Peter Neilson - News

ONWARDS TO OUR MEMORIES

3:04pm Sat. June 2nd 2007

I was much intrigued by a passage in Robert Kaufmann's essay on(in part) modern lyric poetry: 'Poetry's Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illuson and Sociopolitical Delusion' in New German Critique, Number 97, 2006(p 90)

Though many reasons have been advanced in support of lyric's fundamentally nonnarritive character, two have tended to predominate.

First, lyric is given essentially to concretized, particularized intensities of feelings and to attempts at intersubjective recognitional address; story and plotting would seem secondary at best. A second, apparently opposite contention has been despite the ostensible primacy and immediacy of affect and address (over against more mediated phenomena of narrative and plot), lyric often becomes as abstract as abstraction can get, far more abstract than the most experimental versions of narrative fiction and plotting. This is true not so much in the sense of abstractable or distillable schemata that do indeed lend themselves to, or have affinities with, narrative scaffolding. It is true rather in the sense of lyric's emphasis on giving, and leaving its audiences with, abstract or difficult to grasp but arresting afterimages, an effect stemming in significant part from lyric's dedication to a profoundly ephemeral musicality constantly on the brink of evaporating (and therefore always appearing to leave mere aural and, metaphorically, visual traces of itself suspended in the air, as if sensory musical resonance has become a quasi-cognitive resonance never resolvable into, or as, one determinate cognition, but seeming as if it should and could be).