An Example from the Literature
Peter Seaton’s poem is both an essay in verse and a lecture on aesthetic theory: an example of poetics as praxis, theory as act. In reflecting on the act of writing as a form of writing, Seaton’s poem continually builds new meanings as it performs its own erasure, canceling out any possible conclusion as it moves forward. Its account of the truth value of literature is its refusal to give one in the act of writing: “Signing a formula for writing in ink, a rare, concentrated / Ink made from a division of myself and English / That I’m crossing out.” Seaton’s “Example” demonstrates how a reflection on a work of art can be productive of the work itself, how form and content may coincide in a demonstration of meaning, its construction and dissemination. As a literary model for writing about poetry as poetics, Seaton’s poem adds to the long tradition of texts by poet/critics who demonstrate a poetics through their mode of writing: Gertrude Stein’s “Composition as Explanation,” Louis Zukofsky’s Bottom: On Shakespeare, Charles Olson’s Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn, John Ashbery’s Three Poems, Charles Bernstein’s Artifice of Absorption, Susan Howe’s Pierce-Arrow, and Bob Perelman’s Marginalization of Poetry, key moments in the continuing genre of poetics as self-reflection. Peter Seaton died on 18 May 2010.
There is no text, and its pleasures devolve
Upon this tristesse. There’s always a logic
In which the security of the existence of the momentarily
Unimaginable is ignored in the down to earth
Construction of the perfect poem. That’s what
Nobody’s inside of and in which there is no standing
Because the afterthought is this item of inheritance
Whose all embracing bequest provides for the appearance
Of emptiness, of heroic possibility, of the myth
Enduring never forgetting there’s nobody inside
Being too true to be normal. The white country
Of the page, “trembling with anticipation,” can
Be written off into the clearest cultures
Of the structure of reciprocity to propose and prepare
And observe their growth in the leisure of a lifetime
Of work. But this remote intelligence is preoccupied
With references without which no standing can endure though
It exists famously without relation to itself, occupying
The alienated analysand with confused dreams
Of perfect ego just as the hero’s
Authenticity resides in his will, a residence
Keeping the poet homeless and forever at home with
Indeterminacies themselves adrift from words
Of little wings tied to the mountains, fresh water
Sliding up in one’s soul on currents of the human
Voice between efforts of finding myself falling for
Decisions that no longer exist. I can linger along
The earth’s surface, folding the highway’s edge
Into vulnerable limits of the sun burning
Down with information that lets me tell you
Where I would wander. There nothing moves
When I stop to be alone, no sign of life
Defined on one of the pages acquiring different kinds
Of English to infinity, no fact, no parts, no prime banks
Of ancient days where the person you may not know
Conducts me to the truth. No unintentionally
Scattered horizons discovered in someone
Signing a formula for writing in ink, a rare, concentrated
Ink made from a division of myself and English
That I’m crossing out. I’ll just leave
Some sweet concept of my culture in an English
Settling whatever we believe an American means in
The language preserve of gland controlled unity.
I can see us in its new division, looming out of continuous
English in a paper-strewn past, understanding insights
You might have vigorously finishing with us. Then you
Might have a different word for erupting out of
Civilization which is what I think
You mean takes place in thoughts I think
I had in mind, evanescent possibilities of a hero’s blush
Verging on pluralistic mortality. But you guys
You look out from anything that seems poles are cool
Among crags, the peaks gathering you like dizzying lab drops
Under a tree. The flatness of rocks shoots into
A little bit about baths right under your nose.
If I read you classify some small black object
Under the sun I expect to see the unused
Fantasy watered by a whale running
Out of rocks and bristling with the evidence of a pen
Where it feels this sudden margin in the grip
Of a tradition of a word or two. I don’t really believe
Cells to be single, or even dots of exciting principles
Of preceding days plodding by. I want to pretend
To be a man and actually think, to bring us two small
Pieces of the two of us in that past made
Of all future extravagance that ends a feeling that
Everything comes back grinning, the moon and wild grass
Joined by contrasts of undefined writing grounded
In the one you see that’s on me, the old saying
That doesn’t mean defend yourself against seeming to
Like to touch me or that there’d be surging
Spectra of full vowel futures written on tough
Haunting guesses of everything expectantly locating
Your words out of how good you were you evil
Looking reader disrupting the shock of begging for
Attention from every metaphor for reading
Assignments into the needs of inventive images dominating
The planets about to leave land into a lineage
That some intense dream trails in words.
Hero and Heroine, I was asked to speak while
Writing these priorities. One, this must be
Said because of an urge to write. Two, to write
Something one reads into erotic discovery.
Three, to write so you can read a father
Was killed on the basis of anticipating an urge
To assemble the determining line.
You can ask me this heart line in tropes
Fortuitously sustaining the association of the raw
Material of the language of right thoughts in
Quotes inseparable from antidotes to telling
You this, in differential sleep distilled
To participation in geometries of so many advanced
Ideas for living everywhere, in doing something
For a man who runs against fine timing.
