Ab Abusu Ad Usum Non Valet Consequentia

*

Flarf Architect: Some buildings are ugly. I should make my buildings ugly. To reflect this.

Flarf Doctor: Some of my patients are sick. I should make some of my well patients sick. To reflect this.

Flarf Logician: Some people believe that “If P, then Q. P is a fallacious argument. Therefore, Q is false.” I should make Q false. To reflect this.

Flarf Historian: Some people believe that because something happened, it was bound to happen. I should make what happens bound to happen. To reflect this.

Flarf Theologian: Some people believe that God exists, because there is no proof that he does not exist. I should make God exist. To reflect this.

Flarf Philosopher: Some people believe that X is true, because there is no proof that X is false. I should make X true. To reflect this.

Flarf Painter: Some people believe painting is depicting what you see. I should depict what I see. To reflect this.

Flarf Economist: Some people, treating a quantity as if it were an exogenous variable, believe that the amount of work available to labourers is fixed. I should make the amount of work available to labourers fixed. To reflect this.

Argumentum Ad Logicam

*

“Why These Words?” Passive and Active Poetic Consciousness

5. Did what they were looking for exist ?
6. What were they looking for?

- Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier

I have the impression that the discussion about Celan perhaps has its roots in a much deeper question, which has recently become more and more pressing within me, and which I’ve been wanting to write about at some length. Roughly, it may be summarized as the old dialogue in poetics between instinct and intellect, unawareness and awareness, intuit and rationale, though here this dialogue will take, I think, a new spin.

It's a distinction that C.K. Stead makes in his wonderful book, The New Poetic, which is largely about anglo-american modernism, and more particularly about the development of T.S. Eliot’s poetic, for which Stead identifies two distinct stages. Now, what is important for our discussion is that Stead sees Eliot's career as a sort of struggle between "two halves" of the poetic consciousness:

" . . . that part of the poet's mind which rationalizes, constructs, and, in the rhetorician, illegitimately persuades and pleases at the expense of complex truth; and, on the other hand, that passive part of the mind which, independent of the will, negatively comprehends complexity, and provides images to embody it, but fails on its own to construct, assert, or even affirm."

To give an idea of the implications of Stead's thesis in broad brushstrokes, he basically argues that, considering these two distinct poetics at work in Eliot's oeuvre, the first can be more or less appropriately associated with Prufrock and The Waste Land (they are largely associational, imagogical, "impressionistic", for want of a better word), and the second with the Quartets, (largely more cognizant, directive, rational and dialectic). The lines are, of course, massively blurred: there is passive associational imagery in the Quartets, and active argument in The Wasteland; but I think the division is nevertheless exceedingly useful, especially in the subtle and complex way in which Stead develops it. Especially when we consider the fact that the recent Eliot witch-hunt - and I'm not against certain aspects of this witch-hunt! - seems often to have taken as its easy target the active, “in control”, Church of England rhétoriqueur, without saying much for the passive, associational Eliot. And why? Not for any nefarious reason this time, I think, but more simply because this Eliot – the passive, associative kind – has almost been entirely incorporated – in a literal sense – into our body politic/poetic.

As, I think this idea of the "passive, assembling poetic mind", quite foreign and shocking to Eliot's contemporaries – repugnant to the Georgians, for instance, as to many of Eliot’s heroes, (can anyone imagine an “out of control”, unaware Pope, Dryden, or Donne?) – has been entirely taken up into our contemporary idea of what poetry is, and what it actually does. To such an extent that we don't even notice it anymore, let alone be shocked by it. It is the raison d'être of John Ashbery, and you can't imagine Michael Palmer without it.

So, we are very used nowadays to being comforted about this fact of us “not knowing”, of artists simply responding: “oh sure, don’t stress about it, artists, or people who want to be artists, never see clearly regarding art or their own processes: just read some Kandinsky, see what kind of stuff he said . . .”

