Desire Pronounced and Punctuated Lacan

"Desire Pronounced and/Punctuated": Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject Kellogg, David American Imago; Winter
1995; 52, 4; ProQuest pg. 405
DAVID KELLOGG
"Desire pronounced and/Punctuated":

Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject
A certificate tells me that I was born. I repudiate this
certificate: I am not a poet, but a poem. A poem that is
being written, even if it looks like a subject.
-Jacques Lacan (1981, viii)
Throughout the 1980s, as future histories of the academy

will no doubt recall, the concept of the self was in big trouble.
Theoretically, that is. Outside the academy it was a different
story; indeed, in popular culture, forms of self-exploration and
-expression proliferated alongside fragmented and fragment-
ing media technologies. Next to this complex narrative, the
self in the academy enacts a fairly consistent retreat. 1 Attacked
by intellectuals in every corner of the human sciences, the self
was nowhere less secure than in the very discipline often
accused of giving it ultimate priority: psychoanalysis, symbol-
ized especially by the figure of Jacques Lacan. In the eyes of
some historians at least, Lacan singlehandedly loosed analysis
from its traditional moorings; as Anthony Elliot (1994) re-
cently phrased it, Lacanian theory "has completely trans-
formed cultural debates about the development of the indi-
vidual subject in social and historical terms" (91-92). Yet at the
height of this transformation, the Lacanian theoretical vocabu-
lary of desire was being picked up and employed by several
young American poets toward very different ends. As post-
structuralist theory grew more important to the academy,
Lacanian terms became important to poets who struggled over
the fate of traditional poetic notions of agency, selfhood,
individuality, and authorship. What resulted from this heady
mixture of lyric and Lacan by no means reaffirmed the
centrality of the subject in either poetry or cultural theory; it
did, however, implicate the collapse of traditional discourses of
the self in the reproduction of contemporary poetic value.
Arrummn lmagu, Vol. 52, No. 4, 405-437. © I 995 by The Johns Hopkins University Press
405
Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Copyright (c) Johns Hopkins University Press
406 "Desire pronounced and/Punctuated"
At the intersection of such troublesome categories as

pleasure, politics, and information, the self holds a problem-
atic-and important-place in the contemporary American
poetic (Gilbert 1992, passim). 2 It continues as an object of
inquiry and a source of articulation against, and partly because
of, the serious challenges posed to it both within the poetry
community and outside it. Indeed, in spite of the cynicism of
much postmodern cultural production, a fair amount of well-
received poetry in the eighties-work produced across a broad
geographical and stylistic spectrum-explicitly addresses the
issue of personal emotion as a subject for the poem (rather
than merely its context or source). At an interpoetic, stylistic
level, the affective and experiential registers of language may
have received renewed attention as some poets in the early
eighties reacted both to the depersonalized, object-centered
poetry of the Deep Image and to the New York poets' ironic,
noncommittal style. Yet we would be mistaken if we read this
reaction as a return to confessionalism, since such a reading
would reduce the history of American verse to the crudest
possible dialectic of Self and Other.
Besides, the historical situation of the poetic today is
different. Current verse is implicated in social institutions-
including the university, the media, and the state-in ways
distinct from those characterizing American poetry in the
sixties. Personal poetics shares a social stage with language
poetry; 3 if it is experiencing a resurgence of sorts, that context
must be taken into account. It is more difficult now than it was
thirty years ago to set up drastic oppositions between academic
and antiacademic in poetry-between the cooked and the raw,
the formal and the spontaneous-though it is still possible and
sometimes useful to do so. Much contemporary poetry, includ-
ing the New Formalism and what Vernon Shetley (1993) calls
"the MFA mainstream" (20), may be postmodern against its
will, taking part in the postmodern blurring of resistance and
cooptation by its very participation in an articulatory matrix
that it has not author(iz)ed. Even the most radical contempo-
rary poetry, such as that of the language movement-which,

David Kellogg 407
like most avant-garde movements in this century, has tended to

pit itself against the academy-has found much authorization
for its practice in academic theoretical discourse; and as its
chief practitioners seek university jobs, it is confronted with
what had hitherto seemed the unlikely fate of being quickly
assimilated into academic writing programs.
In any event, we should recognize that such categories arc
socially constructed and blurry at the edges; individual writers
move rapidly in and out of them. When John Ashbery, whose
work was considered among the most "radical" and "difficult"
in American poetry for years, is made readable for broad and
diverse audiences by critics who represent his project as a
revisionary Romanticism, then admitting discursive and ab-
stract elements into a poem does not turn out to strike a blow
against the self after all. 4 Indeed, Ashbery's later work exempli-
fies how the contradictions of discourse and subjectivity impli-
cate the poetic through and through. As his influence demon-
strates, the self in the contemporary poetic may be represented
by a poetry that simultaneously affirms personality and engages
a dispersed field of social discourse whose fragments the poem
arranges without "centering." As Andrew Ross (1986) has
recognized, postmodern writers like Ashbery no longer view
issues of subjectivity as external to the poem but rather as
"problems to be described and displayed within language
itself' (159). Admitting this "irreducible share of subjectivity" in
language may be basic to postmodernism (xvi); but unlike
earlier poetic moments, postmodern poetry does not dismiss
social and supersubjective components of discourse as unsuit-
able for poetry. On the contrary, postmodernist poetry has
embraced the languages of science, advertising, historical
inquiry, and other areas previously thought inimical to the
lyric impulse-and this without subscribing to the modernist
myth that such a gesture necessarily erases the personal
subject. A return to subjectivism, in other words, has not
accompanied postmodern poetry's acknowledgment of subjec-
tivity.
The tension between discourse and subject in postmodern
poetry is visible at a number of levels. As several critics have
noticed, recent poetics has increasingly emphasized the sentence

as opposed to the line or the image; I read this emphasis as a

product, to some degree, of the historical pressures placed on
contemporary poetry by its combined investment in subjective
articulation and social discourse. A kind of baseline of practi-
cal linguistic attention or "measuring rod of thought and
reality," the sentence is seen as a flexible unit that mediates
between social data and personal signatures (what used to be
called "voice"), whereas the line may flatten heterogeneous
social languages into patterns of repetition: for its advocates,
the sentence is "inscriptive not prescriptive" (Fredman 1990,
35). Given such assumptions, the New Formalism, which is
deeply invested in traditional metrics as a primary source of
poetic value, cannot help seeming reactionary; but the con-
cept of the sentence as the vehicle of poetic meaning has had
influence, if not success, even there. Indeed, the newfound
importance of the sentence is visible in corners of the poetry
world far from language poetry, where most talk about the
sentence takes place. (My reading opposes the prevailing view
that sees recent interest in the sentence as a conscious re-
sponse to the commodification of public discourse. Such an
argument may be partly accurate but is hard to apply outside
language poetry.) 5
We should not, therefore, ascribe the emergence of new
relations bet\veen discourse, emotion, and subjectivity in a
number of poets to the creative invention of a few brilliant
writers; nor should we frame such relations within a progressiv-
ist model of corrective literary change. Both moves, common
enough in discussions of contemporary poetry, mystify the
dynamics of literary production and consumption in the
poetic, perpetuating the model they describe. Bo Gustavsson
( 1989), for example, subverts a promising essay on these issues
in both ways. He rightly argues that "a new discursive poetry"
has arisen in contemporary American verse, locating useful
examples in Robert Pinsky, Stanley Plumly, and Robert Hass
(193). But by accepting the celebratory self-representation of
these writers as seeking "to go beyond the lyric self and to
speak about the facts of our common existence in the world"
(193), Gustavsson ignores the historical pressures behind
rhetorical differences, closing off the possibility of socially

