Paul Jaussen. Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital.

Cambridge UP,
2017. 226 pp. $105.00 hardback.

Abstract

In Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the Digital, Paul Jaussen reconsiders the
formal idiosyncrasies of the American long poem through contemporary systems theories. Jaussen claims
that the immutable architectures that support long poems from Walt Whitman to Nathaniel Mackey
cannot be reduced to the play of lyric intensities, nor are they productively approached through extensive
genre categorization. Instead of these two methodologies, he argues that their forms interactively emerge;
they unfold in real time as adaptive systems with the capacity to critique, rework, and respond to their
changing material environments. To read the diversity of the American long poem through systems
theoretical discourse is to reveal what Jaussen calls “interactive emergence,” the poet’s sustained
creative/critical improvisation with the material dynamism of time.

Keywords
Systems theory/ Long Poem/ Emergence/ American Poetry
Emerging Improvisations: A Review of Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics from Whitman to the
Digital

James Belflower, Siena College

Like a flock of birds in flight, the complex organism that is the American long poem responds and
adapts to its changing environment as it passes through both time and space. Or so Paul Jaussen argues in
Writing in Real Time | Emergent Poetics From Whitman to the Digital, when he applies contemporary
systems-theories to explicate a variety of formal techniques and structures particular to these notoriously
idiosyncratic long poems: Leaves of Grass; The Cantos; The Maximus Poems; Rachel Blau DuPlessis’
multi-volume Drafts; and Nathaniel Mackey’s sequences on the Black Atlantic and Hurricane Katrina
woven through “mu” Song of the Andoumboulou and Splay Anthem. Jaussen’s analysis culminates by
analyzing current digital poetic systems, including grappling with Juliana Spahr’s version of the post 9/11
internet socius in This Collection of Everyone with Lungs. Roving through the past and present, and
networking a diverse variety of formal techniques and lexicons, Writing in Real Time is a welcome
contribution to the dearth of systems-theoretical analyses of historically pivotal but formally unwieldy
poetic projects.

Jaussen opens Writing in Real Time by tracing the history of systems theories from Norbert
Weiner’s cybernetics through Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela’s concept of “enactive
emergence,” and culminating in Edgar Landgraf’s claim that autopoietic change occurs in a closed system
only from within. In contrast, he asserts that “disruptions are not only the result of a hermetically sealed
system; they can also come from perturbations in the environment itself” (27). The improvisational
interaction this implies between “domains of significance” situates him in a systems-theoretical discourse
that is more enactive than autopoietic, a difference crucial to understanding how the “interactive
emergence” he reformulates is productively characterized by a number of systems theory concepts turned
literary techniques, each responsible for producing a portion of the text’s interactive and sustained
relationships to time: provisional closure (form patterned largely through feedback loops and structural
coupling); iteration (the deployment of single, repeatable, yet variable structures); and recursion (“…
elements from one structure […] self-referentially used as a model for generating subsequent structures”)
(3). Most importantly for Jaussen is that through these techniques, unanticipated effects emerge in the
poem’s architecture and “register surprises through the form while also registering surprises in the world”
(3). The adaptability for surprise interactive emergence assesses, clearly, is not static, but rather self-
guided; it is the dynamic relationship of the poem’s formal mutability to the internal/external stimuli
(re)structuring the system of poetic improvisation it employs. Reading for literary emergence means that
“The poems appear as dynamic hermeneutic systems capable of generating meaning in an immanent
fashion, embedded firmly within the environment that they cause to appear” (32).

Jaussen’s proposal that the long poem is a “dynamic hermeneutic system” articulates much of the
critical portion of his argument, namely that reading for emergent form proposes alternatives to a variety
of formal debates, including modernist appeals to aesthetic autonomy, postmodern/deconstructive
negation, and the LANGPO insistence on “medium as content.” This situates his argument historically
between critical debates that tend to interpret the lyric aspects of the long poem at the expense of the
poem’s many other registers and genre analyses that typically do not thoroughly address the long poem’s
mutability. Rather than ignore or reduce this mutability, his study expands and complicates the treatment
of the long poem’s structural diversity by reading across conventional literary periods and forms.
Systems-theoretical analysis, he explains, reveals that the poem’s disparate architectures are organized by
“provisional closure and emergent properties […] within a feedback loop, allowing the poem to generate
an adaptive account of its environment” (16). The American long poem, it could be said, is the poet’s
sustained creative/critical improvisation with the material dynamism of time.
 Belflower 2

