The Matter of the Poetic Text

“A poetic fragment, different versions then, has for Spicer the dual charge of being an event in language, and a piece of something like literary ‘matter’, part of a set of concerns and topics (to use the rhetorical term). This loose net of literary matter is kept fresh and alive by variation, substitution, and the transformation of nonsense into language by a whole variety of activities Spicer called-almost certainly knowing the rhetorical sense of his word choice—‘invention’”(Nealon, “Affect, performativity, and actually existing poetry” 276-277).

In our respective blog posts, we have been exploring notions of connectivity and collectivity that undermine “traditional” views of individuals bound in a deictic consciousness. We can see these moves in de-centering and de-locating for example via Best’s rethinking of historical contexts, in Latour’s replacing discrete individual subjects with ever-expanding imbricated networks, and in Derrida’s re-reading of mythopoetics in Levi-Strauss. With these re-definitions of individuals—of poets and readers— in mind, Nealon’s argument of poetry as a constructed and malleable matter and/or material buttresses and serves as a paradigmatic shift in how we read and think about poetic production and reception.  Therefore, thinking in the historically disparate terms of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, it is possible to note a kind of writing that exists outside of the modern construction of the singularly-bodied author. Instead, it feels more appropriate to consider how these two texts function as and orient themselves around poetic material as a distributable form.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, attributed to an anonymous yet imagined and potentially collective author(s), gives the reader little choice but to handle the text on its own terms rather than relying on biographical contextualizations or modern conceptions of authorship which might otherwise mediate potential readings.  Thinking in Roland Barthes’ terms, there is not a “mythic” or “oracular” author dictating the shape or construction of the text, nor a spontaneous constitution of its materials or ‘content’. Furthermore, given that the text does not provide novel material, but instead molds and recasts established legends as topoi (the Arthurian and the romance), Sir Gawain delineates a well-crafted narrative structure from a creation of material generated by an ‘author-god’. From both the plane of originality and the plane of biography, Gawain lacks an author in modern terms. If all that is left is a text composed of poetic matter and not oracular manifestations, then our task becomes the interrogation of the ways in which a text enacts variations, substitutions and transformations as a form of play.

“The lyric spirit’s idiosyncratic opposition to the superior power of material things is a form of reaction to the reification of the world, to the domination of human beings by commodities that has developed since beginning of the modern area, since the industrial revolution became the dominant force in life” (Adorno 40)

Commencing with the Early Modern period, and its concomitant development alongside Capital, there was a concretization of subjective individuality, including a conceptualization of the singularly-bodied author as the sole-manufacturer of texts. In this sense, according to Adorno, the individuation of the poet sets both the author and the work apart from a collective-imagination which is written over and against.

To our understanding, then, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, functions as a recovery of an older method of poetic production and reception which was lost—or better, occluded—following the advent of the “author-god.”  Don’t Let Me Be Lonely dissembles the modern distinction between form and content, production and reception, by performing a multiply archivist assembly which reenacts a medieval distribution of textual materials. Insofar as a 21^st century social-imagination is condensed from highly disparate and diffused materials, the book transfigures social matter into poetic matter by (re)organizing these different concerns, topics and received forms (television, literary passages, music, pictures, etc) into a collage intended for redistribution. By gesturing outwards to these various sources, the text is read as poly-authored. Once again, we are left with the experience of poetic matter rather than individual authorship.  

“I also mean … to lure us away from an absolute distinction between “form” and “content,” because “matter” in the Arthurian and Carolingian cases contains the sense…of subject matter given different forms, and expressed as different kinds of content­­––abridged, expanded, translated, revised.  So “matter”…will mean for me less a metaphysically substantial “content” lodged in the abstraction of “form” than a question returned to through different topoi, in different forms and different genres.  These imply different sense of what texts are, and who poets are, when brought into the orbit of capital”(Nealon, Matter of Capital 1)