bing advertisement.
Both suggest that language is spiraling out of control around us.
In working with this excessive verbiage, Shirinyan claims to have used
“everything that came up”
167
(np), including repetition, spelling errors, and odd
capitalization. This means that some poems include an insistent refrain that juxtaposes
the rest of the content. “Brazil is Great,” includes the line “Brazil is great for cheap
bikinis that look like a million dollars” (42) three times over the course of three pages.
The line is comical on its own, but set against stanzas that deal with the harsher reality of
the country they ring out like the voice of a spoiled tourist blind to his or her place within
the country’s social and economic fabric:
November in Brazil is great–
it is spring and warm
and sunny!
We also had an ulterior motive for going to Brazil:
to collect seeds for our balcony chile

167
A particularly Steinian claim; “using everything” is one of the three main precepts of “Composition as
Explanation.”
135
Brazil is great for cheap bikinis that look like a million dollars.

Brazil is great! Everyone is really relaxed here,
no one hassles you, people are always helpful and friendly.
Unless they’re robbing you blind, of course,

Brazil is great. Despite acts of cruelty and discrimination
primarily against indigenous and black communities,
and all the inequalities and pain (43)

The language of the first stanza above establishes a tourist speaker enjoying the weather
(banal topic of postcards and letters) abroad. The speaker’s “ulterior motive” sets up a
potential dark side to this sunny trip then just as quickly pulls the rug out from under us
with the promise of “collect[ing] seeds for our balcony chile,” a crime likely to offend
only members of the department of agriculture. The undertone of colonial conquest,
though, once established, continues to haunt the poem. While the “bikini” refrain
becomes a comical truism through repetition, the third stanza above veers toward irony in
the clichés of native “people” as by turns “relaxed” and “friendly” then greedy thieves
who will “[rob] you blind.” Given this patronizing perspective, the subsequent stanza
takes on a darker tone with its more academic language of “discrimination [...] against
indigenous and black communities” (43). This seriousness is offset, however, by the
sweeping generalization of “all the inequalities and pain,” a vague phrase which suggests
that the speaker either does not know these details well enough to describe them, or that
they have been cut off because they lie outside the Google preview.
Absences like this one emphasize the partiality of our view, revealing the
constraint of the work to the reader. By letting the absence stand, Shirinyan forces us to
account for the seeming contradiction of the stanza. In order to show us the phrase we
wanted, “Brazil is great,” Google truncated the page content and, because it is an
136
algorithm and not a human, delivered an oxymoron (or a bit of sarcasm, though the
academic tone suggests we are missing a larger framework for these lines). We cannot
envision the poem to be spoken by a single voice when we see that the
decontextualization of these lines corrupts their meaning—a grim reality faced more
often by public figures and politicians than poets. Absence itself becomes a space of
implicit commentary on the poet’s part—he has assembled these results in order to reveal
something about nationalism, tourism, and the distribution of information.
This emptiness is clearest in the poems “Burkina Faso is Great,” “Central African
Republic is Great,” and “Equatorial Guinea is Great,” each of which contains only a title
on a blank page. As Shirinyan notes in his preface, “no one who could write in English
and had access to the web thought to say anything great about those countries [in
September 2006].” The absence of poems for these entries provides a stark commentary
on the way our information-saturated state can lull us into believing that if something is
not online it does not in fact exist. Our expectation of pervasive data grows directly out of
what media scholar Janet H. Murray calls “the spatial property of the medium, its
capability for embodying dimensionality.”
168
From the file structures on our desktops to
the network of web “sites” on the internet, computers provide highly effective
simulations of spatiality because they accept our commands and respond “in a consistent
manner that reinforces our notion of space” (6). When data is pervasive, breaks in the
cloud become suspect.

168
“Inventing the Medium,” NMR p. 6.
137
Both conceptual poets and the media cited perpetuate the image of life in a data
cloud. In the case of conceptualism, if the concept or constraint is, as Goldmith suggests,
“the machine that drives the poem’s construction” (138), then language becomes data:
“material [...] something to be shoveled into a machine and spread across pages, only to
be discarded and recycled once again” (139). With this metaphor Goldsmith makes the
provocative case that uncreative writing is a response to the information saturation of our
contemporary landscape. Paraphrasing Douglas Huebler, he claims, “The world is full of
texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more” (144). Rather than creating
new texts, Goldsmith has made his mark remediating existing ones into book form: a
day’s newspaper, a year of radio weather and traffic reports, sports scores, every
movement of his body and every word he spoke in a week. These texts, Day, The
Weather, Traffic, Sports, Fidget, and Soliloquy, are also available online through
Ubuweb’s Archive, which means they will be available for remediation by users of
laptops, iPhones and iPads and still other unforeseen generations of digital devices.
Certainly, to recombine, rewrite, and remediate existing texts is indeed to add another
text to the world, whether or not that text’s content, or data, is new, and Goldsmith’s
assertion is partly in jest. Yet his reference to textual abundance clearly links an evasion
of lyric subjectivity with life in the data cloud. How should I presume when so many
others have presumed before me? This work redefines the scene of writing: “The writer’s
solitary lair is transformed into a networked alchemical laboratory, dedicated to the brute
physicality of textual transference” (144). The poet, “shifting contents into different
containers,” helps readers navigate the data cloud, a Virgil who prefers to remain in the
shadow of his machines.
138
While simply moving data around suggests anonymity, like the modernist poets
who attempted to shift the focus from themselves to their devices, the conceptual poet
cannot stay hidden long. As Marjorie Perloff notes in her essay “The Pleasures of Déjà
Dit,” these intertextual dialogues and remediations “permit the poet to participate in a
larger, more public discourse, even as the poet’s personal signature is once again
present.”
169
As Goldsmith himself has acknowledged, the curatorial impulse behind
conceptualism, while it provides the illusion of authorial abstraction, can never entirely
annul the writer’s presence. In a 2009 interview for Bomblog, the web arm of Bomb
Magazine, he expresses the paradox that recurs throughout the work explored by this
dissertation:
Contrary to my own claims, I’m always banging my head against the realization
that no matter how hard you try, you can never remove the individual from art. I
have made arguments for egoless art, found art, art driven by chance operations
and many other strains, but in fact there’s always someone behind the curtain,
manning the machines.
170

What appears to be a robotic act of transcription becomes, in Goldmith’s metaphor, a
physical act like shoveling coal into an engine or mixing chemicals in a lab. The guiding
intelligence of the “man behind the curtain” who appears to have a plan for his literary
Oz becomes present despite bold attempts at its removal. This contradiction perhaps
reaches its zenith in Vanessa Place’s latest work-in-progress, Factory Series (Ood Press),
a set of books written by her contemporaries to which she (with their permission) has
affixed her own name. The project’s very title plays on Andy Warhol’s appropriationist

169
“The Pleasures of Déjà Dit: Citation, Intertext and Ekphrasis in Recent Experimental Poetry,” CI p. 257.
170
“So What Exactly Is Conceptual Writing?: An Interview With Kenneth Goldsmith,” Katherine Elaine
Sanders, Oct 2, 2009. http://bombsite.powweb.com/?p=4653.
139
approach to art, which attributed as much value to idea as to artifact.
171
Like Cendrars
and H.D., Place has found a way to mediate between herself and the page, removing her
hand from the writing altogether. I am not here referring to a fantasy of disembodiment or
cyborgian union with the machine which is predominant in some early 90s digital
writing. Rather, I wish to suggest attempts by contemporary poets to redefine lyricism
and authorship relative to their experience of a networked society and a data cloud. The
hand here stands in metonymically for authorship, and Place’s project attempts to sever
this connection, just as generations before her attempted to change the definition of the
writer. Place offers her name in service of an author function for which there is no
author.
172
Yet the aura surrounding her concept grows by virtue of the placement of her
name on the book’s cover. Within the circle of readers of conceptual poetry, she, like
Kenneth Goldmith, has reached an odd kind of celebrity status despite the work’s
seeming attempt to negate the very notion of authorship.

III. “THE EXPERTISE OF A SECRETARY CROSSED WITH THE ATTITUDE OF A
PIRATE”
173
: REDEFINING INSPIRATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

If Cendrars and H.D. used writing technologies to draw words out of the ether and
onto the page, what happens to poetry in an age where words on the page contain

171
Christian Bök suggests that Factory Work, the book in the series ghostwritten by Kenneth Goldsmith, is
in fact a direct appropriation of Warhol. “Flarf, Arf, Arf, Arf! (Part 2),” Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry
Foundation, April 13, 2010, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/flarf-arf-arf-arf-part-2/.
172
Marita Sturken has written eloquently on the perils of advocating the cyborg as a liberating postmodern
figure in “Mobilities of Time and Space.” Sturken suggests that this metaphor belies the complex
relationship of thought and emotion to the body as well as the lived experience of individuals for whom
race, gender, and ability are inescapable because the body cannot be transcended in life as easily as in an
online RPG.
173
Kenneth Goldsmith, “A Week of Blogs for the Poetry Foundation,” CI, p. 144.
140
references to vast amounts of information surrounding us? Much of the most interesting
digital poetry currently being written embraces this wealth, opening up its process to let
the data flow both ways between writer and reader. The pieces I wish to examine, by
Ander Monson, Jer Thorpe, and Boris Müller, treat poems as fields of data to be
permuted by both author and reader. These works, like those of Conceptual Poetry, revel
in the quality of language as data and explore the potential of the cloud to provide
meaningful connections within seemingly dissonant information.
Writer Ander Monson and programmer Jer Thorpe describe their project “Index
for X and the Origin of Fires”
174
as “an experiment in mass collaboration.” Published as
poetry in 2006 by Born Magazine, a website that pairs authors and artists to create
interactive texts, the piece also won the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction
from the print journal Bellingham Review in 2002 and appears in Monson’s book of
essays Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007). This
is a differential text, as defined by Marjorie Perloff, a text that “exist[s] in different
material forms, with no single version being the definitive one.”
175
It defies easy
categorization; an alphabetized index with an internal, associative narrative, it
encompasses several genres.
In the text’s digital form, the reader sees the index one entry at a time, each
ranging from one word to several phrases with a large majuscule and smaller body text.

