Edmond Jabes

Varieties of silence, and near silence

(Jabès, Eluard, Celan, Kundera)

Raphael Rubinstein
Edmond Jabès. Photo by Bracha L. Ettinger via Wikimedia Commons.

The aesthetic stridency of modernism was frequently accompanied by strong political stances, often with disastrous results. Among the innovative writers who managed to navigate the twentieth century without becoming entangled in its worst excesses was Francophone Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912­–1991). Did Jabès’s attitude toward language offer some degree of immunity from totalitarian attitudes? 

The aesthetic stridency of modernism was frequently accompanied by strong political stances, often with disastrous results. Among the innovative writers who managed to navigate the twentieth century without becoming entangled in its worst excesses was Francophone Egyptian poet Edmond Jabès (1912­–1991). Did Jabès’s attitude toward language offer some degree of immunity from totalitarian attitudes?

July 22, 2020

A slowing 9: Necessary unsayability (or: what the poetic makes)

Leah Souffrant
Image: looking back is for the birds (detail), 2012 by Jennifer Wroblewski

At some point, yesterday or long ago, you read a poem and something happened to you: and you thought, or you didn’t quite think: yes. And this affirmative recognized a need, or a touch, or more precisely an answer to a question you hadn't even asked. The question hadn’t existed until the work appeared to create it, opening that space, revealing a gap.

At some point, yesterday or long ago, you read a poem and something happened to you: and you thought, or you didn’t quite think: yes. And this affirmative recognized a need, or a touch, or more precisely an answer to a question you hadn't even asked. The question hadn’t existed until the work appeared to create it, opening that space, revealing a gap.

What is a question?

Eric Baus
Image by Eric Baus

This playlist is comprised of recordings related to questions. Bhanu Kapil, in her recent post on Harriet, Notes on Mutation, asks: “What is a question? How do questions work in your writing?  What do they perform?  What happens when you ask them?”  Today’s commentary might be considered an appendix to Kapil’s post, paying particular attention to the relationship between composition strategies, recording technology, and public performance. I’m also interested in grouping these recordings together in a playlist so that the questions from one piece might circulate through the others.

I’ll begin by quoting more from Kapil’s notes: “A question: Literally, it’s a way of gathering information but not of processing it.  As a mode of enquiry that’s also, linguistically, founded on doubt, on not having the words for what happens at the end of a relationship, the question seals space*.” I have excerpted a portion of Kapil’s comments contextualizing her own book of questions, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, from her Kelsey Street Press audio page. At one point in her discussion, Kapil describes the weaving together of the disparate material she has gathered from interviews as well as from her own answers to her questions as “a shared space for voices.”  On PennSound, you can listen to an excerpt from The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers recorded in 1999 at the Left Hand reading series in Boulder.

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