THIS IS A
GOOD BOOK, a valuable book, but there’s something awkward about the title,
which is misleading In at least two ways. This is not a collection of the early
essays or manifestos of a famous artist, as the subtitle suggests. It’s a book
of poems. Vito Acconci is a well-known artist, but from the mid-’60s to some- time
in the early ’70s he was mainly a poet, fashioning language works that would
have situated him within a loose network of experimental writers including Jackson
Mac Low, George Brecht, Emmett Williams, and Robert Grenier, and that probably
would have projected him into the center of the circle of Language poets who
were just coming onto the poetry scene as Acconci was leaving It for the art
world. But no more than twenty or so of the hundreds of pages of poetry
collected In this book have ever been published, until
now. So we are confronted with work that was part of its time without having
been seen In its tame. Which is what makes the main
title unhelpful, because Language to Cover a Page suggests either a kind
of concrete or graphic poetry In the manner of Augusto
de Campos (it is not), or a familiar polemic promoting the treatment of words
as nonreferentlal objects (a reading most of these
poems don’t support).
The question of how to think
about a radical body of art that was part of its time but was not seen In its time has come up before, maybe most strikingly with
the work of Emily Dickinson. When she died In 1886,
she had published nothing and left behind an oeuvre of more than a thousand
poems, most of which were composed between 1858 and 1865. If these poems had
been published then,
And recently the scrupulous
editing of Johnson has been challenged by contemporary poets like Susan Howe
who see, in
But Acconci, unlike
Dickinson, did not work in isolation; though his poetry may have remained
mostly unpublished, his oeuvre as a whole was well suited to the overlapping
Interests of the community of experimental poets and masts of the late ‘60s,
many of whom were moving freely across the genre boundaries that had separated
poetry, art, and music. Was John Cage a composer or a poet? Was Brecht a
performance artist or a sculptor or a poet? And Acconci himself credited the
experimental journal 0 to 9 with the poet Bernadette Mayer from 1967 to 1969
while actively writing and performing. In January 1970 he exhibited a hybrid
performance/installation at Robert Newman’s Gain Ground Gallery In New York, In which each day over the course of the show
he emptied out the furnishings and appliances of his apartment and deposited
them in the gallery, to which he would have to repair to make use of them.
Three of the other exhibitors at this gallery during the 1969-70 season--the
poet/art critic John Perreault, the concrete poet
Hannah Weiner, and the Conceptual artist Eleanor Antin—had
all published poetry in avant-garde journals. Whit almost all of these
boundary-crossing artists had in common was a sense of the need to reexamine
and challenge the fundamental suppositions upon which the separate arts were
based, and one of the most basic suppositions that came under question was the
expectation of subjective expressivity. In Acconci’s work this questioning
shows up very neatly in poems like this:
I
am here.
I
am here as I go by.
I
do it, go into the other.
I
do without it, stop outside.
It’s not hard to read this
as a narrative of frustrated desire, but these four cryptic sentences don’t do
too much to encourage such a reading. In fact, the effectiveness of the piece—its
wit-depends upon the discrepancy between the magnitude of the personal crisis
that might be inferred and the minimally of its representation. In this reading
the poem seems to invoke litotes, the rhetorical trope of understatement
familiar from the bumper sticker “One atom bomb can spoil your whole day,” but
the usual form requires a strong sense of the scale of the event against which
the understatement plays. Here the neutral style of the representation renders
a personal reading absurd without completely erasing it. A number of the short
poems in the first section of the book which is appropriately called
“Idiom,” seem to invite crypto- or pseudonarrative readings, though most of them tend to break
up in a kind of punch-line ending as in
.
