I’VE BEEN WAITING TWENTY YEARS for this book. First published in 1982 by The Figures, a small press dedicated to experimental writing, Stephen Rodefer’s Four Lectures soon went out of print and entered legend. “Everyone’s favorite six-hundred-dollar book of poetry,” a wag at the Poetry Foundation dubbed it in 2014. Xeroxed copies were passed around on college campuses like samizdat—such a copy was the only one I possessed until now.
I got all excited in 2008 when Carcanet put out Call It Thought, a selected edition of Rodefer with the same cover design as the original Four Lectures, rotated a half-turn. I ordered it from the UK immediately, waited impatiently for it to arrive, opened it rapturously—only to discover that exactly five of its pages are devoted to Four Lectures, “a text that so exceeds conventional lineation and bibliographical form that only a few extracts could be included in this book,” according to the introduction. But John Wilkinson, reviewing the volume for Chicago Review, is right: the “splurge” of Rodefer’s later work “at the expense of a fuller presentation of Four Lectures mars this selection badly. This is not the selected that Rodefer deserves.”
Now, finally, forty-three years after Four Lectures’ initial publication, New York Review Books is doing the Lord’s work. My only complaint about the new edition is that it bewilderingly fails to reproduce the original perfect cover, from a design by the Russian constructivist Lyubov Popova, though it does retain the “four factory shots of a sleek automobile being assembled,” as Figures publisher Geoffrey Young puts it in his introduction (it also “corrects” an epigraph from Frank O’Hara). I don’t think there’s been a more coveted text of recent American poetry. Before I received a copy, I wrote to Princeton professor Joshua Kotin, who edited Chicago Review’s issue devoted to Rodefer in 2009, to ask a question about the original book cover. (I went to grad school with Josh and served as a contributing editor during his tenure at CR.) I knew he’d have a first edition; indeed, he had three. One of them had been Rodefer’s own second-to-last copy; it had previously belonged to his son, who had died. Rodefer reinscribed it to Josh (I doubt this was unfeeling; there are no safer hands in which to entrust a treasured book than Josh’s). “To spare you the photocopy,” he wrote. I asked Josh if I could buy one of his other copies; he sent me one for free.
Rodefer studied with Charles Olson, knew Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley and Basil Bunting and Allen Ginsberg and Charles Bukowski, and is alleged to have been a Language poet, though by my lights the poet Jennifer Moxley got him straight in her Rodefer eulogy for Chicago Review:
I bridle at Wikipedia’s description of him as “one of the original Language poets.” He was nothing of the kind. Only dumb luck could allow such a misnomer to seem credible: Four Lectures (the title a nod to Stein’s 1935 Narration lectures in Chicago) inhabited the prose-y reference-filled anti-lyric zeitgeist of the 1980s.
He was a beneficiary of the chaos of the late ’60s, when a poet could hang out with Sonny Barger and get subpoenaed by a state legislature for printing a poem with the word “cunt.” Four Lectures, as he put it in a characteristically obnoxious, motormouthed interview, came out of “the clutter on the kitchen table after another dumb night, the hardscrabble of a sleepy and sleepless chaotic life.”
The four long poems of Four Lectures, plus an opening “Pretext” and closing “Codex,” owe something to Language poet Ron Silliman’s “New Sentence”—a technique that subordinates narrative and “syllogistic movement” to parataxis and polysemy—and something to Black Mountain projectivism. But these poems are most indebted, it seems to me, to those of Frank O’Hara, whom Rodefer recalled reading during their composition.
Rodefer was O’Hara on rock and roll, O’Hara if he’d been born late enough or lived long enough to dig the Stones. The final poem in Four Lectures, “Plastic Sutures,” takes its epigraph, without attribution, from O’Hara’s “Second Avenue,” including the lines “As the sluice / pours forth its granular flayings a new cloud rises” and “Everything / depends on whether somebody reminds you of me.” Rodefer’s poem rises like a cloud from the golden grains O’Hara and other predecessors have left at the bottom of their sluice box, and Rodefer reminds us of them. Or as he puts it at the beginning of “Plastic Sutures: “Look, there has never been / a new wave. Five minutes at any shore should satisfy the most doubtful idiot / on this point.”
