The Exorbitant Quiet
Kyle Kinaschuk
I
My father lifted his own eulogy from Jacques
Derrida. A few weeks before his death, he called me to solicit writing to be
read aloud at his funeral. He was moved by the first text I shared with him
over the phone: a brief eulogy Derrida composed in anticipation of his own death
(to defend others, Derrida said, from the torturous “ordeal” of writing in the
wake of loss). Always prefer life and constantly affirm survival. So my
father asked me if he could copy the entire thing, and then proceed as if he
had written these words as his departing address. I love you and am smiling
at you from wherever I am. This must have been the final thing he would ever
ask of me. A wish, dying, belated as ever, to be at a loss for words upon – and
in advance of – your own death.
This rather absurd instance of
falsifying one’s own self-eulogy is made all the more bizarre not merely by the
reality that my father never read and was unfamiliar with philosophy, but by
the sheer headache-inducing irony of the source in question. We might go on,
yes, about the future anterior and the logic of iterability with its iter
and itara that cathedralize this scene (to write is to die a living death,
and so on). And yet there’s an attendant question between grief and citation I
want to pursue here that follows from my father sampling Derrida (and really
letting that track play out, perhaps, for a little too long).
II
What I am moving toward is a claim I
suggest is pivotal to a pulse within contemporary poetic production: poetry
is at a loss for words. While hyperbolic and glib, this contention intensifies
and compounds Marjorie Perloff’s thesis that originality is maxing itself out
in the digital age as genius survives the exhaustion of inventio by
choking language of its direct expression. Put differently, many twenty-first
century poets have renounced language’s capacity to infinitely express original
utterances (a commitment that underpins both language poetry and lyric poetry).
Poets have begun to seize, instead, upon Walter Benjamin’s literary montage,
his “I needn’t say anything” (460),
that puts rags and refuse on full display by writing through, within, and
against other texts. For Perloff, Benjamin anticipates “the turn writing would
take in the twenty-first century, now that the Internet has made copyists,
recyclers, transcribers, collators, and reframers of us all” (41).
The difficulties implicit in such a turn,
however, can be rehearsed like a litany. The first is philosophical. Writing is
necessarily a writing through the voice of the other that precedes and exceeds
us while also being, from the first instant, subject to cutting, grafting,
citation, falsification, and corruption. The second is largely historical. To
announce such a turn risks lapsing into a presentism that blinks myopically at
the many modes of “writing through” that are the very tissues of literary
histories whether originality and authorship are within the domain of the sayable
or not. The third is formal. The so-called deaths of expression, the lyric, and
the fragment are not that compelling of wagers to place. Poetry, as Sina
Queyras argues, can be lyrical and also conceptual. The fourth is political.
Conceptual poetry is often irrigated by a “post-identity politics” that
flattens social difference and escalates what Cathy Park Hong calls, echoing
James Baldwin, the “delusion of whiteness” in its drive to “casually slip in
and out of identities…when there are those who are consistently harassed,
surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are” (Hong). Hong identifies a
certain voluntarism that often infuses constraint-based writing and neglects
the entanglements of race, settlerhood, sexuality, gender, able-bodiedness, and
class. All language necessarily constrains to different degrees and at
different intervals, but these constraints are asymmetrically distributed and
interlocking.
These complexities do not contradict that
there has been a palpable shift in contemporary poetic production. On the
contrary, these critiques establish at the outset four co-implicated pressure
points that raise the philosophical, historical, formal, and political stakes
of reading and composing writing that steals, lifts, collects, resituates,
tarnishes, pulverizes, minimizes, heaps, cuts, and hoards.
III
And so my question. If contemporary
poetry is thus at a loss for words, then something arresting happens when
grieving from beyond, across, and below the word: the idiomatic phrase “at a
loss for words” attains a second power. It’s commonplace to say that one is at
a loss for words when someone dies, but what occurs formally when we lament
without literally taking the word as the basis for claiming, grieving, and
tallying up loss? What might it mean, then, to grieve when one no longer relies
upon the paradigmatic substitutions and syntagmatic relations of the word as
the primary site of composition? With the loquacity of a melancholic, one says
too much and nothing at all. An odd volubility ramps up the reserve that often
afflicts the bereaved. Here, we might encounter an exorbitant quiet that puts
into crisis the boundaries between language and silence.
Works Cited
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
UP, 2002.
Hong, Cathy Park. “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde.” Lana Turner 7, 2014.
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry By Other Means in
the New Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010.
Queyras, Sina. “Lyric
Conceptualism, A Manifesto in Progress.” Poetry
Foundation, 2012.
Kyle Kinaschuk is a PhD
candidate in the Department of English at the University of Toronto, where he researches
the politics and form of lament in contemporary poetry situated within Canada.
His poetry has appeared in journals such as The
Capilano Review, filling Station,
PRISM international, The Puritan, Hart House Review, Poetry is
Dead, and FreeFall Magazine. His
debut chapbook, COLLECTIONS-14,
appeared with above/ground press this past April.
