Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography

The introduction summarizes the scope of the project and its methodologies, arguing for a critically descriptive reading practice. Looking at artists’ books, conceptual writing projects, and texts by writers as diverse as Marcel Duchamp, Solmaz Sharif, and Angelo V. Suárez, the chapter first sketches the range of works that engage the dictionary in ways other than those investigated in subsequent chapters. In contrast to writers who have turned to the dictionary as an idealized abstraction, or a source of suppressed cultural biases, the chapter then proposes a dictionary poetics extrapolated from the particular form of reference books and the typography of particular editions, with their emphasis on the chain of the signifier, the chance proximities of otherwise unrelated words, and recursive structures of motivated paths and self-referential loops. Discussing poems by Emily Dickinson, Cecil Giscombe, Lyn Hejinian, Jack Kerouac, and Stéphane Mallarmé the chapter outlines the principles of a radical lexicography in which the inherent logic of the dictionary serves as a generative, structuring device (and not merely an authoritative compendium).

Reading Happily with John Cage, Lyn Hejinian and Others

This chapter discusses various theories of happiness and gives particular consideration to Sara Ahmed’s suggestion that we need to rethink how the affect relates to the haphazard. Ahmed’s suggestion fits with Lyn Hejinian’s poetic experiments that present happiness as affirming happenings of the happenstance. After considering examples of that in Hejinian’s Happily (2000), the chapter then considers how John Cage used ‘chance determinations’ to make the happenstance happen in a range of his poetic ‘lectures’, including ‘Juillard Lecture’ (1952), ‘Indeterminacy’ (1958), ‘Diary: How to Improve the World’ (1965-82), and ‘Themes and Variations’ (1982). In analysing examples from those texts, the chapter reflects on how Cage’s lectures present and encourage modes of experimental reading that include being happily open to surprising aesthetic and affective possibilities. It concludes by comparing such happy reading to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of ‘reparative reading’.

Barthes in America

This chapter considers how Barthes was read in America, among a far wider range of poets than in Britain. It starts with a brief consideration of Robert Duncan’s essay on the ‘kopoltus’, and then looks at the poets gathered in Ron Silliman’s 1975 anthology ‘The Dwelling-Place’, New York School writers such as Bernadette Mayer, and other ‘Language poets’, closing with a more in-depth consideration of the importance of Barthes to Lyn Hejinian. Links are established between these writers’ poetics, which are varied but all describable as ‘language-centred’.