William Watkin

The poetics of presentation: Lyn Hejinian's My Life project and the work of Giorgio Agamben

This article considers the development of Lyn Hejinians poetics across the period of the My Life project. Taking its lead from a critical interaction between Hejinian and the philosophy of Giorgio Agamben, it argues that Hejinians poetics have moved from concerns pertaining to representation in the early versions of My Life to those of presentation as such in the later My Life in the Nineties. Asserting that Hejinians poetics of presentation is very much in keeping with Agambens view of language as communicability or pure presentation as such, this article concludes, however, by arguing that Agambens interest in presentation is part of a wider project of suspending the signature of poetry in its entirety through his philosophy of indifference in a manner that is not commensurate with Hejinians own view as regards the language of inquiry.

The Materialization of Prose: Poiesis versus Dianoia in the work of Godzich & Kittay, Shklovsky, Silliman and Agamben

This article presents a critical theory of the medium of ‘normative’ prose. Relying on the work of critics of poet’s prose and the philosophy of Badiou and Nancy, it commences by defining prose ostensibly as the immaterial and thus invisible dianoia or discursive other to the radically material poeisis. The essay then attempts to trace a brief history of critical attention paid to prose to uphold and further develop this thesis. Using the poeticized prose of Ron Silliman’s Tjanting as an exemplary, contemporary text the remainder of the article delineates the three elements of prosaic immateriality. The first is the predominance of the role of deixis in prose as the very act of referring to reference itself devoid of actual referents in the world, the moment of the predominance of prose as normative according to Godzich and Kittay. The second is the attempt by automatized prose discourse to occlude its alterity and the role of poetic alienation in revealing this automatization as a political/ideological construct. This is traced back to the formalism of Shklovsky and then reconsidered in the Language poetics of Ron Silliman’s own theorization of the New Sentence as that which resists automatized syllogistic cohesion. Thirdly, the paper looks at the significant incursions in the field by one of the key contemporary thinkers, Giorgio Agamben. Analysing Agamben’s theory of prose as the collapse of poetic semiotic singularity into semantic generality, I finish with a consideration of how Silliman’s work resists this very gesture in an attempt to create a permanently materialized prose that resists being relegated to dianoia or the prose of generalized connections.