The Image of the City - Copley Square

Copley Square in Boston, where the Boston Marathon always finishes, is one of my favorite urban spaces in the world. The skyline is defined, on the west side, by the squat but dignified Boston Public Library, with its Victorian-era bronze statues of feminine virtue perched on thrones and its roll call of the illustrious names of humanism (DaVinci, Agassiz, Rousseau) carved into the building’s façade. Across from it, and just to the south, separated by a generous swath of the square itself, rises the shiny and bewitching splinter of I.M. Pei’s Hancock Tower (which a student of mine at Northeastern once wrote a first-rate paper on).

In between sits H. R. Richardson’s magnificent Trinity Church, a kind of happy Gothic fin de siècle folly that’s all Romanesque curves and spires. And just across from that, on the south side of the square stands the elegant Fairmount Hotel, a place where Ingrid and I, back when we were grad students and poor as mice, occasionally repaired to for martinis at the fabled Oak Room, a Boston institution, where they serve them in carafes plunged into smoking buckets of ice.

Just around the entrance to the old library, on Boylston Street, outside the steps to the inbound Green Line T Station a perpetually happy guy hands out copies of The Metro, a nationally syndicated free paper. He’s like the Mayor of Copley – he always makes you feel welcome, no matter how crappy the weather or how tired you feel at 7:00 am.

Oh, and there’s also a CVS and a Panera’s.

I feel inexplicably happy whenever I walk through Copley Square. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is. Early morning or late at night. Bright sunny day or total Nor’easter shit show. It’s a space that invites you to look; to be part of the city and join in its cosmopolitanism. A space that asks you to take it in, but which never overwhelms you. It’s perfectly scaled. Large enough to inspire a sense of delight, but small enough to make you feel that what makes a city great is the way it creates a sense of intimacy amid such impersonal structures. For me, it embodies the essence of city living – the hustle and bustle, the dirt and the grime, the greenery and fountains and stone, the mad dashing taxis and the vibrant assortment of street people, office workers, skateboarders, and beautiful women, but also the richness of a detailed and intricate and somehow serene place.

A great part of its charm comes from what Boston architect and MIT professor Kevin Lynch outlined in his famous 1960 book, The Image of the City. Copley Square, to use some of Lynch’s seminal terms, combines in a lyrical way such features as landmarks and paths, while acting itself as a major node -- all elements by which we make our cognitive maps of complex urban environments.

Above all, I love the layers of architectural styles on view in Copley, the way the old butts up against the new and the new reflects and enhances the old. Pei’s tower shimmers like a mirage from the future, while Trinity Church’s rosy stone incarnates a nostalgic dream of the past. This, I think, is the good modernity.

Walking through Copley Square makes me feel a bit like Frank O’Hara. The Frank O’Hara who wrote, in “Meditations in an Emergency,” that “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.”

Well, yes, this is an emergency.

And yes, the whole world is in a state of emergency. And yes, Boston is not Baghdad, is not Kabul, is not Aleppo. But right now, it’s bleeding.

And right now I could really use a blade of grass. And since there are no more record stores, a bookstore would do very nicely.

I’ve always thought marathons were absurd and preposterous events. Expressions of the cult of excess, they seem to exemplify the metastatic logic of capital, promising spiritual liberation through grotesque labor, engulfing its participants in a massive spectacle that has just a little too much of the air of martial rallies of the 20th Century for my comfort. A product of the same era that gave us Teddy Roosevelt's exuberant (not to say hysterical) paean to masculinity and nationalism, "The Strenuous Life," (which we're studying just now in a Harvard course on the cultural logic of Manifest destiny), they purport to celebrate such civic virtues as sacrifice and dedication and the triumph of the individual over the odds: avid displays of endurance and athleticism which the ancient Greeks would have found bewildering since arête depends on moderation and balance. To say nothing of the fact that each time a marathon is run, it reinforces an unconscious Orientalism by marking the victory of classical Greek Civilization over the barbarian East.

Fortunately, as if to counter my Adornian pessimism, Dave Zirin has written a very moving article, at The Nation on the first woman to have run in the Boston marathon, Katrine Switzer. It offers a potent account of why sports matter.

And anyway, I’m not sure I think that way anymore.

