Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who know, perhaps poetry goes its way - the way of art - for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusas head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction - it is perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusas head shrivels and the automatons run down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free? Perhaps after this, the poem can be itself ... can in this now art-less, art-free manner go other ways, including the ways of art, time and again? Perhaps. It is true, the poem, the poem today, shows - and this has only indirectly to do with the difficulties of vocabulary, the faster flow of syntax or a more awakened sense of ellipsis, none of which we should underrate - the poem clearly shows a strong tendency towards silence. The poem holds its ground, if you will permit me yet another extreme formulation, the poem holds its ground on its own margin. In order to endure, it constantly calls and pulls itself back from an already-no-more into a still-here. This still-here can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and - not just verbally - corresponding to something. In other words: language actualised, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens. This still-here of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature. This shows the poem yet more clearly as one persons language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present. The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it. Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter? The poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes towards it, bespeaks it. For the poem, everything and everybody is a figure of this other toward which it is heading. The attention which the poem pays to all that it encounters, its more acute sense of detail, outline, structure, colour, but also of the tremors and hints - all this is not, I think, achieved by an eye competing (or concurring) with ever more precise instruments, but, rather, by a kind of concentration mindfulness of all our dates. Attention, if you allow me a quote from Malebranche via Walter Benjamins essay on Kafka, attention is the natural prayer of the soul. The poem becomes - under what conditions - the poem of a person who still perceives, still turns towards phenomena, addressing and questioning them. The poem becomes conversation - often desperate conversation. extracts from Paul Celans 1960 Der Meridian
Posted on: Fri, 22 Nov 2013 03:50:09 +0000
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