Over the past year or so I have become acquainted with Allen Grossman's poetry and poetics. Since there are no calm shoals to be found along the shores of his oeuvre, no place in his work where the river's current is not immensely strong, deep, and opaque, I decided to dive into the thunderously crashing tides of his primer of "speculative poetics," Summa Lyrica. I have been reading this collection of scholia off and on for over a year now--underlining, musing, and returning to the book every now and every then to continue with revivified perplexity and antinomic wonder. Today's reading brought me to Grossman's "commonplace" number 27, "Poem as Appearance or Phenomenon":
A poem is an appearance. There are no appearances which are not appearances to someone (275).
In this book, as elsewhere (strongly so in his new collection of essays, True-Love), Grossman characterizes poetic indeterminacy as one side of an antinomy between manifestation and mortality (or disappearance of the person). We long to preserve the image of the Beloved, even while such an act of preservation is fraught with painful contingency and fugacity. A poem is a complete experience, Grossman claims, but a complete experience of indeterminacy, the latter being "in an intricately qualified sense...autonomy." "Indeterminacy" for Grossman is not equivalent to "constructivity and undecidability" in general, but rather it "must mean unilateral undecidability by the other." The materials of poetry resist being put otherwise. It can only be so.
This does not sound fatalistic to me, but it does sound like it needs further reflection, further conversation. If I am indeed a pragmoet practicing pragmoetics (the science of endlessly useful image-making) what do I make of the sense of completion that Grossman imputes to a poem? Well, perhaps he gives us a clue in this commonplace: a completion, or an appearance [of completion] to someone. Poetry is simultaneously a radically contingent and radically autonomous construction in language of the human image. The disappearance of this image might be increasing with the speed of perceptual technologies (e.g. see Virilio's concept of "picnolepsy" in The Aesthetics of Disappearance), but still from the space of such disappearances emerge new figures, like the turning face of a holograph, the anamnestic encounter with the unexpectedly familiar, the indeterminate other shimmering brightly amid the dark abysm of a hypnotic, lethal sense of limitation.
