Another Language – Contemporary US-American Poetic Experiment in a Changing World
WITHOUT LOCATION:
ON THE POETICS AND FUNCTION OF THE NEUTER
Nikolai Duffy, Goldsmiths College, University of London
ABSTRACT
This paper explores the provocative role of the neuter in contemporary US-American experimental
poetry, arguing that the neuter is the neither/nor locution around which current poetic experiments
both turn and tend. On the one hand, the cultural and economic marginalisation of experimental
poetry forces experimentation to proceed from a socially neutered position. On the other hand, the
recent distillation of the space of the neuter in experimental poetics in fact situates the neuter at
the very centre of debates concerning the form and function of poetic experiment. With particular
reference to the gap or fissure that, for example, Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe and Leslie
Scalapino locate at the centre of their respective projects, this paper sketches a conceptual
definition of the neuter as an extracted but ineffable space in order to show the ways in which
experimental poetics point toward another way of thinking the world, outside relativised notions of
nationality, ethnicity and gender. In the context of global change and interaction, the cultural
currency of a poetics of the neuter lies precisely in its invocation of a restless mode of discourse
and way of thinking that moves freely between, across, behind and beyond the regulative
principles of conceptual, temporal and geographic borders.
Nikolai Duffy is currently completing a doctoral thesis at Goldsmiths College, University of London,
on the lightening of meaning in the work of Steve Erickson, Rosmarie Waldrop and Lydia Davis.
He teaches at Goldsmiths part-time.