Perhaps some readers—under the age of twenty (write to me if I am wrong!)—will have found the print version via the web version—something vaguely akin to seeing David Lean’s Zhivago, and only then reading Pasternak. It’s no news to anyone that holding a book in one’s hand is, for school children and university students, an increasingly novel way to read. New generations of readers will no doubt come to books, if they do so at all, through their Hollywood cousins and digital doppelgängers. The demise of bibliohegemony is an assumption that already guides the editorial posture of www.Conjunctions.

They are not alone. As with web versions of The Paris Review and the TLS, to name just two cases, the idea is to give culturally adroit webnauts a sampling of the more encompassing print version. I suppose that it is all designed to attract new surfers to old beaches, as least those who still shuttle between cyberspace and the massy quadrangular world of print. But lest you be fooled, www.Conjunctions is not, as with the two just cited, a glorified advertisement for its printed parent.

Taken together the print and the web version provide readers with a comprehensive package that goes beyond what either could achieve on its own.

The editor, Bradford Morrow, has engineered a site, which not only substantiates his original conception of the magazine as a “living notebook”, but expands on this premise by exploiting resources which only the web can offer. Taken together the print and the web version provide readers with a comprehensive package that goes beyond what either could achieve on its own. Considering Conjunctions in the round, as one is now bound to do, we’d be hard put to find another leading literary magazine establishing itself so pre-eminently in electronic format. While many have this potential (just think of The Paris Review’s historical interview series, APR’s catalogue of essays, The Iowa Review’s poetic Mecca) none have moved so energetically and decisively as Conjunctions.

This editing symbiosis is manifest on the opening page of the site. Our eye is drawn to the cover of the current issue of the print Conjunctions. Lined up next to this, as though waiting to be plucked from a bedside bookshelf, the previous three or four issues show us their spine. Something rustic for the digital age, this virtual bookshelf is a sure sign that the magazine’s Old World literary values are a top priority. These values—the smoky leisure of actual reading—are manifest in the design of the site. With its crisp graphics and tawny colors, we have the sensation of shuffling actual pages. Each section has its own distinct uncluttered feel, which makes us want to linger. And there is more here to linger over than simply excerpts from the current issue. The Conjunctions site is really a work in progress. The magazine’s entire history is dynamically unfolding via a comprehensively hyper-linked index that ranges all the way back to 1981. It is as though suddenly we had one of the commanding versions of the American avant-garde accessible by the click of a mouse.

As well as the generous access to nearly two decades of recent literary history, there are several other features on offer that extend beyond the ambit of the print edition. The "Audio File" seems to me one of the masterstrokes of this site. I can’t describe what a comfort it is to hear, in the midst of my fastness, living poets reading their work, their voices beamed down to my screamingly irrelevant little platform in the middle one of Europe’s most edge-inflected countries. It is hard to generalize from my own aural concupiscence, so I won’t try. Rather let me stick to the facts. You can hear, from among various writers, Leslie Scalapino reading from Friendship, Robert Kelly reading from his recent “Berlin Sonnets” (some of which you can read, by the way, at another wonderful site called www.Archipelago), or Rikki DuCornet reading "The Many Tenses of Desire". There is also music by Manno Charlemange, and Fred Ho.

By letting such different writers hash it out in close proximity, a reader's angles of opportunity are everywhere, and so her evaluations are drawn naturally like sniper fire down a cold alley of winter air.

"Web Conjunctions", another one of the half dozen features we are presented with upon opening the site, is an autonomous zine, a digitally molted version of its parent, which, rather than waiting for the new issues of the magazine, seems to expand by fanciful osmosis. Take for instance one of its latest postings from the 28th of November, excerpts from Tangier Days: Conversations with Paul Bowles, 1984-1988 by Richard F. Patteson. On the one hand, Paul Bowles, who writes, as Gore Vidal once observed, as if Moby Dick had never been written, seems out of place in this preeminently American avant-garde journal. When asked by Patteson to arbitrate between Saul Bellow and John Barth on the question of linguistic experimentation, Bowles sides with Bellow who considered it close to irrelevant in serious fiction. Bowles wonders (and we can almost here the Conjunctions staff chuckling behind the editorial arras) why, for example, "one should strive to invent new language. You're attempting to get across certain ideas. Experimentation should not become a hindrance." Bowles’ eloquent tacitness and sand-pocked reserve, not to mention his undying concern for classical rigor in prose, might be serving as a lesson to experimental writers like Brian Lennon, whose "Web Conjunctions" selection, "From Nineteen Italian Days: An Essay", is a masterpiece of indirection.

