Poetic Networks Begin After Death

For me, writing means having to deal with the death ofothers, but it basically means having to deal with others tothe extent that they're already dead.

—Michel Foucault, Speech Begins After Death

Very simply, poetry is life. It does not however end there

—"was Emily Dickinson" via Lucille Clifton, Lives/Visits/Illuminations

I have some suspicion of the concept of networks. It's not that I believe poetry, or poets, should be considered in isolation, or somehow autonomous, but rather that I am haunted by some of the warnings offered by the work of Michel Foucault. One of Foucault's most famous analyses, from Discipline and Punish, is that "Le réseau carcéral … n'a pas de dehors" (1975, 308): the carceral network (or "grid": the French réseau means both, and translations of Foucault similarly employ both words extensively) has no outside. The concept of a network is integral to Foucault's definition of power, which is a non-agential model in which "power" emerges in relations between nodes, and "systems" of power as a whole are comprised of the interplay between those relations. Therefore, no one agent constrains another—rather, our interrelations create the "great system of constraint," to borrow a phrase from Foucault's 1977 essay "The Lives of Infamous Men" (1998, 174). It is no coincidence that such a description of power could well double as a description of networks themselves; in fact, Foucault's analyses of power closely resemble Caroline Levine's descriptions of networks in Forms, in which Levine cites Discipline and Punish as a primary inspiration (2015, X).

Often, Foucault will describe these réseaux as "grids of intelligibility," warning against the consequences of "a fine, differentiated, continuous network, in which the various institutions of the judiciary, the police, medicine, and psychiatry would operate hand in hand": in other words, "power exercised at the level of daily life" (1998, 171–72). His focus on intelligibility is an important one, and also seen throughout a range of his writings. As Foucault understands it, modern power thrives on replacing obscurity and illegibility with clarity and coherence; consider his well-known claim, for example, that sexualities are controlled not by the repression of discourse regarding sex but by the increasing proliferation thereof, which ultimately enables every sexual activity to be carefully categorized and scrutinized. This is one of his most famous articulations of the dangers of modern networked life, but similar concerns proliferate in his other works on how a variety of norms and knowledges come to exist.

None of this is to say that I feel networks are avoidable. In fact, I find Foucault's critique particularly compelling because it depicts networks as precisely as inescapable as our recent attention to them indicates they may well be. They are also not quite "bad," to riff off of one of his remarks in his 1968 "On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress," but rather "dangerous, which is not exactly the same as bad" (1998, 256). As a result, when he writes about countering our "grids of intelligibility," he does not suggest that we might avoid, unravel, or crash them altogether. Rather, he suggests that we might look instead to creating disturbances within them, and seek places where "a vibration," "wild intensities," and "shock[s]" lie within that "fine, differentiated, continuous network" itself (1998, 170, 159, 171). Levine makes the compelling point that texts that rely upon networks as a formal principle, like Charles Dickens's Bleak House, "must refuse totality": they require an "emphasis on withholding knowledge" in order to accomplish "the task of representing multiple distributed networks" (2015, 129). But since Levine's interest here is both narrative and representational rather than, say, lyric or rhetorical, I'd like to offer, by way of extension and complication, the example of a surprising twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetic network that possesses obscurities and wild intensities aplenty. For that example, I turn to the poet Lucille Clifton.

Clifton spent a sizable portion of her life communicating with spirits. While the results of this...