Skip to main content

Lineation: Lines into Columns

Lines into Columns
One of the problems of Agamben's dialectical approach is that, like all dialectical approaches, it is extremely limiting and reductive. Oppositions feel right and they give good structure, but the gradations of the semiotics of space in the poem are subtle and various, and a prose/poetry dichotomy simply does not do them justice. No, to better understand the semiotics of space in relation to the line the main source remains poets themselves, not their poetics, but the actual work. Although lineation and space are fundamentally important to poetic language, nothing has really been written on the subject that comes near to tackling the remarkable usage of semiotics in contemporary poetry.

Recently, in my own work on the poetics of loss and mourning, I have been looking at the interface of the semiotic and semantic in that of all the semantic areas space could address, obviously the theme absence/loss is the easiest. In particular I have been looking at the right hand margin, mysterious zone of poetic definition that speaks with the eloquence of the poetic by remaining almost permanently silent. I have also been looking at the tendency of memorial monuments to be articulation semiotically through the use of a broken line suggesting links between the aesthetics of commemoration and the basic conditions of poetry.

This has led me increasingly to think about columns. (Blogger doesn't allow right margin flush it seems)

In a traditionally ordered poetic field, the left hand margin is flat and ordered like prose is, while the right is jagged and confusing the way poetry is. The imposed semiotic event of the space brought about by line-breaks, suspends the eye and consciousness in this locale of familiar alterity. That space is, semiotically, of massive importance as without it there is no poetry. However, its semantic capabilities are restricted by the fact that nothing is written there. How do we come to terms with space when seen in this way, can one actually read space or is it just there as material to arrest the progress of the eye/voice/mind enough to allow poetry a space to come to being?

What I have discovered in looking at the column poems of Ashbery ("Litany"), Derrida (Glas), Blau duPlessis (Toll), Raworth (various) and my own experiments with the form, is that the jagged, empty right hand column is a very real presence in all lineation. I have concluded that all poems consist of at least two columns, the left-hand inscribed column and the right hand, jagged and empty column. That this has not been commented on much if at all is typical of our inability, as readers of text, to read that foundational part of text, the gap or space. All this is changing now the distribution of the poem across the field of the poem is becoming so central to contemporary poetic measure. This has the benefit of making us look to the right hand column and also the move away from the order of the left. It also allows us to find space interior to the line as well as at its furthest extremes.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977) First Published (New York: Viking, 1975) Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Introduction: · Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive. “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2 · Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet reli

Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others. Bernstein on absorption: “By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...: belief, conviction, silence. Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom, exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented...: skepticism doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29. Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible Through the