But this is an overly easy answer. As, the problem is not so much with the old formulation of “should a poet be cognizant of what poetry is, of its processes, of what he or she is attempting to do?”, but rather the larger, more serious question: “should anyone, poet, reader, critic, philosopher, be cognizant of what poetry is, of its processes, of what it is attempting to do?” For the first question can be simply brushed away by the rebuttal: “yes, the poet is ignorant, but the critic sees clearly”, which is actually the position that Perloff seems to employ a lot of the time. This is an old idea: New Criticism is basically an extremely positivistic methodology, in that it assumes that everything in a poem may be justified. Even if the poet is not conscious of his or her own procedures then, there is a still a basis for these procedures, and who is to find out what this basis is: of course, the critic.

However: say that I’m a poet, and that I don't really understand what I do when I write poems, or what poetry is, or what it is trying to do. This lack of self-awareness may sometimes discomfort me. But say that I’m a critic, or worse – and this is crucial in Eliot’s case – that I’m that Horatian centaur, the poet/critic, and I still don't really entirely understand what poetry is, etc. That seems to me a big problem. (And this is really the reason for Plato’s very clever use of Ion, who, as a rhapsode, is simultaneously reader and actor, critic and performer . . . )

For if the critic is largely in the same boat as the poet, are we not reduced to an extremely passive, intuitive vision of the poetic art? Are we happy about that? If we don’t really buy the Perloffian “critics see clearer” off-ramp - as I don't think we did for Celan - then where do we go?

I think it was Chris Vitiello – and I do hope I’m remembering correctly – who asked a while ago something along the lines of “Why shouldn’t we ask that a poet be more or less aware of his or her processes?” We do it for other people. Wouldn’t this be more or less responsible? Well, yes, I suppose so. But here is the crucial point regarding Celan, which Ben outlined:

“The referential difficulties of a passage like ‘Die starken Uhren / geben der Spaltstunde recht, / heiser’ (the strong clocks back the fissure-hour, hoarsely) are only an exacerbation of more fundamental problems of understanding; even if we grasp the plain sense of the lines, we still need to ask more substantive questions: Why these words? These sounds and images?”

Why these words, indeed. We may talk about Celan for hours, and find interesting things to say, but do we ever penetrate to this deeper question? (If not this, then what ?) There is a poetry where you can answer this. You can (usually) do it for Shakespeare, for Pope, for the Georgians, for all these more or less “active” language users. But please, somebody do it for “the strong clocks back the fissure-hour, hoarsely”. Please.

The ironic thing is that this epistemological abyss does not really pose a problem for poets during the process of their composition: it only poses a problem when, a posteriori, one tries to justify the resultant work’s value. For the “passive consciousness” poet probably uses criteria like “that works well there; that looks/sounds good to me; that’s better than it was before” etc. Without extrapolating these out into a more global “understanding”.

An interesting, recent response to these questions, for me, came from my partner some weeks ago when I was talking with her precisely about this discomfort sometimes regarding writing poems without knowing what poetry actually was. And she basically replied the following, (with my additions and clarifications, condensed):

“When artists start questioning the value of art in a general way, they are usually questioning the value of their own art. And when they want to locate a deeper justification of their own processes, it is usually in order to confirm the value of the work of art which results from these processes. Doubts regarding ‘deeper justifications’ are thus often the first signs of a deep egotism, of a purely personal stress on the part of the creator. These questions do not concern art or creation, but rather the status of the individual. The proof of this is that when artists make, they usually cut off this “what is art” question from their processes: it doesn’t concern them at this time. This question only becomes pertinent later, when one must confer upon this creation a value.”

The desire to understand, to bridge the epistemological abyss, to overcome the passive consciousness, is thus linked (solely?) to a desire for value, which has nothing to do with actual artistic processes. Is this too cynical?

Strangely, more and more, I think that perhaps it is not.

The Hermeneutics of Hermeneutics

Just wanted to take a moment to respond to Ben Friedlander's comment at the end of the last thread, because it makes two excellent points, and made me think of a few things I haven't really clarified. So . . .

"When hermeneutics begins in a search (often fruitless) for a proper ground for hermeneutics, the experience of reading will often seem independent of understanding: will often seem to be an orientation toward understanding.

Reading as if understanding were impossible or irrelevant "aestheticizes" the poem; turns it into a strange object with certain sensual properties. Which is entirely reasonable, of course, but not exactly in the spirit of Celan's poetics."

