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.
I don't think Grossman imputes 'completion' in the prosaic sense of the word but rather his work transforms itself unto completion inadvertently. As Bidart once stated, 'A poem has a form, and changes that form.' Thus, Grossman's number 27 is the exception that proves the rule.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Grossman's cryptic sense of completion is like a second language within his work; a second language containing its own mutually incomprehensible dialects, to be acquired by visiting the place or milieu in which they become the norm. Unfortunately, "his lyric tenderness and strangeness can be matched only by poets now dead so long that it's hard to imagine resurrecting their prophetic energies." As a result, his 'completion' stands alone in the language of twenty-first century America.
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"Grossman is one of our great Low Moderns; he's Wallace Stevens with stronger stories to anchor lame minds; he's Eliot without footnotes. Like all great poets, he faithfully serves both word and world...and us."
I have to confess to my quasi-absolute (isn’t it almost oxymoronic to combine that prefix with that adjective?) ignorance regarding Grossman right off the bat – which is, in a certain way, a dirty shame. But as for ‘commonplace’ number 27, and given my somewhat solid background in poetics, I will now venture through the depths of my psyche and make my (irrelevant?) contribution. There must a disclaimer, though: even though some of my concepts are rooted in readings I’ve done over the years, I will undoubtedly come up with personal glosses, whose origins and influences I am now utterly incapable of tracking down.
ReplyDeleteMax Milner published a stupendous book some years ago (actually, I guess it was many years ago, but I do not feel like looking it up) called “La Fantasmagorie”, in which he investigates the invention of phantasmagoria at the end of the 18th century, which not only mesmerized its audience, but also terrified it. It consisted of light tricks that gave viewers the impression that a ghost, a phantom, a specter, enfin, had materialized right before their eyes. Reading your post reminded me of both Milner’s work and the Freudian concept of fantasy (which, by the way, is referred to as ‘fantasme’ in French). In a nutshell, Psychoanalysis defines ‘le fantasme’ as an imaginary formation – and it is important to say that it is disorted, scary, heinous etc by default – that hints at the subject’s pre-conscious and unconscious desires. I may be digressing too much here, but I can’t rebut the link (which at least occurred in my brain) between Grossman’s ‘apparition’ and both phantasmagoria and ‘fantasme’. But I have been in the realms of consensus so far. I will now move on to more abstract (and, as a result, idiosyncratic and mannerist considerations – or, in Kantian, judgments).
I wonder if Grossman envisages an appearance either/both epiphanically or/and ghostlike. And his tautological sentence, even though it almost ends up sounding sheer nonsense, actually makes a lot of sense, provided it is read in a not very stupid/limited way. Furthermore, we cannot forget that ‘appearance’ is closely linked to ‘apparition’, which could support my phantasmic reading of his sentence. The ambiguity of the construction only makes the problem more complex: are we dealing with deceiving images, or are we dealing with a phenomenon (if there is, of course, a difference between both meanings of the word)? I now feel I’m not making too much sense, but bear with me.
The appearance of a poem and the disappearance of a person. Aren’t we referring to the same phenomenon after all? I find his formulation of poetic indeterminacy quite convincing, albeit a little enigmatic, and as a result I concur with your statement that it needs further reflection. But I am not sure I would come to the same conclusions as you did. I question your claims of a) the contingency of poetry; and b) its autonomous construction. I also confess that you lost me in your final paragraph. But here goes my final provocation: can a poem be both an appearance and an apparition? What are its relations to human desire, the desire to last, and the refusal to vanish? Last but not least, if a poem achieves completion, what sort of (contradictory, paradoxical) completion are we talking about? A presence that refuses to vanish, but that vanishes anyway, despite leaving back a trace?
One last thing I forgot to ask. The reference to Aquinas is obvious, but do you know if Jacobus de Voragine has been influential to Grossman?
ReplyDeleteThanks for your responses Fashion Doctor and Bruno. Let me continue the conversation with the end of Bruno's comments and work through questions raised for which I have some ideas of how to start my answer, or, as some academic folks say quite a bit these days, to "push back" a little bit.
ReplyDeleteFirstly I want to know what the enigmatic question is that seems to be paradoxically latent and fully formed in Bruno's final thoughts:
"But I am not sure I would come to the same conclusions as you did. I question your claims of a) the contingency of poetry; and b) its autonomous construction. I also confess that you lost me in your final paragraph."
The logic of this passage is confusing, if not simply contradictory: if you are lost by my final thoughts (which I admit are decidedly elliptical), how can you question my claims (i.e. know what they are, and subsequently think otherwise)? What would your question be if you were to question both a) and b) (both of which, in their present iteration, appear to be descriptions of my perhaps confused and confusing representation of Grossman's assertions rather than my own conclusions)? My problematic sentence is this one, which I admit does not effectively distinguish my own account from Grossman's:
"Poetry is simultaneously a radically contingent and radically autonomous construction in language of the human image."
Perhaps in lieu of "contingency" and "autonomy" I should have used the terms that Grossman stresses in this section with regards to poetry (versus the rules that guide these terms): poetry, or image construction, is both "collaborative"--social by nature--and, antinomically, a complete occasion of thought that "can take no further form" without becoming something else. In this sense, "the poem is a version of experience which is complete" (275). So its contingency lies in the social nature of image making and its autonomy is not absolute but experimental, or experiential: "a judgment on the whole consciousness from within" (276).
But I am still just rehashing, I think, Grossman's argument and not my own. Grossman never uses the word "apparition" and I can only guess that he would not commit himself to the psychoanalytic vocabulary of "fantasy" or "illusion" as the basis of for an ethics, or poetics, of presence (this substantial and undeniable etymological/symbolic connection between "appearance" and "apparition" is very fascinating but it moves away from Grossman's concept of "manifestation" as an act of consciousness in the presence of another. Maybe Pound's "apparitions" are a good example of this--at least the faces. Would you read the "petals" as the apparitional, or symbolic, trace that lingers after the faces have vanished?
"The appearance of a poem and the disappearance of a person. Aren’t we referring to the same phenomenon after all?" YES.
Finally, but not eternally, I think the final provocations underscore my (Grossman's) problematic or ambiguous use of "completion." Barbara Herrnstein Smith's Poetic Closure is an indispensable work that explores this issue--how the "implicit closural constraints upon representation...produce...references to death as one sort of closural allusion" (TL 41). Turning life into death (what Plato accuses poetry of perpetuating) or death into life (what Plato thinks philosophy achieves by turning the incarnated manifestation back into the Idea, or eidos) form a process. In order to produce immortality, one must first produce mortality, Grossman claims. The preconditions of a poem's closure is its own manifestation, its "trace" (not being otherwise) is the phenomenon of the poem. Frost calls this a "momentary stay against confusion."
Too sleepy now, but I didn't mean your final "paragraph", but your final "sentence": "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."
ReplyDeleteWill get back to you tomorrow. But I kind of sensed you were a bit offended by my comments, which, honestly, was not something I intended to do. If that was the case, I apologize. I just enjoy challenging discussions, that's all.
I will, however, continue the discussion tomorrow morning when I wake up.
No, I am not offended in the least. I am also enjoying the conversation. I think that my wordy final sentence tries to convey the same dynamic as the first third of your final sentence: "A trace that refuses to vanish." It doesn't vanish, but it doesn't reappear unless it is disguised as something else. Here's where Philip K. Dick comes in (the holographic world of divine anamnesis), but I have a long way to go before I can spell out my thoughts on that connection.
ReplyDeleteI still have a lot to say about this. But I'll wait for Coleridge's words on the problem, as you have suggested.
ReplyDelete