Poetry and the crisis of personhood

For some poets, poetry had come to seem implicated in or complicit with the crisis of personhood. The very qualities that give poetry power in the domain of personhood—its ability to open up powerful channels of communication, to create a vivid and subtle picture of a mind in action, to create opportunities for readers to exercise their powers of sympathy to recognize and value their own subjective powers—these had come to seem restrictive rather than expansive—because every one of them had a limit and an end. Even the most minimal account of the person (like the most abstract picture or the most “anti-closural” poem) specifies some minimal features. Now, features themselves had become part of the crisis, and something extraordinary had to happen within or to the art of putting words together into sentences and lines, ordering sounds into sequences and patterns, arraying lines on the space of the page, in order to address that crisis. - Oren Izenberg

regarding Being Numerous

Kafka the Anarcho-Conformist

Externally, he adapted: to the family surroundings that he left for good less than a year before dying; to the externals of dating and pretending he wished to marry; to steady rise as an exemplary official in a state insurance company. These were all facets of an adaptation he hated to various degrees. And while he acted his part in the world, he defended himself by fiercely subverting that same world in his writings. In his fiction he demolished the very norms to which he submitted in his everyday life: Authority, Justice, the Rule of Law, the very logic of human communication. - Saul Friedländer

On Antigone / Sublimation & Oedipus Rex / Freedom

Antigone, as Lacan's figure for the beautiful, embodies this excess of the ethical over the aesthetic. The effect of her beauty, what Lacan refers to as her 'splendour', is to trace the sublime movement of the ethical within the aesthetic. The key term in Lacan's extraordinary reading of Antigone is até, which he renders as 'transgression'. Thus, the function of art is transgression, the transgression of the aesthetic through the aesthetic. Namely, that Antigone transgresses the laws of utilitarian Creon, refuses to feel any guilt for her transgression and does not give way on her desire. As such, she obeys the categorical imperative of Lacanian psychoanalysis: ne pas céder sur son désir [not to yield to his desire].

The law of desire is death and Antigone goes all the way unto death because she will not give way on her desire. The beautiful work of sublimation, and Antigone is this work - she is the beautiful - takes the human being to the limit of a desire which cannot be fully represented. The work of sublimation traces the outline of something sublime, the aesthetic object describes the contour of the Thing, la Chose, das Ding, at the heart of ethical experience. In Seminar VII, this is why Lacan writes, 'Thus, the most general formula that I can give you of sublimation is the following: it raises the object to the dignity of the Thing.' In sublimation, we are momentarily lifted from the utilitarian world of calculations, the world of our familiar concerns, and allowed a relation to the Thing that does not crush or destroy us. The beautiful artwork sublimes the object, endowing it with Thingly dignity. Or again, beauty sublimes an object into the Thing. In relation to this sublimed object, we experience catharsis, what Lacan thinks of as a kind of purification of desire. . .To my mind, Lacan makes Antigone into the heroine of psychoanalysis: she who does not give way on her desire and follows that categorical imperative all the way to her death.

Thinking of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex rather than Antigone. . .the claim here is that at the end of the tragedy Oedipus succeeds in attaining a free recognition of his determination by necessity or fate. At the start of the drama, Oedipus falsely believed himself to be free. Unbeknownst to himself, however, he is determined by necessity: married to his mother, his father's murderer and the source of the evil pollution that threatens the life of the polis. By the end of the tragedy, however, Oedipus is truly free because he knows the truth about who he is and also knows what is to be done, that he must leave the polis. Having stuck out his eyes, he can finally see and is led calmly from the stage by the hand of his daughter, Antigone. The tragic hero, then, is defined by the free acceptance of their determination by fate. They heroically bear the truth of their finitude in an act of affirmation which allows them to achieve authenticity. - Simon Critchley

“A Little Fable” by Kafka

"Alas," said the mouse, "the world gets smaller every day. At first it was so wide that I ran along and was happy to see walls appearing to my right and left, but these high walls converged so quickly that I’m already in the last room, and there in the corner is the trap into which I must run." 