David Kellogg 409
representing the emergence of the new discursive poetry he

identifies. He thus portrays these writers' interest in social
discourse as entirely clear, freely decided upon, and relatively
simple of motivation, correcting the "extremes" and "solip-
sism" of sixties poetry (194). Besides forcing poetry into grossly
misrepresentative oppositional categories (such as "discursive"
and "lyric" poetry-much of the work he examines is both),
this model of literary-change-as-positive-development is power-
less to understand the social causes behind shifts in poetic
style.
An alternative model of the poetic field must not be
content to rest at the level of interpoetic difference. Stylistic
arguments are struggles among what Pierre Bourdieu would
call "position-takings"; however, these struggles are deter-
mined by the state of poetry as a "position" or "post" in the
literary field as a whole. As Bourdieu ( 1993) argues:
The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e., the

structured set of the manifestations of the social agents
involved in the field-literary or artistic works, of course,
but also political acts or pronouncements, manifestos or
polemics, etc.-is inseparable from the space of literary or
artistic positions defined by possession of a determinate
quantity of specific capital (recognition) and, at the
same time, by occupation of a determinate position in
the structure of the distribution of this specific capital.
The literary or artistic field is a field offorces, but it is also
a field of struggles tending to transform or conserve this
field of forces. (30; emphasis in text)
Bourdieu's distinction between positions and position-takings

allows individual poems and poetic statements to be inscribed
in a broad literary-social context without reducing their opera-
tion to a functionalist model of culture. 6 As a component of
the literary field, poetry is shot through by issues of power; but
as Bourdieu argues, power in the literary field is not a thing
but a process of struggle. Moreover, this process is bifurcated,
governed by the opposing principles of heteronomy and
autonomy. At the "heteronomous" pole of the literary field,

power is more or less economic, operating according to such

criteria as sales and popularity; at the "autonomous" pole, on
the other hand, where we find most contemporary American
poetry, power is indexed by recognition and prestige (27-73
passim) .7 Read as struggles for recognition within the literary
field, interpoetic differences may become wholly social while
retaining their specifically cultural operative principles.
Only a perspective which sees poetry in the literary field,
and the literary field within the larger social field, will be able
to release itself from the pervasive idealism of American poetry
criticism. Further, Bourdieu's emphasis on recognition as the
dominant principle of value at the autonomous pole paradoxi-
cally undermines the autonomy of the critic, who can only be
framed, in this context, as another participant in the literary-
social field of struggle. Through Bourdieu's social field model,
we are able to address the functional role of critical statements
in the dynamics of canon construction and change. To apply
this insight to the present subject, we must note that any new
discursive poetry has not come into prominence by itself, but
rather has been assisted in its rise by a ready and appreciative
audience cultivated to receive it; this audience is equipped
both with specific stylistic preferences and, more important in
the long run, sufficient economic and cultural capital to
increase the symbolic value of the work it endorses. Robert
Hass and Jorie Graham, the poets I will examine here, have
thus emerged as two of the best bets for canonization among
mid-career poets in the United States, ironically fulfilling
Whitman's maxim about the greatness of poets and that of
their audiences.
2.
Discussions of postmodernism in poetry are less likely to

focus on changes at the lexical level than at the level of syntax,
since the image is not postmodernism's central concern. 8 Yet
the complex of forces just outlined has had effects at this level
too; while it is impossible to define a vocabulary of contempo-
rary poetry, we can isolate words which have gained increased

David Kellogg 411
prominence across diverse styles. The word I want to focus on

is desire.
You know what I mean? I mean the desire

To crouch and loosen earth, toss pebbles,
Pull the taut grass at it5 roots
And wonder what to do with a fat rope of old vine.
(Ann Lauterbach, "Mountain Roads," 1991, 3)
Gossip and length, hours

Yoked together, sun shines,
Air presses on their capillaries,
Actions. Desire pronounced and
Punctuated, their minds end
In their senses. Pleasures
Lag across solid bridges.
(Bob Perelman, "Pastoral," 1986, 73)
Why have men been taught to feel ashamed

of their desire, as if each were a criminal
out on parole, a desperado with a long record
of muggings, rapes, such conduct as excludes
each one from all but the worst company,

and never to be trusted, no never to be trusted?
(Stephen Dobyns, "Desire," 1990, 6-7)
a voice absorbed
by eyes and eyes by those

so close to home, so ready to resume
the lunge of desire, rested and clear of debris.
( 0 lga Broumas, "Mercy," 1989, 11 )
Many poetry readers could no doubt assemble whole antholo-

gies of contemporary desire-poems. Desire appears to have
gained enormous flexibility through the eighties, since it is
employed by poets of vastly different stylistic temperments and

affiliations. As Calvin Bedient (1991) argues, desire "has be-

come the most commonplace of topics" (212), but more
importantly here, the word "desire" is becoming a common-
place signifier. It has a gender dimension as well, which I shall
address presently.
First, though, it is helpful to place this word in the context
of other words privileged in American poetry in the sixties and
seventies. The word most associated with the deep image poets
is probably stone. In "Stone Soup: Contemporary Poetry and
the Obsessive Image," David Walker traces the interest in this
word back to Robert Bly's early collection Silence in the Snowy
Fields and from there to the surrealists Bly was translating. Bly,
for one, understood stone in the cultural context of Spanish
surrealism as well as through Jungian archetypal models; but
Walker (1980) argues that other poets, such as Gregory Orr,
have "introduced the surrealist vein a little too easily" (150). In
its heyday, the stone was the ultimate image of the Thing, and
for poets like Bly,James Wright, Galway Kinnell, Charles Simic,
and Mark Strand-each of whom tapped into specific Euro-
pean or Latin American traditions of object poetry-it repre-
sented unmediated contact with the elemental world of things,
as well as a shedding of the self and of personality ( often
associated with a receptive stance toward death). Later, as
Walker notes, the word was used less for specific echoes than
for poetic effect: "dozens of poems ... seem to be written in
the belief that merely by mentioning the word stone one can
plug the poem into a current of hermetic insight and gnomic
utterance ... " (154). When it became "a central metaphor of
our poetry" (14 7), the signifier stone abandoned its association
with a particular poetic practice, serving instead to announce a
poem's presence. Eventually, according to V{alker, it devolved
into a cliche.
At the other end of academic poetry in the sixties, as so
often remarked, is the ubiquitous confessional I. If stone
represented the object before its apprehension by the perceiv-
ing sul::~ject, the I privileged subjective experience over all
other routes to knowledge. As with stone, historical patterns
found in the deployment of the I can help us understand how
words rise and fall in the shifting hierarchy of the poetic. For

David Kellogg 413
Lowell and the other poets M. L. Rosenthal would call confes-

sional, the I signalled a radical break from the controlled
academic poetry in the forties and fifties-poetry that Lowell,
among others, had actually written. Lowell's leap from the
dramatic monologues of The Mills of the Kavanaughs to Life
Studies, with its autobiographical poems and prose autobiogra-
phy fragment, heralded a dramatic shift in certain poets'
understanding of themselves and their relation to the poem
(Rosenthal 1967, 27-28) .9 Yet if for Lowell and others the turn
toward autobiography represented a radically altered attitude,
it is worth remembering that Jin poetry is first and foremost a
word, a signifier-and that as such, those reacting to confes-
sional poetry may in part be complaining about the overuse of
this word rather than just about a certain stance toward the
world. The limitations of confessional language were as rhetori-
cal as they were epistemological.
Both stone and J, initially representing a particular attitude
toward the world, the self, and the language, quickly became
commonplace rhetorical moves. Theirs is a familiar pattern
with code or signal words in poems. They first gain power in
the context of a specific nexus of associations, and among a
particular group of poets; stone and J are not just words but
resonate with layers of meaning. In this stage of use, they are
associated with specific domains of knowledge-to schematize
it rather crudely, with Jung and Freud for deep image and
confessional verse respectively. Later, as their use widens, they
are transformed, as Walker complains, into little more than
poetic devices indicating a general tone or mood. Their
proliferation is a result of the kind of symbolic capital initially
associated with the words' specific use; yet this same prolifera-
tion is precisely what undermines their symbolic value. Be-
tween the origin of code words in particular knowledges and
their devaluation through overproduction, such words hold
intermediate value, still retaining some symbolic worth but
slowly falling in value. Like everything else under capitalism,
then, poetic signifiers have a specific pattern of planned
obsolescence, with perhaps diminishing shelf lives over time
( Silliman 1990, 150) .
It is unclear where on the scales of value desire may