Firstly, what is interesting for me is that, though I agree that this aestheticisation is globally against Celan's poetic - both its origins and its ends - the irony of this for me is that at certain points in Celan's poems it seems impossible to engage with them on any other level than precisely that of the "strange object with certain sensual properties." The second stanza of the Snowpart poem quoted below, for example - "the strong clocks back the fissure-hour, hoarsely" - seems to me much more profitably seen through the coloured lens of sensual wondering and (ap)perception than the clearer lens of any defined understanding-search. But of course, the important thing to remark is that this is not always the case in Celan, which is why Ben's feeling is just when he notes that stating that "understanding is impossible or irrelevant", in a general way, twists the poetic. After all, how ever can the witness witness if nobody understands what he means?

The search for meaning is thus necessary, but it is necessary as an orientation, a self-reflexive process which nevertheless, in thinking through and about the text, thinks through and about itself. And this search will sometimes come up against things which are more or less "aesthetic" in Ben's sense of the term, or more or less "referential", but this is, after all, the weft and woof of the hermeneutic cloth.

So, if we may decide then that Celan's poems attempt in no way to be non-referential (which perhaps seems obvious, but it's actually quite a common idea, especially in studies of Celan's reception of Mallarmé for instance), I feel that we may still say that they have certain more or less non-referential moments. New Criticism is not particularly adept at dealing with these moments, but I'm not sure what critical methodology is.

Ben seems valuably to underline, and he'll correct me if I'm wrong, that rejecting New Critical approaches to Celan is in no way to reject the referentiality of these poems: it is simply to indicate the possibility of orienting oneself toward a different, perhaps still positive, but more self-aware, hermeneutics.

Also, I think it's good to keep in mind that our discussion originated primarily from the idea of how to teach such poetry as Celan's in class, in the context of a school or university. Which is not the same as writing a critical essay - though it may sometimes resemble this - nor , further down the line, is it in any way the same as reading at home. For one thing, it takes professors who are willing, and perhaps confident enough, to say: "here, there is not much one can say."

And this reminds us that criticism is a very particular task, confined to particular moments, with value according to the particularity of these situations.

Which is in the end a sort of anti-hegemony that Paul Celan may have liked.

Putting Into Practice

I promised a mis en oeuvre of some of these abstract ideas
regarding the application of referential methodologies to non- or less- referential works. So, here's an attempt. It's a simple experiment, so we'll see where it works and where it doesn't.

To begin with, let's take a poem of Paul Celan's which is almost about this very question. Translations are by Pierre Joris, used with his permission. From Snowpart, "Schneepart" :


Unreadability of this
world. All doubles.

The strong clocks
back the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.

You, wedged into your deepest,
climb out of yourself
for ever.

The irony of the poem, I feel, and the reason why I would like to begin with it, is that even though it begins with this initial statement regarding unreadability - though of course it is the world here, not poetry, which is 'unreadable': poetry is, however, part of the world, so we detect nevertheless an implicit analogy - is that this poem's 'resistance' level, to pick up the terminology from the last post, is in the end perhaps not exceptionally high. New Critical studies of ambiguity and contre-sens can, for example, be applied at certain points, (though given the statement regarding unreadability at the beginning, we may feel all the more uncomfortable about these uses). The poem begins, for example, by way of an initial statement, which it then seems to seek to justify, to give a reason for its truth: the world is unreadable, and why? The term "doubles" is then richly ambiguous: is the idea that real phenomena are simply degraded versions of their conceptual models? Are we speaking of doubles in a platonic sense? Or is it that everything, including meaning or "readability", doubles itself, recreates itself, leads to a new version and vision of its own mode and being, meaning that meaning is eternally deferred, (in a rather Derridean sense)? Mr Empson, what do you say to this ?

"All this, and more."

Thank you. Then, however, I think we may just meet one of those famous 'resistors' I was so abstractly talking about:

The strong clocks
back the fissure-hour,
hoarsely.

Now, this passage can be unpacked, in a New Critical way, but I don't think that this really gets us anywhere. Let's try. The clock is perhaps strong because its progression is unstoppable: one cannot fight against fate, poor, poor Oedipus. But this powerful Time seems to lend its support to a moment of rupture (it 'backs' the fissure-hour), where 'hoarsely' perhaps refers to the foreboding and unpleasant quality of the clocks' chimes to announce this given, inevitable moment.

