Sentinel
Poetry (Online) – October 2005 Online Magazine Monthly…since
December 2002. ISSN 1479-425X
Editorial
Poetry
as an Easter Egg.
Early in education most
of us must have been impressed by those poems always signed off with
‘anonymous’. The teacher never cared to explain who that man or
woman, Anonymous, was. More mysterious was the fact that these poems occurred
so frequently and had only one name attached to them instead of the usual first
and last names of a poet. So Mr. or Ms. Anonymous was a very prolific poet but
a mysterious and engaging one – “ah, another poem by Mr.
Anonymous!” And of course such offerings took on more significance or
interest due mainly to the mystery surrounding them.
And such is the case with
the poem I stumbled upon between the pages of a Doris Lessing’s
book titled, The Golden Notebook!
Well, irony of ironies! A golden notebook which begets poems! It naturally
reminds one of the Easter egg and the tireless ever-laying proverbial golden
hen. The antics of the electronic hen- electronic, that is, since the invention
of the internet- fascinated me so much that I was once forced to heed the
goodwill call of persistent e-card
sellers and sent a card of an hen sitting and hatching away to a couple of
harassed academic friends. I duly signed the e-card with the punning electronic
flourish, “have a good lay!”
Lessing’s book becomes a womb for all kinds of
surprises beyond the plenitude of words formed from the letters a-z, which
resulted in this fat tome - all of five hundred and more pages. There is also
the gratification that this situation could lead to all kinds of structuralist and poststructuralist games with randomly
drawn cards bearing – ‘intertextuality’,
‘the meaninglessness of meaning’, ‘Derrida derided’,
‘the death of the author’
‘binary pairs’ and so on. A book is indeed a surprise
waiting to catch the unwary reader by the lapels and swing him around to face
– of all things, words! Talk about the plotting book! And what can be
even more surprising; your irascible deconstructionist might insist that this Lessing novel itself is not complete without that little
fragment of a poem found inside it; that it is ‘writing in the
margin’- never mind that the poem was not in the margin this time but
embedded in the middle of the huge narrative itself. One could quote Roland Barthes- Image, Music, Text. (1977), on the death of the
author: “We know now that a text is not a line of words
releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’
of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of
culture. Similar to Bouvard and Pecuchet,
those eternal copyists, at once sublime and comic and whose profound
ridiculousness indicates precisely the truth of writing, the writer can only
imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to
mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to
rest on any one of them. Did he wish to express himself, he ought at
least to know that the inner ‘thing’ he thinks to
‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary, its words
only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely”
In short it can be argued that the poem, ‘mis-placed’ as it is inside the tome, is inter-textual to the novel; that the infinitely deferred meaning of lexical items making up The Golden Notebook is further deferred away by the presence of the lexical items of the poem on the one hand and of the ‘poetry’ as a single unit of signification on the other. It is such that The Golden Notebook would then not mean at all without this shiny scrap of poetry, whose existence is nevertheless autonomous and contradictory; or that the meaning of a novel of five hundred pages or more would be necessarily refracted by this frail little poem. Poor Doris Lessing. She probably never would have imagined what structuralist problems she set in motion the moment she began her novel. And she also never did know what fate would befall her book; what reader would pick it up and leave it on some lonely mailbox in a dead street in Ottawa, Canada in the year of our Lord or our Lady (whichever the case might be) 2005. Barthes is vindicated. The work is produced but it has an existence independent of the author, who takes a back seat to the reader. The author is dead!
The writer of the poem,
the poet, must have placed his or her work there to send a message to the
casual reader who might pick up the novel from its abandonment on the mailbox
within an apartment block which itself looks abandoned from the run of rain and
wash of time and sun on its walls. Or he or she simply penned something out of
boredom or a whim, placed it in-between a novel and promptly forgot about it,
having achieved the cathartic release of self-expression. The anonymity of the
poem emphasizes Barthes’ structuralist
idea that the reader is more important to the art of literary production,
displacing the humanist model built around the author. In the surreptitious
fashion in which Mr. or Ms. Anonymous, slipped things into our childhood lives,
I anonymously discovered this gem ‘laid’ by Doris Lessing’s Golden
Notebook on page 277, precisely. The thoughtless thing was etched out in
blue ink- probably with a ‘bic’ pen - on
a piece of white grainy toilet paper. It is a thought solemnly expressed; an
untitled mental note. It is a casual passer-by’s observation of the world
he or she lives in as that world floats by. It is unpretentious in diction, a
frail, quiet thing, satisfied in its own anonymous, clear-eyed recognition of
events. Perhaps the beauty of anonymous poetry lies in the fact of an
unpretentiousness that simply celebrates the poem’s mere existence. It is
self-referential and does not point to anything beyond itself. And if the
casual reader discovers it; he does no more than eavesdrop on a private
conversation, it is literary voyeurism. And this voyeuristic aspect is what
makes anonymous poetry ‘sexy’, and gives to it most of its literary
force.
This accident of a poem does have an
author whom we shall never know; in a sense then the author is dead. The
anonymous poem is as, Georges Battaille would have it
in a different context in Erotism: Death and
Sensuality, ‘discontinuous’ with the existence of its author;
the anonymous poem celebrates the reader and kills the author as the structuralist would have it.
Amatoritsero Ede
Writer-in-Residence