of course Feb 2 we start NEXT week, and Maddie will put the two prose poems out for you, since I didn’t see how to do it

but you do have PARIS to read, see you next tuesday, m.a.c.

Mary Ann Caws

of course Feb 2 we start NEXT week, and Maddie will put the two prose poems out for you, since I didn’t see how to do it

but you do have PARIS to read, see you next tuesday, m.a.c.

Mary Ann Caws

[Madeleine Barnes]

Hi friends,

So I just read the Ben Lerner prose poem, and it reminds me so much of Heidegger’s essay, “What Are Poets For?” in which Heid. writes about song, Rilke, and Hölderlin. Since I know some of us love Rilke, I thought I’d share the passages I was reminded of. They strike me as relevant to our group, “poets together,” and this two pieces seem very much in conversation!

—

“Is Rainer Maria Rilke a poet in a destitute time? How is his poetry related to the destitution of time? How deeply does it reach into the abyss? Where does the poet go, assuming he goes where he can go?

…Mortals have not yet come into ownership of their nature. Death withdraws into the enigmatic. The mystery of pain remains valid. Love has not been learned. But the mortals are. They are, in that there is language. Song still lingers over their destitute land. The singer’s word still keeps to the trace of the holy. The song in the Sonnets to Orpheus (Part I, 19) says it:

Though swiftly the world converts,
like cloud-shapes’ upheaval,
everything perfect reverts
to the primeval.

Over the change abounding
farther and freer
your precluding song keeps sounding
God with the lyre.

Suffering is not discerned,
neither has love been learned,
and what removes us in death,
nothing unveils.
Only the song’s high breath
hallows and hails.

Meanwhile, even the trace of the holy has become unrecognizable. It remains undecided whether we still experience holy as the track leading to the godhead of the divine, or whether we now encounter no more than a trace of the holy. It remains unclear what the track leading to the trace might be. It remains in question how such a track might show itself to us.

The time is destitute because it lacks the unconcealedness of the nature of pain, death, and love. The destitution is itself destitute because that realm of being withdraws within which pain and death and love belong together. Conceitedness exists inasmuch as the realm in which they belong together in the abyss of Being. But the song still remains which names the land over which it sings. What is the song itself? How is a mortal capable of it? Whence does it sing? How far does it reach into the abyss?

[ a couple of pages later ] – “Song is existence,” says the third of the Sonnets to Orpheus, Part I…to sing, truly to say worldly existence, to say out the haleness of the whole pure draft and to say only this, means: to belong to the precinct of beings themselves. To sing the song means to be present in what is present itself.”

To me, Lerner’s piece echoes Heidegger’s when he writes, “you can hear that sorrowful foreknowledge in the song;” “talk precedes the song that makes speech possible,” etc. Lerner writes about “the ethical ground” and “the grass I love..which is neither speech nor singing, but a grassy area between them, cordoned off by cops.” Heidegger writes about the “absence of ground,” or the abyss, and the act of “clearing” the ground, which Lerner references at the beginning.

Anyway, so exited to discuss this (and/or our many other exciting things—whatever works)!

xo
Maddie

[Mary Ann Caws (she/her)]

Mary Ann Caws