Difficulty, Discursivity, Temporality
The open question I often return to in my reading life, which has spanned the years of this folio: what is “difficulty” in American poetry?
One of Theodor Adorno’s most important tenets in “On Lyric Poetry and Society” is that poems are the best literary form suited for an individual’s private language. When Adorno highlights poetry’s escape from the pressures of commodity culture, it feels liberating not just as a writer, but as a careful reader. Language presented in Adorno’s personal and private light implies intimacy and complexity and invention and particularity. But that doesn’t necessarily explain what a “private language” would look like. It also doesn’t establish the poet’s role as the poem’s source. Should they plan to instruct their reader on best language practices? Should the poem, or poet, exhibit a conspicuous personality? Do the answers to these questions necessarily create a more “difficulty” in poetry? And what consistent features, if any, could be identified in the poetry of the past seventeen years as a consequence?
Adorno’s essay has long been used as a permission structure for difficult poetry, primarily through critical readings of Baudelaire—in many ways, the mascot of modernist and post-1945 American literary criticism. Since 2000, however, “difficult poetry” in the United States has occupied many different aesthetic spaces, from the rapid vertical poems of Eileen Myles to the sharp-edged fragmentation of An Duplan. “Difficulty” still describes dense, syntactically discontinuous, and opaque language questioning the subject position of the author—what is considered a purely theoretical difficulty. Such difficulty in poetry has expanded to include more expressive poetic stances towards a subject beyond the rejection of closure or the refusal of direct meaning. Its absorption of difficult subject matter, in which trauma is not just revealed (as narrative poetry of the 1990s was especially apt to do) also encompasses the difficulty in matching traumatic experience to a language that most closely estimates the poet’s experience.
But in Adorno’s essay, I've also been curious why he juxtaposes a careful, critical treatment of Baudelaire’s density to the drastically more accessible work by German Romantic poet Eduard Mörike and Symbolist poet Stefan George—the examples he uses in the second half of “On Lyric Poetry and Society.” Their quoted poems may depict alienation, but it’s a softer, warmer one, distinctly unlike Baudelaire’s. Perhaps the “personal language” of lyric, which Adorno is observing can be as much about Baudelaire’s angularity as it is Mörike’s and George’s internal monologues dealing with their surroundings. And if so, it offers a different angle into the crux of Adorno’s argument. Poems that use “personal language” can appear in immersive work. Involved and lyrically overflowing with subject. They might feel more accessible, but they’re still a reliance on a medium designed for communication (language) makes for an underlying contradiction.
And I understand such irony is sharper the further language is removed from the sole purpose of communication. And transhistorically speaking, that kind of linguistic irony is present even as you’re reading gorgeous poems by John Clare or John Keats, or that the irony of an increasingly personal language used for public comprehension can be seen in work like the disjointed and disorienting mid-twentieth century poetry by Louis Zukofsky or Charles Olson. It can appear in the poetry of an uncertain mind struggling for a resolution with any answer or reconciliation when there are no answers. For instance, in Megan Fernandes’s Good Boys (2020), the poems often express a bewilderment when she reads a dominant white culture existing around her. The poems give us distance to observe the injustice of the situation while also depicting the poet’s state of mind. Or consider Gillian White’s 2014 study, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry, in which she reads poets like Elizabeth Bishop for the various modes of shame appearing in their work. If you hear someone say, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” And you see it both as that person’s projection of shame on you, as well as your own sense that you’re already filled with shame .
What I am describing here is the most recent iteration of a “difficult” poetic mode and interpretive method accompanying it, borne out of a range of lyric styles that rose to prominence in the early 2000s. The discursive often makes sense by fragmenting the sentence into phrases and clauses (just as its twentieth century predecessor was described as doing). But contemporary discursive poems seldom emphasize the fact of fracture alone, opting instead to blend fragments through a sentence’s conventional syntax, or to deemphasize the fractured breaks by way of the prosaic, like how the transition in many of John Ashbery’s sentences feel natural, even as they often propose a longer associative leap. For instance, at the opening of “The Other Tradition,” where “they all came,” the sentence feels like a straightforward statement about the arrival of “them,” its syntax rushes past the various kinds of moments and how they signal a much grander scope for this other tradition:
They all came, some wore sentiments
Emblazoned on T-shirts, proclaiming the lateness
Of the hour, and indeed the sun slanted its rays
Through branches of Norfolk Island pine as though
Politely clearing its throat, and all ideas settled
In a fuzz of dust under trees when it’s drizzling:
The endless games of Scrabble, the boosters,
The celebrated omelette au Cantal, and through it
The roar of time plunging unchecked through the sluices
Of the days, dragging every sexual moment of it
Past the lenses: the end of something.
