>not only a sense of personal
littleness and irrelevance, although goodness knows that would be
enough, but also a feeling that something quite different is called
for.
>though I often feel that something quite different is called for, in all
sorts of circumstances, as if there's a lot of space one could go into if we
could just see the way; & I have in a poem an image of a pin man on a page
imagining a room in which that page is turned trying to see out into the
room
I agree and think a huge flinch would come with the idea of memorialising in
a poem (I flinch just getting out of bed, I'm a very flinchy person). And
considering, as the discussion has flipped to death camps, that Primo Levi
spent a lifetime trying to work out what that something quite different
might be.
One of the quite different things called for, though still literature, would
seem to be the writing which is not ABOUT, but somehow encompasses a silence
or a not-speaking-of. Celan. Then everyone influenced by Kafka - Bernhard,
Handke, Hofmann. Then, to tie in to the Lyotard quotes, and to run blindly
into the terminology of another proper name, Deleuze, I think Robert
Sheppard's Twentieth Century Blues is an attempt at a rhizomatic poetry
(though he has written of it as a "(k)not-work" and made caveats about his
engagement with D & G) which would be inexhaustible. I'm looking forward to
the whole thing in one book.
I like the Celan piece from Spike Magazine - it was reading the Spike site
years ago that made me read Thomas Bernhard. That was probably where things
went wrong. Coincidentally, I'm currently writing a piece on Gabriel
Josipovici to put up on Spike.
Edmund
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