# Notes on Montage and Poetry

Vincent Dussol

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Vincent Dussol. Notes on Montage and Poetry. Journée d'étude "Arts visuels: emprunts, déplacements, trans-formations", Etudes Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone, Apr 2012, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 – Site Saint-Charles, France. hal-04817683

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# Notes on Montage and Poetry

Vincent Dussol

Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3

Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone

« [C]utting is more than just the convenient means by which discontinuity is rendered continuous ».<fnref n="1" />

I am fascinated with lists: they leave it up to you to imagine semantic links between the items they include. They are pure potential: you can create your own narratives out of them or let the echo of each item ripple like chimes.

Lists have always been a part of poetry. More specifically, catalogues, the literary form of lists, have been a feature of epics. The first two examples given by Umberto Eco in *The Infinity of Lists* are “the catalogue of ships in Homer’s *Iliad*” and “the list of things contained in the drawer of Leopold Bloom’s kitchen in the penultimate chapter of *Ulysses*” (7). Eco contrasts the poetics of “everything included” and a poetics of the “etcetera.”

It seems that the United States lends itself to list-making. Eco’s critical anthology of lists includes Walt Whitman and Thomas Pynchon. Take too Michel Butor’s extensive use of lists in his attempt to span the space of the United States in *Mobile*. French poet Emmanuel Hocquard, a translator of American poetry and a keen reader of author-of-the-very-long-A Louis Zukofsky, made lists a defining feature of what he calls “inverted elegy” (*élégie inverse*).

The poetic power of a list results from several reasons. The list may be of rivers, of birds, of clouds, things or beings that are associated with the poetic genre. Alternately, poetry can be generated by different patterns of juxtaposing items: patterns of clash (or of nearness), of increment (or diminution). Clashes can be semantic: directly so, or generated by distance, the depth or width of the gap created between items.

What lists have in common with montage is juxtaposition.

“Montage,” as opposed to cutting, or editing, may sound a little obsolete. A definition from the dictionary, which defines it as “a method of film editing involving the juxtaposition or partial superimposition of several shots to form a single image,”<fnref n="2" /> fails to characterize what is special about that method. We return to this point further on.

Walter Murch, who edited for Coppola and a few other major directors, says there are two approaches to reducing the length of a film. What he calls “the spaghetti-sauce method” consists in letting the process take place “gradually, organically [...] until the volume of the film reduces to the appropriate level. The opposite approach is more brutal”<fnref n="3" />: the editor’s work amounts to chopping the film down to the size of its Procrustean bed. The end-product need not be bad. Referring to a film thus mercilessly cut through, Murch writes: “It worked ‘in an exciting, slightly confusing, montagey sort of way’” (Ondatjee 137). Quite clearly, Murch does not wish to be regarded as a practitioner of montage.

<footnote n="1">¹ Walter Murch, *In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing* 2nd edition, Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001, 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² *The Free Online Dictionary*</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Michael Ondaatje, *The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film*, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002, 136-137.</footnote>
The most recent edition of Eisenstein’s writings on film-editing is entitled *Towards a Theory of Montage*. One of the articles therein is entitled “Pushkin the Montageur.” Unlike Murch when he used “montagey,” Eisenstein was brandishing the then-neologism “montageur” like a banner, pointing a way to go.

Walter Murch's two books on film editing – one of them a revised lecture, the other consisting of five conversations with Canadian novelist Michael Ondatjee – bring out, what is, one might say, “natural” about film editing, if “natural” is understood as “in harmony with the human body.”

Murch's first book entitled *In the Blink of an Eye* develops an intuition of director John Huston in the 1970s. Huston said:

> ‘Look at that lamp across the room. Now look back at me. Look back at that lamp. Now look back at me again. Do you see what you did? You *blinked*. Those are *cuts*. After the first look, you know that there’s no reason to pan continuously from me to the lamp because you know what’s in between. Your mind cut the scene. First you behold the lamp. *Cut*. Then you behold me’ (John Huston, quoted in Murch 2001, 60).