There are at least two different cross-currents working in this opening sentence to the poem. First, there’s an end of days depicted in the images of the “lateness / Of the hour,” the setting sun “clearing its throat,” and even an explicit observation about “the end of something.” Then there’s the casual events going on in spite of or oblivious to this fatalism figured in “sentiments / Emblazoned on T-shirts” or “The endless games of Scrabble.” Significantly, however, the sentence is mainly driven by a tonal register that might favor fatalism, but the tone is still too casual to be taken so seriously as an the end of days would warrant.
It allows the poet to actively think through difficult subjects by way of verse. Brian Teare's Doomstead Days (2019) configures a discursive style to address a topic much larger than language—the Anthropocene. In his poem, “Clear Water Renga,” he shifts casually from admiring the California shore to the devastating impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Pierce Point Road rides out over
hills dry in July :: high fire
danger day, grasses
a gold nerve pricked by thistle ::
though “scenic views” line
the road, the surround is sky
without horizon, silver
vague sun haze :: vision’s
discursive limit :: mostly
I want to live there,
the precise site the mind stops
its blameless languaging job ::
as if there the real
stops burning, oil its gush from
the uncapped well :: no ::
it’s July 2010 ::
I’ve spent weeks watching YouTube
footage of a flight
over BP’s Deepwater
Horizon oil spill
The personal side to the language leads the work. However, where Ashbery’s end-of-days sentiment can feel more like a rhetorical gesture, Teare’s consideration of the Anthropocene is exemplified with concrete situations, like the California wildfires and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Teare’s crosscurrent comes through his wonder at the horizon—“vision’s discursive limit.” The poem’s uniform tone speaks to that unsettling dissonance where the world can be admired for its beauty even as the human activities actively destroy that world. In effect, the discursive for Teare is like an exclamation point notated with a fermata. Because there is no final statement to be made about what nature is, or what people are doing to nature while they live amidst it—or the amount of damage nature keeps absorbing.
Doomstead Days could almost be read as a textbook treatment of the Anthropocene, as he takes the role of a poet in wonder when he occupies a natural settings, eager to fit all he can possibly address in the moment, associatively meandering from natural observations to criticism of human intervention in the natural world, but still open to an experience of enchantment that might be prompted by details that signal either the despoliation of nature or the uncomfortable resilience of the landscapes and ecosystems he moves among. For Teare, it seems as if the practice of thinking imprinted onto discursive language is like undergoing the logic game Lacan describes in “Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty: A New Sophism.” Lacan’s essay uses a logic puzzle involving prisoners with a tag set on each of their backs. They are promised freedom if they can identify who’s wearing what tag. There is no immediate solution available. And even when they can see their fellow prisoners’ tags, they still need time to mark the others’ reactions to the tag they have on their own back. Lacan emphasizes that logic does not always occur instantaneously. The variables to which a given subject is exposed might only be revealed in time.
A discursive poetic style approaches a similarly challenging situation. The irony shouldn’t be lost when Teare first notes the “sky / without horizon silver // vague sun haze” then four stanzas later highlights the name of the offshore rig spilling oil into the ocean as the Deepwater Horizon. The language is being conspicuous with its responses to what was already said, like the prisoners in Lacan’s logic problem where they try to solve for which prisoner has a white tag on their back and which a black. And however extensively Teare’s poem can draw a context that anticipates a solution for the Anthropocene’s consequence and contributing variables, all the poems can do is accumulate hopelessness. Each observation of nature is a call for disappointment. And using the discursive style as a vehicle allows Teare to draw out a crescendo for that disappointment. It’s the poet in him that keeps going out to live and observe more of the natural world being destroyed.
