poetry theory

1. The Last Word: The Ends of Poetry, Agamben, and Early Modern Spain
Sonia Velázquez
MLN, Volume 132, Number 2, March 2017, pp. 461-463 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI:
For additional information about this article
Access provided by Freie Universitaet Berlin (2 May 2017 08:58 GMT)
https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0027
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/656922

2. MLN 132 (2017): 461–463 © 2017 by Johns Hopkins University Press
The Last Word:
The Ends of Poetry, Agamben,
and Early Modern Spain
As daunting as a blank page may be, beginnings also brim over with the
effervescence of creation. In the beginning God created the heavens
and the earth, Genesis tells us. In the beginning was the Word, we
read in John’s Gospel. The snide narrator of Samuel Beckett’s Murphy
sneers, “In the beginning was the pun.” By their beginning, incipit,
were written works known before the advent of print and the cultural
embrace of titles. Manuscript, printed, and now digitized collections
of texts are saved from chaos and oblivion by an alphabetized table of
“first words.” But in a cosmos that celebrates beginnings as the advent
of the new, who spares a thought for the end?
This critical cluster takes as its point of departure an essay from
a project imagined by Giorgio Agamben and friends Italo Calvino
and Claudio Rugafiori to examine what they called “the categorical
structures of Italian culture.” The project as such never came to frui-
tion, but Agamben recuperated the essays inspired by the enterprise
to examine foundational features of poetics such as “the end of the
poem,” the title given to the English translation of the collection as a
whole. In the essay of the same name, Agamben sets out to examine
“a poetic institution that has until now remained unidentified: the
end of the poem” (109).1
This seemingly limited scope, however,
soon opens up to staggering depths that include at once matters of
form and content (quite literally, the importance of studying closely
the way a poem ends) and matters of care (what are ultimately the
ends or purposes of poetry?). Or, in the words of David Ben-Merre,
Agamben’s short essay is an exploration of “indefinable spaces: the
1
Giorgio Agamben, “The End of the Poem” in The End of the Poem: Studies in Poetics.
Stanford UP, 1996.

3. 462 SONIA VELÁZQUEZ
spaces between the lines of verse, the spaces between verse and prose,
and the spaces between poetry and philosophy” (90).2
The purpose
of this cluster is thus to think together, through the close examina-
tion of six case studies that span the philosophical, poetic, sensual,
and social aspects of the end of the poem as it abuts the rise of prose
fiction, religious hermeneutics, and courtly expectations.
Agamben’s essay turns to the conventional identification of poetry as
“verse” (linguistic expressions with the potential to “turn,” or run over
into the next line of verse) to suggest that the “poetic institution” of
the end of the poem poses a unique problem to the tension between
the metric aspect of poetic expression and grammatical syntax which
Paul Valéry held central to the definition of poetry as “a prolonged
hesitation between sound and sense” (109). Considered from this
perspective, the end of the poem can never fulfill its ends, that is,
to continue into a subsequent line. Ending, therefore, is not always
synonymous with closure. From this perspective, attention to the raw
matter of poetics--phone, graphe, and logos--acquires an urgency that
goes beyond wooden formalism: it is intertwined with the existential,
psychological and bodily responses to loss and longing. Poetry and
poetics give us an alternative to both the work of mourning and mel-
ancholia as imagined by Freud and his followers.
Moreover, the separation of the desire to end with the delivery of
closure has repercussions for the ends/purposes of each poem and
of poetry itself because in verse expression, more than in any other
linguistic practice, meaning is tied to time and timing--hence the
heightened importance of repetition most obviously recognized in
rhyme. Anne Cruz’s contribution shows us, in fact, how the expecta-
tion of a return is central to the melancholy poetics of the refrain--the
break that nonetheless guarantees the precarious continued life of
poetry. Taking the example of Garcilaso de la Vega’s famous Egloga I,
Cruz argues that the repetition of the refrain “salid sin duelo, lágri-
mas, corriendo” cannot be understood as the simple working “out”
of the grief sung by Salicio; instead something is being worked “in”
the stasis guaranteed by the repetition: when refrain is a refraction
as much as a return, each iteration accrues new meaning. Endings
become thus the site of new beginnings. Similarly, Sonia Velázquez
analyzes the “alpha-omega poetics” of Fray Luis de León’s ode “En la
Ascención,” whose end echoes the beginning. The poem describes
the mixed emotions that the apostles must have felt upon seeing
2
David Ben-Merre, “Falling into Silence: Giorgio Agamben at the End of the Poem.”
Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 45.1 (2012): 89–104.

4. 463M L N
their triumphant Savior leave the earthly realm permanently when He
ascended into heaven--permanently, that is, until the redeemed end of
time. She argues that the ode recuperates what is proper to lyric, the
play of sound and sense, by privileging echo over metaphor to give
form to grief thus providing an alternative to the elegiac unending
cycle of mourning.
The end of the poem, Agamben suggests, is also the caesura that
gives birth to prose. The consequences of this artificial or natural
delivery are explored in the context of Cervantes’s Don Quijote by
two essays in this cluster. First, Natalia Pérez’s contribution addresses
directly the coexistence of poetry and prose, silence and music, in
Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Her reading of the transition between chap-
ters 42 and 43 of Part I as a precarious bridge between language as
meaning and language as object suggests that the self-conscious blank
space between the chapters becomes the site of the impossible task
of translating voice (phone) into meaningful words (logos). Paul M.
Johnson’s essay takes as its point of departure an interpolated poem
within the fiction-within-a fiction of El curioso impertinente to argue
that in Cervantes’ sonnet “Crece el dolor” enjambment becomes the
very embodiment of the involuntary physiognomic gesture of shame,
and that in the mediation between semantic and semiotic posited by
Agamben as unique to the end of the poem an ethical act of self-
scrutiny is also performed.
The last two essays turn to religious poetry. Gloria Hernández’s study
of the theopoetics of San Juan de la Cruz focuses on how the incom-
mensurability of sound and sense implies not only a schism but also
an outpouring of divine presence rather than its mere reproduction.
Finally, Ronald Surtz’s reading of a poem in honor of St Lawrence
shows not only how the outpouring of the divine cannot be contained-
-in poems or bodies--but also that in cooking, as in poetry and theology,
timing and degrees of doneness rather than endings are everything.