You Must Change Your Life: Poetry, Philosophy, and the Birth of Sense

2. Living Poetry

2 Living Poetry At this point we have some sense for what orients Heidegger’s dialogue with the poets: ur-poems, poems of poetry, and in two senses: such poems concern poetry (in fact, the grounds of poetry) through events of autofiguration. And precisely because autofiguration is at issue, urpoems belong to and even issue from the poetry they figure. I am drawn to the language of ur-poetry because it provides us with one way of characterizing how the language of the poem addresses us: through repetitions of traditional sayings that recast them as poetic figures that recoil upon the grounds of their own saying. I now aim to explore the import of ur-poetry’s reflexive repetitions, for in those coils, we will experience the claim that ur-poetry has upon our lives. Let us return to Heidegger, for he attributes to poetry a remarkable import, 46 You Must Change Your Life import of the kind that Rilke registers when he writes, facing a torso of Apollo: ‘‘for there is no point / that does not see you. You must change your life.’’ As we shall see, ur-poetry sounds us out in this way by addressing being itself. Ur-poetry addresses being? An exceptionally radical thought, and one that concerns, in part, what poems are for, or, more generally, what poets are for (to recall the title of Heidegger’s 1946 essay on Rilke). Admittedly , the question sounds pretentious, even presumptuous. Should a philosopher tell poets what they or their poems are for? I do not think so. Why? In part, because inspiration does not seem to work that way. As Marina Tsvetayeva writes: ‘‘But—whether by command or by plea, by fear or by pity the elements overcome us, there are no reliable approaches —neither Christian, nor civic, nor any other kind. There is no approach to art, for it is a seizing. (While you are still approaching, it has already seized you.)’’ (Proffer 1976, 182). Poets have enough trouble keeping the muse around. I doubt, therefore, that she will find my pleas (or worse yet, my commands) any more compelling. Also, I doubt that any poet worth his or her salt would listen if philosophers did provide assignments.1 But then, the question ‘‘What are poets for?’’ does not seek an answer that would provide such a command, at least not when Heidegger asks it, nor when I here repeat it. When Heidegger asked ‘‘What are poets for?’’ in 1946, he did so amid the nihilism that he found characteristic of metaphysics, a nihilism that he aligned with the spread of modern technology. And he suggested that poetry, Hölderlin’s poetry in particular, had the power to turn people (a) away from technological rationality (a mode of disclosure founded upon an almost insistent forgetting of its own origin), (b) away from the markets that such rationality makes possible, and (c) toward the basic character of their being. Over a decade earlier, Heidegger also turned to Hölderlin for direction, claiming that ‘‘the fundamental happening of the historical dasein of human beings’’ comes to pass poetically (Heidegger 1980, 36). But ‘‘direction’’ skews the matter. Heidegger did not turn to 1. This is not to say that there have not been doctrine-driven or even ‘‘state’’ poems. The history of twentieth-century Russian and Polish poetry offers us many examples, some delivered under extreme duress—e.g., Osip Mandelstam’s celebratory Stalin poem or Mayakovsky’s late work. And yet, those histories also suggest that a far superior poetry arose in resistance to ‘‘party lines’’: Akhmatova, Brodsky, Herbert, Mandelstam, Milosz, and Szymborska, for example . Generalizing from these instances, it strikes me as ludicrous to suppose that one might compel a generation’s true talents to adopt a systematic program. 47 Living Poetry Hölderlin for adornment or for the lyric presentation of an encrypted philosophical project. In fact, not only was Hölderlin not supposed to be subjected to the rulings of philosophy, but he was also to be the measure of this epoch: ‘‘We do not want to measure Hölderlin according to our time, but the opposite: we want to bring ourselves and those to come under the measure of the poet’’ (ibid., 4). What is sought in the question ‘‘What are poets for?’’ is thus not some prescription that might govern poetry. Rather, whatever authority is at work here...