Teare’s iterative cycles of disappointment and reconciliation fit within Sianne Ngai's “interesting” aesthetic category. Doomstead Days, as a book, can engage with the sublime, but each incremental observation contains only mild consequence. This play between sublime and mild sublime fits with what Ngai calls “interesting.” The poetry feels pliable and engaging. It feels more amenable to the audience’s sense of any given poem’s content.A writer might have something to say, but that won’t prevent a reader from forming variant impressions that endorse or contradict what the writer’s “this” is. There is a space here too for Marjorie Perloff’s indeterminacy, in which a poem appears to have every intention of resolving or discovering its source of coherence only for a reader to realize its “intention” (disingenuous or not) outweighs any consistent attitude it might have about subject or story. There is also a space for discursive poems, of which Teare’s work is a primary example, to participate with Hejinian’s rejection of closure. Closure is impossible in light of the mind’s capacity to elaborate and digress and reconsider the infinite possibilities available to any one person. Even as this radical concept from 1983 has by 2019 been absorbed as a foundational poetic strategy, it is nonetheless still understood as a signature of poetic difficulty.
These critical tenets have continued to play out through poetry of the 2010s and the political trends that defined the period. In Cynthia Arrieu-King's The Betweens (2021), there is, on one hand, the indeterminacy of the poet’s intersectional identity—a subject that would on its own invite a thoughtful, discursive treatment in which the writer considers the contradictions of what happens when identity embraces you, rejects you, and mistakes you in ways that feel untrue to who you are. But Arrieu-King’s use of the discursive mode naturally invites further complication of the subject by including autobiography as a narrative accumulation of these contradictions, family as both anchor and other, cultural bias as constantly morphing sting. What should her arrangement of self be when culture insists race be taken into identitarian account, but her experiences show that same culture to consistently misread her? Difficulty produces strategies of legibility, and throughout The Betweens, Arrieu-King disperses the many variables she sees around race, rearranging them, and then containing them in uniform microessay forms that might seem to ironically contain each of these affronts, even as the book discursively intersects the various biographical narratives to make clear the limitless nature of their complexity.
For a writer like Laynie Browne, the practice itself of writing is the art. In her 2023 book of prose poems Practice Has No Sequel, she arranges her apart-from-self sentiments under the auspices of feminism, giving the language a sense of momentum as she realizes her solidarity with women. Browne’s discursive mode provides a means for expressing that something that feels beyond the scope of writing in the current moment—there will always be other concerns conducive to the moment you’re writing into, whether a personal moment or a cultural one. What were you going to write about yesterday? What does that evocative image stand for? Why can't the present be in the poem the way a poet feels it was when they were writing it, opening to her right now? Is that, then, the present moment? The invitation to write that? Practice Has No Sequel, in my view, is really about writing as a way of observing the creative self who would be the one writing. By comparison, Aditi Machado’s Emporium (2020) proposes tapestry as a means for investigating what comprises the moment. Tapestry’s abstracted arrangement is repeated in language through the poem’s geometry of simultaneity, an argument that takes a more structural point of view. And yet the poems’ ironic position as language whose multiple concerns are constricted to a serial consideration rather than a temporal simultaneity. Discursiveness, through pattern and memory, attempts to bridge that gap, to often difficult result.
Narrative, while most often associated with the poetics of prose, can provide helpful insight into the difficulties encountered in discursive, contemporary poems. And because narrative has many different forms, because it’s a common method for the collective imagination to narrate itself across cultural forms from painting, film, it appeared beneficial to Roland Barthes, in 1966’s “Structural Analysis of Narrative,” to highlight a semiotic code at work behind any given story’s enchantment. He proposes reading stories like a linguist reads a sentence. And what appears most useful to me for this discussion of understanding discursive poetry is how Barthes’s reading method temporalizes a story. Where stories are often read for their characters, the events these characters participated in, all appearing like a facsimile to real life, Barthes argues the story should be read for each phrase in a sentence: almost like the narrative is a poem, with its lineations and gestures that structure meaning. In Barthes’s reading, a character isn’t a stand-in for a person, it’s a construction (and the narrator is a construction, the setting is a construction, and so on).
