I'm always a little nervous about mics,
but is this OK, the level and everything.
I want to introduce this reading tonight
by reading to you a statement that I
wrote in January of 1986.
It was really a letter to Michael Cuddihy
who is the editor of Ironwood.
As you all know, the final issue of that
has appeared, as Lois mentioned.
And I want to acknowledge Michael's great work
over the years in producing Ironwood.
And I want also to acknowledge my debt to him.
He has published my work very generously
in a number of issues.
In Ironwood 27, which was an issue that is devoted,
about a quarter of that issue is devoted
to work of mine and essays about my work.
For that issue, Michael asked me to write a statement.
The statement that I wrote however, was not published,
and I have not read it before.
So I thought tonight that I would read it for you.
Before I read the statement, I want
to read what became the epigraph to A Reading.
I consider it an epigraph to the whole work.
It is published however in the beginning of this volume,
Reading 1 through 7.
It comes from a book called After Babel by George Steiner.
And it reads: Wittgenstein asked where, when, and by what
rationally established criterion the process of free yet
potentially linked and significant association
in psychoanalysis could be said to have a stop.
An exercise in total reading is also potentially an ending.
And so my letter to Michael is this.
At the most literal level of association,
A Reading begins with my reading of George Steiner's After Babel
in the spring or early summer of 1978.
His demonstration of the endlessness of literature
was impressive, but I might not have taken up
Wittgenstein's challenge implicit in my chosen epigraph
had I not already sustained the wound of reading Freud
at an earlier age.
The theoretical possibility of the open endedness of writing
linked with the idea of the interminability
of psychoanalysis was the peak gap, peak/ gap,
the trap into which I fell.
A Reading also begins with a critique of the persona poem.
Excuse me, of the persona poem as
exemplified by my Egyptian Poems,
in which Erica Hunt, who is a writer and a friend of mine
at the time argued against the stylization of the mask,
the limitation, a kind of censorship of sources,
and for a writing of wider inclusion.
It's an argument I was prone to hear sympathetically insofar
as I was quote, ''already looking for it.''
A Reading is not psychoanalysis: it
demonstrates, is even in revolt against, the lack of an other.
Psychoanalysis may occur as a privileged social interaction
highly formalized between two people.
A Reading cannot claim that luxury.
There's a way in which A Reading is not only interminable
but is also incurable.
It obscures any hope of cure whatever
that may mean at the beginning.
In this way, it affirms the powers
I would say following Lacan's usage of the real.
That is of the invisible, the dead, ghosts
and demons, the gods.
It is about repeating, the repetition compulsion,
circularity and closure as marks of the formal.
It is about the possibility of grace and mercy, quote:
"death is a mercy and so also is beauty."