What then are the ends of poetry, in view of its recent technological empowerment? Once upon a time it mattered that not enough folks had access to poetry and not enough of it was being read, written, or thought about. Now, apparently, the opposite is the case (per David Alpaugh’s article). Let us say then, following Alpaugh’s discussion, that the poetry of today is being written in a gluttonous spirit of accretion, of interminable addition. The web allows us this luxury. Its content, inversely, will almost always deal with the opposite of addition: with elliptical subtraction or with layman eschatology (i.e. the death of poetry, death of punk, death of…) We here at Hydra are somehow involuntarily fascinated with endings, specifically the end of days. But also: the ends of things and their uses, because the end of something is inherent in its purpose, its telos. The poetry of representation seeks to define and finish with terms and their branches and derivations; but it also somehow manages to splice meanings and multiply them tenfold.
Take the Urban Dictionary for instance: the ceaseless list of definitions for words and phrases in the street-educated parlance of media urbanites, each entry fully intending to produce the most consummate or most ridiculous definition possible, only manages to cause others to try their hand, however absurdly, at correcting and adding unto the original. The Urban Dictionary may continue to grow forever, so long as the language is there to feed it with inventions and perversions. I include the Urban Dictionary because it presents in many ways the arse-naked possibility of poetic invention (or semantic corruption) in a public forum accessible by all.
Another example is Hydra’s very own Edgar Garcia, whose poems I recently referenced. His Poem-A-Day project promises to deliver one “poem a day, everyday, from now until who knows,” and all of them to be written by him and none other. Edgar’s project is virtually the same as Poetry Daily‘s — mentioned by Alpaugh as the most visited online poetry anthology site — except that Poetry Daily reprints poems by already established poets and receives “millions of hits per month,” while Edgar’s site, which promises poetry of the same outstanding caliber, receives only a fraction of the number of visits PD does, yet guarantees the more interesting documentarian prospect of tracking the spiritual and aesthetic progress of an underground poet on his way toward finality (by which I refer to an implicit consummation of craft.)
Edgar’s site continues to grow in poems each day, and he has already reached his 100th consecutive push-up. The 100th poem, however, rather than finishing his project, has rather elongated it in a radical stanzaic fashion. The occasion of the poem “Centum” (abbreviated by the poet to the letter C) introduced the possibility of a continual enjambment — in other words, of a continuous accretion. At the time of this writing, “C” is currently at part xviii and looks to grow more limbs indefinitely. The poem begins with the observation of a colony of ants moving along in a column and from the ants it has gone toward starry heights invoking oblique and backwards and forwards meditations on the poet’s ancestral origins; in short, “Centum” looks nowhere near to finishing at 100, nowhere in search of an end since, in Eliot’s phrase, “in [its] end is [its] beginning.”
So if the end of poetry is to do exactly the opposite, to grow and prosper and grow more, then wherefore the solution to the mysterious stigma of too-much-poetry? In an economic inflation, the value of money depreciates: we find, so too does poetry. The harmonics of Edgar’s “Centum,” in its search for origin, do not arise from its inflation and growth but from its obstinacy to give limb to limb, add joint to cartilage, strap muscle to bone. It is the invention of a single man, the poet’s self-organism, and of the history that articulated his presence; the enjambment of a particular man in running dialogue with his historical conjunction. “Centum” grows more in meaning the more it grows in length: the end of “Centum” is nowhere in sight because it will have to, forsooth, exist in flux.
Giorgio Agamben theorizes on the “end of the poem” (literally, the last verse of a poem) as the locality where a poem’s identity is compromised by two motivations. One motivation is semantic: the poem seeks a meaning, or rather, a meaningfulness that acquires a vestige of the ratiocination which drove it to invention; the other impulse, which Edgar refers to as “the happy impulse” and which I refer to, borrowing Edgar’s terminology, as “indigence,” is semiotic: it is charged by invisible, exquisitely musical wavelengths, and it is driven by a hunger and urgency that demand a velocity of signs, of sounds especially, in no expressly ratiocinative order. The end of the poem, and usually the last verse line, is the site where the two currents collide and must come to a resolution: does the poem end here, satisfied that it has gathered up its quarry; or does it continue onward, enjamb yet again, trek forward on its tired legs until… until the end of days? Agamben’s understanding has it that enjambment — the occasion of a line breaking into another line without syntactic pause — signifies the poem’s identity and distinguishes it from prose forms:
Awareness of the importance of the opposition between metrical segmentation and semantic segmentation has led some scholars to state the thesis (which I share) according to which the possibility of enjambment constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose. For what is enjambment, if not the opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause? ‘Poetry’ will then be the name given to the discourse in which this opposition is, at least virtually, possible; ‘Prose’ will be the name for the discourse in which this opposition cannot take place.