Barthes proposes smaller units he calls “functions,” and he identifies “sequences” as functions threaded together. The idea is to notice the effect when functions appear in an explicit sequence versus functions that are implicitly referring to other functions in the story at irregular intervals. So the story, rather than serving as a representation of reality, exists in a series of symmetrical and asymmetrical juxtapositions, and the associative logic that might result from them.
[E]ither a narrative is merely a rambling collection of events, in which case nothing can be said about it other than by referring back to the storyteller’s (the author’s) art, talent or genius—all mythical forms of chance—or else it shares with other narratives a common structure which is open to analysis, no matter how much patience its formulation requires. (80)
Barthes’s reading of plot as a mechanism of distinct parts could be compared to poetic fragmentation, which is a Modernist technique that remains a key antecedent particularly for difficult, discursive poetry. Think of the basic reasons why critics will often use T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as the primary point of reference for Modernist poetry: the discontinuity of modern life finds its expressive form in the fragment, and other figurations of experiential disruption. An early discursive mode like Eliot’s fits, especially when dramatizing the inevitable tension of the attempt to reconcile the modern’s speed and fragmentation with the narrative continuity most people use to understand their experiences under a rubric of “self.” Fragmented poetry can exploit this tension, perhaps even antagonize it. Here I draw a congruence between “poetic fragment” and what Barthes calls “function” (what could be thought of as the unit of discourse) that can contribute to a critical lens for reading discursive poetry as it appears in the 2010s and 2020s. However, after an entire twentieth century’s worth of Modernist strategies and stylistic moves, it feels reductive to describe poetry of the 2000s and beyond through the poetic fragment alone . Discursive poetry can assuredly draw a lineage from Pound and Eliot, it also contains the multitudes of different fragmentary styles or maneuvers that entered into and have since emerged in twenty-first century poetry.
Consider, for instance, the fragmentary nature of a list. And then reading the list as though it were a poem. Which is partly the game in Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. What is a list enumerated while the poet waits to be overcome by sleep, the ultimate and elusive state of both unconscious continuity (rest) and conscious fragmentation (dreams)? How can subsequent items elaborate on a line of thinking? A list titled “No Use” that starts with “Wet cigarettes” then “E-cigarettes” then “A babysitter whose babysitter is sick”? How is a reader to transfer the easy association with the first two items with the much longer leap needed to include the line about a babysitter? Or is the associative movement really not that hard. The items on the list are just funny. There is “No Use” to them.
But what about a list that grows in what it’s listing? Buffam’s lists of daily endeavors, or stresses, or existences, or annoyances, or “Hateful Things,” as Sei Shōnagon phrases it in her own Pillow Book (which Buffam often refers to). What is the Barthesian “function” in poetry whose fragmented edges have been worn down to read more like prose, but they’re still invested in the poetic value of interruption or disjunction or poetic turn? In Buffam’s A Pillow Book, they serve as assertive remarks on her current situation. She’s a mother. She’s a wife. She’s a writer. She’s contingent faculty at the university where her husband teaches. She’s a friend. She’s a woman, and she’s all too aware what that might mean. She’s a sophisticated reader. And all those she’s together would just love it if she had a regular sleep schedule. And she’s therefore also a she who’s very interested in pillows.