While Jaussen provides a thorough theoretical background for his approach, such a formally and
historically wide-ranging analysis is typically suspect. However, he defends his application by noting that
alongside the developments of systems theoretical analyses in other disciplines, the American long poem
has historically shared similar concerns: “form, environment, time, and order” (17). This apposition leads
him to one of the most overt connections between poetry, systems theory, and literary criticism in the
book, Muriel Rukeyser’s prescient speculation on the application of cybernetic concepts—feedback,
information, and systemic change—in her 1949 essay collection, The Life of Poetry. With Rukeyser’s
speculation in mind, it is surprising that an analysis of her long poem The Book of the Dead is missing.
Perhaps the poem’s compositional period is too short to reach the systemic mass of epics like The Cantos,
or perhaps it does not encompass such an institutionalized historical moment. Whatever the issue, it
seems that early documentary poetry’s attention to “reportage”—a sustained creative/critical
improvisation with the ephemera of current events—is a prime example of Jaussen’s application of
“interactive emergence.” For example, in addition to the ways in which The Book of the Dead
reconfigures the key concerns of the Gauley Tunnel Tragedy, the tighter feedback loop generated from
the exchanges between Rukeyser’s textual research, interviews, and the personal relationships she formed
with the poem’s subjects, would allow Jaussen to articulate how the documentary process inflects the
temporal transformations and the reconfiguration of key historical concerns that shape many of the
emergent qualities he finds in the more mediated news stories that appear in his analysis of A.R. Ammons
Tape for the Turn of the Year.

Be that as it may, Jaussen’s critical path through “interactive emergence,” is a convincing read.
Starting with Walt Whitman, in “Emergent America | Walt Whitman’s Enactive Democracy,” Jaussen
traces proto forms of autopoiesis and enaction in nineteenth century philosophers of organic form for the
purpose of differentiating what he names “emergent organicism.” Whitman’s title, he explains, is a prime
example of the concept; it highlights how its own ambivalence (“is grass a leaf or a field?”) “enacts its
form through interactions with environmentally entangled processes, [which create] a swarming poetic
that makes possible dramatic and unexpected change in the total architecture of the poem” (41). Jaussen
also rearticulates the transformations inherent to Whitman’s “emergent organicism” through his
sociopolitical notions of “America” and “Democracy.” He asserts that “one and many,” the terms
typically used to define Whitman’s politics, is better understood through the systems-theory concept of
“particular/all.” This suggests that Whitman’s constructivist sense of “America,” is in fact a synonymous
gesture of complex unification in the poem “Starting from Paumanok,” where Whitman networks the
“particular” American poet with the emerging “all” of a diverse and changing populous in the process of
coupling with the “ensemble” of massive cultural changes (52). Whitman’s relational language in this
poem, Jaussen explains, is as ambivalent as grasses’ form: “both a specific utterance and a mode of
repetition, an endlessly adaptable medium for relationships” (53). The “transferable relationality”
Whitman’s pronouns exhibit show that his notion of the “particular/all” actualizes a “democratic
ontology, where being is both iteratively particular…as well as increasingly complex, embedded within a
recursive structure of networked relationships” (55). Moreover, “Enactive Democracy” in the sense
Jaussen reveals in Leaves of Grass, can also apply to the poem’s extensive publication history.
Subsequent editions allowed him to recursively, iteratively, and formally actualize the poem’s national
and political imbrications in the ongoing trauma of the Civil War. For Jaussen Whitman’s formal
structures inaugurate an emergent poetics because they enact an early provisional “organicism,” an
improvised creative coupling with the myriad evolving transformations of American life.

Chapter three, “Emergent Vocabulary | Ezra Pound’s ‘Translation Machine’” reinterprets the
challenge Leaves of Grass proposed to organicism as a form of multivalent translation. Jaussen compares
early modernist responsive machine theories to Pound’s multiyear process of culling ancient and modern
texts to compose The Cantos and asserts that this yields an emergent vocabulary that fuels the engine of
 Belflower 3

an enactive “translation machine” “capable of producing adaptability, surprise, and experimental excess”
(68). The motor of this machine, for Jaussen, appears in Pound’s extensive and wide ranging quotational
process that demonstrates an ongoing and immediate relationship with outside texts. His analysis
subscribes neither of the two critical approaches that dominate the scholarship on Pound’s quotational
habits: textualist (interpreting the play of sign systems across the page); nor referential, (the application
of an overall unifying structure to his quotational pastiche). Rather, he argues, the abundance of
translational nuts and bolts leftover from Pound’s innovative techniques of collage grease his “translation
machine,” “mak[ing] visible both the worldly work of textual production, and the many environments in
which those texts are embedded, where they are appropriated, transformed, recast, and shaped” (77).

