I call to the mysterious one who yet
Shall walk the wet sands by the edge of the stream
And look most like me, being indeed my double,
And prove of all imaginable things
The most unlike, being my anti-self,
And, standing by these characters, disclose
All that I seek. …

—W. B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus”

I hold my breath,
and try not to shake my tree house,
so high away I only hear
the melancholy slap of their hands,
and see them move from side to side,
dressing the cypress in their wet clothes,
passing and coming so close to each other
that I cannot tell them apart,
cannot separate them when they part.

—Jay Wright, “Baptism in the Lead Avenue Ditch”

“American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist.”¹ Without being particularly attracted to the role of the advocatus diaboli, I find it nevertheless hard, if not impossible, to resist the discursive potential of what might strike us as an extravagantly patronizing, though not altogether unfamiliar, remark. To be more precise, I'm interested in re-examining here one of the questions which is most frequently prompted by this quotation from William Carlos Williams' Paterson of a quotation from Englishman George Barker: How can American poetry not exist? This response, colored by feelings of defensive indignation and a certain degree of innocence or naivete, is as obvious as it is problematic. The dilemma becomes clear once one attempts to define “American poetry” or “American literature.”

What, precisely, is “American poetry”? How does its “Americanness” manifest itself and where does it come from? Is it poetry written by Americans about America? Is it poetry that is characterized by a particular practice of genre that could be called American? None of the answers inherent in the questions appear fully satisfactory, which may well lead to the analyst's increasing discomfort with the implicit assertion that instigated the search—namely, that “American poetry” exists—and strengthen the claim of George Barker that “American poetry,” whatever it is, does, in fact, not exist. What's more, if one continues to pursue the path of Cartesian (or, shall I say, Derridian) skepticism, one will inevitably be driven toward the painful realization that this problematic non-existence or “absence” of “American poetry” is not only due to the elusiveness of its particular mode of existence but, perhaps more importantly, to the general indeterminacy of poetry's or literature's mode of being; that is, if we are prepared to contend that “existence” requires a certain kind of “visibility” or “presence.” The shadow of Derridian deconstruction does indeed loom large to remind us, time and again, that any text (or body of texts), not just “American poetry,” is, in effect, an extremely difficult subject to discuss because it does not, as it were, exist:

… there is no present text in general, and there is not even a past text, a text which is past as having been present. The text is not conceivable in an originary or modified form of presence. The unconscious text is already a weave of pure traces, differences in which meaning and force are united—a text nowhere present, consisting of archives which are always already transcriptions. Originary prints. Everything begins with reproduction. (italics added) Always already: Repositories of a meaning which was never present, whose signified presence is always reconstituted by deferral, nachträglich, belatedly, supplementarily; for the nachträglich also means supplementary.²

“Everything begins with reproduction”—curiously enough, this statement does not strike us as being far removed from the notion implicit in George Barker's remark that “American poetry” does not exist, for the simple reason that it is nothing but a reproduction or imitation of English poetry and, after all, has to use a borrowed language for lack of an idiom of its own. Put in other words, originality, or lack thereof, becomes the convenient criterion for determining the presence or non-presence of a “text” or an entire body of “texts.” At the same time, this is exactly the point at which our comparison of the two quotations is bound to come to a rather abrupt halt: George Barker and others like him, expressing what was by no means an unusual sentiment earlier in this century, would hardly have stopped to question the so-called “originality” of their own national literatures.

The controversial issue of originality vs. reproduction finds a striking parallel in the relation between what might be termed Anglo-American and Afro-American literature. More often than not, Afro-American literature is viewed as a mere subcategory of American letters in much the same way, and for much the same reasons, that George Barker's Eliotic remark implies the derivative status of Anglo-American poetics in relation to the European literary tradition. It has to be admitted that the distinction between Anglo- and Afro-American is somewhat awkward; but, after all, it has to be kept in mind that what Joseph Riddel has called the “oxymoronic” existence of American literature³ is, at least to some extent, an adequate reflection of this hyphenation, which defies any preconceived notions about America as a unified cultural entity. Unless one is willing to subscribe to Moynihan's convenient fable of the “melting pot,” one is forced to acknowledge that American literature is a multitude, a varied song indeed, to paraphrase Whitman or, for that matter, W. E. B. Du Bois.⁴