Among the oldest living pillows in the world today is a smooth block of unpainted wood with a wide crack running through its middle and a shallow indentation on the top. (1)
Kings and commoners alike have known the value of a good pillow forever. From Quito to Cairo to Chicago to Xiangyang, examples can be found in museums all over the world. (4)
Among the Minhe Tu of modern China, if the deceased has enjoyed a natural death—having married, that is, produced healthy offspring and grown old—her head is laid upon a pillow embroidered with a virgin boy and girl extending an embroidered plate of food (33)
Among the Ngoni of modern Tanzania, the feather-stuffed pillow is considered so intimate a possession it is often buried with its owner. (33)
In the case of A Pillow Book, Buffam’s delivery might suggest she’s using each of her lists or vignettes to explain to herself the kind of person she sees herself as. She spells things out on the page. And as she gets further into whatever she understands, she realizes there are still other parts of her life that could be fit to that understanding. Plus, the book would have us believe her life keeps happening, so the present moment of Suzanne Buffam, the person currently writing this book also takes a chance to sound in, much like Laynie Browne’s writer observing the creative act of writing. And the gathering of all these listed concerns get in the way of that deeper note Buffam might or might not admit she ever intended to pursue in the end. Barthes has something to say about that:
[T]here is a sort of structural ‘limping,’ an incessant play of potentials whose varying falls give the narrative its dynamism or energy: each unit is perceived at once in its surfacing and in its depth and it is thus that the narrative ‘works’; through the concourse of these two movements the structure ramifies, proliferates, uncovers itself—and recovers itself, pulls itself together: the new never fails in its regularity. (123)
This is the gathering of sense that accumulates between each of the book’s vignettes, and in each of the lists that presumably drawn in the poet’s most sleepless moments, there is a pause for what had been said to contribute to the larger picture. As though there must be a larger picture. And that larger picture feels as disoriented as the poet’s sleep-deprivation would have put her even without all these commitments and identities trying to find footing.
For Barthes’s narrative structure has different interruptions incidental to it, distorting it, so that a logical time is the primary concern rather than an accurate accounting. Narrative draws out any sequence of events, excising extra information. It signals to the reader what should be emphasized over other moments in the story. And, as with reading any conspicuous mention of form, these emphases should signal the reader’s attention. The sequencing in Buffam’s book is based on humor and interest on one hand. But there is a notably increased pacing of dreams as the book comes to its end. It occurs to me that a consideration of sleep, what the book has portrayed as an ache for sleep, leads to sharply illogical dreams. But it might also be Buffam using an extreme zaniness to explain her sleepless situation.
To some degree, the discursive style constitutes writing that is mimetic of thinking and reading. Specifically, discursive poetry shows how a writer self-consciously uses language to further develop their thinking. But where Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories comments on artists who have incorporated the theory of art into their making (or they’ve acknowledged the role of curators’ explicit interests into their art making), a poet using the discursive style is incorporating their personal practice of reading into writing. This is how their mind works while they’re reading. How time can feel both suspended and endured while they read. For discursive poets, reading has a similar influence on writing as would a curator’s interest in artists’ practice: their perception of theory present in the work, their expectations that might integrate granularly into an artist’s production. Discursive writing is most especially a performance of synthesizing ideas. It articulates the temporality of composition: both the moment when two ideas come together, as well as the anticipation of when an argument or a plotline or a lyric thread can be seen converging into a single epiphanic point. Like Lacan’s expanded logic that includes both the fast click of rationality as well as the time it takes for people to doubt rational thinking before realizing what their rational thought really is, poetry can be read using a similarly temporal lens.
Cuthwulf Eileen Myles’s work, through this lens, guides the reader through various states of mind, like Myles is reading the world. Or Myles’s work perceives the world, and the life they’re living, as something to be read. I understand the irony in that statement, given how Myles’s poems often feel both momentary and trapped in the moment, slick with language. Whatever words they use might not stick well enough to any moment, but the moment itself is preserved in a poem. However, Myles’s use of the discursive style is not only about how the poem can be read understanding it for how it expresses the shifts of logic. For instance, in “The Perfect Faceless Fish,” filled with the poet’s eager interest in fulfilling their beloved’s desires, they move quickly to fan out the many ways affection speaks past the very language the poem uses to be affectionate:
We could only talk through
our eyes and now
that is gone. But this
is deeper than
the marrow
we don’t need rods cones
those Sanskrit piles of things
I am seeing through a stain
right now
in your love
I am swimming for years.
In a sudden absence
of trouble in a deftly
handled conversation
I, a luminous fish
felt in this spectacle of impossibility
a fragrant graze upon the
world
an intermittent twitch,
whisper.