In Four Lectures sentences, phrases, and ejaculations blast off, achieve escape velocity. Inevitably, some simply skitter off the surface of the reader’s mind. Others adhere like oddball bumper stickers to my brain: “Just smoke the facts”; “The refrigerator starts to fucking hum”; “Eventually everything becomes all stars”; “Life is a waste of money”; “Sky rains plane debris” (a found newspaper headline); “And I’m probably the only person in the world to know exactly what that thing over there is.”
This is not a poetry that expects you to know exactly what anything is: “What I am looking for / in a reader is a certain amount of misunderstanding of what is happening.” The irony here is thick: the amount of misunderstanding of what is happening any reader of Rodefer experiences is total. Misunderstanding is the whole point. More precisely, the reader creates her own understanding of the poem. In his preface, Rodefer likens his poetry to painting, words like colors rather than signs. This has never seemed convincing to me—words can’t shed their denotative skins so well as they are famed to do. But the related (modernist) notion of collage, disparate elements pasted together to create new contexts, is central.
At first or even third glance, the poems in Four Lectures can seem merely series of unconnected quips, cracked observations, word salad, occasionally rising to the level of cleverness or insight. But lived with over time, they take on the sheen of scraps shored against the ruin of the historical present. Rodefer anticipates our 24-7 just-in-time poly-hyper-crisis information-breakdown welter of instanter simultaneity:
A field of hideous blonde six year old soccer stars. Too much gulf.
Not enough dread. Ashley ashes destroy Datsun but hush.
A nubbin fossil in the turf. A tuumba without a hand.
A frisky consensus of three. Russia bound corn from Iowa.
The coroner’s coronary. A jewel on his pinkie. Morman jive and tackle.
Mahler in the tabernacle. John’s piece The Heavens Shall Glow Beyond
for prepared earth. His weltanschauung was finished.
One thing Rodefer learned from Olson was “jump-skipping,” a process of “the next thought jumping the next thought and the next—as though pressing ahead to some undefinable endgame of thinking.” Mental leapfrog. As John Ashbery, another obvious influence, once put it, “These are examples of leaving out.”
If we buy this—and it’s probably more metaphor than operational procedure—then the filaments that connect one thought or line or sentence to the next have been severed, the associations that might have joined them forever irretrievable. Sometimes this seems to be the subject of the work itself, to the extent that it has one: “And so it is with me—filament and sabotage.” Or consider:
Diffusion can be complex and lead to disintegration
or it can a way of life be, even a joy, staring into the lake
of all former reflection. The leaves are really rusting.
What is the closest candy to school? Shut off art static.
Passing so and so’s loft, shout THROW DOWN ART MONEY!
You honor me by asking me to leave a world to which you belong.
The first three lines sound like Ashbery riffing on Wordsworth, with an un-Wordsworthian deferment of the verb in the second line thrown in for kicks. Then a desire for pleasure (candy) as against obligation, tedium (school); or sweetness against instruction; or perhaps, since childhood is in play, something more sinister, the proverbial stranger with candy (with an echo of Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria,” with its surprising take on the adult seduction of children?). Then some gripes against the art world’s commodification. Then a rather formal denunciation, perhaps a further disavowal of that art world, which is all static and money, to be shut off and thrown down. One doesn’t belong; one refuses to; it’s an honor to be asked to leave (out). That’s my reading; YMMV.
Even more than Ashbery, Rodefer amps up the modernist penchant for allusion and quotation. Four Lectures splices more than Paul’s Boutique, from Ethel Waters to William Eggleston, Finnegans Wake to Funkadelic. I haven’t even mentioned the delightful index (sample entries: “Boys, Beach, English homage to”; “Mason, fucking”; “Ruin, ordinary human love”; and an ongoing joke about the title of the Language poets’ house organ). Ian Heames has produced annotations to Four Lectures, though he misses a few allusions or quotes (Gertrude Stein, Ashbery, E. E. Cummings). But I recommend reading the book as we read it before the internet rendered mystery superfluous, and as The Waste Land, Ulysses, The Cantos were once read—let the sound of the waves collide.
Sometimes it’s tedious. Sometimes I don’t want to be immersed in this nonstop cacophony. Besides his “translations” of Villon, I don’t love Rodefer’s other work. But Four Lectures is always alive, always restless, questing. What’s it after? The next thing, then the next. It can be as exhilarating as anything in the American grain.
Michael Robbins is the author of Walkman (Penguin, 2021), Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music (Simon & Schuster, 2017), and other books.