“In arranging the sequence of shots,” Murch explains, “the editor is in effect ‘blinking’ for the audience.” “[B]links are the equivalent of mental punctuation marks” (Ondaatje, 141). Experimental work in the psycho-physiology of the blink seems to confirm that “*the blink is either something that helps an internal separation of thought to take place, or it is an involuntary reflex accompanying the mental separation that is taking place anyway*” (Murch 2001, 62).<fnref n="4" /> As a result, good editing should be based on a human being’s natural inclination to blink under certain circumstances.

Another more obvious connection between film editing and the experience afforded human beings by their bodies is dreams. Walter Murch wonders:

> ‘Why do cuts work?’ Do they have some hidden foundation in our own experience (...)?
> 
> (...) Well, although ‘day-to-day’ reality appears to be continuous, there *is* that other world in which we spend perhaps a third of our lives: the ‘night-to-night’ reality of dreams, [“eight hours every night spent in a ‘cinematic’ dream-state”]. And the images in dreams are much more fragmented, intersecting in much stranger and more abrupt ways than the images of waking reality – ways that approximate, at least, the interaction produced by cutting.

> Perhaps the explanation is as simple as that: we accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. In fact, the abruptness of the cut may be one of the key determinants in actually *producing* the similarity between films and dreams in the darkness of the theater. (Murch 2001, 58-59)

Murch goes on to acknowledge that “the problem with all this is that the comparison of films and dreams is interesting, probably true, but [that] it is relatively barren of practical fruits. We still know so little about the nature of dreams that the observation comes to a stop once it has been made” (Murch 2001 58-59). Murch does not stop at dreams:

> I believe ‘filmic’ juxtapositions are taking place in the real world not only when we dream but also when we are awake. And in fact, I would go so far as to say that these juxtapositions are not accidental mental artifacts but part of the method we use to make sense of the world: We must render visual reality discontinuous, otherwise perceived reality would resemble an almost incomprehensible string of letters without word separation or punctuation. (Murch 2001 63)

<footnote n="4">⁴ Italics in the original.</footnote>
He explains:

Here's a wonderfully simple experiment which clearly shows that our visual cortex is also routinely editing our perceptions – while we are wide awake – without our ever being aware of it. Stand about eight to ten inches from a mirror and look at your left eye. Now look at your right eye and then back at your left eye. Do this five or six times in quick succession. You will not notice any movement – your eyes will seem to be completely still. But this is in fact *not* the case, as an observant friend will immediately tell you: your eyes move quite a lot with each shift of focus.

The blurred swish during the movement of the eye is somehow snipped from our conscious awareness, and we are left with just the significant images before and after the movement. Not only do we not see the blurred movement, we are unaware that anything has been removed. And this is happening all the time: with every movement of our eyes, an invisible editor is at work, cutting out the bad bits before we can ever see them. (Ondatjee 50)

To finish with the stress laid by Murch on the natural link of film editing with the human body, there is this intriguing comparison he found between the techniques of film editing and American Sign Language:

‘In signed language, narrative is no longer linear. Instead, the essence is to cut from a normal view to a close-up to a distant shot to a close-up again, even including flashback and flash-forward scenes, exactly as a movie editor. Not only is signing arranged more like edited film than like written narration, but also each signer is placed very much as a camera: the field of vision and angle of view are directed but variable.’ (William Stokoe, *Language in Four Dimensions*, New York Academy of Sciences (1979), quoted in Murch 2001, 63).

Although Murch equates editing to visual dislocations we should be used to for the different reasons given above, he still largely sees his editor’s job as dedicated to facilitating access to a work for the audience, never losing sight that cinema is a mass medium:

> As much as possible, you try to *be* the audience. (...) If you think the audience's focus of attention as a dot moving around the screen, the editor's job is to carry that dot around in an interesting way. – after each cut it takes a few milliseconds for the audience to discover where they should now be looking. If you don't carry their focus of interest across the cut points, if you make them search at every cut, they become disoriented and annoyed, without knowing why. (...) You make a tossed salad of it, you abuse the audience's attention. (Ondatjee 41)

