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La lettre au risque du visible

The Reserve of Poetry

Graphic Matter, Material and Medium in Lorine Niedecker’s Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (1934)
Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet

Résumés

Je propose de lire Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (1934) de Lorine Niedecker, poète américain objectiviste. Ce livre d’artiste, à édition unique, est resté non publié et fait maintenant partie du corpus colligé par Jenny Penberthy en 2002. En tant que volume hétérogène au corpus, il oblige à approcher le poétique par son bord matériel, visuel et graphique. Il a en cela une forme instituante : il inscrit l’œuvre poétique à l’horizon d’attentes esthétiques contemporaines qui articulent le texte poétique à son dispositif intermédial. Découvrir la série poétique déconcertante de Lorine Niedecker signifie faire l’expérience d’une écriture vue autant que lue et d’une image que l’on tente de lire pour comprendre pourquoi elle a été visiblement absentée, effacée. Dans le contexte calendaire de Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, le rapport du lisible et du visible soulève une difficulté théorique posée frontalement : que sont la matière et le matériau d’un poème? Mon hypothèse de travail envisage l’œuvre au regard des catégories esthétiques de l’art, du non-art, et de l’anti-art. Elles permettent de saisir les renversements de la matérialité de l’objet usuel (un readymade industriel anonyme et sériel) en un objet poétique par un processus de des-esthétisation puis de ré-esthétisation, qui maintient certaines marques visibles et lisibles du poétique. Celui-ci surgit dans l’écriture sur le cartouche effacé, et c’est l’écriture sur une oblitération qui révèle la puissance de la graphie : l’écriture à la main produit le sujet poétique plutôt qu’elle ne le reproduit. C’est elle qui révèle une possible résistance de la matière graphique au matériau du dispositif. J’utiliserai les images d’un Sunlit Road Calendar de 1926, très proche de celui approprié par Lorine Niedecker, moins pour exhumer un objet de collection, que pour prendre la mesure de la violence réservée du geste esthétique de Lorine Niedecker.

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Texte intégral

There are things
We live among ‘and to see them
Is to know ourselves’.

Occurrence, a part
Of an infinite series,

The sad marvels ; […]
George Oppen (NCP 163)

  • 1 Lorine Niedecker’s archives are in the Dwight Foster Public Library and the Hoard Historical Museum (...)

1Lorine Niedecker like fellow Objectivist poet George Oppen was sensitive to commonplace objects and "things that we live among" and that are "a part/ Of an infinite series." Next Year /or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous is such a disruptively commonplace object, a serially produced calendar and a poetic artwork. It is a series of 27 poem-pages assembled as a Christmas gift in 1934 by Lorine Niedecker who sent them from Wisconsin where she lived to Louis Zukofsky who lived in New York City. It is a single edition artist’s book which was to be read by one reader.1 It offers a proleptic experience of companionship over a year, each poem waiting to be read and meditated upon over the next month. Lorine Niedecker inscribed their friendly, common and future poetry time in a calendar: the cartouche which holds her hand-written lines of verse was to be the site of their textual meetings in absentia.

Fig. 1 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 41)

Fig. 1 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 41)
  • 2 Poet Clayton Eshleman published "Next Year /or/ I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous" in Sulfur 41 (Fall 19 (...)

2The poems circulated as an artist’s book, Louis Zukofsky showed them to friends, William Carlos Williams in particular. Then they disappeared until they surfaced again in Jenny Penberthy’s probing of the Louis Zukofsky Archives at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, Texas. She edited them first in Clayton Eshleman’s Sulfur 41 (Fall 1997, 42-71) 2 and then in the 1998 Collected Works of Lorine Niedecker published by University of California Press.

  • 3 In 1964, Lorine Niedecker sent a small, handmade volume entitled "Homemade Poems" to Cid Corman and (...)
  • 4 See Jen Bervin and Marta Werner’s The Gorgeous Nothings, a facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s m (...)
  • 5 On typographical norms of poetry printing, see Jean Alice JACOBSON, How Should Poetry Look? The Pri (...)

3Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous is like Lorine Niedecker’s other Handmade or Homemade Poems: 3 they were artist’s books but are read today in normalised print format. They were intended as manuscript, as scriptural events rather than "printer’s copy" manuscript (McGann 1993, 38). However, they are usually read as printed poems, as typographical events. And yet, they "[were not] composed with an eye toward some state beyond their handcrafted textual condition" (McGann 1993, 38). The manuscript as œuvre is what Jerome McGann called "the work’s initial horizon of finality" (38) when he discussed the printing history of Emily Dickinson’s intentionally unpublished poems.4 Likewise, Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous "was not written for a print medium, even though it was written in an age of print" (McGann 38). My hypothesis is that reading it as a manuscript rather than a draft lying in wait for publication would allow the poems to modify our relation to poetry as "meaning made." Lorine Niedecker constructed her reader’s encounter with a physical object. She foregrounded an experiment with writing as medium, material and matter for poetry. In print, medium, material and matter are invisible and suppressed (in normatively printed poetry),5 but they surface in her manuscript which preserves a tension between the poems and the appropriated calendar. In this paper, I would like to value the poems as manuscript and observe how Lorine Niedecker’s original scene of writing affects our interpretation of the poems.

4Thinking of poetry in terms of printing conventions means becoming aware that the first poem-page shown above (Fig.1) was not originally made to look like this:

Wade all life / backward to its/ source which / runs too far ahead.

The satisfactory / emphasis is on / revolving. / Don’t send / steadily; after
           / you know me / I’ll be no one.

To give / heat is within/ the control of / every human being.


I talk at the top / of my white / resignment.


What a / white muffler / in a darkcoat / will do for a / dull man.

I like a / loved one to / be apt in / the wing. (Niedecker in Alcosser 30)

  • 6 Unmarked is used here in the sense of Johanna Drucker (The Visible Word and Figuring the Word).

Nor was it meant to look like this unmarked poem:6

Wade all life
backward to its
source which
runs too far ahead.

