1Before I began this article I went back, as one must, to reading Eliot, to see again, how the themes of personality and impersonality are worked and reworked in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” that fundament of modernist poetics, in which he writes – we all know this by heart – that “the emotion of art is impersonal.” That “the artist who suffers is not the artist who writes,” etc.1 I went back, not only to refresh myself but also to remind myself that the poets who deeply interested me and who I felt I learned from, had, in one way or another, been affected by those words. Affected too by Eliot’s formulation of the “objective correlative,” a conception of the poem or literary artifact that can only be the product of an artist working in an “impersonal” manner. And also I wanted to remind myself that Eliot’s prominence and insistences strongly affected critical attention. Indeed, Eliot’s thought can be said to contribute, even if indirectly, to the words of Gilles Deleuze that guide this volume. “Writing,” Deleuze says, “does not have an end in itself precisely because life is not something personal. Rather, the goal of writing is to raise life to the state of non-personal power.” These words entrain Eliot’s doctrine of impersonality, and my talk, then, is about some approaches to Deleuze’s formulation of the poetic act as having “non-personal power,” a wished-for power that appears implicit in both the critical approaches and poetic practices of the modernist and now post-modernist period.

2The Objectivist poets, George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky – these were the poets who taught me so much – sought, as Zukfosky wrote in “An Objective,” to create “a poem, A poem as object,”2 one that was self-sufficient, “objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars.”3 Its aim, as he writes in “Mantis : An Interpretation,” “to hold the simultaneous, the diaphanous, historical in one head.”4 The poem, as Zukfosky envisioned it, was to present an order that will speak to all men.

3But such an impulse is not unique, for twentieth-century poetry since Pound and Williams also seeks a kind of objectification, especially through its self-conscious awareness of and nearly obsessive concern with the subject of language, the poetic image and voice. Thus, any discussion of these terms in the present is borne on the back of an argument that has irritated and irrigated both poets and critics for the last hundred years of poetic activity in Western culture. More than fifty years ago, Frank Kermode in his study of the Romantic tradition and Yeats, The Romantic Image, rendered the argument in the tales of our tribe this way :

What it comes to in the end is that Pound, like Hulme, like Mallarme and many others, wanted a theory of poetry based on the non-discursive concetto. In varying degrees they obscurely wish that poetry could be written with something other than words, but since it can’t, that words may be made to have the same sort of physical presence “as a piece of string.5

4Kermode’s book, published in 1957, may be said to be an early critical meditation on the impersonal, for he is seeking, he writes, “the great need, a corrective to the Symbolist theory of language,” a corrective which would show the way out of the self-enclosure of language (or as Fredric Jameson puts it, its “prison house”).

5The “physicality” of words, (i.e. words having the presence of a “piece of string”) their “materiality” to use current terminology, suggests our inheritance from one of the operative terms, “non-discursive,” in Kermode’s passage above. The wish behind this term, to achieve something like the Objectivist “objectification,” inhabits many of the conceptions of poetry found in Fenellosa, in Pound, in the Objectivists and Black Mountain poets and in numerous poetic movements including, Imagism, Vorticism and aspects of Language poetry, a desire that continues into present-day literary theory as that theory mediates between the formalist or “linguistic” approaches of such critics as Jakobson and a tremendous variety of other approaches labeled (sometimes pejoratively) traditionalist or humanist.

6Central to arguments concerning poetic language is the status of the poetic voice, for the voice inhabits simultaneously both physical and literary realms, the biological and aesthetic, the arenas of non-referentiality and of utter referentiality. For “what singles out the voice,” Mladen Dolar tells us, “against the vast oceansof sounds and noises, what defines the voice as special among the infinite array of acoustic phenomena, is its inner relationship with meaning.”6 “The voice precedes the Word,” says Dolar, “and makes possible its understanding.”7 The literary voice then, revealing itself not only as sound but through the scored writing of poetry, has become, in the dichotomous theorizing of the present, the real world entering into the space of poetic discourse, a nodule of linguistic material arising out of internal psycho-semantic relations. Merleau-Ponty in his writing on language seeks a bridge across these views. He reminds us that phenomenology is a call to an incarnated knowledge. In The Structure of Behavior, his earliest work, he argues that behavior, from a phenomenological perspective, can not be examined as a “thing in itself”; rather, one must see in behavior “an embodied dialectic,” a conversation of sorts8. In The Primacy of Perception, he maintains that perception is a “nascent logos”9 and in remarking specifically on the making of art, he claims that “every technique… is a technique of the body.”10

