Soul and Substance -
A Poet's Examination Papers
By Jay Wright
Princeton University Press - £17.50
Jay Wright may well be one of the most important American poets of the past half century, but if these 455 pages are anything to go by, I'd have to wholeheartedly disagree.
I do not understand anything he is trying to convey.
Not ONE single word.
Nothing.
Nada.
Nichts.
To be sure, Soul and Substance - A Poet's Examination Papers is so decidedly dense and square and masculine and unpleasantly written, it makes T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land appear as if it were a fairytale written for toddlers.
For instance, the book's initial 43 pages is on the subject of death, and is unsurprisingly (as well as unnecessarily) entitled 'On Death: A Speculative Approach to Death's Future.' It ought to have been entitled 'More Convoluted Than Chinese Algebra and Joyce's Ulysses Combined.'
Don't believe me?
Endeavour to read the following:
''What does it mean to initiate death? We sit with a particular provocation. We cannot simply mean that we cannot bring death about, our own or that of another human, or that of any material being, or that of any substantial or insubstantial complex. There, at the end, we have an evasion'' (page three). ''We might begin by saying that life could offer death a future. Would I have been more exact if I had said the possibility of a future? Wouldn't that be another begging of the question, pretending that death could be held off and established only as a possibility? You might insist that the real question-begging lies not in asserting the possibility of death but in ignoring the inevitability of death'' (pages fifteen and sixteen). ''What are we proposing? that it takes an audience to confirm the body present and the body absent? that the constitutive potential of place only matters when there is a refutation, some force of being that can, in principle, deny these bodies' existence? We seem to suggest that a body's ability to deny its own existence is the mark of its existence. How far will that take us? Far enough to be brought face to face with the idea: so with life, so with death. If you can conceive of your non-existence, can you not conceive of denying your own death? I want to phrase this in its most outrageous fashion: can't you conceive that death does not exist? What happens to our entanglement?'' (page 27).
What happens to our entanglement?
What the fuck is he essentially talking about?
Might I add, I picked the above three quotations at random.
Might I further add that the rest of the book continues in the exact same, highly irritating manner, A manner which makes no sense whatsoever.
Don't believe me?
Endeavour to read the following:
''Consider Mudimbe's ''etude semantique,'' with the analytical, structural, and, one might propose, mathematical temper of this '' breath of wind.
[…]
Concerning that ''breath of wind,'' Bernstein gives animus, spiritus, and the Hebrew ruach (breath).
1 – 5
a + ( b + c) = (a + b) +c
[…].''
('The Counterfactual Self')
Thoughts?
''How could Kant avoid the Akan postulate, sunsum, or escape the word-centered function in Yurugu? And must we, battling our own apprentice, argue against any ontological derivation in these functions?''
('A Material Emptiness or Entanglement as (a) Decidable Aesthetic Form').
Thoughts?
These are mine: what a complete and utter hogwash of sterile, superfluous, mind-numbingly dumb, pretentious bollocks.
David Marx
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