Danielle Vogel defines language as: “a communal lung that holds and remembers all things through us. … A neural interconnectivity … an extended nervous system that we all share.”
Poetry nurtures this shared nervous system, sometimes by shocking it and sometimes by soothing it. Both can be a form of necessary nurturance.
Poetry is living ecotone that requires our participation.
In other words, poetry is an open text. Open texts reject rejects hierarchy, authority, commodification, closure, and control, instead inviting (requiring) the reader’s participation in the text.*
On a road trip through the California desert in 1968, Mary Corse became enchanted by the reflective qualities of highway paint, which contains glass microspheres. She began painting with these glass microspheres, which glimmer, shimmer, flicker, reflect, refract, and generate their own light. The paintings appear flat and monochromatic at first but contain a whisper of something more that compels the viewer to begin to move around, tilting her head or pacing. As she does so, the painting shifts in complex and mysterious ways. Like an open text, these paintings require participation in order to be completed. And like an open text, they are never still, never resolve into a product—they are nearly impossible to reproduce in photographs. A Corse painting makes the utter subjectivity of perception obvious (if one shifts her gaze even slightly, the entire painting changes), which leads to an understanding, at least momentarily, that the entire world is a fleeting, subjective illusion, that all of life’s apparently solid structures are helplessly subject to change.
If language is felt to be as mutable as light, if there is “an unstable boundary : the body / the book” (Vogel), then we might begin to question where the borders of our bodies really are — where do we begin and end? Where does language begin and end? A radical, necessarily empathetic porosity sets in.
* “The ‘open text,’ by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority as a principle and control as a motive. The ‘open text’ often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material and turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification.” (Lyn Hejinian)
No comments:
Post a Comment