Dictionary Poetics: Toward a Radical Lexicography

259 Pages·2020·6.057 MB·English

by  Craig Dworkin

Dictionary Poetics
Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics
Lazar Fleishman and Haun Saussy, series editors
Dictionary Poetics
Toward a Radical Lexicography
craig dworkin
Fordham University Press
new york 2020
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Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
22 21 20 5 4 3 2 1
First edition
Contents
Introduction: Toward an Experimental Lexicography 1
1 Funk & Wagnalls Practical Standard Dictionary of the En glish
Language and Louis Zukofsky’s Thanks to the Dictionary 33
2 Webster’s Collegiate and Louis Zukofsky’s “A” 48
3 The Oxford En glish Dictionary and George Oppen’s
Discrete Series 77
4 Webster’s New Collegiate and the Poetry of Clark
Coo lidge and Bernadette Mayer 101
5 The Random House Dictionary of the En glish Language
and the Poetry of Tina Darragh 129
6 Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African- American Slang
and Harryette Mullen’s Muse & Drudge 161
Acknowl edgments 185
Notes 187
Index 239

Dictionary Poetics

Introduction: Toward an
Experimental Lexicography
Neither is the dictionary a bad book to read. Th ere is no cant in it, no
excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion— the raw material
of pos si ble poems.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Books”
Diff er ent dictionaries w ill produce diff er ent results.
— Bernadette Mayer, “Experiments”
Surveying the state of literary criticism in the early twentieth c entury,
William Carlos Williams decried the fact that most critics, seeing only
chaotic clutter, “ haven’t the vaguest notion why one word follows another,
but deal directly with the meanings themselves.”1 The fundamental prem-
ise of this book is that to read in ways less distracted by the “meanings
themselves” and more in tune with the writer’s methodology not only ex-
poses and clarifies the pattern beneath the clutter— revealing the logic
with which “one word follows another”— but also provides a more robust
access to those meanings themselves, including meanings that are not dis-
cernable from other perspectives. The new ways of writing pioneered by
modernist avant- gardes, in short, invite new ways of reading commen-
surate with their modes of composition.
When abstraction erupted in painting at the end of the 1910s, it not only
changed the look of art, introducing a new formal language and range of
possibilities for paint erly practice, but it also altered the demands placed
on art history and criticism.2 Certain modes of critical practice had to be
retooled or abandoned altogether in order to accommodate the ruptured
illusion of the pictorial plane. Traditional iconography, for example, no
longer made sense when faced with a monochrome canvas (or, at the very
least, it required its own abstraction in turn, and an equally radical re-
thinking of what might be meant by an “icon” u nder the new dispensa-
tion). The same was true for musicology following the advent of atonality.
The second movement of Brahms’s first piano sonata, say, affords certain
readings: tracing the minor- key deviation of folk themes in relation to the
C- major tonality of the opening and concluding movements’ harmonic