--through this city, in which, for the writers, the essay begins, there walk the travelers---who are on their way to Rome, another city, in which another essay will begin (beginning being something open to question), in which, perhaps, the essay will truly and finally begin:

--for who is to say where what begins, beginning is open to question, perhaps the essay truly begins in Rome, and the essay that begins on the plane over Chicago, the essay that begins in New York, are impostor essays;

--perhaps we need to slice through the impostor essays to the real ones:

I can only assume that the editor’s intentions run to the dialogic. By letting such different writers hash it out in close proximity, a reader’s angles of opportunity are everywhere, and so her evaluations are drawn naturally like sniper fire down a cold alley of winter air.

After Lennon, one clicks with relief on Martine Bellen’s entry, “Song of the Little Road”, posted on the 1st of October. Bellen, a senior editor at Conjunctions whose latest book, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems, won the 1997 National Poetry Series, is an unabashed exotic. She writes with the verbal precision of Marianne Moore, her words and phrases almost crocheted into the line, so tight are they, but with a different palette entirely. Her lines, even if they are only a word long, have a flushed, inscriptive quality. The effect is of flashes of luminescence held against a blackened ground.

Mother drags daughter
by her beautiful mane
beads and seeds fall from her
magic box -- cowries

inadmissible
desires
dying’s
the easy part
like shutting off the projector and sitting in the dark

This is a daughter’s tale of woe, as I suspect much of her work is; a tale of "Bamboo birds and girls in gardens" and "Oil, salt, chilies stolen from the kitchen". Bellen’s voice is unmistakably her own, chronically beautiful, and always embroidering the silken threads of lyrical desire over a taut strung mesh of pain, weaving and unweaving the lush provisos and terms of continuance which are part of her tragic heritage. For it is obvious that she has aligned herself with a tradition of long suffering women, from Dickinson to Akhmatova. This poem ends with one of the sacred dicta of that very tradition: "Sometimes it is necessary to leave home."

We might move on to Peter Handke, Antonin Artaud, or to one of my favorite postings in this evolving selection, Rachel Sherman’s "Nose" ("Noses give the father in the girl away."). Yet we’d still only be scratching the surface of the site. To really delve we must pursue some of the actual issues, that is selections from Conjunctions proper; and to get there you must click over the archive link. In preparing for this column, I looked at some of the authors in the 30th issue, Paper Airplane, which opens with a commentary on the first chapter from a new translation of Kafka’s Trial, and ends with another estimable K. from contemporary America.

One detects, in Robert Kelly’s fabulistic oeuvre, a great patience for the world, and for all its solitary architects. His narrators are inevitably existential characters bound round by their own freedom: eclectics, haunters of foreign sidewalks, students of crows, studied men of leisure exquisitely ill at ease in their perfection, and hell-bent on doing the ultimate good before the gods of articulation.

Kelly writes with the aggressive precision of his European masters; one supposes Kafka. Maybe too we read the influence of the Paris-based Oulipo (Queneau, Mathews, Perec, Calvino). He shares the manic exactitude of, especially, Harry Mathews, contemporary literature’s most important researcher in the science of formalism. Though one doesn’t get the feeling that Kelly’s muse is, a priori, a woman of strictures and arcane debts. There is more languor and ease in his approach. He has Huysmans’ love of the exotic, yet he is more curtailed, as though by some after-breath of New England Puritanism, mixed with the dabbler’s self-consciousness. He is a Romantic disguising himself in 18th Century légerté.

As so often when reading literary journals—on the web?—one finishes one section and easily clicks to another without the requisite retooling, without changing the filters, or even basking a bit, belly up, in the word bath. Moving too quickly through this site might find us one minute suffused in the dream realism of Robert Kelly, and the next gasping on the ascetic asperity of Susan Howe's "Rückenfigur".

But Kelly is a Master and it is fitting that this issue, which starts with a discussion of Kafka's Trial, should end with a story which evokes high modernist stakes, of dream and deep reading, and actually attempts to describe Edmund Wilson’s problems writing a work he never wrote. "Edmund Wilson on Alfred Musset: The Dream" is a fantasia in Z sharp minor, and in it Kelly brings the world of dream into drawing room focus.