How, then, can we possibly assert that “American literature” does exist? Are not the common features far out-matched by the differences? While it would be unreasonable to pretend to possess an all-inclusive solution to this problem, I would like to suggest a few points of departure for what could be called an answer-in-progress. Let me then begin to begin again, as Williams would have it, by quoting a passage from T. S. Eliot's “Tradition and the Individual Talent” which will help to clarify some of the assumptions underlying this essay:

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.⁵

Although I question Eliot's notion of an “ideal order” of literary of artistic “monuments,” as well as the inevitably resulting definition of artistic “progress” as a “continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality,”⁶ I find his remarks valuable because they stress the importance of the intertextual relation of the individual work of art and its pretextual tradition along with the aspect of simultaneity that characterizes the creative and the interpretive process. American literature, Joseph Riddel suggests, “begins with the contradiction inherent in the notion of original or creative ‘literature,’ of original secondariness.”⁷ One could argue that this is equally true of all literatures, and I'm quite prepared to agree. On the other hand, American literature in general and Afro-American literature in particular, due to its precarious hyphenated status, offer an excellent prism from which to view this paradox and the ways in which it gives rise to a variety of “stages” on which the already-familiar dances with its “new” and unfamiliar doubles. This dance as an expression of the Eliotic idea of simultaneity is the result of repeating or “reproducing” the past, of beginning (again), and can be regarded as the act of establishing a visible relationship between the old and the new, the familiar and the unfamiliar, that goes beyond mere derivation. As Wilson Harris points out, “There are two kinds of relationship to the past—one which derives from the past, and one which is profound dialogue with the past (one which asks impertinent questions of the past). The nature of tradition is, in some degree, a ceaseless question about the nature of exploitation, self-exploitation, as well as the exploitation of others, the exploitation of one culture by another.”⁸ Harris' allusion to a specific historical phenomenon, the relationship between Europe and its overseas colonies, by no means distracts from “literary” issues. Rather, colonialism offers an appropriate and illuminating metaphor that introduces an important geo-cultural dimension to our previous discussion.

I'm only too aware at this point that, by leaving what Edward Said describes as the “conservative safety of language without history,”⁹ I might well be accused of breaking the rules, as it were, of the kind of criticism my initial reference to Derrida might have seemed to inaugurate. If this is the case, then so be it. At any rate, we have to be conscious of the fact that any definition of language—or of writing, to be more precise—as a particular form of communication almost automatically requires us to include the element of intention into our analysis. While it is true that no linguistic sign in any text—and I'm talking about the rhetorically conscious and not the “unconscious” text here—ever refers only to itself, I'm not entirely satisfied with placing an emphasis on its referring to that which has always already been there at the expense of that which will always already have been there—the reader. The initial dialogue thus turns out to be, in effect, a tri-alogue, or put in Derridian terms, “[a] signifier is from the very beginning the possibility of its own repetition, of its own image or resemblance.”¹⁰ Quite to the point, intention, as the will to be present and to communicate that which manifests itself in the form of a text, not only occupies a place, but creates for itself a space with distinct geo-cultural and historical dimensions. In Said's words, “a signifier occupying a place, signifying in place is—rather than represents—an act of will with ascertainable political and intellectual consequences and an act fulfilling a strategic desire to administer a vast and detailed field of material.”¹¹

These linguistic as well as geo-cultural spaces, called into being by the triangulation of the various doubles which cohabit the poem—text, pre-text, and con-text—will constitute the central focus of my following interpretive response to the poems of Sterling Brown and William Carlos Williams. American poetics, I hope to show by comparing Anglo-American with Afro-American poetry, derives its validity as an ordering concept not from any notions about a common origin, but from the particular ways in which its multi-cultural components and participants are visible, textual expressions of the continuous quest for forms and shapes that would actualize their own (inter)textual dynamics by drawing together past and future in this timeless category we have come to know as the present. While most of my examples in this quest for poetic, and for critical, authenticity will be taken from Brown's Southern Road and Williams' Paterson, it often seems inevitable to refer to other texts as well. Although one could argue that the poetic features of Paterson and Southern Road are far too different to provide a basis for any fruitful comparison, I wish to point to the shared concern for language as an “energy” or “force” that is capable of calling into existence its own spaces. Williams' claim that language's “highest dignity [is] its illumination in the environment to which it is native,”¹² which revoices his earlier notions about the “local” being the only manifestation of the universal, holds true for a poet like Sterling Brown as well. While terms such as “native environment” or “local” could easily be viewed as direct references to the “verbal” spaces of the poems themselves, both Williams and Brown are quite explicit about the geo-cultural dimensions of their poetic spaces.

