Whiteness Has a Dialect: Reading Bruce Andrews’s WhDiP

The first thing I notice about Bruce Andrews’s WhDiP is how quickly it takes away the habits I normally bring to a poem. There is no stable speaker waiting to tell me what happened. There is no scene I can settle into and no argument arranged so that I can follow it from beginning to end. The 445-page text presents itself as “a sequence from White Dialect Poetry,” and much of it is made from isolated dialect words and clipped fragments, often one item to a line.[1] I encounter spellings such as “purtiest,” “look-a-here,” and “rickollections,” but I am not given the complete people, conversations, or places from which this language might have come. I have to listen to language after its ordinary surroundings have been removed.

That removal is central to Andrews’s work. He is one of the major figures associated with Language poetry, and he coedited the journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E with Charles Bernstein from 1978 to 1981. His poetry does not treat words as transparent containers carrying a message from poet to reader. Words have weight, texture, history, class, embarrassment, violence, comedy, and sound before anyone organizes them into a clear statement. In WhDiP, language does not simply describe a social world. It is the social material placed directly in front of me.

Andrews’s method makes that material quality literal. He has described recording words and clusters of words on small cards, storing them for months or years, and later sifting and arranging them for a particular project. The paper cutter matters because it changes the scale of composition. A phrase can be lifted from the sentence that once explained it. A word can be held, moved, placed beside an unlikely neighbor, or left by itself. The Poetry Foundation describes this process as freeing words from their syntactical and narrative shells so they can be handled as objects.[2] What might look spontaneous on the page is therefore the result of accumulation and editing. The poem is not a first outpouring. It is an archive made restless.

This helps me understand why WhDiP is long. Its length is not the length of a plot. It is the length of sustained attention to a field of speech. The text keeps returning to altered spellings, elisions, repeated particles, and verbal habits that standard written English usually corrects, ignores, or treats as evidence against the speaker. Andrews does not correct them. He makes them occupy hundreds of pages. The sequence turns what might be dismissed as an error or quaint pronunciation into the main event of the poem.

The title White Dialect Poetry is provocative because whiteness is often allowed to present itself as if it has no dialect at all. Standard English can pass as neutral while other forms of speech are labeled regional, ethnic, broken, informal, or impure. Andrews’s title interrupts that arrangement. It says that white speech is also made, located, inherited, and marked. At the same time, I do not think it is accurate to describe WhDiP simply as a collection of dominant white middle-class speech. Andrews identified the project’s sources more specifically as rustic Midwestern material moving into Appalachian dialect.[3] That distinction matters. The sequence does not expose only racial power; it also enters questions of region, class, education, prestige, and who has the authority to display another person’s speech.

For that reason, I cannot read the title as if it settles the politics by itself. Phonetic spelling has often been used to turn rural and working-class speakers into comic types. Once a word is removed from a person and placed in an art object, the speaker loses control over how the audience hears it. The poem may make a neglected vernacular visible, but visibility can become display. It may challenge the fantasy of standard white speech, but it can also reproduce distance between the editor and the people whose language becomes his material. The difficulty is part of the work. I have to ask not only what the words reveal, but what has happened to the people who originally spoke or wrote them.

This is where Andrews’s political poetics becomes more demanding than poetry with a political topic. Craig Dworkin explains that Andrews distinguishes politics in a poem from the politics enacted by the poem’s form. The politics lies in how the work is produced, arranged, circulated, and how it positions the reader in relation to language.[4] WhDiP does not give me a correct interpretation of dialect and then allow me to agree. It makes me participate in sorting, hearing, judging, associating, and sometimes stereotyping. My response becomes part of the social action of the text.

Fragmentation creates that participation. When a conventional sentence supplies a subject, action, and context, it also narrows responsibility for meaning. Andrews removes much of that support. A fragment can sound tender, foolish, comic, hostile, musical, or wounded depending on what I carry toward it and what appears near it. Repetition does not necessarily clarify. It changes pressure. A common particle seen once may look incidental; seen hundreds of times, it becomes rhythm, evidence, structure, or accusation. The poem keeps meaning active without promising that every fragment hides a single answer.

