Language, what is it good for?

The language poets are an interesting lot. I find the exacting, tedious methods MacLow uses in constructing (or deconstructing) the Pound poems, for example, to be fascinating. Yet, at the same time, I can't quite grasp the point of making a poem that it is inevitably devoid of meaning and that will prove incomprehensible to the majority of readers. I'm interested in the idea of trying to remove language from it's referential frame so that words exist only as the words themselves, words with no "baggage," or past (so to speak). Yet, I'm not sure that it is truly possible to ever do this--and if it is, I'm left wondering what the point is. To remove language from any kind of frame, it seems to me, is to render it utterly meaningless. Though, I suppose, that this is part of the point. But then this makes me wonder if such language constructions are really poems--and it follows that this question raises the eternal question of what exactly constitutes a poem. I don't intend to try to answer that question (I think I once wrote a very long paper addressing the "what is a poem?" question which inevitably could not provide an all-encompassing answer). It just seems to me that much of MacLow's work is an exercise in numerology more than it is poetry. I found Perloff's article to be helpful in determining the ways in which this kind of poetry is working (that Mac Cormack's poems are designed for the eye, for example) as well as in helping to see ways that this poetry can be categorized. Yet, I still find myself highly resistant to the work even if I better understand its construction and purpose.

I have an easier time accepting Bernstein and Hejininian's works--probably because the words seem a little less random, to have been chosen with at least some degree of personal decision and, ultimately, because their poems more resemble "poems" as I know them. Yet, while I might prefer reading these poems over MacLow's, the fact that Bernstein and Hejininian seem to allow even a small amount of word choice and manipulation makes me wonder why they don't choose one extreme or the other. That is, why limit the poet's control in some aspects but not others? How do they decide how much "choice" to allow themselves? The best answer I can come to is that they are trying as much as possible to remove language from its "prison" without reducing it to gibberish. Again, though, I really don't think language can ever be free from its referential use--it seems to me that every word carries with it some remnant of connotation, that we can't help but think of all different ways we have heard a word used or the things it has been previously associated with. Rather than a limitation, I see this as a challenge in constructing a poem--as a way to incorporate these associations, but also to manipulate them and to create new ways of seeing the word. But maybe I'm just one of Gelpi's Neoromantics, preferring to believe in the idea that language is not entirely corrupt or used up, that it is still good for something.