The two titles, Paterson and Southern Road, already articulate such an intention. It might be worth noting here that what I am calling geo-cultural referentiality has nothing to do with “local color” or some sort of literary regionalism; nor does it depend on the actual existence of a place or a region called “Paterson” or “the South” respectively. Neither Williams nor Brown is interested in “realistic” portraits or representative “copies” of an external reality or world. The fact that Brown calls his poetry “portraitures,” which Henry-Louis Gates, Jr., interprets as “close and vivid detailings of a carefully delineated subject that suggested a sense of place,”¹³ illustrates the concern for an imaginary reality that shapes and, in its turn, is shaped by the poem itself. It is, to paraphrase Williams, not a matter of representation, but of separate existence.¹⁴ The tension between this so-called external reality and the imaginary symbolic space of the poems creates a contrapuntal movement that is appropriated by the figurative dynamics evoked by the choice of language in the two titles. The genealogical transitions inscribed in the combination of “Pater”-“son” identifies this figure as a “befitting emblem of adversity”¹⁵ as well as transmuting it into what Robert B. Stepto has termed a “spatial expression of communitas and genius loci.”¹⁶ The effect of the combination “Southern”-“Road” is quite similar to that of “Pater”-“son.” The kinetic trope of the road suggests two kinds of seemingly opposed movements which are ultimately but two different versions of the same activity. Ascent and separation figure as much in this image of transition as do descent and immersion.¹⁷ The characteristic referential ambiguity of “Southern Road” derives from the fact that it leads both away from the South (to a symbolic North), and thus becomes an emblem of adversity, as well as back toward the South, in which case it is transformed into an “image of kin,” in Michael S. Harper's words.¹⁸ Brown's Southern Road interconnects two symbolically charged landscapes, the South and the North, in much the same way that the genealogical line from Pater to son is both an expression of the simultaneous distance and closeness between father and son—in this case, between Europe and America. In this sense, the poems of both Williams and Brown become figures of their own referential doubleness or what Jay Wright has very appropriately termed “emblems of the ecstatic connection.”¹⁹ They are the visible manifestations of those peculiar dialogues with the past—in effect, trialogues between past, present, and future—that textualize themselves as “performances,” in the Derridian sense, or, to be even more accurate, as dances:

The law? The law gives us nothing
but a corpse, wrapped in a dirty mantle.
The law is based on murder and confinement,
long delayed,
but this, following the insensate music,
is based on the dance:
                                                                                          an agony of self-realization
bound into a whole
by that which surrounds us
                                                                                                    I cannot escape
I cannot vomit it up
Only the poem!
Only the poem made, the verb calls it
                                                                                                                                                      into being.(20)

This “agony of self-realization” vis-à-vis the “law” of a dominant literary tradition and its “legal” confinements links the different, yet analogous, cases of Williams and Brown as American poets.²¹ The following two stanzas, which provide the frame for one of Sterling Brown's best poems, “Odyssey of Big Boy,” offer an excellent example of how a poem is indeed drawn out of the structural and figurative isolation of its alleged self-referentiality and bound into a whole by that which surrounds it:

Lemme be wid Casey Jones,
          Lemme be wid Stagolee,
Lemme be wid such like men
          When Death takes hol' on me,
                    When Death takes hol' on me. …
.....An' all dat Big Boy axes
          When times comes fo' to go,
Lemme be wid John Henry, steel drivin' man,
          Lemme be wid old Jazzbo,
                    Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo. …(22)