Taken thus, the site of the poem’s ending, where enjambment can no longer occur, jeopardizes the poem’s identity as ‘poem’; it could turn out to be something other than a poem, something opposite, or just the determined nihilism of prose. Agamben, citing Dante’s authority, implies that what the poem of authentic power does to resolve the issue of identity is altogether different from what it is expected to do; the poem of authentic power neither ends nor does it continue along its same passage of inquiry and invocation; rather, it terminates, as all rivers do, at the mouth of the ocean. It loses its singularity, its principium individuationis, and reaches into the Nietzschean “eternal life behind all phenomena, and despite all annihilation.” Agamben quotes Dante from the Florentine’s De vulgari eloquentia:
The endings of the last verses are most beautiful if they fall into silence together with the rhymes. (Pulcherrime tamen se habent ultimorum carminum desinentiae, si cum rithmo in silentium cadunt.)
The end of poetry (as purpose and as location) achieves its aims when it has at last “fallen” into the silence which the terminus of speech announces. Rhymes terminate in silence because the cognitive faculties are eclipsed by sonorities that subside in contemplation. A soundless music, a senseless sense. It is the poetry of an empty winding valley, of the volcanoes that pattern the desolate valleys of Mars. No one is there to listen: this is veritable, authentic ontology.
The lyric begins when the opposition commences: against the indomitable silence that precedes and shapes and terminates all poetry, the lyrical I, or I-ness, calls forth the dove of creation and spreads its feathers across the gold-black whisper of fathomless void. Such are the descriptions of Genesis. In the beginning was the logos; meaning, in the beginning was the first and everlasting I, the principium individuationis. And in the end is the I’s beginning, the poem’s origin, the poem’s death. The Florentine’s description of what verse endings should do incites Agamben further:
What is this falling into silence of the poem? What is beauty that falls? And what is left of the poem after its ruin? If poetry lives in the unsatisfied tension between the semiotic and the semantic series alone, what happens at the moment of the end, when the opposition of the two series is no longer possible? Is there here, finally, a point of coincidence in which the poem joins itself to its metrical element to pass definitively into prose? The mystical marriage of sound and sense could, then, take place. Or, on the contrary, are sound and sense now forever separated without any possible contact, each eternally on its own side? In this case, the poem would leave behind it only an empty space in which, according to Mallarmé’s phrase, truly rien n’aura lieu que le lieu.
The end of poetry begins at the end of the poem itself: where the emptiness of space predominates — the gold-black void of the cosmos or the white blue-veined blankness of the page or the smooth flickerless screen of the iPad — the possibility of a poem, of the poem, of all poems, presents itself. No addition here is too great or too small. Even the web is hardly large enough to accommodate the mass-intensity of this possibility. “Nothing shall have place except place itself.” The web is the preeminent metaphor for this semblance of limitlessness. The new poetics then is not very different from the old: the old math had been updated to a calculus of immeasurability, but hardly changed from its precursor strengths. Allow me one last mysticism: the poetry that is not there, is the new poetry. Uncountable, immeasurable, continuous, the poem persists, even after ending, in furnishing a perpetual means to an end. “It often happens,” Nicolò Tibino writes, “that the rhyme ends without the meaning of the sentence having been completed” (Multiocens enim accidit quod, finita consonantia, adhuc sensus orationis non est finitus). It often happens, as it must happen, that the 100th part of a poem can finish without its project ever arriving at the final destination. The project is simply passed on from one craftsman’s hands into the next’s: a heritage thereafter constructed and pursued.
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