currently lie; it seems pretty popular, though. I suspect that it

mainly operates as a second stage word, no longer implying
direct link with specific knowledges but not yet having outlived
its modishness. In fact, I date its emergence precisely: 1977,
the year of the English abridgment ofLacan's Ecrits. In the late
seventies and early eighties desire was quite strongly encoded;
as it proliferated through the eighties, following the pattern
just outlined, its specific resonance diminished. Nonetheless,
one can see traces of its original specificity in the overwhelm-
ing preference more recent poets have for desire in its noun
form. 10 Desire, desiring, desired: while in the abstract desire is as
respectable a verb as a noun, contemporary poets gravitate
toward the potential of the word as thing. In addition to
referencing a specific zone of knowledge, this preferred usage
points toward a crucial feature of the word's recent impor-
tance: its intersu~jective character. Neither object (stone) nor
subject (I), desire moves like a verb at its most nounlike. It
posits a subject-the one who desires, who has desire-even
when pointing to an object. This gestural, deictic quality
increases its appeal for recent poets who negotiate the Scylla of
discourse and the Charybdis of subjectivity.
The above schema is by no means exhaustive. Other
signifiers are also privileged in eighties poems; other styles
could be traced. Even within the limited range I have dis-
cussed, numerous words have special status in confessional
verse ( blood and father come to mind) and deep image poetry
(snow, breath). No term is irreplacable, and any change would
alter the patterns I am tracing. Further, the linear nature of
this model only comprehends a word's travel in one direction,
from the excitement of discovery to tired obsolescence; it does
not account for the various ways words may regain currency
after the run of their initial lives, whether in the remarketing
of signifiers for their nostalgic value or through postmodern
parody and pastiche. But desire still seems to hold particular
privilege in poetry today, and focus on it is useful insofar as
such focus traces the dynamics of contemporary verse in a
threatened literary culture. In any event, I am not interested in
the word's frequency (J remains one of the most frequent
words in American poetry) so much as its use as a coded term.

David Kellogg 415
3.
An important and early instance of the contemporary

encoding of desire in American poetry is found in Robert
Hass's (1979) poem, "Picking Blackberries With a Friend Who
Has Been Reading Jacques Lacan," from his watershed second
volume Praise. Here is the poem in full:
August is dust here. Drought

stuns the road,
but juice gathers in the berries.
We pick them in the hot

slow-motion of midmorning.
Charlie is exclaiming:
for him it is twenty years ago

and raspberries and Vermont.
We have stopped talking
about L'Histoire de la viriti,

about subject and o~ject
and the mediation of desire.
Our ears are stoppered

in the bee-hum. And Charlie,
laughing wonderfully,
beard stained purple

by the word juice,
goes to get a bigger pot.
(36)
Taking the title as a cue, Gunilla Florby has read this piece as a
riposte to Lacan in particular and poststructuralist critical
theory in general. The poet has won a victory over Lacanian
theoretical discourse: "Hass thumbs his nose at post-structural-
ist notions of alienation," Florby (1991) argues, and Hass's
poems as a whole enact a "defiance of the structuralist split"

between signifier and signified ( 194). To this extent, Florby

reads the poem as it asks to be read. But the title of the poem,
which acts as a guide to its proper reading, also seeks to
control it. The space between title and poem traces the
disjunction between the text and it5 ideology. Lacan's presence
in the title can be seen as a sort of ritualistic naming-as-
exclusion, as the proper name of Lacan is absent from the body
of the poem. By weaving Lacan back into the fabric of the
poem from which he has been "ousted," as Florby perhaps
unwittingly says (194), we are able to distance our reading of
the poem from the text's explicit ideology, refiguring the
function of desire in the contemporary poetic. In such an
improper reading it is possible to find a more troubling
deployment of desire.JI
Note that Hass here employs desire in its early stage of
coding. While the poem is readable without our knowing
either the word's importance for Lacan or its specific functions
in his work, the reader who comes to the poem familiar with its
recent history will recognize its resonance. In addition, Hass's
poem, like the book in which it appears, is an early instance of
a style that would proliferate widely in eighties American
poetry: this style, or set of styles, merges informal, almost
flippant personal narrative with a larger discursive sweep
invoking political, historical or philosophical reflection. Fi-
nally, "Picking Blackberries" indicates how much American
poetry has come into uneasy contact with structuralist and
poststructuralist critical theory. The poem could only gain
wide recognition in a social context where American poetry is
deeply implicated in the academic world. At least in 1979,
when Praise was published, there were no pop-Lacanians (as
there are pop-Freudians and pop-Jungians) ;12 the specific
knowledges that find echoes in this poem are centered in the
university, even the graduate English or comparative literature
department.
To understand the role of Lacan in this poem, we must
note how Lacanian discourse enters the poem, indirectly,
through the characters. The poem's "Lacanian" section oper-
ates as a semi-autonomous discursive unit, almost as a poem
within the poem, at the poem's uncertain center. This section,

David Kellogg 417
which takes up one sentence and four lines, seems to provide

access through the narrator and "Charlie" to the specific
discourses that inform the poem. Both characters are familiar
enough with Lacan to converse knowledgeably "about subject
and object / and the mediation of desire." However, because
the poem contains no dialogue, the reader cannot participate
in this conversation. We only read what the conversation is
"about," not its content; the related words "stopped" and
"stoppered" framing this section apply to the reader as much
as, or more than, the characters. They do not talk ("We have
stopped talking"), we do not listen ("Our ears are stoppered").
The conversation is thus anterior to the poem and barred from
it in two senses: it precedes both the writing of the poem and,
strictly speaking, the time the poem represents. Like speech
markers signalling class, race, or region, the Lacanian terms in
this poem situate the characters as possessing a probable
perspective and range of knowledge. The words themselves, of
course, would not have enacted an actual speech situation-
the poem is still silent on the page. However, the manner in
which the words are distanced from the reader depends on the
bete noir of deconstruction: the myth of speech as presence.
Indeed, if we remove the "Lacanian" sentence (not coinci-
dentally the sentence containing desire), the poem is still fully
readable. Perhaps even more so: the title L'Histoire de la verite is
easy enough to understand, but it might send readers scram-
bling to locate the reference. Further, with this sentence
removed, the later phrase "the word juice" loses its air of
poststructuralist argot. Without this sentence the poem is still
concerned with binaries of presence/absence, plenitude/want,
and nature/language, but these issues are addressed through
deeply traditional imagery: the dry summer heat, the ripeness
and sexualized "wetness" of fruit, the garden of Eden motif,
and Charlie's almost Frostian nostalgia.
It is not the case, however, that familiarity with Lacan is of
no aid in reading the poem. Readers with a good grasp of
French poststructuralism may know that the title, L'Histoire de
la verite, is fictional, invoking no single, specific text but rather
a set of theoretical assumptions (for example, that "truth" has
a variable history rather than a stable content) .13 Indeed, basic

recognition is necessary for the joke at the poem's conclusion

to succeed; the reader has to associate Lacan with the
poststructuralist thought supposedly finding no reality outside
language in order for the cool put-down of "beard stained
purple/ by the word juice" to have its full effect. Thus, whether
fluent in the discourses of contemporary theory or not, the
reader can participate in a joke authorized by the "insider"
knowledge of the characters.
This insider stance is carefully cultivated in several poems
of Praise. The book's most widely anthologized poem, "Medita-
tion at Lagunitas"-a poem that, like "Picking Blackberries,"
also uses blackberries as a foil against poststructuralism-
begins by noticing that "All the new thinking is about loss. / In
this it resembles all the old thinking" ( 4) . 14 The sober, reflec-
tive tone here gives the poem such authority as to characterize
"all the new thinking" at a stroke, and to dispute its newness.
As with the joke at the end of "Picking Blackberries," the
friendliness in the lyric tone mitigates against the real hostility
in the poem's treatment of poststructuralist writing. Blackber-
ries are affirmations of the sensual world against the immateri-
ality of speculative thought; they are Hass saying "I refute it
thus." Yet with Hass as with Dr. Johnson, the responsive kick
does not touch the disputed claim on its own terms; the overall
language of this poem is informed not by the discourses of
critical theory but by the meditative stance of T. S. Eliot's Four
Ouartets and John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror."
An example:
Or the other notion that,

because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
( 4)
The arguments of poststructuralism are here taken up and

absorbed into a lyric observation with a specific literary and
personal ancestry. These lines explicitly echo Eliot's ( 1971)
"Every poem an epitaph" (144) but also such later theory-
laden poems as Ashbery's (1975) with its affirmation that