7Now if we survey the poetry and writings of many modernist and contemporary poets, we will find what I will here call a phenomenological poetics, a poetics which has at its root an opening on or resolution of the inner/outer world problem that lies at the center of phenomenological investigation. The phenomenology of the poem, its modality as a bridge between the outer (or so-called objective world) and an inner (or subjective one) is already pre-figured in Williams’influential rubric for the poem of “no ideas but in things.” This statement, echoing so many in the writings on phenomenology, is more than the simplified argument for poetry’s necessary war against abstraction. This rubric can be understood as “an act of expression,” Merleau-Ponty writes, urging us to consider perception as a kind of vocabulary, reaching for the objects of the world, a “joining through transcendence of the linguistic meaning of speech and the signification it intends – not for us speaking subjects as a second order operation… but our own taking possession or acquisition of significations which otherwise are present to us only in a muffled way.”11

8Charles Olson’s influential essay “Projective Verse” posits the poet as agency, composing in “open field”, as he calls it, subject to the pressures of existence, his historical moment in that world, shaped in part by the make-up of his physiology. (Hence his focus on breath and “breath-units.”) In Olson, the poet is a joiner of “inner” and “outer” a maker of poems about that very joining. The dialectic (or logos as Merleau-Ponty would have it) unifies things inseparably. Olson acknowledges the phenomenological linkage as a given, but rather than take it as an unstated assumption of poetic practice, he inverts and thereby suggests its obverse, a phenomenological demand placed by world and language on the poet, asking in “Archeologist of Morning” :

In what sense is
what happens before the eye
so very different from
what actually goes on within…
When the field of focus
is not admitted as the point is,
what loss! Who loves
without an object, who dreams
without an incubus, who fears
without cause?12

9Robert Von Hallberg notes in his essay on Olson, “Olson, Whitehead and the Objectivists,” that this poem is very likely derived from Whitehead’s remark that “the thing experienced and the cognisant subject enter into the world on equal terms.”13 It is worth noting parenthetically that Olson was an in-depth reader of phenomenology, along with Whitehead and other “organismists,” and that his copies of Merleau-Ponty’s works are among the most heavily annotated in his personal library. Both Williams and Olson seem to be suggesting that their statements are neither methodological nor interrogative but bound up in a recognition which could be a starting point for the nature of poesis.

10In Olson’s poem above, the narrator describes and questions his condition. But it has left out a more complex situation related, not to the phenomenal world impinging on the poem but to the complicated phenomena of words and language. Here is a section from the poem “A Language of New York” by the American poet, George Oppen :

Possible
To use
Words provided one treat them
As enemies.
Not enemies–Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks. If one captures them,
One by one proceeding
Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense.14

11Oppen’s use of the impersonal pronoun “one,” echoed by the “one by one” in the next line seeks to place the poem within a commonality in which meaning and sense are intelligible to all. And while the ostensible “subject” of the poem is Oppen’s poetics – he is, after all, the word-user of the poem, there is also an effect – or “truth-value” – aimed at the reader as a kind of generalization about using language. Oppen’s “ghosts” in this respect are those accruals, those encrustations and bad faiths of language corrupted by commerce, the media, relations of power and, of course, the personal inflections of individuals with varied hopes and fears, drives, impulses, prejudices… And here is the problem – if I may borrow from pop culture – that the use of language to restore meaning and sense to language, well, isn’t that a bit like that wonderful Dr Suess story of the Cat in the Hat who is trying to clean up a bright red spot with the very paint-soaked rag that made the spot in the first place. Doesn’t language almost always tend to carry its “ghosts” along with the sound and spelling of its words, so that the task of a clarifying language is hopelessly hindered by a smeared and marked-over bunch of words which no dishwasher or word-washer in heaven or on earth can make sparkle again? Something more must happen.