The “Odyssey of Big Boy” realizes the full potential of Southern Road's figurative and structural design. The structural topography created by Big Boy's journey ranges from the “Kentucky hills” to “li'l New York” and back to “Southwest Washington.” This private ritual ground is framed, if you will, by a variety of “ghostly presences” that people the poetic space and thus transform it into a symbolic landscape which figures as a spatial expression of poetic storytelling as a communal rite of passage. Big Boy, himself a twin version of Du Bois' “weary traveller,” invites these not-so-ghostly ghosts of the past to share the “food,” which is the poem. J. Hillis Miller's intriguing discussion of the figurative and the etymological interdependence of host and parasite, of text and pre-text, might be profitably extended to this poem to illustrate the relationship between Big Boy and the “guests” conjured up by his voice: The poem as the visible resonance of his “call” provides the figurative food for its mythic guests—Casey Jones, Stagolee, John Henry, ole Jazzbo—, whose existence depends as much on their “host” as the poem-as-host needs these guests to achieve a particular kind of visibility or presence.²³

The poem's will to communicate with its historical-mythical past as well as with its contextual future, the reader, is by no means limited to the figurative level of its Afro-American idiom, but finds its structural equivalent in the call-and-response relations which govern the individual stanzas as well as the frame. The poem is set in motion by the call of the first stanza, whose open form already anticipates the response of the final one. In fact, the anticipation is really a formal prefiguration: The response repeats or revoices the call in such a way that it inverts the lines of the initial stanza. Put differently, the response appears as the inverted double of the call, so that the beginning is, in a sense, indeed the end. More to the point, the conspicuous absence of a poetic closure leaves us with a circular movement which could be described as the macro-rhythmic version of the micro-rhythms generated by each of the individual stanzas. Throughout the poem, the final line in each stanza either literally repeats the next-to-last line (“Won't work in no mo' mine, / Won't work in no mo' mine”) or improvises upon it (“But won't do dat again, / Do dat no mo' again”). This rhetorical device is a direct reference to the blues and thus invites yet another ghostly presence which concretizes the figurative dialogue by carrying it over into the structural sphere of the poem. It might be worth noting here that such rhythmic properties can dominate a poem to such an extent that the figurative qualities of its language are almost literally smothered by the embrace. The best example for such a “strangulation” is the title poem, “Southern Road,” in which the underlying work-song structure is modified by the call-and-response pattern of the traditional blues stanza:

Doubleshackled—hunh—
Guard behin';
Doubleshackled—hunh—
Guard behin';
Ball an' chain, bebby,
On my min'.

(CP [The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown], p. 52)

In “Odyssey of Big Boy,” however, the successful interaction of micro- and macro-rhythms render visible the poem's continuous quest for its own figurative and structural form. The double circular movement, generated by the call-and-response patterns of the dialogue between figuration and structure, gives birth to one of the most striking emblems of the ecstatic connection, the dance of doubles—

For the beginning is assuredly
the end—since we know nothing, pure
and simple, beyond
our own complexities.

(P [Paterson], pp. 11-12)

Although this passage from the “Preface” of Paterson invites us to participate in a very similar circular movement, I'm far from suggesting that Williams' poetry is a product of the same call-and-response network that readily and consistently draws attention to itself as method and poetic intention in the texts of Sterling Brown. However, one can hardly ignore the fact that the rhetorical effects of the interplay between the already-familiar and its most unlike twin, “something else, something else the same” (P, p. 44) in Paterson are at least comparable to those in Southern Road. Paterson is set in motion by a citation, this most parasitical of all presences, which is immediately answered, if you will, by the subsequent stanza so that, in essence, we can legitimately regard the resulting relation between the two as a dialogue with the past:

“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance?”

                                                            To make a start,
                                                            out of particulars
                                                            and make them general, rolling
                                                            up the sum, by defective means
                                                            Sniffing the trees,
                                                            just another dog
                                                            among a lot of dogs. What
                                                            else is there? And to do?

(P, p. 11)

As we can clearly see in this passage, “to make a start” means, in effect, to repeat, “to begin to begin again” and to find a shape that will offer evidence of at least some innovation—of having begun.²⁴ Therefore it is not at all surprising that the communicative motion incited by this repetition multiplies and continues to call attention to itself as a dynamic process throughout Paterson in particular and Williams' poetry in general. If the following citation does indeed revoice the above dialogue, and I think it does, then the way in which the evidence of having begun is presented to us is most striking in the context of the statements made in its opposing parts:

How to begin to find a shape—to begin to begin again,
turning the inside out: to find one phrase that will
lie married beside another for delight                    ?
—seems beyond attainment.

