Signage

by Alan Davies

Nonfiction. "All criticism, if it is to get beyond the quibbling positioning of most expository writing, must aspire to fiction. The only true arguments are the ones we cannot make, and in making create universes we can begin to inhabit. In SIGNAGE, Alan Davies singularly fulfills such possibilities for writing. His prose of desire gives forth" - Charles Bernstein.

179 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1987

About the author

Alan Davies, is a contemporary American poet, critic, and editor who has been writing and publishing since the 1970s. Today, he is most often associated with the Language Poets.

Alan Davies was born in Lacombe, a town in central Alberta, Canada. By the mid-1970s, he was editing a poetry journal, Occulist Witnesses, in the Boston area where he had stayed for a few years after attending Robert Creeley's poetry class at Harvard Summer School in 1972. By this time he had hand-published John Wieners' treatise on and for young poets, "The Lanterns along the Wall," which Wieners had written especially for Creeley's class and began more actively publishing his own poetry. Soon, Davies was forming relations with an experimental group of writers whose practice became determining features of what grew into the Language School. This 'school' was not a group precisely, but a tendency in the work of many of its so-called practitioners.

Davies edited A Hundred Posters, one of the important "little" magazines of the "Language" movement. Subsequently, Davies was included in the crucial anthology devoted to "language-centred" writing: In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman (National Poetry Foundation, 1986; 2002).

Alan Davies, who is a Buddhist (as pointed out by Juliana Spahr), is currently living and working in New York City.

Davies was the 2011 writer in residence at the University of Windsor.

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 4 out of 5]

Intellectuals are often criticized for using big words where small ones will do. In Baltimore, there was a scene of poets who believed that writers shd ONLY use words that the 'Ordinary Joe' uses. They loved Bukowski. Personally, I don't like Bukowski much at all - debased humanity is a problem not a quality. & the reduction of vocabulary to a few hundred words is extremely oppressive to me.

So, "Signage": Davies cd've called the bk "Signs" but wd it really've been the same thing? IMO, NO WORDS ARE COMPLETELY SYNONYMOUS. Every word has its own unique qualities, its own etymology, its own pronunciation, its own feel. I like to use the word "persnickety" - I much prefer it to "picky". Its multisyllabicness is more fun for me, more evocative of.. persnicketiness. I like its "marminess". So, "Signage". This might be Davies' bk of literary criticism, of poetic theory.

"PURSUE VERITABLE SIMPLES": "the function of criticism, and particularly of book reviews, are infatuated with, and activated by, a past. Criticism sells the book ("pushing the book"), it sells criticism, it sells two authors." But, then, later, "Criticism abandons its book-selling function without abandoning the book".

"LIES": "Truth is lies that have hardened."

"The Indeterminate Interval: From History to Blur" (coauthored w/ Nick Piombino): This starts off w/ a lengthy quote from a New York Times article & a chart from the same re voltage measurements from the brain vis a vis reading nonsense. Heisenberg, Mallarmé, Bateson, Freud, Satie, Duchamp, Debussy, Ravel..

"notes for CONSTRUCTION": "Poems have to be constructed architecturally. That is, clusters of words and pieces of the poem must work to support other sections." Even though I'm deliberately twisting Alan's words, this helps justify in my mind a previous review I wrote about his "NAME": "I feel like I walk on these bks, I walk on the middle star of the ratings, as if the writing's a wall".

The theory of this bk is so serious & so diverse & thorough from section to section that I become eager to move onto his next bk, to review it, to find what new challenges it presents me.

At times, the text seems extremely assertive: "An enigma cannot be plural; it depends upon its indistributability. If it becomes dispersed in the text, if it is acted, its character is delineated in diffusion; of necessity, its still factness is destroyed." But what is the title under wch this apparent assertion occurs? "Private Enigma in the Opened Text". Is the privateness a stance unseen no matter how far the text opens?

Much of the theory here seems to concentrate on criticism of criticism. "CLOSE READING CLOSE READING": "A close reading is a reading made from within the mind of the person who wrote what is being read." Later, "A dissection of a text is not a close reading of it." "The dissection of a text is the activity of a shallow, overactive mind." In "ESSAI A CLEF" he writes about Roland Barthes: "It is his contribution, initialled by his perseverance, to discern that it is a failure of critical writing to view its task as the reading of a text; excellent critical, attentive, writing knows its task to be the reading of the writing of a text." My selection here cd be called a dissection.

Alan responds to Ron Silliman's "The Chinese Notebook": "155. You wrote "As always, the intention of the creator defines the state in which the work is most wholly itself" because you wanted to build up a great deal of certainty, some certainties which you hoped to link by their proximity, to make it be true." Another seemingly strong assertion. Cd Alan be doing the same thing?

I give this a 4 star rating even though I liked the 2 bks by Alan that I've already attempted to review more ("Active 24 Hours" & "NAME") & gave them 3 star ratings. So much for the ratings. This bk is EXHAUSTIVE, a labyrinth of permutations of relations between speech & language & text & truth (& so on).