Ex Perimeter

Text, 2019

A great deal of what any of us know and feel is elusive, and much of what we 'know' is at the periphery of consciousness. Sometimes this (often subversive) knowledge or feeling is composed of nearly inaccessible memory material; sometimes it consists of bodily knowledge still being formed into mental concepts and searching for the language in which it may be expressed. This knowledge is often situated on the outskirts of our usual modes of apprehension and -to the extent that we access it at all -is experienced as an intuition, intimation, mood, hint, inkling, suggestion or glimpse. In the right circumstances, writers are able to bring such knowledge into their creative compositions -and, indeed, there is occasionally a sense that art is the medium that finally permits its full expression. As a way of exploring some of our 'peripheral' knowledge through an intuitive creative process, in early 2018 we embarked on a collaborative project to write prose poems (which we exchanged as text messages) exploring the idea of perimeters. To date we have produced a series of prose poems for this ongoing collaborative project. Paul Hetherington has published and/or edited 27 books, including 13 full-length poetry collections and nine chapbooks. Among these are Moonlight on oleander: prose poems (UWAP, 2018) and Palace of memory (RWP, 2019).

1989

Paul Celan: The Poet as ‘Outsider’. One who observes only by ‘distanced perspective’ is a theme carried to full annihilation in Paul Celan’s poetry—where the Jewish question responds in eternal echo proscribing: ‘the “ultimate distance” is to be kept’. Our own sympathizing with the outsider is the most convincing of all literary devices. We find ourselves enthralled by classic outsiders of the late 19th early 20th century genre. There is the character of Harry Haller, a self-professed ‘Steppenwolf’ (Hermann Hesse). Other more subtle though equally unorthodox types such as Jane Austin’s Elizabeth Bennet come to mind. My favorite is the deprived and lonely character of Gustav Achenbach (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice). Regarding a Death in Venice, it can be argued that any notion of Gustav’s homoerotic character can be readily explained as an exercise of this device, i.e., as a clever literary means to ensure that the novel unfolds to the reader only from a 'distanced perspective'. <> Paul Celan, in similar counter-measure, utilizes as a linguistic device the infinitive form ‘To I’, (past tense ‘Ied)—where introspection calls upon us to whisper in the dark, to ask ‘No one there’? and then to reply, 'Yes, yes, I…, I am…, I am here…, I exists’… despite all the better forces which would deem me otherwise... <> 'Peculiar observations and chance encounters of the solitary and silent are more blurred, yet at the same time more probing than those of social beings' (Thomas Mann). <Count the Almonds. Count what was bitter and kept you awake, count me among them: I searched for your eye, when you opened it and no one looked at you, I spun that secret thread, along which the dew you thought slid down to the jars, watched over by a saying that found its way to no one’s heart. Only there did you wholly enter the name that is yours, did you step sure-footed toward yourself, did the hammers swing free in the belfry of your silence, the overheard reach you, the dead put its arm around you too, and all three of you walked through the evening. Make me bitter. Count me among the almonds> (Paul Celan) Joseph Galasso (1989-1990). 'Open Work' on Poetry (Umberto Eco). Homage to Paul Celan. (Publication in prep, 2024)

 Paper derives from larger project to reconceive the notion of "senses of place" in contemporary poetry: