America Mitchell continuedfrom previous page Without Credentials," where Heller asserts that the poem "shakes up and disrupts our certainties. We could say it introduces uncertainty where perhaps there was none before.... What is actually true is not the certainty but the uncertainty." As the passage continues, the tone becomes increasingly spiritual: "If we are willing to recognize that moment, to live thoroughly in that understanding, we recognize that it is just as we give up our views and* our values, give up ourselves and our credentials that poetry takes place." It is a similar sort of giving up of the self that most religions ask of us—quite the opposite , in my view, to what a progressive politics or a progressive esthetics might ask. I, too, would like to see a poetry that sees what can be seen clearly (and no more) and that does not imagine the physical universe as subsumed by language. But I would not be willing to give up my certainty that the world we live in is a threatened place; nor would I want to see those poetries that express this fact, in so many words, invalidated. We need to remember, as Bernstein puts it, that "[p]oetry, like war, is the pursuit of politics by other means." The danger here is that an aesthetics of "uncertainty" can, in trying to avoid ideology, become itself ideological, finally, and as John B. Thompson has argued, help to "sustain relations of domination" by implying that certainty is impossible or inconsequential. Roger Mitchell's most recent book, Delicate Bait, was chosen by Charles Simic for the Akron Prize in Poetry. He is a 2005 Fellow in Poetry with the New York Foundationfor the Arts. To Speak Is to Forget Alan Sondheim echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language Daniel Heller-Roazen Zone Books http://www.mitpress.mit.edu 287 pages; cloth, $28.00 — Slight indentations/impression in the surface of the cover of the book—this particular book I am reading, now. Someone had used it for a portable desk. In the proper light, the message is apparent, or almost apparent. — The message is almost, but not entirely, absent, a forgotten inscription, lost text, absence revealed only by the accidental impression of the pen or pencil. Forgetting and absence are two major tropes of Echolalias—as well as the evanescence of language, language undergoing continuous transformation —the births and deaths of languages—deconstructed , for example— languages embedded in other languages, silent letters, the aleph in Hebrew, the problematic of 'h' aspirated and otherwise, Indo-European — the languaging and confusion of tongues of Babel, the forgetting of poetry and poetics in Paradise — — Ghosts and the. ghostliness of language haunt this work— — Language always already in flux—the mutability of language— Montaigne writing in recognition of language shifting beneath him. A book for poets, for anyone questioning the apparent eternity of language opening up worlds—as if worlds undergo transformations against the background of analytical language— as if analytical language were even possible. — Now, for example (and not in Echolalias), philosophy reliant on analytical language (Carnap, early Wittgenstein, Russell, etc.) seems highly problematic; if language is haunted, if language is in recession from strict facticity, then what one has left axefictions. Fictions (as Jeremy Bentham uses the term) reference language that we accept as true, in order to function in the world; the term connects with Vaihinger's philosophy of "as-if." We live "as if language isn 't haunted, "as if our statements can be accepted as true "without further thought." On the periphery, then, of linguistic truth, Echolalias presents, not an attack, but a murmur, the evidence of the archaeology of language-within-language, its translucency. — In Echolalias, analysis mixes with phenomenology , cultural and linguistic history; sometimes I miss the gloss that moves across extremities. For example, page 74— in relation to issues of language recuperation among various cultural communities — Hence the vanity of all attempts to slow or stop the fleeting course of languages. Whether they are nationalist or international , philological or ecological, such projects are united in the belief that speech is an object in which linguists can, and must, intervene to recall and conserve the identity...