5These presentations reflect printing norms and typographical traditions in English-speaking poetry as well as scholarly interpretation. But reading this poem as manuscript means reading poetry differently without being limited to its printed literary site. We need to approach our own reading experience of Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous without considering that the poems aspired to a typographical existence. We need to take these poems at face value, as material events, and look into the ways the manuscript changes our reception and understanding of the poetic series.

  • 7 See Patrick Vauday for an illuminating definition of matter, material and medium in the visual arts (...)

6I suggest reading these poems as manuscript means first becoming aware of the material aesthetic choices made by Lorine Niedecker ; then becoming aware of the disconnection existing between the hand-written originals and their images as texts. They point to tensions between medium, material and matter.7 They raise questions that will guide my reading : how did poetic operations of appropriation, erasure and inscription lead to the poems? How does poetry as an art of making relate to immanent matter? How do editorial decisions impact interpretation?

Poetry As An Immanent Art of Making

7The central cartouche of each poem-page results from three combined material and poetic operations of appropriation, erasure and inscription. To account for these aesthetic gestures, it is necessary to turn to similar calendars which had been in circulation at the time when Lorine Niedecker appropriated one. What she used was a mass-produced calendar with data of brand and patent office registration number : "No 5918/copr.,1934, by Dodge Pub. Co., New York" "Printed in the U.S.A." "Reg.US Pat Off. ." She made an artist’s book which bears her handwriting and does away with patenting.

Appropriation

  • 8 Source : screen shot retrieved on ebay 2011/11/29 at 21.37.40
    http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll (...)
  • 9 « En général la séparation opérée par [Jean] Cohen entre ‘langage ordinaire’ et un ‘langage radical (...)
  • 10 Readymades should not be limited to Marcel Duchamp. However, his May 1917 comment in New York Dadai (...)

8We need to look at original Sunlit Road Calendars from the same period to notice their month-year-day layout and cartouche poems.8 As a poet, Lorine Niedecker used a manufactured artefact and introduced ordinary, standardized, mass-produced material into poetry. She related poetry to reality rather than realism. From an art perspective, her appropriation of a calendar turns it into a readymade or found object. Her gesture is fully consonant with those artistic avant-gardes that used mass-produced material to downgrade aesthetic hierarchies. A readymade downgrades those hierarchies that had elevated the Fine Arts above craftsmanship; then craftsmanship above mass production; or the artist and artisan above anonymously manufactured objects. The point of using a found, replaceable and disposable calendar, is to shift attention away from the artist as pyschological subject. Lorine Niedecker broke away from poetry as a display of affects,9 and from the Art object identified with authorship, original self-expression and interiority.10

Erasure

9Looking at what Lorine Niedecker appropriated further helps see she erased the central cartouches which held devotional poems. They used to encourage the reader in need of the sun of faith on the road of life. By cutting and pasting over such cartouches, Lorine Niedecker erased their implicit aesthetic statements which Theodor Adorno or Clement Greenberg in his essay 1939 Avant-garde and Kitsch would have termed kitsch, "ersatz culture."

To fill the demand of the new market, a new commodity was devised : ersatz culture, kitsch, destined for those who, insensible to the values of genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some sort can provide. (Greenberg, Essay I 12)

10The notion of kitsch accounts for an industrially mass-marketed product offering the serious mask of beauty through non-chalenging forms. In this context, Lorine Niedecker’s erasure de-aestheticized poetry but since she presented the calendar as a gift of poetry to Louis Zukofsky, she simultaneously re-aestheticized the readymade. She potentially extended art to all that usually stands outside art, to non-art. She claimed for an ordinary calendar the kind of serious attention reserved for art. Seen from this art history perspective, Lorine Niedecker transformed a found source into a a poetic resource. She went beyond the opposition of Art (as artistic tradition) to Non-Art (the ordinary other of art). She introduced the third possibility of Anti-Art which refuses the separation of art from ordinary objects (William Seitz). Appropriating the calendar and erasing kitsch cartouches are aesthetic decisions we should read as part of Marcel Duchamp’s long and heterogeneous lineage. They should be associated with contemporary art, since these operations go well beyond the Modernist search for an artistic object adequate to its medium.

Inscription

11This is the third aesthetic gesture that shapes the poems. When Lorine Niedecker erased kitsch poems, she also erased habits of poetry printing—the miniature with a rubricated letter; Latin-looking font harking back to medieval illuminated Books of Hours. They would point to quaintness, higher tastes and finer printer’s craft. She erased graphic habits and chose her own handwriting or penmanship over the typewriter. This is all the more striking as typewriting is considered to be the signature act of modernist authoring. Lorine Niedecker replaced the typewriter with her own handwriting, she reserved the cartouche as new hand-graphic surface. She replaced print with writing as hand-lettering. It might not be a palimpsest nor a "palimptext" (Davidson), since prior traces are hardly visible. It is definitely not an attempt at beautiful calligraphy in the sense of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and Kelmscott Press books. I would term her gesture chirography, from kheirographia, "hand written testimony" (OED). Writing with a running hand bears witness to the poet as writing subject. Chirography produces the poet who does not precede nor exceed writing. Chirography is precisely what is suppressed by mechanised print. Typography would de-materialise the poet as writing subject and re-materialise her as print allographic other. Instead, the poems which remain a manu-script preserve her hand script, her physical language matter of ink on paper which is normally désoeuvrée or inoperative in published print form. The manuscript preserves a form of her presence which implicitly becomes a resistance to the printed medium. It strikingly operates on the page, and we now need to look at its images closely.

The Images of the Text

12Reading Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous as manuscript means becoming aware of the disconnection between the hand-written originals and their images as texts. Both originals and images affect the reception and understanding of the poems because text and image interoperate at the material levels of hand-writing, typography and photography.

  • 11 Writing is originally "to scrape, scratch" on clay tablets with a stylus (OED).

13First, writing as graphein is a hand gesture that is etymologically dual since it is a drawing and a writing. 11 Regardless of meaning, we see and read letters or words as graphic shapes in the center cartouche. Hand-writing connects image as trope and image as icon. Sense-making or interpretation results from this combined action of seeing and reading.

14Second, typography combines graphein with typos "dent, impression, mark, figure, original form" (OED). Typography makes language visible. It is the industrial other of hand-writing : it is the invisible manufactured mediation that allows a text into being. It gives the text its textual condition (McGann). But typography is also the concrete image of a text. We see and read manufactured typography in the circular frame of dates and months of the Sunlit Road calendar appropriated by Lorine Niedecker in 1934. However, in Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, typography does not replace hand-written verse, it duplicates hand-writing. The reader notices editor Jenny Penberthy’s typographic transcriptions of the poem under the page. They are later additions: she subtitled the hand-written poems. It is far from an infra-ordinary or endotic action.

15Third, subtitling the poems affects reception as it makes readers realise that they watch the material, analogic image of the calendar, a facsimile or photograph or photostat of the poems. Subtitling signals a photographic threshold. Now, what truly complicates the reception of these poems is that the Collected Works and Sulfur do not reproduce the original artist’s book in the same manner. Each book produces its specific image of the poems, even though the photograph —literally a photo graphein, a writing on light—is a photographic reproduction that is indexically related to the original. It stands for the original’s materiality and raises epistemological issues we need to address.

16The image of the text is part of what George Bornstein (in Material Modernism, 2006) and Jerome McGann (in The Textual Condition, 1991 and The Visible Language of Modernism, 1993) called "the textual materials," "the most material (and apparently least ‘signifying’ or significant) levels of the text". They are usually left out and regarded as peripheral to "poetry " or " ‘the text as such’ " (McGann 1991, 12-13). However, if one considers reading a phenomenal event to be grasped in its material condition, then one realises how Sulfur photographs and Collected Works photographs shape our interpretation of poems differently. It is not a question of authenticity. Photographs make us see the poems as an allographic artwork that exists in the infinite number of its reproductions by Sulfur or the University of California Press, while Lorine Niedecker made the poems as an autographic artwork, as a hand-written manuscript, a unique object. Its photographic reproductions do not have the value of the original. Nelson Goodman’s useful distinction between autographic and allographic artworks helps accept the manuscript as a one-of-a-kind, autographic œuvre rather than a failed copy that never reached publication. Critics usually claim Lorine Niedecker’s literary and social exclusion explains the absence of publication. But the validity of this socio-economic fact screens her interest in the making process and her reflective control of the object-book. It further screens the way the object-book comes across to the reader as a series of photographic images of an original.

17This is where reading is affected: print publication normalizes the original to the point of altering poems. Watch how Sulfur (Fig. 2) shows the cover page of the poems. Its photograph shows an upside down, handwritten title Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous. It is a stanza. The inverted lines THE FAVORITE / SUNLIT ROAD CALENDAR lie as another stanza in inverted mirror position to the title stanza.

Fig. 2 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44)

Fig. 2 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44)
  • 12 However, in both cases, as she wrote for the January 1935 page, "The satisfactory/emphasis is on re (...)

18Loose pages were bound with a ribbon tied into a visible bow which holds the book together through punch-holes. ("Hole-punched pages are held together by a red velvet ribbon tied in a bow," Penberthy’ Editor’s Notes). In the original artist’s book, each page was a leaf, a folium or folio, to be turned from bottom to top while the printed versions in Sulfur or the Collected Works make the reader’s hand predictably go from right to left (Fig.3). 12 Now, watch the first two pages of the manuscript in Sulfur (Fig. 3) :

Fig. 3 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44-45)

Fig. 3 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44-45)

The calendar frame is visible. The title page is longer that the first poem-page.

19In contrast below (Fig. 4), the Collected Works edition presents the poems in the material continuity of earlier and later poems. It skips the title page ; it suppresses the hand-written title and the inverted title of the calendar gift; it capitalizes the title on top of page 41 ; and what used to be page 2 of the artist’s book becomes page 1 of the poems. It becomes the title page. All pages have the same size. Most importantly, any traces of the ribbon and calendar frame are gone (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 40-41)

Fig. 4 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 40-41)

20In the Collected Works, the title loses its upside down position, its comma and lineated breaks. The title is no longer a tempestuous, hand-written stanza but looks like a formal, modernist one-line haiku. All the photographs further crop out the calendar top binding and punch marks. Combined with the printing norm introduced by the subtitles, the photographs normalize the poems. They undo the experiment in book-making.

21In both editions, a legitimate editorial wish for legibility led to subtitling the hand-written lines under the poems. However, these editorial decisions displaced the autographic identity of the poems by visually reinstating their allographic print condition. In other words, subtitles and hand-written poems make conflicting statements about the material, allographic-vs-autographic status of the lines of verse. The same conflicting statement surfaces in page numbers. They were pointless in the autographic calendar, since dates were an organic page order. Sulfur adds magazine page numbers in bold while the Collected Works edition does not include any page numbers for Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous in an otherwise paginated volume. Here, one should note that Jenny Penberthy edited both versions of the poems. So, my point is not to pit one editorial choice against another but to draw attention to the fact that Sulfur’s image of the text differs from that of the Collected Works. Two different printing sites with different images of the text lead to differing views of the poems’ salient features that carry interpretation.

The Materiality of Photographs

22What is at issue when we read and see poetry is that it takes the materiality of photographs to remind us that understanding is not only a hermeneutic process but a visual experience combining verbal and editorial components, linguistic and bibliographical codes. Why should they matter ?

23One reason is given by Jerome McGann and pertains to poetry as autopoiesis (1991 10-11):

Poetry is language that calls attention to itself, that takes its own textual activities as its ground subject. […] [poetical] texts operate to display their own practices, to put them forward as the subject of attention. That means, necessarily, that poetical texts—[…]-turn readers back upon themselves, make them attentive to what they are doing when they read. (McGann 1991, 10-11)

24When we read poetry, we need to pay attention to the set of material events that institute a poetic text as the authoritative version of the poems. It leads to realizing that Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous stands within one editorial horizon of production (the manuscript given to Louis Zukofsky) and two editorial horizons of reproduction (the Collected Works and Sulfur editions). They both affect our reading.

