WEBVTT

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I'm always a little
nervous about mics,

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but is this OK, the
level and everything.

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I want to introduce
this reading tonight

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by reading to you
a statement that I

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wrote in January of 1986.

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It was really a letter
to Michael Cuddihy

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who is the editor of Ironwood.

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As you all know, the
final issue of that

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has appeared, as Lois mentioned.

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And I want to acknowledge
Michael's great work

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over the years in
producing Ironwood.

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And I want also to
acknowledge my debt to him.

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He has published my
work very generously

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in a number of issues.

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In Ironwood 27, which was
an issue that is devoted,

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about a quarter of
that issue is devoted

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to work of mine and
essays about my work.

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For that issue, Michael asked
me to write a statement.

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The statement that I wrote
however, was not published,

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and I have not read it before.

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So I thought tonight that
I would read it for you.

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Before I read the
statement, I want

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to read what became the
epigraph to A Reading.

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I consider it an epigraph
to the whole work.

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It is published however in
the beginning of this volume,

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Reading 1 through 7.

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It comes from a book called
After Babel by George Steiner.

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And it reads: Wittgenstein
asked where, when, and by what

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rationally established criterion
the process of free yet

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potentially linked and
significant association

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in psychoanalysis could
be said to have a stop.

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An exercise in total reading
is also potentially an ending.

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And so my letter
to Michael is this.

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At the most literal
level of association,

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A Reading begins with my reading
of George Steiner's After Babel

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in the spring or
early summer of 1978.

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His demonstration of the
endlessness of literature

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was impressive, but I
might not have taken up

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Wittgenstein's challenge
implicit in my chosen epigraph

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had I not already sustained
the wound of reading Freud

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at an earlier age.

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The theoretical possibility of
the open endedness of writing

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linked with the idea
of the interminability

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of psychoanalysis was
the peak gap, peak/ gap,

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the trap into which I fell.

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A Reading also begins with a
critique of the persona poem.

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Excuse me, of the
persona poem as

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exemplified by my
Egyptian Poems,

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in which Erica Hunt, who is
a writer and a friend of mine

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at the time argued against
the stylization of the mask,

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the limitation, a kind
of censorship of sources,

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and for a writing
of wider inclusion.

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It's an argument I was prone
to hear sympathetically insofar

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as I was quote, ''already
looking for it.''

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A Reading is not
psychoanalysis: it

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demonstrates, is even in revolt
against, the lack of an other.

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Psychoanalysis may occur as a
privileged social interaction

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highly formalized
between two people.

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A Reading cannot
claim that luxury.

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There's a way in which A
Reading is not only interminable

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but is also incurable.

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It obscures any hope
of cure whatever

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that may mean at the beginning.

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In this way, it
affirms the powers

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I would say following
Lacan's usage of the real.

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That is of the invisible,
the dead, ghosts

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and demons, the gods.

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It is about repeating,
the repetition compulsion,

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circularity and closure
as marks of the formal.

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It is about the possibility
of grace and mercy, quote:

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"death is a mercy and
so also is beauty."

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