Lecture

What keeps us holding fast to forms we barely know the origin or import of? The assumptions that undergird them, the effects they serve, the modes of knowing and desiring that they keep in place?

Now I want a meeting place fashioned of differently angled and differently scaled inclined planes. Instead of sitting at long tables, each person lies on her back looking up. Each speaks without facing the other as at a campsite at nightfall, our documents in common: one star-stud or a spiel of constellations. Some are silent, while others carouse and carry on. Everyone murmurs on the verge of sleep.

To re-determine how the lecture can meet us ear to ear, and eye to eye?

derives from a mostly invisible “uncommon archive”—my pet phrase—or what Barthes would call a plurality of desires and reservoir of perversions that lay at the heart of any creation and must be allowed free play. As textured as our notes and as untranslatable, they include, for me, my mother’s agoraphobia and the time bomb that was my father; the boom of my father’s voice that knocked out each rib that held a breath in place, and sometimes his hand; the scent of a gardener’s gardenias in my mother’s hair (the gardener was my father); the sound that broke the dinner plates in the same moment it killed the little girl next door when a bullet aimed at her father struck her down instead; the daily search for the antidote; my first encounter with the word “crepuscular,” my sense there was something to be learned of “crenellations”; getting lost in a department store when I was seven and in a snow bank when I was eight; the particular gracefulness of a flying squirrel who glided across branches in a future sleep; the tendency to curve, coil, spring and screw in spite of all the world’s attempts to straighten, stiffen and stuff.

Barthes thinks of his lecture as an object but adds a psychological twist to the mix, when, in his Lecture before the Collège de France that I have plumbed quite happily more than once in this lecture, he likens “the speaking and the listening that will be interwoven here to … the comings and goings of a child playing beside his mother, leaving her, returning to bring her a pebble, a piece of string, and thereby tracing around a calm center a whole locus of play within which the pebble, the string come to matter less than the enthusiastic giving of them.”

“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God”—Simone Weil likens knowledge to an object that “penetrates” us. But I’d prefer an image of being brushed, and in that encounter, sounded or stirred.

might leave me breathless, but at its best helps me remember that I breathe.

“My lecture is called ‘What Makes a Poem and Poem.’

I’m gonna set my timer …

It’s not … rhyming words at the end of a line.

It’s not … form.

It’s not … structure.

It’s not … loneliness.

It’s not … location.

It’s not … the sky.

It’s not … love.

It’s not … the color.

It’s not … the feeling.

It’s not … the meter.

It’s not … the place.

It’s not … the intention.

It’s not … the desire.

It’s not … the weather.

It’s not … the hope.

It’s not … the subject matter.

It’s not … the death.

It’s not … the birth.

It’s not … the trees.

It’s not … the words.

It’s not … the thing between the words.

It’s not … the meter.

It’s not … the meter

(here the timer on his watch goes off, which he pauses to listen to for several long seconds).

It’s the timing.”

“Pain arrogates consciousness to itself”; pain claims consciousness for itself

It’s thinking as a form of breathing.

To grant sleep to someone is “the very act of benevolence” for it gives the sleeper “the power to be utterly confident.”