You’re talking to old friends, to a legend,
A scheme of resistance humanizing you
Within reach of my writing. Yet the elusive
Tempo of seeking patterns in the methods of questions
In my muscles actually happened to that poet
Existing in the loss of a word. It’s that adventure
I want, the nature of what happens starting to create
A subset of cleared-away English giving you trouble
Between two nouns sounding good on the bridge
To word matter, in the mind’s hardness
Of the word instance of eloquent new painting
Around a field and a cow. Without this
New object becoming a context for images of thinking
Becoming words my impetus does not falter in the fact
Of something you see in thinking this thing out. But
One good idea for secret technical gratification
Is not that tightly revelatory written word. It’s not
Those words referring to veiled thoughts of sure reading
Demanding concepts of the nervous spectator and his wife
Admitting me to proving to take decades
That I have to work with, centuries
To occur to our sufficient age beyond the reach
Of classical certainty. That’s how
You understand humans earnestly lacking means
For adding the future I to each strange language
I guess I can’t imagine arising from mine.
Ah, Maria, these problems don’t tear
The place down. And what a lot of reasons jar
Le neige bleu into certain kinds of Proust
Aviation such as dialects minus those syllables
Going to make me cry. This son of a gun
Is reading the highest standard of living.
This moralist studies the subject’s real things
Overflowing his or her main chance. This patriot
Exists in spite of books written for me
To read Kant, this troubled people
Orders its survival and keeps it whole and breaks
Your heart into dossiers of elementary ambition, live people
Need so much. These peasants starve into print
And rush through pearls of prime guesses to see you.
These women, reduced to the trouble with men define
The developing words with grammars you mix with reading
Knee deep in concentrating on upright amounts of time.
This technician sees the words that always come
For us. This linear being just lets go.
Because the subject is pure matter in excess
Of roaming some writer’s logic it’s our golden
Age remaining embarrassingly central to how we are
Where we are now varies right away. At least one
Formula for necessity or speaking to incidents
Radiating letters to literature hovers over all the time
That grants composite logics openly and ceaselessly
To you. I want its greedy associations
To accommodate far-fetched archetypes of inaccessible
Nerve sites of the oldest fantasy specializing in
Getting away with menacing attention.
That’s why the poet demands the discontinued artifice
Of its energy. I’m talking of making one million
Years merge in each metaphysics of creating
A fever eater poem. The best page
Sees it first, the blessing this emphasis
Makes print all physiology at once and
Spirits in the traits of misleading believing
Proud things into the sunset design thought
Gripping life true to an aesthetic verity that fits
All the riches to referential riches to English.
Maybe I persist in seeing the several rhythms cruise
Agencies of metaphysics of the imperative for
Converging on historical shock, for honing
The edge of seeing you think I’m mixed up
In my libido, my education, etc. I’d learn how
To like the idea, but you’d write and talk
In my crisp fantasies, making up
Where I just lived, then dropped into everyone
I think you’ll feel up to rescuing from the miracle
Of solid walking off before strong bodies sleep
Off the difference you come up with remembering
The rope to my room looks like entities of English
You’ll write to me soon, especially words inventing
Blue and pink sounds like a language producing
The approval of the first word which is red.
That helps you recite a page in alien alphabets
In the written debris you write home not to mention.
Congratulations to the two best males judging both
Poetry and painting exercising sources to pieces.
They’re earthlings in our influence respected
For disappearing into the bosom of an integral depletion
I also wrote out of a new dimension for surveilling
Them from stopping being who you are. I want your world
Which was not always I make a poetry we don’t know
Yet, a vibrant poetics keeping the walls of my life
Sufficient to the field of carbon-produced facts from
Draining the need of the largest adult into tons
Of something to say that could sum up the parts
I was in love with. I thought life could manage
Iconoclastic micro-things mobbing the problems you say
You make up reading of gaining each other, let’s say
Where you’d kiss the hands of every woman in the sixties
Writing unpredictable intermissions in particularly
Escapist Soviets. But linear sighs
Of narrative lines form huge imperious
Looks across the bay. And daily, or even hourly,
This is the pumping heart. I never began writing.
I write I have a fantastic rock and look
At it again. I wrote How To Read into the blur
That becomes words behind the trunks of trees.
And I knew my mother’s finite intervals as passages
Before the spot that went into the military. I was
Writing the sensibility of the subject satisfied
With being looked at with a kind of fear packed
Into a test for mind that meant something
Fills me with terror. But the disappearing
Herald of numinous suspense, that thing
In my nature that cannot be mistakes words
You say to yourself for edges of something you drop
For falling beyond itself. By the time our conscience
Accelerates such things to the service
Of the dilemma of so much work a wish
Permutes to a world in which writing is too
Much for any man to have to jinx
That mythical necessity separately, in steps.
PUBLISHED: Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), 6:98–103.
KEYWORDS: Language writing; poetry; philosophy; nonnarrative.
LINKS: Mike Anderson, “Framing the Construals” (PJ 5); Alan Davies, “Close Reading Close Reading” (PJ 2); Jean Day, “Moving Object” (PJ 9); Erica Hunt, “Beginning at Bottom” (PJ 3); Pamela Lu, from “Intermusement” (PJ 10); Bill Luoma, “Astrophysics and You” (PJ 9); Larry Price, “Aggressively Private: Contingency as Explanation” (PJ 6); Lisa Samuels, two poems (PJ 10); Leslie Scalapino, “Pattern—and the ‘Simulacral’” (Guide; PJ 7); John Smith, “Philadelphia Newspapers Read Crossways” (PJ 10).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Agreement (New York: Asylum’s Press, 1978); The Son Master (New York: Roof, 1982); Crisis Intervention (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1983); Imaginary Ship (N.p.: Beaumont, 2003).