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Conduit
poetry from GAZ, San Francisco
76 pages, Unknown Binding
First published January 1, 1988
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May 21, 2021This is a wild text, tangly, knotted, abraded, ripped, Acker-punkesque, against itself by playing and not playing the game. There’s a sort of manic humour in Conduit that isn’t funny (except in variant senses of “funny”). Conduit isn’t pastiche-like either, at least in the usual way pastiche is figured, nor is it straight-up parodic or satiric.
I don't want to put it the following way: Conduit is an important twentieth-century experiment in premising poetry on/as theory.
Nor do I want to specify it further in a way that might lead you to think that the language of poetry in Conduit is conditioned by a theory of language.
Conduit isn’t so much premised on a fully-formed linguistic theory as on an essaying at theorizing an aspect of English-language usage with broad implications (so the theory’s claims go).
An extraordinarily productive essay for many, Michael Reddy’s "The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language" (1979) initiates (let’s go with that word) the experiments of Watten’s book-length work. Reddy’s ranging, highly-suggestive essay should have for readers of some west coast Language Writing—for Watten’s, especially—the sort of status that Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919) has for many readers and poets coming after Pound all the way through the New American Poetry and New Wave Canada. Reddy’s status as a reference-point today however may be eclipsed, “The Conduit Metaphor” somewhat fugitive due to what Reddy’s essay helped launch: no less than an entire field of cognitive linguistics. Reddy's conduit metaphor becomes an example of what Geroge Lakoff theorizes as a conceptual metaphor. This systematically worked-out theory of conceptual metaphors, expounded in such books as Metaphors We Live By (1980) and in many others since, is of great renown and remains of interest to many, but isn’t relevant specifically to Conduit the way that Reddy’s probing, socially-evaluative sketch is.
The relationship of poetic text to "its" theoretical text in Conduit isn’t causal, isn’t linear, isn’t abstract-to-concrete, manual-to-machine, diagrammatic, secondary-to-primary, source-to-original. Perhaps the relationship—and not only of poetic text to theoretical text but of the seven texts comprising Conduit to each other and each to itself—is one of “agencement,” a separate coming together, without unifying, or a vectoral alignment. In any event, the relationship isn’t quite starkly “theory-driven art” in the “bad loop” sense Sianne Ngai brilliantly takes up in Theory of the Gimmick, one of the most important books on poetics in a generation (her text is all about poetry’s current condition and available styles, even though—and this is actually one of its great strengths—poetry is never addressed, let alone mentioned except in an ornamental flourish).
The forms of the sentences in Conduit often stay very close to the pedagogically ideal grammar of what Noam Chomsky calls “minimal syntactically functioning units” (he calls them lexical and grammatical “formatives”). Chomsky’s transformational grammar, as the dominant idée recue or doxa, also figures in Conduit.
Conduit's sentences are mostly short clauses (some of them dependent) with plain words in standard English order: (random selection) "Lightning multiplies over cornfields, / replicating an enormous bolus in all its / parts" (19); "That pleasure is a kind of time left over from counting" (45); "Opposite rows of books" (63). Laying aside their combination and arrangement, many of these sentences could serve as examples of English phrase structure as you’d find it explained in mid-20C descriptive linguistics textbooks. The feel of exemplarity never leaves these sentences.
Turning to their combination and arrangement, an analogy to the dance phrase might help to introduce my general comment. Think, for contrast, of the balletic grand jeté, a movement-sequence in roughly three parts, stopped either end with a pause, and synchronized to the music and its rhythm: sudden acceleration into the air, legs and arms spread, suspension, then the graceful finish on the ground.
Choreographer Yvonne Rainer disrupted the language of classical dance phrasing. “Her [Rainer’s] decision in Trio A [1966] to execute movements with an even distribution of energy reflected a challenge to traditional attitudes to ‘phrasing’, which can be defined as the way in which energy is distributed in the execution of a movement or series of movements. The innovation of Trio A lies in its attempt to erase the differences of energy investment within both a given phrase and the transition from one to another, resulting in an absence of the classical appearance of ‘attack’ at the beginning of a phrase, recovery at the end, with energy arrested somewhere in the middle, as in a grand jeté” (“Yvonne Trainer,” Wikipedia).
So too, the energy of each of Conduit's sentences in their combination and arrangement is often evenly distributed for reader’s attention across the entire text. The overall effect is that we don’t know where to begin to focus, amidst violent fluctuations of scale, particulars, framing. Yet homogeneity and consistency are not the result.
This is because, to continue with my dance analogy, as Carrie Lambert puts it, “[i]n Trio A […], it is the stillness of the pose against which Rainer is positioned[….] Trio A has a prime directive: constant motion. Rainer's formal innovation is to suppress all starts and stops within the dance; to level out the modulation and emphases of traditional phrasing. She produces an even, uninflected dance continuum.”
Further enabled by scarcely a concrete noun or perception (in the strict sense of "embodied"), the text of Conduit is in constant motion and won’t let itself be punctuated into a series of photographic still-points by a reader, even though the texts are replete with periods and capital letters (as exemplary English sentences must be).
Another way to think of these qualities of even distribution of energy and of permanent revolution is to compare Conduit to what’s going on in another (permit the reified slogan's shorthand) New Sentence practitioner, such as Ron Silliman. Many of Silliman’s texts present themselves, in these terms, in the opposite way, as composed of uneven distributions of energy articulated only by photographic still-points (the image).