25Another reason why the materiality of photographs matters is that showing poems as material objects of their time in their manuscript state recontextualises them in the larger history of experimental artists’ books : from Fortunato Depero’s 1927 Depero Futurista, 1933 Dinamo futurista ; soon to be outdone by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 Parole in Libertá Futuriste Olfattive Tattili Termiche (Words in Futurist, Olfactory, Tactile, Thermal Freedom) and Tullio d’Albisola’s 1933 L’Anguria lirica, poema passionale (The Lyrical Watermelon : A Long, Passionate Poem); later to be followed by Max Ernst’s 1934 Une Semaine de Bonté ; or Georges Hugnet’s 1936 livre-objet, and Marcel Duchamp’s 1941 La-boîte-en-valise. This quick recontextualisation allows Lorine Niedecker’s gesture to regain its avant-gardist thrust and her object-book to be recognized as part of a specific genre. It belongs with other artists’s books in such avant-garde movements as Dada, Constructivism, Futurism, or Fluxus and contemporary art (Cy Twombly, Anselm Kiefer). Her artist’s book is part of this open-ended art history lineage. It is a deliberate gesture that probes book-making as an artisan craft in an age of commodified culture and manufactured mass production. This is what gets to be overlooked when the calendar frame is cropped out.

  • 13 The poem’s signifiers (lineation, margins, indentation or flush left and right, commas, line breaks (...)

26A third reason why noticing the images of the text matters is that cropping out the calendar frame from the Collected Works edition is in line with a dominant view of poetry as "the text as such," and of interpretation stemming from the linguistic code only. This explains why we need to compare the various images of the same poems: conflicting images of the same poem invalidate "textual idealism" (McGann 1991, 11 sq.) 13and raise the "problem of poetry’s relation to its material encoding" (McGann 1993, 45). Overlooking editorial decisions or printing decisions means overlooking their role in meaning construction.

Literary texts may be—have often been—studied according to [informational] models [constructed on a sender/receiver, or transmissional, model.] But the literary text does not easily submit to them. […] Textual scholars register these forms of self-attention as the inseparability of the medium and the message, the advent of meaning as a material event which is coterminous (in several senses) with its textual execution. Literary works do not know themeselves, and cannot be known, apart from their specific material modes of existence/resistance. They are not channels of transmission, they are particular forms of transmissive interaction. (McGann 1991, 11)

  • 14 See Ruth Jennison The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde.
  • 15 See Elizabeth Willis, Niedecker’s Materialist Surrealism.

27The transmissive interaction between poems and their photographic images affects interpretation. We trust what we see/read as photographs because photography as image is indexically related to its object. The photograph stands for the material original. Rosalind Krauss famously argued in The Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths (1986) that "[the photograph] is a kind of deposit of the real itself" (Krauss 110). Her contribution to art history is of interest as she showed how photographic indexicality ruins the modernist notion of medium-specific art. In other words, because a photograph is perceived as contiguous to reality, its ontological relation to reality is not entirely compatible with the modernist ideal of autonomy, self-referentiality or medium-specific art. This results in an aporia for readers of Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous : the indexicality of photographs is in keeping with Lorine Niedecker’s choice of the calendar as material object but may be less compatible with critical readings of these poems as pure experiments in non-referential language, or in Surrealist autonomous sound play,14 or in Modernist medium-specific word play.15 Photographs show poem-pages as material objects that cannot be reduced to their linguistic scripts. Not only was Lorine Niedecker aware "of poetry as a system of material signifiers" (McGann 1993, 93) but she paid "the closest attention to the semiotic potential which lay in the physical aspects of the book and text production" (McGann 1993, 141). I find what Jerome McGann wrote about Ezra Pound could apply to her :

Like so many of his contemporaries, Pound as a writer repeatedly imagines the page and the book the way a painter or a book designer would imagine it. This bibliographical imagination can be traced back through Pound’s vorticism, to the Pre-Raphaelites, and —their point of modern departure—to William Blake. (McGann 1991, 141-142)

28It could also apply to poet Charles Reznikoff who printed his own books on his own printing press in the 1920s and 1930s. The conclusion I draw is that we need to factor in the way image and text interact in the poems at various levels : hand-writing interacts with typography (as the image of a text); photographs (as indexical images) interact with the original manuscript. They affect the way poetic language is used as symbolic exchange of saying, seeing and showing. Their edge-to-edge interaction only comes to the fore if we pay attention to the ontological status of poems as manuscript. It is the manuscript that signals a resistance or a form of self-attention of the poems to the material medium of the printed book/calendar. It is unseen or overlooked in normalised print editions. It is this resistance I call the reserve of poetry.

The Reserve of Poetry

  • 16 Arthur Rimbaud about A Season in Hell "I wanted to say what it said, literally and in all the sense (...)
  • 17 From the OED, online edition : "d. In dyeing, pottery decoration, etc.: an area which is kept free (...)

29Reserve as reticent speech is usually associated with Lorine Niedecker in the sense of a gendered holding back. Reserve as gendered restraint has often been tied to women poets like Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Bishop. I implicitly expand on this much-researched meaning and use reserve "littéralement et dans tous les sens ".16 A less usual meaning of reserve originates in the visual arts. It is an area "kept free from an applied colour," "which remains the original colour of the material" (OED).17 It is such a reserve Lorine Niedecker created in the central cartouche of each page. It is the color of its material. It is in that reserve that the handwritten verse was placed (Fig.5.). She erased the original calendar image and line of verse and pasted over a blank reserve she only partially filled in.