In the numerous essays Eisenstein devoted to editing and montage, he insisted it was an intellectual process. In 1928-1929, he developed an enlarged concept of montage, theorizing it as much more than “a special case of film editing”, but rather as a principle to be found underlying artistic construction of all kinds from time immemorial; from architecture to painting or literature. He refers to it as “the Osiris principle” after the Egyptian god who after being dismembered is put back together again. But the general emphasis is on discontinuity. Eisenstein refers to “montage as a leap – the montage leap!” (Eisenstein 56). When by 1938, under the pressure of Stalinism, as montage came under strong suspicion for being an excessively open form, Eisenstein came to indict those he called “the ‘Leftist’ proponents of montage,” he may well have been referring to what had most fascinated him about this technique: “When playing with pieces of film they discovered one property of it that amazed them for a number of years. The property was that *any two sequences, when juxtaposed, inevitably combine into another concept which arises from that juxtaposition as something*”
*qualitatively new*” (Eisenstein 296). When Murch referred to a “montage” feeling about a film, he was distancing himself from the inclination to bring together clashing opposites that had been there in 1903 in Russia when montageurs ruled the day. The explanation, he contends, lay in philosophy:

> there was a huge dialectical influence, from Kant to Hegel and Marx, and then Eisenstein and others found a way to show Marxian dialectics – opposition and synthesis – in cinema. In the Soviet Union, cinema was seen to be the art that most clearly showed the superiority of Marxian dialectics in its very essence. The Communists naturally pushed that aspect of it, the editing, very hard. (Ondatjee 107)

Murch goes on: “We who are not Marxian always worked with those elements but didn’t push them so hard” (Ondatjee 107). But when in 1951, Langston Hughes entitled a collection that juxtaposes short poems in colloquial language dealing with African-Americans’ continuing tribulations *Montage of a Dream Deferred*, he was unambiguously if belatedly acknowledging American poets’ debt to the more radical form of editing. Could it be that calls for revolutionary change cannot be accommodated in smooth form?

We have tried to trace back the path of a poetics of juxtaposition which may run from epic list-making to more, or less, radical forms of film-editing, popularized as “montage” in the heyday of the Russian Revolution. We shall now proceed to look at the reasons why and the ways in which the aesthetics of film-cutting have percolated into poetry.

> “What you do as an editor is search for patterns – patterns of sound and image – at both the superficial and ever deeper levels,” says Walter Murch (Ondatjee 10). This “job description” encapsulates the essence of what reading or writing poetry is about. Splicing shots can be achieved through images or sound. That similarity of sound will suggest similarity of sense is also basic poetic idiom. Like metaphors, montage also involves creating sparks by rubbing together what does not usually belong together. Similarly, line break – the decision, central to modern poetry, about when to break a line – is a manner of cut.<fnref n="5" /> To complete the picture, it is worth recalling that “rhapsodist” was the name given to those who, in ancient Greece, recited epic poetry. In Renaissance English, “rhapsody” was synonymous with epic poetry. The Greek roots of the word are *rhaptein*, “to stitch” and *oide* “song.” The etymology is eloquent: a long poem, an epic, results from the stitching together of short poems, or songs. Murch repeatedly reminds his readers of the similarities between film editing and sewing, which is why editing was long considered a woman’s job. He shares with Eisenstein a taste for poetry<fnref n="6" /> and often returns to this literary genre for pedagogic parallels aimed at explaining what film editing involves.

The considerations above led me to choose two long poems by North American authors as the most suitable material for an exploration of the cross-pollination between poetry and editing. Like films, which are shot out of sequence, long poems are likely to have been written out of sequence. This may be why “[t]he lack of restrictive generic conventions or ‘open form’ is crucial to the identity of the long poem” (Keller 534).<fnref n="7" /> So long poems imply

<footnote n="5">⁵ Pre-modern Stephen Crane’s “central formal technique,” is thus “lineation, as later poets will, in order to distribute emphasis, mediate suspense, and command stark juxtaposition” (Wolosky 299).</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ The range of poets whose work is examined in Eisenstein’s writings is extensive and includes Homer, Pushkin, Whitman, Mallarmé, Mayakovsky among many others.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ The one quasi-defining feature of open form – “‘openness’ identifying often organic conceptions of poetic form as an evolving process or as a reflection of a perceived disorderly unfolding of experience” (Keller 534) – is polyphony and/ or multiple point of view. The film editor’s experience confirms this: “With more points of view</footnote>
stitching. Why choose two North American poets? It seems that the twentieth century made the long poem in open form a North American genre with T.S. Eliot's *The Waste Land* as its foundational text.