Where the poem lists out this outrageous, boundaryless closeness, it also presents slippery discursive gestures. The lineation helps to form one version of phrasing the sentiments into a sentence-like construction. Then there’s another phrasing I would propose through brackets: [those Sanskrit piles of things / I am seeing through] [a stain] [right now] [in your love / I am swimming] [for years.] The vertical momentum in Myles’s work, and how often a phrasing dictated by lineation isn’t immediately present makes alternate phrasings like this a common discursive styling in their work.
Discursivity for other poets is a technique for enacting what it feels like when you’re in the moment reading a poem or a book. The poem, not just the poet, can be seen sifting information, or arranging a context, or demonstrating a comparison of one perspective to the other. It’s playing out the poet’s state of mind. And, ironically enough, it’s comparable to the late twentieth century mode of the first-person narrative lyric, which was often told in a discursive, though didactic, fashion. In Natasha Sajé’s reading of Philip Levine, she observes Levine’s tendency to privilege his own interest in relating what mattered to him in a story, rather than merely informing a reader about a series of events. A discursive narrator, in fact, is often paced with observational and temporal shifts that feel similar to a discursive speaker.
It’s difficult to understand what prompts the transitions in Suzanne Buffam’s A Pillow Book. Is it entertainment? Idleness? To what degree does Sianne Ngai’s “interesting” category apply to the book’s elaboration of ongoing elaboration? Should the book be read as an episodic autobiography? As a depiction of the circumstances experienced in 2010s America? Could it be more constructive to read Gillian White’s views on shame in twentieth century poetry as the drive moving the book from one section to the next? Any of these lenses could provide an overall view. However, it’s the book’s indeterminate sequencing that complicates the use of any one critical lens. To join things together, Buffam uses humor. It’s funny how interesting it is moving from one consideration of a twenty-first century adult woman to the next. And Buffam has a funny take on how funny it is, a discursive humor. And yet, as often happens with comedy, the humor creates a novel perspective on what’s not right. It prompts the reader’s interest in Buffam as a thinker and as a participant in twenty-first century American culture. It fits with Sianne Ngai's "interesting" category. The self-deprecating nature of Buffam’s humor fits the incrementalizing of information while also indulging her complicated view of the nuclear family. Should shame be read as an understood foil for the work?.
And it’s each half-closure, each ridiculous list from “Military Operations A to Z” to “Home Appliances A to Z,” that discourages a reader’s individual consideration, given each poem’s much more interesting contribution to an overall statement, how one moment surprisingly leads to the next is one of the compelling points sustaining A Pillow Book. For Buffam, it’s her personal commentary that ultimately constitutes the medium. She documents her reality. It’s presented as a series of notes fashioned for a reader, but made to feel more like the thoughts the writer had made for herself. “I would Inform the reader…” says the book, with further bits of interesting information about Buffam’s life as a mother, a wife, a woman entering her forties. Often, she elaborates on what she’s told the reader with information that is slightly expected, like it represents incremental levels of surprise.
The interesting makes light of the increment, fascinates at its slightness, indulges what might be merely mundane. And A Pillow Book provides a variety of methods for the increment to perform. Or to downplay itself. Yes, there is some surprise when the poet compares herself to Shōnagan, because, historically speaking, what could Buffam and a courtier from the Heian period of Japanese culture (circa 1000 AD) possibly have in common? But the comparison is also unsurprising, the collection’s title notwithstanding, given the stature Shōnagan has among writers. She was featured in Philip Lopate’s foundational anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay. There was an art film adaptation of The Pillow Book in 1995. My own sense of surprise in Buffam’s work is that there’s an additional balance between what shouldn’t be surprising but admittedly is. That’s what makes Buffam's book interesting, like her late-night interest in QVC. No matter your background, who wouldn’t be looking at it in the middle of a sleepless night? Each context Buffam positions herself in sheds one more light on this person, the central character of her book, in incremental, or temporal, revelations. Each is a new, informative light. But it’s also done tongue-in-cheek, or it’s done out of genuine desperation for more sleep, or it’s done to gain just a small upper hand on managing her own life.
