There is power, race, class, ability, gender, sexuality, and all the other ways this I bleeds out, historically, now, ahead of itself.
That, yes, we hold the camera, manipulate, but also we aren't implicated in only our own I, our individual neuroses alone. It's old news that the I isn't self-transparent. Likewise I don't know about I's, about confession. Which is a way of saying I doubt we can arrive at 'things themselves' anywhere-let alone in a poem-but rather, we arrive, at best, at a thing, poetically. I don't know if poetry is or isn't suited to it, if that's the right question, but I do know there is no 'raw dissemination of fact' in poetry, or rather its facts are 'poetic' (just as the most well-sourced documentary is "cinematic").
What interests me in poetry though, in the project of poetry here and now, isn't the truth of the fact. That doesn't mean one can't point or indicate, or even arrive at something like a fact. Just as a documentarian hasn't effaced a viewpoint just by having a pretense to "fly-on-the-wall" observation, so the poet hasn't effaced an "I," even if it never shows up in a poem. On "Seagull, Tiny": Confessionalism, Documentation, Approximity
0 kommentar(er)
