The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure

in Contemporary American Poetry

Hélène Aji

One may argue that it all started with Gertrude Stein and her focus on the constraints imposed by
language on perception and the subsequent grammar of infinite repetitivity and minute variation that
informs her poetic texts. This notion of a subject permanently and irredeemably caught in the very
“structure” of his expressive modes opens up a multiplicity of debates centred around the attempts at
assessing and gaining control over these restrictions.

One of them lies in the impulse to free poetry from the fetters of meter and rhyme, thus
blatantly asserting an assumed independence of the poetic subject from the pre-established demands
of his medium. It is however interesting to notice how, with poets such as Ezra Pound or William
Carlos Williams, this effort culminates in the claim for impersonality and an erasure of the subject—at
least from the text of the poem. Pound’s choice of didacticism over aestheticism and Williams’s work
toward a new metrics could then be seen as perverse returns of the subject through structure: they
send poetics back to its original dilemma of inscribing the subject in the poem in a manner distinct
from sentimental projection as well as from arbitrary metrical constraints. Whatever failures Pound
and Williams’s poems might embody in terms of impersonality, they albeit sometimes unwillingly
outline the possibilities for new inscriptions of the subject in the poem in terms of organised
production and controlled, streamlined genesis. Both the compositional method of the Cantos and of
Williams’s Paterson can be understood as striving toward the adoption of rationalised procedures in
the production of the poem. The conflation of Stein’s writing with these attempts has engendered an
awareness that the inscription of the subject in the poem is indeed an inescapable fact but that this
fact is structural, and does not coincide with issues of self-expressivity .

Consequently the last part of this paper will focus on the modes some contemporary poets
have been adopting to move away from the assimilation of subject to self. The subject is other than a
self: in the procedural poetry of Jackson Mac Low the subject becomes generic, de-personalised so as
to embody a conceptualised individual in a world or context conceived of as structure or architecture.
Procedural poetries have often been considered with condescension for various reasons, which all
have to do with poetics and the poetic agenda of those who look at them. At worst, they are
dismissed as obscure, pointlessly complex modes of composition which produce even more obscure
and hermetic texts, failing to trigger off the reader’s empathetic projection and vicarious expression of
self. At best, they are deemed interesting in the philosophical approach of authority which they imply
and more often than not thematize in the hypotactic discourse they unfold. More disturbing perhaps
than these contradictory appraisals is the fact that procedure as a text-generating method is almost
unavoidably reduced to “play,” as in Marjorie Perloff’s formulation of the modernist shift “from free
verse to procedural play.”1 Such an expression, even as it justifiably chronicles and emphasizes a key
moment in the evolution of poetic praxis and theory, also unwittingly downgrades the very texts it
aims to describe as serious and valuable. And indeed, because procedural poetry is often based on
game-related methods (manipulating cards, dice, etc.) and because it imposes compositional
constraints that jeopardize meaningfulness, one is tempted to dismiss it as purely experimental and in
no way a viable option for poetry. Moreover one is also tempted to constrast it with free verse,
forgetting that there might never have been such a thing as “free verse.” Indeed, one would rather
talk of changes in the nature of compositional constraints and their problematic role in the definition
of authorship, of the field of poetry, and ultimately of the conception of voice or rhythm as self-
related—or not. These questions can be raised in front of many a poetic text and what follows does in
no way argue that they cristallized for the first time with the advent of high modernism: Whitman’s
bombastic rambling verse and Dickinson’s often playful conciseness could be as worthy fields of
investigation. Nevertheless, what differentiates Eliot, Pound or Williams from earlier poets is perhaps

1
Cf. “The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed: From Free Verse to Procedural Play” (Radical Artifice 134-70).

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 66
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>
their famous claim for impersonality, universality, objectivity—and their radically personal, particular,
and subjective subsequent poetics.

