“Inscription in[verse]”: Marjorie Welish, Interpretative Indeterminacy and The Praxis of Iteration

Abstract

This study meditates upon the conjectural property of inscriptions and its metatheoretical grounding in Marjorie Welish’s poetry to contest ontological, epistemological and representational fixities and aims to understand their affects in
meaning-production through the practice of iteration. Here, the process of iteration provides a space for interpretative differentials in order to revisit the anxieties of linguistic autonomy, monumentalization, hypermediations and ideological consensualities attached to the generic and historical use of inscriptions. Drawing attention to different modes of inscriptions— letters, picture postcard, mathematical notations, graffiti, epitaph, calligraphy and public ephemera — I show how Welish’s poetry from Handwritten (1979) to her latest collection So What, So That (2016) propose a postmodern theory of reinscription in which content and form, erasure and
residuality and appearance and depth of inscriptions are counterintutively left to repeat, replace and resist each other for the suspension of meaningful closures.