Reading the Difficulties: Dialogues with Contemporary American Innovative Poetry

The Game of Self-Forgetting: Reading Innovative Poetry Reading Gadamer

the Game of self-forgetting: Reading innovative Poetry Reading Gadamer Judith Halden-Sullivan all encounter with the language of art is an encounter with an unfinished event and is itself part of this event. —Hans-Georg Gadamer The poem—in this case the “difficult” contemporary american innovative poem—is an event that opens possibilities for more events. With each reading , the poem offers a deliberate, unique presence. The poem is play that invites play. The poem makes possible a self-forgetting that opens for thinkers a transitory glimmer of what we daily obscure: our immersion in the language of being. i want to locate language that both grounds these claims and lets innovative american poetry speak—lets it be. i recall how grateful i was for poet ann Lauterbach’s clarity in defining the poem as an “experience,” an “event, in and of language” (qtd. in d. Kane 110). Like many of the contributors to this anthology, i teach contemporary american poetry and poetics; once in a graduate seminar i shared with my students Lauterbach’s purpose in composing her own verse: “to give people permission to think for themselves, on the one hand, and to be deeply responsive , on the other” (qtd. in Kane 111). Lauterbach suggests that poetry invites self-reflective observations about poetic “experiences” not through traditional questions like “What is the poem’s theme?” but through inquiries such as “What kind of event happened to you when you read this poem?” (qtd. in Kane 110). she asks her students to examine the feelings, ideas, and memories these “events” evoked. Charles Bernstein echoes Lauterbach, asserting that, in engaging with innovative poetry, “What is called for is not so much analysis as responsiveness” (Attack 80). so i invited my graduate students to think hard, and they were clearly up to the challenge, open to possibilities, eager, and mindful. But, despite my efforts, they remained unconvinced of the character of poems as events. They had such an ingrained vision of poetry as historical artifacts that they hungered for the patterned particulates that construed each difficult poem: what did the word choices say about the poet’s life and her or his historical milieu and political stance? 128 Halden-sullivan How did the images or symbols add up? What purpose did the verse form serve? Was it original or a parody of some established structure? These are not unimportant or uninteresting questions, but they continue to relegate the poem to the beautiful thing that atom-smashers must explode to know. some of my students were more distanced observers than engaged “experiencers ” of poetic texts. in his chapter in this anthology, Hank Lazer points out how innovative poetry makes transparent the difficulty of understanding understanding —understanding that, in turn, permits readers to negotiate with poems to pursue possibilities for thinking. i want to speculate about the nature of such collaboration. This chapter will offer two interconnected parts: first, a preamble in which i define terms central to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s aesthetics, such as energeia, “play,” and the “game,” and then demonstrations of these concepts in select works of two quite different innovative “eventplanners ”: the overt poetic festivals of stephen ratcliffe and the piercing, implosive moments made possible by Myung Mi Kim. How do these poets show that the “difficult” poem is an event? and what good is a poem that is really an experience? to describe innovative verse’s temporal fluidity, i need to first establish firm ground. The hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer offers a context for the event of reading innovative poetry in all its diverse poetics and modes of composition. But my application of Gadamer’s aesthetics in this chapter is in no way a primer for innovative reading strategies nor a totalizing response to “difficult” verse. instead, in his examination of artworks , poetry in particular, Gadamer fully describes the experience of innovative verse and the event of its understanding in a lexicon that directly accounts for the work’s temporality—its distinct temporal identities. Gadamer’s ethos complements the project of contemporary innovative poetics. as John arthos claims, Gadamer exhibits a “hermeneutic sensibility” more so than just a perspective: Gadamer’s sense of the world and human beings reveals “a commitment to dialogic openness” and “a refusal to separate the ethical, aesthetic, and epistemic” (xiii). These same descriptors capture the intentions of a contemporary american literary critic who also ventures boldly into defining the experience of texts, affective experiences: Charles altieri, one of the most...