Discursive Events in the Electronic Archive of Postmodern and Contemporary Poetry

Discursive Events in the Electronic Archive of Postmodern and Contemporary Poetry Louis Cabri University of Pennsylvania ^ I/he fo llo w in g excerpt is n o t Krapp spe a k in g , from Samuel Beckett’s 1958 one-act play, Krapp’s Last Tape, which features one actor and “a tape-recorder with microphone and a number of cardboard boxes containing reels ofrecorded tapes” (10). The following is David Antin writ­ ing, in a 1984 book of, as he calls them, talk poems. This excerpt is from the introduction to the published rendition of Antin’s talk-poem entitled “whos listening out there.” Italicizing introductory materials is a publish­ ing convention of drama that the Beckett play and the Antin talk-poem both follow. ... it was my habit to record my talks tofind out what id said (tuning 268) Antin is from the generation whose work would be anthologized as the New American poetry, but he went his own way, inventing an improvised talk genre beginning in the late 1960s that requires performance and inscription, audience and tape recorder and typewriter.1 1 Antin reflects in 2001 on his relationship to the i960 Donald Allen anthology The New American Poetry, “a poetry,” Antin declares, “I wasn’t very close to”: “I ESC 30.1 (March 2004): 51-72 Louis Cabri is completing Poetics of Political Economy, a dissertation on modern and postmodern American poetry, at the University of Pennsylvania. He curated the poetry event series, PhillyTalks, from 1997-2001, and presently sits on the board of Slought Foundation , a nonprofit artists’ space in Philadelphia. “After 1923: ‘The Social Command,’” an essay on the idea of a Marxian social in poetry, will appear in the “Reds” issue of XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics (Minneapolis, MN). I want to begin to address the event in relation to poetry by considering Antin’s evocative phrase, “to find out what id said.” There is, as Derrida might say, a double discovery to be made here. In Antin’s statement, the first discovery occurs by means of tape-recorder, and refers to what is said, and, one can add, to how it is said. By introducing variables of interpreta­ tion (context, tone, etc.), the question of how what is said is said, already hints at the doubling. To arrive at the second discovery contained in the phrase “to find out what id said,” imagine yourself Antin about to give a live talk before an audience. That is, shift your temporal sense from past-tense after to present-conditional before and present-conditional as the talking and tape­ recording happens. The second discovery occurs by means of audience presence, and mostly refers to what might be said. The present-conditional of this discovery does not leave a magnetic trace on the tape, is speculative. Derrida argues that in its Latin derivation, to invent is to find out what is already there waiting to be discovered, and also to found a speculation (“Psyche”). The double sense of invention applies in Antin’s case. By listen­ ing to the talk-poem recording, Antin discovers what he’s already said. In order to transcribe the talk-poem for publication, he must also speculate once again on the present-conditional moments of what he might say and how he might say it. That is, writing intervenes in the double discovery. Speculation on what he might have said is not an idle afterthought listen­ ing to the tape, but implicates editing the transcription and results in his distinctive representation of speech in the presentation of the talk-poems for publication (spacing between phrasal units, almost no punctuation, and no capitalized letters). Antin’s professed commitment to what he calls “dialogue” in his talks— in which no dialogue, as that word is generally understood, occurs (I will further detail this below)— is also speculative yet integral to inven­ tion in the above sense. It is the staging of talking as an event that invents the talking. In order to conceive of what might be said, one must already have staged a place or scene for talking, a pragmatics that enables certain possibilities of speech so that a speaking may be enacted...

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