Marjorie Welish

Marjorie Welish is the author of The Annotated “Here” and Selected Poems, Word Group, Isle of the Signatories, and In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy (Spring 2012), all from Coffee House Press. The papers delivered at a conference on her writing and art held at the University of Pennsylvania were published in the book Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish (Slought Books). In 2009, Granary Books published Oaths? Questions?, a collaborative artists’ book by Marjorie Welish and James Siena which was the subject of a special exhibition at Denison University Museum, Granville, Ohio, and part of a two-year tour of artists’ books throughout the United States. Her honors include the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Fellowship from Brown University, the Judith E. Wilson Visiting Poetry Fellowship at Cambridge University, and two fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has held a Senior Fulbright Fellowship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. She is now Madelon Leventhal Rand DistinguishedLecturer in Literature at Brooklyn College.

Interview

The following is excerpted from “Part Architecture, Part Language: Marjorie Welish and Ben Lerner in Conversation,” which first appeared in Poetry Project Newsletter #228 (October/November 2011). Edited by Paul Foster Johnson. Used with permission.

Ben Lerner: Another way the book investigates narrative grammar is in its testing of predication: “Statement (Some Assembly Required),” for example, offers us a variety of elaborate predicates for “the real,” inviting us, perhaps, to choose among them. “To Be Cont.,” with its various ellipses, also solicits our participation as readers in the assemblage of sentences, propositions, possibly a story. And those ellipses come back in “For Best Results, Try . . . ,” among other places. I am interested in the degree to which In the Futurity Lounge requires assembly, comes with instructions, suggestions, imperatives, etc.

Marjorie Welish: As with Isle of the Signatories, my previous book, In the Futurity Lounge explores the nature of inscription: assertions not only commemorative but decidedly functional and instructive in the present. (Judith Goldman and I discuss this topic at length in the journal War and Peace 4.) At stake for the society that writes and reads these inscriptions is knowledge, and, so, predication of the real. Formatted like a wall plaque, “In Situ” is built of inscriptions: HERE LIE / THE FALLEN, THIS CERTIFIES THAT, FOUND, ROAD OPEN, etc., condense a guide to pragmatic social relations significant enough in public speech to appear in contracts and street signs. The poetics of inscriptions such as these, together with that of discursive statements, constitutes writing out of the written commonplaces informing public speech, but not derived from pop culture as much as from the polis, or so I think. “Statement (Some Assembly Required)” is a different sort of thing: a montage. It presupposes the space of a cosmopolis within which text moves from cultural present to cultural past and back again, through displacement, not through recuperation. Even so, these poems are not so far apart int heir main concern. The focus of the first part of my book–the complete title of which is In the Futurity Lounge / Asylum for Indeterminacy–is poetics meeting modernity and tis aftermath in urban sites that are themselves part architecture, part language.

BL: Your selection of sites is exquisite: in “To Be Cont.,” the Parc de la Villette, designed by Bernard Tschumi with input from Jacques Derrida, its follies intended as architectural signs of deconstruction; in “Pastoral Transfusion,” Fallingwater, with its aspiration of integrating nature and culture (an urgent symbolic “transfusion” within range of Pittsburgh); and so on. But I want to ask about one poem in which poetics meets modernity with particular force: “Roebling Rope.” Roebling is of course John Augustus Roebling, the German-born engineer who developed the wire rope suspension bridge, and is best known for designing the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling’s innovations were key in moving from hemp to wire ropes that could make such structures possible, and your poem beautifully elaborates this “wiring” as a figure for the modern cosmopolis and its contradictions. I give this very abbreviated (your poem has a great pun on “abridged”) background so I can ask about the word “Aeolian” that appears in the poem’s fourth section, which not only evokes the god of the winds, but the harp played by the wind (and the cables on such bridges do indeed resemble a harp). It also evokes the “Harp and altar” of Crane’s poem–a poet with a particular uneasy relationship to modernist poetics. I am spilling all this ink in order to ask you to talk about the role of musicality in the meeting of the poetics and modernity. What is the place, in all this wiring, of the lyric, a word whose source is also a stringed instrument? Let me quote these haunting lines from the third section of the poem that make a weird and powerful refrain:

. . . in signage that disinters cultural strata,
the freight of the song
Organizing social forceps in signage that disinters
the freight of the song

MW: As specific cultural sites prompted most poems written for this first part of the book, I should say that sites constructed recently–or sites reconstructed and so reconceived–allow me to study their distributions of space and time, to think about their modern and postmodern proposals for society and culture, yet also present their constructed praxis for the future. Diller Scofido + Renfro’s High Line (which prompted this prose poem), deriving some of its aesthetic ideology from the Parc de la Villette, is one o those instances. (As for Parc de la Villette, Tschumi won the competition, but Peter Eisenman, who failed to get the commission, subsequently published his conversation with Derrida, who had advised Eisenman to do a sort of grille structure that erased itself by being just at the surface of the park grounds. Poststructuralist insofar as it undoes the very assumption of architecture, Derrida’s ideas was not enthusiastically received by Eisenman. Actually, they spoke past each other. And by the way, decades ago I proposed to a magazine that I research and write an article on situations in which architects decline to build.) Poststructuralist theory informs the High Line’s distributed space and time. But my verbal artifact would not be recognizable to a tour guide looking for descriptions of destination spots or prospects, and this is deliberate, of course.

I am taking the scenic route in answering your question, evidently. Invited to speak on monuments’ conservation some years ago, I heard myself say the words that you read as the epigraph to my poem “Pastoral Transfusion” concerning Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, dependent as Fallingwater is on an ecosystem. As for “Roebling Rope,” nothing is more compelling to modernism than technological progress, which might be better expressed as the real-time inventive engagement with problematics of culture. (Think Roebling’s cable of twisted wire as deriving from the twill principle, integral to the technology of textiles many millennia old, and you will appreciate the cultural depth of Roebling’s reapplication of thread.) It happens that I am familiar with Roebling’s prototype suspension principle as realized in the Delaware Aqueduct, a site now preserved; and in consideration of this work, “Roebling Rope” is a poetic assemblage of technological and museological statements. Indeed, what function has the lyric in such a discursive project as culture itself?

That Pound and Stein, Joyce and Musil, found the lyric relevant within epic and epical poetics is heartening. Of course, musicality in modernist terms is much more comprehensive than the lyric as such, as is readily demonstrated in modern music from the Viennese modernists to free jazz and the poetry it inspires: Coolidge and Mackey, Taggart and Mullen, Bromige and Rodefer, Wellman and Clover, Shapiro and Hejinian, Scappettone and Tyrone Williams–all different, all theoretically savvy and musical at once. Critical theory tests the validity of lyric. Some Language poetry accommodates the lyric on behalf of a collective investigative instrumentality; and those of us who presuppose the written convention rather than the oral tradition for poetry, and who adhere to textual strategies for conceiving our practice, nonetheless find in certain music crucial forms of thought. Not my only point of reference , but the antagonistic aesthetic ideologies embodied in the music of Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis help orient my poetics.

“Asylum for Indeterminacy,” the second part of the book, issues from reading certain lyric poems under test conditions.

BL: And in this Baudelaire’s “Correspondences” has a central role.

MW: Yes. The entire section is “about” that poem; but neither its theme nor its style initiated this sequence so much as the translations from the French others have done. “Asylum for Indeterminacy” gives scope to my transformations of the poem, provoked through the discrepant vocabularies of two translators’ attempts to capture the sense of the same poetic object.