Because maybe such an event is how the religious has migrated into the secular. And maybe the celebration of the communal and the absurd transcends any critique. But above all, because we can’t allow ourselves to live in a world where a bomb is more powerful than a footrace. Or a poem.

The Place of Poetry or, The Narcissism of Small Differences

Either in a spirit of homage and renewal, or else gently deflating mockery, the editors of the March issue of Poetry asked four poets to “update” Ezra Pound’s now seminal “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste” on the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of its first appearance in their magazine. It’s a nice idea. And a testament to the lasting influence of Pound, whose The Cantos, has Basil Bunting wrote, bestrode the 20th Century like the Alps. “They don’t make sense,” yes – but, “you will have to go a long way round/if you want to avoid them.”

The sharpest of these updates is by the neo-Conceptualist poet and provocateur, Vanessa Place. Place has a distinctive sense of literary history and a good instinct for how to go for the jugular, even if the intervention she stages turns out to be just the sound of one poem clapping.

[And here let me just say that the term “update” is nothing if not problematic. It implies that the grain of literary intuition is somehow, like, software, amenable to patches and upgrades. Does anyone think Keats’ letters need updating? Of course, Pound himself was the all-time updater, constantly quibbling and quarreling about how aesthetics is adjudicated. This is one reason he’s such a juicy figure to lampoon. Yet he took the long view in a way almost no contemporary poet can do – not because they lack the ambition or the imaginative scope, but because “the pictures got small,” as Gloria Swanson puts it in Sunset Boulevard.]

Place’s poem is entitled simply “No more,” a rather Poe-like anaphoric refrain that performs a more melodic version of Pound’s blunt “don’t,” as in “don’t chop your stuff into separate iambs.”

It’s a great conceit, to make a list poem of admonitions, and in a mere twenty lines Place manages to condemn or cast aspersion on nearly every mode of contemporary poetic practice while maintaining a kind of shining rhythm. The not-so-secret, if still unspoken, center of all this censure is, of course, her rather shopworn theory of neo-Conceptualism. But hey, what’s a over-indebted, under-leveraged First World avant-garde to do?

Some of her lines are quite funny:
“No more children pimped out to prove some pouting mortality.”

Take that, Laura Kasischke! Or maybe its real target is the women anthologized in books like The Grand Permissions, or Not For Mothers Only. In fact, no one, or no school or proclivity, seems to escape Place’s machine-gun splatter effect. “No more Gobstoppers: an epic isn’t an epic for its fingerprints.” I have no idea what this means – maybe an injunction against big baggy Olsonian-isms? – but I like it.

And I was particularly thrilled to see that my own overdetermined, retro-modernist bent was taken into account, weighed, measured, and found wanting.

“No polyglottal ventriloquism.” That’s actually pretty good.

It’s rather fun to play at this sort of game. If I could add an extra line to her poem, it might run something like this (and here I’m quoting from Place and Rob Fitterman’s manifesto, Notes on Conceptualism): “no more treating the written word as a figural object to be allegorically narrated.” Or, “No more uber-prolix theory sprach playing at actual intellection; no more vocabularies in search of a sentiment.” Or “No more Althusserian/Jamesonian critiques of late capital.” And “No more vulgar secularism that forgets that language is always already the sacred, that is, the communal.”

Place never quite puts her cards on the table. The closest she comes to advocating on behalf of the kind of poem she wants to see (and it’s an impoverished aesthetic that wants all poetry to be written one way only) comes in the final line: “No more retinal poetry.” Which I take to mean, no more scopic regimes of subjectivist appropriation. No more naïve affirmations. No more banal series of prosaic descriptions rounded by an epiphany, as Marjorie Perloff once damningly wrote of Philip Levine’s work.

The arguments poets have about poetry have always fascinated and energized me. My class at Amherst College, "Poetry and Theory," was conceived of as a way to engage the poetry wars that have consumed and animated everyone from the Imagists to the Language Poets (we didn't have time to touch on Flarf or Conceptualism). But these turf wars invariably remind me of Freud's observation that those groups which share the most in common are also those most likely to find reasons to dispute the stakes of ownership, which he described as "the narcissism of small differences."

