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POETRYETC  2001

POETRYETC 2001

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Subject:

Levinas's door/ collaboration

From:

kent johnson <[log in to unmask]>

Reply-To:

Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics <[log in to unmask]>

Date:

Tue, 5 Jun 2001 18:07:36 -0500

Content-Type:

text/plain

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Doug,

A felicitous typo, yours below: "'heteronymy' top"!

You ask:

>So: is there any hope whatsoever to achieve 'collaborative modes [that]
>would no doubt explode within an active counter-economy of heteronymy'?
> >And where is that 'heteronymy' top be found?

Yes, I think moves outside normative attributional forms will expand
potentialities of collaboration, and not just between "really existing"
authors. If I keep quoting from my forthcoming interview, there won't be any
reason to publish it (!), but since the issues being raised connect directly
with some of the things I discuss there, I will go ahead and quote some
more-- the opening (unabashedly utopian as its tone may be), which I think
goes to the point of your question:


Bill Freind: When it was revealed that Araki Yasusada was in fact an
invention, many people were quick to call the work a hoax or a fake. Do
those terms seem accurate to you?

KJ: Who is more authentic, who is less a reproduction: the poet who markets
his person and career, proudly hoarding his cultural capital into the mutual
fund of resume and copyright, or the poet who creates another poet or more
and refuses, to his dying day, to claim this writing under his own name? In
the special issue of Boundary 2, 99 Poets/1999, edited by Charles Bernstein,
the expatriate Syrian poet Adonis proposes the following about poetry's
future task:

"To save itself, poetry will need to progressively espouse the unknown
eternal truths and refuse again and again to be regimented from the outside
by any kind of ideology, system, or institution....[P]oetry will have to
advance by exploring regions the invader cannot reach....[T]he traditional
view of the poem cannot survive, it will have to be transformed in its very
structure. Just as the traditional concept of poetry has already broadened
to exceed the limits of traditional forms of speech, so, in order to resist
the utilitarian goals which nearly strangled it this century, in order to
escape ideology, the structure of poetic language will have to open itself
to more movement, and move always toward a concept of the total poem."

This is well said, and I would say that this movement or opening toward the
"total poem" will also require a sloughing-off of narrow and fake notions of
authenticity. It will mean a guerrilla war of the heart against the ideology
of the Author.


Q. What's wrong with the ideology of the Author?

KJ: I don't mean that all poets would or should cease to attribute their
poems to their persons. That would be more than a quixotic proposal. So I'm
not suggesting that modes and versions of heteronymity will totally replace
traditional conceptions of authorship. Nor, I should say, will any move to
something truer and more authentic have anything to do with simple notions
of anonymity. As Mikhail Epstein, the prominent Russian theorist and critic
wrote in a letter to Yasusada’s creator, Tosa Motokiyu, in 1996:

"Poststructuralism has pronounced the death sentence for the individual
author(ship), but does this mean that we are doomed to return to the
pre-literary stage of anonymity? One cannot enter twice the same river, and
anonymity in its postauthorial, not pre-authorial, implementation will turn
into something different from folklore anonymity. What would be, then, a
progressive, not retrospective, way out of the crisis of individual
authorship? Not anonymity, I believe, but hyperauthorship."

As in the physical world one has Newtonian and quantum mechanics coexisting
in paradoxical simultaneity, so also will classical Authorship and
heteronymic strangeness coexist. The problem is that literature is still
very solidly in pre-Einsteinian times, and the quantum realm has not even
yet begun to be observed...


Q: The quantum realm?

KJ: I believe there will be, in this future and broad-based “refusal to be
regimented from the outside,” a more subtle and fluid relationship with
poetic identity as legally and culturally, even biologically, circumscribed.
And in this resistance to regimentation, the circulation of created,
fully-realized hyperauthorships will become a vibrant and branching and
authentic utopian space, with schools and collaborations, journals and
sub-genres, critical forays and epistolary crossings. I think that readers
will flock to this apocryphal space and jump in, grateful to abide in
mystery and to pursue the traces, clues, and revelations its authors leave
behind. Poets both real and not real will move in shimmering ways back and
forth between realms and across times. Cross-disciplinary forms and genres
unimaginable at present will flower forth. It will be a "wavy" zone
impossible to appropriate or to discipline, because authorship in this
topography will not have a discrete location or body; it will be
continuum-like, a wave, to draw from Epstein again, going across times,
places, and personalities.

But this will require strong conceptual moves that leave behind the
vanishing point of genetic ascription and push poetic- performative
activity-- sometimes illicitly and against “known laws”-- beyond the generic
canvass-horizon of the page.



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