Shadow Work

Lyn Hejinian suggests: “He distinguished the individual animals, discovered the concept of categories, and then organized the various species according to their different functions and relationships in a system” (626). She continues, pointing out that individual experience and cultural education determine the sorts of relationships that will be recognized or blindly passed over. For instance, she recognizes the paradigmatic expectation that perfect language “will meet its object with perfect identity” (626). Her suggestion that this state of language would be insufferable is supported by Coolidge’s description of Aram’s one word poems. Although there is a certain wonder in Aram’s capacity to actually go through the editing process, to engages with his one word, this image becomes comic and insufferable to Coolidge. Within such a complete language, the space for individual play and expression is lost. The attempt at sameness between word and world that she suggests is an instinctual desire, if realized would prevent the positive recognition of difference, of individuality; only “the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other” (628). Aram’s poems motivated Coolidge’s work at putting things together—highlighting both similarity, a willingness to come into relation, and difference, the resistance to come into relation.
The inability to to say what one wants to creates an anxious space. One function of poetic writing seems to be engagement with this anxiety, Stein’s notion that writing must go on, and attempts to communicate despite the private natures of individuals’ languages, the desire to close the gap: “To myself I proposed the paragraph as a unit representing a single moment of time, a single moment in the mind, its content all the thoughts, thought particles, impressions, impulses—all the diverse, particular, and contradictory elements that are included in an active and emotional mind at any given instant. For the moment, as a writer, the poem is a mind” (Hejinian 620). Poetry becomes the communication of a consciousness rather than a reality.
How a poem might mediate the space of translation between poet and reader is a good question, especially in time following the numerous descriptions of the failures of language and artistic constructions, such as Watten’s reiteration of Smithson’s: “The possibilities of language in art are described as fictional and illusionistic” (79). Watten suggests projects that reflect on their own incomplete state. Using Smithson’s mirror sculpture instillations to illustrate mimetic failure, Watten points out that these objects create their image out of their surroundings. It is the syntactical arrangement of objects with consideration of how they will interact in the world at large that allows the poet to “do something.”
Combining my reading of Watten and Coolidge, and probably all the others, has created a model in my mind of the poet as the arranger of words as objects in order to come to something new. However, for this productive quality of poetry (and I feel each poem should produce something distinct) to be understood and appreciated by external consciousness, the poet must control the work to account for the space of translation between himself and others. I see the poet arranging specific objects not only for himself, but with and understanding of how the light of others will create a shadow. It is not the poem the poet needs to be conscious of per-say, but the shadow.