American poetry is a very easy subject to discuss for the simple reason that it does not exist

(P, p. 167)

As in “Odyssey of Big Boy,” the two dance partners have exchanged places, and this structural inversion itself is sufficient proof that the dance has indeed begun! At the same time, the figure of the dance attests to the impossibility of Williams' quest for “one phrase that will / lie married beside another for delight” and opens the insight that “Dissonance / (if you are interested) / leads to discovery” (P, p. 207). Put in other words, the dance is not a structural figure that is characterized by harmony. On the contrary, it is moved by oppositions which are inextricably locked in a rather ambiguous embrace, because one is always inherent in the other. The emphatic detachment of the sign will from its syntagmatic context, will/lie, in conjunction with drawing together married and beside, already prefigures the larger contrapuntal rhythm of the poem as a whole and elucidates Williams' concept of poetic “marriage.” “The dance! The verb detaches itself / seeking to become articulate” (PB [Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems], p. 120). I wish to point out that my frequent references to “The Desert Music” are largely prompted by the poem's intimate structural and figurative ties to Paterson. In fact, “The Desert Music” seems to start exactly where Paterson “ends,” which is clarified by the following juxtaposition:

We know nothing and can know nothing
                                                                                                    but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contrapuntally,
                              Satyrically, the tragic foot.

(P, p. 278)

—the dance begins: to end about a form
propped motionless—on the bridge
between Juárez and El Paso—unrecognizable
in the semi-dark

(PB, p. 108)

Since any attempt to do full justice to either of the two poems within the confines of this essay is doomed to fail from the very start, “The Descent” (Paterson, Book Two) will have to serve as a representative response to the perpetual search for formal realization of this emblem of simultaneous kinship and adversity which is the dance. Or, as Williams himself put it so much better, “How shall we get said what must be said? / Only the poem” (PB, p. 108).

The descent beckons
                    as the ascent beckoned
                                        Memory is a kind
of accomplishment
                    a sort of renewal
                                        even
an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new
places
                              inhabited by hordes
                                        heretofore unrealized,
of new kinds—
                              since their movements
                                        are towards new objectives
(even though formerly they were abandoned)

(P, p. 96)

The poem as verbal space is the perfect realization of the dynamic potential of the two central nouns, descent and ascent, in precisely that order. Their order derives its significance from the fact that the memory of the third line is experienced, both figuratively and structurally, as the measured simultaneity of the two movements, which are logically separated by their attachment to sequential time-categories. While the poetic space outlined by the rhythmic interaction of this particular pair of etymological doubles seems largely self-referential and self-contained when divorced from the context of Paterson, it cannot be overlooked that the space it breaks open is indeed a new, “unsuspected” place, in the sense of a private ritual ground for the initiated individual, Paterson, the man-city, the poet. As in the parallel case of “Odyssey of Big Boy,” this personal ritual ground assumes the features of a genius loci once the ghostly guests, the “hordes heretofore unrealized,” are invited to participate in this special rite of passage, which is to transform the space laid out by the poem into a spatial and temporal expression of communitas. Williams' idea of “marriage” as the contrapuntal dance without beginning or end is, in the final analysis, as much an image of kinship and immersion, with all that is implied here in terms of intimacy and adversity, as is Brown's Southern Road, to which we now return. Although my following example, “Transfer,” is taken from a later collection of Brown's poetry entitled No Hiding Place, it clearly revoices the rhetorical strategies inscribed in the “Southern Road” metaphor.

Like “Odyssey of Big Boy” and other poems such as “Long Gone,” “Transfer” begins with a journey which is set in motion by the stubborn absence of articulation presented to us, quite ironically, as “tongue-tied” absent-mindedness:

It must have been that the fellow was tongue-tied,
Or absent-minded, or daft with the heat,
But howsoeverbeit he didn't say sir,
So they took and bounced him out on the street.