174
Born Magazine, http://www.bornmagazine.org/projects/indexx/. Built in Flash, the text and animation
load on a single page, thus no page references are possible. The text of the complete poem, information on
how to contribute images, and biographies of the creators are available from the menu at the top of the
page.
175
Marjorie Perloff, “Screening the Page/Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,”
NMP, p. 146.
141
These words are accompanied by one or several images that fade in and out against a
black background, sometimes partly obscured by black bars or broken in pieces and
appearing at random anywhere on
the page. Snare-heavy down-tempo
electronic music plays, lending an
eerie feeling to the project: the
repetitive tune, both atmospheric and
claustrophobic, suggests obsession
and fixation. Each time the reader
clicks his or her mouse, the lines and
image on screen fade out and new ones appear. The images continue to refresh, each
remaining on screen just long enough to catch the reader’s eye before disappearing, while
the text remains onscreen until the next click. Selecting anywhere on the right side of the
screen progresses the index forward, while clicking the left takes readers back to the
previous text entry, a subtle navigational choice the reader might miss if he or she never
moves the cursor. The interchanging images and driving music juxtaposed with the
alphabetized index entries suggests an account book of someone trying to come to terms
with past trauma by laying it out in an order. As an early line suggests, “Amalgamation.
Accumulation. What comes down in time accretes.” “Index for X” is a poem of accretion.
We learn the story in bits and pieces.
Just as the lines of the poem accrue meaning as we go on, they accrete images as
well. When one opens the project, the Flash player loads 100 “indexed images” at
Fig. 24. Ander Monson and Jer Thorpe, “Index for X and the Origin of
Fires,” “Memory,” Born Magazine, 2006.
142
random from a pool of photos tagged, or labeled, with the word “indexx” on the Flickr
176

website (Fig. 25). This is the “mass collaboration” referenced in the creators’ project
statement. In the “Contribute” section of the project, Thorpe invites Born’s readers to

176
Flickr, www.flickr.com, is a photo sharing website that allows users to share images privately with
friends and family, a wider network of contacts, or the public at large. The site is a resource not only for
snapshots, but for professional photographers seeking to make their work available to others through a
creative commons license (for which each user may define the terms). Photos carry a large quantity of
metadata with them, enabled by digital photography, which embeds information about file size, camera
type, and sometimes gps location in the images. Users may also geotag their photos manually, apply
descriptions, titles, and tags to their photos, and link the people in the photos to their profiles on Flickr.
Fig. 25. Flickr source image for the instance of the “Memory” entry of “Index for X and the origin of fires” recorded in figure 24.
Collection of the author.
143
help build the database of potential images that accompany the poem by tagging pictures
on the image-sharing site. In addition, if users tag these images with words from the
poem, the image is likely to appear contextually with a line containing that word. Thorpe
explains:
This project uses a semi-intelligent engine to pick which words are used to fetch
images and which images are displayed. As a result, you may not see your images
appearing where you expect them too [sic] every time. Picking words that haven’t
already been ‘indexxed’ will improve your chances of seeing your image
frequently. (np)

Juxtaposed with the text, these images create a kind of scrapbook, a card file of
fragmented associations. Under the entries for E, we find “Electronic analysis and data
processing. / Electronic life. / Electronic reconstruction of a life”—lines that move us
through the technologies used to find the victims of the crash, through those used in
attempts to resuscitate them, to those the author uses to “reconstruct” both the traumatic
event at the heart of the story and his own life, which has been shattered by it.
The index reconstructs several disturbing events: a boy named Crisco drinking
antifreeze at a party, the rape and murder of Crisco’s sister, the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend
Liz and best friend Jesse drowning in Lake Superior on prom night, his troubled
relationship with his brother, and the confluence of these characters. One has the sense of
a young man who has seen a number of awful things he would rather forget, but cannot,
who has turned to an obsession with detection and investigation as a way of coping. An
entry under “M” makes this need explicit: “My fascination with crime: novels, hard-
boiled detective thrillers, mail-order dick kits, badges to pass myself as a seamus.” The
abundance of evidence within the index suggests an attempt to reclaim the missing body
they represent: “Blood,” “Lipstick,” “Palmprints, “Perspiration,” and “Zipper fragments”
144
are carefully preserved by the protagonist in his quest for “Evidence, collection of” and
“Erasure, restoration of.” These details help build “a remembrance of the body,” like the
lock of hair the protagonist has taken from Liz’s corpse. By inviting readers to tag Flickr
images, Thorpe asks us to take part in cataloguing the evidence—assigning labels to
objects in order to help map out the life of which this index provides a partial picture. In
the absence of a physical body, we must reconstruct a digital one from the data cloud it
has left behind. In order to understand what has happened, we need to investigate, collect
evidence, and solve for X.
The first line of the poem, “A brother, radio, a winter full of snow and thoughts
on Liz my X,” suggests that the protagonist’s ex-girlfriend is herself the book for which
this “Index for X” has been compiled. However, X’s multiplicity emerges in the latter
part of the text. X is a variable; it stands for everything that has been struck from the
record, everything absent that must be reconstructed. Like the words of the poem, it is
data that can be tagged with any number of images:
X as concatenation & conflation.
X as brother.
X as father.
X as loner. X as lover.
X as mother, myth.
X as queen Liz. As previously established.
X as token. Torn coat or turncoat.
X as unknown.
X, necessity of herein.
X, used in algebra.
X, used safely to recover memory.
X-Axis
X-Ray diffraction.

145
In tagging images, the readers help the narrator “safely to recover memory.” Thus
Monson and Thorpe take advantage of the nature of language itself as data in order to
build the story itself and the reader’s experience of it.
Thorpe makes the role of user collaboration explicit in his 2006 blog entry about
the piece. He claims, “What I wanted to avoid in this project was forcing the reader into
one particular interpretation of the poem.”
177
The text will never be the same twice, he
argues, because his engine selects images randomly from a constantly-updating database.
He also has faith that readers will assist in building a solid foundation by using the
“indexx” tag to make relevant images appear more often so that “the generated
compositions will (hopefully) become more focused over time.” The connections are
unpredictable enough, and the images fade in and out with such frequency, that the
reading experience changes each time one visits the piece. Yet different visualizations do
not necessarily prompt different “interpretation[s] of the poem.” Rather, they enable us to
see the mechanics at work beneath the surface and to better understand the centrality of
information-gathering to both the poem and project.
Thorpe and Monson entrust readers with the task of building the logic that
supports this network of images—like the user of Bush’s hypothetical Memex, each
reader can apply his or her own associations to the information. The protagonist of
“Index for X” has chosen, like Shirinyan, to organize his research alphabetically, but the
relationship between word and image is far less predictable: the tagger’s choice may be
homophonic, antonymic, associational, identical, or random. The images that appear

177
Jer Thorpe, “Index for X: An Experiment in Mass Collaboration,” January 18, 2006.
http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/index-for-x-an-experiment-in-mass-collaboration.
146
sometimes enhance the eeriness of the poem: a mother rocking a baby beside an entry
about the speaker’s memory of his mother (Fig. 24), broken ice on the surface of a lake
for “Liz, still life under ice” (Fig. 26), and clouds through a window seen from below
under “Cloud formations in the sky remind me of when I was young.” However,
sometimes a disjunct between image and
text reminds us of the perils of collaboration.
On a recent reading, the line “Doll heads
bought from hobby stores and pushed down
into the grass” was accompanied by a series
of Barbie portraits, incongruously pretty in
comparison with the severed heads the
words conjure up. The text suggests an
unnatural interest in decapitation, a perverse
activity by which the speaker expresses his anger over Liz’s death. The image of the
Barbie dolls fails to capture the disturbing nature of this doll head graveyard, which
suggests the speaker’s emotional imbalance.
On another viewing, the name “Crisco” brought up a vintage product
advertisement featuring a lattice-topped apple pie and a caricature of an American
housewife pleased with her baking (Fig. 27). The humor in the image felt insensitive
against the serious repercussions of “Crisco drinking a half-liter of anti-freeze,” which we
later learn may have been “a passive suicide attempt” after his sister’s murder. Did the
tagger hope to create an ironic juxtaposition, or was this appearance purely coincidental
and driven by machine logic? Like the non sequiturs spewed by victims of “search
Fig. 26. Monson and Thorpe, “Index for X and the Origin of
Fires,” “Liz, still life...”
147
overload” in Microsoft’s Bing ads or the heteroglossia of Your Country Is Great, results
that don’t fit unsettle us. They’re related, but not intelligently, and that lack of a
governing force strands us in a maelstrom of data.

While these irrational connections can destabilize our experience of the text by
breaking the illusion of “a collage of images [...] present in their memory” (Thorpe,
2006), their inclusion is in fact central to the model of mind created by “Index for X.”
The form of the text provides a metatextual commentary on memory: how ideas are
created, related, and stored. In its print form, Monson evades lyric subjectivity by shaping
his poem into an index, dispersing the narrative into what Pound would call an
Fig. 27. Monson and Thorpe, “Index for X and the Origin of Fires,” “At the after-party, Crisco...”
148
“overblotted series of intermittences.”
178
In the digital version, Thorpe in turn refuses to
allow the protagonist a single voice or the text a single reading. His “experiment in mass
collaboration” weaves a network of images around the text that, even as they attempt to
reconstruct the bigger picture trapped in the details, reveals the utter impossibility of
making sense of what has happened. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether one reads the
piece through to its (open) conclusion—its length demands patience and its format makes
no attempt to enforce a reading of each word on the page. Readers may click rapidly and
experience an atmospheric image/text phantasmagoria. They may visit the poem
repeatedly simply in the hope that one of their own images will turn up out of a sense of
ownership or investment in the work. And each time they read, they will be fully aware
that this is only one possible experience.
The story, purposefully broken apart, will not be made to cohere because the
writer does not wish to make it do so. Monson published this piece as an essay, or non-
fiction, but in an atomized structure that reveals the speaker’s inability to come to terms
with it. The poetry of the index lies in the data surrounding it—the imagined text to
which it applies, and which users rebuild and re-make, applying our own associations to
each word. The web of events cannot be untangled. We cannot uncover, as one of the last
entries attempts to, “What is the origin of all fires.” This ambiguous statement may allude
to the myth of Prometheus, who brought humans fire from the gods and was punished for
it, just as the speaker of “Index” punishes himself. It may also allude to the story of
Adam and Eve, who ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil—an act of

178
Ezra Pound, “Mauberley,” Personae (New York: New Directions, 1990) p. 201.
149
questioning, asking “what”— an “original” sin from which all subsequent follow, and for
which they were banished from Eden. Or it may refer to the speaker’s own pyromania, a
recurrent theme in the index. He himself cannot say which of the many traumas in his life
made him who he is or set the fires that keep him going.

