william watkin's blog (since 2003)

I recently published an article on the work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben in Jacket Magazine. Take a look at it here: "Though we keep company with Cats and Dogs": Onomatopoeia, Glossolalia and Happiness in the Work of Lyn Hejinian and Giorgio Agamben. It fuses together some central elements of Agamben's work on the poetic word, and Hejinian's provocative theory of happiness. Effectively Agamben's conceptualisation of poetry as a potential modality for an alternate form of life as thinking breaks down into the study of four elements. 1. the poetic word (onomatopoeia, glossolalia, xenoglossia, the semiotic and naming) 2. Enjambement 3. Caesura 4. Structure/Rhythm, what I call projective recursion Placed together these form the basis for what I call logopoiesis in my most recent work, that is what has been called elsewhere by Heidegger and Badiou, poetic thinking. I think now there is material on all four elements posted on the blog in relation to various conte

Conclusion In the process of adding up the diverse phrases of these two very different poetic units, The Tennis Court Oath and Writing is an Aid to Memory, one gets then a sense of how a certain structural similarity, the predominance of parataxis as mode of combination, can produce different text-ideology. Ashbery’s chosen title emphasises a self-conscious exploitation of erasure, leaving all out, and the myth of national politics. Written during a self-imposed exile the poem conveys in its two extremes, “America,” and the much analysed “Europe,” not only two very different modes of combination, parataxis and collage, producing two very different text units, but also two myths of nationhood predicated on the revolutionary fervour of the late eighteenth century that David’s painting depicts. And the to and fro of the game of tennis matches the to and fro of the poetic consciousness between a myth of America as free and Europe as horrific, which is cut across by the paradox of the se

Hejinian's Slippage This musical “back and forth” movement is a myth of intersubjectivity which is directly opposed to the more disjunct sense that Hejinian describes in the preface to Writing is an Aid to Memory: I am always conscious of the disquieting runs of life slipping by, that the message remains undelivered, opposed to me. Memory cannot, through the future return, and proffer raw conclusions...Abridgement is foolish, like lopping off among miracles; yet times is not enough. Necessity is the limit with forgetfulness, but it remains undefined. Memory is the girth, or again. [i] The main difference between Ashbery and Hejinian is that Hejinian does not presuppose the interaction between subjectivity and writing to be an easy passage, a musical to and fro productive of the poem unit with the aim of “going on.” For what happens when one cannot go on any more? Paratactic syntax is not endless, it is proscribed by number and thus by size, and whilst we all now know abridgeme

Ashbery's America and the Taxonomy-Parataxis Copula The duality of word-phrase is the origin of the copula of poetic syntax: taxonomy-parataxis. Ashbery seems almost painfully aware of this in the work of The Tennis Court Oath which tends to reduce the phrase towards the level of the word in a work such as “America”: Piling upward In fact the stars In America the office hid archives in his stall... Enormous stars on them The cold anarchist standing in his hat. Arm along the rail We were parked Millions of us The accident was terrible. The way the door swept out The stones piled up— The ribbon—books. miracle. with moon and the stars. [i] What we have in this opening stanza and in the poem as a whole is a particular type of motivated parataxis which, in actual fact, is more akin to an intertextual taxonomy of limited motifs. Each phrase is combined in exactly the same fashion as the example of “leave all out” poetry Ashbery talks about in the opening of his Three Poems. [ii] W

Hejinian's Writing is an Aid to Memory Section 34 of Lyn Hejinian’s Writing is an Aid to Memory contains a self-conscious and self-referential catalogue of combinations which I have listed here in full in respect of the structure of taxonomy which does not respond well to paraphrasing or selection (Figure 1: Paratactic Combination of Combinatory Schemas--Note: can't find this figure at present will add when I do). Within this taxonomy of combinations, internal cohesion in the section is based on the potentiality of the interaction of any number of these so that each moment of framing the phrase-strings into form is simply the onset of other binding hermeneutic potentialities which again open up the frame so as to then close it based along other lines. And what is true for the section is also true for the poem as a whole This movement is conveyed by the first and last phrases of my list: the anaphora implied by “making the body binding,” which suggests a closure of the anaph

This paper was originally presented at a conference on postmodern poetry in Plymouth in 1998. I was still rather young and had not yet finished my PhD. Hejinian was in the audience along with other people I really admired. Having given the paper the chair, a well-known experimental British poet, passed a comment suggesting the paper was simply deranged. Luckily the audience didn't think so and the paper become a mini cause- celebre during the conference on the back of which met Hejinian , John Kinsella and later Rachel Blau duPlessis . So thanks curmudgeonly British poet. Written in the technical, rather high-blown style I used back then, the terminology in parts is a bit off now but the observations are still valuable I think. The paper was never published. You Do the Math One might argue that the phrase is the optimum unit of poetic language. Whilst its limits are fairly flexible, it can be as small as a word or even a mark, and it can extend along beyond the semi-mythic pau

Paper presented at Keele University, May 2001 and again at Reading University in June 2001. Death is never completed as there are always leftovers. There are the literal remains of the body which, within western culture, are vital to the mourner’s sense of how to mourn successfully; there are those who are left over or behind who must make sense of their loss; and then, more often than not, there are monuments. Elegy theory pays a great deal of attention to the nature of the monument, as does art history and social anthropology, and certainly the memorial is the moment when the privacy of mourning meets the public gaze of the community. At this most difficult of meeting points, private and public, we often like to construct something to mark the occasion, something arresting and affecting. But which occasion are we commemorating with our monuments to that which has been lost? Elegists and psychoanalysts tend to stress the affective importance of the monument as an essential step toward