Fig. 5 Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (69)

Fig. 5 Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (69)

30The second meaning of reserve is also what is left unutilized but remains available for future use. In poetry, reserve is the other name for unreadability. When reading "Sweet ekes / of soft drips - / bathroom / luxuries," the transparency of linguistic signs does not lead to immediately understandable meaning beyond legible shapes. The unreadability of such a line is hardly ever acknowledged, even if the unreadability of Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous has kept most critics away from the poems until recently. Of course, looking at this line of verse means seeing the legible signs (from the Latin legere) which are graphic and visual - the eyes can make out what is written or printed. But these signs do not easily lead to meaning, they are unreadable (from the Saxon root read) in the sense that they block the transparency of writing leading to meaning beyond graphic shapes. The poem is made to resist meaning by keeping it out of reach and by keeping it in reserve for other readings. The potentiality of poetry—as opposed to its power—lies in its ability to mobilize unknown meanings held in reserve until the poems are read and seen differently. They may re-serve as Lorine Niedecker also "dwells in Possibility."

  • 18 From the OED, online edition : "7. An act of keeping some knowledge from another person; a fact or (...)
  • 19 From the OED, online edition : "Etymology: French réserve reservation, restriction, qualification (...)

31The intended reader Louis Zukofsky might have understood "I like a / loved one to / be apt in / the wing." (November 1935) or "What a / white muffler / in a dark coat / will do for a / dull man." (July-Aug. 1935), but do other readers make sense of "nobody / ekes out a more / facile distend — / bathroom luxury." (May 1935) or "Holes are too / late nowa- / days. One / freak ass to / wire." (Oct.-Nov. 1935) ? They point to a deliberate choice which limits the reading contract between readers and poet. The poet’s right is to reserve or restrict meaning.18 I use reserve here in the sense of "a clause which modifies and limits a contract." 19 This semantic reserve is instituted by Lorine Niedecker and may stem from her awareness of the danger of readability: ideas and words are glued in cliché usage in a commodity culture.

Fig. 6 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (59)

Fig. 6 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (59)
  • 20 Lorine Niedecker :

    "What would they say if they knew
    I sit for two months on six lines

    of poetry? " (...)

32"I talk at the top / of my white / resignment." (CW 55) resists the expected collocation : voice is given a height, pitch is given a color, and the written sign of voice as autography is a "re-sign," a resignation of voice, and a "re-sign," a sign again. The portmanteau word resignment baffles the reader. It connects the resignation of voice to an assignment which marks out voice by a sign, and a consignment which seals voice with a sign. If we substitute for one question, "what does this poem mean?" another question, "what does this poem do?," we see it as an aesthetic statement of unreadability. It need not be only construed as a temporary Surrealist excess for a maker of otherwise condensed poetry.20 Unreadability is the necessary experience of poetry intended for more than immediate consumption. It is not an obstacle but the defining trait of poetry as artifice. Artifice gives readers the experience of an "estrangement," "a making strange" which is a prerequisite to what Lyn Hejinian calls the reflexive "experience of experiencing" inherent to poetry (Hejinian 301). No wonder artifice was at the heart of Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Manifeste which claimed "Il nous faut des œuvres fortes, droites, précises et à jamais incomprises" (We need strong artworks, erect, precise and for ever misunderstood). Were poetry to retain its obduracy, its ability to block understanding, then it would not be degraded into expository commonplace. It would retain its disruptive potential, its tempestuous reserve and its p-reserve, if I but add a p to reserve.

  • 21 See Basil Bunting comments: "Her work was austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental (...)
  • 22 "What Niedecker meant by "surrealist" might be a phenomenology of consciousness (and unconsciousnes (...)

33What Lorine Niedecker had in common with the New York Objectivist poets is a wish to p-reserve the disruptiveness of poetry.21 Her poetic voice is self-conscious because she pays serious attention to the minutest literal details of her language.22 So, when she writes, "The trouble / is : this stirs / a real mean- / ing." (June 1935), she states the potential of poetry to stir meaning by breaking the flow of meaning-making habits. She separates words with blanks and breaks in lineation while connecting them in a meaningful sentence. She separates the root morpheme (mean-) from the suffix (ing) while connecting sounds (/is/ /this/ /stirs/) and eye rhymes (/this stirs/ ; real mean/). Poetry both separates and joins coeval semantic energies which lead to partial, limited or reserved understanding:

34The trouble / is : this stirs / a real mean- / ing./
Humanity / is engaged - / on unequal burial.
                                                        (June 1935)

  • 23 From the OED, online edition : "a. In troops of reserve (also brigades of reserve, etc.): troops or (...)
  • 24 Rachel Blau DuPlessis about Niedecker’s use of haiku : "With Niedecker, haiku seems to have been a (...)

35Wordsworthian poetry used to be "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," that "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity." For Lorine Niedecker, it is meaning "withheld from action to serve as later reinforcement" (OED).23 The relation between manifest surface and concealed significance is not linear but broken. The line of verse that does not yield immediate meaning becomes a buried verbal remnant waiting for future engagement. 24

  • 25 A poem like " All night, all night/ and what is it/ on a post-/card. " (CW 60) throws the reader of (...)
  • 26 See Charles Reznikoff’s use of archives or Carl Rakosi’s use of newspaper clippings which conjoin i (...)
  • 27 In a letter to Gail Roub, she wrote: " I fell over an entire stanza as tho it was a sandbag to keep (...)