The two long poems in question are Anne Carson's *Autobiography of Red* (1998) and Eleni Sikelianos's *The California Poem* (2004). They are both long poems in the Modernist tradition: the degree of heterogeneity of the material they gather is rather high, although for different reasons. Furthermore, it appeared to me that these poems strongly respond to movies and show awareness of movie construction.

The first of these long poems by chronological order is *Autobiography of Red* by Canadian poet Anne Carson. It was published in 1998. I found that several aspects of this book seem to broach the subject of editing.

Carson is a poet and a professor of Classics. Among her books is a translation of Sappho's fragments. *Autobiography of Red* also has its roots in the work of a poet of Ancient Greece, Stesichoros. What little of his work has survived is of course fragmentary. This ability to work with and from fragments shares much common ground with montage. Both pursuits involve creating fluidity out of discontinuity. The title of Carson's poem – *Autobiography of Red* – and its subtitle – “A Novel in Verse” – highlight the narrative dimension of the work. However, the juxtaposing inherent in montage returns in the fact that the narrative is set into a heterogeneous textual environment that includes an obliquely learned introduction, an anachronistic translation of fragments of Stesichoros, three appendices, and an equally anachronistic interview with Stesichoros himself. (He lived in the 7th century BC). *And*, believe it or not, Stesichoros has a place in the history of editing. Before film editing was digitalized, the job meant constantly rewinding reels of film. Stesichoros can be considered as the inventor of rewinding. The story, as told by Isocrates and Plato, goes that Stesichoros was blinded by Helen of Troy for making an inappropriate remark about her sexual misconduct. Upon realizing his faux-pas, he “wrote for her an encomium [a panegyric] and got his sight back” (Carson 15). The panegyric is called “The Palinode.” It is “the first recorded use of the genre” defined as “an ode in which the writer retracts a view or sentiment expressed in an earlier poem” (*Wikipedia*). The third appendix entitled “Clearing up the question of Stesichoros’ blinding by Helen” is a succession of mock-serious either/or deductions intended to exemplify the possible rhetorical paths of reversibility.

Montage relies on sound cuts as much as visual ones. In the narrative *Autobiography of Red*, a romance, a chapter entitled “Fast-Forward” features a film crew who are making a documentary film on Emily Dickinson.<fnref n="8" /> They have been recording sounds of volcanoes and tsunamis for it and play the tape to one Geryon, the former same-sex lover of Herakles, a member of the film crew. The recording is like a sound cut to earlier scenes. It is as if Geryon’s and Herakles’s lives had suddenly been fast-forwarded. The volcanoes and the tsunamis of desire are reawakened in Geryon. More bridges between this episode and former ones are built, more knitting of pieces of the story together as Geryon and Herakles are also the two main characters in Stesichoros’ *Geryonis* (“The Geryon Matter”), a long lyric poem about one of Herakles’s twelve celebrated Labors.<fnref n="9" />

<footnote>you can sustain that juggling act [which a long-feature film is], just because it's richer and more complex. A symphony can be longer than a sonata.” (Ondatjee 34)</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ Interestingly, Jay Leyda (1910-1988) who, after studying with Eisenstein, brought back to the USA the first complete print of *Battleship Potemkin* and then translated his writings in the 1940s is also the author of two well-recognized books on Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson respectively.</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ It consisted in killing a strange red winged monster named Geryon who lived on an island, in order to get the magical red cattle which he spent his time quietly tending.</footnote>
To continue with the subject of editing, the interview with Stesichoros focuses on seeing. The account of his responsibilities and achievements leads one to think that he held a job that could be referred to as world editor: “I mean everything everyone saw everyone saw because I saw it”. Which he clarifies in going on thus: “Wherever I looked it poured out my eyes I was responsible for everyone’s visibility” (Carson 148). In other words, everyone depended on him for what they saw or did not see. It was therefore impossible for him to “blink, or the world went blind” (Carson 148). Carson may have heard of John Huston’s theory?

