"We have the right to our own aesthetic values and approaches, and we are under no obligation to take into consideration, or make concessions to, aesthetic approaches (or political ideologies mascarading as aesthetics) that are hostile to us."
Lyle Daggette
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From "Between Tongues: an Interview with Rosmarie Waldrop"
Well, yes, Absence is the great generator. I sometimes wonder, are most poems lastly elegies?
Jabès holds that we speak, comment, write because we cannot bear silence, which is lastly the absence of an “original word” lost in the breakage of the first Tablets of the Law. But that it is also this silence that allows us to speak, read, write. “Writing is an act of silence, allowing itself to be read in its entirety.” And we must “rather than to sense, hold on to the silence that has formed the word.”
I’ve worked with absences, esp. in Lawn of Excluded Middle: absence of center, empty center, the womb, the resonating space of a musical instrument, the space between words that makes them words, words carrying absence as a sea shell carries the roar of the sea: “words shelling the echo of absence onto the dry land,” or “the empty space I place at the center of each poems to allow penetration.” But as for the "metaphysical presence" I have no experience of it.
Silence and elision figure in many poets’ work. Almost by definition: every line of verse at its end turns toward silence, toward the white of the page, toward what is not. (It is one of the challenges of the prose poem to preserve this silence once there is no white space at the end of a line because there is no line. It has to be displaced into syntactical/grammatical “turns.” Or semantic shifts. Recently I have created silence inside the sentence by using periods rhythmically where they don’t belong grammatically).
One could also say that white space, while it interrupts the text nevertheless is the larger continuity, and that the poem rests on this continuity, on this silence that is present in the white of the page.
Silence in conversation is a different matter. I am happy that Edmond and I were comfortable enough with one another not to get fidgety with silence. It sometimes proved the silence of a thought forming that later could be communicated. But other times not.
Ortega y Gasset has a very interesting passage on this phenomenon:When we converse, we live within a society; when we think, we remain alone. But in this kind [of true interchange], we do both at once...: we pay attention to what is being said with almost melodramatic emotion and at the same time we become more and more immersed in the solitary well of our meditation. This increasing dissociation cannot be sustained in a permanent balance. For this reason, such conversations characteristically reach a point when they suffer a paralysis and lapse into a heavy silence. Each speaker is self-absorbed. Simply as a result of thinking, he isn't able to talk. Dialogue has given birth to silence, and the initial social contact has fallen into states of solitude.
(read the whole here)
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But as for the "metaphysical presence" I have no experience of it. I wonder then how it is possible to experience or work with absence . . .
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