The Place of the Poet

• Poesis-According to the Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, this term can be translated using the English word ‘production[1].’  This word ‘production’ derives from Latin, pro-ducere  “to lead forward, to bring forth, to draw out[2]” and this is the multiple role of the poet that I would like to focus on here;  the poet leads, creates, and selects, these three activities are interrelated.

• In what sense does the poet lead? Adorno, in perhaps his most famous quotation, said, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” let us start from this quotation.  Does Adorno intend for the wells of poesy to run dry after the holocaust? I would say that he does not, that with this quotation he is acknowledging the holocaust as an event that solicits the foundations of culture.  The poet cannot pick up his or her instruments and operate in good faith as if he or she were writing in 1929, or 1829 for that matter, the poet must acknowledge an abyss, a chasm across which communication is difficult if not impossible.  All poetry written now must have this barbarism in its mind, must live with the knowledge of the complicity of language and its entire metaphysical heritage with this event, and the inadequacy of language when faced with it.  What can language possibly say? Who is not reduced to a stammer to a stutter?

• Memory can be quite short.  The poet leads indirectly by choosing to remember.  The poet reduced to silence and tears before this event, the poet unable to respond to this traumatic reality in an adequate fashion,  in what sense can this being lead? In what sense is it possible for the poet this powerless figure to lead? Certainly not in the modernist sense of the poet as re-creator of the world, the romantic sense of the legislator, but rather in a more subtle way.  Now, it may very well be true that due to the nature of poetry poets are more sensitive to human suffering, more concerned to feel for the entire human race, to express the human condition and so on, but they do not do very well in the direct leadership role, like Annunzio taking Fiume. The poet leads, like it or not, but in an oblique way.   The poet leads by dismantling language, as Deleuze and Guattari discuss in their many texts on the minor and major modes of handling language, the poet puts language in variation, drawing it away from the majority language of the state, the stable, rational, traditional usage.   The poet breaks up the “mandatory language” the poet dissociates thought and habitual usage, the metaphysical inheritance of a profoundly unlivable civilization.

• What does the poet bring forth and draw out?  I would argue that the poet simultaneously brings forth and draws out.  The poet brings forth a universe, a world, the inherited world,( this holds at least for poets writing in the European and other Majority languages of the world a problem which I regretfully cannot enter into right now) and in the double gesture of his or her writing simultaneously draws out, extracts something that he or she hopes is not in complicity with the genocidal inheritance under which he or she labors.  Each of the words that we use, that constitute us, has a history, and the poet cannot control this, this heritage of language, from the bloody birth of linguistic memory in the human being, to the death camps, this all floods into view upon utterance of the first syllable.  One cannot speak, but one must.  But the poet can play this language against itself, can turn it inside out, can as Deleuze and Guattari say, “make language stutter.”  How is this done?  Language is a sort of bond between sounds/letters and concepts/affects, language is made to stutter when the bond between these is jeopardized, when there is no longer an automaticity to this connection,  when language no longer operates as a seamless code, but begins to burst, the threads begin to loosen, the subject begins to dissociate from the forms that constitute it.  One’s own language is made foreign.