12Oppen counsels the reader and himself, to “capture” the words, “proceeding carefully” in the hope of restoring meaning and sense. This is well and good, but I think something more important has come earlier in the poem with what amounts to a psychic shift of intentions when the poet changes his mind from treating words as “enemies” to “not enemies.” The dash that follows, and precedes the redefining of “enemies” as “ghosts,” is one of those lacunae in the verbal array of the poem, an example of, as Dolar calls it, “the non-voice” or “object-voice,” the “voice outside of speech.”15 The dash is something like a linguistic black hole into which any and all signifiers rush because it is, as Dolar claims, “a short circuit between nature and culture.”16

13Oppen’s poem is couched in the language of the impersonal i.e, its use of “if one” and the poem’s hope for meaning and sense, goals that we take, on a practical and immediate level, to be those of the impersonal. At the same time, the dash, it seems to me, has a more uncertain significance than any of the poem’s words, since it represents the intrusion of nature or its short-circuit, something entirely “non-personal” into the poem.

14Now I have entitled this reflection “The Voice of the Impersonal”, and yet this dash line that I am making a fuss over seems anything but voiced in the usual sense. It is composed of hesitation and silence, and stands in a different relation to the reader than do the words of the poem. One finds it hard to imagine Oppen “capturing” this dash the way he seeks to capture the words; one imagines it is quite hard to proceed carefully, examining the ghosts of the dash the way one can explore the ghosts of words, looking at their entrained history, their current usages and misusages or their Saussurean difference with other words. It is not that this can’t be done, but that it leads away from the cultural world established through language and toward the murkier physiological realm, toward the most intimate and deeply-set currents of biology and physical structure.

15It should be noted in passing that Oppen’s work is characterized not only by the frequent use of the dash, but also by a powerful – and not well-understood – use of white space, semantic break-up and what looks like fragmentation. In particular the late poetry exhibits what looks like a crafted aphasia or anarthria, marks that show where the pressure of articulation causes the poet to pause, to jump across linguistic and visual space, to bend or break the usual syntax of poetic language. Such marks strike the reader as the most primal moments of the poem, places where poesis seems to exist before any way of interpreting it can be brought to bear.

16I speculate that Oppen’s dashes and open spaces represent the areas of his work that are most marked by the physical over the cultural. If they are less like words than like “pieces of string,” it is because they exhibit a kind of language interruptus, closer to punctuation perhaps than the word with its imagistic or conceptual baggage. Closer even to coughs or pauses with their nuanced expressive possibilities ranging from nervousness on the part of the speaker to the “a-hem” of non-verbal critique.

17The formulations above must be seen, from the phenomenological perspective, not as alluding to an object of the senses nor as a reconstitution of the something sensed. The dash has no one semantic meaning; in fact, it can exceed all meaning. What it does have is a dynamic function, an awakening or arousal. It operates the way a poem operates by startling us, breaking a silence or interrupting a conventional chain of discourse. Dolar writes that “the non-articulate becomes a mode of the articulate; the pre-symbolic acquires its value only through opposition to the symbolic, and is thus itself laden with signification precisely by virtue of being non-signifying.”17

18In trying to conceptualize the parts of speech that resist conceptualization, Dolar offers a brilliant discussion of the famous hiccups of Aristophanes’s in Plato, which he calls “the most spectacular proof, the most famous hiccups in the history of philosophy, namely those by which Aristophanes is suddenly seized in Plato’s Symposium at the very moment when it is his turn to deliver a speech in praise of love.”18 Dolar asks, rhetorically, if hiccups can be a philosophical statement? He reminds us that Aristophanes’s hiccups interrupt the sequence of dialogues in the Symposium, and changes their order. Further he reminds us that there is much commentary on these hiccups, including a highly detailed study by Lacan who went so far as to consult his philosophical mentor Alexandre Kojeve about their meaning. Kojeve tells Lacan : “You will certainly not be able to interpret Symposium if you don’t know why Aristophanes has hiccups.”19 Lacan is perplexed, and Dolar sees in this perplexity the meaning that Kojeve wished to impart, that “ultimately the entire interpretation depends on understanding this unintelligible voice, for which one can only propose the formula : it means that it means.”20 Dolar takes this analysis an important step further, and I will cite his words here in full, as they are entailed in the rest of my discussion :