I - Poundian Impersonality as Decoy

Thus, it is interesting to notice how Ezra Pound’s imagism gives way, almost instantaneously,
to vorticism. The very poem he presents as the quintessential example of his imagist theory, “In a
Station of the Metro” (Collected Shorter Poems 109), does not foot the bill of his theoretical dicta: in a
highly metaphorical way (“petals on a wet black bough”), the poem conveys an emotion, which is very
remote from the demands of a “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” proclaimed in Make It New (“A Stray
Document” 335). Rather, this poem paves the way for the vorticist theory of concentrated but also
distorting fluxes of energy. Pound’s imagist poem par excellence evidences the type of transmutation
performed by the vortograph, which so fascinated him: the lenses of the photographic camera are
made to interact in such a way that the resulting picture is not only blurred but allows for the
multiplication of interpretations, in other words, for an endless game of projections. At the same time
though, by playing with the camera—and the notion of play is tantamount here—the artist establishes
procedures by which he is going to convey a mode of being in the world, or rather to the world. In
Pound’s view, similar methods were to be developed by the vorticists in painting (decomposition into
planes as seen in Wyndham Lewis’s Timon illustrations) and in literature (by himself). However, one
can wonder whether this mechanization of artistic production goes beyond wishful thinking and a
fairly erratic pseudo-scientific reaction to the assumed emotionality of romanticism. If one is to believe
Pound’s argument, poetry before him, apart from a few select exceptions, had reached an absurd
point of sentimental self-centredness, encased in the statutory form of the iambic pentameter. But if
one is to abandon fixed forms, what else is The Cantos doing than convey the emotional as well as
intellectual tribulations of a modern version of the romantic genius? The practice of selection,
juxtaposition and repetition obeys an overall vision which functions as the poem’s hypotext and which
stabilizes its methods while eluding rationalization and systematization: the original motif of the fugue,
alluded to by Yeats in A Vision, does not hold, nor does the poem fully “cohere” on a referential level,
to take up a Poundian phrase. But this cannot be easily dismissed as a failure, at least not according
to Pound’s conception of literature and of the poet’s mission, both from a historical and from a
linguistic point of view. Thus one reads, in ABC of Reading, that “Great Literature is simply language
charged with meaning to the utmost degree” and that “the good writer chooses his words for their
‘meaning,’ but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-
board” (“Compass, Sextant, or Landmarks” 36). Although vorticism, after imagism, tries to standardize
the procedures of writing, the result, for Pound, is not to be assessed in terms of dynamics but in
terms of accumulation and stasis—something paradoxically apparent in the poem he wrote as an
example of vorticist literature and which reinvests the metaphor of the chess game. Here, mobility is
turned into motionlessness through the use of gerunds and nouns, and adjectivation charges the
words with meaning, subliminally conveying the agenda of the poetic self:
Red knights, brown bishops, bright queens
Striking the board, falling in strong 'L's' of colour,
Reaching and striking in angles,
Holding lines of one colour:
This board is alive with light
These pieces are living in form,
Their moves break and reform the pattern
(From “Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess–Theme for a Series of
Pictures”)
The willful suppression of the subject (the grammatical ‘I’) does not equate a suppression of
the subjective, but allows for a return of the self in disguise, unfamiliar maybe, but in no case
impersonal. The semantic field of violence betrays the intention until it is voiced explicitly: to “break
and reform the pattern”—where reforming, in other words recovering a fixity, is at least as important
as breaking. At the centre, “L” is the letter that comes to embody—in a symbolical way—the intrinsic
link the poet makes between “light,” “life,” and “line,” thus assimilating his poem to a vehicle for his
enlightened vision of self in world, and definitely asserting form as the locus of meaningful, personal
revelation. Pound’s cuts in Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land could be read in the same way, as

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 67
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>
the syntactic erasure of self—another decoy to draw our attention away from person, a step further
than the recourse to persona, but without any essential differences.

II - Williams/Stein: the poem as configuration

Similar attempts, with different modalities, could be outlined to amplify this point, and exhibit
the ambiguities that inform procedural composition: William Carlos Williams’s interest in photography
and the work of Alfred Stieglitz on urban views, as well as his attraction to the empty industrial
landscapes of Charles Sheeler, convey an aspiration to a form of expression deprived of perspective:
in Stieglitz’s pictures, all planes are in focus; in Sheeler’s landscapes, minute detailing defies the
capabilities of sight; in both cases, the human figure disappears from the landscape and point of view
loses determination in an attempt to prevent projection and induce estrangement. The world or
context emerges as a shell, a structure or an architecture, which are only optionally inhabited. In
those works, the removal of the human in representation does not involve its negation but rather its
generalization. This is part of Williams’s poetic project, and to a certain extent, of Gertrude Stein’s: in
Williams’s words about Stein, “it is simply the skeleton, the ‘formal’ parts of writing, those that make
form, that she has to do with” (“The Work of Gertrude Stein” Selected Essays 115), and, one might
add, that Williams wants to have to do with. Yet this is not what happens in his famous “Red
Wheelbarrow” poem:
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chicken
(“Spring and All, XXII” Collected Poems I 224)
Nor is it what happens in Gertrude Stein’s “A Red Hat,” in spite of all the critical rhetorics aiming at
defining it, along with the other poems of Tender Buttons, as a Cubist poem, which would offer the
whole range of points of view to the extreme of losing sight of the object:
A RED HAT
A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so
monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not
an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any
place that has so much stretched out. (Selected Writings 467)
In both poems, despite their formal differences and despite the absence, again, of an “I” to denote
the presence of someone behind the text, one can find orientation which determines the range of
interpretation in ways more constraining than could be believed at first reading: to give but two
examples, Williams’s “so much depends” and Stein’s final question without a question mark are ways
of circumscribing the poem and reminding the reader of the presence of an agent, who defines him-
or herself through the poem. For Williams, a whole organizational system is hinged on the “red
wheelbarrow,” whereas for Stein the dialectics of desire inform the relation to the outer,
simultaneously stressing the power of the absent and the illusory nature of fulfillment. Red versus
white or red versus grey, in both cases, the poem is generated through a method of contrasting and
out of the potentialities these distinctions generate for metaphysical meditation. What makes these
two poems more stimulating perhaps than Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” or than his “Dogmatic
Statement on the Game and Play of Chess” is the fact that both are non-metaphorical and non-
symbolical: the figure at the centre of the poem (more strikingly perhaps in Stein) is no more than a
passage-way to theoretical thinking. However, it has been acknowledged that in both cases the
theories were eminently specific, personal to the point of idiosyncrasy. In Williams, this appears in his
development of the notion of measure; in Stein, in her use of repetition as a mode of “explanation”