Film editing is about creating negotiable gaps. *Autobiography of Red* features yet another major instance of such elliptic film grammar. Photography is omnipresent throughout the poem. Geryon, the protagonist, worked on his autobiography “from the age of five to the age of forty-four” and it takes “the form/ of a photographic essay” (Carson 60). But, just as one listening to Mussorgsky’s *Pictures at an Exhibition* today walks through an imaginary gallery,<fnref n="10" /> no visual has been included in the book. “How can you take away something and wind up with more of it?” Walter Murch wonders. This must have been Carson’s bet. The thinking on photography may run even more deeply as none of the photographs described is included. Along the same paradoxical lines, Geryon’s favorite question is: “What is time made of?” Musings on photographs give him the beginning of an answer: “Much truer/ is the time that strays into photographs and stops” (Carson 93).<fnref n="11" />

*The California Poem* is a long work that was published in 2004. As its title aims at suggesting, it is not *only* a poem about California but rather a California of a poem, a composite text involving the juxtaposition and superimposition of miscellaneous elements. What follows is the poem’s “Prologue”:

Let me tell you of my cat-o-nines cosmovision.

After the last light on clouds, darkness came laying over the known world
with a sick at heart that could only be carved out of gold & cured
with $35 worth of history

Hunger unhinged the doors, hypertension in the trees

Hi-summer, lo-summer, waiting for golden hordes of killer bees; smoking holes, haloes
on copper mines

When I looked up it had already changed again—
No more fair, no flaxen clouds:

While the light lingers in layers on high
Deserty lands lie in the dark smoothed floor that the night has seen
Dipping my toes in the Pacific off the edge of—
Tell, what lurks at the boundaries

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ A visual list of a kind since most of the real pictures that inspired the composer have been lost. The concept of “visual list,” to refer to paintings that represent collections or assemblies of people or things, is introduced by Eco in *The Infinity of Lists*.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ For instance, Geryon’s favorite question is: “What is time made of?” Musings on photographs give him the beginning of an answer: “Much truer/ is the time that strays into photographs and stops” (Carson 93).</footnote>
Scattered across Precambrian rock: spent shot-gun cartridges, bullet-flown bottles
truckle, the Glass
Factory at Lizard's Mouth shatter

shatters birds

tibiotarsus, furcula

Evel Knieval jumped the Snake River Gorge; we saw
General Patton's path
in Mojave dust, modern man
run amok in the desert

Might our lands lift off
the pale
face of the earth & float
away, a
glittery sheet,
Ghost,
Lift up in us some
shiver should wastelands
arouse themselves out of dumb
stupor

So we elaborated our peninsula out past the resort Town of Tijuana, mating
turtles mistook the lights of Cancún
for the moon, malls made a language
“to eat up
Available reality”

“By now the dream is falling in on itself. . .
Or someone is dismantling it . . .”

(Sikelianos, 7-8)

The first line immediately refers to sight and feels like a reference to filming.
“Cosmovisión,” a Spanish word for “vision of the universe” sounds like a state-of-the-art, top-of-the-range, anamorphic widescreen lens made by “Panavision.” “Cat-o-nines” conjures up a picture of a cat-o-nine tails with its nine pieces of knotted line spread out, fan-like, from the handle. The lens is *that* wide/screen).

Follow the nine tails of the cat. Nine shots to introduce California.<fnref n="12" />

Shots one to four are about sunset, the processing of rushes<fnref n="13" /> of gold, their ‘leaping’ montage following the direction of the observer’s eyes.

Shots one and three are low-angle shots at the sky, the world like a dark chamber now.

The chain of signifiers works alongside the chain of signifieds. Music takes over: The speaker is Sick like gold, golden sickle, sick *helios*, Sikelianos. Then a music of aitches.

Note the blank lines, blank shots, *blinks of an eye*.

As a reader, I am made to do constant editing.

<footnote n="12">¹² Their lay-out vaguely recall Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Rushes: meant as the unedited prints of a movie scene.</footnote>
Shot four lends itself to syntactic doubling: “the light lingers in layers on high.” It first seems that “on” works as a “preposition” introducing “high/ deserty lands.” Except that these are said to “lie in the dark.” So could it be an adverb particle modifying “lingers.” I must rewind, go back and try to splice the words differently.

This prologue reads like a lesson in gap-creation.