I'm not convinced Place's poem is an outright rejection of all the positions she decries. If it is, it's incredibly myopic and finally, self-defeating. By rejecting any idea of a Republic of Letters, it works against itself. Because the problem with a poem of polemic denunciation like this is that it inevitably ends up enshrining the very thing it sets out to condemn. The poem of condemnation becomes, ironically, a poem exalting the very thing it objects to. The stern injunction of “no more” fades away into a kind of white noise and what’s left ringing in the ear is the descriptive clause, whether it’s an example of the poetics of expressivism or constructivism. “No more lines on the luminescence of light” (the poem’s first line) is not about “no more,” but the word “luminescence.”

Such is the logic of litany or anaphora – even when it aims to censure, it leads back, by melody or cadence, to a fractured form of praise.

Reaching for Justice

I resisted Lee Child’s suspense novels initially because on first, casual perusal they just seemed too airport-y, too simplistic, without any of the bravado or poetic terseness I associate with the genre that runs from Hammett and Chandler and MacDonald through Parker, Burke, and Connolly. (Pelicanos belongs in this tradition along with Ellroy and really, just too many to mention; but these are the key figures, for me, at any rate).

Reader, I was wrong.

My conversion experience came about not through Child’s diamond chip prose (yes, he can write) but oddly enough through the recent Tom Cruise vehicle, Jack Reacher, based on One Shot. The movie is good. Damn good, in fact. Far better than the tepid review the second-stringer from the Times gave it. Cruise is dynamic and utterly convincing as Reacher. The pacing and plot logistics are deft and the supporting characters are sharply drawn, always key in any kind of atmospheric thriller. Moreover, the film is notable for the way it gives a backstory and dimension to the sniper’s targets: mere collateral damage, they are given a voice and a fleeting touch of pathos, which is one of the motive forces to the whole Reacher series.

From there it was easy. I picked up One Shot and devoured it. And was surprised by how much of the plot mechanics Chris Macquarrie had filed down into such a pointed script. I chose the next few at random: Bad Luck and Trouble (excellent); Nothing to Lose (promises a lot, and sadly, fails to deliver); The Affair (kind of exquisite, except for the grotesquely symmetrical ending); and The Hard Way (my favorite so far; superlative on all levels: plot, tone, characterization and setting).

So what is it about Reacher? Much has been said, by Child and by critics, about Reacher as a sublime fantasy icon/fetish—the giant lone wolf avenger, unbeholden to no one or no thing; his grim, monastic, ascetic bent; roaming the country, owning nothing and owned by no one, yet always true to the highest ideals of his training and his own, hard-wired code. And that’s true. His interiority is both less and more complicated than say, Marlowe’s or Bosch’s. He’s not tormented. He’s not even really self-reflective. Except that he is, in a very pragmatic way. He kills only when necessary and so when he does it’s less about vengeance and more about keeping some kind of metaphysical absolute in the balance: Justice, writ large, but served small, and without remorse.

He’s a consummate professional, in the Hawksian manner. His training is itself a kind of metaphysics, a way of compensating for contingency. Most importantly, and true to the tradition of the genre, from Chandler on, he is a champion of the underdog, the oppressed, the crushed; a knight errant for whom violence is just the other side of the equation that produces and safeguards compassion.

Beyond the vigilante stuff, though, what appeals about Reacher is deeply mythic, I think. When I think of what other character he is like in literature I come back to Odysseus. Like the man from Ithaka, Reacher is never at a loss. He is the cunning man, the master of wily stratagems, the one who can see all around every angle, every hazard, every dire situation. No one can get the better of him. Not for long.

Unlike Odysseus, though, he is not driven by the journey home – to nostos – but by a thirst for dike – for justice. It is not the pleasure and comforts of the domestic which compel his actions, but the hunger to avenge the wrongs done to those who are incapable of defending themselves. He is, in the most direct way imaginable, an agent of liberal social activism.

Just as gratifying, Reacher’s pursuit of injustice carries a powerful critique of the US military and American foreign policy. That’s the real genius of the series (and of his last name, too). That such a seemingly dark, foreboding, vengeful figure could be a force for progressive thought, rather than a conservative bulwark, reaching into the dark, repressed places created by the security state, is deliciously satisfying.