So why is Conduit doing this? Stay tuned. Somewhere... some time....
I don't want to put it the following way: Conduit is an important twentieth-century experiment in premising poetry on/as theory.
Nor do I want to specify it further in a way that might lead you to think that the language of poetry in Conduit is conditioned by a theory of language.
Conduit isn’t so much premised on a fully-formed linguistic theory as on an essaying at theorizing an aspect of English-language usage with broad implications (so the theory’s claims go).
An extraordinarily productive essay for many, Michael Reddy’s "The Conduit Metaphor—A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language" (1979) initiates (let’s go with that word) the experiments of Watten’s book-length work. Reddy’s ranging, highly-suggestive essay should have for readers of some west coast Language Writing—for Watten’s, especially—the sort of status that Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry (1919) has for many readers and poets coming after Pound all the way through the New American Poetry and New Wave Canada. Reddy’s status as a reference-point today however may be eclipsed, “The Conduit Metaphor” somewhat fugitive due to what Reddy’s essay helped launch: no less than an entire field of cognitive linguistics. Reddy's conduit metaphor becomes an example of what Geroge Lakoff theorizes as a conceptual metaphor. This systematically worked-out theory of conceptual metaphors, expounded in such books as Metaphors We Live By (1980) and in many others since, is of great renown and remains of interest to many, but isn’t relevant specifically to Conduit the way that Reddy’s probing, socially-evaluative sketch is.
The relationship of poetic text to "its" theoretical text in Conduit isn’t causal, isn’t linear, isn’t abstract-to-concrete, manual-to-machine, diagrammatic, secondary-to-primary, source-to-original. Perhaps the relationship—and not only of poetic text to theoretical text but of the seven texts comprising Conduit to each other and each to itself—is one of “agencement,” a separate coming together, without unifying, or a vectoral alignment. In any event, the relationship isn’t quite starkly “theory-driven art” in the “bad loop” sense Sianne Ngai brilliantly takes up in Theory of the Gimmick, one of the most important books on poetics in a generation (her text is all about poetry’s current condition and available styles, even though—and this is actually one of its great strengths—poetry is never addressed, let alone mentioned except in an ornamental flourish).
The forms of the sentences in Conduit often stay very close to the pedagogically ideal grammar of what Noam Chomsky calls “minimal syntactically functioning units” (he calls them lexical and grammatical “formatives”). Chomsky’s transformational grammar, as the dominant idée recue or doxa, also figures in Conduit.
Conduit's sentences are mostly short clauses (some of them dependent) with plain words in standard English order: (random selection) "Lightning multiplies over cornfields, / replicating an enormous bolus in all its / parts" (19); "That pleasure is a kind of time left over from counting" (45); "Opposite rows of books" (63). Laying aside their combination and arrangement, many of these sentences could serve as examples of English phrase structure as you’d find it explained in mid-20C descriptive linguistics textbooks. The feel of exemplarity never leaves these sentences.
Turning to their combination and arrangement, an analogy to the dance phrase might help to introduce my general comment. Think, for contrast, of the balletic grand jeté, a movement-sequence in roughly three parts, stopped either end with a pause, and synchronized to the music and its rhythm: sudden acceleration into the air, legs and arms spread, suspension, then the graceful finish on the ground.
Choreographer Yvonne Rainer disrupted the language of classical dance phrasing. “Her [Rainer’s] decision in Trio A [1966] to execute movements with an even distribution of energy reflected a challenge to traditional attitudes to ‘phrasing’, which can be defined as the way in which energy is distributed in the execution of a movement or series of movements. The innovation of Trio A lies in its attempt to erase the differences of energy investment within both a given phrase and the transition from one to another, resulting in an absence of the classical appearance of ‘attack’ at the beginning of a phrase, recovery at the end, with energy arrested somewhere in the middle, as in a grand jeté” (“Yvonne Trainer,” Wikipedia).
So too, the energy of each of Conduit's sentences in their combination and arrangement is often evenly distributed for reader’s attention across the entire text. The overall effect is that we don’t know where to begin to focus, amidst violent fluctuations of scale, particulars, framing. Yet homogeneity and consistency are not the result.
This is because, to continue with my dance analogy, as Carrie Lambert puts it, “[i]n Trio A […], it is the stillness of the pose against which Rainer is positioned[….] Trio A has a prime directive: constant motion. Rainer's formal innovation is to suppress all starts and stops within the dance; to level out the modulation and emphases of traditional phrasing. She produces an even, uninflected dance continuum.”
Further enabled by scarcely a concrete noun or perception (in the strict sense of "embodied"), the text of Conduit is in constant motion and won’t let itself be punctuated into a series of photographic still-points by a reader, even though the texts are replete with periods and capital letters (as exemplary English sentences must be).
Another way to think of these qualities of even distribution of energy and of permanent revolution is to compare Conduit to what’s going on in another (permit the reified slogan's shorthand) New Sentence practitioner, such as Ron Silliman. Many of Silliman’s texts present themselves, in these terms, in the opposite way, as composed of uneven distributions of energy articulated only by photographic still-points (the image).
So why is Conduit doing this? Stay tuned. Somewhere... some time....
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