David Kellogg 419
"there are no words for the surface, that is, / No words to say
what it really is, that it is not / Superficial but a visual core"
(70). Accordingly, when the speaker of "Meditation at
Lagunitas" later comments on the cheapness and unreality of
theory-talk-"talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, /
pine, hair, woman, you and /"-he counters this observation
with the remembrance of a lover and the "violent wonder" he
felt "at her presence" (Hass 1979, 4). The poem's critical
observations, which stretch the domain of the poetic to in-
clude the discourse of critical theory, are countered by the
stereotyped material of postromantic lyric verse: love, memory,
image. In this regard, and given the stress placed on "absence"
in poststructuralist theory, "presence" seems deliberate, even
aggressive. This poem negotiates a series of absences, attempt-
ing to take poststructuralism's attack on presence seriously
while it refutes the Derridean (1976) slogan that "fl n 'ya pas de
hors-texte" (158).
But it is precisely at the level of slogans, not of understand-
ing or dialogue, that the battle is pitched. The stance here
resembles that in "Picking Blackberries" because the authority
or "expertise" of the poem's speaker does not have to be
shared by the reader but is transferred to the reader by what is
shared: a distrust of what is perceived as poststructuralism's
arrogance, and a faith in the emotional force of poetry. Thus,
the reader is able to gain the upper hand on "theory" and
dismiss it as irrelevant; by participating in the emotional
journey of the speaker, the reader also assumes the speaker's
authoritative, knowledgeable tone. To put it another way, what
the reader needs is not an expertise or fluency in poststruc-
turalist theory, but a passing familiarity with its vocabulary. The
implied audience of this poem has a peripheral relationship
with, some respect for, and a general suspicion of the dis-
courses of theory in American university English departments;
it also has a continuing commitment to the Romantic ideal of
literature as self-realization tempered by a worn skepticism
about that ideal's fulfillment in any socially meaningful sense.
In other words, the ideal implied reader of "Meditation at
Lagunitas" is a student in any typical American M.F.A. pro-
gram.

4.
As in "Picking Blackberries," desire in "Meditation at

Lagunitas" holds a crucial place for the rhetoric of the poem:
It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
(4-5)
In this poem the desire earlier linked with the blackberries is

associated with an absent woman. This woman, it is assumed,
desires the speaker even as the speaker desires her. But the
symmetry between male and female in the lines above is, I
think, rare in the poems of Praise. In "Picking Blackberries ... "
the two men of the poem share in a secret knowledge (which is
not given to the reader), and the staining of the beard in that
poem, as well as the domestic and traditional female associa-
tions of the receptacle "pot," grant a gendered dimension to
this poem as well. "The Feast," another poem in Praise,
represents a "wifely woman" who is denied even knowledge of
the object of desire: "She didn't know what she wanted" (18).
And in "Against Botticelli," a kind of private knowledge is
connected with anal intercourse (11-12). Characteristicallv, ;
the man knows what he desires in these poems, while the

woman is either an object of a man's desire or confused about
her own desire.
Brought thus back to the sexual aetiology of desire, we can
begin resituating its place in the contemporary poetic through
the Lacanian problematic. In approaching this issue, an issue
that also addresses Lacan's view of the Oedipus complex, it is
not necessary to answer what Peter Dews ( 1987) calls "the
major question which hangs over Lacan 's work," namely whether
Lacan's writings enact a return to Freud's most radical and
powerful formulations, "or whether Lacan too-for whatever
reasons-was obliged to become a revisionist" ( 49). This is
because Lacan 's discussion of desire is both Freudian and
Hegelian. Indeed, Samuel Weber ( 1991) notes that Freud,
unlike Lacan, never uses desire "as a central theoretical

David Kellogg 421
concept" (120). Lacan's deployment of the term may, as Weber

argues, map an absent space in Freud's work, strengthening
connections between knowledge, the feminine, and alterity
that were implicit in Freud. But its ancestry as a term must also
be traced back to Hegel via the famous lectures of Kojeve that
Lacan, like so many other French intellectuals of his genera-
tion, attended. 15
With this dual ancestry, desire contains for Lacan a mul-
tiple and characteristically overdetermined signification. Read
through Lacan's selfrepresentation of his work as a return to
Freud, desire ( desir) substitutes for the less useful concept of
the Freudian wish ( Wunsch) in Lacan 's redescription of the
Oedipus complex, arising "with the prohibition of the original
love o~ject, the mother" (Weber 1991, 124). 11, It is thus a desire
for what can never be known, what Lacan calls "the Other." In
its Hegelian/Kojevian sense, conversely, desire is directed
toward recognition, and produces a certain positive knowledge
as the subject approaches self-consciousness: "self-conscious-
ness is desire [Begierde]," Hegel (1977) says, and "self-conscious-
ness achieves its satisfaction only in another self" ( 109, 110). This
dual ancestry and signification of desire in Freud and Hegel is
one source of Lacan's distinction between "the Other," em-
blem of unknowable, unrepresentable alterity as such, and
"the other" (left untranslated as object petit a), which can be
read as one element in an Hegelian dialectic of self-realization.
If the objet petit a is a component of knowledge, the Other lies
outside the realm of the known; if one recognizes oneself
through an intersubjective relation with the other, the Other is
unrecognizable, a negative space of mis-recognition.
Lac an ( 1977) is led to reprcsen t desire in terms of the
difference between the other's dialectical, and the Other's
radically nondialectical relation to the subject: "Thus, desire is
neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love,
but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first
from the second, the phenomenon of their splitting (Spaltung)"
(287). Admitting some necessary measure of reductiveness, we
may here associate the first of these-appetite for satisfac-
tion-with Hegel and the object petit a, and the second-
demand for love-with Freud and the Other. Given the

importance of Saussure in Lacan, one should read the word

"difference" through the Saussurean view of language as a
differential chain of arbitrary signifiers. Read as difference, the
split between appetite for satisfaction and demand for love, in
addition to its Saussurean associations, is also linked with both
ancestors of desire: with Freud insofar as the onset of language
in Lacan is connected with the emergence of the incest taboo;
and with Hegel insofar as the dynamics of recognition underlie
the master-slave dialectic. Nevertheless, in Lacan 's reading,
Freud "reopens the junction between truth and knowledge"
closed off in the thought of Hegel: "desire becomes bound up
with the desire of the other, but that in that loop lies the desire
to know" ( 301). In other words, the subject enters the signify-
ing chain through recognition of/by the other, but that
subject is forever barred from knowledge of the Other. This
bar is precisely the bar of signification (150-52).
This double signification of desire as at once Hegelian
and Freudian, dialectical and nondialectical, other and Other,
forms a fault line in Lacan that is carried over in applications
of his work to feminist theory. In general, American feminist
theory has favored the Hegelian side of desire. Juliet Flower
MacCannell ( 1992) argues that "for Lacan desire-as-recogni-
tion remains critical for the history of oppression of women,
because it arranges the sexes in an imaginary symmetry, as it
does all egos, when in fact, owing to its inherent aggressiveness
and its strictures of domination and servitude, dissymetry
prevails" (65). By not recognizing the Hegelian face of desire 's
coin, Freud, MacCannell suggests, ignores how desire can act
as an agent of repression. In demonstrating the power of
recognition, MacCannell ( 1992) says, "Lacan fills in a certain
gap apparent in Freud"; by filling in this gap, Lacan eventually
arrives against Freud on the side of academic theoretical
feminism (65-67). In addition, though MacCannell recognizes
the antihistorical element of the Lacanian description ("imagi-
nary ... desire dramatically suspends the historicity of desire"
[65]), she does not seem altogether troubled by the potential
for reifying the very dissymetry also uncovered in his descrip-
tion of desire-as-recognition. Rather, she notes that later French
feminists "have made the effort to re-write the phallic charac-