36What Lorine Niedecker further shared with fellow Objectivist poets is a wish to dispose of literariness by resorting to literalness.25 "If you circle / the habit of / your meaning, / it’s fact and/ no harm / done." (February 1935). The literalness of facts is an ethical choice often explained in terms of Objectivist Sincerity. It targets image-making, the ability of language to conjure up images and of poetry to create the illusion of reality through hypotyposis. Indeed, Lorine Niedecker blocks the image as readable analogy. Her calendar is not a metaphor of time but a literal object, an instantiation of time. 26 Her images claim the status of literal actions : on the calendar cover page, when she writes, "I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, " her "flights" are literal "rounds" of verse. Interestingly, the very last page (December 1935, Sulfur 71) ends with this line, "Jesus, I’m / going out / and throw / my arms /around." Around and a round are homophones which come full circle with the title, "I fly my rounds, Tempestuous. A physical gesture of writing or inscription brackets the poems from beginning to end: she "throw[s]/ [her] arms/ around" the calendar like a poem that turns and breaks at the end of a line. Lorine Niedecker’s bodily investment in poetry does not announce comfort, it announces a "Tempest," a commotion which fittingly relates poetry to tempus, time. Poetry is this gift of turbulence and deep silence27 which foils the attempt at the visual coherence of Symbolist, Imagist or Poundian poetics. Her tempest was her literal temp "Test of Poetry" in 1934.

  • 28 A review of Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry by Lorine Niedecker was "Originally published in Madi (...)
  • 29 Modernist works "assumed a disjunction between art and life: meaning not revealed but made. Constru (...)

37It is a pun which I offer to link Lorine Niedecker and Louis Zukofsky since she wrote a review of Louis Zukofsky‘s A Test of Poetry in 1948.28 One short sentence she wrote in this review sounds like a manifesto : "poetry is not soft." Her tempest should be taken quite literally. So should the initial, liminal metaphor of wading: "Wade all life / backward to its / source which / runs too far ahead." (CW 41). It might be a hortative appeal to the reader or the poet’s wish to literally experience line, line break and enjambment, as a way of life. Life is a path that breaks backward to its source, to the flush left of a text aligned along a margin. Like hand-writing, lineation is amphibious. It is carried out on paper and in life. Poetry here becomes "meaning not revealed but made" (Brogan and Preminger 55).29

38My view of unreadability as reserve is connected to the way the manuscript preserves this very act of making. When Lorine Niedecker preserved the gift as manuscript and sent it to Louis Zukofsky instead of transforming it into print through publication, she preserved poetry as living material. When she appropriated a calendar, she preserved poetry in its objecthood, in its thisness. It operates on the page and on time as matter and material.

Time as Matter and Material

39Lorine Niedecker wrote on an object meant to be consumed then discarded. Unlike watches, clocks or hour-glasses, calendars are rarely kept once their yearly relevance is over. However, appropriating the calendar both cancelled its use function while foregrounding time in the frame of months, numbers and days that surround every vertical poem. Time as matter is foregrounded in the reading experience, which makes us realise it is usually an immanent, unperceived given. What gets to be visually experienced as an analogue of time is the vertical tabular organization of days and months on the page. Time is implicitly subordinated to verticality on the page. Nesting a vertical poem in a vertical frame signals the subordination of time to a rectangular, pre-ordained order.

40I would like to relate this point to what French contemporary poet Jean-Marie Gleize wrote about the way the poetic page has been variously imagined by poets as a table, a wall, a window, a surface, a frame or a stage. His examples are Emmanuel Hocquard, Bernard Noël, Pascal Quignard, Francis Ponge or Victor Segalen. They help us define the cartouche depth against the verticality of the page, which Jean-Marie Gleize calls "un schème de la verticalité : "

Le poème inscrit, gravé, la page-poème, la stèle ou surface verticale inscrite. Il y a, me semble-t-il, chez quelques poètes, une forte tentation de penser la page rectangle verticalement posée sur un de ses petits côtés, comme l’espace d’inscription du poème, lequel doit tenir lui-même sur cette page, bref, vertical, comme sur une pierre dressée, ou une stèle, dressée immobile contre le temps qui passe (s’écoule). (Gleize 2009, 142)

  • 30 In that respect, a poetrybook lateral page-turning does not do justice to the original vertical exp (...)

41The poem-page in the calendar stands as slab or stele erect against the passing of time. 30 Poem-pages conjure up the verticality of what Victor Segalen termed Immemoriaux or Stèles. The matter of flowing time is such an unnoticed, overlooked immemorial. And yet, it is visually inscribed in linear poetry. Lines of verse which are horizontal visualize another linear image of time flowing, and this horizontal scheme is duplicated at the level of the letter, since letter-writing and reading are a linear consecutive progression despite breaks, stops and lineation. These two implicit temporal flows constitute an immemorial that is de-materialised by the calendar pre-set form. Time as flowing matter dissolves into official calendar pages, into collective time. It surfaces again when it is re-materialised as poetic form on the page. Form is a key poetic issue : the calendar materialises the notion of form as repetition and change. It pits the regulation and regularity of time constraints against the unpredictable patterns of poetry. Order and pattern-bound predictability are on the side of the readable calendar while verse inscribes disruptive unpredictability and unreadability.

42The tempetuous encounter of order and poetry generates a tension that is duplicated at design level. The calendar is a serial object with self-similar pages which are assembled in an ahierarchical structure. It is a form of recursion or recursivity which is also found in the procedure of mechanized printing, since it is potentially endless. In contrast, the 27 poem-pages are serial but unique, limited in number, open-ended, arbitrarily started in January and stopped in December 1935. But they are not terminated. In that respect, they are like other open-ended poetic series : there is no resolution, no summation but potentially unending accumulation. The reference that comes to mind is Gertrude Stein’s way of counting-- poems go one and one and one rather than one plus one is two. An infinite number of poems stands in reserve in the serial form which is a generative structure proceeding from a syntagmatic thrust. Poems function as what Joseph M. Conte in Unending Design called "an arrangement of mobile, substitutive parts, whose combination produces meaning, or more generally a new object" (21). It is this new open-ended object that is preserved in the manuscript.

43Let me conclude in a few words : when Lorine Niedecker took poetry outside its printed literary site, she extended it over and into the world of ordinary objects. Her manuscript calendar poem preserved a resistance to the print medium, to print material that produces a different aesthetic effect on the reader. She preserved the ink matter of handwritten language which would normally disappear in print. She preserved the matter of time and time-regulated forms which are unseen immemorials. She exposed poetic sub-stance, the amnesia of matter in the material and the amnesia of the material in the finished work.

