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(Tr. from the French by Wilson Baldridge)
PROPOSITIONS FOR AN ARS POETICA
I owe you the truth in poems.
The poem is made up of sequences where image, figure, rhythm are undivided. One must enter indivision.
The image is not icon, nor semiosis; but "likening," thing of things.
The poem is in the figure, rather than the figure in the poem.
The characteristic of "modernity" is that of the figure's generalization.
The poem, swinging like a door that invents a threshold, fluctuates between two states of rhythm: from prose poems to prose in poems.
Listen and see! What does he see? Opsis ton adêlon ta phainoména (Anaxagoras): the point whence a phenomenon appears offering a view onto things not patent. Or: what appears offers a (quasi) view onto what does not stand out openly. They exchange positions through likening, wherein they testify.
The manifest shows us the hidden; "that's how it is."
The operation implies a reversal. From the testified which it is, the hidden becomes the testifier; the manifest finds meaning in being like it. Parabolically; ana-logically.
What shows up "by itself? Nothing; nothing is obvious on its own. One would say rather that everything is shown by another, with its others, with what-it's-like.
So. in passing, poetry is not alone; but dancing-with, in the round of the muses.
Always and anyway poetry drops you a reference.
Relating, referring, conferring, transferring, it is of the circumstance; it opens here another over-there than that one.
A principle of comparison federates all figures. The one is not the other; the one is like the other. Poetic attention tries to speak the comm-unity of mortals.
The poem makes us propositions - logically, erotically. "a orb": oris a pivot, as like is. Thus the offering of a possibility opens up, without date of foreclosure; and the poem itself is an "expan-si-on of infinite things" (Baudelaire) - an extension of possibility upon "the world."
To-be-like was an injunction too. "Be ye as children!" (Why "children"?) Whereby to be like them, the carefree . . . we must try to understand, calling back in question the priority of( violent) mimesis and...