David Kellogg 423
ter of this central image of desire" while retammg, even

utilizing, its ahistorical representation (67). For MacCannell,
in other words, desire-as-recognition is itself recognized only
to be deflected as an agent of history and historical repression.
In MacCannell's reading, the nondialectial representation
of desire is caught in a dialectical relation to the dialectical
representation of desire (desire-as-recognition). There is, in
other words, a dialectic between the dialectical and the
nondialectical; the nondialectical is negated as part of a
greater dialectic. On the other hand, this greater dialectic
obliterates the historical as such. To a degree, MacCannell's
reassertion of the dialectic may reauthorize history against the
f un<lamental ahistoricity of desire. For other feminists, how-
ever, this reauthorization might not be enough. In Jane
Gallop's (1985) Reading Lacan, for example, desire is even
more firmly grounded in its Hegelian moment. Here, "the
primacy of recognition" is imperative: "A desire must insis-
tently repeat itself until it be recognized .... [R]ecognition,
that basic fact of psychoanalysis ... , is the effect not so much
of the frustration of desire but of the lack of recognition of a
desire" (104). Gallop's promotion of Hegelian desire has
strategic motivations. Hers is a radically historical psychanalytic
feminism, with its own historicity foregrounded in the service
of a political redescription. 17 In addition to reasserting the
historical as the primary agent of signification and suqject-
formation, Gallop returns to Hegel in other ways as well: for
example, she attempts to destabilize the authority of the
analyst as master. Throughout Reading Lacan, Gallop brings
dynamics of psychoanalytic transference to bear on textual
interpretation: the reader's desire for recognition, including
her own desire as a reader of Lacan, is in fact recognized-that
is, legitimated-and the implicit authority of the Lacanian text
is brought into question. Though Lacan himself can not be
mastered, he loses his powerful significance as the master.
Both MacCannell and Gallop emphasize the Hegelian
ancestry of desire. For Gallop, however, the very symmetry
which MacCannell wishes to undermine is strategically reas-
serted. The desire of the reader is recognized, and symme-
tries-reader and text, Gallop and Lacan, analysand and

analyst, female and male-reborn. Gallop recognizes the prob-

lems in such a reading of Lacan, but she is willing to risk them:
"I am still within the effects of a massive reading transference
onto Lacan 's texts specifically and psychoanalytic literature
more generally. Having denounced the illusory and ideologi-
cally repressive effects of that transference, I nonetheless am in
no position simply to give it up" (30). Gallop, in other words,
inscribes the dynamics of desire into the very form of her
textual practice.
5.
vVe seem to have travelled a good distance from poetry,

and the way back is by no means easy. Yet Robert Hass's Praise
is a book in which desire is central, and the question of gender
both acute and suppressed. \iVoman in his poems is object of
desire and wellspring of knowledge, that toward whom the
male speaks and gestures yet at the same time the source and
ground of his own speaking. The object of desire would seem
to be stable, since that object does not itself desire-yet
Lacan's concept of desire does not allow for such stability. If
desire in Lacan is, as Weber (1991) claims, "essentially uncon-
scious in structure," then it comes about as an effect of
signification, "structured differentially and as a metonymic
movement: it is oriented less by objects than by signifiers"
(127). To illustrate this effect, Weber recasts Lacan's image of
the "loop," noting that "insofar as desire is directed towards
something else which 'itself' can never simply be a self-
identical object, it is not only desirous of another, but is 'itself'
another's desire. It is 'the desire for the other's desire,' the
desire of a signifier, defined as the signifier of.mother's desire"
(128). Reading Praise and the other (typically male-centered)
invocations of desire in eighties poetry with this sense of
desire's history and signification in Lacan, one might ask: who
is this Other whose desire is desired?
The obvious, but for that reason elusive, answer is-Lacan
himself. And the object of Lacan's desire, that which the
contemporary poetic misrecognizes as its own, is theory. The

David Kellogg 425
poet thinks he (sic) desires poetic authority, and represents his

own poetry as having satisfied that desire-but the terms have
shifted, theoretical (in)authenticity has been substituted in its
place, and the theorist has come to replace the poet as the
original and authoritative site of desire. Theory for the poet
has stolen the traditional roles of poetry, separating poets from
their language; it has appropriated both the authority of truth
(miscast as ironic unmasking of ideology) and the burden of
literacy. Thus, theory gives birth to the language and cultural
situation of contemporary American poetry; but in Hass, the
poet who uses this language stands in a secondary relation to
the Other of theory itself. The particular splitting in which the
poet comes to realize his own lack of primary contact with
theory (and the seeming access to primary contact ofLacan, or
the theorist qua theorist) gives rise to the anxious place of
desire in Hass's Praise.
If we take this analogy to its extreme, the linguistic
Oedipal anxiety 18 of the male poet, like that of the male child,
arises through a separation from the mother (in this case,
theory), a separation that is directly constitutive of the su~ject
as subject, in addition to the subject as user of language. The
poet's own narration of this event, which constructs as it
remembers, is unable to disentangle this separation from the
active intervention of the father (Lacan), who is seen as having
caused it. The calmness of tone in Hass's poems masks the
Oedipal anxiety that motivates them. The stress placed on
desire displays not only the awareness of that loss, but also its
denial in a poetic will-to-power; it takes the weapons of the
Father against the name of the Father.
6.
Against Hass's distinctly male, anxiety-driven use of desire,

we may pitJorie Graham's first volume, Hybrids of Plants and of
Ghosts, which appeared the year after Praise. Graham, like Hass,
can be counted as one of the new discursive poets emerging in
the seventies, though her philosophical turn of mind may have
less to do with response to American poetic traditions than

with her own upbringing and education in Europe. 19 Graham's

work has a hard-headedness in philosophical and cultural
matters that distinguishes her from Hass, with his anxious
evocation of "all the new thinking." Like Hass, Graham's
poetry explores how the self is formed and dissolves in
discourse, and, moreover, how language that describes such
formation and dissolution from "outside"-that is to say,
"discursive" language-may operate within the conventions of
lyric.
The difference between Hass and Graham may be clari-
fied through Robert Pinsky's 1976 book The Situation of Poetry.
Though ostensibly an historical argument, Pinsky's influential
work has sometimes been read as a manifesto for the poetry
that would appear with poets like Hass and Graham. Pinsky
describes the style he foresees-still on the horizon but occa-
sionally, briefly visible-as "neither ironic nor ecstatic. It is
speech, organized by its meaning, avoiding the distances and
complications of irony on the one side and the ecstatic fusion
of speaker, meaning, and subject on the other. The idea [ of
such poetry] is to have all of the virtues of prose, in addition to
those qualities and degrees of precision which can be called
poetic" (134). Though Pinsky's book is directed against the
legacy of Romanticism in contemporary poetry, his radical
have-cake-will-eat formula tastes decisively of a Romantic drive
for total absorptive discourse. Ultimately, the bold prophecy of
the book may register Pinsky's anxiety over the failure of that
totalizing drive, a last-ditch effort to refight a battle he else-
where recognizes as lost.
Additionally, Pinsky's formulation suggests that this new
poetry may solve a perceived, and long-standing, dilemma
between "subjective" and "objective" poetry. As I have sug-
gested elsewhere, that impression is due mainly to his having
set up the problematics of contemporary poetry against the
backdrop of the Romantic lyric. 20 Yet though Graham's work
formally addresses the making of categorical oppositions, she
seems less interested than Hass in resolving paradoxes of
poetic tradition; her deployment of Lacan is less confronta-
tional, as is her use of extrapoetic discourse in general.
v\Thereas Hass is anxiously skeptical about the ability of

David Kellogg 427
poststructuralism to describe the world, he is nonetheless

persuaded that there is a world "out there" to describe. His
references to desire attack poststructuralism at the level of its
truthfulness. Graham, on the other hand, seems more recep-
tive to the hermeneutics of suspicion; she is more likely to
explore the possibilities of theoretical discourse for poetry
than contest their perceived meaning and/ or significance.
vVhile Hass writes about poststructuralist ideas in "Picking
Blackberries" and "Meditation at Lagunitas," Graham tries
throughout her work-and even at this early stage of her
career-to write through them. vVhile Hass considers desire,
Graham everywhere deploys it'> effects.
To distinguish Graham from Hass in this manner is not to
suggest that Graham is "avant-garde" as Hass is not. At least in
her early career, Graham remains strongly referential; though
interested in multiple perspectives and functions of discourse,
her work is situated squarely within the conventions of voice.
Indeed, it is precisely those conventions which open her work
to an active or formal use of desire. For Graham, the voice can
provide poetry, and lyric in particular, with access to a tempo-
ral decay which contrasts with reader expectations of a "lyric
moment." In Hybrids, the temporal dimension of speech ener-
gizes her work; she submits the written voice to the effects of
spoken time, allowing what has just been said to pass away in to
silence, all the while hanging the "present" of her sentences, as
the voice does, on what is no longer present (the "past"). This
technique will manifest itself in the title of her second book,
Erosion, and later will be radically extended to incorporate
cinematic effects.
What is that tension between the temporal decay of voice
and the expectation of lyric closure if not the formal mapping
of the dynamics of desire? To read Hybrids as a formalization of
desire is to explain why the poems can evoke a strong frustra-
tion in readers trained to expect the lyric moment. When I first
encountered her poems as an undergraduate, they annoyed
me; next to familiar poets like Stafford, Bishop, James Wright,
even Sharon Olds and Hass of Graham's generation, they
seemed unstable, always ready to fly apart. All the instrumenta-
tion of lyric was present, yet the machine didn't work.