44What I find most valuable in her artist’s book is that readers rarely deal with poetic manuscripts as œuvres. Until we have another scholarly edition of Lorine Niedecker’s works, the material condition of her artist’s book will be a reserve for future editing efforts attuned to the interaction of bibliographical and linguistic codes.

  • 31 Patrick Vauday on the distiction between potency and power or "puissance et pouvoir":
    « Le matériau (...)

45Whenever her unreadable poems are related to the manuscript as œuvre, they force us to distinguish between the power and the potentiality of poetry (Patrick Vauday).31 Power corresponds to energeia (ἐνέργεια), to the fulfillment of a possibility waiting for its actualization in action. Power mobilizes instrumental reason which works towards a telos or a completion. A published work achieves that very completion. But a manuscript remains forever on the side of the potentiality of medium, material and matter as dynamis (δύναμις). It does not mean a potential that might chance to happen or not but one that exceeds the given. In this sense, a manuscript as material potentiality is the reserve of poetry.

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Bibliographie

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BORNSTEIN, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page, Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006.

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Notes

1 Lorine Niedecker’s archives are in the Dwight Foster Public Library and the Hoard Historical Museum, Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

2 Poet Clayton Eshleman published "Next Year /or/ I Fly My Rounds, Tempestuous" in Sulfur 41 (Fall 1997) : 42-71. Jenny Penberthy EDITOR'S NOTE was published in the Sulfur edition.
"The poem was filed with miscellaneous items of unidentified authorship. It is handwritten on small pieces of paper pasted into a 27-page pocket calendar, 4½ x 3¾", two weeks per page, the hole-punched pages held together by a red velvet ribbon tied in a bow. Niedecker's pastings obscure "The Favorite Sunlit Road Calendar's" own text, platitudes such as these-January 13-26: "True bravery is/shown by performing/without witness what/one might be capable/of doing before all the/world"; Sept. 22-Oct. 5: "To reach the port/of heaven, we must/sometimes sail with/the wind and some-/times against it-but/we must sail and not/drift, nor lie at anchor." The original text is just legible when held to the light. Her spirited title inverts rather than pastes over the calendar's title page. The poem makes no explicit reference to the pasted-over homilies but the aleatoric nature of the palimpsest exudes parody."

3 In 1964, Lorine Niedecker sent a small, handmade volume entitled "Homemade Poems" to Cid Corman and a similar volume, entitled "Handmade Poems," to Louis Zukofsky and Jonathan Williams (Collected Works 426).

4 See Jen Bervin and Marta Werner’s The Gorgeous Nothings, a facsimile edition of Emily Dickinson’s manuscript experimental work. She wrote on envelopes.

5 On typographical norms of poetry printing, see Jean Alice JACOBSON, How Should Poetry Look? The Printer’s Measure and the Poet’s Line.

6 Unmarked is used here in the sense of Johanna Drucker (The Visible Word and Figuring the Word).

7 See Patrick Vauday for an illuminating definition of matter, material and medium in the visual arts: he starts with matter « […] du bas latin materia, en latin classique materies, pris au figuré, proprement ‘bois de construction’. Le bois de construction dont sont faits les navires ou les maisons est un matériau tiré d’une matière, le bois. On est en présence d’une série instrumentale finalisée qui, du moins déterminé au plus déterminé, va de la matière dont est fait le matériau au produit final qui en prescrit la mise en forme et l’usage. Dans les termes d’Aristote, le bois est la cause matérielle de toute chose faite « en bois », l’idée du navire à construire est la cause formelle qui spécifie le matériau, le charpentier en est la cause efficiente et la navigation la cause finale ou raison d’être. " (9-10) "Avec le matériau s’esquisse une dématérialisation de la matière qui s’achèvera dans le produit fini et culminera en économie de marché dans sa transformation par la publicité et le consumérisme modernes en pur signe de l’échange. » (11)
Patrick Vauday maps an instrumental series teleologically oriented from immanent matter to contingent material and final product and usage. Applying Aristotle’s categories to Lorine Niedecker’s poems, one may claim that language is the material cause of language-made things (speech, writing and print) ; the poem is the formal cause which orients the use of object and ink; the poet is the efficient cause who pastes over the cartouche, then writes on it by hand; Louis Zukofsky reading poems in the coming year is its final cause.

8 Source : screen shot retrieved on ebay 2011/11/29 at 21.37.40
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?VISuperSize&Item=120765705950

9 « En général la séparation opérée par [Jean] Cohen entre ‘langage ordinaire’ et un ‘langage radicalement autre’ ou poésie (ibid.) est irrecevable (me semble-t-il). La poésie n'est pas un langage spécial affecté à l'affect. » (Michel Deguy 95, note 2).]

10 Readymades should not be limited to Marcel Duchamp. However, his May 1917 comment in New York Dadaist magazine The Blind Man aptly defined it,

Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands
made the fountain or not has no importance.
He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article
of life, and placed it so that its useful significance
disappeared under the new title and point of
view – created a new thought for that object.


As for pumbing, that is absurd.
The only works of art America
has given are her plumbing and
her bridges.

http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/dada/blindman/index.htm, retrieved April 11, 2011.

11 Writing is originally "to scrape, scratch" on clay tablets with a stylus (OED).

12 However, in both cases, as she wrote for the January 1935 page, "The satisfactory/emphasis is on revolving."

13 The poem’s signifiers (lineation, margins, indentation or flush left and right, commas, line breaks, dashes, split lines and letter fonts) come to us in book form as typographical or typset features of linguistic inscription. They materially encode poetry. See McGann 45 sq.

