Poetic language is language in the making. It is factitious, as all language
is; but not all language displays its facticity as poetic language does.
Even when it "communicates", with soothing immediacy, a profound sense of
naturalness and rightness, a poem must stand in acknowledgement of its own
artifice.

A poem can and must survive being found out, caught in the act of making
meaning. This is what distinguishes poetry from demagoguery, which requires
that its constructions be taken for reflections of the way things really
are. Poetry is not forbidden to say how things really are: but it is always,
avowedly, something other than a reflection of the truth: a redress as much
as an addressing of the real.

A poem is not a mirror for the reader's subjectivity, any more than it is a
mirror of the world. Demagoguery pretends that it can be both: that one can
find oneself in the truth as it tells it, and be made whole in the world it
promises to make whole. Any poem whatsoever is the enemy of demagogy and its
promises, because any poem whatsoever will show that there is always some
part that does not fit. This is the irony of Pound, for instance: that he
need only have read his own work to have perceived the imbecility of the
politics he took for his own.

A poem is not a benefit gig; which is not to say that no poetics is beholden
to any interest, but that poetry is a lousy way of making things happen, and
can only make lousy things happen anyway. Granted, there are marvellous and
inspiring poems that are associated with marvellous and inspiring
happenings: but they are poems that let such happenings be, or happen, for
the most part. Blok is a great poet of the revolution, because he lets the
revolution happen in his poetry. This is the opposite of "realism", which
claims to speak for the real, even to ginger it up a bit. Poetry is already
real, cannot be other than real, and the more impressive the claims it makes
for its own realness the more one should be on one's guard against it.

It is not solely through deliberate irony that poetry bears witness to its
own facticity. It is possible to be factitious in earnest, or at least to be
factitious *and* in earnest. What it is not possible to do is to subdue
irony through earnestness. Poetry is steeped in irony, whatever its tone of
voice, because irony is the ineluctable condition of figurative language.
Poetry figures: it says one thing and means another, which is not the same
as being disingenuous (to be disingenous, you have to say one thing and mean
another *without really meaning it*). There is said to be an aesthetic of
disingenuousness abroad, which some people go to the trouble of opposing,
and which sometimes gets confused with postmodernism. This is a serious
confusion, because almost all of the postmoderns are in fact very ingenuous,
often to the point of naivety. In this regard, they are a lot like most
poets most of the time. Poetry is more often ingenuous than not.

Poetry should, but I'm not going to say what. Only that there is almost no
poetry that does not try to do something that it is believed poetry should
do: that does not voice, embody or imply some imperative, perhaps even
multiple and conflicting imperatives. The facticity, the figurativity, of
poetic language does not exclude the ethical: rather it makes it possible to
reconsider ethics, to re-open ethical questions, to uncover the grounds of
ethical opinions. Poetry cannot ground, or be grounded in, an ethic without
at the same time grinding it, putting it through the wringer. A poem cannot
voice a conscience, an ethical consciousness, without putting it in
question, without becoming the conscience of conscience. The rules of poetry
are rules in the making: legislations, acknowledged or otherwise.



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