Jed Rasula & Steve McCaffery, eds., Imagining Language: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA &London,: MIT Press, 1998. xx+618 pp.; ISBN: 026218186X (hbk.); LC call no.: P120.I53I46; US$55

In fairness, the publishing industry bears only partial responsibility for this phenomenon and has in fact brought out several invaluable collections of previously over-neglected writings (O'Sullivan, Sloan), not the least of which are the two volumes edited for the University of California Press by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris (1995 and 1998). Combining a keen sense of text selection with sensitive organizational skills and a gift for lucid, insightful commentary, Rothenberg and Joris stand as an exemplary model for future anthologizers to follow; with Imagining Language, Rasula and McCaffery have at once acknowledged that model (xvi) and yielded a product that lives up to if not exceeds it.

Imagining Language, according to the editors, "situates an array of linguistic explorations in a continuum of creative conjecture. Commencing with the twentieth-century avant-garde, Imagining Language goes on to document an expanded field of practices and theories spanning back across three millenia" (x). Eschewing chronology for a more conceptual framework, the anthology documents a long, restless, often delirious search for language in its fullest creative possibilities--a search that has tended to elude the discipline or body of knowledge that is Literature. Thus the first of the anthology's five parts, "Revolution of the Word," begins the search in the familiar ground of international modernism, although that ground is at once less familiar than we might expect: supplementing the absence of Marinetti's parole in libertà, for example, we find Fortunato Depero's "onomalingua" and Francesco Canguillo's "poesia pentagrammata." We also find, next to a selection from Joyce's Finnegans Wake (a work still largely eschewed by the Academy, in spite of being the fruits of the last 19 years of its author's life), work by lesser-known writers such as Harry Crosby and Bob Brown, who shared the pages of Eugene Jolas' journal transition with Joyce's Work In Progress. The anthology's remaining four sections--which, as the editors intend, are indeed "sufficiently suggestive and elastic to allow continuing cross-fertilization and conceptual reorganization" (xi)--proceed into the realms of sound poetry, broadly construed so as to encompass the activities of diverse language communities in their oral, gestural, and ritual capacities; the interstices of translation between specific languages and transposition between other (non-verbal) communicative media; the specifically graphic and scriptural component of language taken to the very threshold of signification; and finally, language as matter itself.

"Anthologies are to poets," David Antin said in 1984, "what zoos are to animals" (Messerli 31). If this is the case, then Imagining Language is not your ordinary zoo: more like a cross between a museum and a carnival side-show. (It is worth noting that the book "was originally conceived by Jed Rasula in 1983 while working for the ABC television program 'Ripley's Believe It or Not,' on which Steve McCaffery appeared with the sound poetry group The Four Horsemen as part of a segment on 'bizarre' language practices" [xi-xii].) Thus we find here an excerpt from John Bulwer's Chirologia; or the Natural Language of the Hand (1644), reproductions of Hélène Smith's Martian Script (1900), and bp Nichol's "Probable System 14: Re-discovery of the 22 Letter Alphabet: An Archaeological Report" (1972). And although the curious specimens gathered here--which number 140 by my rough count and run the historical spectrum from Aristophanes and Lucretius to the young Toronto poet Christian Bök - are to some extent aberrations, eclectic refuse or refusals of language, they simply cannot be dismissed on those grounds alone. Because both Rasula and McCaffery are unique and accomplished scholars and poets, their research is compelled by the need to explore language at the limits of itself; as the product of that labor, Imagining Language becomes valuable not simply for what the editors have gathered and for the way they have compiled it: the anthology itself becomes an heuristic to further poetic research.

Put simply, Imagining Language is poetry. Poetry conceived not merely as language expressing the self's placements in the world of experience, nor as language solely constituting those experiences in which the self is placed, the real insight of Wittgenstein's assertion in the Tractatus that the limits of my language mean the limits of my world lying neither in pure solipsism nor radical constructivism. In the words of Rasula and McCaffery: "To say of language that there's no getting out of it is not a declaration of nihilistic entrapment, for language is above all the transcultural image of flexibility; of provisionality and commitment, perplexity and security, certainty and wonder. To wonder about language is to pass into that realm where we can imagine anything at all" (xiv). Thus poetry as language, the stuff of life, engaged to plumb the depths of its own very potentialities. Or as Charles Bernstein puts it, "literature - art - is... the research and development sector of culture" (379).

In returning then to the notion of the publishing industry's role in the anthology skirmishes we are witnessing today, we have in Imagining Language a work that both partakes of and critiques that industry. On the one hand, the MIT Press (particularly its imprint Zone Books) is known throughout the humanities for its production of beautiful books, making Rasula's and McCaffery's choice of publisher a highly appropriate one: this book is as aesthetically pleasing as it is intellectually and creatively. On the other hand, the cost of this book is likely to exceed the budget of most university students of poetry and thereby risks diminishing MIT's own returns, which begs two questions, namely, what is this book's intended audience, and will it register its undoubted importance in the anthology market?

I hazard to answer, to the first question, that anyone who loves language will want this book and, to the second, regrettably, no, largely because the Academy--that time-honored research and development sector of culture, whose chief commodity is not the mere degree but rather the discipline in which that degree is conferred; where the choice between English, Comparative Literature, or Cultural Studies thus amounts to little more than the decision to drink Coke, Pepsi or Brand-X Cola; and where the average University student enrolled in Poetry 101 more often than not emerges with a befuddlement or indifference towards language and poetry if not an outright disdain--regrettably, the Academy would appear to have little or no place for Imagining Language. For what course, in what department of what University, would Imagining Language serve as the primary text? Show me, and I will be the first in line to enroll! Until then, Imagining Language will slip, brilliantly, through our disciplinary cracks. Even the Library of Congress, Universal Codifier of Knowledge, failing to note the injunction of the editors that "we have not undertaken this anthology as a contribution to linguistics" (xii), has shelved Imagining Language in the linguistics section and conferred upon it the subject subheading: Imaginary Languages. "If literature is defined as the exploration and exercise of tolerable linguistic deviance," our editors suggest, "the institutional custodianship of literature serves mainly to protect the literary work from language" (x). Ultimately, what Rasula and McCaffery usher forth here is Language itself in an ongoing challenge, inviting Literature to drop its defenses and face a little imperilment.

Thomas M. Orange

University of Western Ontario

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