I
have made my point
I
make it again It
Now
you get the point.
or, as in another short poem:
His hand was raised and
(and then) in a manner of speaking and (and then) he put his foot in his mouth.
which, with its parenthetical intrusions and repeated
line-ending “ands,” reads more like a parody of a
The whole of “Idiom” is a
laboratory consisting of eighty-seven pages of linguistic and textual
experiments. The longer poems employ somewhat Gertrude Stein-like repetitions
or mechanical variations reading as parodic grammatical exercises, as in the
following poem that starts
(He
moved yesterday) (
(He
walked once) (
(He
stirred there) (
then continues for another
thirty-two lines running thirty-two more changes on the verb and its adverbial
complement, through “shuffled,” “rolled,” “danced,” “drifted,” “flew,” “darted,” coming to an end on
(he waddled until then) (
(He
lurched that long) (
(He
passed by Tuesday) (by this time, Wednesday)
(He
trotted to the post) (
It gets most of its impact
from the range of the verbs, the puzzling parenthetical bracketing, and the
more puzzling open parentheses, which suggest some abrupt and arbitrary
termination of the text. The rest of the poem supports this suggestion,
particularly two lines in which phrases are chopped off not only mid-sentence
but also midword, ending on a single letter.
It’s hard to give an
adequate account of the range of interesting and witty linguistic effects in
“Idiom,” and there are live other sections to contend with—“Printed Matter”; “Four Book and Related Texts”; “Transference and Related Texts”;
“Translations”; and “Discourse Networks.” The most radical artistic
experiments- the Conceptual poems that fitted most neatly into their time-are
concentrated in these five parts. The question is what to make of them now.
Toward the end of “Printed
Matter” there is a fifteen- page instruction poem, each page of which directs
readers to a particular place in a particular book where they are instructed to
make certain editorial changes, ranging from excising and replacing one or two
phrases to deleting a period, or to vocalize that portion of text in some
definite way, or simply to take note of it. Since potential readers were
unlikely to have these specific publications on their shelves, and even less
likely to go to the public library to commit these small ants of attention or
vandalism, the text can be considered either a bibliographical poem or the
scenario for a Conceptual artwork the execution of which is of questionable
likelihood.
“Four Book” begins with a set of minor variations on an extensive
group of definitions of the word lop, and then opens onto a kind of Minimalist,
graphic collage poem that runs eleven pages; each page juxtaposes a Xeroxed
image of a different page of the Manhattan phone book with a column of phrases
or single words. The piece might have worked as a contrasting pair of litanies
in a performance for two simultaneous readers. I’m not sure if Acconci had
anything like this in mind.
“Transference” consists of
thirty-five pages that run a vertical column of either one or two letters, all
taken from either the right or left margin of some specified pages in a
particular edition of Roget’s Thesaurus.
Maybe it was an amusing
gesture in 1968 or ‘69, but it’s hard to find any real significance in it now.
After several more dictionary-sampling text pieces that are reasonably
effective, “Translations” moves into forty- six pages of very sparse samplings
from Whitfield’s University Rhyming
Dictionary. This is too long to be more than mildly amusing. The section
ends in eight pages covered with coordinate listings drawn from Hagstrom’s map of the five boroughs of
But “Discourse Networks’’
contains “Act 3, Scene 4,” a nine-page piece of hourly New York telephone
weather reports running from sunrise December 26, 1968, to sunrise January 2,
1969, carrying with it the rich range of human experiences of a New York
winter.
It reads like a sketch for
Kenneth Goldsmith’s grand cycle of seasons in his recently published book The Weather (2005). “Discourse
Networks’’ also contains a startlingly interesting “documentary poem” charting,
in a meticulously deadpan manner, the progress of the Apollo 11 moon launch, which ended in success, against the progress
of Acconci’s desperate efforts to get back together with the girlfriend who had
recently left him, which ended in failure, all over the course of eight days
from July 16 to July 23, 1969. Yet
these successful poems, like all the other successful works in the book were
generated out of the same experimental sensibility that produced the
failures-the ones that seem meaningless to us now. And what kind of experiment
can proceed without failure? If there are no failures there
is no experiment, and Acconci’s success rate is better than most.
David Antin is a poet, critic and performance
artist.