In addition to these stray parts, Pound’s translation machine often employed quotations that
maintained their dissonance to the target text, revealing that for him, “form is the process of adaptation
and recursive transformation: the new addition retrospectively changes the previous iterations of the poem
that have made it visible, just as a new translation expands the poetic vocabulary” (83). Quotation, swarf,
and form, in this sense, also constitute the accidental nature of structural coupling. And as a result, the
“translation machine’s” capacity for novelty, Jaussen explains, complicates Hugh Kenner’s theory that
Pound’s quotations performed “mimetic homage” by explaining that Pound employed imagistic but
inaccurate translations of the literary past, not only to recreate it, but also as a “constructivist mode of
improvisation, a writing in real time that emphasizes unpredictable outcomes through the engagement
with preexisting material and new inputs” (73). In the final analysis, reading the emerging quotational
machine of The Cantos as an improvisational network allows Jaussen to reconsider one of the primary
aporias of the Pisan Cantos, the conflict between Pound’s paradisiacal metaphysics of fascism and the
anti-metaphysical: the ongoing material labor of his poetic writing. Although culminating in fascist
ideology for Pound, the emergent lexicon that composes, greases, and structures The Cantos inaugurates
both a formal model and a vocabulary for future poets such as Charles Olson, the subject of chapter four.

Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems provide a turning point for Jaussen’s analysis of the American
long poem; they mark a watershed “when emergence was expressly articulated as a poetic value” (119).
While Olson is typically read for his poetic treatment of the polis, Jaussen suggests that he crafted an
“emergent history” by thematically adopting the highly flexible microsystems of his homelife into his
poetics. This conflation of domestic space and word allowed Olson to critique the Western ideal of
domestic stability by treating it instead as a shifting epicenter of historical, social, cultural, aesthetic, and
personal change —an ideal reified in popular midcentury American metaphors of the house that
emphasized “domestic closure, stable familial artifacts, arrested hereditary memory, and aesthetic
completion” (96). Through the concept of “housekeeping,” he elucidates the adaptive personal
relationship Olson’s Maximus Poems construct with the social, ecological, and economic contingencies of
Gloucester and its conflicted history.

Jaussen situates the concept of “housekeeping” in the broader economic and social context of
Gloucester, but he also contrasts it to the problematic stability promised by the proto-capitalism of one of
Olson’s colonial heroes, the explorer John Smith. For Olson, Jaussen writes, “historical individuals and
events are presented as conflicted sites of potential” from which he can critique capitalism’s alienating
figures and forces, both (re)orienting and “managing” (articulated by Jaussen as “an adaptive response to
a situation”) modes of attention to more collectively enact the complex and sundry economies of public
and private (107). Anything but stable, “Housekeeping’s” enacted administration of global conflicts at a
domestic level allows Olson to recover an important critical potential in the poet’s domestic life; it
poetically transforms the phenomenological into the historical, by pitting “the attentive poet against the
advertising capitalist, making it possible for a renovated poetic economy to emerge from a marketplace of
abstraction” (110). Olson’s “practicopoetic housekeeping,” therefore, is a writing practice with “a porous
boundary, a provisional configuration of the network of complex, adaptive relationships in which his text
 Belflower 4

is embedded…” (118-19). The relational extensiveness of Olson’s writing practice and its emergent
perspective, Jaussen points out, were adopted into many late twentieth century poetic practices.

In chapter five, “Emergent Midrash | Rachel Blau DuPlessis Glosses Modernism,” Jaussen articulates
one of the most important points for his interactive systems analysis, namely the creation of a
provisionally closed poetic form that necessitates future writing. He returns to the intertextual analysis of
Pound’s Cantos and compares it to the Midrashic writing practices of commentary, gloss, and
reinterpretation that undergird DuPlessis’ major work, the multi-volume poem Drafts. The formal and
cultural intertextuality that organizes much of Drafts is revisionary, he explains, it critiques the gender
exclusive vocabulary of Pound’s voracious translation machine and recasts Olson’s historical
“housekeeping” by introducing an innovative open dialogic form similar to Midrashic commentary.

Drawing on traditional Midrashic techniques of paraphrase, prophecy, and parable, Drafts employs
a multiple column form that intersects and overlaps source and target text in a variety of ways. Jaussen
argues that this folding together of source and target causes a generative feedback loop where each
column glosses, comments on, and multiplies the other’s semantic, sonic, and visual registers, enabling
ongoing and unexpected meaning making. And, rather than closing this loop by privileging one side or
the other (as Ron Silliman’s Ketjak does), DuPlessis’ structural loops maintain an ongoing exchange, and
as a result, couple to their historical context with an adaptable and responsive “hermeneutic edge” (137-
38).

This becomes especially important because the nontotalizing effects of formal glossing allow
DuPlessis to uniquely challenge Adorno’s familiar contention; to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
Rather than fall into the untenable position Adorno’s claim creates for poetry—either it affirms culture, or
it rejects it—she employs her Midrashic double column form to “open the burden of responsibility with
the work to another text to come” (141). Ultimately, the emergent and ongoing effects of these interacting
columns allow Drafts to sustain an ethical witness to both history and its own fracturing, entangling itself
and the reader in an evolving process of Midrash: meaning making that demands more thinking and
“writing in real time.”