One might attribute my early response to the abstract

language of the poems, as in this passage from "Angels for
Cezanne":
Not because happiness

exists, but because
it can be deduced from continuities
such as these-yew
trees, dark windows
holding back dark sky,
white flower.
(Graham 1980, 10)
Yet the poem, and my frustrated early response to it, escape

such a reduction to abstraction. It is not the vocabulary of the
poem that disturbs, but the dynamic shuttling between vocabu-
laries-its conceptual syntax. The vocabulary is decidedly mixed.
In this passage, visual specifics cluster at the end of the
sentence, providing the impression of an imagistic closure. Yet
the images remain strangely unanchored, floating; their sig-
nificance is relational, and lies in the "happiness" which can be
"deduced" from these "continuities." Of course, they are not
continuities but things; they become continuities as a result of
repeated perception, that is to say, over time. This phenom-
enological emphasis on temporality foregrounds the already
obvious difference between the seemingly eternal yews and the
fragile-and conspicuously singular-"white flower." The yews
and flower are more discontinuous than continuous, and they
are syntactically (and possibly physically-is the flower in-
doors?) divided by the "dark windows," emblematic of the "bar
of signification" itself. 21 Still, by highlighting this difference,
the poem stresses that phenomenological recognition de-
pends on the stability of things, a stability the speaker regrets:
"it is what holds still / too long that belong/ to us." While we
generally expect desire to seek its fulfillment, the cost of
possession-holding still-is here too high.
Though Graham approaches the issue of desire at the
level of use (syntax) rather than meaning (vocabulary), the
signifier desire does appear conspicuously throughout Hybrids. I

David Kellogg 429
count ten instances in all, one m the lines immediately

following those just quoted:
The gaps
between the trees
move more rapidly.
You can feel them
in your kite's crisp
desire the moment before
it leaves you.
This poem does not deploy desire as a philosophical concept

appropriate only for a subject. Here desire is anthropomorphi-
cally attributed to an object; the kite's desire is a desire to
leave, not to possess or dominate. Hass's poems desire to close
a gap; desire in this poem, at least, opens one.
If the pathetic fallacy in giving the kite a desire is read as
pn:~jection, then whose is it? The speaker's, or the "you"? All
attempts to fix desire in this poem only destabilize it further.
The kite has desire; the kite leaves "you." What is their
relation? Here is how the poem begins:
The almost invisible

shuttlecock at dusk
floats over the fine net,
coming to bloom in
the empty gardenia bush.
The game is played in the mounting dusk; external forces

seem to make the loss in this poem inevitable. However, the
"missed shot" here has a humorously gendered aspect: missed
or not, the "shuttlecock" does make it over the net and "come"
to bloom, albeit in an "empty" bush. Everything in the land-
scape is sexualized, but the game of desire is awkwardly, and
humorously, misplayed. In Hass, male desire is profoundly
serious, and its deflection and thwarting is always a loss. Desire
does always lose, though, in part because the game is rigged;
theory has (always) already been there. In Graham, on the
other hand, desire has no "end" in mind; it is mobile, shuttling

across spaces like a badminton birdie. Indeed, the mobile

actions of birds are traced throughout Hybrids, and their
restlessness is admired. Desire is useful only as long as it shifts;
we remember how possession or belonging results from the
game's having been given up ("what holds still / too long").
Indeed, at one point in Hybrids, desire has "become too
accurate / to be of use" (26). Another poem argues that "we
need to seize again / the whole language / in search of /
better desires" (28). Better desires do not equal better oqjects
of desire; the point is not object but action: "If we could only
imagine / a better arc / of flight; you get just what you want"
(28). Better desires, paradoxically, are desires that lose control:
"And see how beautiful / the alphabet becomes / when
randomness sets in" (28) .22
In Hass's poems desire is directed toward its fulfillment,
and the essential lack that theory inserts into the very structure
of desire seems like a cheap shot. In the same cultural con text,
Graham shifts the terms; in her poems, the rules of the game
are its oqject. Thus the end of "Angels for Cezanne":
the gentle kites

find suddenly
what cannot hold them-cone,
cylinder, sphere and
signature like breath
scoring the pane
between us.
(10)
There are Hass-like moments of pathos in the poem's final

recognition of loss, but they are finally overcome. Not tran-
scended: deployed. "What cannot hold" the kites is the human
eye (with nods to Yeats in cone and cannot hold and to Emerson's
transparent eyeball in sphere) as they pass beyond the range of
visual perception. In addition, the kites are released because of
the gaining dark: "cone" and "cylinder" suggest the eye's loss
of color vision as light diminishes. Therefore, it is not the kite's
movement alone that blocks sight, but the passage of time
itself as well as the limits of our own physiology and sense

David Kellogg 431
perception. The last three lines also allude to Derrida, I

think, 23 and the puns on "pane" and "scoring" bring the poem
back to its implicitly human terrain. The humor at the begin-
ning of the poem is also reaffirmed, though the last line (with
its evocation of Lacan's bar of signification again) undercuts
that humor.
What are we to make of "Angels for Cezanne"? Like many
of Graham's poems, "Angels" can best be read as a perform-
ance of its own argument. It shuttles back and forth between
the human and the object world, between earth and air,
between writing (signature) and speech (breath), between
male and female. It does not, however, stop or "unify" those
oppositions; unlike Hass, Graham does not ask us to "accept"
or "rt;ject" poststructuralist arguments. Instead, Graham en-
act<; these claims in the text and texture of the poem. As with
Hass, Graham links Lacan with other major French theorists
including Derrida. But in her poems, such theory forms the
ground of articulation rather than the o~ject of examination.
The difference is apparent in the ways the poets choose to end
their poems. Both of Hass's poems end with a moment of
imagistic closure, one which emphasizes abundance to over-
flowing. In "Meditation at Lagunitas," the repetition of the
word blackberry at the poem's famous end could serve as the
beginning of a counting or accounting ( one blackberry, two
blackberries, three). In such a reading, the poem may open
rather than conclude. Still, the effect of the poem is pretty
strongly closed; each repetition of blackberry hammers one
more nail in the coffin of poststructuralist pretension. Simi-
larly, in "Picking Blackberries," the final image of the pot
evokes the richness and fecundity of nature, a formalized
Horn of Plenty. In both poems the blackberries are not only
there, present, accounted for; they are abundant, infinite,
overflowing. Both poems dismiss arguments about the con-
struction of lack in the very making of language as so much hot
air; next to such arguments, the richness of blackberries looks
like "the goods." "Angels for Cezanne," by contrast, ends not
imagistically but relationally. The kites are in nature, "Above /
in the garden clouds," and the union of culture and nature,
according to the logic of Romantic closure, should satisfy. Yet it

