________________

Flipping back through Poetry & the Fate of the Senses in anticipation of Susan Stewart's reading tonight. The book has a thesis and an organizational logic that it more or less follows, but I prefer to think of it as her Grand Tour of the lyric, or a Xanadu-like mansion full of collectibles with Sappho in one corner and Frank O'Hara in the other. I was not sure how often I would come back to it until hearing from one critic who hated her "everything-and-then-some" inclusiveness. This complaint still endears me to the book. Here are a few passages underlined in my copy: Darkness, breath and touch, sound, speech, presentation, discernment of relation, figuration and naming: this is the sequence of poiesis, that is the pattern of divine creation in the Hebrew Scripture; it speaks directly to the continuing experience of bringing form out of a void. (9) The taboos against the excrescences of the body, for example--menstrual blood, vomit, spittle, hair, dandruff, nail pairings, semen, excrement, uring--appear in the West as total taboos. All five senses are closed to them, with the most animal senses, touch and taste, receiving the highest prohibition. Of course, they are not to be uttered as names--and their names themselves are generalized, as are their few euphemisms. Disgust as the far register of pleasure, disgust experienced physically and not through language, however, is readily transformed into disgust as the pleasure of resistance, temptation, and fetishism: the body's system of closings and openings becomes articulated as it is exercised. Hence the residual familiarity of the tabooed substances and the private as the proper site for their management. (22) Touching by means of skin is often mediated by an appendage: folicles of hair and roots of nails. In animals, claws, horns, and hooves are wrapped in nerve fibers... (163) Her chapter on touch led me to a question she does not address. How did one of the five senses turn into a means for uncovering criminal acts, i.e. through fingerprints? Levinas talks of touch as nonteleological, or as Stewart writes, "Touch is the paradigm for the reciprocal open-endedness of all art forms involving the representation of persons. As in the identification and separation necessary to any form of catharsis, the hand touching its companion must know the connection in order to know the separation" (168). But post-CSI, touch is permanent, nothing is ever separable again. Here's a passage about Frank O'Hara: O'Hara has taken the temporal convention of the poem not just from the present-centeredness of the lyric; he has also specifically borrowed a temporal structure from everyday experience: the structure of recollection we employ when we have lost something. We might call it the genre of "Where did I put my keys?" (219) Out of the unformed utterances of laughing and crying out and weeping, a whole decorum of emotional expression develops and merges with conventions of poetic decorum and occasion. Nevertheless, what might seem at first glance to be rule-goverened behavior is in fact constantly in tension with the vital and ultimately inarticulate forces of pain and emotion that compel such expression. (328) Finally a quote from the last paragraph: "Perhaps I am writing at the end of the world"(333).