Articles

from 'The Premises of Poetry'

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.

Michael Heller, 'The Chronicle Poet'

“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. 

On being 'ill'-informed

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

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