IV. “I THROW IT A SCRAP AND IT HUMS”: TATTERS OF LANAGUAGE

When we see language as data that can be infinitely indexed and connected, we
approach a kind of Derridean différance in which meaning inheres only in association. In
the datacloud of our daily lives, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte,”
179
or there is nothing outside
the text. Thorpe and other programmers have taken this quality of twenty-first century
language to its extreme in the practice of information aesthetics, which consists in
making data into art.
180
Thorpe’s recent projects include a series of graphics using words
extracted from 365 days of the New York Times newspaper (a project facilitated by the
release of the NYTimes.com Article Search API,
181
which makes all of this data available
to developers). In one series, he uses a program written in Processing to extract and
organize the names of the most often-cited people and organizations for a given year. The
size and location of each word indicates its frequency, with the largest words appearing
most often. Barack Obama, Hamas, and the Senate stand out in 2009. These names are

179
Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1967) p. 227.
180
The foremost source for this material is infosthetics.com, the blog of Andrew Vande Moere, a Senior in
Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. The term “information aesthetics” arises
from Lev Manovich’s 2001 “Info-Aesthetics Manifesto,” which defines “info-aesthetics” as the use of
“new media to represent human experience in INFORMATION society in new ways”
(http://www.manovich.net/IA).
181
http://developer.nytimes.com/
150
arranged in a circle with lines connecting them to one another based on how often they
appear together (Fig. 28).
182
The resulting spirograph of words and colors is both
informative and beautiful—a programmatically defined concrete poem using, in
conceptualist form, existing information to make something new.

182
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blprnt/3291287830/in/set-72157614008027965/
Fig. 28. Jer Thorpe, “NYTimes: 365/360 - 2009 (in color).” Flickr.com.
151
Not only do data visualizations like this one turn data into poetry, some
programmers have turned their programs on poems themselves. Boris Müller’s posters
for the “Poetry on the Road” festival in Bremen, Germany, which he has been making
since 2002, turn text into images, withdrawing the words completely after their
computational work is done. Each year, Müller processes a selection of poems by
participants in the festival, applying a different visual schema to transform this data. In
2003, for example, each poem was programmed to draw itself according to a pre-
determined code whereby each letter would alter the course of the single line representing
the text (Fig. 29, 31). As Müller describes it, “Such a transformation is an automated
process. As every letter is connected to a specific set of commands, the line is not
random. The same text will always generate the same image. When every single letter is
a command, the text itself becomes a program.”
183
Essentially, the text is imbued with a
visual grammar—it becomes instructions for drawing.
For his most visually stunning work, the 2006 poster, Müller encoded the
alphabet, assigning numerical values to each letter.
184
This code was then applied to the
words of each poem, giving each word a value by adding the letters within it. According
to this scheme, several words can share the same value. In Müller’s example, the word
“poetry” adds up to 99, as do the words “thought,” and “letters.” Each number is
represented by a red ring, which increases in thickness the more words are associated
with it. The poems are then arranged on a circular path, the diameter of which is

183
Boris Müller, “Poetry 03,” http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry03/.
184
An ancient code structure used in a range of mystical practices including Hebrew Kabalistic study and
Ancient Greek dream interpretation. It is evident as early as the eighth century BCE.
152

Fig. 29. Boris Müller, “Poetry on the Road,” 2003 Poster.
Esono.com

Fig. 30. Boris Müller, “Poetry on the Road,” 2006 Poster.
Esono.com

Fig. 31. “Poetry on the Road,” 2003 Poster detail.
Esono.com.

Fig. 32. Visualization of the poem “Herr von Ribbeck auf
Ribbeck im Havelland.” Esono.com
153
determined by the poem’s length; shorter poems have small-diameter circles (Fig. 30).
185

Finally, gray lines connect the words of each poem, with darker
lines representing patterns of language that recur throughout the
work. The resulting graph, stripped of words, looks like an image
of the motion and collisions of subatomic particles (Fig. 33).
186
It
reveals the poetry of the data itself—the way the words relate to
one another, recur, and build provides a new way of seeing the work.
While the project may appear to be self-contained, Müller has included an
interactive component: a web application for each year of the conference that allows
visitors to create their own visualizations. The 2006 application allows one to see one’s
poem (or anything one types into the text field) visualized in real-time—the rings
growing, the patterns becoming more complex as one types. As the program maps the
data of language into a series of curves and circles, it begins to look like an arcane form
of musical notation, a graphic score for a database, a poem that has grown and mutated
such that we know it, not by its own words, but by the paths of its connections to other
words and other poems. Müller’s treatment of poetry as data throughout the project
allows poems to take on a new shape, one that leaves behind any semblance of
transcendent meaning in favor of the abstract beauty of form. His and Thorpe’s projects
multiply the aesthetic pleasures and possibilities of poetry while simultaneously enacting

185
http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry06/. Figure 33 shows a detail from the visualization of the
poem “Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck im Havelland” by Theodor Fontane as visual explanation.
186
http://www.ssplprints.com/image.php?id=91676
Fig. 33. “Particle tracks, Big
European Bubble Chamber”
(BEBC), CERN, 1990.
Science and Society Picture
Library.
154
the sort of decentering computational constraints earlier writers strove for. Who is the
author of the text—the coder? The source code? The source of the words?
We have been tracking poets’ redefinition of their function through their
interaction with specific writing technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In each case, depictions of the “scene of writing” enable the writer to construct an
authorial identity. Meta-textual references to the writing medium like Cendrars’
typewriter, H.D.’s projections, Shirinyan’s Google searches, and Thorpe and Monson’s
Flickr index remind us of their authors’ presence, while allowing them to construct
themselves in a number of ways—not just as a liberal humanist unified subject. In each
case, changing conceptions of the self, which are influenced by a number of simultaneous
factors that include developments in science, technology, psychology, and art, necessitate
new definitions of the poet.
187
These redefinitions entail finding a new source for that
mysterious force known as “inspiration,” which becomes a contested term in the
twentieth century.
The work of new media writers tells us, as Adalaide Morris has suggested, “about
thinking and writing in a world increasingly reliant on databases, algorithms,
collaborative problem solving, instant retrieval and manipulation of information, [...] and
the ambient and nomadic aesthetics of a networked and programmable culture” (NMP
15). Many new media writers speak explicitly about the reconstruction of authorship
necessitated by contemporary digital technologies. Poet/programmers Brian Kim Stefans

187
Marita Sturken outlines shifting definitions of the modern and postmodern subject in relation to
technology in her essay “Mobilities of Time and Space.” Hayles provides a useful overview of the
theoretical standpoints that have been applied to digital media and the kinds of subjectivity they imply in
Electronic Literature, chapter three, “Contexts for Electronic Literature.”
155
and Darren Werschler Henry describe their own poems as “a dramatization of the
interaction of the individual with ‘dataflow’” in which the “lyrical subject” is not entirely
erased from the piece.
188
Werschler Henry explains that his text The Tapeworm Foundry
attempts to provide “a new model for poetic inspiration [... in which] [t]he writer
becomes a kind of switching node, channeling ideas and words in interesting (and
sometimes unsanctioned) directions” (29).
These redefinitions do not deny the presence of a writing individual, but they seek
to locate that individual within his or her historical context. In this way, they take part in
a lineage of definitions of the poet with access to information outside him or herself
whose very work consists in synthesizing that data and giving it form (isn’t this the
nature of poetry?). These include Wordsworthian “emotion recollected in tranquility,”
Baudelaire’s “kaleidoscope gifted with consciousness,” Marinetti’s “mechanical man
with replaceable parts,” Eliot’s catalyst entering a medium “in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and exciting ways,” Pound’s “consciousness disjunct,”
and Kenneth Goldsmith’s recent description of the poet as possessing “the expertise of a
secretary crossed with the attitude of a pirate,”
189
a fitting description of writing in the
remix era.
In the scene of writing invoked by the texts examined here, the computer mediates
between the author and the page, much like the typewriter and projector in earlier models.
Yet this mediation, as Carrie Noland has argued, is no less immediate than writing with a

188
Brian Kim Stefans, “potentially suitable for running in a loop,” Fashionable Noise: On Digital Poetics
(Berkeley: Atelos, 2003) p. 38.
189
Of course, many more definitions could be, and should be, inserted here.
156
pen and paper, which provide only “a fantasy of immediacy”
190
while representing the
artificial and carefully-honed skill of putting language into a socially-defined form. The
computer’s mediation is only as complete as the writer will allow. While it provides tools
for writing that undermine authorial control of the text, the computer does not necessarily
do this for everyone. Consider a recent poem by Gary Snyder, which appeared in The
New York Times this January in anticipation of the announcement of Apple’s portable
reader, the iPad. In “Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh,”
191
Snyder draws on many
tropes of human-machine interaction, by turns anthropomorphizing, bestializing, praising,
and dominating his laptop computer. The poem begins:
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers, (np)

The abrupt variations in tonal register and plain speech of these lines might mislead one
into thinking this a Flarf poem or conceptual work drawn at random from Google (or
Bing) if not for Snyder’s reputation as a former Beat poet living in “the California
backcountry [of the Sierra Foothills...] without electricity” (np), as John Markoff’s
introduction tells us. The poem’s speaker praises the immediacy he finds in the machine,
which connects his thoughts to the page directly “through [his] fingers.” In this poem
about mediation, however, Snyder purposefully keeps the focus on himself at the
machine in order to ensure readers never suspect the piece might write itself. The

190
Carrie Noland, “Digital Gestures,” NMP p. 222.
191
John Markoff, “Digital Muse for Beat Poet,” Tech Reflections, nytimes.com, January 22, 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/technology/personaltech/22sfbriefs.html
157
machine is fallible: “whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted
and vanish in a flash at ‘delete.’” It requires a kind of master-figure to operate it—one for
whom the computer is like a trusty dog: as he says in the last line of the poem, “I throw it
a scrap and it hums.” Snyder makes it clear that the machine, while a wonderful tool, is
no more powerful than the writer. “My computer and me are both brief in this world, both
foolish, and we have earthly fates,” he writes. The speaker of the poems has no illusions
about relinquishing his agency over the poem. In fact, as an ecopoet invested in
preserving the natural beauty of the pacific northwest, he has a political investment in the
very agency conceptualists and digital poets have often sought to undermine. Taking
responsibility for one’s words goes hand in hand for Snyder with taking responsibility for
one’s environment. His comparison of the clicking of the machine’s keys to “hail on a
boulder,” or of its fidelity to that of a dog, bring the machine back to the natural realm
from which his poetry springs, suggesting this poet’s allegiances are to the natural world,
rather than the machines on which we rely.
These notes, I hope, suggest that while poets choose the medium that speaks to
their social and historical moment,
192
the choice takes place along a continuum, rather
than a teleology. Digital media are not necessarily better able to represent contemporary
subjectivity nor to reflect the relationship the writer wishes to have with the reader and
text. The poets I have examined turned to technologies that tell us much about the
construction of the self and prevailing ideas about authorship at the time in which they
write. Digital poets and conceptualists provide one model of contemporary poetry in