So, we've unpacked the thing a bit. What do we get out of this? What new vision do we have of the piece because of this process? Dare I venture: very little?

I would thus think of this second passage as being a possible New Critical 'resistor'.

Now, we move next to examples of poems with what I would think of as having a much higher resistance level, where very few parts may be successfully tackled by close-reading techniques. In the next poem, for instance, from 'Snowpart':

Whorish else. And eternity
blood-black circumbabeled.

Moored
by your loamy locks
my faith.

Two fingers, far from the hand,
a-row the swampy
oath.

There are recurring, somewhat coherent images: liquid-related (blood, mooring, loam, swamp), theological or metaphysical (faith, oath, eternity), physical (locks, finger, hand), but I simply do not see in this case how New Criticism can help us, where it can take us from here.

Of course, I would love to see readings or efforts to disprove this hypothesis. But at least for this critic, I suspect, gentle(wo)men, that here we have hit a wall.

The new-look stylish lines of Eratio 8 are now online. Included are some of my new poems from "Novaless".

"Points of Resistance"

"The current in a circuit is directly proportional to the applied potential difference and inversely proportional to the resistance of the circuit."

Ohm's Law

Thinking of Celan still, and the application of certain interpretative techniques to actively “anti-interpretative” works of art. My question is the following: even if we can perhaps say, as Andrew and Arne have cogently argued, that a poet like Celan is in the end largely interpretable, might it be possible to locate and define certain nodes or moments in a poem which seem to be there principally in order to actively combat particular reading strategies? In the current case, the strategy is that of New Critical elucidation (that’s I.A. above), but one can think of others (psychoanalytic approaches or genetic criticism spring immediately to mind). These “points of resistance”, to coin a concept, like the resistors in an electrical circuit, would stop the "current" of a particular critical methodology, divert it, or even, perhaps, transform it into white heat.
.
Now, these points of resistance are obviously not only or simply there to act as disruptors of a certain approach: they no doubt serve other (poetic) ends. But this resistance may nonetheless be one of their principle operative functions.

In the case of Celan, I think we can agree that it is clear that certain parts of certain poems are extremely resistant to New Critical strategies, all the while being extremely open and operable to other strategies, such as sound or musicality. This is immediately interesting, and perhaps allows us to make an initial distinction between two different types of possible resistors: on the one hand, resistors which resist one particular critical approach, and on the other, resistors which resist all critical approaches, if such a thing could ever exist. For it is clear that saying that certain moments in a poem may be points of resistance against a particular reading strategy is one thing: saying that there may be points of resistance which actively work against all reading strategies, is quite another. And the difference is crucial. For this second, all-powerful resistor would resemble, I imagine, the type of pure non-referentiality that the more utopian aspects of the Language project seemed sometimes to advocate. To continue the analogy, however, there is actually a very similar distinction to this one between different resistors in the electrical circuit:

"Resistors come in a variety of values and types. The most common type is the fixed resistor. Fixed resistors have single values of resistance, which remain constant. There are also variable resistors that can be adjusted to vary or change the amount of resistance in a circuit."

In other words, it is about an "adaptable" or "universal" hermeticism, resistant to all approaches. Does such a thing exist? To answer this, we would have to talk about whether a poem - further, language - can ever not mean. Now the problem with this is that the oft perceived hegemony of theory in high post-structuralism has perhaps shown that any graphic mark, or even the total absence of a graphic mark, may be considered "interesting", and thus apparently "readable". A certain current of recent art history has been based around the idea that even when proposing apparently "unreadable" works - e.g. utter white conceptual minimalism - these works can still be read, and end up being read, simply because of their context, or more globally, because perhaps nothing never does not refer.

But leaving this question aside for a moment, it is clear that for these points of resistance, their resistance is not necessarily "built-in", in an intentional way (though sometimes one imagines it may be): their resistance is present in the mode of their operation, they are simply not "openings" for a certain strategy and thus represent points of closure: "limits". (Though, it goes without saying, these precise sites of closure may be openings in the context of a different strategy.)

So the real question I suppose is this: when encountering resistance in a text, should one simply adapt one's interpretative strategies in a dynamic way, according to each specific situation: here a New Critical reading, there a different approach? This may be termed the "use-what-works-best-where" method, and it seems initially tempting, inciting openness and dynamism, and a criticism which, far from being rigid, responds, dialogues, adapts and evolves with the poem. But it is not, I think, without some important disadvantages. Firstly, this approach may lead to an extreme, even incomprehensible eclecticism. But even if an eclectic reading is not considered bad, a worse risk is that these diverse, changing strategies, though overcoming very different "resistors", might lead to a terrible sort of "categoricism", that is, the implication that "here the poem is more 'about' sound, here more 'about' reference, here metaphoricity etc. . . . " As, if only an aural-based approach works at a certain point - because of this point's resistance to fundamentally reference-based, New Critical strategies - then one would have a tendency to prioritise, and thus perhaps separate off, this aural aspect of the text, in default of others. Whereas we like to think that all of these things- sound, reference, metaphoricity -are really all in play at all times, only to a greater or lesser degree.

And so choosing one strategy and more or less sticking to it would level the playing field, as well as giving a very strong, coherent interpretation. But in this case, because of the static nature of the approach, those little points of resistance will always remain, and the best a critic can do is point to them and say: "Here it all broke down; I have to recognize that."

I think I will try to do a reading of a Celan poem to show how this idea of points of resistance might work. Perhaps you don't think that this idea of resistance is a useful one to apply to poetry at all. This will be interesting to see. Also, it will be curious to see if some things are for me "resistors" to a New Critical approach, whereas to others they pose little or no problem at all. This could, I hope, be a valuable extension of the discussion of poetic limits. I'd be very interested to hear some of your thoughts.

Because for me, these points of resistance, if they do indeed exist- the jury is out -may perhaps be precisely some of the most interesting moments in a poet like Celan: like little glowing, locked doors, they attract our attention, all the while playing games with our critical (skeleton) key.

The Sky is Crying

And now for a little musical interlude in the continuing poetics soirée. Pink champagne and cheezels are being served in the foyer. With Coltrane's Paris concert, two beloved live session tapes. First, Stevey Ray Vaughan in a little Hendrix cover:



And moreover, did anyone since Bird ever dress better on stage than BB?

Celan, Non-Referentiality and the Horizon of New Criticism

The experience of teaching Celan during these past few weeks has seen me confronted with a problem which I've been mulling over for quite a while now, namely: is it profoundly paradoxical to apply methodologies of close reading and textual analysis to poems which seem to defy the very posits and preconceived notions upon which these methodologies are based?



In other words, is it appropriate to apply New Critical-like techniques - techniques which after all were originally invented for a largely referential type of writing - to a writing which attempts to actively undermine, even to deconstruct, our conceptions of the very ways in which language refers?


This takes some explaining!



A very dear friend of mine recently reminded me of a moment in one of Celan's letters, (to Giselle I suspect, though I haven't been able to dig up the key quote), where Celan notes that at a particular moment during the composition of a poem he realised that a certain phrase was too explicit, too complacently categorical, and thus demanded to be rendered less direct, more "obscure". It's an experience many poets, especially contemporary poets, often have I suppose, namely, that of "making strange" by obscurity, the escape from the "obviousness" or "uninterestingness" of pure referentiality, where that which refers and refers simply often seems like language without texture, robbed of its modes or modulations.



And it is precisely this making strange so dear to the Russian Formalists which has been so vociferously attacked by more conservative, New Formalist and Quietist currents in contemporary poetics, and not, I think, without some justification here. For the "escape" from the "explicit referent" is an escape which perhaps requires an extremely complex and developed theory of poetic production, one which, arguably, supposedly non-referential projects such as high era Language never truly provided.

For is making strange always a quest to fly in the face of the hegemony of the signifier, or is it also sometimes a rising fog, the making out of language a mist . . . even a sort of posturing?



