A Statement on Poetic Composition

I have always been interested in ideas and have approached writing poetry sensitive to metaphors that can be turned into ironic language that I might use. From there I take the language seriously so that I might have “fun” with it. I am interested in writing ironist poems, driving concrete surfaces to address oblique possibility’s express ways, giving direction to the distant relations to call attention to lost relations and family resemblances. Unresolved irony is my guide, and I try to bring unity around interrogation, commentary, or narrative that remains open at its close.

Postmodern / post-avant poetry has little use for beauty because harmony and justice are suspect. In fact, the difference between modern poetry and postmodern poetry may also be attributed to modern poetry’s putting forward the sublime as “missing contents” at precisely the right moment among beauty. The exercise is supposed to be a Wittgensteinean therapy perhaps. Usually the sublime moments are meant to substitute something transcendental, an oneness. Postmodern poetry ignores beauty and form to attempt to put forward the unpresentable. One is sublime while the other is the aporia revived by Derrida. Postmodern poetry is interested in Wittgenstein’s ladder.

The sublime relies on the ability of the poet to overwhelm the reader and for the reader to empathize with the persona. The reader is set up by the poet using the elements of beauty to encourage empathy and build contrast to what is to come. The sublime is where the poet brings the passion and compression of language in an attempt to say more than what can be said, to attempt to go beyond language and thus overwhelm the reader standing in the persona’s shoes.

The pleasure comes from a combination of the “reader” seeming so unimportant and insignificant and yet somehow a part of the sublime’s overwhelming experience. Emmanuel Kant attempts to explain that the experience of the sublime is the victory of reason over sensible being. Romantic poets through Edmund Burke made great use of the idea of unity of “reader” and nature in the sublime.

Postmodern sublime or aporia is different from longinus’, Kant’s, Burke’s because the reader faces a gap, an abyss, something open and unresolved that inspires suspicion, doubt, and difficulty in choosing. Aporia is a suspicion of all frames reminding the reader that there are no frames except for the ones that are made, that the only conventions we have are the ones we make. In fact, Jacque-Francois Lyotard complicates the idea by emphasizing the lack of reason and the overwhelming threat of violence that also leads to its antithesis in the feminine sublime.

The postmodern poem is not going to lead the reader to a sublime moment but challenge the frames of the familiar, the beautiful, the harmonious at every turn of phrase. So when the familiar or conventional performs as a frame, aporia emerges. The frame promises convention while aporia disturbs. There isn’t an intimation of a transcendental oneness. Instead it attempts to present something unpresentable, perhaps the gap between fragments, the gap between signifier and signified. The postmodern poet’s text, like the philosopher’s text, isn’t influenced by rules that the poem is investigating.

The paradox suggested in irony is the tool that frustrates easy reasoning toward resolution, keeping the problem, the frame, the poem open. The effect reminds the reader of the limits of language that the medium isn’t going to pretend it is something it isn’t. This kind of sublime is another kind of overwhelming, the overwhelming of the apparent absence of meaning or what David Shapiro in his essay “The Mirror Staged” refers to as “deferred sense.” While aporia is the overwhelming of limitation, it is also the overwhelming of possibility; because if it reminds the reader of limits of convention, it reminds of freedom also, the freedom of possibility. This is its pleasure. Using aporia is not a “one-time shot” in the poem but a regular reminder of the limits of language and using those reminders to further the poem. The regularity of aporia in these kinds of poems may also be seen as recognition of the sublime that is ever-present. For Nietzsche’s cosmic dancers every moment is sublime in touching down and leaping again: Barnet Newman’s now, now, now.

Gilles Deleuze reminds us that philosophy and art have long been in conversation, and so in this postmodern age art initiates and replies. In his book Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton suggests that the philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno coaches: “art may thus offer an alternative to thought, which . . . has become inherently pathological. All rationality is now instrumental, and simply to think is therefore to violate and victimize. . . . Emancipatory thought is enormous irony . . . .” Because theory and art are matters of a conversation, poems may use irony and the family relations of ironic statements to skate the concrete surfaces to address oblique possibility.