(CP, p. 180)

But the journey does not end out on the street, as it were; it leads us to a figurative inversion of the referential significance of “tongue-tied” as an act of resistance. By the end of the fourth stanza, the persona is indeed physically tied up on “the prison farm,” and this image of actual confinement prefigures, by contrast, the flight to Atlanta which culminates in the textual revoicing of a Du Boisian “Sorrow Song,” indeed a familiar “sermon.” The initial images of spiritual and physical imprisonment and violence undergo a figurative transformation in the second part of the poem, which, significantly, is underscored by the narrative movement away from those manifestations of oppressive “justice” and toward those “images of kin” inaugurated by the distinct echoes of both W. E. B. Du Bois and Richard Wright in the fifth and sixth stanzas.²⁵

But one day a red sun beat on the red hills
As he was in the pasture, haltering a mare,
And something went snap in his trusty old head
And he started a-riding away from there.
When he got to Atlanta, the folks took him in,
And fed him and clothed him, and hid him away;
And let him out only when the cops disappear
From the streets of Darktown at the dusk of day:

(CP, p. 180)

And it is at this point that the poem's narrative structure does indeed become a “transfer” to a new direction: The rebellious inarticulateness of the first stanza, which is narratively figured as an act of separation, gives rise, at the end of the poem, to a most powerful image of articulateness, the “one text” which all have heard; and the persona's retelling of this “text” is an act of liberation which asserts its own literacy in the process of assuming control over one's own “tale.” In this sense, the (re)turn to Atlanta is an act of descent and immersion, suggesting a strong sense of place, tradition, and, ultimately, kinship:

“I stayed in my place, and my place stayed wid me,
Took what I was dished, said I liked it fine:
Figgered they would see that I warn't no trouble,
Figgered this must be the onliest line.
“But this is the wrong line we been ridin',
This route doan git us where we got to go.
Got to git transferred to a new direction.
We can stand so much, then doan stan no mo'.”

(CP, p. 181)

The persona's transition or “transfer” from a “tongue-tied” fellow to a virtual storyteller, which is effectively signaled by Brown's conspicuous shift to the vernacular in the last two stanzas, is textualized as the gaining of a personal voice (“I stayed in my place …”), extends into an embrace of the collective “we” in the poem's final line. This articulation of a sense of community may be regarded as an emblem of kinship and love renewed vis-à-vis an oppressive cultural context, and this process is comparable, at least rhetorically, to the poetic message emanating from the following passage from Williams' “The Descent”:

With evening, love wakens
                                                                                though its shadows
                                                                                          which are alive by reason
of the sun shining—
                                                            grow sleepy now and drop away
                                                                                                                                                      from desire
Love without shadows stirs now
                                                                      beginning to waken
                                                                                                                                                      as night
advances.

(P, pp. 96-97)

Within the context of the poem, this passage provides the transition from the new “places” and their anonymous inhabitants to this hopeful new awakening “which is a reversal / of despair” and as such announces the culmination of the idea of love in the collective “we” of the adjacent lines. These final lines of the poem are a fascinating realization of this particular kind of reversal or inversion which reaffirms, on the micro-structural level of “The Descent” itself, the macro-rhythmic circle of Paterson's more elaborate dance:

                              For what we cannot accomplish, what
is denied to love,
                              what we have lost in the anticipation—
                                                  a descent follows,
endless and indestructible

(P, p. 97)

When compared to the structural movement at the beginning of the poem, these lines present themselves as variations on the initial triangulation: descent—ascent—memory. Curiously enough, the order within the triangle has changed to such an extent that the former positions of its constituents are now inverted. This reversal, which is announced by the introduction of the negative cannot accomplish, effectively draws attention to itself as the very accomplishment it denies. In fact, this accomplishment is the only one that is possible because it is neither denied to the renewed love, the “love without shadows,” nor has it been lost in the ascending anticipation. To be more specific, what has indeed (or better, in deed) been accomplished is the visibility of the inherence of one part of the binary pair in the other, which takes a form of a descent (as opposed to the descent), and this descent is a new beginning in the sense that it repeats the old one. It is thus both a beginning and an end at the same time, a perpetuum mobile whose openendedness becomes even clearer once the poem is recontextualized within the body of Paterson. The following two lines should suffice to re-establish this context: “Listen!— / The pouring water!” Quite to the point, this is the same water that “encircles” Paterson. Interestingly enough, the rhetorical effect here is quite similar to the “pouring” voice at the end of Brown's “Transfer”; like in Paterson, we as readers are indeed listening, as it were, to the pouring language of the descent.

