Tim Lantz
April 23, 2008

A Prior "I," Not A Priori: Statements of Poetics

Why protect yourself from yourself when you could just as easily go out and turn your writing practice into social practice?

Mark Amerika 191

What? A great man? I always see merely the play-actor of his own ideal.

Friedrich Nietzsche 90; apothegm 97

You need not feel obligated to remain who you are. This is not a granting of permission, for how can I hold you to yourself? And even if I could, who am I to do so? I don't even hold me to myself.

I have no idea what the hell a pinnacle looks like, and so I'm a poor judge.

Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa writes: "Each of us is several, is many, is a profusion of selves. So that the self who disdains his surroundings is not the same as the self who suffers or takes joy in them. In the vast colony of our being there are many species of people who think and feel in different ways" (327–28; text 396). How appropriate, then, that he should use the word heteronym instead of pseudonym for the names under which he writes (Zenith viii): multiple selves referring to the same writer in different enactments of the language. Pessoa's work "suggest[s] that each and every poem invents both its writer and its reader, and that both writer and reader are engaged in an endless round of negotiations…" (Muldoon 223).

To quote Foucault quoting Beckett: "'What matter who's speaking?'" (148).

Everything's worth talking about. Or else why bother talking?

One of the most useless things you can be is scandalized. There's a false belief that "we need to bring particular actions under general principles if we are to be moral" (Rorty 33). "Groups and individuals contain microfascisms just waiting to crystallize.… Good and bad are only the products of an active and temporary selection, which must be renewed" (Deleuze and Guattari 99).

Too much anxiety revolves around consistency. Revised aphorism: Too much anxiety resides in the expectation of consistency.

Some may argue that speech has no materiality, but I would like to remind you that there is no sound without a material through which it can vibrate. The problem, as I see it, is that sight is too privileged.

Interesting note: both hearing and touch work only when things bump into other things.

The content of the text doesn't come from the world. It comes from the attempt to give the world language, which the world does not possess. As Rorty argues, "The world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not" (5).

Ronald Sukenick writes that "we can in fact partly invent our autobiographies, in which life is not something imposed on us but a process in which we are creatively involved" (qtd. in Amerika 186).

Poetry is not a means to arrive at an "I" but a negotiation of experiences. "[T]he important thing is to manipulate very similitude" (Amerika 189).

The reason I started writing is not the same reason I continue writing. Or, as I often think, I'm glad my definition of writing has continually changed.

Writing is navigating within contesting definitions of what constitutes writing. Pierre Bourdieu writes that "what is at stake is the power to impose the dominant definition of the writer and therefore to delimit the population of those entitled to take part in the struggle to define the writer" (42).

Jed Rasula writes, "The implications of fractiousness are so traumatic to Americans, apparently, that a deliberate confederacy of variables is unthinkable" (447–48). And Donna Haraway warns that any

story that begins with original innocence and privileges the return to wholeness imagines the drama of life to be individuation, separation, the birth of the self, the tragedy of autonomy, the fall into writing, alienation; that is, war, tempered by imaginary respite in the bosom of the Other. These plots are ruled by a reproductive politics—rebirth without flaw, perfection, abstraction. (177)

"You have to learn the rules before you can break them." Is my apprenticeship up then?

An awareness of the rules helps you situate yourself in relation to anybody else who does or does not agree on the validity of the rules. This relationship is too often taken seriously.

Writing has no essence.

The pithiness of Viktor Shklovsky: "It's impossible to create in forms already established since creativity is change" (Knight's Move 55). And of Sukenick: "The radical edge [is] situational" (qtd. in Amerika 197). And of Dodie Bellamy: "[G]enre policing comes out of a panic over identity and ambiguity" (Academonia 53).

Will it be poetry? I don't know. I'm more interested in making things than naming them. Or, at least, the name comes later.

The process is worth showing, even if it's embarrassing. Especially if it's embarrassing. Because this display is actually part of the poem, and it demonstrates that there is no single writer.

How do I know when a poem's finished? Depends. What am I going to do with it? What are you going to do with it?

On the page, not in the page. What about off the page? Because I'm not in any of these pages. Neither are you.

The unnamed young writer in Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds tells his friend that

the novel was inferior to the play inasmuch as it lacked the outward accidents of illusion, frequently inducing the reader to be outwitted in a shabby fashion and caused to experience a real concern for the fortunes of illusory characters. The play was consumed…by large masses in places of public resort; the novel was self-administered in private. The novel, in the hands of an unscrupulous writer, could be despotic.… [A] satisfactory novel should be a self-evident sham to which the reader could regulate at will the degree of his credulity. (19)

In Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, Steve Coogan, as the title character, says into the camera: "Groucho Marx once said that the trouble with writing a book about yourself is, you can't fool around. Why not? People fool around with themselves all the time." This scene occurs after the audience has just seen Coogan in the makeup room, playing (a version of) himself, and now he's introducing himself as somebody else. Never mind the fact that, as a representation of somebody in the eighteenth century, he shouldn't even be aware of Marx, or the fact that Shandy never says this line in Laurence Sterne's 1759–67 novel. Coogan's performance alerts viewers to the knowledge they bring to the movie. If their thoughts aren't restricted to the present diegesis, why should the presentation be?