As an ex-MP, Reacher is the conscience of a nation’s stricken military. He answers not just to a perennial need for superhuman derring-do, ala James Bond, but to the severe demands placed on masculinity after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the devastation of 9/11. Not to collapse into reactive barbarism or Cheney-ism, but to stay true to some core ideal of justice. Though discharged, Reacher is still on the job – more so than ever, in fact, since he’s not hung up by bureaucratic chickenshit. He’s still policing the excesses and derangements of American military action, representing what is most honorable about that tradition: a code of idealism and a caring for the innocent.

Maybe I go too far. Maybe this is just a wish-fulfillment fantasy. No such posture exists or can possibly exist. No one can redeem the cold-blooded rapacity of policy-makers or the pathologies of the warrior caste. Nevertheless, it’s comforting to think that someone like Reacher is out there, restlessly roaming the roads, inexorably righting the wrongs.

The New Gnostics

N.B. – This was intended to be my introduction to the two panels on New Gnostic poetry at the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900, but for reasons of time and a failure of frayed nerves – the fear that the whole thing was overdetermined and that I would end up standing in the docket, accused of neo-Catholic recidivism by my elders – I decided against reading it. Robert Archambeau has posted a wonderful and as usual very perceptive account of the panel and some of the offsite discussion it provoked and Ben Friedlander on Facebook has made some smart comments which need addressing, some time when I have the time. But for now there’s this:

Why gnosticism? Why now?

One of the most difficult things in writing about the re-emergence of a gnostic poetics is having to continually backspace to override MS Word’s (MS Logos?) auto-correct function, which insists on capitalizing – or is that historicizing? – “Gnostic.” I call it the small “g” problem. Because the new gnostic poetics I’m trying to describe has to do with dethroning the tyranny of the majuscule. Gnostic has become such an elastic term, used to describe such a wide swath of writers, often as different from one another as say, Poe and his evil double, Emerson, that it threatens to lose its usefulness as a meaningful category.

Though Gnosticism’s heretical beliefs about an alien god and the struggle to attain spiritual knowledge was quashed by the 3rd Century C.E., its perturbing legacy continues to speak to a profound yearning for alternate modes of poetic epistemology which neither the pieties of Iowa nor the heterodoxies of the Grand Piano can answer to. It has influenced modern thinkers and writers from Carl Jung to H.P. Lovecraft. For Harold Bloom, modernist gnosis includes writers as diverse as Kafka and Hart Crane, while Hans Jonas finds strong affinities between the Gnostic conception of the world as exile and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology and the thrownness or Geworfenheit, of Dasein. “Gnosis,” as religious scholar Elaine Pagels observes, “is not primarily rational knowledge … we could translate it as ‘insight,’ for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself.”

This trend toward a contemporary gnostic poetics owes its origins to several distinct vectors: the Heideggerian/Derridean Destruktion or deconstruction of onto-theology and its weird quasi -reconstitution through dispersal, differánce, and the trace; the linguistic turn and its emphasis on the materiality of language; and the continuing commitment of poets aligned with the tradition of high modernism and the New American Poetry to an avant-garde aesthetic.

The idea of gnosis persists because it offers a powerful tool for counteracting the disenchantment and alienation of the world. It is a response to a specific historical moment that is less about reviving the tenets of an ancient and problematic heresy then about using the tropological resources of that heresy to produce a modernist gnostic horizon.

What stability the term retains, however wobbly, is still enough, I think, to address a postmodern poetry that contains both avant-garde and spiritual commitments. The idea of a new gnostic poetics derives in part from the recognition that one branch of modernism was all along deeply invested in and reliant on heterodox spiritual systems (Yeats, Pound, H.D.) which have been consciously carried forward by postmodern poets like Duncan and Mackey, and in part on the idea of a post-secular religious turn, or the return of the theological repressed. It subscribes not only to the idea that, in Marjorie Perloff’s words, language has become “the new spiritus mundi,” but to the continuity of a strong visionary mode in American poetry, as outlined by Peter O’Leary in his recent essay, “Apocalypticism: A Way Forward for Poetry.” “Apocalypse and other forms of sacred expression unbind love from material desire, freeing it to embrace the unknown and the unspeakable … apocalyptic poetry, then, is language charged with the kerygmatic power to reveal sacred reality, in history and beyond it.”

Such enthusiasm threatens violence to the Gnostic by trying to recontextualize it within the horizon of gender and the body. It's a kind of anti-Gnostic gnosticism. Or maybe I just like to have my cake and it eat it too.

What’s important here is that small “g” gnosticism strives to reverse the perverse polarities of the Gnostics by reclaiming the body’s centrality for both history and ideas about spirit. In this view, the material is not the site of exile and the soul’s imprisonment, but of messianic intervention.

The new gnostic poetics is not a system then, but revives the idea of spiritual knowledge as a way to contest system. It designates a group of fellow travelers committed to a poetic agon in which the articulation of spiritual values is rooted in the material world and therefore integral to articulating the terms of a redemption worked out solely within the ruins of history and the disjointedness of everyday life through a visionary experimental poetry.

Of course, We Serious Academic Types also enjoy fine dining. Here's two gnostic Men in Black at the Mayan Cafe (Norman Finkelstein and Yours Truly).

The Next Big Thing

I was tagged by Julia Bloch to take part in the viral meme called "The Next Big Thing." This isn't really next, since the book's already out, and it's hardly big -- but hey, it is a thing, and that's not nothing.

What is the working title of the book?
Gnostic Frequencies. Though for most of the time of its composition it was called "Doctrines of the Subtle Body," after a weird and wonderful little book by GRS Mead. Mead was Madame Blavatsky’s secretary in the Theosophical Society though he was no slouch or flake, but a serious scholar of Greek who translated many of the key Hermetic texts of antiquity. It was Mead who invited Pound to give his talk on “Psychology and Troubadours” to the Society in 1915, which is where Pound first articulates his theory of the phantastikon, a concept which provides much of the underpinning for Gnostic Frequencies.

Where did the idea come from for the book?
The pleroma, naturally. But more specifically from a perverse desire to create my own religion. To inquire into what religion in a post-secular, post-metaphysical age could still mean or better still, say. Something that could answer to a need for a poetic liturgy, though I often think of the poems as emerging from and addressing the ruins of liturgy. Gnostic frequencies speak to the poem’s way of knowing, of tuning in to the weak transmissions still emanating from theology’s ghost.

What genre does your book fall under?
Poetry, liturgy, hermeticism, heresy, theurgy, ecstasy – in that order, more or less.

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?
This is a silly but delicious question, because as Frank O’Hara once quipped, few poets are better than the movies – Hart Crane being one of them. Crane incidentally is one of the hidden tutelary deities of the book. The first part of Gnostic Frequencies follows an imaginary scholar of the Alexandrian library named Ariel and because she played Hypatia in a recent film I have a hard time seeing anyone else in the role but Rachel Weisz, though I think either Jean Arthur or Natascha McElhone would be equally dreamy, I mean, great. Ariel’s correspondent and lover (it’s not really clear if they are lovers but I think they are) is the 3rd Century Plotinian philosopher Iamblichus, who really ought to be played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Or Steve Buscemi. I have a hard time keeping those two apart. Part 2 features a who’s who of poets from Yeats to HD to Duncan so they must all be played by themselves. Or Robert Downey Jr. Part 3 would either feature the seraphic ghosts of logos, chanting of what’s passed, passing, and to come, or late Robert Mitchum. If he's unavailable then John Garfield from the final scenes of "Force of Evil."

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?
As I write in the Afterword: “Gnostic Frequencies is a poetic essay that treats semiology as though it were a species of shamanism and shamanism as a branch of semiotics.”

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
The first garbled transmissions occurred in the spring of 2004 and the final revisions made in 2012.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
A deep longing for a wild extravagance of the word. That, and the usual suspects: high modernism, hermeticism, Robert Duncan, HD, Erza Pound.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
Readers who crave clarity will go a-begging, but lovers of the mystery of logos will find welcome.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
Spuyten Duyvil is my publisher.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday are:
Norman Finkelstein (maybe), Joseph Donahue (who knows with that guy?) and Paul Eluard as he is channeled by Anna Karina in Alphaville.

Theories of Lyric

At last month’s MLA conference in Boston, Stephen Burt appeared on a panel convened by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, the editors of the forthcoming collection of essays, The Lyric Theory Reader, which also included Rob Kaufman and my wife, Ingrid Nelson. Burt opened the panel with a dazzling account of lyric that focused on its locodescriptive properties. The examples he cited were plentiful, indeed, encyclopedic, ranging from Whitman to Housman to Larkin, Olson to Pound and C.D. Wright, and delivered at a breathless, slightly manic pace that was rich with references, but somewhat short on argument.

