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"...it is precisely out of the flaw or excess in an equation that meaning springs"
When you pick up a piece of old crockery in a second-hand shop, often there is a
little
white tag on which the price is written, along with the phrase "as is". "As is"
indicates that
the object, say it is a cup, has a flaw: a crack or a chip or some other anomaly
testifying to
past use. If the object in question is a textile, say a slip or a sweater, "as is" indicates
a rip,
or a stain. As is suggests the distance from perfection from which the object has
traveled
through the course of time, its fall from Platonic grace or virgin purity; "as is" is a
variant
of "as if", the way in which desire ineluctably turns into fulfillment or
disappointment, and
clear, and not to overstate the obvious, contemporary poetic practice negotiates this
terrain and its
and so on, more insistently than any other current human activity.
The lost/found place of "as is" thus could be seen as a poetic methodology, through
which we
might revise the modernist "fragment". The poem now is rendered as an address
which
series of flaws or openings through which both chance and change register a matrix
of
When President Clinton remarked "It depends on what the meaning of the word Is
is" he
an imaginary but knowable present and the imperfect or furtive is of the actual as
is. Between the
first and the second "is" is ---however inadvertent on the President's part --- an
acknowledgment of chronic interpretative vigilance which
the generation he and I (we) share came to understand as the only possible
negotiation with reality
For a while I have been interested in the notion of a whole fragment. This fragment
is not
one in which one laments a lost whole, as in Stein, Eliot and Pound, but which
acknowledges the fact
of our unhandsome condition, where we suffer from having been being, and in that
or arises exactly at the place where "use" appears, use here as both pragmatics
syntax, where syntax stands for any logic of recognition. I share a love for this
construct of
a normalizing stability, but I recognize its habit of formulating, at the least impulse,
categorical imperatives which obscure and resist the actual conditions, posssibilties
and
These signifiying terrains elude and evade my own sense of being on a flexible and
indeterminate boundary or frame, even ones which eschew frames and boundaries
to "celebrate" upwardly mobile margins.
I think world presses on language and language on world at every point, and by
world I mean material,