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 68
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>
and “composition.” However a shift occurs from the “meaning” of the poem as input of the poet to the
idea that what “makes a difference,” is arrangement and the dialectics between specificity and
genericity which inform it. Thus Williams:

To make a poem, fulfilling the requirements of the art, and yet new, in the sense that in the
very lay of the syllables Paterson as Paterson would be discovered […] — it would be as
itself, locally, and so like every other place in the world. […] It is up to us, in the new
dialect, to continue [Whitman’s theme] by a new construction upon the syllables. (“Author’s
Note” Paterson iv)

And Stein:

[…] anybody knows it that composition is the difference which makes each and all of them
then different from other generations and this is what makes everything different otherwise
they are all alike and everybody knows it because everybody says it. […] The only thing that
is different from one time to another is what is seen and what is seen depends upon how
everybody is doing everything. […] Nothing changes from generation to generation except
the thing seen and that makes a composition. (“Composition as Explanation” Selected
Writings 513)

With the notions of construction and composition, Williams and Stein initiate a line of reflection on the
poem as a grammatical place, where the various configurations that can be achieved in language are
played and displayed. In this perspective, the self is no longer artificially assaulted through its eviction
from the poetic text, but becomes the instable locus of an interplay between the “I” as affect and the
“I” as subject, dramatizing the limitations brought upon creation by ego and the extension of
boundaries achieved by its momentary silencing in the formalization of the writing process.

III - Procedure: an avatar of ectoskeletal forms

Thus, this move from self to subject, in what Michael Davidson calls the “crisis of
expressivity,” finds one response in the emphasis laid on the “productive nature of language in
forming the subject” and in the development of a “process- or action-oriented aesthetics”
(“Approaching the Fin de Siècle” The San Francisco Renaissance 205). The focus moves away from
the poem as monolithic product to the modes of its production, and the streamlining of these modes
according to procedures or rules turn the poem into what John Ashbery calls “an all-purpose model”
(“The Impossible” 251). This is far-removed from the “graph of consciousness,” which Perloff used to
define the form of Pound’s Cantos, and indeed this type of formalism has elicited a great variety of
comments, both from critics and from poets, that revolve around the issues of projection both in the
context of a poetics and of a theory of reading. The exemplum of the radical rejection of projection
would be the chance-generated text that Jackson Mac Low, sometimes in collaboration with John
Cage, has been producing. The approach to such texts has too often been narrowly ectoskeletal, and
exclusively descriptive of the procedure involved—a consequence of the impossibility to narrativize a
meaning for the poem. This type of reading can reach a high degree of sophistication and propose the
ideal of an “anti-content,” “nonreferential”2 text, solely preoccupied with showing the range of
syntactic and/or semantic possibilities. In this respect, one can read the following by Charles Bernstein
on Mac Low:

The Mac Lowian systematic poem refuses the normal process of identification of a ‘self’
(voice, persona, sensibility) in the text as expressed or revealed—of writing as confessional
or personally expressive. Faced with the Mac Lowian structurally generated poem, one is
hard put to ‘read into’ it to recognize the mapping of the author’s consciousness or a
narrative or pictorial image. (“Jackson at Home” Content’s Dream 252-3)

2
Cf. Davidson, “Approaching the Fin de Siècle” The San Francisco Renaissance (214).

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 69
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>
 Mac Low […] has generally been more interested in his written texts in building structures
than in inhabiting them […]. His work is a great testament to the possibility for structures in
and of themsleves, and for the sufficiency of possibility. That it is architectures that shape
the world, but we who must fill them up. (“Jackson at Home” Content’s Dream 257)

