Tags
Poet Paul Stubbs: the primordial cry.
I’m reading The Black Herald #2 in preparation for a review.
I wanted to share this quote by Paul Stubbs in his excellent introduction to the magazine (about which I will wax lyrical later)
“… It must at all costs remain the brutal single-mindedness of the writer to endure and locate what Paul Celan described as the ‘ways of a voice to a receptive you‘. And this should become de rigueur for all the mental processes that conclude with a language arriving at the nerve-terminals of experience before the act itself of writing. Any desire to write or read or worse, ‘talk’ about literature, should not be part of any kind of a pedagogical need or want, it should merely be by biological necessity that any discourse is begun. The ‘professional’ poetry ‘performer’, after a hard day ‘teaching’ at a creative workshop, will retire to his study to tell himself how important his work is – a depressing all-too-familiar tale of the contemporary writer who works the ‘circuit’; and it is all mostly vacuous, whether by empty intellectual titillation or by constant self-gratification. For there is no literary ‘world’, there is (or should be) only the ongoing search for a language that might just begin to alter and destabilize, not just any redundant literary forms, but also entire biological systems of thought and ideas, and geographically solid terrains of mind.”
I will be reviewing this magazine in the next day or so, but in the meantime you can read more or purchase a copy here.
Thanks so much Lisa – the editorial in English (and also in its French version) will be online shortly. (I couldn’t help laughing when I read “the RURAL single-mindedness of the writer” 😉
LikeLike
OH NO!
Hilarious typo!
Rural is a TAD different from brutal and does steal from Paul’s point somewhat!
I was sitting in a cafe reading his essay and I was moved to type this directly onto my blog from my i phone.
BIG mistake! 🙂
All fixed now! (apologies to Paul)
LikeLike
With all due respect, it’s not so much the relentless search for a language, but for knowledge. A kind of knowledge that perhaps ultimately doesn’t fit properly into the narrow confines of language.
Bogartte
LikeLike
Welcome – Bogartte – to my blog, and thank you so much for taking the trouble to find me here. I’m very pleased to see you, and thank you so much for your comment.
In reference to that, can I ask you something? Isn’t knowing and language the same? Can you know without the words? I’m thinking of Lacan here – ‘knowing’ without the language is an intuitive feeling, and although I think that is a kind of knowledge, isn’t it mute (impotent) until there is a language found to bring it to the surface?
If you feel moved, I’d love your comments on this.
Anyone else who feels like joining in is most welcome also.
Thanks again for your wonderful comment.
LikeLike