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For Want of a Door: Poetry's Resistant Interiors

For Want of a Door: Poetry's Resistant Interiors This essay explores the ethical stakes of poetic difficulty, focusing on images of impeded access and remote interiority in poems that dramatize encounters with matters that resist comprehension. Following Barbara Johnson's suggestion that having both an inside and an outside makes the “thing, the human, the poem, and indeed language itself” into metaphors for each other ( Feminist Difference 130), this essay takes the link between poetic difficulty and images of occlusion as a way to broach the difficulties of entering into alien experience by way of lyric poems. More broadly, it finds in imagined encounters with resistant interiors answers to the question of what it means to want to know, to understand, or to relate to an other and argues that, in the face of irrevocable remoteness, poetry's potential for repair resides in the restoration rather than resolution of its resistance. The essay begins with a brief overview of recent theories of poetic difficulty, finding in the personifications and anthropomorphic metaphors of interiority that appear in those theories evidence of the ways in which we project agency, will, and moral choice onto poems that resist our attempts to grasp them. It then explores the workings of such resistance — particularly its renegotiation of the divide between interior and exterior, self and other, which anthropomorphic projections seek to overcome — in poems by William Butler Yeats, Jorie Graham, Wisława Szymborska, Francis Ponge, and Anne Carson. The essay argues that, like D.W. Winnicott's transitional object, resistant poems open a space between interior and exterior worlds, a space of “experiencing” that helps one learn to tolerate frustration, separation, loss, and reality. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1590146 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 2: 207-229 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Feuerstein, M. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2012 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {} http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Comparative Literature Duke University Press

For Want of a Door: Poetry's Resistant Interiors

Comparative Literature , Volume 64 (2) – Mar 20, 2012

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References (22)

Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright © Duke Univ Press
ISSN
0010-4124
eISSN
1945-8517
DOI
10.1215/00104124-1590146
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

This essay explores the ethical stakes of poetic difficulty, focusing on images of impeded access and remote interiority in poems that dramatize encounters with matters that resist comprehension. Following Barbara Johnson's suggestion that having both an inside and an outside makes the “thing, the human, the poem, and indeed language itself” into metaphors for each other ( Feminist Difference 130), this essay takes the link between poetic difficulty and images of occlusion as a way to broach the difficulties of entering into alien experience by way of lyric poems. More broadly, it finds in imagined encounters with resistant interiors answers to the question of what it means to want to know, to understand, or to relate to an other and argues that, in the face of irrevocable remoteness, poetry's potential for repair resides in the restoration rather than resolution of its resistance. The essay begins with a brief overview of recent theories of poetic difficulty, finding in the personifications and anthropomorphic metaphors of interiority that appear in those theories evidence of the ways in which we project agency, will, and moral choice onto poems that resist our attempts to grasp them. It then explores the workings of such resistance — particularly its renegotiation of the divide between interior and exterior, self and other, which anthropomorphic projections seek to overcome — in poems by William Butler Yeats, Jorie Graham, Wisława Szymborska, Francis Ponge, and Anne Carson. The essay argues that, like D.W. Winnicott's transitional object, resistant poems open a space between interior and exterior worlds, a space of “experiencing” that helps one learn to tolerate frustration, separation, loss, and reality. CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? « Previous | Next Article » Table of Contents This Article doi: 10.1215/00104124-1590146 Comparative Literature 2012 Volume 64, Number 2: 207-229 » Abstract Full Text (PDF) References Classifications Article Services Email this article to a colleague Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Similar articles in this journal Similar articles in Web of Science Download to citation manager Citing Articles Load citing article information Citing articles via Web of Science Google Scholar Articles by Feuerstein, M. Related Content Load related web page information Social Bookmarking CiteULike Connotea Delicious Digg Facebook Google+ Reddit Technorati Twitter What's this? Current Issue Winter 2012, 64 (1) Alert me to new issues of Comparative Literature Duke University Press Journals ONLINE About the Journal Editorial Board Submission Guidelines Permissions Advertising Indexing / Abstracting Privacy Policy Subscriptions Library Resource Center Activation / Acct. Mgr. E-mail Alerts Help Feedback © 2012 by University of Oregon Print ISSN: 0010-4124 Online ISSN: 1945-8517 var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www."); document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E")); try { var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5666725-1"); pageTracker._trackPageview(); } catch(err) {}

Journal

Comparative LiteratureDuke University Press

Published: Mar 20, 2012

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