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Reading the Illegible (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

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In this exquisitely legible foray into the poetics of illegibility, Dworkin

takes on such forms of confusion.text, and effacement.text, and complex.text

as overwritten poetry, overprinted poetry, lined-out passages in poem, and

entirely censored poem by Man Ray, and then moving into land art by Smithson

and others in order to finally explore the poetics of illegibility more

broadly. Dworkin is unflaggingly obsessed with the avant-garde, and in talking about such only marginally

comprehensible texts, Dworkin summons his full tool box of

critical.linguistic.textual.analytic tools to do the job. Each lengthly

passage of analysis signifies new ways to read easily dismissable texts. He

has no one reductive argument, no simple insistence that "this stuff represents

our postmodern, muddled lives" or anything so cheap as that. Instead,

Dworkin moves through the various texts he looks at finding them variably meaningful, as

clearly their mechanics are quite different. In the middle of the book lives

what I suspect is one of Dworkin's favorite forms, the diastic poetry of

Cage and Jackson Mac Low. In those poems, the poets "write through" the

cantos of Pound (and others) to produce mechanistic, rule-governed

renderings of the larger text. I say that I think Dworkin likes this

strategy more than others because it works with the available, the flood of

existing text (Humumanent works this way too, of course, as Hayles has

discussed) while doing so within rule-governed methods for creation. He

likes it too, because of the Wakean jingles that result, the random playful

bits of language that result.

This is a book, then, about how to read graffiti on passing trains, about

how to read half-effaced ancient signage, about reading overwritten graffiti

and notes and all of the text that hangs on the bulletin boards of our

lives. It is a text, too, about not overlooking the illegible, the opaque,

the odd and apparently unsignifying. By employing poetics, what does not

clearly produce semantic meaning suddenly does, as the activity of social

and political artists (see the later discussion of Smithson, for instance)

is the activity of such opaque and hard to parse texts. This is poetry as

social, political, engaged, and pushing the envelop of meaning. In a

constellation of relation, there is Drucker, Pound, Joyce, Cage, Smithson,

all the other overwriting and illegible.fetishizing poets, and then there is

Dworkin pulling it all together, keeping it all separate, and ultimately

currating a fiasco of textual innovation.

This

is a map of the innovative, the poetic, the academic, and the original. So,

this is the map.