Text Curtain

"Text Curtain" is one poem that struck me as reveling in enjambment. And interestingly enough, it, in stasis, is primarily organized as a prose block (at least until the pointer shifts the curtain of its form). The play between prose and poem reminded me of Giorgio Agamben and his statements regarding prose and poem.

Giorgio Agamben, political philosopher and critical theorist, writes in The Idea of Prose, “No definition of verse is perfectly satisfying unless it asserts an identity for poetry against prose through the possibility of enjambment” (39). For Agamben, the enjambment is the foundational difference between verse and prose. In The End of the Poem, Agamben asserts that enjambment is the “opposition of a metrical limit to a syntactical limit, of a prosodic pause to a semantic pause” (109). Poetry, for Agamben, is the discourse where the opposition between sound and meaning is made manifest; prose is the discourse where the representation of the difference and opposition between the semiotic and semantic event cannot occur (110). In addition, the end of a poem is marked by a falling toward prose through the finality of the poem’s possible realization: if the poem is identified through enjambment, the end of the poem marks the state where enjambment is no longer possible: hence, the poem realizes itself into the field of prose. The most striking assertion by Agamben, at least in reference to poetry and prose, is when he states, “This sublime hesitation between meaning and sound is the poetic inheritance with which thought must come to terms” (Idea of Prose 41). The “sublime hesitation” Agamben alludes to is the point where poetry edges toward pure semiotic materiality: language invested in its material as language. The poem no longer attends to communication, semantic intention; rather, it communicates its state as language itself. The singular nature of any given poem is founded upon, what Agamben calls, the semiotic event when enjambment occurs: where there is enjambment prose becomes poetry “to let language finally communicate itself, without remaining unsaid in what is said” (115). This semiotic event is the horizon limit of reason’s dominance as intention or meaning in language itself. Language, for Agamben, is the limit of reason; in the semiotic event reason must encounter itself as embodied in material. It loses agency as reason in that horizon: the unsayable is spoken. Alexander Duttmann states in “Integral Actuality,” the introduction to Agamben’s Idea of Prose:

“Communication cannot be anything but the communication of communicability.. . .; but, as such, communication implies an exteriority that originally transforms it into communication of something: it is in this way that language gives rise to poetic singularity and to philosophical generality (6).

Poetic singularity is the semiotic horizon of reason’s failing; it is where poetic language becomes conscious of itself as materiality (in the semiotic event) to the betrayal of “communication of something.” Philosophical generality, prose, is the betrayed communication. In this binary, the poetic is placed after philosophical generality: the semiotic event of enjambment can only occur from the presupposed material intention of non-enjambment. Invention, i.e. singularity, is manifested from prose.

"Text Curtain" enters into this symbolic space between prose and poem; the invention of the piece is manifested from the prose. The semiotic horizon is the shifting phoneme hung from their thread; this horizon is directed by the experiencer of the piece. The shifting terms on the screen in stasis are the philosophical generality of communication as communication; placed under the eyes of reader/experiencer, interpenetration occurs: fluid signification manifests as poetic singularity. Enjambment in "Text Curtain" requires the horizon (participation and all possible contexts) of the participating reader. In other words, the curtain of text in "Text Curtain" when pulled away reveals/revels in the freedom of the reader in the reader's engagement; it reveals/revels in the agency of signification.

Agamben, Giorgio. Idea of Prose. State University of New York Press. Albany, NY. 1995.

Agamben, Giorgio. The End of the Poem. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA. 1999.