Fall 2016: CPLT-119: Poetry in Flux, Dance Afoot, Cecile Guedon

Wednesdays 4-6pm, Dana Palmer Seminar Room

Week 3 (Sept 21) Abstraction

Stphane Mallarm, Divagations/Crayonn au thtre
Un coup de ds jamais nabolira le hasard (1897)
Crise de Vers (1894) Ballets, Autre tude de Danse

I read Mallarms unconventional spatial organization of the words and phrases in Un Coup de Ds as a
precursor of the intense early 20th century avant-gardist grappling with the philosophical question on
whether "the play of language" (from Crisis of Verse) can actually capture the world in its unity and fully
express our experience in and of it. In a sense, though his novel way of using language in poetry, the
poem pushes towards a development, transgression or reinvention of the poetic medium. However, in the
preface Mallarm stated clearly that this early experimentation and questioning of language as a holistic
system was not intended as a potent rupture with tradition. Probably in order to not outrage the literary
circles of Cosmopolis, the poet confirmed that he did not intend to act too contrary to custom, but only
to reclaim and bring forth into a new form what he thought was poetrys evident and inherent musicality
and theatricality. In this context, I was intrigued by the juxtaposition between the tangible world and its
abstraction, which is made evident also in Crisis of Verse: on the one hand, there are facts of nature,
which are transposed by pure notions and therefore disappear into more abstract entities that define
Mallarm refers to as the Idea. Going back to Un Coup de Ds, the reader
reality at a different level; what
is challenged both with the poems syntactically fragmented structure and opaque vocabulary, but most
importantly with its very layout on the paper. The gaps and blanks participate in the signification of the
work by bringing forth a new parameter of its constitution, what the poet calls the printless distance (at
the typographical level) or the surrounding silence (at the theoretical one). This notion accentuates the
performative aspect of Mallarms poetic model. As in oral utterance, reciting Un Coup de Ds requires
retreats, prolongations, and flights. This evident focus on intonation and intensities, rhythm, typographical
variations, and all sorts of pictorially embedded reading instructions sketches out a new model, or what
the poet calls a new state of poetry. This model looks to strip bare the process of thought (both the
poets and the reader's) in a more unrefined and unmediated form compared to more traditional poetic
forms. The assumption of a linear reading format is outright radicalized. The poems constellation is a
multidirectional assemblage of word fragments, which seem to address an unquiet mind, as they evoke the
active participation of thought and require the readers reflexivity and active choice in order to reconstruct
the dispersed fragments into a fragile constellation of meaning.