Despairing of applied animal movements within self regard, “the self-valuable word” is embedded in instrumental discourse. Bob Perlman maps, among other things, Quintilian’s rhetoric, noting key components, meaning, clarity and tasteful adornment or decoration (“Words Detached from the Old Song and Dance”).

Meaning and clarity are fair game for Rob Fitterman: “weeds we may not always / have emptied this meaning for / a top-growth peel-back of another.”


When it comes to weeding and adornment in poetry, which involve making sense of / sense in any alteration of literal expression (via figures, other prosodic devices), Fitterman is an advanced horticulturalist. With 1-800-Flowers, Fitterman smartly “updates” sources for Louis Zukofsky’s last completed poem, 80 Flowers, a construct that “takes to new extremes of density Zukofsky’s methods of composition by quotation, transliteration, and compression” (Mark Scroggins, Louis Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge).

Fitterman replenishes the grounds with inventory of similarly conflated devices, writing in two sections “About” and “Through” Zukofsky’s work. Fitterman frames Zukofsky’s as “constrictive verse” that indeed gets “driven” by inventory, while Fitterman’s own lyric comprises mixed inventories within a discourse hybrid, an essay in verse, substantiation of his exemplary reading, that is, his generatively engaging Zukofsky. More splendid, Fitterman fulfills the half audible invitation within Zukofsky’s poetry and poetics, joining Zukofsky Ltd whose biz ethos is “precise information... thinking with the things as they exist” inside a recontextualized (if not continuous) present in which Fitterman fixes “new meanings of word against word” (Prepositions).

[...]