Grass-Harman-Whitman-Bryant

Graham Harman's post earlier today about the cover of his new book (nice violet with huge letters—good one) made me think of teaching Whitman last year and how much I truly enjoyed it, for the first time, because I was working towards something that I now see as OOO.

Meanwhile Levi Bryant has been posting on the mesh and his analysis of lawn grass is bang on.

So I started thinking I would put something down about Leaves of Grass. What an alluringly simple yet cryptic (withdrawn?) title for a book of poems.

Since traditionally flowers are tropes (“the flowers of rhetoric,” which goes back at least to Aristotle), all flower poems are inherently fascinating because they're about language. (An “anthology” is a collection of flowers.) Moreover, titles about flowers and plants are playing on this linkage. So a title I really like from the Romantic period is Leigh Hunt's Foliage. It's beautifully offhand, like titling your book Some Poems. And it brings to mind the folded density of a book itself (folio being a way of making a book with only one fold—the most high-end, expensive luxury product kind of book).

It occurs to me that the flower-as-trope trope actually refers to the rhetorical flower as an object, in the OOO sense: independent of human minds and withdrawn from itself and from other objects. Its meaning is irreducibly hidden, and hiddenness is part of its meaning.

The title Leaves of Grass talks about the paper the poems are written on, doesn't it? It brings the paper into the poetry. Leaves means pages, of course.

A blade of grass is long and slender, like a line of Whitman. One of his genius innovations was very long lineation, as in the prophetic works of William Blake. These lines are hard if not impossible to take in all at once. The very long poetic line is an object that decisively withdraws.

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass

The long, slender blade of the fifth line of Whitman's poem removes the grass from the observing “I” even as it links them semantically. The “I” is itself withdrawn from the quotidian round of labor. In this sense the line is part of the extended phenotype of grass! (Hat tip to Levi there.)

(Of course this is maybe a counterintuitive way of reading a “Song of Myself”...)

A trope in this OOO sense is not simply a linguistic object, if by that we mean something linguistic turn-y. It's a curve (the literal meaning of trope, sort of like “spin”), like the gentle crescent of a blade of grass.