It is the subject of shot four: blank space following the mention of “dark,” a dash at the edge of a line standing for an absent word, with the semantic field of limit – “edge” and “boundaries” – then cut to the next shot after “boundaries,” hence the blank space.

Shot five is a close shot on, among other things, “spent shot-/ gun cartridges”. The line break creates a gap, and the next line closes it. Despite the cut, some fluidity is preserved.

However, splintering, breaking into pieces, is what is emphasized. Gun cartridges do shatter birds.

The long blank space in the middle of shot six visualizes the erasure of death. Follow two names of bird-bones. The second one closing the line, *furcula*, or *fourchette*, wishbone-like, is like a fork in the road. Shot six continues with an objective correlative of gap-filling, or leaping across semantic chasms. *Evel Knieval* is an American motorcycle legend, who specialized in long-distance jumps on a motorbike and is in the *Guinness Book of Records* for largest number of broken bones within a lifetime at 433.

Echoing T.S. Eliot’s *The Waste Land* and its pioneering poetic gaps, the “glittery sheet” and the “Ghost” in shot seven can be regarded as allusions to California’s movie making industry, the uplifting, redemptory power of which the speaker strongly doubts, but to which the poem repeatedly refers. Still, poetry *can* use film editing.<fnref n="14" />

Shot eight returns to gaps not quite filled with the elaboration of a peninsula and “mating” at the edge. The poem’s bold narrative syntax could be that of an avant-garde movie.

The concluding distich of shot nine, mentioning the dream “falling in on itself,” most obviously appears as a hint at the failure of the American Dream, quintessentially linked to the Californian State. The grand opening of the poem proper confirms this:

> I want to tell you about the dream. The California is a paradise lake with colorful animals dream
> The when I go back to my homeland California is a paradise I am happy for you dream
> (Sikelianos 12)

But, to bring Murch back into the picture, it is also the dream syntax which may make us readers able to negotiate the rough surface of such works as *The California Poem* or *Autobiography of Red*.

One conclusion one is tempted to draw from both *The California Poem* and *Autobiography of Red* is that, writing after decades of long poems and moviemaking, poets know they can rely on a readership well-trained in movie-watching whose abilities to take, negotiate, process wider gaps in the poetry have been honed by film syntax.

However, it can be objected that these recent exponents of long-poem writing are in some ways regressive compared to, say, Pound’s post WW2 *Cantos – Pisan Cantos, Rock Drill* or *Thrones* – the surface of which provides ample evidence that Eisenstein’s calls for moderation of radical montage aesthetics did not stop them from percolating further. Canadian-born Carson and California-born of Greek extraction Sikelianos may have felt that some reference

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Most interestingly, *The California Poem* includes visuals showing examples of American sign language, pointing to novel, less linear narrative possibilities that may owe something to film editing. (Sikelianos, 59)</footnote>
to visual arts – not just through ekphrasis – can be a useful prop for long-winded poetry. “The roots of American filmmaking,” Murch points out, “were in finding the common denominator that unified people from different cultural backgrounds. This was not true in other countries.” (Ondatjee 92) This democratic, Whitmanian instinct could be what lies behind the dialogue between word and image in the long poems discussed in these notes.

WORKS CITED

Carson, Anne. *Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse*. New York: Vintage Books, 1998.

Eco, Umberto. *The Infinity of Lists*. Trad. Alastair McEwen. London: MacLehose Press, 2009.

Eisenstein, Sergei. *Towards a Theory of Montage*. Ed. Michael Glenny & Richard Taylor. Translated by Michael Glenny. I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, London, New York, 2010.

Keller, Lynn. "The Twentieth-Century Long Poem." *The Columbia History of American Poetry*, ed. Jay Parini, Associate ed. Brett T. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 534-563.

Murch, Walter. *In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing*. 2nd edition. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 2001.

Ondaatje, Michael. *The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film*. New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 2002.

Sikelianos, Eleni. *The California Poem*. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004.

Stokoe, William. *Language in Four Dimensions*. New York Academy of Sciences, 1979.

Wolosky, Shira, "Poetry and Public Discourse, 1820-1910," *The Cambridge History of American Literature*, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, Volume Four. *Nineteenth-Century Poetry, 1800-1910*, 1993. 145-480.