Diagrams

Much of my work focuses on understanding how poetry — in its minutest phonic sounds and scriptural marks — thinks. To this end, I make use of diagrams and animations to visualize poetic form as a dynamic process at work in the poem.

‘Absolute’ metaphors in modernist poetry

The following sonnet to Orpheus by Rilke (I.XXI) opens with a seemingly simple figurative comparison: the earth is like a child… That simile turns out, however, to function as the hinge for an extensive, elaborate metaphor that governs the whole poem. The metaphor is ‘absolute’ because one cannot decide what counts as the poem’s vehicle and what as its tenor. In other words, this class of metaphors does not allow one to distinguish between the literal and the figurative. Rilke’s brilliant sonnet instead ceaselessly oscillates between imagining nature in terms of culture, culture in terms of nature.

The final cubist painting perfectly depicts a similar figural oscillation: the undulating curves above the hole of the guitar could be taken as the material instrument’s upper half and contour or just as well as the guitarist’s plucking fingers and arm. What Wittgenstein called ‘aspect seeing’ thus extends beyond visual art to the art of poetic figuration.

Rhyme as the sonic shaping of time

The following animation attempts to understand August Wilhelm Schlegel’s temporalization of Dante’s rhyme scheme, terza rima:

“Freylich erscheint diese erste in sich vollständige Zahl hier unter den Schranken der Endlichkeit, indem jede Terzine, vermöge des vereinzelten Reimes in der Mitte eine folgende fordert, grade wie durch die Produktivität der Natur immer in jeder Erzeugung ein Widerstreit der Kräfte ausgeglichen, zugleich aber der Keim eines neuen Widerstreits ausgestreut wird, und so ins unendliche fort. Dieß begründet denn die Verkettung der Terzinen, die darin liegende Hinweisung auf die Zukunft, welche dieß Silbenmaß zu einer prophetischen Bedeutung so geschickt macht. Und wie der Geist in dem Progressus der Endlichkeiten nur durch einen freyen Akt, durch einen unbegreiflichen Sprung das Unendliche zur Einheit zusammenfassen kann, so kann auch die Kette der Terzinen nur willkührlich durch einen zugegebnen Vers geschlossen werden.” (Vorlesungen über die romantische Poesie, 1803/04)

Articulatory Gestures (Lautgebärden) in Celan’s poems

Poems obviously channel our senses of sight and sound, but how might they engage the other, less directly ‘verbal’ senses such as touch, taste, and smell? Lautgebärden designate the physical gestures that coordinate tongue, lips, teeth, and palate into an articulation that resounds from within the body to release a voice into the world. Poetic ‘touch’ most immediately happens in these gestures that enable reading aloud, whether alone to oneself (a doubled self) or to others. Such gestures isolate the articulating movement of the speech organs rather than the sound thereby articulated, whether codified phoneme or proto-lingual babble. Linguists and theorists from Wilhelm Wundt to Roland Barthes have been entranced by articulatory gestures, phantasizing through them an embodied origin of language. Paul Celan, whose library testifies to his study of the physiology of speech production as well as the linguistic theories of Jakobson, often ‘scripted’ articulatory gestures in his poetry, nowhere perhaps more explicitly than in the poem “Offene Glottis.” To the right of the poem is its transcription in IPA, with recurring phonemes accordingly highlighted so as to allow the gestural patterns between colors and beyond all linguistic codes and hierarchies of unit to become apparent.