But such a reading also has to come to terms with the persistence of authorship even when meaning
has become problematic: as Bernstein suggests but does not account for, “the circuit of intentionality
is not so easily broken. Words get in the way” (“Jackson at Home” Content’s Dream 253). Not only
that, but in fact the very exhibition of procedure gets in the way, as it allows for commentary and
provokes a reading into the procedure for meanings that the poem seems to preclude. Asserting, as
Bernstein has done, that in procedural texts “language speaks for itself” (“Jackson at Home” Content’s
Dream 253) is preposterous as it presupposes a radical dissolution of agency, perhaps confusing the
existence of an author with the exercise of authority over the poetic text, the construction of a subject
with the expression of a self. What procedure is trying to do is at least partially relinquish the
arbitrariness of psychological decision and selection, as well as the fixity of “inherited form” to
establish a “programmatic”3 formalism in which, to take up Lyn Hejinian’s parallel with Adamic
scenarios, “what naming provides is structure, not individual words” (“The Rejection of Closure” The
Language of Inquiry 53). What the procedural poem is supposed to do is work out the consequences
of such a structure-oriented poetics: the authoritarian posture of one magisterial self telling another is
ideally to be replaced by the distribution of the subject-function to all the individuals involved with the
poem. But, of course, this never happens: as Mac Low evokes the writing of Barnesbook: Four Poems
Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes , he underlines the distinction between the
“nonintentionality” that procedure allows for and an absence of determinism. The use of his computer
program DIASTEXT—“an automation of the ‘diastic reading-through text-selection methods’ that [he]
first developed in January 1963” (“Afterword” Barnesbook 47)—makes him unable to “predict what
will be drawn from a source text,” but it does not suppress the fact that he has chosen the seed word
and the source text—the seed being “used to select words (or other linguistic units) that spell it
through repeatedly throughout a poem” (48) in a manner akin to the acrostic. Nor does it suppress
the fact that he maintains the possibility of editing the resulting text. As a consequence, Mac Low’s
procedural poems are not, as is too easily formulated, chance-generated, but, as he puts it, devised
according to compositional methods that include “rule-guided interaction with nonintentionally-
generated materials”(51). In a final twist, one is made to realize the possibility of formalizing the
generative activity of self in language, to the extent of replacing it with a subject producing and
inhabiting structures that others can in turn inhabit. The poetic text becomes indeed an architecture
and DIASTEXT-based composition is one possible architectural organization:
Such the is in them.

“Then the ones,

Robin their extremity
of extremity—
with years,
ledge?”

Extremity,
extremity,
extremity,
extremity
were responsible for other and painful ran building,
apart.
(“Barnes 2” Barnesbook 19)
However, since the poems of the Barnesbook , Mac Low eventually acknowledges, are also “acts of
homage,” this product of his procedure becomes a form of elegy. Procedural poetry, thus, does not
preclude the persistence of expressive intention, but because it asserts the status of ectoskeletal form

3
Cf. Perelman The Marginalization of Poetry 167 n.1.

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 70
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>
not as “a fixture but an activity” (Hejinian “The Rejection of Closure” The Language of Inquiry 275), it
displaces the locus of meaning from content and context to form and text. Simultaneously and
paradoxically, it opens the text to the proliferation of compositions and readings, and reduces the
range of activity of the self to his position in text, which is why it can indeed be deemed a poetics of
the subject.

Works Cited

Ashbery, John. “The Impossible.” Poetry 90 (July 1957).

Bernstein, Charles. Content’s Dream. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1986.
Davidson, Michael. The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Mac Low, Jackson. Barnesbook: Four Poems Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes. Los Angeles:
Sun & Moon Press, 1996.
Perelman, Bob. The Marginalization of Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Perloff, Marjorie. Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1991.
Pound, Ezra. “Dogmatic Statement on the Game and Play of Chess-Theme for a Series of Pictures.”
Blast 2 (July 1915) 19.
–. ABC of Reading. London: Faber, 1961.
––. Collected Shorter Poems. London: Faber, 1984.
––. Make It New. London: Faber, 1934.
Stein, Gertrude. Selected Writings. New York: Vintage, 1962.
Williams, William Carlos. Collected Poems. 2 vols. London: Carcanet, 1987.
––. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1963.
––. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions, 1969.
Yeats, W.B. A Vision. London: Macmillan, 1962.

Aji, Hélène. “The Subject in the Structure: Issues of Procedure in Contemporary American Poetry”. EREA 2.2 (automne 71
2004): 66-71.<www.e-rea.org>