Poetry's Knowing Ignorance by Joseph Acquisto;

Author:Joseph Acquisto;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

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“Moving Forth from Uncertainty All the Same” (Jaccottet and Maulpoix)

The two poets I will examine in this chapter, Philippe Jaccottet and Jean-Michel Maulpoix, write in full acknowledgment of the ways that a long-standing view of poetry as possessing transcendent powers is no longer tenable in the twentieth century. Both write with what, from the perspective of the avant-garde, could be labeled a nostalgic approach. But neither Jaccottet nor Maulpoix could be said to mourn the passing of a transcendent lyric poetry. Rather they, like so many poets in the twentieth century and beyond, seek to extend the lyric tradition in light of, and not despite, the dismantling of some of its most important assumptions about what poetry can do and be.1 A new esthetics and epistemology of doubt emerge from these poets’ writings as they seek to preserve a role for lyricism that is faithful to a new vision of it, one that makes room for uncertainty and doubt and catastrophe and actually generates a poetics from them.2 In that sense, we can read this passage from Jaccottet’s La Semaison as a kind of poetic program:

A partir de l’incertitude avancer tout de même. Rien d’acquis, car tout acquis ne serait-il pas paralysie ? L’incertitude est le moteur, l’ombre est la source. Je marche faute de lieu, je parle faute de savoir, preuve que je ne suis pas encore mort…. Comment recommencer pourtant ? Tout est là. Par quel chemin détourné, indirect ? Par quelle absence de chemins ? A partir du dénuement, de la faiblesse, du doute. (Œuvres 434)3

(Moving forth from uncertainty all the same. Nothing for granted, for anything taken for granted, would that not be paralysis? Uncertainty is the motor, darkness is the source. I walk without a place, I speak without knowledge, proof that I am not yet dead…. How to begin again though? That’s the question. By what roundabout, indirect path? By what absence of paths? Starting out from destitution, weakness, doubt.)

Giving voice to incertitude thus becomes a new poetic program, a new way for poetry to craft a form of knowledge, and in this, poetry may continue to play the role that I have been suggesting that it plays, not as a reflection of ways of knowing or unknowing but as an active creation of them. What this would mean is, necessarily, irreducible to a series of propositions, which is always the case when claiming that poetry yields a kind of knowledge. Jaccottet moreover continues down the path whereby prose reflections on poetry play a key role in what we might call poetry’s way of knowing. Explicit acknowledgment of uncertainty and tentative assertion brings with it a potentially endless set of contradictions, the risk of nostalgia, and the possibility that the process of thinking about poetry may end up being of greater import than any product or result of that process. Both Jaccottet and Maulpoix have explored what it might mean for poetry and reflection on poetry to give form to these doubts and these contradictions and yet not be foreclosed by them.

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