192
In the words of Marjorie Perloff, “the artist or poet uses a particular medium not because it is ‘better’
than others but because it seems most relevant to his or her moment—currently, of course, the electronic
screen, with its enticing challenge to the printed book” (NMP 160).
158
response to the data cloud, but for many poets the computer is nothing more than a tool—
an amanuensis and not a collaborator. What their work shows us, however, is a desire to
displace agency onto the machine that persists from modernism to the present. When my
father compiled “War stings your rotten bombs” in 1967, he approached poetry as a
puzzle. While his classmates wrote programs for adding sums and calculating pi out to a
vast number of decimal places, he wanted to see what this new technology could do with
language instead of numbers. What he and other writers of computer poetry stumbled
upon was the relationship between these two materials, words and numbers, as kinds of
data around which meaning can be built, an index of information to be explored.
The hand again returns phantasmally in this metaphor. Index arises from the Indo-
European word root deik- or deig-, “to show, pronounce solemnly; also in derivatives
referring to the directing of words or objects.”
193
This root refers to signs and
signification, teaching and pointing. It gives us “digit, from Latin digitus, finger (<
‘pointer,’ ‘indicator’),” as well as “dictate,” and “indicate.” Even when the author hides
behind a cloud of data, he or she is present in patterns—a Steinian “system to
pointing.”
194

193
Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Word Roots (Boston: Houghton
Mifflin, 2000) p. 14.
194
Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1997) p. 3. First published New York:
Claire Marie, 1914.
159
CODA

This project looks closely at only a handful of the poets of the twentieth and twenty-first
centuries for whom technology has facilitated both their craft and their authorial identity. I can
envision other incarnations of this work that would probe the interregnum between H.D. and
today, exploring the mimeograph revolution of the late 1950s and telephone poetry of the late
1960s in order to draw on a wider range of devices and traditions than I explore here. This
project could also be pushed backward to explore earlier mediations including the printing press
and the advent of copyright in order to connect this work with current scholarship on the
ownership of ideas and the creative and critical commons. How does life in the data cloud
change our conception of literary ownership? Historically, a book’s text was considered an entity
distinct from its presentation and binding. Given digital reproducibility, are we returning to an
era in which literature has become separable from the media through which we consume it, or
are “books” marked in some way by their remediation among paperbacks, cell phones, personal
computers and e-readers? How have the intellectual and creative commons changed writers’
ideas of authorship, and to what extent has the free exchange and reuse of ideas with attribution
been with us from the start?
Such a range is outside the scope of this dissertation, but I hope that by bridging the
different writers I have managed to examine, I have begun to outline a network of threads
surrounding poetry, technology, and the mediation of subjectivity and authorship which other
scholars will continue to untangle. Within a quarter century of Cendrars’ poems about the
Remington, the typewriter had given way to new writing technologies. What “little accessories
of modern life” does the next half-century hold for us? I look forward to seeing these questions
unfold in the coming years and taking part in the dialog they stir.

160
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168
APPENDIX A

POMEGRANATE-EATER

169

For BB

170
POMEGRANATE-EATER — CONTENTS

Self Portrait as Radiant Host 173

I. FEAST OF INGATHERING
Quince: An Era 176
Naming 177
Date Music 178
Wood Nexuses I 179
The Nectarine’s Second Sight 180
Weeds 181
Breadfruit 182
Landscape with Priapic Courtship 183
At the Bottom of the Apple 184
Baking Blind 185
Mulberry Bait 186
A Combray Garland 187
Whisper, Nispero 189
Indexes Woo Us 190

II. NERVE AND BURNT SUGAR
Ablution 192
Apophasis 193
Dear Sore 194
Spy 195
Compass Course 196
Some Dust in You 197
Urgency 198
Small Letters 199
Deflagration 200
Dear Drawn 201
Cubist Landscape with Immolation 202
Night Watch 203
To Death (the Pine-Eater) 204
[Heaviness] 205
[Chill] 206
[Readiness] 207
Dear Ally 208

171
III. WINDY ORCHARD ITCH
Voir Dire 210
At the Virtual Garage Sale of My Life 211
Persephone: A Confession 212
Hera 213
Ophidian Orpheus 214
Endymion: A Rape 215
Six from the Dreambook 216
Making Sense 219
Stashed Evidence: Selected Victorian Gentlemen 220
Principles of Resonance 222
Openings 223
Pomegranate: Rimon’s Rhyme 225

*
Notes 226
Acknowledgements 227

172

Show her the pomegranate, in her armor of Cordova leather: she is bursting
with future, holds herself back, condescends....And, letting us catch just a
glimpse of her possible progeny, she smothers them in a dark-red cradle. She
thinks earth is too evasive to sign a pact of abundance.

—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Tangerine-eater

173
SELF PORTRAIT AS RADIANT HOST

After a Painting by Julie Heffernan

Ravenous in pelts of prior selves, I step
out of my vestments
into ravishment. I lay table
for my own
commensal multitudes.

Full-length when most aware,
armed in offering
or pleasure, I could spiral
at any moment,
shift my fruited baldachin skirt.

My guests as much my hostages,
my home as much hospice
as grove,
this is my favorite role:
I’ll be their server.

They come to be nearer the river,
its alliterative languor,
call me Brookweed, Cripple,
Ghost. They approach
to hear what’s sibilant
in my libant crops.

By what prodigal pedigree
was I rendered so adorned?

It began with a rupture mistaken
for a late-descending
testis. I turned color
from citron to thistle, my skin
regimental
(never uniform).

I brooded,
forced to live under a bed,
and there I billowed,
never learned to contain
my mutation.

I grew hinge-dark, knew rapture
as the taste of broken
skin. Lean in, I’m not contagious,
just hospitable.
It’s bright here
and everything grows.

174
We’re lit from within
by systems of exchange.
The feast of ingathering
is laid.
What we love
is not the rose,
but the smell of its decay.

175

I. FEAST OF INGATHERING

176
QUINCE: AN ERA

Bless me, I am translated somewhere
between Hebrew and French: chabush, a
little mouth, I’m styled for my delectable
exhale. But call me Cydonian Rose, my
family does. I come from a dwarfing stock;
we keep things short. I’m the last of
Aphrodite’s dears. I’m wedding luck. I’m
hearts. I’m another bad domesticated fruit, a
little tart, packed in, preserved in capucine
or copper yellow. Like quoins, I wedge; like
coins, I dazzle (Atalanta lost it). Yet, for all
my bitters, I can cure with my astringent
seeded smack. Listen, I’m the lion vile that
hath here deflowered my dear. I’m evil
livid, that lion vile, I meant to say, devoured.

177
NAMING

This night’s errant wish: to not be orant, but cormorant,
cornute-beaked perfection, a feathered venus
who comes up with a grouper in her mouth. In the orient
she’s an ancient lure—not ornate, as the sparkling jelly-
spike used now with such aplomb, but a naked
swish in water too sharp for escape. These aren’t
your average birds-of-prey, they stay close
by when tethered.

Does it matter that this is what I’d like, bedraggled,
wet and molting, lips a cupid’s-bow
capable of all kinds of new sounds:
to ker and kraw from kitchen to bedroom, to bring
you fish, to peck the leash? Gomphrena flower
mistaken for clover, a badger does not become
a bird. Take what you’re given from thighs to chin—
take it in.

178
DATE MUSIC

To be pitted: whistled through with wind enough to anchor every
anther-fleck. The daily drama: keeping time. Do tell of the sharp note
doubt makes in the lay, how gold-bronze turns tamarack or snuff,
how heat’s details draw out your sweet debut. Be guileful, dauntless,
slight, adroit. Regret orr, my jewel, translucent and unknown.
Curated, handled, hand-picked: from the first, your bearing’s blown.

179
WOOD NEXUSES I

Your task is to gamble on limited
light and space and face the
meadow, alkali mallow, let light
lick your basal rosette and bloom
bottle thistle through your bearded
creeper.

Here harm comes to gorse
and harmel, desert broomrape
and field bindweed
—bad seeds—
leafy spurge on a two by three foot stage
where Malta starthistle rears a medusa head,
milking musk thistle
for nimblewill.

What must thrive: povertyweed
and puncturevine,
ditches of jointvetch and blue panicgrass
taking advantage
of all this rough comfrey,
beaten by shattercane.

Skeletonweed, tanglehead, rise up and bless
the velvet mesquite.
This is the witchgrass hour,
so switch your yellow foxtail
to stun.

180
THE NECTARINE’S SECOND SIGHT

Given a chance with the nacre, I might
try on litchi’s torose skin. I’m no tyro
with my tawnier hide and tourniquet
cleft. Look into my lone narine: a
nocturne with a hollow tone—the windy
orchard itch. It’s the necro in me, thing
I’m meant to overcome, my inner blue.
It’s why I blush. I’m better fresh,
though just an altered peach. More
freestone than peachblow, I lack the
hue, but get the nectar. Ask me, how do
I play? I cleave and cleave the alveolar
stone, my pit, amarevole.

181
WEEDS

In the wild grass
In the mannerist style

clover, chickweed, crabgrass, plantain

I was strong
I played strings

they called me bad luck bird, musky rider,
strangebody, screw

straggler, strangler, a seed pod coils
into a feathered dart

at twenty, I’d been up to my neck in soil
for centuries, my skin itched

I came out beak first and fast
I’m into pin grass

its art, the friendly shiver: sending spikes
it chokes the others out

fingers, faena, fracture, saffron

thinks thank you
thinks another tattoo
this time cut deep

182
BREADFRUIT

Custard-white and thick, unripe, you’re
caustic, holding back latex. Why not say
yes, spondulix, take me, I’m easy money?
Practiced in primage with your green
exterior, your freckled flesh, like shekels,
adds up. What’s pelf but another skin?
What’s a luckpenny? Fruit of flinch. Spare
me, painfruit, you’re brick and rivet and
lime. Blighted by Bounty, you let yourself
be taken. Free, you let them, all ahem,
disperse you. The myth: god’s green
back, a tree, head fruit to feed a nation.
Who needs kale or cabbage now? It’s
bread makes the world — —

183
LANDSCAPE WITH PRIAPIC COURTSHIP

The satyr is in love with Cynthia; he visits her mother’s garden daily.
Mummy married a sailor, forbade her to see An Officer and a Gentleman,
so you know a god-thing was out of the question.
The family portrait sags.

The sitter locks the windows, but the suitor won’t be dissuaded.
In a fit of madness he eats the wisteria like grapes and licks the forsythia
blossom-bare.

Insatiable for things floral, his hoof prints in the sweet alyssum, the satyr
roots in the honey-buds, disrupts the carpet beds. He stutters.
Each fruit he touches explodes to over-ripe, then rots.
His earth-beard tickles,

Cynthia says, fingering the TV’s static. Poulticed to keep fever off, a girl,
or most, will see herself half-empty. In migraine, eyelights scatter and twitch: her brain
radioing for help.

Wishing to be Doric, she turns loricate, lost in transmission. She’s Victorian (it’s hard
to be proactive with a mother so protective). Cynthia hears him calling her out
of her private cowering, but fears the casing’s teeth. Her mother turns on the sprinkler,
so the satyr drinks,

and, like a setter, his ruddy body leans: he can’t help but point her out. He stalks the garden
turning soil with his hooves, then tunes in for Cynthia’s evening broad-cast.
I’m his wentletrap, she says, he’s going to climb my rare bone staircase
to the sky.

One day he sucks the snail shells dry, the next, the jasmine smells like urine
or eucalyptus and someone’s crushed the saxifrage. The aloe’s languets lose
their spines. The garden smells of sulfur or of sewage, the rosemary and roses
of exhaust, but by day three

of Mummy’s watch, the satyr, adjusting his sautoir, makes his sortie. She hangs the laundry
out and leaves a saucer of milk for Mr. Red on the retaining wall: porcelain scraping stone.
Cynthia prickles.

Mummy says C’s hardened, so she takes the ice packs off, grinds honeybush
for tea. She wants to eat cut grass. If the garden’s gone out of me, she thinks,
then I’ll go to the garden. It’s morning. She smells the doughnuts frying.
What a tease: the deep

plumeria smell of oil pretending to be light—it may glow amber, but it’s molten stone.
She’s always preferred the dark and the sea. The garden’s gone all heavy: the fruit,
water-logged—a deity will do that.

Cynthia lets the starlings have it. The satyr’s left his calling card in Mum’s azalea: a live
butterfly winks beside her hero’s credo: For a Good Time, Fall. The other side
he’s plagiarized a bit: This Too Shall Pass, Go Chew Some Ice. Cynthia buries the billet-doux
in her blouse.

184
AT THE BOTTOM OF THE APPLE

Why don’t you take your skirt off, stay
a while? You don’t have to be an apple
anymore, you could be opal if you’d
shed your skin, though it has some eye
appeal—you are all red épaule. You
hate that too, you’d rather be appalled,
scrubbed down from freckle to label—
opal was close, then—you want to be
open, I’ve known that all along. Ach,
you won’t be hoppled. Take it off.

185
BAKING BLIND

This undertaking—wrestling with the spillage,
with the piqued crust that heals
over fingered wounds,

with plucked fruit peeled and pared—
a chance at meticulous grace.

Held hotly in the wherefore by the baker’s
skein of bees, it blisters, boldens to umber,
vents a vaporous shriek.

In its little solitude, then, twelve fortunes apple-tart,
twelve intricate, edible fears.

A thumb to every flute—a clamor of blades.
At a loss for fancy words, the tongue,
bitter stone, repeats lemon

makes the white stay. No matter what I fill it with,
the pie is always birds.

186
MULBERRY BAIT

Mûrier, you multiple fruit, sorosis (sweet
association of dark chambers), your catkin
parts synch up, blossom in stage whispers.
More? You purple meltingly, moored, a
mudhook, always looking all ways with
your stylish antennae. No field fruit you,
many-flowered, praised most tart: a tout
à l’heure. Tout fait food for (silk) worms.
Milked by your bookmaker, you’d rather
be elsewhere, become your eponymous
whelk. You want to cut flesh with your
tongue, lick the barnacle out of its shell.
I’m not afraid. It’s much to mull.

187
A COMBRAY GARLAND

Selections from Moncrieff and Kilmartin’s translation of Swann’s Way

1 I used to receive | my mother’s heart | entire,
without | blemish | burnished | to luminescence
of | apple-trees | no trace

2 the trees | kept their | substance |
almost horizontal flames | touched by the sun’s | chestnut |
the leaves | ablaze | red flowers |
of a tree that itself remains | like bricks | against the sky |
a coloured map | an oriflamme |
the shore of the lake. Here | would appear

3 light, breaking | the trees | would skillfully | chisel |
trunks and branches |

a single | liquid | contour | of sun |
as though beneath the sea | leaves | velvet | scattered

4 tattered | forget-me-not | garland encircling the | luminous | iris,
flourishing | sword-blades | over | water |
The absence of Mlle | the terrible risk |
to see | to avoid | to make her acquaintance

5 veins in | silk | blossomed out | strawberry-flowers |
dog-roses | climbing | the heat of | intervals | of wind | the hawthorns—
breathing in | trying to fix | the rhythm which | light |
can play | on a stray poppy

6 sunlight | on | slumbering water | insects
dreaming | silent reaches of | sky | almost vertical |
the longing and | terror | of making her acquaintance |

Mlle | was biting | me, surprised | I found
the whole path throbbing with | hawthorn

7 a single poppy hoisting | slender rigging | scarlet |
a stranded boat which | cries out | “The Sea!” |
the hawthorns | look | away | make a screen

188
with | flowers | to float across | this mysterious
longing | we feel on seeing | a painting
of which | we have heard only | the colours

8 reading | in the heat | I could see |
limpid currents | mouldering | cress |

quickened | running | flowers, purple
and red | on either side of her |

the landscapes | I read were | more vividly | spread

189
WHISPER, NISPERO

What’s that you’ve got in your locket, Shesek,
your shiny, five-chambered chasse? You hold
your stones close to the chest, hide your lack.
You’d best cooperate, Loquat, we know your
sobriquets: in Japan, Early Red, Tanaka; in India,
Fire Ball; in New Zealand, Mrs. Cooksey; and in
California, Eulalia, Placentia, Premier, you star
in ornamental border films, abandon your old
world name (Wooly Grape), and try to measure
up. Let’s talk. Tonight’s lockup: Chesscake and
Clusterfruit. They both peached. Confess, you
hate to be the roper or the leak—loose lips, you
know. Instead, you took look-out. You’re afraid
to get too close. Listen, Ruby, you’re the rube.
You cut in with toughs who won’t be cleft.
When they’re on the graft, only one con will do:
Success.

190
INDEXES WOO US

A leafy spurge listens. The scarlet gaura heaves.

But try this on, feathertop, we could be thistles on the face of nature driven in by wind and walking.

Clad in giant ragweed, we drive biobarrier back.

Given black nightshade, we’ll cage all strangers.

I call my common crupina slenderflowered thistle for her stolen stolon.

I call you tansy ragwort, pet petiole, peppercress.

I have a giant foxtail, I’m a smartweed.

I have a hundred hands for digging into air.

It is the seedlings which suffer most.

Little whiskey for crimson fountaingrass, little swill for ladysthumb.

Loosestrife, lift a stipule, vivify this weaver.

My dodder and biddy-biddy make baby’s breath. Nothing phases.

Out of twenty species growing on a little plot of turf, nine species perished.

Perennial wild red rice rustle.

Quick, quicksilver couchgrass, quitchgrass: rising rhizomes in the risk garden.

Scotch broom’s toxic burnished stalks.

Someone calls us all with care, shakes glyphosate from our hair.

Striving to the utmost to increase in numbers.

191

II. NERVE AND BURNT SUGAR

192
ABLUTION

The real history of consciousness starts with one’s first lie.
— Joseph Brodsky

Each new beginning pulls us up from darkness
into matter. With fibs, we’re fortified, our friends approach

by ladder and, once they’ve scaled our fractures, admire
the precious wreckage below.

Our history is written in the strata that support us:
stories shoring up our sense of self.

If we each dig back to our own tectonic shelf
we might find the white-hot poker, the body’s constable,

the truth: I enjoy being made uncomfortable.
It’s not dreams, but the constant getting up

I like. The liar is instrumental in playing out
her personal pain. What else when you’ve done wrong

but to come clean? It will take centuries
before I learn to speak plain.

193
APOPHASIS

Something flutters in the sky’s heart—a cloudscape of purpled rows—
and I begin to see blue at the edge of the text. The wind is
uncomfortable with the angle of the light. It moves sky’s moving
parts—the wilting white of far off water. What’s rupture but a glorious
descent? Something drifts—a fluid spark, a brilliant fissure. I run
across the grass, a trail of green gone bright from being turned. You
board the windows up with boxes. I nail furniture to the porch. The dog
and cat run off. The squirrels cache acorns in the alcove. We’re so
ready to get wet we scorch. It always happens this way: you’re shinning
up the drainpipe and the woods are out of focus. The windows swell.
The sky turns on its armor. The air gathers up to shake. I’m worried
about my mother, but the family’s gone—there’s only us. We don’t
discuss it. The clouds ache in their arched hull. You’re on the roof
swallowing nails when I remember I’ve left my book beneath the
hollow limb. The horizon is all flaming pool. My eyes keep falling
shut. What whips us are the fluttering hands of trees turned palm-up for
the rain. The front door slams. I yell up through the screen, I’m at the
point in life where I have nothing to confess. Okay, you shout back,
then do it.

194
DEAR SORE

I’m not avoiding you or your aura of blown
salt. I’ve been eroding your compact language.

Thorny after our last conversation, I considered
your error—you haven’t given yourself

enough rope. Your character needs danger.
The world turns over and falls asleep

before we’ve reached the man enisled. The word
I’d like to see in stanza eight is “arrows.”

We savor the rare and the sharp and serve Sauternes
with Stilton in summer. Therein the problem

with letters (or the point)—we’re severed.
Unavailable for comment, when we return

our work’s been ravished and no one knows.
This reader dearly wants to take a risk.

Yours,
Swerve

195
SPY

Looking closely burns. Bent double
by the birds-of-paradise, I brace,

but am not broken. This spider spins
his floss to any insect who’ll have it.

Alone in the aloe, no prey, he is
all ullage, longing for agon.

In the diamond, another diamond—
my face reflected as flame in his back:

an anagoge agog, a pain, a panicle blossoming,
each petal sharp enough to stop all talk.

Some days I think I too could fall in
with anyone.

I’m all for the constant heart, but I heard birds,
I saw the open open, glance gold, and I limped.

It hurts less to imagine being slowly undone.
Maybe someone saves our selvage.

Experiments have been conducted.
Given hash, a spider leaves his web half-

finished. On Benzedrine, his apertures uneven,
sides incomplete, the spider is in frenzy. But on

caffeine he weaves the oddest snowflake—
uncentered, a network of crystal splinters

through which a hundred
undosed flies might pass.

A proof: there’s beauty in infidelity—nature’s truth.
That much I know, and knowing warps the woof.

196
COMPASS COURSE

Sleepless and skyborne between touch
and touchdown, I crook my neck
to the violin of absence.

In the book of the man beside me,
the earth is infinitwisted, halved,
then convex as a lens.

He reads on gravity, and I, too,
am a little high, both dazed
and watchful, wishing

you, moon-suited, were here to fill the space
above my shoulder. I’m asteroid—I read
his title for assurance: It Must Be

Beautiful: The Rediscovery of Gravity—
could be a mourner’s guide. This fluke
of language recalls the möbius

stretch of freeway between Santa Nella
and Bakersfield: for miles in March
each overpass a swarm of

swallows diving from mud nests as though
really to hit the road this time. Each
frenzy, each busking flock

loves falling before flight. Up here,
adhamant, I cling to my branch
and don’t look out

the window. It must be beautiful. It must.
My fear is true enough to steer by.
Love, look toward this go-go star.

Tonight I claw my way across the sky.

197
SOME DUST IN YOU

I.

Take this to the front of the line—
this self-box threaded with piano wire.

I could play you until you sang out like a kettle,
rub your ear to resonance.

My louse, my blouse, my typographic slip,
maybe you are to be worn, and worn through,

finger-marked from inside out,
molded to my every rib.

At night, sternum to scapula,
I knock but can’t come in.

II.

Enter Adonis, quivered, carrying wine.
Our first encounter: shadow-boned,

I’ve never seen such calves,
pearled moon-melons grown too great.

New leaves turn. We build a cantilever truss
of wire and shadow and sound.

Over and over he says I’ve gone totally blind.
Keep going I shrug into the dark,

then hang him up—each part
burn-ready in feather fetters.

III.

By winter water will have us. This time
I come to stay and to return your arrows.

I learn to name the earthmark constellations
of your back. I want to spill through you like gray.

Ourselves unchanged, the first myth ends
because after all the bridging I can step

no closer than this: a distance can be infinitely
halved. Your body’s always in the way.

198
URGENCY

What takes us apart:
shadow-breath of a bulb kept close to the wall,
this trying to fingerprint each thing we touch.

I wait for you to write myself under
your fingernails, to ring myself
through your dark knuckle hair.

The trick is to see things as they are:
locked boxes, chain coils, a wealth
of hooks we anchor to.

This thing we’re building is a room, no more.
A small space to stem the hurt.

199
SMALL LETTERS

The earth turns and the moon
slowly backs away—
an argument we’ll never see the end of.
Freed for summer, we fortify ourselves.
Have you been moated by the one you love?

O

Strung pennants hang
over bandstands and car lots. Most nights
I’m ice-green: colder than deep ocean,
though not so dark.

O

What becomes of us when the sea pulls out
that final time? How will the mirage-sails,
mired at such distance, find their way to shore?
Our sandcastles will still erode, days will lengthen
into days, we’ll always have a face to face.

O

A ring is a link in a chain. It might
weigh down any hand. And why weigh
anchor when the sand’s so warm? The ocean
scares me. The beach is prickly.

O

The shore is mostly spilth:
what we throw out never leaves our orbit.
Besides moon, nothing else comes close
except the occasional coal casino:
a meteor or its kin.

O

We’re not lonely hearts. We stick
to ourselves in the heat. We stick
apart. July’s all swelter and we’re mostly
water. Unlike Earth, we deplete.

O

If sunset’s sky’s lunula, the moon’s
a lamina. We scale one another to reach it.
What are rings for—small trapeze
for hands? Terminal bands on birds?
We circle what we cannot speak.

200
DEFLAGRATION

Clung to by night’s blistering
star-wedge, we edge closer,
kept apart by touch.

Spun upon us: moonlight bent,
as we are, at the window’s
chip-tongued waist.

What name is given
to this friction? Bed’s
debris of spark and fray?

Call it fissure: span
of fire where we curve,
elbow, cleave, and settle,

working back and forth a breach.
Even in sleep we test our mettle.

201
DEAR DRAWN

I climb all night with you on my back,
then turn to offer you half my éclair.

I’ve found no clarity here, but ease
in shifting my joints. I’d like to show you how

I pull myself apart.
Between one dream and the next, I count backward:

dwa, jeden, you, my passport to doubt.
In twill or in two, still I introgress, a kind of hiding from,

this double exposure. These days I’m always of two

mines. I color more deeply than ever, double-struck.
I’ve found a use for the twine: mastered the twofold fugue and bind.

My dual plea: be phantomed if you like, but please
be felt. We fold in our desires, like buried rhymes,

till each expires.

Yours,
Worn

202
CUBIST LANDSCAPE WITH IMMOLATION

I.

Outside Coalinga, lonely, we
dream mostly of burning fruit—
of orchards, fields, and bogs.
What’s odd, the way we parcel
out and order up? The spatial
tricks we play on ourselves to
make one another laugh? These
are places to lose a body, patterns
that trample us.

II.

Lately, he dreams only of
striking glass. It irks, the way a
windshield’s two dimensions
press inside against out. The
world’s action goes flat in the
face of this screen and as you
pass the almond trees trees trees
extrude. We are shot through
with branches. There is no pause
to these relentless rows, their
endless overgrowth.

III.

This town a locked-down ship, I
dream nightly of pushing back
against flaming cat-tails, light-
reticulated clouds, and moving
off. The landscape, hatcheted or
hatched, projects. It breathes out
slag. It wants us dead. I would
not have licked ash from between
the lines if the words had stayed
fixed. What is it to be without my
pyrotechnics? The rain is always
aiming, the lake a lifted flock.
Have mercy, he replied, let me
consume you.

203
NIGHT WATCH

Outside, a mocker bristles in his cording.
This thing I’ve been avoiding: sleep’s scrutiny.

The bird and I are bridled, awake, a vinculo.
Our avodah—attraction. I’d like to play

dream’s ocarina and do, do not.
I’d like to put my lips where they might

make good on this languor. We’re wide with rapture.
We have a sweet rapport—we repeat

our songs and silences of courtship. I too have traps:
each cup ring a clapnet, each nocturne a snare.

Wise, O wise, the mockingbird sings I’m OK,
kay, sharp cricket, sharp saw. Night, I’m awful.

I want another chance to eat up all the light.

204
TO DEATH (THE PINE-EATER)

Tundra love, my borderless sea, from above
you are so beautiful and impenetrable I call you Lapland.

The blue encyclopedia says you are peopled
by compact, muscular nomads and reindeer

are the cattle of Lapland. Standing behind my poem,
harness in hand, you want me to climb,

again, the glacier of my old desires and see
my absurd reflection. You shadow me.

As always, I am ashamed, licking the feet
of your waves, so I ask the snow-stoled barren,

Why do you want to hurt me? Which of us
was first to choose our weapon?

The page replies, I won’t let you rake the sands
across my body or drag me over the fells.

This, the bright ground says, is art—sincerest
artifice—craft’s infarction. You are two months

without light in which I grow slowly red-hearted,
a toothsome hardwood ring-blurred by time’s

five-seasoned hesitation. There’s a little Lap,
as the boy said to the sea, in each of us.

I am two months without dark in which I torture
myself through perversely willful misreading

of all the canonical texts: this one says
love survives death and Mephisto’s mouth

tastes of Lapland pine. All this time
I thought it was you eating my heart,

but it was the iron ore. To the north: an ocean.
To the south: no definite boundaries. When it gets

this cold we learn to speak with frost’s mouth
that stings but leaves no mark. The encyclopedia

was wrong—I am the cattle of Lapland.
You always manage to make me climb.

205
[HEAVINESS]

The lemons are alive with falling
bees, pucker-drunk, returning less
and less to the tallest branches,
their wing-song a series of nested
circles. We are rocked in the sheer
echolalia that can’t be drone. We
are drained and drawn in—we are
drowned.

Each phone call is harder than the
last. We return less and less to the
list. We are hard-pressed to speak
of this—instead, we tend Harlan’s
rosebushes, his trees, and sleep
each night in infinite regress, go
deep and deeper into night’s abyss.
We miss appointments, see distress
in each bee’s flower-faltering. We
tune in natural frequencies.

Our friends unshell our faults like
bitter seeds. They have advice.
They think we want them to know
best, but we want only to keep
falling from the nest. Listen: each
stamen’s a staff to which the music
cleaves. We’re told the eccentric
bee is not bereaved—a pause
between two notes is just a rest, of
which each rusty song has many.
We half-hear, watch the honeybees
stuff their pockets—our cerated
hearts will not be turned. The
body’s emulsion for each day’s
impressions. When we’re grave, we
are not dust—we’re wax.

206
[CHILL]

You make no fierce apology, prying loose
the drag and spark from my undercarriage. Crouched

in the parking lot’s fluorescent glare,
you are fast as cast bronze and as cold to touch—

your back’s hard curve bends away,
tetchy, sinking, from my hand. You’re thinking

We shouldn’t have left. I’m thinking
Piece of shit car. Your father comes from the hospital

to help. With him you are electric wire snips.
The asphalt shines. I step on all its laugh lines. I am thinking,

sub rosa, Rough hands, rough hands, then
hourly, hearken, hardly, hart. Careful, you say, coyotes.

I’m thinking you need a jacket. Your father
wrenches the splashguard free and goes. We’re standing

closer than we have in days. I’m thinking of lyrics
that shatter. You cover your face, Goddamn this piece of shit car.

207
[READINESS]

The finished painting is like that […] It’s all frozen in the pool, and then on the very top somebody comes and
skates. The surface has this history, and that is time, the time of the painting.
— Wendy Sussman

We had a heart.
It was a little heart and beat
lightly—like light on the surface—
to be let in.

We had measured and measured
the box: hold this, please,
please take the bitter bite, please
brighten or blot out the light.

We waited by the window.
Ranunculi wilted on the nightstand,
weighted down by light. The box
had been prepared.

The heart would not be repaired:
it was inspired. It breathed in light.
We heartened then. We brightened at the core,
we levitated, took up oars, we took on light.

We had a heat.
It was a little bear and feet
trod over us, unlike light. And this,
we learned to lift.

208
DEAR ALLY

I’ll bet you expect another love letter.
Here’s news: I’ve given up Narcissus, turned

my gaze from inside out. I’ve been feverish this week—
all flesh. The trees are ripe with thrush

succumbing to the heat. They drop their soft
vibrato like dark berries—dazed. You’d love how,

given water, they rattle in your hand then spring
like scattered paper from the road—such advocates

for air—leaving their oily indicia.
It’s a rush—one’s fingertips inflamed. I mean

I hate the way I shudder and flush each time I find
the first three goddamned letters of your name.

I’ve never felt so ready to be touched.
You have done this country an excellent service.

Yours,
Allay

209

III. WINDY ORCHARD ITCH

210
VOIR DIRE

I’d like to make a statement:
I’m scar tissue, seams

for every action at home and abroad,
an implant for each event.

I’m intimate with cotton—chin
and forehead, false fronts, staples—

the next scheme was to tuck
my knees. I was the minority

whip; I’m well-versed in submission.
My body’s immaterial. Exhibit A:

my botched dentition. Because I
was nearsighted, I made a handy

ditch bank blade—they dragged
my face across the furrows. Someone

said the law has not been dead, it needs
to be awakened. I’m saying I’ve got

information. I was close enough
to smell rubble on my page. Whereas,

I’m saying, whereas without music
we still understand the measure,

whereas pressure to a skull produces
monsters, whereas treble, trouble,

scrapple, whereas filings, whereas
firmament, whereas my flaws reflect

like sequins, whereas my body’s
a caveat, a calculus of incisions, I was

a very important person. Please,
I’d like to make a statement.

211
AT THE VIRTUAL GARAGE SALE OF MY LIFE

I. THIS OLD MAN DOESN’T LIKE THE PRICES

Better in a skirt or earrings, he laughs, it’s all in the wearing. Clothes are
for staring. Wouldn’t Pride be here to help me with the purge? Then why not
wait awhile on the white veranda, why not sell my moment with the moon? And
that’s what’s wrong with girls my age: too many, too much boy in them. His
hands on a childhood Breyer horse: What’s worse, the chip or the missing
bridle? It’s all part of the battle, but I won’t be bargained with. Most men his
age despise a cup concealed. They like a creeping fig. They want sex wysiwyg,
as it was in the days of their fathers. Nice belt, would you take a dollar?

II. DIDO BUYS THE BIBELOTS
Not just my Easy Oven, my childish faith in insect heaven, my ribbons and
attachments, my ladybones lazarus, my lookaway, my scabs and hankies, my
underdonements. Half-buried curios curled up against the night, its inscrutable
bumps, the cards in all their trumpery, a trick of light, a trifle, a box of notions
saved from a summer flirtation with sales. My scales—to weigh or dress in—my
Smith and Wesson oil. The collected blues, the hungry sound of leaves on shoes,
my sad amazement, my nod awake, my every over- and understatement, my
ambition. My applet, anchor, elbow, ampersand, and all in good condition.

III. THE AFTERNOON WEARS ON IN FRENCH
The children are hyperlinked—cliquez ici! cliquez ici!—they drag their
mother by purse-handles, shudder out electric shocks. She sits to rest: No place
like cyberspace. Her feet in pumps are plump as sausages. This crowd could
swallow me whole. Past twelve, they think you’re giving it away. I drew the
signs that brought them here. I take a lot of namespace. My analyst says I’m
inhabited, suggests a flying leap. That’s not for sale—make me an offer. Have a
hopscotch or a domino. Oh linger, haulers hollering at brats, I want your
company, is that so strange? A voice inside reminds: You can’t make change.

IV. PLEASE STOP SPRAYING THE CALGON
This chat is public. We’re airing out the dirty laundry. We’re bonded.
We’re making deals. If it wasn’t washed you can ask a dollar more. Things will
go easier if you believe they aren’t yours. There are no keepers (life’s a bowl of
peepers, watch how you lean—your cookie’s showing) we’re glorified baby-
sitters. What I want is to be taken off my hands. Everything’s up for grabs. I
won’t be undersold or overtaxed. Come close. We have herbal healing. We have
one hundred kinds of feeling. I’ll be here until there’s nothing left. Our lot’s to
be outlived by gourmet pans. Take the datebook, I’m finished making plans.

212
PERSEPHONE: A CONFESSION

His stare was maddening. I chose the hardest thing to eat
among the wheat-cakes and the shriveled dates.
It doesn’t help you’d never let me have one
after my incident with grapes. I thought The end.
She’ll never have to wash my clothes again, so what’s
a sanguine stain or two? At least I spat
the seeds (I thought he’d find me crass. Surprised, I learned
the opposite was true). You can’t imagine—

it’s as though a curtain rose, and when he entered
flowers burned, water putrefied,
took on a dead vase smell. The air: a mire
that made me pant. Then buds and all, he threw me
in the punt. I spent a week on Lethe all bent
on going home, complained about his smell, his rumpled
face and, once arrived, I hove for months
around the place without a single
craving.

Really, the underworld’s a perfect place for girls
like me who never tan. I’ve got myself
a man who’s into melodrama, what I always
dreamed. Of course, it took some getting used to,
living at the self’s thorned center. I’m all nerve
and he’s burnt sugar, bellicose,
a burl in silk I like to run my fingers over.
It’s clever to be someone’s claritas—I think

these trips have done me good. Each time I’m home I find
with every moment I fall in love with a world
I can never possess entire. The loss is always
fresh, and when I come awake it’s always
as from death, a huff, a fist-tight edge
that brings me
out of the wold and into
the willful.

213
HERA

Her greeting on the soccer field, a hush-hasty, swallowed ‘lo,
withered my trumpet flower and I folded in like a feathered fan.

Ungodly plain with her small face like skim-milk bee-stung,
but lovely where cow-like—the glossy eyes—I like in his lovers
what reflects myself; but I won’t share my epithet.

He shivered and flicked away a halo of horseflies.
On the other side of the field, the children began not touching.

I pressed my heel into the turf again and again with my trademark
precision. My husband jingled moonily, so I asked him
to invite her for dinner or a weekend because if I saw her, he could not

see her, though I knew she would not want this from her dopey Oh and Uh.

With her listless invalid beauty, her need for a herding hand, who
could not feel sorry for such a beast? I tightened his hitch
on the goal post. The other parents mingled, grazing

at the buffet, and she hoofed away in flats. Gus, whom I asked to watch her,
winked along with the sequins on his vest. He looked sleepy,

but I couldn’t let it go. I followed her to the dip and watched
her chew and chew a piece of celery. Was this ignorance or spite? I wanted
to bite her, but instead, I poked her with the pin-end of my gadfly brooch. She bolted.

He’d had too much scotch and hung his arms around my neck for peace.
My peacock molted. We all dragged ourselves across the grass.

214
OPHIDIAN ORPHEUS

Have you never wanted to be hurt or dreamt the flash of lash on skin,
or stood by fish-stalls overlong for the beheading and the smoke?

I’ll show you how to play, come by some time—the place is mine, she’s always
in and out. We never drink together; it just breaks the tapster’s heart.

Put your thumb there and she sings—this means it’s time to turn.
I’ve learned to see with my hands. This dance is my favorite—the velvet chords.

Look: flick-tail, contrapposto, fret, the room’s black water, our bracelets are
stars. Imagine being an Ophelia instead—shudderstep through the river’s tatting.

It was this love of texture led me learn to pluck with my teeth.
What delicacy? As long as it ends with music and a throng of girls I’m pleased.

So I stumble on a note, there’s satisfaction in graceful
recovery—you win them that way.

I’m famous here—they know me from my early days. The old ones
buy me fruity drinks. I go both ways, my boy,

this whole life’s been a two-way street from dust to sheets, but no one seems to mind.
If it’s the moue I love, is that so wrong? And her hair—my sizzling brand,

my fire-snap rope and handlegrip. In bone-black stays, she’s good with a whip.
If you’d been torn this much, you’d fray.

215
ENDYMION: A RAPE

New cool night (waterslick quarry, wetaqua, raw silk)
leans you into nickeldark shadow.
You (a wakened, eaten-up thing gone slack)
taken till she shifts a hip, seismic.

Expect a new cosmic suit:
yellow moon a mitt adrip with stars.
Cusp of moon quick,
ecstatic in thin ink,
a spin, kinetic, lonely,
that could pin you
where the goats, unmilked, skim grass.

This her coming: a wash of thunder.

216
SIX FROM THE DREAMBOOK

The Dreambook said Dear, you’re poor
in the ways of love. Beware sharing recipes,
the ladle means risk of exposure—
you’re prone to spill over. The lake
and trees bespeak a struggle of morals
against passion, overcoming which
will yield remuneration. The fire foretells luck
in business, and to feel dizzy indicates
a strong sense of numbers. Walking quickly
portends a small but valuable inheritance.
The pocket betokens secrets or a gift
of tinned fruit. The receipt
implies early retirement. What about
the piano? Opportunity approaches.
Make sure the door is open. So I shut it.

*

My Dear, The Dreambook set in, it’s time
you changed occupations. To jump a fence
is fear of poison. The cough prefigures poor health,
which should be obvious, and hyssop
signifies rumors spread about you.
The stairwell presages repeated
turns, the suitcase cravings, the suit
means someone follows you or you pursue
elusive objects. Arms akimbo augur
unforeseen agonies, often public. An open
closet means see your oculist or take
a cruise. And planting the file? —implies
you rarely trust instinct or men with gloves.
The grubs suggest something ignored
too long. So I took my medication.

*

You’re thinking too hard lately, Dearie,
The Dreambook cooed. To peer through glass
suggests clouded hopes and subordinate
position. The violinist is apprehension
(or the need for a mouthguard), but the elevator
denotes surety. Pressing buttons
bespeaks a need for validation. Oh, please.
Seeing violets means you’ll meet a new person.
The smell of bleach connotes fear of blemish
or future conflagration. The building’s address

217
is a clever disguise for your fear
of clutter: Cupid for cupboard, 24
th
for typhoid (both pertain to suffocation).
The bell portends much-needed rain—
It’s time to strike. So I joined a union.

*

Muffin, the Dreambook pressed, you need
to move on. The field is something stretched—someone
who needs protection. Avoid blue
and favor auburn. The lizard (patterned after
grandma’s sofa) means your sweetheart
fancies another. His operation
is convenient: a change that yields easy
separation. And my tears? They’re neither
self-congratulation nor pity, but a reminder
to water what you’ve sown. The brushfire
is that old avoidance. The grass connotes
something outgrown. The corn portends warmer weather.
Your mustache means friendship: a union
of mirrored halves. It’s time you faced
the unknown. So I got new contacts.

*

You must make yourself over, Sugar,
The Dreambook suggested. Mending bricks
implies energy diverted, eating mustard
denotes repentance, and myrtle blossoms,
coming pleasures. The violets indicate
you’ve met a new person and heather
heralds heartbreak for those you encounter.
Poppies represent partial opportunity,
tread lightly. The river conveys shifting tastes
and love of danger. The oar is your old self,
seeking water, ready to bend. I’m not that
flexible. The nest is a development you don’t
yet see. The timber means it’s time to cut
your losses. Embrace the strangeness. Prepare
yourself for alteration. So I found a tailor.

*

The Dreambook said Darling, you’re making
headway. Your dreams have turned alphabetical.
I’m getting organized. You’re getting lyrical.
The mobile bespeaks mental exertion.

218
The mojito warns against seduction,
but fear not, moon-lit petticoats denote
a manly husband. The moths might be small concerns,
an absence, or a draft in the bedroom.
Mother means marital bliss or a trip to the city.
To see yourself dressed in muslin indicates
sincerity. Pearls are purpose, pears a steady
stance. Eating peas suggests good harvest.
Now’s the time for chances, as the pencil
signifies. Select your companions
carefully. So? So I put my book away.

