Trying and failing vs. trying to fail

The sentence—as opposed to the fragment ...—the sentence tries and fails. (Joseph Duemer)

When I was in graduate school, I was fully absorbed in literary theory—which is not a surprise, since the program I was in was called "Comparative Literature and Literary Theory." I had a period in which I was quite fascinated by Jacques Derrida—especially by his studies of those writers whose work is especially susceptible to deconstruction because their ambitions for completeness are so especially extreme: Stéphane Mallarmé and Claude Lévi-Strauss, for example, or Edgar Allan Poe (at least as Jacques Lacan read him).

Even then, I was struck by something odd about those postmodernists who held up Derrida as a reason to write fragmentary, incomplete texts. Such writers thought that the lesson of deconstruction was that one should not try to construct anything complete. Even then, that seemed like nonsense to me, even at a simple logical level: works which do not aim at wholeness are not interesting enough to deconstruct. A "fragment" that is intended as a fragment does not "try and fail," as Joseph Duemer puts it; instead, it tries to fail. The fact that attempts at wholeness or completeness will fail in ways that are inevitably invisible to the author but can be spotted by alert analysis is not grounds for fragmentary, incomplete work, be it anthropology, linguistics, fiction, or poetry. (There are, of course, many other putative reasons to be "postmodern," to which this critique does not apply!)

[Cross-posted at The Plumbline School, too.]

Practices and Expression

Joseph Duemer posted an interesting response to a reading he participated in the other day, in which he discusses the "distinction between poetry as a set of practices and poetry as a mode of (self) expression."

He articulated that difference as "professionals" and "amateurs," terminology which he himself does not seem to feel comfortable with. But I appreciate his emphasis on the difference between those who write poetry to express themselves and those who, although they surely started out that way, have kept writing poetry for reasons "beyond" self-expression.

It's perhaps important for "professional" poets to keep this distinction in mind, which seems primary to me—and far more significant than differences among the "professionals" (who, whatever type of poetry they write, are all focused on "poetry as a set of practices," to borrow Joseph Duemer's precise formulation).

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I once attended a workshop in Geneva with Ellen Hinsey (this would have been about 1998 or so), and at one point, when I raised my hand to answer a question she had asked (after waiting a bit to see if anybody else wanted to try), she said to me that I was a "professional" and she thought it would be good to hear what the others had to say. (She had already come to this conclusion based on a comment I had made earlier in the workshop.) That was a breakthrough moment for me: I may not have had many poems published at the time, but my emphasis on writing poetry "beyond" self-expression had been recognized, and from then on, I was more sure of myself as a poet!