But in response to a couple different things mentioned…

1. Haven’t read Mitchell…I’ll try and check it out if I get a chance.
2. Lewis brought up a good question about how social / historical / etc. circumstance affects the way we “artifact” ourselves. I think they clearly do. Some of this will come up with issues about “inspiration” and the authority of poetic speech, but it seems clear that we “ingest” our surroundings and they become part of the way we are “artifacted.” Grossman’s distinctions here, I think, will be very helpful. It seems to me that his ideas provide an interesting rebuttal to the PoMo idea that language and meaning are obscure.
3. One last note: Thomistically (as in Aquinas), “subjective” and “objective” differ greatly from our modern understanding (though they are related). I will do my best to delineate my meanings when I use them.

2. @micah and adam: I love this take on “presence” and its mediation through writing. Some of my research now is taking another look at mediated and virtual presence, especially tracing how the figure of a person/ality might be constituted through productive acts of communication (including poetry, although i have been focusing on digital media like search engines, reference sites, remediations of analog works, advocacy websites, and remixes of a database of that person/ality’s oeuvre). What i find most striking in your articulation of presence is its constitution in artifacts – i wonder what you think of the social/economic/political/historical networks of relations around the production of those artifacts, like the publishing/book world – how do those factor into the act of witnessing, or its subjective embodiments?

3. @stewart: Thanks for bringing in Nishida! To anyone who is interested in more of his work, I’d highly recommend the essays “Human Being” and “The Standpoint of Active Intuition,” and i think the essay “Expressive Activity” is key here. All are translated by the incomparable Bill Haver up at Binghamton, and his notes are extremely helpful.
For example, in Expressive Activity (1925), Nishida begins to articulate his position on that “object of art” as the point of relation between “pure apperception” and “poiesis”; “In this world, all actuality subsumes activity within itself; each must be free personhood (jinkaku), activity becomes its means, and becomes incomplete or imperfect expression” – that is, in the act of poiesis, a person is embodied in the objective artifact of an understanding between subjects. I find this idea thrilling – “thinking thinks thinking itself,” and writing writes writing itself… So much for “making time for art,” and so much for “inspiration”. This is not art for the SAKE of art, so much as art for the sake of LIFE. damn, son. Anyway, thanks for reminding me of one of my favorite obscure philosophers.

4. @deborah: YES – Mitchell’s is a great essay, and I for one think it ties in REALLY well with this discussion. I’d also highly recommend Lev Manovich’s treatise on visual culture and media studies, “The Language of New Media.” In terms of driving poetry into a new medium, the work being done up at SUNY Buffalo’s EPC, among many others, totally throws some old-media assumptions into chaos. I wonder what you all make of the digital artifact of electronic poetry? Surely both concrete/visual works and the sheer scope of hypertextual possibilities give you some kind of a reaction?

5. sing the body digital

hi,

lewis

You perhaps have already read, but w.j.t. mitchell’s what do pictures want might be of interest also.

Best, D

@Michael: I, too, am often frustrated at poets who shun theory. Interesting exchange between Halliday and Grossman coming up about why one writes poetry (as opposed to any other sort of writing). I suspect many poets today could not give a solid answer that accounts for their poetry. Not that anyone is forcing them to…and maybe that’s the problem? Maybe that should be the topic of the next post: why poetry, as opposed to any other sort of writing?

The artist, for Nishida, expresses the fullness of his personality while abandoning self in the creative act — much like the experience of the loss of self in the “numinous” experience of the divine presence, or before an icon. The most interesting thing for me is that personality is championed by a Zen Philosopher (yes, that is generally considered an oxymoron, but that is what Nishida is).

Does this relate to what you’re talking about, Micah?

Future blog posts will probably hit on this idea, but Grossman talks about “selves that aspire to be persons” in poetry. He also talks about feminists and other such categorized poets as groups that aspire to be persons…or something along that line. I’d be interested in hearing what Donnelly thinks about Grossman’s distinction. My characterization of it may be totally off, as well…but I think it comes down to this: we cannot say that a poem (even one we’ve written) is or captures, in any sense, our self. At most, we can say that we’ve captured a “construct” of ourselves (and I use the term construct with as few negative connotations as possible), and have impressed the image of that upon the poem.

There may be a analogy between the person/self distinction and the language/speech distinction of Saussure’s that Grossman builds upon later in the book. Language is the collective rules and history of speech that belongs to a community. Speech, however, is a specific artifact that has ingested all those rules and been “made.”

I don’t know if that clarifies it. It’s an issue I hope to clarify for myself.

Micah

Tim brought in Grossman’s poem about ship building, the title escapes. I know he considers AG one of the most important living poets, as well as thinkers about poetics. He seems to me very akin to Susan Stewart, as a theorist on poetry. I sadly however have not read any of his books or his poems, so I should remedy that.

I’ve been aware of him ever since I bought Hart Crane’s letters, however, edited by Landgon Hammer. On the back, he blurbs triumphantly how Crane’s letters — like Dickinson’s and and Keats’s —form with his poems a complete work.

As for something to peck at, peskily, is this division of Self and Persons. It doesn’t seem to lack in nuance, but I wonder what gives it urgency, in Grossman’s eyes, for insight into either composing or interpreting poems?

In one way you describe it, Grossman seems to be recreating the division of subject and object, ala Kant, or self and other, ala Levinas – but putting the distinction towards poetic ends. Are there then only images of persons, no images of selves? Can a poetry of selves be written? If we encounter ourselves only as selves, and everyone else as persons, what does this mean then about a poet encountering his own work?

As for Forché, I must admit to always having been rather skeptical about the notion of poetry as witness. Surely, some poets are, or have been amassed under that label. Take Paul Celan, for example. But Grossman’s distinction at least seems to stress that as selves, we die, and all that are left our images, like Stevens’ postcards from the Volcano. And at least the way people bandy about the “witness” imperative, makes it seem—sentimentally so?—that selves, more pertinent and precious than images, must be saved in poetry. Touted. Raised. Praised. Amen!

Thanks.
A