does not. The poem's end neither closes as one might expect,
nor opens out into the world as Hass's poems do; instead, it
sends the reader back into the poem and to its shifting lexical
registers. To get a sense of what Graham has done here,
imagine the last two lines reversed to read "between us, /
scoring the pane." vVhile the puns remain, the poem ends on
a feeling and its concrete manifestation in "the pane" rather
than in the relational dynamics of Graham's version.
There is more to discuss in these poems, including an
implied narrative of development traced by Graham's use of
"desire" in the volume's opening three poems.~ 4 However, my
argument here is historical, and is limited to the question:
vVhat happens to American poetry when poststructuralism
threatens its traditional affirmation of self? It should be clear
by now that Hass and Graham both use desire in the context of
a poststructuralism that, as it expands into culture and as
poetry contracts into the academy, is increasingly inescapable.
Perhaps it is too much to say that Graham deploys the
dynamics of desire that Hass resists. Yet faced with a common
cultural situation, the two poets respond differently; how are
we to measure that difference in a way that moves the poetry
back into the literary and social field? If both poets are seeking
recognition,2 5 and their response to Lacan is a strategic compo-
nent of that search, then perhaps we can say that Hass bets
against the future success of poststructuralism in the academy,
while Graham bets in Javor of it. To put it another way, if in the
late seventies Lacanian and other poststructuralist theory was
viewed suspiciously by poets in the academy, Hass places his
confidence in the then-present (1979) distrust of critical
theory, and Graham hopes for its future ( circa 1995?) accept-
ance.
Such a reading has several effects. First, it demonstrates
that what is at stake in the deployment of desire is not the fate
of the self but the fate of poetry. Second, it throws a wrench in
the machinery of transcendence. If recognition is transcen-
dence's yardstick, then both Hass and Graham seek to tran-
scend history by means of it. Indeed, in Graham transcen-
dence of reputation is sought by rejecting transcendence as a
category; while Hass, who has more faith in the Romantic

David Kellogg 433
reconciliation of opposites, seems stuck in the dominant logic

of his time. Yet by monkey-wrenching transcendence, I may
have just sabotaged my own essay. Since the future both Hass
and Graham place their bets on includes by definition the
present argument, I too am implicated in their decisions; I
must, therefore, situate my role in the wake of their response.
My increased fondness for Graham's work over the years, and
my increased dissatisfaction with Hass, displays not necessarily
my growth as a reader but my move from one side of the
poetry/ theory divide to the other, even as the divide itself has
moved. For me to cast my lot with Graham against Hass is to
enter, and not merely to describe, this dynamic.
University Writing Program

Duke University
Durham, NC 27708
Notes
1. There have been numerous attempts to take stock of this retreat, ranging from
the welcoming to the apocalyptic. An example of the former is Who Come.1 After
lfw Subject, edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy
(1991), which focuses on perspectives from contemporary French philosophy.
Constru1:tiom of" the Self, edited by George Levine ( 1992), is a more measured text;
Levine's introduction even holds out the possibility that the self may emerge
from the ashes of humanism. The individual pieces are wide-ranging, though
Levine docs rightly identify Irving Howe's contribution, "The Self in Litera-
ture," as the most unswervingly humanist essay in the book.
2. I employ the term "the poetic" to designate the entire social-discursive field of
contemporary poetry, including not only poems but also manifestos, critical
statements, reviews, M.F.A. programs and other workshops, little magazines,
presses, funding agencies, and readings. I develop this tenn throughout my
larger project, DejJloying the Poetir, to describe a limited and semiautonomous
region of the literary field as a whole.
3. Language poeu·y has become the most useful, if still disputed, term for
identifying the diverse configuration of radical experimental verse associated
with the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E (1979-82) and other outlets for radical
writing emerging in the seventies. Central players of the Language movement
who now hold posts in major English departments include Bob Perelman,
Charles Bernstein, and Susan Howe. All three of these writers have recently
published critical books with university presses.
4. Proponents of Ashbery generally divide into two camps, one stressing his role in
the postwar avant-garde, the other emphasizing his connection to "the Western
lyric tradition," in Heclen Vendler's words (1988, 231). The question of which, if
either, of these views will gain ultimate acceptance is by no means settled. But
the general rise in Ashbery's visibility and readership seems directly related to
the power of the latter view, especially as articulated in the (otherwise quite
different) projects ofVendler and Harold Bloom, who both connect A~hbery to

Romanticism via Stevens (see, e.g., Bloom 1973, 142-46). While the opposing
view, presented most forcefully by Marjorie Perloff, continues to have some
influence, a soft version of the Bloom/Vendler perspective continues to
dominate Ashbery's reception. This view's dominance is related to, among
other issues, the teachability of Romanticism-while Perloff stresses Ash bel) 's
strangeness and difficulty (Perloff 1980, 79 and passim), Vendler and Bloom
normalize his work by reference to canonical texts.
5. See e.g., Andrew Ross. 1988. "The New Sentence and the Commodity Form:
New American Writing." In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by
Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana: Universitv of Illinois Press, 361-
80. See also Shetley's critique of Ross (140-43). As for the influence of the
sentence on the New Formalism, I might point to the convergence of New
Formalist and New Narrative interests, participants, schools, and presses (espe-
cially Story Line Press). See, e.g., Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative &
the New Formalism. 1989. Edited by Frederick Feirstein. Santa Cruz: Story Linc
Press.
6. But Bourdieu's own work has been accused of precisely such functionalist
simplification; see Jenkins 1992.
7. Yet these "poles" are not opposites. In fact, Bourdieu rather severely deflates the
absolute opposition between these categories as found in mainstream philoso-
phy since Kant; the principle of autonomy is not free, nor is the heteronomous
principle exactly enslaving.
8. But see Richard Kearne (1987), "The Crisis of the Post-Modern Image," for an
alternate perspective. Kearney takes the Barthesian view that postmodernism is
a crisis of the inauthentic image (and hence a crisis of imagination). It is this
very inauthenticity that makes the image, locus of humanist value in much
previous discourse, central to postmodernism. I would argue, however, that
Kearney's is a minority position, as most studies of postmodernist culture (e.g.,
Hutcheon 1988 and Jameson 1991) focus on narrative and history. Jameson
does briefly discuss language poetry (1991, 25-31).
9. I here rehearse the standard narrative of Lowell's development. Robert Hass,
discussed below, takes the opposite view: "I still find myself blinkering incredu-
lously when I read-in almost anything written about the poetry-that those
early poems 'clearly reflect the burden of the new criticism,' while the later ones
are 'less consciously wrought and extremely intimate."' To hold this view, Hass
argues, "is to get things appallingly wrong" ( 1984, 6).
10. Empirical study in this area is difficult to perform. I have collected dozens of
instances from early eighties poetry of its appearance, in poets published by the
major poetry publishers, in what I would call a strongly coded form. Almost
never is rlPsirP used as a verb. A significant exception is in a Graham poem from
the volume I discuss here. I regret that there is not the space to discuss it. The
lines in question read: "what I desire is/ nostalgia for a moment different from
another's moment, undressed, / clean, / all that you cannot give away"
("Whore's Bath," 1980, 6).
11. It is an open question whether the following mapping of a rather broad social
problem (that of the function of su~jectivity in contemporary poetic articula-
tion) onto a specific psychoanalytical model should be taken seriously. I present
it neither as proof of Lacan's views nor as a cultural diagnosis. Rather, I claim
merely that Lacan 's own work can challenge his ouster, and the broader
exclusion of theoretical discourse, from even that segment of the contemporary
poetic which desires it.
12. Slavoj Zizek may be the first.
13. Florby (1991) finds echoes of Foucault as well as Lacan here (194); also of
interest, especially given this poem's hostility toward Lacan, is .Jaques Derrida's
"Le fadeur d~ la virile," a response to Lacan's seminar on Poe. As Derrida's
translator Alan Bass notes, the title retains a certain multivalence in French and
so is left untranslated (Derrida 1987, 413 n. 1).

