My Way_ Speeches and Poems - Charles Bernstein

t 82
THE RES P 0 N SEA S sue H
between marked and unmarked texts: "[Gutenberg's] bibles, with their perfectly
uniform grey pages, their uninterrupted blocks of text, without
headings or subheading ... are the archetype of the unmarked text, the
text in which the words on the page 'appear to speak themselves' ... Such
a text appears to possess an authority which transcends the mere material
presence of words on a page." Drucker's book is a brief for the poetics of
the marked text. To make her case, she presents extended interpretations
of the work of four representative modernist figures, each of whom used
typography in strikingly innovative, but nonetheless dissimilar, ways. Her
account moves from the militant Italian Futurism of Filippo Marinetti to
the vernacular lyricism of Guillaume Apollinaire and from "hermetic esotericism"
of Ilia Zdanevich (Iliazd), a Russian zaum poet who emigrated to
Paris, to the highly rhetorical Dada subversions of Tristan Tzara.
Drucker traces the origins of modernist typographic experimentation
not only to Mallarme but also both to the print advertising of the late 19th
century and to the typographic self-consciousness of, for example,
William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement. Despite the sharp aesthetic,
social, and political differences among these typographic practices,
Drucker sees their use of marked texts as "aggressively situat[ing] the
reader in relation to the various levels of enunciation in the text-reader,
speaker, subject, author-though with manipulative utilization of the
strategies of graphic design. Such inscription, obvious marking, of the assumed
reader, forces the language into a public domain".
The Visible Word closes with a discussion of the demise of typographic
experimentation, as the unruly incursions of language into public domain
are transformed by the "efficient" and "modern", which is to say uniformist,
principles of graphic design into contained, unified markers of corporate
identity and packaging.
The typographic containment and domestication of the unruly manuscripts
of Emily Dickinson is the subject of Susan Howe's bibliographic
intervention in "The Illogic of Sumptuary Values". Her approach might be
seen as a vital counterpoint to Paul De Man's influential essay on disfiguring
Shelley in terms of the opposite direction of its interpretation of a
canonical English language poetic-toward displacement in De Man and
emplacement-to use Williams's word-in Howe.
Blake and Dickinson remain the two most intractable poets in the
English-language tradition. Both refused the assimilative processes of
publishing and distribution by creating works that defy easy entry into
standard formats of reprinting and dissemination. Indeed, for the most
part, we read Blake and Dickinson in visual translation or reproduction
rather than in the original.