I would now like to close the circle of my own discussion by offering a few comments about yet another striking configuration of such a poetic “descent,” Sterling Brown's “Ma Rainey.”

I

When Ma Rainey
Comes to town,
Folks from anyplace
Miles aroun',
From Cape Girardeau,
Poplar Bluff,
Flocks in to hear
Ma do her stuff;
Comes flivverin' in,
Or ridin' mules,
Or packed in trains,
Picknickin' fools. …
That's what it's like,
Fo' miles on down,
To New Orleans delta
An' Mobile town,
When Ma hits
Anywheres aroun'.

III

O Ma Rainey,
Sing yo' song;
Now you's back
Whah you belong,
Git way inside us,
Keep us strong. …
O Ma Rainey,
Li'l an' low;
Sing us 'bout de hard luck
Roun' our do';
Sing us 'bout de lonesome road
We mus' go. …

(CP, pp. 62-63)

In this juxtaposition of Parts I and III of the poem, the poetic transmutation of the symbolic landscape outlined by the variations on the journey motif, in the first part, into a geo-cultural ritual ground becomes even more lucid than in “Odyssey of Big Boy” or “Transfer.” The way in which the “folks,” the “picknickin' fools” from “anyplace,” actually ascend from their initial obscurity and congregate in the process of gaining a collective voice, which is achieved in the act of repetition that connects the two parts, is already a remarkable anticipation of the descent that follows:

I talked to a fellow, an' the fellow say,
“She jes' catch hold of us, somekindaway.
She sang Backwater Blues one day:
          ‘It rained fo' days an' de skies was dark as night,
          Trouble taken place in de lowlands at night.
          ‘Thundered an' lightened an' the storm begin to roll
          Thousan's of people ain't got no place to go.
          ‘Den I went an' stood upon some high ol' lonesome hill,
          An' looked down on the place where I used to live.’
An' den de folks, dey natchally bowed dey heads an' cried,
Bowed dey heavy heads, shet dey moufs up tight an' cried,
An' Ma lef' de stage, an' followed some de folks outside.”
Dere wasn't much more de fellow say:
She jes' gits hold of us dataway.

(CP, p. 63)

Ma Rainey's song, unmistakably the ghost conjured up by the poem's call to invest this mythic blues singer with a visible shape and an audible voice, turns the carefree audience described in Part II into compassionate listeners and kinsmen, and thereby accomplishes an interesting figurative reversal. But the ascent to voice and the descent to song are not only textualized by the apparent simultaneity of the two actions, which receive additional support from the consistent use of the synchronizing an' and thus draw this particular version of Du Bois' Sorrow Songs into the present of the poem's performance. On the one hand, Ma Rainey steps up onto this “high ol' lonesome hill,” which figures as the singer's stage, only to descend to the audience's space and thus to concretize and symbolically complete the restoration of the communicative ties between past and present, between artist and reader/listener, which had been invoked by her song. In that sense, the poem becomes a powerful vision or revision of Afro-American cultural history and thus re-creates its own tradition, which is significantly bound to the sense of place as expressed by the interdependency of place and voice described above. On the other hand, this reinvocation of the collective assumption that, when the blues singer says “I,” the audience hears “we” extends into the future by including the readers as well as the imaginary listeners. The resulting sets of relationships clearly assume the shape of what I have referred to as trialogue. Put in other words, the accomplishment of the poem, which is the movement from “somekindaway” to the more specific “dataway,” lies in the act of rendering visible its own contrapuntal call-and-response pattern, not by eliminating the ascent/descent polarity, but by controlling its structural and figurative dynamics. Brown and Williams evidently agree that “everything we do must be a repetition of the past with a difference.”²⁶