The narrative begins with a description of that essential piece of reader’s equipment, the chair. It’s almost as though we need the weight of what I can’t resist thinking is Kelly’s own reading chair to set the scene for Edmund Wilson’s realistically improbable La Vie d’Alfred Musset. For the story will play seriously with the conventions of biography, the consistency of reputations and literary lives, and examine the paradigms of historical imagination through the inverted world of the dream. It somehow helps that we are seated comfortably in a real chair. The narrator has fallen to sleep reading Malory:

The chair, of course, like everything else, had once been new, really not so long ago. It had been specially made for me at my mother’s commission, a red leather club chair, meant for a heavy body reading. After five years of heavy reading, the cushions were penitent, and the sleek scarlet finish was off it. In spots, the smooth red polished leather had worn away, and the rough underpelt showed through.

The heavy body reading heavily is so lightly rendered that it almost escapes our attention. But subtle wit is what our oedipal bachelor’s tale is about. Why Kelly chooses Musset’s muse-wrecked life to re-write, and not another, is the question which lingers. The autobiographer’s ruse at first seems just that, a ruse, sharing something perhaps with the mise-en-scène of one of Harry Mathew’s maddeningly torqued recipes from Country Cooking and Other Tales. But there is some degree of self-portraiture here, where there never is in Mathews. Musset, known for being le plus classique des romantiques et le plus romantique des classiques, crossed with Edmund Wilson, as strange as that seems, might just give us Robert Kelly. Isaiah Berlin’s description of Wilson, in a 1991 interview with Lewis M. Dabrey, is to the point. Wilson is referred to as an "old-fashioned 19th century critic who, whenever he wanted to write about somebody, went off for two months and read everything [in a red leather chair?] –accumulated an enormous amount of information until some shape emerged, built itself in his head…He interpreted literature." I’d be hard pressed to produce a better description of what Kelly, with his twist on the pliancy of fact, is doing in "Edmund Wilson on Alfred Musset: The Dream".

As so often when reading literary journals—on the web?—one finishes one section and easily clicks to another without the requisite retooling, without changing the filters, or even basking a bit, belly up, in the word bath. Moving too quickly through this site might find us one minute suffused in the dream realism of Robert Kelly, and the next gasping on the ascetic asperity of Susan Howe’s "Rückenfigur". This is a poem that, patiently, over the course of sixteen linked sonnets, lifts Tristram and Yseult into the realm of "bitter sound".

Reading Susan Howe’s poetry has, by definition, to be a labor of love: love for the word; love for that strange cohesion of words we call syntax; and love for the ideas towards which words tend. True, this kind of love is necessary for reading any poetry worth the name. Howe’s poetry simply demands more of it, and more of those other qualities which allow love to go to work: patience, flexibility, trust, and the willing suspension of disbelief.

At the level of ideas, her poetry rises out of the American vatic, is puritan to the core, and hinges always on the individual’s capacity for revelation, in the "mind’s trajected light". The sine qua non of revelation is for her — as for Protestant revelation always — the marriage of correct living with metaphysical deferral. For poets, Howe included, correct living boils down to purifying the language of the tribe. This is the devotional side, the praxis whose ethic rises out of work and solitary application. Our tradition is rife with hair-shirted priests and priestesses whose urge toward various forms of Calvinistic privation has been transposed into one of America’s central myths of freedom, that the freedom of the poet is always the inverse of everyone else’s freedom. On the other hand, metaphysical deferral, the incomplete utopia, the unfinished scripting, ensures continuance for a nation of narrative-deprived poets as they turn weightlessly to praying in the woods. The oldest truth in the book: when you run out of things to write about, do what all great American poets end up doing, write about the revelation of writing.

Once we understand her terrain, the Emersonian diaspora, the difficulty in Howe’s poetry fixes itself at the level of syntax; though this bears little relation to the willfully contorted language of many poets of our day. It reminds me more of the inherent difficulty in Hart Crane, or even Laura Riding—a difficulty that comes from compression rather than the struggle for effect.

The oldest truth in the book: when you run out of things to write about, do what all great American poets end up doing, write about the revelation of writing.

Syntax in poetry is the mathematics behind desire. As desire leans away from the Eros of description, and towards the purely vatic (the metaphysical utterance) syntax tightens and contracts, discovers a glowing simplicity within the basic difficulty of having traveled such a sheer distance from actual life. Blake and Emily Dickinson are two great examples. Celan is another one. They honed the sheer edge of the sentence, and parsed it to its beautiful nub.

