A Nothing We Were, Are, Shall Remain,

German Poetry Is Going In A Very Different Direction From French Poetry.... Its Language Has Become More Sober, More Factual. It Distrusts "beauty." It Tries To Be Truthful.

A Poem, Being An Instance Of Language, Hence Essentially Dialogue, May Be A Letter In A Bottle Thrown Out To The Sea With The-surely Not Always Strong-hope That It May Somehow Wash Up Somewhere, Perhaps On The Shoreline Of The Heart. In This Way, Too, Poems Are En Route: They Are Headed Towards. Toward What? Toward Something Open, Inhabitable, An Approachable You, Perhaps, An Approachable Reality. Such Realities Are, I Think, At Stake In A Poem.

Reachable, Near And Not Lost, There Remained In The Midst Of The Losses This One Thing: Language. It, The Language, Remained, Not Lost, Yes, In Spite Of Everything. But It Had To Pass Through Its Own Answerlessness, Pass Through Frightful Muting, Pass Through The Thousand Darknesses Of Deathbringing Speech. It Passed Through And Gave Back No Words For That Which Happened; Yet It Passed Through This Happening. Passed Through And Could Come To Light Again, “enriched” By All This.

Poetry Is Perhaps This: An Atemwende, A Turning Of Our Breath. Who Knows, Perhaps Poetry Goes Its Way—the Way Of Art—for The Sake Of Just Such A Turn? And Since The Strange, The Abyss And Medusa’s Head, The Abyss And The Automaton, All Seem To Lie In The Same Direction—is It Perhaps This Turn, This Atemwende, Which Can Sort Out The Strange From The Strange? It Is Perhaps Here, In This One Brief Moment, That Medusa’s Head Shrivels And The Automaton Runs Down? Perhaps, Along With The I, Estranged And Freed Here, In This Manner, Some Other Thing Is Also Set Free?

I Went With My Very Being Toward Language.