Esteemed literary critic Marjorie Perloff reconsiders the nature of the poetic, examining its visual, grammatical, and sound components. The "infrathin" was Marcel Duchamp's playful name for the most minute shade of difference: that between the report of a gunshot and the appearance of the bullet hole, or between two objects in a series made from the same mold. "Eat" is not the same thing as "ate." The poetic, Marjorie Perloff suggests, can best be understood as the language of infrathin. For in poetry, whether in verse or prose, words and phrases that are seemingly unrelated in ordinary discourse are realigned by means of sound, visual layout, etymology, grammar, and construction so as to "make it new."In her revisionist "micropoetics, " Perloff draws primarily on major modernist poets from Stein and Yeats to Beckett, suggesting that the usual emphasis on what this or that poem is "about, " does not do justice to its infrathin possibilities. From Goethe's eight-line "Wanderer's Night Song" to Eliot's Four Quartets, to the minimalist lyric of Rae Armantrout, Infrathin is designed to challenge our current habits of reading and to answer the central question: what is it that makes poetry poetry?
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In 1935, as Gertrude Stein recalls it, Picasso was suffering from what we might call painterâs block.1 Finding himself at an impasse in his personal life, for two years he stopped painting altogether, taking up writing instead. âHe commenced to write poems,â Stein remarks, âbut this writing was never his writing. After all the egoism of a painter is not at all the egoism of a writer, there is nothing to say about it, it is not. Noâ (Picasso, 67). And in Everybodyâs Autobiography (1937), Stein recalls telling the great painter, who was perhaps her closest friend:
Your poetry . . . is more offensive than just bad poetry I do not know why it is but it just is, somebody who can really do something very well when he does something else which he cannot do and in which he cannot live it is particularly repellent, now you I said to him, you never read a book in your life that was not written by a friend and then not then and you never had any feelings about any words, words annoy you more than they do anything else so how can you write you know better. . . . all right go on doing it but donât go on trying to make me tell you it is poetry.2
I mean a dish a cup a nest a knife a tree a frying pan a nasty spill while strolling on the sharp edge of a cornice breaking up into a thousand pieces screaming like a madwoman and lying down to sleep stark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knife that just beheaded the wine froth and nothing bleeds from it except for lips like butterflies and asks you for no handouts for a visit to the bulls with a cicada like a feather in the wind3
The passage is characteristically Surrealist in its mysterious juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated imagesââa tree a frying pan,â a âcornice . . . screaming like a madwomanââits emphasis on violenceââstark naked legs spread wide over the odor from a knifeââand its collocation of fanciful metaphor and simple syntax. A passionate advocate of Picassoâs early Cubism, which she adapted for literary purposes in such works as Tender Buttons (1912), Stein could hardly have approved of the painterâs Surrealist poetic mode, with its elaborate metaphors, so antithetical to her own constructions built on the repetition, with variation, of abstract nouns and indeterminate pronouns, articles, and prepositions.4 âThe surrealists,â Stein remarks dismissively in her discussion of Picassoâs painting of the early 1930s, âstill see things as everyone sees them, they complicate them in a different way but the vision is that of everyone else, in short the complication is the complication of the twentieth century but the vision is that of the nineteenth centuryâ (Picasso, 65).
This critique of surrealism, whether just or unjust, is echoed by another of Steinâs contemporaries. In describing his Box of 1913â14 (the Green Box) to Pierre Cabanne, Marcel Duchamp explains that the assemblage of miscellaneous notes placed inside the box was designed as an art object ânot to be âlooked atâ in the aesthetic sense of the word,â but as a conduit for the removal of what we might call the retinal contract that had dominated painting from Courbet to the present:
The two first met, according to the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in Paris in 1913:
It was not long after this [the winter of 1913] that Mabel Dodge went to America and it was the winter of the armory show which was the first time the general public had a chance to see any of these pictures. It was there that Marcel Duchampâs Nude Descending the Staircase was shown.
It was about this time that Picabia and Gertrude Stein met. I remember going to dinner at the Picabiasâ and a pleasant dinner it was, Gabrielle Picabia full of life and gaiety, Picabia dark and lively, and Marcel Duchamp looking like a young Norman crusader.
I was always perfectly able to understand the enthusiasm that Marcel Duchamp aroused in New York when he went there in the early years of the war. His brother had just died from the effect of his wounds, his other brother was still at the front and he himself was inapt for military service. He was very depressed and he went to America. Everyone loved him. So much so that it was a joke in Paris when any American arrived in Paris the first thing he said was, and how is Marcel.6
âThe young Duchamp,â she wrote a few days later to Mabel Dodge, âlooks like a young Englishman and talks very urgently about the fourth dimension.â7 We know that Stein at this time was keenly interested in questions relating to mathematics and so this was a compliment.8
Indeed, Steinâs account in Alice B. Toklas is unusually flattering and without her usual maliceâquite unlike, say, her references to Matisse or Pound or Hemingway. The âyoung Norman crusaderâ: Duchamp was the son of a notary in the little Normandy town of Blainville, a fact Stein refers to with amusement in Everybodyâs Autobiography, where she remarks how many artistsâCocteau, Bernard FaĂż, Daliâwere the sons of notaries (26). Duchamp was handsome and charming. And in 1917, Stein was made aware of the brouhaha over Fountain (by a letter from her friend Carl Van Vechten):
This porcelain tribute was bought cold in some plumber shop (where it awaited the call to join some bath room trinity) and sent in. . . . When it was rejected [by the Salon of Independents], Marcel Duchamp at once resigned from the board. Stieglitz is exhibiting the object at â291.â And has made some wonderful photographs of it. The photographs make it look like anything from a Madonna to a Buddha. [See figures 1.1, 1.2]9
Did Fountain and related Readymades influence Steinâs writing? Yes and no. Her compositions resemble Duchampâs âobjectsâ in their wholesale rejection of the mimetic contractâa rejection that, to my mind, goes well beyond Cubist distortion and dislocation of what are, after all, still recognizable objects and bodies.10 In this sense, Duchampâs dismissal of the âretinalâ is also hers. Such prose poems as âA Substance in a Cushionâ and âA Boxâ in Tender Buttons, for example, can be related to Duchampâs Green Box and the later boĂźtes en valise in their emphasis on what cannot be seen or inferred from the outside. More important, as different as their artistic productions wereâStein, after all, did not use âreadymadeâ or found textâthey drew on each otherâs work in striking waysâways that have largely been ignored.