It ought to be clear by now that Williams' emblem of love is no more confined to a self-referential space than is Brown's emblem of the ecstatic connection. Both poets share the insight that the end is nothing but a transfiguration of the beginning, in which always already inheres the possibility of its own repetition or double. Interestingly enough, the dance of such doubles is already inscribed in the etymological structure of repetition and its verbal dynamics. To repeat, as the compound of the prefix re (‘back, again’) and the root petere, is divided into two seemingly polar clusters of meanings: The first one is characterized by a notion of hostility—petere ‘to assault’; re-petere ‘to attach again, to renew, to recommence’—which is significantly absent from the other: (re)-petere ‘to embrace (again)’. The way in which the interaction of the two different semantic fields re-voices the relation between host and parasite, which J. Hillis Miller has described as intimate kinship and enmity at the same time,²⁷ adds to an understanding of the third dimension of (re)petere: ‘to seek (again), to travel to a place, to go in quest of, to claim or demand what is due.’ In light of this etymology, the act of repeating can be defined as an ambiguous embrace which is always the beginning of a continuous quest that creates a poetic space for itself. The poem, in turn, becomes the visible resonance of this self-perpetuating search for a communicative form. In this sense, the poem is neither the host nor the parasite, but the dramatization and the articulation of the ambiguous, but not necessarily strangling, embrace in which the two doubles are locked. Hence the “being” born in the process of dancing has only one form of articulation: “the tight voice of becoming,”²⁸ which does indeed and in deed disclose all we seek and all we can know;

But only the dance is sure!
make it your own.
Who can tell
what is to come of it?

(PB, p. 33)

Notes

1. William Carlos Williams, Paterson (New York: New Directions, 1963), p. 167. All further references to this volume will appear in the text as P.

2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. with an intro. and notes by Alan Bass (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 24.

3. “Decentering the Image: The ‘Project’of ‘American’ Poetics?” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 322.

4. Whitman's original in Leaves of Grass reads, “I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear”; see also W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 209.

5. In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), p. 38; italics added.

6. Ibid., p. 40.

7. Riddel, “Decentering the Image,” p. 322.

8. “A Talk on the Subjective Imagination,” New Letters, 40, No. 1 (1973), 45; italics in second sentence added.

9. Beginnings: Intention and Method (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1975), p. xiii.

10. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), p. 91; italics added.

11. “The Problem of Textuality: Two Exemplary Positions,” Critical Inquiry, 4 (1978), 709.

12. The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Direction, 1967), p. 5.

13. “Songs of a Racial Self,” The New York Times Book Review, 11 Jan. 1981, p. 11.

14. Spring and All, in Imaginations (New York: New Directions, 1970), p. 117.

15. W. B. Yeats, “My House,” in The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W. B. Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1977), p. 420.

16. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 67

17. The terms “ascent,” “descent,” and “immersion” are taken from Stepto's study.

18. Images of Kin (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1970).

19. Dimensions of History (Santa Cruz, CA: Kayak, 1976), p. 34.

20. Williams, “The Desert Music,” in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New York: New Directions, 1949), pp. 109-10. All further references to this volume will appear in the text as PB.

21. Unlike Williams, Brown did not have to free himself from his literary tradition to assert himself as an Afro-American poet. What he was suffering from was not the impact of the steel-chains of the tradition he sought to reclaim, but the denial of its very existence by those participants of the Harlem Renaissance who had discarded dialect poetry in favor of so-called standard English. Black oral and musical forms in general and dialect in particular were viewed as archaic remnants of the plantation tradition that perpetuated the stereotypical images poets such as Countee Cullen, Claude MacKay, and, above all, James Weldon Johnson were out to correct. In short, dialect poetry such as Paul Laurence Dunbar's “jingles in a broken tongue” were all too readily associated with the political conservatism of a Booker T. Washington and his disciples, which made them an embarrassment. As a result, Johnson announced in 1931 that the passing of traditional dialect as a medium for Negro poets was complete (it might be worth noting here that Johnson's “Jingles and Croons,” published in 1917, was one of the worst examples of the use of black dialect!). Ironically, Johnson was the one to write the preface to Sterling Brown's Southern Road only one year later, in which he admitted, albeit reluctantly, that he had been mistaken about the “passing” of dialect poetry and that Brown's poems were indeed valuable contributions to American literature.

22. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, ed. Michael S. Harper (New York: Harper and Row, 1980), pp. 20-21. All further references to this edition will appear in the text as CP.

23. See J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 217-53.

24. Said, Beginnings, p. xiii.

25. See Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, and Richard Wright, Black Boy.

26. Williams, The Great American Novel, in Imaginations, p. 210.

27. “The Critic as Host,” pp. 224-25.

28. Jay Wright, The Double Invention of Komo (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1980), p. 36.