"You can't fool around"? How are you supposed to learn anything?

I say it again: one of the most useless things you can be is scandalized. "Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously" (Haraway 149).

Blaspheme? I? I wish I could blaspheme. In that case, though, I'm not sure I would blaspheme.

No, I'm kidding. I don't wish I could blaspheme. I'm glad I can't.

Competition? For what? The leading role? What leading role?

In the course of writing these aphorisms, "I loved it when my tits or my cock or my asshole would destroy my own ego with their needs" (Bellamy, Letters 181). The body requires no apology. It is not under negotiations.

Don't forget the body.

These aphorisms are the results of a lot of concentration and multiple accidents, just like many other documents and people.

When I'm alone writing, I'm not alone writing.

I don't want to fetishize process. I want to appropriate contingency (Rorty 28). The first requires that I have specific ends in mind. The second requires that I give up these ends.

"Write what you know." Why? What I know is only a point of departure.

Deleuze and Guattari's metaphor of the rhizomatic relationship between orchid and wasp illustrates the relationship between writer and written: "The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image…of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen" (99). Or the relationship between written and reader. Or writer and reader.

"The purpose of the image is not to draw our understanding closer to that which this image stands for, but rather to allow us to perceive the object in a special way, in short, to lead us to a 'vision' of this object rather than mere 'recognition'" (Shklovsky, Theory 10).

A rare moment during which I agree with Harold Bloom: The poem's "presence is a promise, part of the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Its unity is in the good will of the reader.… its meaning is just that there is, or rather was, another poem" (qtd. in Rorty 41). My lines merely mean that so many lines have come before.

I'm not the first one to ask, but I want to ask again: who's this common reader I keep hearing about, and how do so many folks know where to find this person for quotes on the state of poetry?

"Why isn't poetry read?" Let's face it: a lot of it is boring.

"Why isn't poetry read?" Too much insistence on beauty.

Don't forget the body.

Parody renders the original work absurd and shows that it is part of an arbitrary convention (Bourdieu 31). Parody renders a previous "I" absurd and shows that it is part of an arbitrary convention.

The language behind the language is learnable. "Let's not get carried away with meta-politeness. Literary theory is simply another kind of literature. It is as much philosophy as the warning on a package of nuts: May Contain Nuts" (Yakich 25).

Renunciation is part of my work. The more useful part is caught up with recognizing alternatives.

The important thing is to disrupt the ceremonial imperative, because ceremony erases the material reality it's meant to celebrate.

Whenever folks say they're afraid of becoming sick, my first desire is to lick the nearest doorknob. If a slobbery doorknob exists, don't try to find a way around it.

Instead, I encourage you to lick it.

References

Amerika, Mark. "The Artist Is the Medium Is the Message: A Ron Sukenick Re-Mix." Musing the Mosaic: Approaches to Ronald Sukenick. Ed. Matthew Roberson. The SUNY Ser. in Postmodern Culture. Albany: State U of New York P, 2003. 181–97.

Bellamy, Dodie. Academonia. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2006.

———. The Letters of Mina Harker. 1998. Fwd. Dennis Cooper. Lib. of Amer. Fiction. Madison: Terrace–U of Wisconsin P, 2004.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Ed. Randal Johnson. European Perspectives. N.p.: Columbia UP, 1993.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. "Rhizome." Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Niall Lucy. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. 92–120. Rpt. of "Introduction: Rhizome." A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. By Deleuze and Guattari. Trans. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. 3–25.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ed. Bouchard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977. 113–38. Rpt. in Critical Theory since 1965. Ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle. Tallahassee: Florida UP, 1986. 138–48.

Haraway, Donna. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149–81. 1 Apr. 2007 <http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html>.

Muldoon, Paul. The End of the Poem: Oxford Lectures. New York: Farrar, 2006.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. Helen Zimmern. 4th ed. London: Allen, 1923.

O'Brien, Flann. At Swim-Two-Birds. 1939. Introd. William H. Gass. John F. Byrne Irish Lit. Ser. Normal: Dalkey, 1998.

Pessoa, Fernando. The Book of Disquiet. Ed. and trans. Richard Zenith. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Rasula, Jed. The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, 1940–1990. Refiguring English Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 1996.

Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.

Shklovsky, Viktor. Knight's Move. Trans. Richard Sheldon. Dalkey Archive Scholarly Ser. Normal: Dalkey, 2005.

———. Theory of Prose. Trans. Benjamin Sher. Russian Lit. Ser. Normal: Dalkey, 1991.

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Introd. Peter Conrad. Everyman's Lib. 7. New York: Knopf-Random, 1991. Rpt. of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 9 vols. 1759–67.

Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story. Dir. Michael Winterbottom. Perf. Steve Coogan. DVD. HBO, 2006.

Yakich, Mark. "Poem." The Making of Collateral Beauty. Dorset: Tupelo, 2006. 25.

Zenith, Richard. Introduction. Pessoa vii–xxvi.