The Voice Over

But there’s a sense that more serious measures might be necessary. A poetics may break with the individual in a variety of ways. The most straightforward and drastic move is the definitive victory by way of refusal.² Here the “I” is under threat not just as the front entrance, the door half-open in expectation of a reader—but as the organizing will that stands behind the sequence of words and texts. The poet must husk off everything that comprises the primal charm of poetry for him, all its bells and whistles, rhythm, rhyme, citations, everything, including the author’s own manner, which is typically called one’s own voice (inevitably putting both notions in question)—in hope that an indivisible, indestructible remnant will be revealed over the line—the substance of poetry in its pure form.

It would seem to work just that way—that is, it can work that way, too—and poetry can be looked at not only as a project (“a colonial one,” someone in the audience will say) to expand the territory of the poetic, where ever more new, uninhabited zones are occupied and cultivated, yesterday’s virgin soil is plowed (and pondered). And not only as a progressive utopia of cultivating new devices in pursuit of galloping modernity. But also as a kind of potlatch, an orgy of self-denial, the ultimate letting go of property (having left the beauty of the world and what is corrupt in it³)—flaying oneself of everything, refusing oneself everything, including existence. This rather hair-raising striptease, where external things (blouse, shoes, panties) are followed by the essential (body, bones, skin), can end as a victory, if it succeeds in proving that the essence blows where it wishes and has no need for bearers and wrappings.

It seems that at present the sense of lyric poetry, its new life’s work, consists in attempting to free itself of something it can’t yet get along without: the selfhood of the poet. And inasmuch as poetry is a self-consistent thing, if the author becomes a problem for it, it has to do something with her. The question is, What?

What thus comes into question is the lyric poet as an agent. How was this set up for the last two or three hundred years, in the traditional arrangement of lyric poetry’s workings? Like in old movies. The hero drives a car, gets on a horse, a motorcycle, a flying carpet, remaining immobile himself—while behind him the landscape goes by with terrible speed, creating the illusion of movement: he’s not the one rushing; rather, it’s his surroundings, the mountains, valleys, clouds. The lyric poet is the static and stable center of his universe—he’s the point where speech emerges, a ray directed at objects passing by. In a certain sense, it’s precisely that immobility that ensures the poetic text’s authenticity and the readers’ trust: it’s a kind of trademark; we have already once and for all dubbed certain images and situations “Blok” or “Aronzon.”

What interests me now lies somewhere in the vacant zone between the author-as-necessity (a guide, an intermediary, a Dersu Uzala,⁴ or Leatherstocking, a living person in the here where strangers don’t go) and the need for a text as a pure and communal cup (where it’s possible and necessary, pace Brodsky, to share a poem by Rilke with someone else). I see something along the lines of a promise there or at least a possibility—and here’s what it looks like.

Let’s suppose a problem has these conditions: we’re being asked not just to dump the ballast, get rid of the excess—but to reject everything we possess, consciously or unconsciously, and “possession of speech” is the natural pretension of a person who lives with the help of words. If the problem is formulated as a victory over subjectivity, rejecting oneself and one’s own, then, I repeat, the most obvious, straightforward solution comes down to purification, smoothing the text with sandpaper—completely renouncing expressive means, what comprises its outer integument. In point of fact, this is something like a cosmetic redecorating that doesn’t touch on the structure of a residence and a way of life; there’s no demand here for radical changes of layout or rewiring the entire building. But from the outside it looks like a powerful gesture—if only because it too exists in a whirlpool of coercion, except that this time it turned to face the author, who’ll have to work in the new system of prohibitions and never step on a crack.

But it can turn out that this is not the only solution—and that the equation should be solved for y instead of x.