[I Call Poetry...]Author(s): Reinaldo Laddaga and Kathy KoppleSource: boundary 2, Vol. 26, No. 1, 99 Poets/1999: An International Poetics Symposium(Spring, 1999), pp. 165-167Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/303888 .

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Reinaldo Laddaga 165

heightening the cold dishes of intolerance, a firebrand of hate feeding the brazier of hatreds, the share of a speculator deposited in the stock market of corruptions. If we write, it is out of respect for the pact of honor we have signed with ourselves since our awakening to conscience, it is out of faith- fulness to the dazzling dreams which visited us, among them, that of a humanity reconciled, fraternal, sower of love, source of beauty, messenger of hope.

(Translated from French by Edris Makward; adapted and with additional material by Pierre Joris)

Reinaldo Laddaga

I call "poetry" (just for myself without the aspiration that this would become common usage) some discourse, some segment of language, that incites me or induces me to utter it out loud, to imagine myself uttering it. Which is to say, I refer in this way to whatever discourse induces me or invites me to enact, in reality or in fancy, a placement of the voice; a segment of lan- guage that presents itself as though it should be-if one wants to get what can be gotten from it, not everything, maybe, but something-intoned. Deliberately.

But one cannot, in all fairness, intone, place the voice, without plac- ing oneself in some determined way in relation to the world, as an exten- sion among extended things. One cannot intone (in reality or in fancy) with- out extending oneself in some determined way at the very moment in which one intones: without dealing with oneself as an extended thing, situ- ated at each moment among extensions. But there are many ways of doing this. There is a character, a way of placing oneself as somebody who requests in the moment of intonation, for example, a fruit or a newspa- per in the appropriate situations. Or the way, different, in which a discourse is spoken at a meeting, another way of affectation, of placing the voice and arranging oneself.

Do I wish to say that there is an intonation, a way of extending one- self, which could be called "poetic"? I do not believe it is so simple. But I do wish to say that the poetry of recent years (of these last decades) that interests me is that which produces hesitation in the moment of intoning it: that which induces me to ask myself, "In what tone should this be said that which I am now reading?" (In one of the few but extraordinary, in the sense

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166 boundary 2 / Spring 1999

of pleasurable, experiences in listening to readings I have had, the unfor- mulated question of mine has been, "What is the tone of the person read- ing?") Put another way, I am interested, in the last decades, above all, in a poetry that does not let me, or does not easily let me, decide in respect to the following question, "How should the voice be placed, mine or another's, in this segment of discourse?" (How to arrange myself in exten- sion, with respect to people and things?)

What does this have to do with the question of context? An invita- tion to think about the question can be found in a fragment of a writer who composed, throughout decades, this type of discourse that I have been speaking about which interests me: an Argentine named Juan L. Ortiz. These are the last lines of a poem of his ("Ah, my friends, you speak of rhymes .. .") included in a book published in 1958 entitled Of the roots and the sky:

Do not forget that poetry if it is pure sensitivity or inevitable sensitivity, this also, or perhaps above all, the want of shelter without end crossed or crucified, if you wish, by endless cries and spread out humbly, humbly, for the invention of love ...

In which tone to read this line? This line-which goes on as if extending itself continuously-hesitating, at each moment, as if it had been uttered by someone who had yet to manage deciding which attitude of enunciation to adopt. Hence this "also," or "perhaps above all ... ," or this, "if you wish ...," or even this repetition of "humbly." But the line, even hesi-

tating, says without equivocation certain things. That poetry is "the want of shelter without end," for example. This can mean, of course, very different things. I choose to read it in this way: the poetic condition, the condition of poetic utterance, is finding oneself completely unsheltered, or weakened, deprived of certain mechanisms bound to shelter, defenses, that also impede pleasure. And exposed, at the same time, offering a maximum of surface susceptible to that which comes from others. "Crossed or crucified" is the extension in which this mode exposes itself, irritated already from the beginning, experiencing the pleasure or pain of this irritation. "Crossed or crucified" without deciding, without finishing deciding, if that which in the endless want of shelter comes, causes imprisonment and pain (if finding oneself crucified) or pleasure and its multiplication (if, before being cruci- fied, it is crossed). And this extension, in poetry, is not crossed or crucified by something that is presented but merely by something which cries out. By

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Reinaldo Laddaga 167

"endless cries." Is it a blessing or a curse, the mere fact that any of us may find himself exposed to cries without end?

All of the distaste and the delight of being there, in whatever place, in whatever moment and whatever place, is ciphered through the fact that, no matter what the place and what the moment, there are cries without end, in the endless want of shelter. Here is the context of a poem-of someone writing or reading, that is to say, uttering a poem-of the poems that, in recent times, interest me: the endless want of shelter. (But is the endless want of shelter a context?) A poem is written in a language, or even more, in a region of language. But any one of these poems is intoned faithfully in the moment and in the place of this intonation by he or she-in the endless want of shelter-who extends himself or herself "humbly, humbly" (the humility of this extension is what matters. Whoever extends himself in this way does so without drawing attention to and without affirm- ing himself, hesitating, if you wish, upon going forward) "for the invention of love." But what does it mean, "inventing love"? It is not, of course, merely discovering it, or identifying it, as though this "love" was itself singular, uni- fied. "Inventing love" means, just, inventing a way of being among others, a mode among others in placing oneself in such a way that the endless cries, which each and every one crosses and crucifies, better yet that deafen, become amplified. At the moment, in any case, if not enduring, of an intonation.

Which is rather vague, in a certain sense, if it means deciding if he who writes in this case does so (believes he does so) in a national context, or in the context of capital, or in some other context, according to the for- mulation of the question organizing this selection. Some precise affirma- tions could be deduced of what has been said if I had more space about the realization of the simple fact that there is poetry, in a language and a culture, that prevents this language from stabilizing itself in a code and this culture in a vision of the world. In context, the endless want of shelter.

(Translated from Spanish by Kathy Kopple)

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