Burt’s straightforward, not to say, reductive, thesis was that lyric arises from the specificity of place. Because I stand in this place here, and feel this feeling, I can connect myself imaginatively to someone else who may have felt the very same feeling here a hundred or a thousand years ago.

There’s something very appealing about this. It speaks to the very real power of lyric to save the person speaking from oblivion, as Allen Grossman might put it (and indeed, Burt nodded to him): to project a human voice across time and reach out to another through what is essentially the ability to imagine that other. Lyric, by this account, becomes a kind of empathy. It’s certainly why Catullus or Tu Fu still strike us as our contemporaries. As Pound put it, in 1912, “All ages are contemporaneous.” But to say so risks collapsing those ages into the present moment, flattening out significant differences. Benjamin warns against the narcotic of historicism, by which the present doesn’t actually see the past as something distinct, but reduces it to mere heritage, yoking it to its ideology.

Among his examples, Burt argued that “The Pisan Cantos” represented the summa of Pound’s poetry precisely because of how they draw on the locodescriptive. But while their pastoral power is considerable, as fine as anything EP ever wrote, they are not notably different from say, “Canto XX,” his extraordinary evocation of Provence as the earthly paradise, modeled after the closing sections of The Purgatorio.

But the real source of pathos in “The Pisan Cantos” comes from the way Pound moves back and forth in time, contrasting his current abject state of defiant, yet humbled, incarceration to his glory days in pre-war London. It is a measuring of things lost, and a life’s work misspent. Among other things, “The Pisan Cantos” lament the unfulfilled promise of modernism. They may be named for a place, but their affective power comes from analepsis and recollection. The flashbacks to London, to Ford and Lewis and Yeats, all offer images of the poet contemplating his past with regret and asking for a kind of forgiveness that is mingled with a bitter refusal to acknowledge his greatest error – supporting Fascism.

An account of lyric which hinges on the locodescriptive can’t be made apart from the temporal. For the real work of the locodescriptive is not only, I think, to provide the details of place in their granular specificity, but to make those details capable of traveling across time. As Sharon Cameron observes in her book, Lyric Time, lyric is also a working through of time; poems can be considered events in time, both in the sense of the time it takes to read them, which in effect causes us to experience time differently, and in the sense that they play with temporal sequence within the line, the stanza, even, I’d say, the syllable. Lyric, Cameron writes, is what arises out of “a contradiction between social and personal time…the lyric both rejects the limitation of social and objective time, those strictures that must drive hard lines between past, present and future, and must make use of them.”

The locodescrpitive lyric is nothing without either an analeptic movement toward the past or a proleptic movement into the future. As Heidegger said of Dasein, lyric poems might be thought of as constituted by and through time. A lyric poem is a kind of time machine: it gives us a concentrated form through which we might experience time, both as duration and evanescence. This is how lyric rescues the speaking voice from oblivion.

On Poetry and Sound

Last December at Harvard, Christian Wiman, (the now departing editor of “Poetry”) gave a marvelous reading of his extraordinary translations of Mandelstam. During the course of the evening he remarked that the Russian poet “followed sounds to their meaning.” This is a typical way of ordering the labor of poetry: chaos, submitted to discipline, produces order. Noise is transformed through design into signal.

But why not the reverse? What if the work of poetry is to follow meanings back to their sounds? Or to follow the sounds inside of meaning? What if order, per se, is not the goal, but rather a kind of symmetry or patterning that performs its own cognitive and affective functions? Is meaning more original, more prior, as it were, than sound? When poetry interferes in the unidirectional flow of sound to meaning then meaning’s priority is dislodged, its reliance on sounds exposed.

This is not the same as nor should it be confused with destroying meaning in some adolescent nihilist gesture. Agamben describes rhyme as the intersection – even the co-production – of the semantic and the semiotic. Poetry that exploits the potentiality of this seam or overlap doesn’t undo meaning; instead it shows that the Orphic contract which legislates the unity between a word and a thing is always highly contingent, susceptible to unraveling at any point along its signifying chain.

And those seams in the chain is where the marvelous can break in.