Oren Izenberg on Allen Grossman ("The Life and Death Kisses")
Close Readings: Episode 16
I’ve fallen behind on these newsletters—apologies! Teaching and writing (and even, occasionally, living!) have crept into the time I’d been reserving for the podcast, and I figured the important thing was to get the episodes recorded and out, and to worry about the newsletters later. “Later” got very late! Sorry, sorry.
By now you probably know and (I hope) have listened to last week’s episode with Oren Izenberg. We talked about a strange and harrowing (and beautiful) poem, Allen Grossman’s “The Life and Death Kisses.” If you don’t already subscribe to the podcast and/or haven’t listened yet, you can find the conversation on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts.
Oren was a student of Grossman’s, and that experience suffuses this conversation. You can hear it, I think, in the seriousness with which Oren considers even the reading aloud of the poem he chose for the episode. I’ve been thinking ever since about what he said by way of preface to that act:
When you take a poem into your mouth as your own speech, you’re being asked to entertain, as a function of your own utterance, a certain experimental attitude toward what being a person is. So one way to say that is to ask yourself: what could, even in theory, be the situation in which saying these things that I’m about to say seems like the right thing to say, or a plausible thing to say? […] We have to be open, through speaking, to being something other than what we are.
Poetry—lyric poetry in particular—has long been taken to be the genre that cares above all about the representation of interiority, of subjectivity, of personhood. Oren’s approach to reading a poem aloud is related to this longstanding tradition but in some sense reverses the direction of the relation. It’s not so much that a poem represents a consciousness as it is that the poem proposes a model for consciousness, for being a person, that the poet, in the writing, or the reader, in the poem’s enunciation, must take on. The “attitude” that you, as a reader, are “asked to entertain” is “experimental” (later Oren calls it “theoretical”) insofar as it doesn’t presuppose that you know what a person is, or might be. Poetry, for Grossman (and for Oren), it seems to me, is one of the privileged techniques for performing such experiments.
As Oren explains it in the episode, “The Life and Death Kisses” is an account of poetic vocation, a vision of what it means to be called into poetry. Which is to say that the experience of personhood we’re being asked to entertain as readers of the poem is one in which a person feels called upon to be a poet. And it turns out that’s a terrifying thing. Why? Because, as Oren says, Grossman believes that poetic legibility comes at a considerable cost:
In order to be recognizable, in order to be audible, in order to speak at all, we submit ourselves to rules we did not make. They might be rules of meter; they might be rules of grammar; they are rules of civilization. To appear in the world, to appear in history, in a meaningful way, means to rearticulate yourself, the things that you feel might matter most about you, in languages that other people can recognize. That’s both the way in which we can come to care about our experience, in which others can come to care about our experiences, and so it is a profoundly humanizing thing to do, to give voice to your pain, to give voice to your experience, but it is also—and this is the terrifying part—a kind of death. Because you have to remake yourself in terms that you didn’t author. In order to count, you have to rewrite yourself as belonging to the order of things that count.
These “rules” govern poetry (whether you write in a received metrical scheme like hexameters, as Grossman does in this poem, or not), but the claim is that analogous rules govern all aspects of humanity, and that it is merely the special burden (and power) of poetry that it defines itself in relation to those conditions.
One consequence of that self-definition is, for Grossman, that the poet must speak with a divided throat. Or to put it another way, that there are, for someone like Oren, who knew Grossman, two versions of the person with that name: one whose life traversed a set of known and knowable facts, points on a map, actual meals eaten in the company of friends, and one whose existence has had to pass, as it were, through the gates of an underworld so that it can live on the page.
Oren Izenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a monograph, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2012). He is currently completing another book, How to Know Everything, about the philosophical significance of poetry’s engagement with “ordinary” mental actions like believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending.
Oren’s teaching spans the long history of the art (from the Iliad to the poem someone is working on right now). He is the author of many essays on poetry and poetics, which have appeared in a variety of journals and collections (Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, nonsite, and others). He is a poetry editor at nonsite.org, an online journal of art and ideas. You can follow Oren on Twitter.
Once again, you can find the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. Listen and share it with a friend. And I’ll have more for you shortly!