David Kellogg 435
14. Florby (1991) refers to "Picking Blackberries" as a "spin-off' of, rather than a
"companion-piece," since the latter term "suggests too great a similarity" (193).
Such language suggests that "Picking Blackberries" is more occasional than
"Meditation at Lagunitas," a ranking I would not like to repeat. In any case,
Florby does recognize that these poems conduct a dialogue.
15. A useful discussion of Lacan's early Hcgclianism may be found in Dews ( 1987,
49-69). Among the attendees of these lectures were Raymond Aron, Georges
Bataille, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (52). Kojeve's lectures are available in
English as lntrorlw:tion to t}w R11arling of H1:gd.
16. This is the view of Alan Sheridan in the translator's note to Lacan's ( 1981) Four
h1ndamental Concepts of Aydw-Analysis. Sheridan argues, however, that Lacan's
use of desir elaborates on what was already standard practice among Freud's
French translators (Lacan 1981, 278-79). See also Jean Laplanche 's (1973) The
Lan[.;llll[;I! of Psycho-Analysis, which discusses desire under the heading, "Wish
(Desire)." Laplanche's standard and some,vhat perfunctory description does
not discriminate between other and Other, nor does it historically situate
Lacan's revision through Hegel, but otherwise it is clear and helpful:
.Jacques Lacan has attempted to re-orientate Freud's doctrine around
the· notion of desire, and to replace this notion in the forefront of
analytic theo1-y. This perspective has led Lacan to distinguish desire
from concepts with which it is often confused, such as need and
demand. Need is directed towards a specific object and is satisfied by it.
Demands are formulated and addressed to others; where they are still
aimed at an object, this is not essential to them, since the articulated
demand is essentially a demand for love.
Desire appears to be the rift which separates need and demand; it
cannot be reduced to need since, by definition, it is not a relation to a
real object independent of the subject but a relation to phantasy; nor
can it be r·cduced to demand, in that it seeks to impose itself without
taking the language or the unconscious of the other into account, and
insists upon absolute recognition from him. ( 482-83)
17. In IV!ruling Lawn and her other works, Gallop (1985) foregrounds her own
historicity by commenting explicitly on the production of the text within the
text itself, as in the passage in Rearlin~ Lawn where she narrates her own process
of revision and her response to an early critique of the manuscript by a peer
evaluator as part of an explanation of her own position: "My assumption of my
inadequacy and my attempt to read from that position arc thus, to my mind,
both Lacanian and feminist. ... It is apparent to me now that in my response to
the reader's report I was justifying my giving up the position of authority by
invoking an authoritative version, an unambiguous sense of Lacan" (20-21).
18. No critic of contemporary poetry can use a term like "anxiety," especially in a
Freudian context, without raising the issue of Harold Bloom's much celebrated,
and much vilified, "anxiety of influence" theory of poetry. In fact, contemporary
poetry may be the only area of academic literary study where Bloom's views still
hold much sway, for a host of interesting reasons which I am unable to elaborate
here. I am indebted to Bloom (as Bloom would say, "so far as I can tell" [ 1973,
8]) for his understanding of poetic work as a struggle for priority and a denial
of belatedness, and to some extent this essay may be read as an analysis of such
a struggle. On the other hand, my analysis refuses the evaluative axis which
would seem to be Bloom's ultimate goal.
19. According to the back cover of my copy of Hybrids o/Plants and Ghosts, Graham
"grew up in Italy and was educated at the Sorbonne, New York University,
Columbia University, and the University of Iowa." She currently teaches at the
Iowa Writer's Workshop.
20. See my essay "Literary History and the Problems of Oppositional Practice in
Contemporary Poetry" ( 1995, in press) for an elaboration of this issue. The

term "absorptive" is taken from Charles Bernstein's "Artifice of Absorption"
(1992).
21. Images of glass, mirrors, ice and the like would provide material for another
essay exploring a different area of Lacanian influence. Aside from the "bar of
signification," another obvious source for this image is Lacan 's famous essay on
the mirror stage.
22. The poem from which these lines are taken, "One in the Hand," forms an
implicit commentary on the opening image of "Angels for Cezanne": "A bird
reentering a bush, / like an idea regaining/ its intention, seeks / the missed
discoveries/ before attempting/ flight again" (Graham 1980, 28).
23. I read the line "signature like breath" as an allusion to Derrida's "Signature,
Event, Context."
24. The poems are "The Way Things Work," "I Was Taught Three," and "Whore's
Bath." The latter poem contains a rare instance of rlesiri, used as a verb.
25. The simplified model of the literary field I am using here assumes that the
position of poetry that is struggled over by means of various individual position-
takings lies at the autonomous pole of the literary field. In fact, the categories
are considerably fuzzier than that. While the logic of recognition seems to
dominate talk about American poetry in the academy, the poles of autonomy
and heteronomy are not all that opposed. Witness, for example, the increasingly
lucrative awards from agencies of recognition such as the MacArthur Founda-
tion, the Readers Digest-Lila Wallace Foundation, the Academy of America
Poets, and so forth.
References
Ashbery, .John. 1975. SlllfPortrait in a Convex Mirror. New York: Viking Press.
Bedient, Calvin. 1991. '"Man is Altogether Desire'?" Salmagunrli 90-91: 212-30.
Bernstein, Charles. 1992. "Artifice of Absorption." A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1992.
Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Injluenr:e. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Tiu: Fidrl of Cultural Production. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Broumas, Olga. 1989. Perpetua. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press.
Cadava, Eduardo, Connor, Peter, and Nancy,Jean-Luc, Editors. 1991. IMw Comes After
the Subject? New York: Routledge.
Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
- - - . 1987. The Post Card: From Sor:ra.tes to Freud and Beyond. Translated by Alan Bass.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Dews, Peter. 1987. Logir: of DisintP-f!;ratiun: Po.,t-Strw:turali.,t 1'/wu[!;ht and the Claims of
Critiuzl Theory. London: Verso.
Dobyns, Stephen. 1990. Body Traffic. New York: Viking Press.
Eliot, T. S. 1971. The Complete Poem, and Play., 1909-1950. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich.
Feirstein, Frederick, Editor. 1989. Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & thr:
New Formalism. Santa Cruz: Story Line Press.
Florby, Gunilla. 1991. "Holding Out Against Loss and Jacques Lacan: Some Reflec-
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David Kellogg 437
Gustavson, Bo. 1989. "The Discursive Muse: Robert I-lass's "Songs to Survive the
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Hass, Robert. 1979. Praise. New York: Ecco Press.
- - - . 1984. Twentidh-Century Plmsuns. New York: Ecco Press.
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Routledge .
.Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Poslmodr,rnism: Or, th,, Cultural Logir of Late Capitalism.
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sity Press, 113-22.
Kellogg, David. In press. "Literary History and the Problems of Oppositional Practice
in Contemporary Poetry." Cultural Critique.
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- - - . 1981. The Four Fundamental Conwpt.1 ofl\ydw-Analysi.1. Edited by Jacques-Alain
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- - - . 1988. "The New Sentence and the Commodity Form: Recent American
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"Desire Pronounced and/Punctuated": Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject Kellogg, David American Imago; Winter

1995; 52, 4; ProQuest pg. 405

"Desire pronounced and/Punctuated":

Throughout the 1980s, as future histories of the academy

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At the intersection of such troublesome categories as

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like most avant-garde movements in this century, has tended to

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as opposed to the line or the image; I read this emphasis as a

Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

representing the emergence of the new discursive poetry he

The space of literary or artistic position-takings, i.e., the

Bourdieu's distinction between positions and position-takings

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power is more or less economic, operating according to such

Discussions of postmodernism in poetry are less likely to

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prominence across diverse styles. The word I want to focus on

You know what I mean? I mean the desire

Gossip and length, hours

Why have men been taught to feel ashamed

each one from all but the worst company,

by eyes and eyes by those

Many poetry readers could no doubt assemble whole antholo-

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affiliations. As Calvin Bedient (1991) argues, desire "has be-

Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Lowell and the other poets M. L. Rosenthal would call confes-

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currently lie; it seems pretty popular, though. I suspect that it

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An important and early instance of the contemporary

August is dust here. Drought

We pick them in the hot

for him it is twenty years ago

about L'Histoire de la viriti,

Our ears are stoppered

beard stained purple

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between signifier and signified ( 194). To this extent, Florby

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which takes up one sentence and four lines, seems to provide

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recognition is necessary for the joke at the poem's conclusion

Or the other notion that,

The arguments of poststructuralism are here taken up and

Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

As in "Picking Blackberries," desire in "Meditation at

It hardly had to do with her.

In this poem the desire earlier linked with the blackberries is

the man knows what he desires in these poems, while the

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concept" (120). Lacan's deployment of the term may, as Weber

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importance of Saussure in Lacan, one should read the word

Copyright (c) 2004 ProQuest Information and Learning Company