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ABSTRACT
From 1975 through 1978, Michael Sappol’s little magazine Personal Injury proposed a remarkable moment of possibility in which writing by Bruce Andrews, Susan Howe, Lynne Dreyer, P. Inman and Tina Darragh (all of whom would be included in Language poetry publications including Ron Silliman’s breakthrough anthology In the American Tree (1986)) jostled amiably alongside writing by New York School-affiliated poets including Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Harris Schiff, and Eileen Myles. Personal Injury showed a little magazine’s ability to productively trouble and push back against critics’ efforts to neatly organise poets into ‘generations’ and/or ‘schools.’ As I will show, Personal Injury predicted a literary-historical future that drew dividing lines between the quotidian affect of poets such as Berrigan and Schiff and the theoretically informed texts of writers including Inman and Darragh and messed that future up before it happened. Personal Injury, I argue, stands as a preemptive and fun refusal of literary classifications, revealing networks of influence and congruence among writers who are now defined distinctly as Language or New York School poets.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 David Lehman, ‘The Whole School’, Poetry, 119.4 (1972), p. 225.
2 Qtd. in Daniel Kane, All Poets Welcome: The Lower East Side Poetry Scene in the 1960s (University of California Press, 2003), p. 191.
3 Barrett Watten, Total Syntax (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), p. 57.
4 Tom Clark, ‘Stalin as Linguist’, Partisan Review, 37.2 (1989), p. 301.
5 ‘Alice Notley, ‘Kenyon Review Conversations’, The Kenyon Review, https://kenyonreview.org/conversation/alice-notley/ [Date accessed: 16 November 2022].
6 Ibid.
7 Ron Silliman, ed., In the American Tree (Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 2002).
8 Sophie Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes: Little Magazine Communities from Dada to Digital (Stanford University Press, 2019).
9 Nick Sturm, ‘“I’ve Never Liked Mimeo”: Eileen Myles, Little Magazines, and the “Umpteenth-Generation New York School”’, Women’s Studies, October 17, 2022, p. 1.
10 For more on the Mimeograph Revolution see Stephen Clay and Rodney Phillips, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side Adventures in Writing, 1960–1980 (New York: Granary Books, The New York Public Library, 1998).
11 Michael Sappol, email message to the author, November 9, 2022. Ellipses in the original.
12 Sturm shows how Myles’ decision to publish their magazine dodgems as a xerograph rather than mimeograph object was initiated in part to mark their apartness from the straight, Lower East Side scene they were emerging in. Perhaps Myles – whose first publications appeared in Personal Injury – had Sappol as a model for their move away from mimeo given that Personal Injury, like dodgems, was ‘an important record of a material and aesthetic shift in New York School writing communities’ (Sturm, p. 2).
13 Ed Sanders, Fuck You/ a Magazine of the Arts, 5.8 (1965) n.p.
14 Michael Sappol, email message to the author, November 6, 2022.
15 For more on the ‘reverse-flow’ between the Language poetry scene in Washington, D.C. and poets in New York, see Ann Vickery’s chapter ‘Cities and Communities: Circling out of Equivalence’, in her book Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), pp. 21–36.
16 Ibid. Ellipses in the original.
17 Ibid.
18 Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes, p. 5.
19 P. Inman, ‘4 Lovers’, Personal Injury, 1 (May, 1975), pp. 1–5.
20 Sappol, email message to the author. Sturm quotes Myles recalling how ‘Sappol had a total agenda […] and he was pushing fiction – he hated poetry, which in the ‘70s was kind of outrageous.’ Sturm, p. 10.
21 Bob Perelman regularly refers to Language poetry as ‘Language Writing,’ explaining that ‘Language Writing occupies a middle territory bounded on one side by poetry as it is currently instituted and on the other by theory. Language Writing contests the expressive model emanating from workshops and creative writing departments; but its potential rapprochement with poststructuralist theory and cultural studies has been slowed due to the specific histories of poetry it presupposes. The material bases of writing – letters, syntax, distribution procedures and networks – are glossed over by the workshop poems' commitment to voice and immediate experience; theoretical regimes generate critique through reading, whether the text is Wuthering Heights or weather reports, and the writing that maps out these readings tends to be subservient to institutionalised philosophic reference, often resulting in jargon. Language Writing differs from both sides in foregrounding writing as an active process.’ Bob Perelman, The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History (Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 15.
