Archaeology, Elegy, Architecture

I want to look with you today at the conditions for existence of the poem, especially the lyrical poem, in three of its most important states. First, as POEM, a unit which has a first line, or beginning, and a last line, or end, and appears to enjoy an independent existence in the world of poems among other poems. Second, as this unit, POEM, now considered in its aspect as one member of a chain of poems, also with an apparent beginning and end, the chain being the totality of poems written in a lifetime by a poet-something I shall call OPUS. If the poet in question be dead, OPUS is closed; if he or she be alive (and let she be understood with he all along from now on all the way through), OPUS is still open-ended. One problem then is the nature and extent of OPUS's meaningfullness to the poet at the moment of writing POEM. Third, this unit OPUS may be said to have a place in another unit, far more vast this time, which might be defined, with Robert Duncan, as the symposium of the whole, but which I shall here specify as the totality of all poems written thus far as well as yet to be written-the possibility of poetry if you prefer-and call PAGE. With PAGE, since humanity is in no way extinct, we are also likely to remain for the foreseeable future, with an open-ended situation. Beyond PAGE, the ability to say anything meaningful recedes; though just to push things as far as they will bear, I might annotate the possibilities of PAGE as TEXT and SOUND in a direction I can only call political, and even, perhaps, push the excursion as far as SILENCE if this can be done without too much metaphysics. Readers of contemporary criticism will be aware, at this outset, of the fact that such remarks about POEMS, OPUS and PAGE appear on the surface to continue granting an authoritative priority to the person and function of AUTHOR. Structuralists and post-structuralists, however, acting on suggestions in Nietzsche, Marx and Freud, have spoken at length of the dissolution of the subject and, in this context, of the meanness and inadequacy of the notion of author, as well as of all notions allowing of any authoritative intents in those who initiate texts. The very linearity of any discourse-its having beginnings, middles and 'ends-is questioned and falters before a vision of texts as composing a far larger field of venture, something like an advancing tide or a widespread geological layer, in which qualities such as adjacency, ? Nathaniel Tarn, 1980

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