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For/e
February 20, 2005    File under: Poetry & Poetics

Gary's exploded from silence at Dag and has an especially intriguing post that speaks to the issues of writing with/for/toward and of the mainstream discussed recently here and elsewhere.

I see Gary's position now more clearly, and I'm drawn to his idea of writing for, especially as he envisions the work as occurring within a geography:

Renovation, in my opinion, literally grounds innovation. Places innovative work within a landscape that must be nurtured. This is not a linear narrative that plots a place and time for poets and their work, begging both to fit within a given tradition. Quite the contrary, this geogrpahic location offers contemporaneity, a cross-section of here and now moments. Individual poems and poetics concresce and become more or less luminous communities in the greater cultural landscape.

Given my geographical self-identification in my earlier comments about writing for, one won't be surprised that I'm wakened by this.

Still I can't even begin to agree with Gary's comment about the limitations of working for:

Work completed for a community, for a cause, for a class, for a tradition always depends on an author's skill to accrue within the poetic object what is determined to be at-that-time--which is always at least one moment old--both significant and formal. This skill is never quite innovative enough to be anything other than creative (showing imagination) and is always a directive that points to something else that has not been nor ever can be fully achieved.

As I wrote in a response to Gary's post over at Dag, I think this argument has some merit if one considers "writing for" as something equivalent to writing under hire. But when the writing for, the gesturing back to those whom one envisions and requires as readers in some sense, takes place within one's own community and as part of one's ethical relationship with others, I think the work is already capable, through its relations with the community, to do more than accrue current determination to itself. Insofar as the relationship is not simply a linear or even a logarithmic feed into the work or into the author but is always interactive (with the work interacting through the author with the community that motivates and receives the work), the writer and work do more than accrue: they also project. In a sense, the work puts before the demanding community not simply a vision of the community as if it commissioned the work as a portrait, but rather a vision that requires the receiving community to answer back to the work, to become or withdraw from the work's vision. In a sense, the work accrues not only determinations and accrues not only to itself, but rather sediments its response as determination and as projection into the landscape of the community, perhaps through a narrative, but in a way that the work becomes part of this contemporaneity of which you write.

Maybe this is what Gary means when he envisions writing or working with. But his vision of his fellows as producers like himself --- not just in a general sense but in a specific sense --- pushes me off that mark. I take his point that to turn away from poetics may suggest that one's interlocutors are not smart enough to engage poetics, may set one up as the worst kind of arbiter, may make the person who's willing to say that poetics is not for everyone the most terrible elitist willing to insult his or her audience. But I find the alternative, that we each become theorists in the same idiom, just as uncomfortable, for it suggests that translation is not just inexact but impossible --- and I value and even derive great joy from both the possibility and in the inexactness of translation.

I recall Bejamin's idea of translation, recognizing that exact transmission is impossible, that languages (idioms) do not align perfectly or even often well, but as well knowing that such asymmetry should not cause despair or dissuade one from the task. The translator's task is to make palpable the difference between the languages involved, to find a way to distort one language by means of another and express through this distortion the character or weight of what cannot be rendered in the target language.

I hope any conversation involves the same. Recognizing that we don't idiomize in the same ways. That we must accept the influence of the other's strange language into our own, that we must change our tongues, twisting as we exchange. That we come to feel the enormity of all that is lost between us. That we stand around this enormity, warming our hands over it, finding its concentrations from our gauge of the powers of its radiated heat. We will not touch it but will nevertheless understand enough about it to keep one another from harm and to keep one another in health.

The inexactness keeps the language lively, always struggling toward that erasure it can never completely overcome and in the process creating more erasures that will have to be approached anew. I don't want us to work with so much, to speak the same language. I want to be preserved in that part that is always erased. So when I write for and am, perhaps, written under or off, I am under the writing over, crease in the page, erosion that draws all waters to witness and enlarge it, the absence that is passed on. So that there is always a communication (in the latin sense) and a preservation.

Perhaps it's narcissistic, but I believe this, more than anything else --- an idea of a robust speaker, a translator dedicated to transmitting what can be offered to others and to preserving what cannot in such a way that the impalpable becomes recognizable without being exhausted --- helps us preserve our power as actors in a democracy.

More on this, via Whitman, after sleep.

Posted by Jake Adam York at February 20, 2005 6:26 PM