22 I will follow Oren Izenberg’s example and refer to writers associated with Language poetry as Language poets. As Izenberg explains, he does not ‘address the various terminological debates around Language poetry (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry, Language writing, Language-oriented poetry, and so on). Despite protestations to the contrary, I do not see that the term chosen has much of an effect on the descriptions or arguments proffered. For reasons of convenience, I use the term “Language poetry” throughout.’ Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton University Press, 2011), p. 217.
23 Examples of long-format prose poems written by language poets include Lyn Hejinian’s My Life: And, My Life in the Nineties (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2013), Silliman’s Tjanting (Applecross, W.A.: Salt, 2002), and Rosmarie Waldrop's The Reproduction of Profiles (New York: New Directions, 1987).
24 Ron Silliman, The New Sentence (New York: Roof, 1989), p. 89.
25 Inman, ‘4 Lovers’, p. 1.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid, p. 4.
28 Stephen Fredman, Poet’s Prose: The Crisis in American Verse (Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 137.
29 Bob Rosenthal, ‘Poem’, Personal Injury 1, p. 7.
30 Ted Berrigan, ‘Kinks’, in The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan (University of California Press, 2007), p. 325.
31 Aram Saroyan, Aram Saroyan: Complete Minimal Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007), p. 203.
32 Bob Rosenthal, ‘Numbers’, in Personal Injury 1, p. 9.
33 Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes, pp. 1–2.
34 Sappol remembers ‘Judith Ghinger:, a girlfriend, who was a producer at WBAI. Grew up in Yonkers. Her father was an identical twin. The twins married sisters (also twins?). The cousins were almost siblings.’ Vincent Beniquez was, as Sappol remembers it, a friend of Lynne Dreyer’s. Sappol, email message to the author, Nov. 6 2022.
35 Ibid.
36 ‘Peter Inman interviews Michael Sappol’, in Personal Injury no. 1, pp. 19–23.
37 For examples of the many hilariously insincere interviews that became a kind of genre unto itself among New York School poets, see Ted Berrigan and Ron Padgett, Bean Spasms: Collaborations (New York: Granary Books, Inc., 2012). Bean Spasms, first published in 1967, includes Ted Berrigan’s interview with John Cage, though the interview was in fact entirely written by Berrigan – Cage was not involved in it in any way.
38 ‘Peter Inman Interviews Michael Sappol’, p. 19.
39 Michael Sappol, untitled, Personal Injury no. 1, p. 24.
40 Michael Sappol, e-mail message to the author, December 4, 2022.
41 ‘Michael Sappol Interviewed by Debbie Ku.’
42 Olivia Laing, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency (Pan Macmillan, 2020), p. 256. This description of Padgett and Schneeman’s work is drawn from Laing’s review of Jenni Quilter, New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, ed., (New York: Rizzoli, 2014), an important document of the many painter-poet collaborations described briefly in this essay.
43 Like Sappol’s Personal Injury, Strange Faeces published an eclectic range of writers associated with (or soon to be associated with) the Language and New York School poetry scenes, as well as writers affiliated with the ‘British Poetry Revival’ including Jeff Nuttall. The magazine ran from 1970–1980 and published twenty issues. For more on the transatlantic publishing exchanges between the New York School poets and their readers in the United Kingdom, see Nick Sturm, ‘Wivenhoe is enrolling en masse’: Notes on the New York School in the UK’, in The Stinging Fly, no. 46 (Summer 2022), stingingfly.org.
44 Michael Sappol, e-mail message to the author, November 9, 2022. Parentheses and brackets in the original.
45 Myles’s preferred personal pronoun is ‘they.’
46 I asked Sappol directly whether the Myles poems were one long poem titled ‘Elton John Album’ or whether they were three separate poems. Sappol responded with the following lines:
After due consideration
I think it most likely
that EM intended
these
to be separate pieces,
let's call em poems,
one entitled Elton John album,
the other entitled The Grand Otherhood.
(Although really, what's the diff …)
You could of course
toss this question
into EM's inbox,
where all decisions would be
final. (Michael Sappol, e-mail to the author, December 30, 2022).
Following his advice, I reached out to Myles, who responded ‘I think three. I'm pretty sure he proposed printing them like that’ (Eileen Myles, e-mail to the author, January 1, 2023). Given that Myles thinks the poems might be three, while Sappol thinks they might be two, it is simply impossible to come to any clear conclusion.
47 Izenberg, Being Numerous, p. 154. The ‘fantasy that motivates Language poetry,’ Izenberg writes provocatively, ‘is not the liberal idea of a better situation – a situation with relatively greater autonomy, more freedoms, expanded access to resources for self-definition – but rather a fantasy of no situation. This is why the Hejinian sentence, incapable of eliminating content altogether – there is always some set of conventions that could make sense of a poem, no matter how obscure – makes content seem always to be punitive, as if to demonstrate that your literacy always testifies to your subjugation’(p. 154).
48 Peter Middleton, ‘Language Poetry and Linguistic Activism’, Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990), p. 246.
49 Ron Silliman, qtd. in Will Montgomery, Short Form American Poetry: The Modernist Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 161. In his chapter on Robert Grenier’s Sentences (pp. 159–79) Montgomery notes that Silliman’s definitions were published initially in the introduction to a ‘mini-anthology of nine poets representing the emerging Language scene for an issue of Jerome Rothenberg’s Alcheringa entitled ‘The Dwelling Place’. The 25-page selection includes work by Watten, Silliman, Coolidge, David Melnick and others’ (161).
50 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Expanded Field of L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E’, in Joe Bray, Alison Gibbons and Brian McHale (eds), (Oxford: Routledge 2012), p. 288.
51 Ibid.
52 Jennifer Russo, ‘Hannah Weiner’s Book in Air: Clairvoyant Journal and the Clair-Style Poems’, in J. Mark Smith (ed.), Time in Time: Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North American Avant-Gardism, 1963–2008 (McGill-Queen’s Press, 2013), p. 77.
53 In the mid to late-1970s Sappol produced radio shows for New York City-based alternative radio station WBAI.
54 Sappol, e-mail message to the author, November 6 2022.
55 Maggie Nelson, Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions (University of Iowa Press, 2007), p. 155. Nelson quotes Notley insisting that ‘“Language poetry … often sounds like a mind or voice reading printed matter. But there is the possibility of pushing harder at cadence … ”.’ Nelson adds, ‘For Notley, this “pushing harder at cadence” means finding “a new measure,” and then using it to tell a “holy story.” [She sees] academic feminism as hopelessly invested in the kind of scientized poststructuralist theory that insists that there is no true self or soul outside of linguistic and/or social construction’ (Nelson, Women, the New York School, p. 155).
56 In ‘August 1972, the experimental poet Hannah Weiner began seeing words – hallucinations appearing on surfaces around her, including her own forehead, which she could “read” from within. She believed she was clairvoyantly receiving directions and commentary from unseen guiding spirits’ (Russo, ‘Hannah Weiner’s Book in Air’, p. 75).
57 Alice Notley, ‘Poem’, in Personal Injury 4, p. 5.
58 Russo, ‘Hannah Weiner’s Book in Air’, 78.
59 Bruce Andrews, untitled, in Personal Injury 4, p. 33. Excerpts reprinted with permission by Michael Sappol and Bruce Andrews.
60 Ibid., p. 34
61 Aram Saroyan, Aram Saroyan, (New York: Random House, 1968), n.p.
62 Ibid., n.p.
63 Seita, Provisional Avant-Gardes, p. 95.
64 Ibid, p. 96.
65 Sappol, e-mail message to the author, Nov. 6, 2022.