I think this is the source of the work’s provocation. Andrews does not merely shock through difficult or abrasive language. He unsettles the division between active poet and passive reader. Dworkin describes the demanding reader participation in Andrews’s poetry as a movement away from an authoritarian monologue toward a more productive dialogue.[4] I would add that the dialogue is not always comfortable or equal. The reader has interpretive freedom, but the source speakers may be absent. The poet gives up one kind of control while exercising another through selection. That contradiction prevents the work from becoming an easy celebration of openness.

The page is only one life of this material. PennSound documents Andrews introducing white dialect poetry and performing from “Success Without Goals.”[5] In an interview with Andrews and choreographer Sally Silvers, he described sections of that project as live sound-poetry performance. Silvers spoke about improvising movement to Appalachian material that had personal resonance for her own background. Their collaborations joined text with timing, music, dance, rehearsal, live editing, and bodily response.[3] Once spoken, the fragments are no longer only visual evidence of altered spelling. Breath supplies duration. The mouth tests the consonants. Repetition becomes physical effort, and dialect enters the moving body.

Performance also clarifies that Andrews’s modular process is not cold. Cards, cuts, and rearrangements might sound mechanical, but the purpose is not to eliminate human force. The method releases sound and social tension from the explanatory sentence. Andrews compared live editing to spreading cards across his living-room sofa, making phrases, and inserting new material while performing.[3] Composition becomes an act of listening with the hands. Order is temporary. The archive can be reopened.

What I take from WhDiP for my own writing is not a license to copy dialect or reproduce Andrews’s surfaces. The useful lesson is that collected language can remain physically and ethically unsettled. I can gather fragments from my own speech, family sayings, prayer, instructions, mistakes, dictionaries, equations, or systems I have the right to enter. I can let those pieces wait before deciding what they mean together. I can ask what changes when a word is cut from its explanation and placed where sound, memory, and contradiction have to do more of the work.

That method also gives me a practical test. If I fragment a piece and nothing changes except its appearance, the fragmentation is decoration. If I use an unusual spelling only to make a voice look colorful, I have reduced a person to an effect. The form has to expose a real pressure: who is considered educated, whose language gets corrected, which voice is heard as neutral, what gets preserved, and who becomes material for someone else’s art. The arrangement should make those questions harder to avoid.

WhDiP leaves me with a changed idea of what a long poem can be. It can be a field rather than a journey, an archive rather than a confession, a performance score rather than a silent page. Its fragments do not abandon politics for wordplay. They locate politics inside the smallest decisions about spelling, sequence, sound, and permission. Andrews makes language strange enough that I can no longer pretend I am only receiving it. I am choosing how to hear it.

That is the part of the work that stays with me. Whiteness is not silent, neutral, or without an accent. Language carries the conditions under which people are heard and judged. When Andrews cuts words loose from their former sentences, he does not make them innocent. He makes their histories unstable and newly audible. My responsibility as a reader—and as a poet—is to listen to that instability without confusing freedom of arrangement with freedom from consequence.

Sources

1. Electronic Poetry Center, “Bruce Andrews,” listing WhDiP as a 445-page sequence from White Dialect Poetry and linking the complete Ubu Editions PDF: https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/andrews/ and https://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_001_Andrews_Whdip.pdf
2. Poetry Foundation, “Bruce Andrews,” biography and account of Andrews’s modular card-and-paper-cutter process: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bruce-andrews
3. Erica Kaufman, “10 Questions for Bruce Andrews & Sally Silvers,” The Poetry Project, on live editing, performance, collaboration, and Midwestern/Appalachian white-dialect material: https://www.2009-2019.poetryproject.org/10-questions-for-bruce-andrews-sally-silvers/
4. Craig Dworkin, “Bruce Andrews,” Electronic Poetry Center, on Andrews’s language-centered political poetics, reader participation, and editing practice: https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/andrews/about/dworkin.html
5. PennSound, “Bruce Andrews,” recordings and program notes for Andrews’s introduction to white dialect poetry and reading from “Success Without Goals”: https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Andrews.php