We must, of course, distinguish between language which seeks to give us no possible reading, and language which seeks to give us many different possible readings (the distinction between "non-referentiality" and "ambiguity" respectively). After all, this seems to be Perloff's position with regard to some elements of the Language era: that it's just a poetry with a lot more possible interpretations than other poetries, but that that in no way makes it non-referential. (Whether language can ever truly be non-referential, even in part, is also at the heart of the question, obviously . . .) For perhaps Celan, in the case of the above quote, simply wanted more positive ambiguity in his poem, in an Empsonian sense? More polysemic, more connotational, and thus more rich: like Shakespeare quoi . . .

Tim Peterson had some interesting things to say on these questions on his blog a few weeks ago, and I hope he won't mind me quoting him here:

"What interests me most about lit crit is how adorably inapplicable most of its analytical models are to our present rate of production and consumption. I'd like to see I. A. Richards come back and do a "close reading" of a postmodern postlanguage poem; it would probably take him all day. Or, sitting down with something more recent like Kristeva's famous Tel Quel essay about paragrams, let's bask for a moment in the glow of that first sentence which contains no less than three footnotes: "Literary semiology is already going beyond what are thought to be the inherent limitations of structuralism, its 'staticism' and its 'non-historicism', by setting itself the task that will justify it: the discovery of a formalism that corresponds isomorphically to literary productivity's thinking itself." Yikes. The ectoplasmic manifestation of an ideological Vermonter is haunting Europe."

For me, the precise problem here is that it is clear I think that I.A. Richards would not have spent hours on some postmodern postlanguage poems, and may rather have simply, after some concerted reflection, puffed at the pipe and shrugged: "New art needs new criticism". Although, importantly, this is precisely the opposite reaction to somebody like Perloff, who seems to have set out to prove, in the case of Language poetry, that in spite of some of its manifestorial premises, it can be interpreted; and of course Perloff's interpretative readings of these works -which were supposed to defy interpretability - are exceedingly impressive. 1

But for Celan, I don't know if I can do it. There is much to say, enormous amounts to say, but I feel always that my critical methods are too strict for these (most beautiful) poems, that it is like the application of set ideological structures, for instance, upon the organism of a society. And I don't know if the beauty and value of Celan depends on that. To some extent, it does: but there is so much, the greatest part perhaps, which often seems to simply pass through the critical net like so many wondrous little anti-referential glitter fish.

(The "anti-referential" side to Celan is of course extremely complex. First up, it is not at all clear, I think, that such a term may ever be used in relation to Celan's poetic. But even if it may, it surely has something to do with the imagined referentiality of History: that is, if Celan felt the hegemony of sense, the oppressive weight of the signifier, it is perhaps something similar to the oppreasive significatory weight of History, to which the individual is able to (re)assure his or her own status as individual only by means of the rebellious presence of witness and witnessing (der Zeuge, bezeugen). )

I tried to make the students see that so much of the value of Celan depends precisely on this tension, and this possible "refusal" of language's easy links. But I don't know if they're there yet. They seemed to still simply want to watch me play "Watch-Me-Interpret!" New Critic: the party-trick, the "I'm a very clever close-reader", who has the answers, who makes links and is rigorous.

Except that, Celan's words almost aren't there any more: joined to other words, disfigured and deciphered, the words have almost, in places, disappeared . . .

(1 And yet if Perloff seems to suggest that Language poetry can, indeed must, be interpreted, does that mean that it must be Empsonised? For of course, the Perloffian counter-attack to this idea might be that not all types of close reading are marching to the same drum. But I think that maybe we can at least say that they make part of largely the same army.)

Poem of a Day

This was originally elicited by Tom Beckett's “poem of a day” project, but then became something almost entirely else. It happens. I suppose I’ll share it nonetheless.


aubade in a remembered style

do the bells still announce an occurrence ?
in predawns * bereft of awakening
while in a moving darkness
out of sleep
as the leaves elicit
documentaries as the day grows to be
itself * then replaces the screen
by the screen
of light :
perishing perception
fading its stylings * into antecedents . . . do
not recount «the following» of the hours :
ubi sunt is never in the sketch *
of matter all petals are
golden
past the still sundial upon
the lived place . . . in polished wood
no birds means we have become «baroque»
entered into quiet history and made
sleep * this : coiled and recoiled
against any feasible idea
of even a sole tran-
-s(c)ending *
moment

Death and Critical Transparency

A few months ago I was asked to write an appreciation of the last, just-released book of a recently deceased French poet. I choose the word “appreciation” intentionally: it was this word the editor himself used, and I remember understanding– by its subtle, unassuming presence –precisely what was, in this case, required. For of course, what was wanted was not a critical appraisal of the poet’s final book– “this works, this does not work”, and why –but rather a eulogy, an attempt to see this final work as a summation of that which had come before. An occasion to render homage.

And so I said no.

Firstly, let me say that I don’t know what I would have thought of the poet’s last book, but one thing was clear: to have written a negative review would have been considered exceptionally bad taste. And of course it's clear why: funeral eulogists rarely talk much about the many problems and issues in a person’s life, or talk of them only in passing: there are limits which surround this cultural discourse, the limits of expectation.

Now, all our language uses are determined by what our interlocutors expect from us. Thus, the critic’s task is always surrounded by what one can and can’t say in a certain situation; but in the French case, the limit’s placed upon my critical liberty by the expected statute of the piece seemed too weighty, too directive for me, and thus elicited my non.

It is an unusual situation, and shows us something about the way we consider death and artistic production in society. Look, for example, at the often very silly things people are saying about Robert Altman’s last film. (The critical perspectives now emerging out of Altman's death are rendered exceedingly ironic in the context of Altman's 1982 film "Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean", which is about the post-mortem reunion of a 1950's Dean fan-club). Now, the poor man did not know he was going to die, and yet critics are already calling it his “testament”, something which unifies, in a final statement, all his previous preoccupations. This seems a rather anachronistic reflex.

But, with the death of Kari Edwards this week, I have been thinking about my decision and wondering if it was the right one. For it makes us realise that each piece of criticism always has a specific role, a specific context, and one of our obligations as readers is to try to understand, before anything else, what this context might be. I was thinking of the reviews to come, in Galatea and in many literary reviews and forums, of Edwards' last volume, which I recently read. These pieces will be influenced by the early death of the poet, and I wonder what to think about this. I wonder too what Edwards may have thought about this.

I am not at all saying that I did not like Edwards' last book, that opinion is here irrelevant. But we are so very careful around death, our language uses become suddenly hypersensitive. (Even the fact that I feel it necessary to here underline my respect is indicative.) In spite of this, it is clear the value that appreciations have, for a eulogy has a very specific, no doubt necessary role in a culture, and often takes, in critical circles, the form of writing as mourning. But if this mourning were to be rendered dishonest by its limits, were to cover over problems for the sake of homage, may it still be an authentic coming-to-terms?

.

My problem is that I recognize that things no doubt should be written of poets at the time of their death, as they were just last year for Robert Creeley. Not everyone then shares my perhaps unproductive reticence, and not everyone is made uncomfortable by the imposed limits of this discourse.

.

Remains the fact however that I don' t think I could accept, on a personal level, considering reviewing such "testamental" works, (at least without talking at length about the role such a review is expected to play). I’d be interested to hear from people who would.

Limits, World and Language

In the ongoing discussion about limits and barriers in poetry and poetics, Tom Beckett quotes Charles Bernstein's following very beautiful passage:

TB: "In what regard does a sense of 'limit' enter into the work or your work in general?"

CB: "Well, completely--that there's no limit to limits and blockages, stoppages, jam as depth of field, as the abstraction/condensation of poetry, as if a dam were the poem's hydroelectric power/intensity source. So it's both a subject matter and a formal concern. What, after all, is the subject matter of poetry? Certainly limitation is right up there, as the body, time, place. Here you have a subject matter that actually raises itself in formal terms. I'm a bit leery of what gets called self-referentiality in poetry because of the possible self-consciousness in that--'here I am writing this on yellow paper, and you, the reader, looking at this script become type' and so on. I tend to want to cut that out. The Occurence of Tune was partly a work in which I left in, made a piece around, what I would normally think to edit out. But the point is that what's significant about issues of formal limitation as a subject is not the self-comment on the object you can get, that's almost a distracting byproduct, but rather what this says, manifests, works out, about communication, about what and how one person can mean something, what the limits of that are. So it always seems ironic to hear someone say, well I'm not interested in aesthetic issues, I'm interested in emotion, or life, since if you can attend to the writing in the right way these so-called aesthetic issues stop being comments about writing or the poem itself and become investigations into the possibilities of and the realizations of communicating or acting or being in the world. Everybody has their ends, the things they can make do with. What's the subject matter of poetry? The way a person walks across a room, listens to him or herself, the patterns of the water as it falls, the color of the sky. One reads these words to see how a person measures their day, or how it could be measured. Everything is contained when it is apprehended; language is limitation. One sees certain things, or constructs them. And a limit is just the measure at hand."
(Charles Bernstein, from Content's Dream, Sun & Moon, 1986).

‘Language is limitation’ Bernstein tells us: but, I think it is important to add– and this was evident in Tom’s post, and also with regard to our discussion about poetic constraints –that so is the world. It is this which prevents us from adhering to any utopian vision of a “true perception”, (autonomous and distinct from perception through language), which would have no limits, no barriers: a pristine phenomenology. Bernstein recognizes this, for our perception for him is a process of (re-) “construction”.


What was so very interesting for me in Tom's Unprotected Texts was the way in which it was so clear in these poems that the limits in question were not solely the limits of language or those of the world: that they were strangely both at once, mixing, crossing, overlapping and overlying one another simultaneously, as in a coloured weft. So that to address one would be to address the other. Which is what Charles Bernstein points out when he underlines the fact that “aesthetic issues” become issues about the world.


This said then, to be tortured by the limits of language is to be tortured also by the limits of the world. At a posterior stage, maybe, but the mode is the same. And it is also the reason why we should perhaps try to see these barriers not as the abyss of language, as Mallarmé no doubt often did, but as something else: for limit is what confers upon us a certain understanding, it is even the modality of our understanding, (for “limit is measure”, in Bernstein's words, and we cannot even contemplate, it seems, the "unmeasurable limitlessness".) (The French poet Philippe Jaccottet is very interesting on this idea). It's almost like the Aristotelian unmoved-mover: the unmeasurable-measurer, creator of initial perception!


The link of poetic limitation and poetic self-referentiality is also crucial, for it’s not surprising that those poets most interested in questions of formal, referential or communicational barriers are often those the most often accused of “hermeticism”. Mallarmé springs to mind again, Celan also, and the Metaphysical poets, Donne, Herbert, Richard Crashaw, where the limit of the body (for the Metaphysicals) or the cosmos (for Mallarmé) are the event-horizons of language, and also, somewhat amusingly, something which language tries to overcome. Which is ironic, because language as limit is thus used to overcome limits: to abolish them, to take us elsewhere!


And yet beyond the limit of words there is the limit of objects and of objecthood. Which is precisely why we must accept language’s game, perhaps, for this is also to accept the game of the world: there are certain rules, and one cannot pick up one’s ball and go home without a solid rope or a gun.


And to return to constraints: it’s clear that constraints are a putting forward, an announcement, a mis en relief of the limitations of language and of the world. But what disturbed me initially in the constraints of OuLiPo disturbs me still: namely, that the static nature of these limits make them much more passive and amenable than the terrible Protean limits with which we are confronted in our lives: the changes of the world, its sempiternel proposition of new barriers and new obstacles to our thought, perception and action.


And I do love Craig’s image of the joy of OuLiPo being “a morbid fascination with the contortions and facial gestures that escape-artists make when finding their way out of strait jackets”. But my issue is: what if this poetic strait jacket were actually too simple, as if all its buckles, which seem done up, were actually undone, whereas the changing, dynamic strait-jacket of the phenomenal world (bear with me here . . .) is never still, but responds to new situations with new limits. The OuLiPo jacket is thus not a model or metaphor of the limited world, but a way of feeling more comfortable about limits: almost a patting oneself on the back.


Which is why I prefer Tom’s poems to OuLiPo poems: they are about the fluidity of present limits, and their "strait-jacket" accordingly made up of moving and morphing buckles.


There is lots more to say about this, mainly on Craig’s very interesting suggestion that there are perhaps three major constraint categories, not two: organic, mechanic, and a third, “mechanic where the mechanical form of the constraint MATTERS.”


Another post soon.