Apr 13, 2005

Any dialecticization of the poem below on my part has more to do with me pushing the boundaries of my own hangups than an attempt to actually polarize aesthetics. It is generally good to challenge one's boundaries, but in doing so one can of course be anxious.

In regard to Silliman's notion of "quietude," I think much of his thinking on the matter derives from the etymology of "quietude. While the dictionary definition of quietude indicates placidity, the definition of "quietus," from whence we arrive at "quietude" is as follows:

"qui- e - tus( P ) Pronunciation Key (kw-ts)
n.

1. Something that serves to suppress, check, or eliminate.
2. Release from life; death.
3. A final discharge, as of a duty or debt."


Death is the ultimate annihilator of ambiguity. While Derrida would say that when an author writes something, he or she is opening a pandora's box of ambiguity, and is also dead, based on the fact that a written record implies that there is no breathing human around to explain the text. Thus in this capacity all writing is a kind of death. However, empirically, death is a negator of ambiguity insofar as it is a final halting of potentiality, there's only one thing left to do: decay and disappear. I think that Silliman uses "quietude" to describe texts that are syntactically dead insofar as they repel ambiguity and look to enshrine/embalm a given reading in a poem. In this respect I think that Silliman is connecting elegization with death, or at least the death drive, in his critical approach to certain works. What's problematic, to my mind at least, is that he dismisses quietude a priori. I think he neglects the totemic power of some such posthumous elegiac narratives. Which is a paradoxically authoritarian outlook for one so interested in defying authority.

Admittedly the quietude manifest in the majority of post-confessional poetics is cloying. "I'm going to memorialize my lust for my hot 19-year-old student because I am the first male who's ever felt like this," is just bufoonery, and an unironic violation of objective correlative. It's the difference between building a memorial for your dead pet canary and building and building a memorial for a hero (or alternately, for a notorious criminal). The tone should fit the subject matter. (Not that I believe that humans are in any way superior to canaries, this is a rhetorical point). To rely solely upon this elegiac trope is problematic, too much thinking of death engenders sociopathology...

So I would argue that the poem below is, in fact, "quietudinous." Hopefully it is a little better than more banal invocations of said technique. It was a conscious choice to invoke the powers of quietude in this piece, as I thought they were befitting the nuance of the subject matter. It is still possible to maintain a certain amount of open-endedness even in such a funerary offering, but I think my intent was to point towards a few readings more vehemently than I'm ordinarily wont to do.

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