Abstract

This is not a transcription. More like a reenactment of the possibilities of performative poetics as improvisatory, open-ended.As a way to engage the relation of poetics to poetry and by implication differentiate poetics from literary theory and philosophy, although not necessarily from poetry.As a way to extend the ideas about closure—the rejection of closure—into the discussion of essays and critical writing.To eject, that is, the idea that there is something containable to say: completed saying.So that poetics becomes an activity that is ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to disrupt or make problematic any formulation that seems too final or preemptively restrictive.Speaking at the Buffalo conference, Linda Reinfeld pointed to the wedding that was being enacted between critical theory and poetry as a kind of subtext of that gathering. Hearing Rosmarie Waldrop read, in that context, from Reproduction of Profiles suggested something very much along these lines: Waldrop has created a literary wedding, in the sense of wedding together, or fusing, of philosophy and poetry. In this work, she has taken phrases from Elizabeth Anscombe’s translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and added—weaved in—phrases of her own making. The structure of Reproduction of Profiles provokes a number of questions, including the status of Wittgenstein’s original text, which may itself be taken as a poetic work, and also the status of the Reproduction of Profiles—what kind of a work is that? Charles Bernstein is the author of a number of books of poetry, including Rough Trades, The Nude Formalism, The Lives of the Toll Takers, The Sophist, and Controlling Interests. Other books include Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 and Artifice of Absorption. He coedited L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E and recently edited The Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy