city in speech

Because we are talking about the city of the poets! If only a god or a beast can live without a city, and all the cities we know incline economic, and the poets are at best “Barely tolerated, living on the margin/ In our technological society,” then the poets are their own city. And it is nothing but Merz! First a column then a room then a house then wandering, accommodating thought, world, dream, everything. There would have been more but the weather knocked it down. Nonetheless it set a pattern: founder, found, displace, wander, found, displace- so the city. (He who walks with his house on his head is heaven, rising again to vanish.)

An old city then, language its Forum, Pantheon, Coliseum, Captiline, and Tiber. But for all that language remains “nevertheless, for all of us, a place of exile” (Rothenberg 60). What of a city which swallows us all, which settles none? Why come to a city to be thrown back on what few threads you had before you came? Better to pack up it seems, lay your bag aside, leave the city behind. But this is not possible. “As Pierre Joris has written, in defense of ‘nomad poetics:’ ‘It is only when constantly aware that the writer is not ‘at home’ in language (or anywhere else, for that matter) that any real and critical engagement with the enemy forces is possible’” (Rothenberg 60). Only under the sign of such a diasporic telos will any work be done.

The limits of language limit the city. Tar doesn’t have to be the bedrock of human building. Language is free, endlessly evasive, a “domain of art: [that is,] an experimental ground on which such human possibilities can be played out as images” (Rothenberg 63). But there is a danger here. If “metapoetic concerns could open a window on alternative language possibilities, they also pointed to the trap inherent in a language-dominated universe- a trap of language through which the poet would have to break, Artaud had warned us, ‘in order to touch life’” (Rothenberg 101). Or, as Celan says, “Reality is not simply there, but must be searched and won.” The city, metapoetic and language-dominated, proffers a different sort of exile.

True, it is on the other side of the Lethe, but not a Lethe which washes us of the streets we walked, the blind past, or our own mistaken memories. Such cleansing would cleanse our poetic memory as well. Touch the water from the end of a rotted, slanted pier. It rises above is banks, fed by blighted, filthy Delian springs, staining the marble columns and Merz floors. What patterns! They too are incorporated.

I find I incorporate gneiss and coal and long-threaded moss and fruits and grains and esculent roots,
And am stucco’d with quadrupeds and birds all over,
And have distanced what is behind me for good reasons,
And call any thing close again when I desire it.

(Leaves of Grass, 31)

An outlandish totem at the center but it couldn’t be otherwise. What would happen if we were reconciled? atoned? settled instead of unraveled further? Nothing. Poesis is the building project at the heart of the city, the finding and settling of the most disparate forms, including detritus, scrap aluminum and post-war trash scraping against the curb; blossoming then into the open. Whitman is the founder, devoted as he is to “a radical opening of the poet’s vocabulary to ‘all words that exist in use,’ for ‘All words are spiritual- nothing is more spiritual than words’ (American Primer)” (Rothenberg 145). The doors are open. Having been unscrewed from the jambs they lay askance at the gate, feathers, paint, and words scrawled all over.