University of Arizona Poetry Center

Dreams, Physical Pleasure, and Books Without Words

Before I begin, let me hand out a page with only a rectangle printed on it. Later I will make it clear why I am doing so.

Some of us in this room have been working for 24 years or more, in Tucson, to cultivate a home for “conceptual poetry” and related work, and I want to thank the University of Arizona Poetry Center for stepping into this territory where we live every day, in a big and most welcome manner. Thank you for creating this symposium.

Twenty-four years ago, when I moved here to Tucson, I brought with me one book-in-progress that was the end of Black Mesa Press and the beginning of Chax Press. It was a book titled French Sonnets, by Jackson Mac Low, very much a conceptual work involving procedures that made use of French and English dictionaries. I remember at the time having a dream in which the main characters were William Shakespeare and Samuel Johnson. Johnson was working on his dictionary. I’m not all that involved in telling my dreams, but, oddly, last night I had a dream in which I was walking in Paris along the Seine, and I saw Craig Dworkin, one of the primary presenters at this symposium and the author of the introduction to the Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing. He was sitting at a chair by a table along the Seine, and, though in my odd dream logic he was breathing and speaking and otherwise functioning normally, he was entirely encased in either a vinyl or leather bag (later note: the next day Craig told me it was definitely a vinyl bag, and he remembers being hot and sweaty). So in twenty-four years I’ve moved from Mac Low, Shakespeare, and Johnson, to Craig Dworkin and the encasement of poets in vinyl bags, possibly a “conceptual poetry” move.

I want to touch on a couple of things in my comments today, which are extemporaneous except for two paragraphs from a work-in-progress. One is related to the way conceptual poetry, at least as presented in this symposium, turns us to a certain kind of physical pleasure I associate with the production of sound in poetry. I find such pleasure particularly present in works either read, performed, or referred to in the last day and a half, by Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Tracie Morris, Charles Bernstein, Craig Dworkin, and others. I will end with a journey outward, toward certain practices that can be considered as conceptual writing in the work of two contemporary Chinese artists.

Here are the first two paragraphs of a book I have been working on about the pleasures of poetry. They take the notion of physical pleasure back to a point at or near the beginning of poetry in English.

To Louis Zukofsky’s definition of the value of poetry as the experience of pleasure through “sight, sound, and intellection,” I would add another quality, that of tactile physical pleasure. Related to sound, but located in the pleasure of producing sound rather than hearing it. The addition of physicality leads us to start somewhere near the beginning, at least of poetry in English – and though I might venture with little cat feet into Chinese, French, Italian, Greek, Roman, Russian, Spanish, and other poetries – I will remain primarily with English, simply because it is what I know best, though I carry no illusion that its poetry is even one iamb better than that written in any other language.

To the beginning we go, and to physical pleasure.

Hwaet we gardena (first line of Beowulf, circa 680-800)

You don’t have to know what that means, although it helps to know it is a kind of boastful greeting, said with gusto, that the “ae” of Hwaet should be pronounced like the short “a” of drat or gnat, that the “Hw” should literally be sounded, like a wind blowing until it closes in that “w” sound, that the word “we” is pronounced more like the contemporary “way” than like “we” as in us, that the “r” in “gardena” should be slightly rolled, and the first syllable of “gardena” should be a noticeably longer syllable than any other in that word, the “de” in “gardena” should be spoken like “day” but cut off just a bit short, and the final “na” should sound like the final “na” in banana. Now, say it all, first slowly, “Hwaet we gardena,” then again and again, each time a bit faster (but more with confidence than with speed), until you say it as if you are greeting a friend who has come into the very friendly pub in which you like to down a pint now and then and have a very good time. Feel what your lips do at the beginning to both produce and cut off that wind, how the tongue slaps inside the mouth on that first “t”, how you go to the back of the mouth at the beginning of “gardena” but then come up toward the front to roll that “r”and then just stop, neither too suddenly nor with too much lingering, as you let out that short exhalation of “na.” If it doesn’t feel good to say, you’re either not doing it right, or you haven’t considered that speech is a physical pleasure, related to kissing, breathing in cool air, cooing, whistling, oral sex, licking a popsicle, and other great things you can do with your mouth.
(from The Poetry Book, working title of an in-progress book)

Finally, let me move away from western culture to two contemporary Chinese artists, both represented in an exhibition last year, titled Shu: Re-inventing the Book in Contemporary Chinese Art, which was presented first in New York, then in an expanded form at the Seattle Asian Art Museum, where I had the pleasure of viewing it.

In perhaps the most visually stunning work of the exhibition, “The Book from the Sky,” Xu Bing created an installation in a large room, perhaps fifty feet by forty feet. On the ground were several hundred, perhaps a thousand, books open to their centers, all printed with Chinese ideographic characters. At either end of these books were wooden platforms, seemingly intended for quite devotion to the books in front of the viewer. On the walls were pages printed with Chinese characters. Hanging from the ceiling, perhaps 12 feet wide, was a long scroll from end to end of the room, almost touching the books on the floor at one point, and illuminated from above. In some ways an obvious shrine to the notion of language, book, printing, and knowledge — except that the Chinese characters were not in the Chinese language at all. The artist had carved 40,000 nonsense characters, making a most ambivalent statement about his relationship to language and the book, to knowledge and to history.

Another artist featured in this exhibition, Song Dong, had cut calligraphy teaching books, with models of Chinese written characters, into strips, keeping them attached to their bindings, but with the books open, flat on the floor, and fans blowing the strips of language, like wind blowing a field of tall grass.

Two works not in this exhibition, but to which the exhibition led me, by Song Dong, I find most compelling as “conceptual writing.” In one, titled “Book Without Words,” the artist has made what he calls his most important work. He has shown it to no one, including his wife. In it he has drawn a rectangle on every page. He reads the book without words, noting to the left of the rectangle the time he begins, and to the right the time he ends. He reads from a few minutes to half an hour per day. Once a page’s margins, outside the rectangle, are filled with his notation, he goes on to the next page. He says he has been reading the book for eleven years, and he is not yet finished. The pieces of paper with rectangles that I passed out at the beginning of my talk are for you to at least have a “page without words.” It is yours to read and interpret as you wish.

The final work I want to mention, also by Song Dong, is what he calls his “Water Diary.” He keeps a diary, writing on stone with a calligraphy brush dipped in water rather than ink. He has performed parts of this work around the globe. The water, of course, evaporates, often as soon as it has been written. Some have posited “conceptual writing” in opposition to Romantic and expressivist writing. Yet in both of the works by Song Dong, the attention is to the relationship with language, and to what is not present. In certain ways I find his approach Romantic, even touching on the possibility of transcendence of the physical. I certainly find both of these works expressivist, even spiritual, in nature. They lead me to admit a conceptual writing that is not in any way removed from expressivist or Romantic tendencies.

Thank you.

Charles Alexander