*
To read literature as a discourse, as Barthes instructs, is to read as an activity occurring over time. Yes, literature can be read for its completeness, for its conclusion where all the pieces interlock. And then there’s reading for the experiences while you’re reading it. Or, as Marjorie Perloff explains in 21st Century Modernisms, there’s a method of reading where you’re aware that meaning is happening while you read—something that’s original to what distinguishes poetry from other forms of writing. It’s “an understanding of poetry in its classical Greek meaning as poiesis or making, with the specific understanding that language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for thoughts and feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of meaning-making.” (9) For Perloff, this is basic to her argument that T. S. Eliot should be read differently for his first-half-of-career work versus the second-half-of-his-career. Early Eliot (of The Waste Land) might have been foregrounding his language, forcing the reader to reckon with the jaggedness of his fragments. His style intentionally avoided a straightforward clarity, because expressing subjectivity is a confounding exercise. People are filled with contradictions! Later Eliot (of Four Quartets) is not so resistant to the activity of reading. Or its sentences are more interested in surprise truths made available via rhetorical turns of phrase. As Perloff argues, these represent two different modes of “constructivism” for Eliot, and his interest in making a poem’s language a site of meaning-making, one that must occur while the reader is reading.
Time is necessary for judgment. Time can lead to either certainty or doubt regarding judgment. And where a writer can introduce these temporal aspects into the reading process is the degree that fragmenting the text can provide handles for this consideration. The purpose of a discourse need not be completion, it can be about participation with it.
Lacan is skeptical of the presumed solution to logic. This is not necessarily a skepticism of logic. But it’s a different matter to understand that the time required for solving a logical problem is not just a measure of how long it takes you to put together variables that supposedly existed the moment you were given the problem (“what is / comes in boxes” Myles says in their poem, “My Box”). Lacan would like to account for certainty of the problem’s solution as it develops over time (“what is not / comes in waves” Myles states immediately after their comment about boxes), and he wants an account for the necessary variables appearing over time. Logic, then, should not be instantaneous, where an individual races to the click of truth.
True solutions can be well served by process.
This is helpful for thinking about the discursive style, which includes the unfolding of an argument, like in Don Mee Choi’s critique of capitalism and neocolonialism in her 2024 collection Mirror Nation. On one hand, what stability and prosperity bring to people’s lives is generally accepted. But, as Mirror Nation argues, capitalism exploits this desire for order and collective well-being. Her argument for an economics that incentivizes obedience is most effective when it’s conducted over time, revealing different interests and concessions. Choi, using a discursive structure, follows an “anticipated certainty” (Lacan’s words) but also distorts the path that would lead to certainty by including personal digressions. And since the book’s success lies not only in its effective execution of a political argument, but also in the poetic complication of that logic. Across the collection Choi incrementally relates her relationship with her father, her life growing up outside her native South Korea, and her choice not to have her own children, which is juxtaposed with the value she places on the relationship with her father. The incremental quality of discursiveness benefits from the time required to encounter the life presented in the work. Timing contrariety and perspective provides an interesting take on the temporal logic Barthes describes in his “discourse” lens on narrative. Like Buffam, the speaker negotiates and reacts these multiplicities in real time.
In a way it’s a reconsideration of Perloff’s indeterminacy in American poetry. On one hand, these poems involve the reader in what feels certain and necessary. The poet has recognized what needs to be said, and they’re saying it. But then as the poem closes, it appears to settle on something that lacks determinacy. The discursive poem drives forward with some certainty, but then it digresses and acknowledges things might not be so certain. And as the reader spends time moving through the poem this shift between certainty and uncertainty is revealed. Is it the poet delaying, giving the reader time to discover the variety of their thinking, like Teare caught between a poetic wonder at nature and a certain doom about the Anthropocene? Is it the poet mimetically positioning the reader with their own indeterminacy, as Cynthia Arrieu-King accounting for her intersectional identity? Is it the poet informing the reader of what they had to learn in the order they learned it before coming to this realization, as Laynie Browne recognizing there is no certainty in the creative act, even as its appearance on the page most certainly exists?