Like these writers, Susan Howe tends toward mantic utterance, "Bitter sound as truth is / silent as silent tomorrow." Her syntax is appropriately unforgiving, demandingly passionate, admonitory — in the sense in which it calls upon the past to witness the present — and driven by a kind of sublimated wrath, as though it were still feeding off the energies of Hutchinsonian homily. Most often she dispenses with the niceties of the sentence and lets nominating energies subsume predicating ones—the effect is of motion poised above its depth. Her stanza approximates the luminous strictness of a Quaker chair.

"Rückenfigur", which literally means "back-figure", and might be interpreted as "image without a front side", is a sonnet sequence based on the story of Tristram and Yseult. The origins of this story are lost in medieval twilight. It went through at least four major re-workings before Gottfried von Strassberg (fl.1210) produced his amazing German poem, "Tristan". Those of us who don’t read German, are indebted to its translation into Modern English prose by A.T. Hato, whose wonderful introduction (Penguin Classics) I have just reread. In it he justifies offering Gottfried’s "Tristan" (which was written in the colloquial language of the Hohenstauffen courts) "in a form which (whatever its defects) is not intrinsically absurd—plain prose."

We can only imagine then, those of us who don’t read medieval German, what it would be like to experience Gottfried’s language first hand. "His verbal subtleties and intricacies are," Hato tells us, "unmatched in any period of German literature." Hato hoped that his prose version might be "found useful for a good English poet one day."

Howe — whether she reads medieval German or not I don’t know — has not given us the verse translation that Hato seems to have been waiting for, but a penetrating commentary on the successive re-workings of the story. Her interrogation is aimed at the language itself, its "literariness", which she sees underpinning the dense psychological fabric, the tragic motivations of the lovers, and all who get caught up in their plot. Like Gottfried himself - who diverged from the ordinary Christian apologetics his staunch community demanded — Howe lays claim to the moral history of antiquity, as she attempts to find her way back to "Ysolt’s single vision of union". She calls, by turns, upon the story of Antigone, and on Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice.

Gottfried’s heroic conception of love depends, in practical terms, on social resistance. His lovers would be reduced to dithering in a world Hato describes as "free of mésalliance". Susan Howe retains this paradigm of resistance, of love as essentially "other". But while resistance in Gottfried is colorfully comprised of an array of spies, jealous husbands, and willing corrupters of the truth, like the rascally dwarf, Merlot, in Howe it is language itself, the materia prima, which provides the necessary resistance. The poet must struggle against the banality with which expression cages sentiment; against the closure implicit in narrative and lyric form; and against language’s capacity to resist its own erasure in the merging apotheosis of lover becoming one with the object of her love.

The task is an ambiguous one. The goal is at once heatedly pursued, and hedged. Waiting is implicit: "Eurydice sits by/ the bank of a river seven days"; Mark waits in a tree to trap his wife. Howe, swift on her appointed assignation with the truth sees, as Isolde did, "Mark’s shadow in the water". The husband’s "moral right" is played off, as it is in Gottfried, consummation with her lover. Suspension. Above the river. Leaning against the handrail.

Her poetry can cause dislodgements of memory. Reading “Rückenfigur”, by tropes and slips of association, suddenly I am in Jenna again, on my way from one place to another, in the snow with the acrid tinge of cheap East German coal in the air. I am standing in front of the two-story brick house in which Novalis lived.

Lean on handrail river below
Sense of depth focus motion
of chaos in Schlegel only as
visual progress into depth its
harsh curb estrangement logic
Realism still exists is part
of the realist dual hypothesis
Dual on verso as one who has
obeyed acceleration velocity
killing frost regenerative thaw
you other rowing forward face
backward Hesperides messenger
into the pastness of landscape
inarticulate scrawl awash air

What a poem like this can do ("face/backward", like the Rückenfigur?), as we spall off its wounded surface, is lift us into our own experience, even as it keeps us gripped by the lyric sway. Why Schlegel all of a sudden? And how that tips me out of the poem, back to 1992 when I went traipsing about on a drunken tour of the town, leaning over such bridges and watching the snow swirl into the brooks beneath them, as focused as Schlegel must have been on the "motion/ of chaos". Evocation in Howe sneaks up on you. Suddenly you are shunted into "the pastness of lanscape". There is a component in Howe that is vastly expressive of our period. In the best sense she is a poet of her day.

