CODA Language Poetry and Neo-Cratylism

Abstract

Whenever linguisticity and social vision are conjoined in poetry— whenever “a more than ordinary consciousness of how to do things with words” takes the world as well as language as its object (Kramer 14)—impulses toward Cratylism will inevitably arise. These impulses may be resisted, they may be entertained playfully as tropes, they may become temptations difficult to avoid, but the very fact that they arise will in itself be noteworthy, an indication of the poet’s desire to act on the world by acting on language. Not all poets whose projects would impinge on the social experience these impulses. Those who conceive of poems as tools to be wielded in the ordinary course of fulfilling their responsibilities as citizens, who conceive of poetry as exhortation, denunciation, testimony, or document, will not feel the need for a perfect or more natural language in order to complete their work (though the fantasy of such a language will often be expressed even then, as in Adrienne Rich’s “Cartography of Silence,” which begins with “lies” but concludes with “these words,…/ from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green” [16, 20]). But those who demand more of their poems, who look to poetic language as in itself transformative, will find Cratylic formulations immensely attractive. Even where dreams of social renewal are not explicit, the desire to make writing a meaningful act in its own right will reveal itself to be implicitly Utopian—a desire for plenitude in language that slides easily into a desire for plenitude in everyday life.

Cratylus: Very good, Socrates. I hope, however, that you will continue to think about these things yourself.

Plato, Cratylus 440e

What if life remains to be discovered? What if language still could be used to wrest “objects” from “experience” towards reality in the literal strata of the words?

Robert Grenier, Attention

We need a rewriting of the language…so it’s not just another confinement, another structuralist closure. CIVIL TONGUE. Politics = language (so you economic determinists can just go to hell). All of life would be government, constitution. Freedom!… I’d like that hope in writing.

Bruce Andrews, Paradise &Method

The trend of my theory may sometimes run utopianward in reality.

Lyn Hejinian, My Life