Body, Language, and the Limits of Ontology

Abstract

To invoke the ontology of poetry is to recognize the independence of the poem, qua object, that any text can enjoy, while acknowledging the hermetic and volatile semantic interface between writer and reader. That the poem exists independently of any meaning that a particular reader or group of readers may ascribe to it strengthens the poem’s independent existence theoretically, but does not aid the practicality inherent in the need for participation in the arts; the poem, or any text, may exist as a printed object in an old briefcase in someone’s closet, but until it is engaged beyond appearance only, and thus judged semantically, its ontology is nil. Moreover, although a poem may occupy relatively little space in a textual sense, or even, like concrete poetry, may strive to engage in an advanced interplay with the spatial arts, it pertains unavoidably to the temporal art of literature, which means that it can readily explore changes to ontology over time. Nonetheless it can accomplish this less well than the longer prose genres, and it is perhaps this shortness of textual space, coupled with the perceived frenetic pace of interwar modernity, that yield the avant-garde preoccupations with fragmentation and simultaneity so evident in poetry from this time period.

Un poema es una cosa que será.

Un poema es una cosa que nunca es, pero que debiera ser. Un poema es una cosa que nunca ha sido, que nunca podrá ser.

Vicente Huidobro

[A poem is something that will be.

A poem is something that never is, but ought to be.

A poem is something that never has been, that never can be.]

Trans. Eliot Weinberger