And what might that mean? I think that at this point it is superfluous to say that we live in a world of fragments and image nodes, and that there is no longer any means of making sense of our experience. By doing so we grossly underestimate the experience of those that have come before us, even as we pander to our own deficiencies. Gloating over the so-called collapse of meaning represents a failure of historical imagination, elucidates nothing, and serves only to inflate our vanities. Hamlet it seems to me, skull in hand, mud clods clinging to his boots, had just as much trouble to sort through the ontologies of his day. And besides, his girlfriend was mad. Chesterton, talking of the mistake which people made by underestimating the pre-romantic’s ability to represent nature says that "They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills; but they sat on great hills to write it."

I think that at this point it is superfluous to say that we live in a world of fragments and image nodes, and that there is no longer any means of making sense of our experience. By doing so we grossly underestimate the experience of those that have come before us, even as we pander to our own deficiencies.

Seamus Heaney once said that one of the qualities of real poetry is that the tone of it is somehow at odds with the content. But what strikes me in this poem is not that the tone is at odds with the content, but that the method is. For the beauty and the crisp slanting of the piece, one would like the poet to relax a little, fall back into a line closer somewhat to the spoken. Instead there is a driven and methodical syntax from beginning to end, even though the poem is all about hesitation, and half-proffered gesture.

A justification for Howe’s style, if one wants to read it as such, can be found in her criticism. It is in the way she equates "Americanness" with the antinomian tradition of Anne Hutchinson, a tradition which she extends to Emily Dickinson, and, to a certain extent, Emerson, Thoreau and Melville. This correlation is based on various arguments that run the gamut from textual criticism to the metaphysical.

"…I have come to believe that what is crucial when trying to understand what makes the literary expression of Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Dickinson, and to a lesser extent, Hawthorne singularly North American is their use—and in Dickinson’s case, intentional misuse—of Noah Webster’s original American Dictionary of the English Language. (1828)."

This supposition and others like it are augmented by the almost irresistible eloquence of statements that lean more towards Old World philosophy.

“There is a mystic separation between poetic vision and ordinary living. The conditions of poetry rest outside each life at a miraculous reach indifferent to worldly chronology.”

Other such statements outlining the "American" project, and basing it on a "language of the heart" that "has quite another grammar", are sprinkled throughout Howe’s critical work. At one point in The Birth-mark, she asserts that after "1637, American literary expression couldn’t speak English." Meaning of course English English. This kind of literary nationalism contrasts sharply with the generation of poets and critics from the 1950’s. John Berryman, for instance, wasn’t even willing to admit that there was a national American literature. American literature could not be separated from English literature, and American writers were nothing more — in literary terms — than English writers born on the other side of the Atlantic. Even Ezra Pound’s search for a more demotic poetics to replace the Anglo-American obsession with iambic pentameter, was based on the contents — the prose, as it were — of world literature, as opposed to the syntax of earlier American writers.

I, for one, find all brands of literary nationalism at this late date — shadowed as they inevitably are by all sorts of political nationalism — more than somewhat distressing. The quasi-religious justifications for a language placed "at a miraculous reach" from the syntax of ordinary discourse are common to such searches for identity. In fact, beyond poetry, this is in many cases what is wrong with our century. The gap that opens between justification and motivation is like a grave. In Howe’s case, the sacredness that she bestows upon the fragment as a modus operandi rises out of the traditional antinomian trust in wild and unrestrained speech, in the voice of the enthused, and the touched. As with Anne Hutchinson — mustering a fragmented rain of scripture against the "legal" articulation of a court that sought to banish her — the struggle for identity in Howe is paradoxical. In the end it is a struggle to be articulate, limpid, and free of babble.

Similar tensions — between the disintegration of languages and the urge for spiritual consolidation — might be said to mark Conjunctions itself. Writers like Martine Bellen and Robert Kelly, and a host of other writers read at Conjunctions.com, seem to be pulling against that geist which ostensibly sponsors them, toward more deeply imagined fictions and a more eloquent relation to narrative. They still hold the conviction, of course, that meaning is indeed a construction, and never more than provisional, yet do not preclude the possibility of its substance and largesse, of its elegance. Their ideological slippage in relation to writers of more standard experimentalist pedigree is remarkable particularly in this setting, and by virtue of the variety of authors Conjunctions publishes. The magazine itself becomes the scene of an argument that deeply implicates our present literary life. It is a scene in which the tug between polarities we are all so familiar with is allowed, in the "spirit of a living notebook", to find expression.

Martin Walter Earl

Martin Earl lives with his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa review, Denver Quarterly, Metre (U.K.) and PN Review (U.K.). His work has been translated into French, German, Portugese, and Swedish.