Thank you.
This will mostly not be a formal deal.
I did have six or seven pages here that I
would like to begin with.
And then if I'm still here we'll go into a little discussion
of particular writers who, in various, vastly different ways,
embody this notion of the poem as a kind of meeting place.
Can you hear me back there?
No, not really.
I'll try to be louder.
[INAUDIBLE]
And at the appropriate time, particularly when
we're talking about individual poets,
to change this into an exchange if you
are interested in the particular writers and material
that we're dealing with, the persons of a poem.
On cable TV recently I surprisingly
came across the documentary Derrida
in which some young people follow the French philosopher
cameras in both his domestic and professional life
and constructed a personal portrait
over a couple of years.
Occasionally they would insert a quote from Derrida
along the bottom of the picture.
One in particular caught my eye and stayed with me.
Quote "The determination of the self as one is violence.
Determination of the self as one is violence."
And that struck me as good a place
to begin this little talk as any.
This talk on what?
We'll see.
The persons of the poem, I suppose,
and its space, the poem's space, both metaphorical and actual,
and the present of the poem, and the future past,
and the historical present.
I'd better hasten to add that it will not
be about Derrida or deconstruction,
so you may all return to your seats, or both of you
may return to your seats, whichever applies.
Since I'm reminded that it is always
difficult to anticipate the nature of the audience,
and therefore the conversation, when we are engaged with poetry
and poetics, we do trust that a conversation takes
place even if only one within the poem itself,
and that too is part of our topic.
I must confess that I find it particularly difficult to know
how to address you this afternoon in the name
of poetry, when it seems to me that our Republic
and its foundational language and values and its place
in the world of nations are all under such relentless assault.
I speak now of the assault from within,
an assault conducted by means of those very words we take
as basic to just governance, freedom, liberty, democracy,
justice.
Words whose currency has been debased
in the purported support of those things they are meant
to secure, openness, candor, respect for others,
and for difference, and for the varieties of life
on the planet.
What could a poetic signify in such times?
What is the necessity of poetry beyond the blasé of poetry
of instrumentality and harangue?
What use poetry's weak and strong voices, quiet and loud
voices, its celebration of otherness and difference,
of the play of imagination and reason, chants and pattern,
chaos and order, dreamed and waking consciousness?
We seem to be searching now, and perhaps always,
within the present for a present that is not,
a present in place of the one offered and ordained,
product of some monstrous devolution of thought
and the inebriation of power.
We search for the body of the poem, veiled or cloaked
as it is in our time.
The body of the poem, its presence, only a small number
of poems find this.
That poem that is fashioned at once alone
and in company, an impossible thing,
ungovernable, and exiled, and without power.
That eternal tradition of examining things as they are,
and as they are said to be, by means of a language
everywhere present around us and within us,
within language itself, but unheard.
A world, some might say, of misrule, wherein we experience
the truth of the poem's lies, and the lies
of the state's truths and absolutes, where
the subversions and refusals of the poem, its nothings,
its disorders, counter the institutionalized corruption
of the logos, the word, and the nomos, the law.
We employ encomium, praise, and satire, ridicule,
but let us not forget lyric and its insistence
on desire, the desiring self in the face of repression.
It reminds me, of course always, of the force
of this particular nothing, individual desire.
When you think, for example that Anna Akhmatova was
capable of terrifying Stalin by writing love poems.
This is great, the new terrorism, the old one.
The space of the poem is a space of debate, and staging,
and conversation among ourselves, and there others,
and those voices that precede, and those yet to come.
The figures therein, the figura, are not ours.
It is an alternative space at once
outside and inside, as any space can be at a given moment.
This room, for example, this stanza, should we so insist,
it is perhaps the only space where I am truly at home since
I cannot recognize myself there, or here.
Who are the persons of the poem?
Let me begin by reading a poem that that phrase popped out
of when I began to think about this talk.