Introduction: On Flaws

Contemporary ways of thinking about politics and philosophy may seem inescapably (and for some of us joyously) inflected by the partial, the fragmentary, the incomplete. One of the less noticed tasks of theory may be to struggle with giving expression to those inflections. So too with poetics, or so it seems in this dispatch from the front lines of poetics provided for us by Ann Lauterbach. In a series of columns over the past few years in The American Poetry Review, Lauterbach has been tracing the boundary line — the frontier — between meaning and being. Because she is a poet she is a seeker, but because she is a democrat she acknowledges how a craving for completeness unveils the unhandsomeness of our grasping.

“On Flaws” was first presented as a talk at Barnard College in New York City at a conference “Where Lyric Tradition Meets Language Poetry: Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry by Women,” April 8–10, 1999. In this talk, Lauterbach traces filaments of a poetics of the whole fragment to the mutual (ex)pressing of world and language. Such a tracing, as she suggests, may reveal a surprising connection between poetics and politics.

Nancy S. Love’s essay interacts with this theme when it dwells on the notions of sound and reticence. Adorno and Horkheimer write that the narrative role of reticence “is the sudden break, the transformation of what is reported into something long past, by means of which the semblance of freedom glimmers that since then civilization has not wholly succeeded in putting out.” Needing to write without concepts in Dialectic of Enlightenment , Adorno and Horkheimer invoke sound. Love hears there “the presence of specific women–and men” in a text otherwise thought to exclude such specifics.