"But you’ve only got to run the other way," said the cat, and ate it.

"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" by Ariana Reines

If the mind is the sword that stabs
The heart and the heart is bleeding
In the art and the woman is bleeding
In the night where her love is as sweet

As a book in a boat on the hissing sea
Then could the bad that crosses the good
In her book be the quotient of all the good
And bad in the world but also especially

All the good and bad in any Good
Book and the least good book of all worlds?
And if that could be then could the light that flares

Whenever with a full heart you open the ark
Where all your promises are burning
To death and kept be the selfsame light of all things?

“Lines” by Anne Carson

While talking to my mother I neaten things. Spines of books by the phone.

Paperclips

in a china dish. Fragments of eraser that dot the desk. She speaks

longingly

of death. I begin tilting all the paperclips in the other direction.

Out

the window snow is falling straight down in lines. To my mother,

love

of my life, I describe what I had for brunch. The lines are falling

faster

now. Fate has put little weights on the ends (to speed us up) I

want

to tell her—sign of God’s pity. She won’t keep me

she says, she

won’t run up my bill. Miracles slip past us. The

paperclips

are immortally aligned. God’s pity! How long

will

it feel like burning, said the child trying to be

kind.

Letter to Kafka

Berlin-Charlottenburg, April 10, 1917

       Dear Sir,

       You made me unhappy.

       I bought your "Metamorphosis" as a gift for my cousin. But, she is incapable of understanding the story. My cousin gave it to her mother who doesn't understand it either. The mother gave the book to my other cousin, who also didn't find an explanation. Now they have written to me: They expect me to explain the story to them as I am the doctor in the family. But I am at a loss.

       Sir! I have spent months in the trenches exchanging blows with the Russians without batting an eyelid. But I could not stand losing my good name with my cousins. Only you can help me. You must do it, as you are the one who landed me in this mess. So please tell me what my cousin should think about "Metamorphosis."

       Most respectfully yours,

       Dr. Siegfried Wolff

"Stanzas, Sexes, Seductions" by Anne Carson

It’s good to be neuter.
             I want to have meaningless legs.
                          There are things unbearable.
                                       One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The ocean reminds me
             of your green room.
                          There are things unbearable.
                                       Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.
             I do not want to be a person.
                          I want to be unbearable.
                                       Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.
             Who does not end up
                          a female impersonator?
                                       Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.

I tempt you.
             I blush.
                         There are things unbearable.
                                      Legs, alas.
Legs die.

Rocking themselves down,
             crazy slow,
                          some ballet term for it —
                                       fragment of foil, little
spin,
             little drunk,
                          little do,
                                       little oh,
                                                    alas.

Jorie Graham on Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus

I often teach a painting of Caravaggio’s, Supper at Emmaus. Christ is sitting before us in an alcove against the “back wall” of the painting. We face into a dinner table covered with things for the meal. We are quite sure that the edge of this table is identical with the absolute front of the canvas. But then one undergoes a troubling sensation. The basket of fruit, the edge of the wicker basket, sticks out into our “actual” space, our here and now. The host suddenly recognizes the stranger at his table as Christ and throws open his arms, like this. [Gestures.] His left hand comes out, beyond the border—further than the sacramental grapes in their wicker—out here into the same air that you (and I) are breathing in the National Gallery. At the same time, his right hand penetrates the crucial illusionistic space, the alcove in which Christ sits. What he does, by going like this, is enact what it is to be “taken” by surprise, to be, suddenly, in that spiritual place where the otherness of the world, of possibility, “turns” one’s soul—taking one off the path of mere “ongoingness” onto the other path of “journey.” At any rate, the host’s gesture connects that immortal-because-imaginary space Christ occupies, with the mortal one of the gallery in which I am standing breathing my minutes—and you suddenly realize Caravaggio has activated what I call the “sensation of real time”: the time of the painting’s represented action has crossed over into the time in which my only days are taking place. So you cannot read the painting without being inside the terms of the painting, which are these graduating degrees of temporality: mortal time, immortal time, represented time, actual time, the “time” of process. The activity of the painting is to do that. The host is crucified in this position—a position the artist is also in—saying, You reader and you subject (God, Christ), I have put you two together. It’s my job. That’s what the meal is. That’s what we eat.

Five Poems about Poetry

Poem

by William Carlos Williams

As the cat

climbed over

the top of

the jamcloset

first the right

forefoot

carefully

then the hind

stepped down

into the pit of

the empty

flowerpot

Notes on the Art of Poetry

by Dylan Thomas

I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on

in the world between the covers of books,

such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,,,

such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,

such and so many blinding bright lights,, ,

splashing all over the pages

in a million bits and pieces

all of which were words, words, words,

and each of which were alive forever

in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

Poetry is a Destructive Force

by Wallace Stevens

That's what misery is,

Nothing to have at heart.

It is to have or nothing.

It is a thing to have,

A lion, an ox in his breast,

To feel it breathing there.

Corazon, stout dog,

Young ox, bow-legged bear,

He tastes its blood, not spit.

He is like a man

In the body of a violent beast

Its muscles are his own...

The lion sleeps in the sun.

Its nose is on its paws.

It can kill a man.

My Heart

by Frank O'Hara

I'm not going to cry all the time

nor shall I laugh all the time,

I don't prefer one "strain" to another.

I'd have the immediacy of a bad movie,

not just a sleeper, but also the big,

overproduced first-run kind. I want to be

at least as alive as the vulgar. And if

some aficionado of my mess says "That's

not like Frank!", all to the good! I

don't wear brown and grey suits all the time,

do I? No. I wear workshirts to the opera,

often. I want my feet to be bare,

I want my face to be shaven, and my heart--

you can't plan on the heart, but

the better part of it, my poetry, is open.

A High-Toned Old Christian Woman

by Wallace Stevens

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.

Take the moral law and make a nave of it

And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,

The conscience is converted into palms,

Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.

We agree in principle. That's clear. But take

The opposing law and make a peristyle,

And from the peristyle project a masque

Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,

Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,

Is equally converted into palms,

Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,

Madame, we are where we began. Allow,

Therefore, that in the planetary scene

Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,

Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,

Proud of such novelties of the sublime,

Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,

May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves

A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.

This will make widows wince. But fictive things

Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

"High and Bright and Fine and Ice" by Darcie Dennigan

When the motorboat man asked me to love him

I whispered precipice

the word for the no-more-boyfriend feeling

because precipice contains ice (practically twice)

because I wanted teetering—

What? he said

Yes

His ears from the engines—so hard of hearing—his hands always so hot

Mid our first winter—I’d clung so long to the dock

he had to crowbar my fingers off

Each digit cracked so cleanly

Would you say they break like icicles? I asked sweetly

I knew I was nothing! But if I could sustain one song—

I is, I is, I is I is I is

I could be: ice

Sex on the bathroom’s cold marble counter was best

I whispered statuette, monument

What? he, sculpting my legs, said

Yes

The child? I named her Cecily

It sounded like iced lily

For pure, I said pristine

At the ocean, I said brine

Isle for vacation; for flowers, edelweiss

But when I said (only of late, late!) I choose ice

Brittle pearls broke behind my syllables

Did he hear me?

Again, twice, thrice:

For my love

we would need to live

in a great pyramid

We would need to sleep

beneath the continental shelf

with Antarctic crust blanketing us

The only driveway to any kind of house

is an iceberg-ridden Northwest Passage

When I whispered universe

you were to translate it as

one bright line

one bright rime

On failure and perseverance towards the living impulse

You write something and there’s no reality to it. You can’t inject it with any kind of reality. You have to be patient and keep going, and then, one day, you can feel something signaling to you from the innermost recesses. Like a little person trapped under the rubble of an earthquake. And very, very, very slowly you find your way toward the little bit of living impulse. - Deborah Eisenberg

Why Schools Need the Arts

There are habits of learning (like “sticktoitiveness”) that the arts foster.

The tangibility of the arts: the presence of a something that was not there before the artist/student created it. From this emerge the learning outcomes of imagination (possibilities that the student invents and/or considers) and agency (the student’s central role in effecting these ends).

A focus on emotion, out of which students learn about expression (giving shape to their own feelings) and empathy (recognizing the emotions of others).

Ambiguity: the arts deliberate delivery of multiple meanings from which students learn about interpretation (making sense) and respect (for others’ sense making).

Kids who struggle in reading seem able to memorize all their lines for the play.

When the arts are included, more students show up at school and furthermore, they stay to graduate.

Kids who have left high school show up at community art centers and direct shows.

Visual arts give students the opportunity and courage to express their inner lives.

Musical ensembles give students a sense of community and mattering.

Playing a dramatic role enables students to experience almost first hand the suffering of a grieving friend.

The safe haven that students find in the arts classroom and the difference they experience between arts teachers who treat them like colleagues who can make their own choices and non-arts teachers whose expectations are set and constrained.

The passage from childhood to adulthood is both thrilling and perilous and at this challenging time of life, these students find that arts learning helps them with the pressing agenda of self-discovery.

The arts teach students to think in important ways that other subjects do not - beyond the right answer to critical analysis and interpretation.

What is beyond measure often has the most value - imagination, agency, emotion, expression…

Arts learning’s more authentic often holistic means of assessment: just as it seems laughable to reduce our estimation of expression or imagination to a numerical score, we need to be more mindful of the injustice we do to all learning areas by restricting them to the playing fields of right or wrong - math and science, like the arts, are fueled by good questions (not just right answers).

How many more of us would be able to participate as makers and audiences in the timeless and particularly human conversation that the arts perpetuate.

- Jessica Hoffmann Davis

The Olympian calm of form in Tarkovsky’s "Mirror"

Tarkovsky always maintained that he used the laws of music as the film’s organising principle. He considered film to have much in common with a musical ordering of material, where emphasis was placed not on the logic, but on the form, of the flow of events. And form for him was ultimately linked to time - the duration and the passage of time in each shot. But he did not approach time as an abstract, philosophical concept; rather, it was an inner psychological reality and he believed that one of the aims of the film director was to create his unique sense of time in a film, which was independent of real time.

This Olympian calm of form is what prompted those of Tarkovsky’s colleagues who were expecting intense scenes between the protagonists to call the film dull; it is what turns the burning shed from a destructive accident into an epiphany, and why the grenade the military instructor throws himself on is a dummy… Tarkovsky admired Checkhov for removing the first page of his stories, in order to eradicate the ‘why’. He himself removes pages throughout the story, leaving us with fragments, whose meaning and motivation is not easily decipherable. We are left instead with a feeling for a particular mood, atmosphere or emotion – and a world of juxtapositions and correspondences, to which we must bring to bear our own sensibility. - Natasha Synessios

Watch it for free here, or without it periodically stalling for $3 here.

from “No Word, No Sign” by Aaron Kunin

There’s no word for you. There’s no word

for what you do to me. For what you do,

somehow, and you don’t know you do it,

to my mind with just your voice, so that

everything I once was sure of seems wrong;

for what you do to my way of seeing,

so that I start to doubt my own eyes if

what my eyes report isn’t just like what

I hear you say; and for what you do to

my voice to keep it from talking, to keep down

every word somewhere where I can’t remember

it: for this, there’s no word. To me

you’re like a machine without a purpose,

whose purpose is to cast doubt on every

idea that my mind is thinking, and

the end of every idea is you.