219
MAKING SENSE

Staccato sheets stripped back:
a sensible attraction. What we are:
an experiment in density—oil / water / molasses.

The belief in body must be studied.
We spend our first months on this brief
brocard pulling things to our mouths
to pick up a taste for difference.

A triumph’s in the sum that doesn’t come
from thought, but touch. There isn’t much
that sense can’t teach. The cogito confuses,

so combed swirls in concrete look like
the crests at Kanagawa, cineraria is ashen
for its silvered leaves, and crown means king
and not the other way around.

We melt, but can’t be molten—my hardest
axiom. What desperate noise the static makes:
crackle of a thousand farewells.

I couldn’t resist, she said, lapping
the gasoline in her cupped hand, it smelled
so good, like liquid flame.

220
STASHED EVIDENCE: SELECTED VICTORIAN GENTLEMEN

On the appearances of characters by Trollope, Gissing, Oliphant, and James

GEORGE:

Alice did not │understand him │That black
ravine running through │was certainly │hideous │
cicatrice │countenance │it │would │contort │
would │stretch itself out, │become │revealing │old │bully │
the devil himself │might have been thought handsome
by many women. │hair │parted in the front. │
all his face │was eye and eyebrow. He wore
a thick black moustache, which covered his mouth. │
He would not grow hair to cover it.

EVERARD:

Of course he must come. │After two or three
years in Japan, │a slight raising of │eyebrows. │
Of course I disapprove of him │a │keen but
friendly scrutiny │muscular frame, │full lips, │
the richest │chestnut │peaking slightly forward— │
moustache │inclined to redness │warm purity │
of his bearing. The lower half │was wrinkled, │
an air of languor │made graceful. │he had a soft voice,
and used it with all the discretion of good breeding. │
Miss Nunn? He smiled. │
She gives me valuable help.

MR. CAVENDISH:

mustache │slightly red, like most people’s.
It gleamed │such things │seemed │likely │
these days │with that look of insane terror
on his handsome face. │fear of │failing
to please │the position, │of course, │
was utterly out of the question │a trifle│
rather │he was still the │member │
which, of all others, she would have chosen │
He hoped he had not been entirely forgotten │
A month is a month │putting her hand
to her chin, which made Mr. Cavendish laugh,
and look more nervous than ever.

221

GILBERT:

arduous │occupied │he │had been cropped
close. │He had a fine │fault │a trifle │a little │beard │
of the sixteenth century │surmounted
by a fair moustache │a romantic
upward flourish │suggested │a gentleman
who studied style. │He had none of the superficial │
he had English blood │he suggested │mintage, │
he had │no vulgar things │he was dressed
as a man

GENERAL TRAVERS:

I daresay │you know │his mustache │
meant no offense, │a pretty │a charming
little thing, │a frightful want of self-control │
Then why do you stop a fellow short like that? │
I hope you are not playing the gay deceiver, friend. │
It was Rose, I suppose, │
The General │so tickled, │forgot his anxieties
for the moment.

CAPTAIN BELLFIELD:

He was got up │with brass buttons │the exquisite shapes of │
a pair │dancing on │Venus. │a delicate white │
stud │ in his shirt, and │kid gloves │
and │of course, │in his pocket for │the evening.
His array │had stricken dismay into the heart │
He was│well-made │with dark hair │and │moustache, nearly
black, │carrying, perhaps, │some │midnight amusements.

THE INEVITABLE YOUNG MAN:

a pink sash │
a young man with a fine moustache
going down on his knees │
We’ve all had the young man
with the moustache. │He doesn’t count.
Isabel was silent. │
This was very metaphysical.

222
PRINCIPLES OF RESONANCE

Bear me along your light-bearing paths.
— C.D. Wright

The freighted task of naming:
to make a word the echoself,
shadow picture of the future life—

Oh nixie docent, doughy note,
my hipshot kickshaw, lovely—
if love were only rich digraph
not fractured diacope.

We make of ourselves plucked
strings, notes compressing
air—like the harpist
who leans so to the instrument
she plays her hair.

Brightnesself and darknesself,
in the night, sight falters—
it takes a universe of moon to make
this shape, these falling bodies.

We listen for the light motif:
sound of a thousand lifetimes
collapsing. Starbent, we go on gazing—

223
OPENINGS

The best time to fly is when the void is exhaling, and the outpouring flow of warm air through
various openings brings the temperature of the surrounds to above ambient, and they become
detectable—i.e. one detects the openings, not the void.
— J.N. Rinker

I.

What gifts Wind brings are always broken:
feather, mulch, and dust: each bears
the mark of touch,

is better left the reliquary:
windowsill’s downward list
where each stays as it landed.

Wind is like this: Wind takes
what comes, doesn’t linger,
leaves behind handfuls of change.

Better to practice this kind of absence:
to watch from within the particles rise
in the wingbeats of finches

who feed here, cracking seeds against
the glass. Better to isolate oneself
from cattail and pinwheel, stay restless.

Wind likes me breathless and sheltered, so I’ll wait.

II.

Wind wagers we have time for games,
goes unharnessed a while longer.

No one’s lover, Wind veers
from matters of the heart, shows me the vent
in ventricle, blows me full of air.
Wind has some nerve, swerves easily from truth.

To be and to soothe share a pre-historic root.
Being is soothing when Wind is blowing.
There’s a yes in it and a sin, interest
and essence. Like the weathervane,
I forget myself a moment, let
myself be moved.

III.

O reverberant hollow,
circumference of sound,

224
amphoric, I could gorge on your
plangent, black-eyed embers.
Reed tongued pliant
for the passage of air,
held wet until it splits,
smelling of spit and balsam,
yours are measures of frequency
and strength: the throaty
worship of fertile sources.

O blaze and power,
Side-worn wind rose,
turn and offer these orbits,
suffer no complaint
from those whipped by your
hopeful withdrawal.
Open us with your rare
aerial glance, your opulent
uproar. Here we are,
ready for oblivion.

IV.

I want to take wind’s measure. Wind
would rather take me out,
take pleasure in the welts of one inspired.

In the jewelweed behind the house,
we trigger flowers, make each
prismatic pod coil into ribbons.

I ask Wind what it’s like to have lost sight,
but get no answer. I want to tell Wind
I too feel my way along the surface.

Wind leans close, smelling of moss,
to remind me I’m a guest in this opus.
I thought pressure moved us, but it’s heat

draws Wind from one place to the next.
Inured to heartache, Wind wants to blow out
every hunger. Wind grows thin.
Wind fasts.

Spread like laundry in the grass, I listen,
one ear to earth and one
to air. Open to the svelte,
attenuated music of Wind’s going,
I begin to leave myself.

225
POMEGRANATE: RIMON’S RHYME

You’re nothing but a bad pomme, grainy fruit
(not pome), a globose berry from which we’ve
garnered garnets, grange, gram, and grenadine.
Sometime King in calyx, sometime Cloud or
Crab, your cultivars Sweet, Phoenician, sad:
Fleshman, Early Wonderful, Home. From you,
grenade and filigree: the embroidery of bright
arils, flesh in cells of granite. Your ripe sound,
when tapped, is metallic. Colonel Amaranth,
what remains once you’ve remanded all your
ponchoed points? To remind yourself, rename.

226
NOTES

Rilke’s prose poem “Le Mangeur de Mandarines” appears in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke,
edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. “Montre-lui la grenade dans son armure de cuir de Cordue: elle
éclate d’avenir, se retient, dédaigne....Et laissant entrevoir sa lignée possible, elle l’étouffe dans un berceau
de pourpre. La terre lui semble trop évasive pour faire avec elle un pacte d’abondance.”

The italicized lines in “Quince: An Era” are from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene I.

The italicized phrase in “Breadfruit” comes from Yip Harburg’s “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”
(1932).

The italicized lines in “Indexes Woo Us” come from Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, chapter 3.

“A Combray Garland” is a paring of short excerpts from the C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin
translation of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Each section emerges from a single page.

“Cubist Landscape with Immolation” is inspired by and in dialogue with John Ashbery’s “They Dream
Only of America.”

In “To Death (the Pine-Eater),” the phrase “Reindeer are the cattle of Lapland” is from the 1958 World
Book Encyclopedia.

“Six From the Dreambook” gathers inspiration from the occult guidebook 3000 Dreams Explained (1941)
by “Aspasia” and from T.S. Eliot’s infamous Madame Sosotris.

The characters in “Stashed Evidence: Selected Victorian Gentlemen” are drawn from Anthony Trollope’s
Can You Forgive Her?, George Gissing’s The Odd Women, Margaret Oliphant’s Miss Marjoribanks, and
Henry James’ Portrait of A Lady.

227
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the editors and staff of the publications in which these poems first appeared, sometimes in
slightly different form:

Beyond the Valley of the Contemporary Poets 2004: “Persephone: A Confession” as “Persephone
Confession” and “Principles of Resonance”

Colorado Review: “Ablution”

Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art: “The Nectarine’s Second Sight” and “Breadfruit”

Columbia Poetry Review: “Quince: An Era” and “Dear Sore”

Denver Quarterly: “Self Portrait as Radiant Host,” “Mulberry Bait,” “Night Watch,” and
“Openings”

The Drunken Boat: “Naming,” “Small Letters,” “Hera,” “Deflagration,” “Heaviness,” and
“Landscape with Priapic Courtship” as a chapbook titled Natural Frequencies

Eleven Eleven: “Baking Blind,” and “Wood Nexuses I”

FIELD: “Voir Dire”

Hotel Amerika: “Readiness” as “Puppet”

The Los Angeles Review: “At the Virtual Garage Sale of My Life” and “Compass Course” as
“Traveling”

Pool: “Stashed Evidence: Selected Victorian Gentlemen”

Smartish Pace: “Making Sense”

Westwind: “Ophidian Orpheus”

ZYZZYVA: “To Death (the Pine-Eater)”

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Asset Metadata

Creator Borsuk, Amaranth (author)

Core Title 'Machines made of words': poets, technology, and the mediation of subjectivity; and, Pomegranate-eater (poems)

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature

Publication Date 07/21/2012

Defense Date 05/05/2010

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

Tag conceptual poetry,data,digital poetics,inspiration,modernism,new media,OAI-PMH Harvest,Poetry,projective mediumship,Spiritualism,Technology,Typewriter

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor McCabe, Susan (committee chair), Anderson, Steven F. (committee member), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Muske-Dukes, Carol (committee member), St. John, David (committee member)

Creator Email aborsuk@usc.edu,amaranthb@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3203

Unique identifier UC1287180

Identifier etd-Borsuk-3743 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-355322 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3203 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Borsuk-3743.pdf

Dmrecord 355322

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Borsuk, Amaranth

Type texts

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

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu