Poetry is a step beyond paraphrase.

In my more radical moments of pursuing the purity of the unparaphrasable, I tried to differentiate within a given poem which of its elements tend toward the prosaic (or ‘sophic’) and which are purely poetry. At that time, I came across a line from a poem by Michael Laver that seemed perfectly elucidative of this: The frost tattoos its sermon on the rose. This line stood out at me amidst thirty others which, so I felt then, lent themselves more to paraphrase— whereas that line absolutely resisted it. The reason Paul Celan has been my go-to figure in poetics is because his work manifests this resistance to paraphrase to a maximal degree, and he has the vision to back it up.

Over time in my own writing I have complicated these distinctions between pure poetry and the sophic, but still I would say the most rewarding experience as a poet is to write something that is so much its own thing that not even you can say what it means besides. This obviously creates certain issues when it comes to sharing the poem— it can seem like nonsense, a riddle, an empty game. But this is a risk the poet runs in order to communicate, convey, evoke, something beyond the “ambitions and expectations” of prose and escape “prosodic capture” (cited from Jonathon Tillotson in conversation).

I view poetry as intervening at the very level of our linguistic imagination, as potentially breaking down barriers at the frontier of language-comprehension, thawing the frozen images in common consciousness and restoring the flow of living signifiers to life.

Hence poetry is a challenge to any conceptual grip on meaning (“interpretation” broadly speaking, if it pretends to closure). Poetry manifests a remainder of communication that cannot fall under interpretation’s control. Here one lacks the categories to describe the nature of this remainder. Is it a restoration of archaic conjuration? Is it a novel eruption from a future or superior cognition? Is it a concretization that transmits something more solid than the sophic ever could? Is it a spiritualization of sense transcending whatever we could put our finger on as corporeal?

Poetry investigates this borderland, and this is why it remains exciting to me, even if pursuing it does not provide much sure ground to stand on, and even if the temptation is always there to retreat to the safer ground of prose, which inevitably we do.

*

It is tempting to make difficult things seem easier than they are, but it is not by lowering standards and upholding simplistic platitudes that we liberate ourselves. Nor by producing one-offs that are the equivalent of one-night-stands in the world of Eros. Poets through all time have labored over their works, they’ve wrestled with them until the sounds and words yielded to the vision. Those are the works that stand the test of time because they speak from a core that can’t be simulated. If we only want ephemera, we can get that anywhere. To achieve something that can survive the fleeting moment, takes time and effort, humility, risk, and a willingness to constantly grow as a person and in one’s craft. It means the opposite of boasting in one’s skill or verses, rather something more like a constant dissatisfaction and striving for perfection that only renewed efforts to write and edit can answer and master. Perhaps the most accomplished poet could say who is or isn’t a poet, but I venture to guess they would not bother doing so, since everyone must find out for themselves if poet they are and, more importantly, what poetry is and really can do.

*

There is a labor of the image that increases the precision of a thinking, though it may also appear extravagant from the perspective of conceptual utility. Philosophy generally wants to pin insight into its discourse, whatever the degree of rationality presumed; it wants to fulfill knowledge in an abstraction purporting a fixed universality. That is its dictum, its almost tawdry vocation, worthy of much respect. Whereas the image – may it never be “tasteless” – flutters down. Metaphor is greater than its intellectual adaequatio, yet the tragedy of this greatness is that it has nowhere to stand, no ground to claim. It invariably recedes into the background of more urgent matters, whether they’re hot off the presses or pressed into the strata of philosophical habit. The runaway effect of metaphor, of images, risks leading the philosophical writer away from philosophy to literature. But literature imposes different demands. Though it share the common vocation of logos, to gather, its “rightness” seems of a different order. Its images are not illustrative of thought but the thought itself, just as its phrases are not made for paraphrase but stand, unabstractably, in their own universe of unprovables. (from July 2020)

*

One of the enjoyments of writing poetry—which is quite a lot different from reading it—is the pursuit of that moment when, suddenly, regardless of the poem’s specifics, it touches the whole, you seem to touch the whole, everything you could say about being and language and world is, in that flash, condensed into some fixture on a page, and it is like there is a portal opened up to the real world, to an instant of communion, nativity, and undeceit.

It may be a fanciful moment, and often proves so later when one reads again and sees only the details. Incidentally, this is why poems often endeavor to ruin what they’re “about”, so that they rather “are” what they intend. Perhaps you could say (I speak only for myself), one edits and edits away at the poem until it more reliably gives way to such moments of feeling linked with the whole—that feeling that ranges deep reflection to enchanted pleasure, that fascinates us, that is whimsical and profound and, if felt deeply enough, change the whole trajectory of our saying.

Poems are perhaps machines for reestablishing contact with the reality that gets lost in the parceling out of beings, words, and things into the informations that compose the world. Suddenly language is strange, it does the unexpected, what it refers to isn’t what we thought or previously understood, it is something new and immemorial, all-pervasive, rejuvenative. We’re reminded of ourselves, of our relations, of our mortality, we are awakened both to the tearing precious moment and to whatever sort of eternity beings like us can experience—we intuit, we enter, the whole.

Or, if “whole” is inadequate (it is), say we become aware of the permeality of the border between our self and what is not us and we traverse it somewhat (we transverse it), we exist where inside is outside and outside is inside, somewhat like a touch past death, a living touch on all-life, and there arises a sense of openness with completion at that point or across that borderspace (cf. Bracha Ettinger’s concept). It is like time was not wasted on us, like we have healed from something, from a gross deficiency or myopia in the normal cognitions, the vistas are back and with them our heart. It is like we have accepted a word from elsewhere, and finally something true, something irrevocable, has been said.

It is unpredictable as a lightning bolt, where it will strike and when, but all along one works up the cloud and the rain, preparing for the sound of thunder—that we give the rather flimsy name “poetry.”

*

There is a discrepancy in speech, over which no one has mastery because it cannot be mastered. The discrepancy is that speech seems to us to stem from our ‘livingmost essence’—when we speak it feels to us we are saying what we mean and are—, while at the same time the medium of speech is language, which is a shared and generic medium, a zone which negates any supposed singularity of subject, and hence divides us supremely from whatever intimate essence we suppose we have (which we hence suspect is a mere illusion of an unconscious language). We try to overcome this through higher degrees of precision in our discourse, but then, ironically, the discrepancy becomes even more pronounced. The more one seeks to express oneself actually, the more one must submit oneself to a language and a logic that seems at odds with one’s own; except that again, in writing, one realizes there is no logic of one’s own whatsoever, only the logic which language lets you express by failing you. Language is a zone wherein all of us (finally) are dead, yet we seem unable to anticipate this (how many years hence have I tried to prove it to you, yet still you do not see). Language as a medium we believe of self-expression forever fails before language as a medium of silencing singularity; this is something no one can reconcile with living speech, but nonetheless it haunts every word with the suspicion that these are, inescapably, the words of a dead man. Proof is apparent: no matter how I read them, I can never say that they are me, my speech. I can only witness that “it speaks”—and it has no need for any sustenance from the supposition of my life. My speech works perfectly without my living; ironically, this is proof that I am, already, as good as dead. A death that is unforgettable, although no one remembers it.