Oren Izenberg intro

I'm very intrigued by this preview/intro to a new book by Oren Izenberg. It reads as quite clear & sensible to me... looking forward to seeing the book itself. Some of the emphases he outlines here seem related or fairly close to some things I've been blogging about (more incoherently) for some time : that is, the connection between a philosophical and ethical concept of "the person" as fundamental to our engagement with the aesthetic & artistic dimension of poems & poets...

I see this as a dimension I've sketched out elsewhere as "incarnational." A loaded (overloaded) word, I realize : in my scribbles it refers in part to a sense of life, reality, time, the cosmos, etc. as centered in, & somehow proportioned for, the person... the person as an ethical, teleological, aesthetic "end" or ultimate & self-sufficient framework or life-purpose...

A few days ago, reading a book by Hubert Damisch, A childhood memory by Piero della Francesca, I came upon a passage where Damisch discusses a theological concept called the Verbum infans, or "infant Word" (as the Piero work he analyzes is an image of the pregnant Virgin Mary). Damisch remarks that the Verbum infans, as (purely verbal) Word of God, in a sense disappears, or goes silent, as it is "made flesh", become incarnate, in the living divine Person (of Jesus).

The comment fertilized some inchoate ponderings on my part, which I am still working out. I thought about the particular aesthetic dimension of poetry - of the imaginative constructions of art & their inherent value as beautiful things, as ends in themselves. & I thought about how this involved representations : mimesis, recognizable impressions & images from the shared experience of both artist and audience, poet & reader. & I thought about how poetry seems to tend toward the dramatic : from the mini-dramas of a lyric poem to the full-fledged spectacle of a narrative or dramatic story, a novel or play. & I thought about something that Plato worried about : the danger that our artistic ("virtual") representations might actually displace or replace the reality which they represent. This is a way in which "Word becomes flesh" - the poetic word embodied in dramatic mimesis - which loses itself, goes silent, is absorbed in the larger synthesis, the synthetic whole, of its mirrored images.

How might poetry resist this displacement of reality, this turn to the self-absorption of its own mirrored irreality? I think perhaps poets themselves resist this pressure of the unreal, in various ways... One way they might do this is through a kind of reduction or abstraction - an intentional self-limitation. The poem does not aspire to be a "universal whole" or total mimesis : rather it aims for its own quiddity, or unique integrity - which might very well involve the making of literary fragments & very short poems, rather than cosmic epics or play cycles. (I'm thinking of this in terms of my original reaction to reading some short lyrics by Mandelstam in a Providence bookstore : how I was so taken with their brief, sudden, puzzling, musical but mysterious imagery. A kind of "experience-shorthand" or telegraphy.) Another way that poets might offer resistance is through the intentional cross-over or intercalation of person & poem, of art & experience : with the result that in responding to a poem we react to the presence of both a person & a poem, an artistic creation and a personal communication.... Poets & poetry have a way of pushing through the barriers erected between the objectivity of the art work and the personal charisma or presence of the poet....

But I have to think about this some more. (Paul Celan dealt with some of these questions in his little story "Conversation in the Mountains"...)