14 See Ruth Jennison The Zukofsky Era: Modernity, Margins, and the Avant-Garde.

15 See Elizabeth Willis, Niedecker’s Materialist Surrealism.

16 Arthur Rimbaud about A Season in Hell "I wanted to say what it said, literally and in all the senses".

17 From the OED, online edition : "d. In dyeing, pottery decoration, etc.: an area which is kept free from an applied colour, originally by the application of a resist (resist n. 2); (more generally) an area which remains the original colour of the material or the colour of the background. "

18 From the OED, online edition : "7. An act of keeping some knowledge from another person; a fact or piece of information kept back or disguised; a secret. "

19 From the OED, online edition : "Etymology: < French réserve reservation, restriction, qualification (1342 in Middle French denoting a clause which modifies and limits a contract), amount kept in reserve, supply, reinforcement (mid 16th cent. in de réserve , en réserve , earliest in spec. military use in hommes de réserve (1535)), (in plural) property or sums of money put aside for later (1588) < réserver reserve v.1"

20 Lorine Niedecker :

"What would they say if they knew
I sit for two months on six lines

of poetry? " (CW 143)

"Poet's Work
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoff
from this
condensery" (CW 194)

21 See Basil Bunting comments: "Her work was austere, free of all ornament, relying on the fundamental rhythms of concise statement, so that to many readers it must have seemed strange and bare. " (Alcosser 36). They fit her own early dissatisfaction with Imagism, with painterly image-making " like gorgeous quill-pens in old inkwells / almost dry " (Transition CW 23). She would not face " the dull prospect/ of an imagist/ turned philosopher " (Mourning Dove CW 23).

22 "What Niedecker meant by "surrealist" might be a phenomenology of consciousness (and unconsciousness) and the desire to render the movements of mind. " (Rachel Blau Du Plessis 2005).

23 From the OED, online edition : "a. In troops of reserve (also brigades of reserve, etc.): troops or parts of a military force which are withheld from action to serve as later reinforcements, or as cover. "

24 Rachel Blau DuPlessis about Niedecker’s use of haiku : "With Niedecker, haiku seems to have been a means to a commentary so buried, so deeply embedded in apparently artless word choice, line break and tone that the resonanes are very delayed." (1992, 108).

25 A poem like " All night, all night/ and what is it/ on a post-/card. " (CW 60) throws the reader off track : we hear the implicit duality of all night as all right, we see the full stop instead of the implicit question mark and we notice the logic of syntax (logopoeia) is visually broken by her script (phanopoeia McGann 28). The line blocks meaning made outside the page but can be related to the next poem: " Van Gogh’s / “Bar”-/ In all free states / the selves un- / mix and walk / the table’s /length. " (CW 61). What is Van Gogh’s night on a post-card ? If "things explain each other and not themselves, " then, poetry and paintings like Theo Van Gogh’s Bar and Salvadore Dali’s imbedded Archaeological Reminiscence Millet’sAngelus” (1933 – 1935) explain each other and not themselves.

26 See Charles Reznikoff’s use of archives or Carl Rakosi’s use of newspaper clippings which conjoin individual art and collective usage. L. Niedecker shared the Objectivists’ concern for the material qualities of words, their preoccupation with sincerity (" the accuracy of detail in writing " 280). Their rejection of " imperfect or predatory or sentimental" self-expression (Poetry 37 :5, February 1931, 292) fitted her need to " see straight " (269). But unlike other Objectivists in the 1930s, she probed the limits of object-based poetics and she challenged poetry to account for itself by looking into the literal graphic matter and material of poetry.

27 In a letter to Gail Roub, she wrote: " I fell over an entire stanza as tho it was a sandbag to keep the flood out ... I like planting poems in deep silence, each person gets at the poems for himself. " (Alcosser 35)

28 A review of Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry by Lorine Niedecker was "Originally published in Madison's Capital Times on 18 December 1948 in the "Books of Today" column edited by August Derleth. Available on http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/niedecker/essay3.html (retrieved July 14, 2011).

29 Modernist works "assumed a disjunction between art and life: meaning not revealed but made. Construction was itself the cognitive act: mastery of the medium disclosed the form of perception, organic now not to the operations of nature but to the internal relations of its structure" (Brogan and Preminger 55).

30 In that respect, a poetrybook lateral page-turning does not do justice to the original vertical experience of calendar page-turning. The gift-object inacted the physicality of the vertical page and heightened the sense of the calendar visual subordination of time to a vertical frame.

31 Patrick Vauday on the distiction between potency and power or "puissance et pouvoir":
« Le matériau se définit par des pouvoirs mobilisables dans la perspective d’une rationalité instrumentale, il est si l’on veut en attente de réalisation : on sait ce qu’il peut parce qu’on en connaît les propriétés et qu’on en calcule les limites de résistance. En revanche, étant ce qui est en excès de possibilité dans le donné, la puissance n’est pas rationalisable ou calculable : par exemple la peinture est muette et pourtant elle peut être éloquente chez Poussin ou criante chez Bacon, immobile et exprimer le mouvement chez Delacroix, visible et pourtant présenter l’invisible chez Le Gréco ou Rothko, pâte blanche et se faire transparente chez Chardin, et chez Soulages extraire du noir la lumière et les couleurs que pourtant il absorbe. Si la peinture est conduite à outrepasser les limites du matériau 26 – « la volonté artistique de l’homme semble s’être ainsi dès le début assigné sans répit de briser les barrières techniques » écrivait Alois Riegl –, ce n’est évidemment pas pour les repousser plus loin mais pour rendre la matière picturale à son infinie disponibilité ; c’est ce qu’on pourrait appeler dissonance par rapport à l’usage du matériau."

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Titre Fig. 1 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 41)
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Titre Fig. 2 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44)
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Titre Fig. 3 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (44-45)
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Titre Fig. 4 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous (Collected Works 40-41)
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Titre Fig. 5 Next Year /or/ I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (69)
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Titre Fig. 6 Next Year / or / I fly my rounds, Tempestuous, Sulfur 41 (59)
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Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet, « The Reserve of Poetry »Sillages critiques [En ligne], 21 | 2016, mis en ligne le 01 juin 2016, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/5161 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/sillagescritiques.5161

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Geneviève Cohen-Cheminet

Université Paris Sorbonne (VALE EA 4085, ARP)

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