Writing poetry
necessitates acts of sabotage. Sabotage sustains the labour of
composition by encouraging in the line of verse an agency capable of
offering definition to the previous line by deliberately withholding
it. Writing verse can do this not because it is not prose, or because
the fantasy of composition involves an inherently contradictory
process of abstraction, but because the “prosodic gift” is
something which compels the temporal signature of living thought to
register the traffic of its combination by re-creating the conditions
for its survival. Poetic work must involve the sabotage of its
mechanisms of production in order to emerge as poem. The phrase
“prosodic gift” is Lisa Robertson’s, from the last 'Untitled Essay' in her Nilling: “Covertly the poem
transforms [the] vernacular to a prosodic gift whose agency
flourishes in the bodily time of an institutional and economic
evasion.” Such a gift must be taken from the prosodic lab by the
labour of composition in order to be freely available for giving; its
value emerges from the
impossibility of its final determination as thought or thinking. No
free lunches, either. Giorgio Agamben is wrong about the “end of
the poem” because the “poetic institution” he defines as such
can never “[trespass] into prose” since to do so would be to keep
the poem shut forever. What the “end of the poem” in fact
necessitates is a theory of the possibility of the poem beginning to
be a poem in the first place, that is, a theory of prosody defined by
the structural incoherency of “prosody” itself to account for the
comings and goings of each line in relation to every other. The poem
sabotages prosody by appearing to present a finished product, when
really what it proves is that the product of poetic thinking is
always infinitely defective. Prosody constitutes the poem by covertly
evading itself. All good poems are damaged goods. To coin a tautology
in prose: the conditions for the survival of living thought are
poems.
When I had written that
paragraph it was late at night. I was in the middle of writing what I
thought was going to be a much longer poem than it turned out, in
fact, to be. I think what I was trying to articulate was something
like the fear that writing the poem would not be able to carry on
forever, which of course it duly didn’t. That’s a fear anyone can
live with. But the twist point of risk and sustain seems to me at the
moment to be something like this: writing a poem involves the need to
continually discover the possibility of being able to continue to do
so, and to do that it needs to prevent itself from securing the kind
of survival it would otherwise continue, uninterrupted, to enjoy.
Another way of saying this, or of perhaps saying something similar,
is that there has to be a way that the poem can begin to unravel so
that it feels like it can really begin. I’m paraphrasing, or
para-reading, Lisa Robertson’s untitled Nilling essay
again. Robertson’s incredible sentence I quoted above is
followed by this, equally incredible one: “Let us suppose here that
poems are those commodious anywheres that might evade determination
by continuously inviting their own dissolution in semantic
distribution.” Robertson is too much of a poet to allow this
sentence to remain purely propositional: sequestered into its
supposition is the whiff of final “determination,” of the
security of ending up, of an odious somewhere.
The somewhere that Agamben’s essay ‘The End of the Poem’ gets
to, quite explicitly, is that “poetry should really only be
philosophized.” The end of the poem “reveals the goal of its
proud strategy: to let language finally communicate itself, without
remaining unsaid in what is said.” Agamben’s intuition is to
treat the threatening excess of tension and thought that he
identifies at the of end the poem as potentially figuring what he
calls the “mystical marriage of sound and sense.” This is because
of what he thinks poetry is: the name given to the discourse in which
the possibility of enjambment exists.
Agamben’s thesis would
only really work, or apply, if it were possible to read a poem only
from beginning to end, and only once. It relies on the distinction
that poetry needs to be conceptually promoted to an object to be
thought of, and not a thing to be read, in order to be amenable to
the rigours of Heideggerian disclosure. The
difference between Agamben and Robertson’s definition of what
poetry consists of, and in, is instructive: whereas for Agamben: in
poetry language can finally communicate itself; for Robertson: in
poetry language listens, since in poems “speech still evades
quantification, escapes the enumerating sign, and follows language
towards its ear, towards natality, which is anybody’s.”
Robertson’s definition of a poem does not reside in the lines and
ligaments of prosodic movement per se,
but in a kind of roving co-embodiment: “the poem,” she says, “is
the shapely urgency that emerges in language whenever the subject’s
desiring vernacular innovates its receivers.” The
possibility of enjambment is emphatically lacking from Robertson’s
recent long poem Cinema of the Present.
It is a work in which every line attempts to start again – to begin
the poem – and thus in some sense to sabotage the opportunity of
its completion. That this opportunity is continually suspended is the
condition for the poem’s capacity to keep going. All of its
questions are the titles of its unanswered interior cartography. The
poem sustains itself by the exponential accumulation of irresolution.
The question of what to
sustain has been an enabling element in some recent correspondence
I’ve shared with poets. Sustain seems related to two questions that
are deeply interconnected: why write poems? And, how can I write the
next word in any poem? These questions have seemed to me lately to be
of roughly the same significance. The answers I can try to find for
them may not be causally or structurally related; that is, the next
word in the poem will not provide an answer to the question of why I
write poems, although it may help me to answer the question of why I
am writing this particular
poem. The thicket of relationships the two questions together throw
up – as well as the relationship between both questions and the
question, or predicament, of sustain – enables something to come
into focus which is the real subject of Robertson’s essay in
Nilling, and that is
the kinds of politics that only poems have the capability to present,
promise or predict. Robertson’s poetic, as I understand it, is
centrally concerned with the relationship between embodied social
life and the distribution of that life, which is anybody’s, through
the desiring speech of lyric utterance. The poem starts by refusing
to determine the limits to the social life that its politics begins.
Composition is the sabotage of poetry to account for the existence of
poems.
All quotations from Giorgio Agamben, The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: University of California Press, 1999), and Lisa Robertson, Nilling: Prose Essays on Noise, Pornography, The Codex, Melancholy, Lucretius, Folds, Cities and Related Aporias (Toronto: Bookthug, 2012).
[Delivered at Work, Performance, Poetry, the Fourth Annual Northumbria Poetry Symposium, University of Thumbprint, 16th April 2015.]
