Articles

from 'The Premises of Poetry'

Michael Heller
Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s handwriting, inscribed in a first-edition copy of ‘Éloge de la philosophie.’ Image courtesy of Librairie le Feu Follet.

Editorial note: The excerpts below are from Michael Heller’s decades-long endeavor, “The Premises of Poetry.” They are drawn from Heller’s notes and entries from the 1980s through 2018. Heller describes the work as follows: “‘The Premises of Poetry,’ an ongoing project of prose and citation going back nearly fifty years, is derived from my notebooks and informal observations on readings in poetry, philosophy, history, and current affairs.”

Editorial note: The excerpts below are from Michael Heller’s decades-long endeavor, “The Premises of Poetry.” They are drawn from Heller’s notes and entries from the 1980s through 2018. Heller describes the work as follows: “‘The Premises of Poetry,’ an ongoing project of prose and citation going back nearly fifty years, is derived from my notebooks and informal observations on readings in poetry, philosophy, history, and current affairs.

August 29, 2018

Michael Heller, 'The Chronicle Poet'

Fiona McMahon
“Writing is figured here as a painstakingly physical yet frail endeavor, its repeated efforts sometimes fruitless: ‘pulling syllables clean, like freeing / old nails from plaster.’” Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The poetry of Michael Heller appears deeply sensitive to the achievements identified with the poet Charles Reznikoff, a mentor for Heller who brought to the textual horizon of the twentieth century an unprecedented form of testimonial poetics. The dualism Reznikoff breathed into verse poised between narrative and song grew from the condition of a poet who sought to reconcile poetic discourse and the records of historical and judicial import to which he persistently turned over the course of his life. 

 There are no sagas — only trees now, animals, engines: There’s that.  — William Carlos Williams

To write poems is not enough if they do not keep the life that has gone. — Louis Zukofsky

August 29, 2018

Barbara Will, unliking Stein, and scholarly malpractice

Logan Esdale

In Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (Columbia University Press, 2011), Barbara Will examines a relationship not unlike Christopher Newman’s with Urbain de Bellegarde in Henry James’s The American. 

If there was no identity no one could be governed. — Gertrude Stein, “What Are Master-Pieces?” (1935)

Now there is no opposition to anything being together. — Gertrude Stein, Listen To Me (1936)

July 23, 2018

On being 'ill'-informed

H.D.'s late modernist poetics (of) d'espère

Cynthia Hogue
Image of H.D. above originally published in 'Tendencies in Modern American Poetry' by Amy Lowell, 1917; accessed via Wikimedia Commons.

In The H.D. Book, Robert Duncan aptly terms the work that H.D. produced during and after World War II a poetics of “testimony.”[1] In the last twenty years of her life, she experimented with new hybrid forms in both poetry and prose, writing major innovative works that bore witness to the public and shared trauma of World War II and responded to the ensuing rise of the Cold War. She was also increasingly chronicling the private trauma of disabling conditions following the war.[2] 

Illness is not a metaphor. — Susan Sontag

Illness is a kind of knowledge. — Anonymous 

I

July 9, 2018

Echo's echoes, or what to do with Vanessa Place

Naomi Toth
Above: a portion of Alexandre Cabanel’s ‘Echo,’ 1874, oil on canvas, 38 1/2 x 26 1/4" (97.8 x 66.7 cm), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Echo repeats. Her practice, in eviscerating ecce, exposes the human. For her repetitions point to the obscene, that which we push off-scene, the refuse we refuse in order to make being — our human being — be. “Ergo, echo,” Vanessa Place has said of herself. But if, on the one hand, Echo adds to our artifacts, augmenting our understanding — Echo ergo sum — she does so through what she removes, withdraws, or lacks — Echo ergo subtract, so to speak. Echo’s repetitions become the paradoxical indicator of excess. 

I wrote about poetics of radical evil,[1] and there must be an art of the same kind. Art that is willing to be affirmatively evil, not immoral exactly, but as a work of malfeasance, not for the polemic or didactic turn, showing that certain things are bad, stupid, etc, that’s easy enough, and sadly it seems one is expected to say these things, which is another form of obscenity, but for a more primal acceptance. This too is our artefact, this too, too human.

May 1, 2018