Pierre Joris is working on a super-translation of Paul Celan's Meridian Speech, and he's releasing pieces of it on his blog, Nomadics. The speech is full of important ideas. One of them is the "site of poetry" (Ort der Dichtung). And he began there to outline what he called the "In-Between" (das Inzwischen) that happens between speakers in talk. The "site of poetry" and "In-Between" are related concepts. Knowingly or not, many contemporary poets assume the centrality of these notions: a second space outside the poetic subject, made through intersubjectivity. A poem is as much Other Minds as it is the writerly self out of which the words are written.
Monday, January 05, 2009
poetry happens between speakers
Pierre Joris is working on a super-translation of Paul Celan's Meridian Speech, and he's releasing pieces of it on his blog, Nomadics. The speech is full of important ideas. One of them is the "site of poetry" (Ort der Dichtung). And he began there to outline what he called the "In-Between" (das Inzwischen) that happens between speakers in talk. The "site of poetry" and "In-Between" are related concepts. Knowingly or not, many contemporary poets assume the centrality of these notions: a second space outside the poetic subject, made through intersubjectivity. A poem is as much Other Minds as it is the writerly self out of which the words are written.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
