No tree says\u00a0flowering is better
\nthan bearing fruit, just lovers, who embrace
\nthe faith we belong to homo sapiens,
\nthat nostalgic species, the one which takes
\nthe egotism of dying for its own,
\nlonging for perfect flowers and fruit.
\nLike hummingbirds, themselves deciduous
\nleaves which perish if trapped in airlessness,
\nthey flit from one lush shrub to another,
\nsucking at salvia and drooping fushia,
\ndrones darting off to persist, if at all,
\nin retinal afterglow, green\u00a0for red,
\nabsence for the flutter of\u00a0a wing,
\na heartbeat for a spasm.<\/p>\n
***<\/span> That may well be what the play\u00a0of motif and self-referentiality looks like from the outside. From within, this “auto-intertextuality” (ta-dum!) can feel like a debilitating lack of creative energy, abject surrender to ones obsessive tics and manias. Repetition as death. <\/em><\/p>\n Time, I guess, will tell if this conceit lives on.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n As for how I came to literary criticism, I have been perusing my archive of\u00a0diaries lately, those that have survived a precarious vagabond, transnational existence. <\/em><\/span>This is how I can situate the approximate moment at which I took the turn which led\u00a0to that particular slough of despond. \u00a0I was lucky enough to benefit from a third year abroad in Grenoble. \u00a0By the time I returned from France, in the summer of 1966, the deed, I might even say the deal, a diabolical one, was done. I no longer thought of myself as a poet or writer, rather\u00a0as someone who knew a lot about books. The first assignment returned to me\u00a0in a senior English class bore, ironically perhaps in red pencil, a remark something like: “now you are learning to write like a literary critic”. The grade was A+. \u00a0A kiss, if not of death, at least of treachery.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n We all have to make a living somehow. At that point in time, though still resisting graduate school and apprehensive I would soon face a choice between jail and exile, I saw that it might\u00a0be possible, providing I\u00a0avoided incarceration, to become a teacher and earn slightly more than I could performing\u00a0the menial labour to which I was accustomed. That at least was\u00a0the pay scale in force in the mid-sixties. By the time I retired from my academic career, the disparity in income between someone who makes things or at least moves them around and someone who fabricates parcels and packets of knowledge and passes them on to students had radically widened.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n It could be argued <\/em>das ist auch\u00a0gut so:\u00a0this is as it should be in an\u00a0knowledge economy. Value is now produced more by making things up than by making them. The financial value of what academics make up \u00a0may well be grossly\u00a0inferior to that of what financiers make up, but the academic product still resides on the prosperous side of the boundary between what materially is, and what is fiction. The advantage accruing to those who produce fictiti<\/i>ous capital is<\/em> nonetheless exponentially greater than that falling to authors of mere academic fiction, let alone fiction itself, and even lower down the food chain, poets. In this world, the value of the poem above approaches nil.\u00a0<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n No tree says\u00a0flowering is better than bearing fruit, just lovers, who embrace the faith we belong to homo sapiens, that nostalgic species, the one which takes the egotism of dying for its own, longing for perfect flowers and fruit. Like hummingbirds, themselves deciduous leaves which perish if trapped in airlessness, they flit from one lush … <\/p>\n
\nBack in the days when I practiced literary criticism for a living, I admired readings of a poet’s work\u00a0which successfully identified its returning themes, and especially recurrent images and metaphors. The above poem is one example of <\/em>m\u00e9taphore fil\u00e9e, in English a conceit — no relation to ego, to be sure.\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n