Expanding his analysis to the auditory dimension of the long poem, Jaussen asserts that Nathaniel
Mackey’s book leaping sequence “mu,” is largely structured by “emergent sounds,” which in their
attempts to voice the tensions between extreme loss and idealized utopia define his concept of “post
expectant futurity” (a fraught leap into an unknown future). Jaussen drawn on Anthony Reed’s claim that
Mackey’s project employs a “poetics of the cut” to show how his emergent poetics cultivate conditions
for acoustically enacting a critical cognition of differences: “cuts,” between the poem’s subsystems,
networks, and forms. One of the primary ways these acoustic distinctions emerge is through forms
common to the ontology of what Mackey and other critics have called “Black Music:” jazz most
commonly, but the category includes Blues, Reggae, Gospel, and Hip Hop, among others. Jaussen reads
the musical cuts and iterations characterizing these forms as recursive improvisational gestures that
organize large portions of Mackey’s three major open sequences, “mu,” Song of the Andoumboulou, and
Splay Anthem. Due to the temporal and improvisational nature of Mackey’s sequence (it occurs across
multiple collections), Jaussen argues that it “demands an improvisatory reading correlative to its writing,
a writing always in the process of discovering its own terms, ‘learning to speak’ through the possibilities
enabled by its earlier forms” (150). In improvised compositions, meaning emerges in some sense like a
musical phrase, tonal sequences release or sustain notes, and in so doing, phrase various degrees of aural
anticipation between tones. Mackey’s “cuts”, as Jaussen explains it, register similarly, writing, drumming,
ventriloquizing, historicizing, and formalizing the tension between words as the performer gives voice to
a “post expectant-futurity.”
 Belflower 5

Equally important to Jaussen’s reading, is the fact that Mackey’s sequence is the only one in his
analysis characterized by “a deliberately ‘post-expectant’ orientation, an attempt to m’ap that reclaims
ghosts of the past while generating an emergent interpretation of the present” (164). However, Mackey’s
auditory articulation of a post-expectant futurity is both haunted and constrained by this reliance on the
contingent sense of hope. Not subsumed by time’s flow, nor “cut” from it, Mackey’s extended sequence
investigates the traumatic past by relentlessly employing a “self-transforming poetic process [that] makes
possible adaptable yet critical cognition” in an effort to precisely distinguish a weak messianic melody
from the totalizing noise of utopic idealism (171). Ultimately, Jaussen claims, the open process of
auditory poetic “m’apping” Mackey employs throughout his work allows him to rearticulate hope as the
process of critically thinking with and in the creative expression of the ongoing flow of time, whether that
be through the trauma of the Middle Passage or contemporary cultural traumas such as the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.

One of Jaussen’s most productive ideas appears in the conclusion, “Emergent Poetics and the
Digital.” Although he does not explore systems-theoretical structures underpinning the current surfeit of
“imaginaries” debated in contemporary poetics (such as the “racial imaginary” by poet Claudia Rankine),
he does develop a systems guided concept of the “digital imaginary.” In keeping with his analyses up to
this point, his digital imaginary does not transcend its material/virtual conditioning, but rather sifts,
critiques, and then inserts novelty into the abundant informational flows that characterize contemporary
poetic couplings with digital life. Although I find his argument convincing, I find his examples less so.
The “digital poetics” of Kenneth Goldsmith and Juliana Spahr tend to fetishize the digital age and they
remain primarily text based poets, yet his argument seems to necessitate a post-internet treatment, perhaps
long poems that live digitally and whose nuanced relationship to their entanglement in an intermedia
process of adaptation would contribute much to the potential for creativity and surprise within the
“emergent poetics” of the internet.

In addition to performing a rigorous systems-theoretical analyses of formal idiosyncrasies in

American long poems from Walt Whitman to Juliana Spahr, one of the most valuable things Jaussen’s
book accomplishes is transforming a Postmodern poetic lexicon, to often haunted by a diction of lack,
loss, fracture, and disruption, into terms of complex relation: iteration, adaptation, structural coupling, and
surprise. Each of these techniques not only connotes the complexity of writing in real time (arguably a
condition of writing in the contemporary moment), it also identifies the multiplicitous possibilities
interactively emerging with(in) this immanent process. “Emergent poetics,” he writes, “is a literary
practice that “…shapes the subjectivity of poet and reader through the adaptive forms of an imagination
fully embedded in time” (9). With Writing in Real Time, Jaussen provides tools that are vital and
necessary for developing a critical and creative poetic practice with the capacity to engage the complexity
of contemporary literary, social, and political ecologies.