This involuntary voice rising from the body’s entrails can be read as Plato’s mana : the condensation of a senseless sound and the elusive highest meaning, something which can ultimately decide the sense of the whole. This precultural, non-cultural voice can be seen as the zero-point of signification, the incidence of meaning, itself not meaning anything, the point around which other – meaningful – voices can be ordered, as if the hiccups stood at the very focus of the structure. The voice presents a short circuit between nature and culture, between physiology and structure : its vulgar nature is mysteriously transubstantiated into meaning tout court21

19Doesn’t Oppen’s dash qualify as embodying an “elusive highest meaning?” Elusive because, unlike the words of the poem, it doesn’t lead back to a signified the way words normally signify, and “highest” because the dash occurs at the most crucial moment in the poem, the poet’s decision to look at words, not as his enemies, but as “ghosts” with the possibility of words being understood rather than fought against. For me, the dash represents the highest “poetic” moment of the poem; that is, while the words of the poem can be explained and explained away, the dash, which makes the poem possible, retains the elusive, non-para-phrasable quality we associate with poetry itself. Oppen’s dash, like Aristophanes’s hiccup, floods the surrounding language and places it in a different category, one that says, as Dolar insists, that it “means that it means.”

20Let us step back for a moment. Isn’t this formulation of meaning “that it means” the final way we describe a poem, after we have exhausted our paraphrases, our sense of the poet’s good or bad intentions, those seductive descriptions of the world, all those things that poems contain? The form of poetry tells us that beyond our care of language, those restorations, such as Oppen talks about, “to meaning and to sense,” there is yet a powerful supplementary quality, an assertion on the part of poetry that insists on its own existence, its being there, so to speak.

21I want to speculate here that Oppen’s dash and Aristophanes’s hiccup belong not to the category of words but to the category of poems. To further suggest that, though poems are made of words, they are less like words than like those things which, to echo Dolar, mean that they mean. By any number of tests, the poem’s unparaphraseability for example, or by the fact that in their uncaptured state, words are running around as though they were possessed of different kinds of ghosts. That is, the poem is less about what its words mean individually than that it – the poem (pace Archibald MacLeish) – means. And makes that meaning as something that expresses its being, and makes being as something expressing meaning. I know, I’m reading too much Heidegger.

22Oppen’s stringing of words together across the dashes and white spaces, across the “hiccups” of language allows us to engage with Merleau-Ponty’s thought. In The Phenomenology of Perception, he writes that the study of speech provides the opportunity “once and for all” to leave behind us the subject-object dichotomy, and to see “speech as an “originating realm.”22 In his most poetic book, The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty instructs himself : “Make an analysis of literature in this sense : as inscription of Being”23 Speech is made by a voice, but the voice, as Dolar demonstrates, “appears to mean more than mere words, it becomes the bearer of some unfathomable, originary meaning.”24 In other words, these aphasic elements in Oppen and in other poets show where the physiological obtrudes from the semantic frame. If we look across the speech and linguistic realms in their entirety, isn’t it possible to imagine poetry – poems anyway – both in fine and large as something like these obtrusions, disrupting ordinary speech and reminding us that language is the product of incarnate speakers (“hiccups” that invade the status quo of discourse)? And aren’t poems, looked at this way, characterized by a universal “meaning that they mean?” so that in a sense, the voice of poetry is the voice of the impersonal?

23As I said at the beginning, Deleuze’s words on the impersonal are a motivating “prompt” to this conference, which I take as permission to look again at the book he co-authored with Felix Guattari, Kafka, with its intriguing subtitle, Toward A Minor Literature. Although the book is ostensibly about Kafka, it struck me that much of its thought is applicable to a discussion of poetry, poetry in its dream to speak to others, to affect others – to manifest an “impersonality” that takes on value for both its maker and its readers. As is to be expected from these authors, the book’s argument is a contrarian one : a “literature of the masters” (usually thought of as the home of “universals” – and therefore a false potential of the impersonal) is opposed to a “minor literature” created by those writers, in this case Kafka, on the fringes of or completely outside of their cultural and linguistic communities. Their exile enables them to “express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility.”25 That is, their writing focuses intensely on what constitutes their particular dis-location, one which lies on the insider/outsider border. Because it is not an expression of the nationalist mentality nor its folklore and kitsch, such writing leads more clearly to the “impersonal” than that literature which celebrates the provincial ethos of a writer thoroughly comfortable within his native surroundings.

24Kafka, in Czech Prague, wrote in German, according to the authors, as an act of “deterritorialization,” an act that must resemble one of Michaelangelo’s Slaves emerging from the stone. So much is left behind that the writing of this other sensibility is an impoverished one, likened by the authors to a kind of fasting.26 Deleuze and Guattari go on : “The glory of this sort of minor literature [is] to be the revolutionary force for all literature.”27 At the end of this chapter, they seek to formulate an ethics of minor literature as follows :

How many styles or genres or literary movements, even very small ones, have only one single dream : to assume a major function in language, to offer themselves as a sort of state language, an official language (for example, psychoanalysis today…)… Create the opposite dream : know how to create a becoming minor. (… Let us profit from the moment in which antiphilosophy is trying to be the language of power.)28

25If I understand Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka tried to write in a language that the masters could not own. Kafka may not have done this consciously perhaps, but out of a need to express the pressures upon him, to articulate – as all serious artists do – the conditions under which they create.

26But this also raises a question : where does Kafka’s German leave the Czech reader, the individual for whom, according to the authors, a revolutionary consciousness is being formed? Kafka’s greatness, it seems to me, lies first of all, within those universes of languages, German foremost, in which he is read. So yes, Czech, but in Czech, and in English and French. Dana Polan, the translator of Kafka, in the introduction to Kafka, says that Deleuze and Guatarri

don’t see writing as a solution to the interiorized problems of an individual psychology. Rather, writing stands against psychology, against interiority, by giving the author a possibility of becoming more than his or her nominal self… the romance of the individual life is exceeded, deterritorialized, escaped.29

27Polan’s comment leads me to think of Paul Celan and perhaps his most gifted commentator, Jacques Derrida. In Sovereignties in Question, his collection of essays and interviews on Celan, Derrida writes that “it is of the essence of language that language does not let itself be appropriated. Language is precisely what does notlet itself be possessed but, for this very reason, provokes all kinds of movements of appropriation.”30 We can think of Celan, of course, as writing in a German that seeks to “deterritorialize” German from itself, to write the “minor literature” of a language that had, at the very least, been the subject of numerous, violent appropriations. It was still deeply infused in Celan’s time with its “mastership” : the rantings of Hitler and the Nazis, the horrific baggage of the death camps and the Shoah. Derrida turns to the metaphor of translation to suggest the nature of Celan’s difficult in-dwellings in that linguistic environment, pointing out that Celan had to see the language as both “source” and “target” language. Celan in effect had to go between these two languages both of which happened to be German in order to create a kind of new idiom, one that makes poetry even as it “passes on the inheritance of the German language.”31

28One senses throughout Celan’s work a great dis-ease, a despair with his metier. For the poet is asking himself how to write with this language that was once used to fulfill the hack requirements of the National Socialists, to stir and inspire the foulest deeds in our time. Celan, in Meridian, described his situation as followsn :

Perhaps – I am just asking – perhaps poetry, in the company of the I which has forgotten itself, travels the same path as art, toward that which is unheimlich and strange. And once again – but where? but in what place? but how? but as what? – it sets itself free.32

29The two key words in the passage, “unheimlich” (uncanny), and “free,” surely re-inforce each other. The condition of uncanniness already involves a freedom from convention or norms, a freedom even from normal cause and effect. And the word “free” strikes as the end-moment of a special calling. There is no purity or cleansing of history. But having achieved the uncanny, the poem renders the subject impersonally, free of the detritus of the personal. Celan’s “I which has forgotten itself” seem to betoken Eliot, who wrote that : “The creation of a work of art… consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the work.” A process he describes in the same paragraph as “complex and devious.”33 It is like a warp and woof. The poet, standing at – existing at – the nexus of inner and outer, can be the subject of any experience and can bring to it the fullness of knowledge and history, not necessarily as a comprehensive whole, but as the focus of impact. We have here something like Simone Weil’s nail, the head of which is all time and space, with the artist at its point.

30We can imagine an American poet looking at English the way Celan looked at German, finding himself, in the Derridian sense, caught between English as both source and target language and requiring, as with Celan, a new idiom by which to write poetry. Oppen, too, faced what he felt was a corrupted language as his medium, and like Celan had forsworn restoring it to a purity it could not have. Instead, he would re-tune it in a number of ways so as to articulate, to make “understood,” as he put it, “what cannot not be understood” (in unpublished correspondence to the author).

31Derrida sees Celan, with respect to the German language, as exemplary. Oppen, who was my mentor, also achieves a certain exemplary status, one given to him, as with Celan, by history. And this status also bears on the “impersonal.” For a short period in the late twenties and early thirties, Oppen was deeply involved in the world of poetry, in friendship with Williams, Pound and Zukofsky and with the other poets of the “Objectivist” group, Charles Reznikoff and Carl Rakosi. And then, abruptly, Oppen left off writing poetry to engage in worker politics, not only because he saw that as more efficacious in helping people than poetry but also because he could not bring himself to write the kind of socialist- realist poems demanded by the Communist Party of which he was a member. The decision marked his abandonment of poetry for worker politics because, as he explained in a letter to John Crawford, “I did not write ‘Marxist’ poetry. I made a choice. Stopped.” Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, Oppen’s first book Discrete Series is written

under duress… less a poem about avant-garde techniques or even about “making it new” than it is a desperate cry in the poetic-political wilderness [of the Thirties] over insufficient means and, given Oppen’s politics, the ultimate insufficiences of his own poetry to enact social change or offer hope.34

32What, in a naïve way, can seem more “impersonal” than the hack requirements of Party political poetry, poetry written to the dictates of party goals, one of which is to forsake the private, bourgeois sensibility for that of the worker, the common man, whatever, and speak in a parlance of that common man, so as to arouse the requisite political sympathies and action in its readers, the proletariat? To borrow Derrida’s schema, if the source language (Socialist Realism) and the target language (more Socialist Realism) are identical, no poetry is possible. This is the situation Oppen found himself in, and with something more : a constant awareness of the blindness to knowledge and understanding that such a solipsism entailed. Oppen described his poetic “silence” in this way :

25 years to write the next poem means… we didn’t know enough from the poetry that was being written, from the poetry we had written. And when the crisis occurred we knew we didn’t know what the world was and we knew we had to find out so it was a poetic exploration at the same time it was an act of conscience.35

33Oppen’s refusal strikes one as both aesthetically and ethically inseparable. A path is prepared here for what Oppen did not yet know, the form for his poetry, for his awareness. In the late 1950s, shortly before leaving Mexico, where he had begun to write again, he encountered the writings of Jacques Maritain, in particular Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry, published in English in 1953. Oppen wrote a précis of what Maritain’s work signaled to him, including “becoming aware,” as he put it, “of the intelligible value of being” (collected in the Oppen Archives at UCSD).

34Oppen’s statement of faith in the “intelligible,” in the impersonal or transpersonal power of expression occurs simultaneously with his return to poetry. He found a way, a basis, to articulate what he had not known, to write what he once felt unable to do. This return must be seen as some sort of new “development,” as a complex break with the earlier work’s methods. Indeed, the rupture ought to seem obvious to readers, for the poems of The Materials of 1959 in no way resemble those of Discrete Series. The book has as its epigram, a sentence from Maritain’s book, one that could almost serve as a motto for all of Oppen’s writing : “We awake in the same moment to things and ourselves.” The new poems, while they retain Oppen’s need to record his perceptions and register his awareness, show now greater room for that Maritainian “ourselves,” for the minds of one’s self and others that not only make note but transform such recordings into rhetoric and argument and narrative. It is as though Oppen wanted to make the same poem, but now had picked up a new tool kit to write it with.

35In a sense, Oppen seemed to view the poems he wrote on his return to poetry as founded on something almost Platonic, an “Idea” or design, something that in no way resembles the atomized imagist-based nodules of the early work. Already, he had moved away from any desire to pre-judge the form of articulation, and, instead, to acknowledge that any such articulation would be the product of an encounter with self, with things. We can see the central leitmotif of all of Oppen’s work in the one formal and very short essay that he wrote in 1962, “The Mind’s Own Place.” Here Oppen referred to what “poetry intends, clear pictures of the world in verse which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality… in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem.”36

36Standing against such clarity and its realizations were the words with their “ghosts.” Ghosts compounded of misunderstandings, of language’s misuse and our own passionate attachment to ideas, to myths, to history. “Our hearts,” Oppen tells us in Seascape : Needle’s Eye, “are twisted/in dead men’s pride.”37 Oppen was looking to untangle those twists, to free perception, yet with no loss of information, no unearned purity of the image. In this regard, his entire poetics is conservatory, both by its careful “capture” of words and by its passionate inclusiveness of human motivation as part of the verse structure.

37Thus the later poems from the 1970s, with their disjunctive look across the page superficially resembling Discrete Series, are, in fact, propelled along on a submerged receptivity to and critique of rhetoric, political thought and ideas about art and culture. “Dead men’s pride,” Oppen called this rhetoric, but he also insists on the power to grasp what he called “the metaphysical concern,” in “a language that talks about physical fact.”38 The act of poetry, Oppen maintains, can redeem or provide the occasion for a restorative from the dead weight of past thought and past conventions :

One writes in the presence of something
Moving close to fear
I dare pity no one
Let the rafters pity
The air in the room
Under the rafters
Pity
In the continual sound
Are chords
Not yet struck
Which will be struck
Nevertheless yes39

38Oppen, in a letter to his sister, June Oppen Degnan, shortly after his return to poetry, writes “Existence one encounters as the existence of objects. Yet it is difficult to say that an object exists… if I say ‘This rock’ it is already not the same rock. And yet surely there is ‘is-ness’.”40 But such ideas, Oppen claims, belong to the philosopher, for the poet is less a speculator on existence than a celebrant of its wonder : “the point,” Oppen insists in another letter, “is the mind operating in a marvel which contains the mind.”41 With Zukofsky, Oppen wishes “to speak the things of the world and himself out,” to enact a Zukofskyian “in sincerity” functioning already in medias res, in the very heart of the poetic process. It is as though, with respect to perception, he had tried to regress one step further toward the most primordial existence, living out “the chords not yet struck,” the uncertainties and unforeseen contingencies of intuition itself. In “Ballad,” he recognizes the bewilderment he experiences :

Difficult to know what one means
– to be serious and to know what one means –42

39Oppen expressed this sense of unanchored poetic compulsion in another way, when he referred to his work as receptive to a “philosophy of the astonished.”43 Not an attempt to astonish but to be astonished, to be taken, even unawares by his own poetic activity. “Each word,” he insisted was not only a “stance” but also a “question never answered,” something leading as he put it to “that moment in its actualness.” “The discovery of fact,” as he says in “Of Being Numerous” that “bursts/in a paroxysm of emotion.”44 Fact, incident as “compelling any writing.” For Oppen, the voice of the impersonal is not simply saying something to us. It is pointing at something, at poetry.

40Finally, I am thinking of silence, not the absence of noise, but a positive effect, surrounding our rituals, surrounding the poem on the page and adding meaning. Dolar calls it “the silent sound, the soundless voice.”45 To begin with, the truism that everything is marked off from everything else, the ritual from commerce in the streets, the poem from the babel of our random musings, so that in a sense, silence is the actualization of discriminations. Utilitarian speech and meaninglessness characterize the “source” language surrounding our “target” usages of words. It’s as though poems are entombed in verbiage, and silence the active principle of isolating that resurrects them. Poetry as the utterance that makes silence, that surrounds itself with silence. Silence, from the standpoint of language, is the birth-bed of resurrection. Shakespeare’s “the rest is silence” can only come after five acts and gobs of poetry.

41Derrida implies that the language faced by the poet is dead, but that he can restore life to it, this life consisting of evoking those “ghosts” that Oppen speaks of and what Derrida, in Sovereignties, calls “the spectral errancy of words.”46 “Whoever has an intimate, bodily experience of this spectral errancy,” he writes, “whoever surrenders to this truth of language, is a poet whether he writes poetry or not.”47

42I’m aware that I am circling about, trying to express something that may be inexpressible – the strong poets testify to this. Something that Derrida’s Celan in Sovereignties is also trying to point to. The discussion, which I am carrying out by quotes, might be summarized as follows : Celan, in Meridian, speaks of crossing certain kinds of borders, entering the realm of the uncanny not so much as a project – art is a project – but as a discovery on the path, on the way to somewhere we do not yet know :

Here we have stepped out of the human, gone outward, entered an unheimlich realm, yet one turned toward that which is human, the same realm in which the monkey, the automaton [in which]…alas, art, too, seems to be at home.48

43Celan’s “alas” speaks volumes to me. It virtually divides artifice from logos, marking it off from the sacral function that amounts to either recognition or to the sense that the poet acts as agency for the gods. Celan cannot stop worrying this problem : “And Poetry? Poetry, which after all, must travel the path of art. In that case, we would be shown the path to the Medusa’s head and the automaton!”49 He cries out, finally, “the poem is alone. It is alone and underway. Whoever writes it must remain in its company.”50

44And Oppen, apparently with no knowledge of Celan’s ruminations, writes : “the power to originate lies not in aesthetic man (the exercise of taste) but in onto-logic man, man as he confronts the world.” In his poem “A Dream Of Politics,” with its spatially arrayed exclamations “in art, in art,” we encounter an ambivalence that Celan would surely have recognized. “The image,” Oppen says in the poem, “need not declare itself the work of god.” He continues later :

terror in the soft dusk centuries
behind these words here with the tongue and groove
wood of the back porch in the minor riot
of the grasses starlight
among us the night
becoming dawn51

45What marks an image is not its divinity but its responsibility to the history of words, those “centuries” embedded in the here-and-now truth power of language. Here, language is given back to the poet; it becomes his tool to irradiate the world; it transforms night, with its buried words, into a dawn. Isn’t this a surrender to that spectral errancy that Derrida speaks of? And isn’t this accountability to both words and the “awe” of the world – as promised in that dawn imagery – what gives the poem its warrant to invoke silence and its own awe, to make itself and us “tongueless,” as Oppen’s poem later says.

46What more to say, by way of conclusion, about Oppen’s “tongueless” and Celan “alas?” Dolar reminds us that “the voice links us to nature… [but also] promises an ascent to divinity.”52 But it is also clear that both poets see silence as a voicing, as an arrival, and that what stands in the way of arriving is the quieting of or accountability to other voices, to ghosts and to spectrality. Oppen wanted his poems “to be transparent, inaudible.” “Because I am not silent,” he insisted, “my poems are bad.”53 In Signs, Merleau-Ponty speaking of both phenomenology and literature in the same breath, writes :

Our present expressive operations, instead of driving the proceeding ones away – simply succeeding and annulling them – salvage, preserve, and (in so far as they contain some truth) take them up again… we keep others’promises… each act of expression realizes for its own part, a portion of this project, and by opening a new field of truths, further extends the contract which has just expired.54

47What remains, after that expiration, is the “impersonal,” that part of language which is alive and can still speak.

48I recall Yves Bonnefoy’s comment in an old Paris Review interview that, in order for the poem to take effect, both poet and reader had to raise their eyes from the page, had to let the poem exist in its closures and silences. I would identify that silence as the extreme expression of impersonality, when the poem by its many devices, including the device of “truth-telling,” has accounted for all our engarblements. For doesn’t such a silence, like the hush in the concert hall after a great symphony, or – let us be clear – the astonishment after Aristophanes’s “hiccup,” speak to all? Doesn’t silence understood this way strike as correlative to what Eric Santer in On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life describes as the “nothingness of revelation?” Santer has been following LaPlanche’s distinction between language which is a “signifier of something” and that which is “a signifier to someone.”55 He redefines this latter term as “interpellation without identification,” that is something without the identifying marks of signification. Such silent speaking has the potential to “penetrate, even frame intentional life,” producing “a message that in some sense causes life to matter”56 (OP 38). The voice of the impersonal, as words or silences, causes life to matter.