Ars Poetica: At Every Turn Today Poem by Desmond Kon

I am not Proust and his literary machine.

Am I partial as objects, as impulses that make me burst open Stevens?
Am I eros that resonates like an oboe?

The oboe is getting clinical yet pedestrian; it is listening for sounds in my chest
that point to lovers and quiet hope, and forever forgiveness.

Do you hear its waiting like an ear to the wall, like notes slipped into cracks?
How we stonewall the cracks, the poems we first loved to hear.

Can they not see the sadness of forgetfulness?

If not, haven’t their hearts ever braced themselves for loss?

We were never made to be machines, forcing movement into limbs to work
out signs like a formula. We are cells and vessels but we don’t have to follow them.

Will you follow me?
Will you follow me into eternal wonder of no beginnings, and thus no endings?

That will help me survive; it will help me live.

It will help me write poetry as if tomorrow I forgot I ever wrote.

That is how I want to remember this, this precious machination of moments
that gears itself for no cabal. That is my secret.

My secrecy was to write without condition, without limits,
as if a cipher could free itself into fields and how no one would mind.

If only my inhibitions allowed such inhibition,
I say to Deleuze, as his fingers spider my spine.





Author’s Note:

An earlier version of this poem appeared in University of Houston’s Gulf Coast, opening with an epigraph from Horace’s Ars Poetica: “He, his head in the clouds, belches out his poems and loses his way.” Its companion poem was later published in Portland Review, featuring citations from Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux’s L’Art Poétique and Wallace Stevens’ Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction. This poem ends with this line from Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria Nova: “Note the signs that accompany a given circumstance. Present the facts, but do not represent them as such; rather, reveal only signs of the facts: show fear by pallor, sensuality by adornment, and shame by a sudden blush; show the thing itself by its definite signs, what is prior by what is consequent upon it: this complexion, this sex, this age, that form.”

In The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac, translated by John P. Leavey, Jr. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press,1973) , Derrida offers his reading of Condillac’s 1746 Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, questioning under what conditions frivolity remains possible, saying: “Frivolity consists in being satisfied with tokens. It originates with the sign, or rather with the signifier which, no longer signifying, is no longer a signifier. The empty, void, friable, useless signifier. ‘…Useless is said of things which serve no purpose, are of no use. If they appear to have some utility but are fundamentally useless, they are called vain. If their utility bears only on objects of little consideration or worth, they are frivolous. As for futile, it adds still more to frivolous and is said chiefly of reasoning or arguments which bear on nothing.’” Derrida then locates at the origin of all knowledge the notion of desire which “produces understanding and the theoretical relation with the object”. As he sums up: “No longer is desire the relation with the object, but the object of need. No longer is desire a direction, but an end. An end without end bending need into a kind of flight. This escape sweeps away the origin, system, destiny, and time of need (an exempt [franc] word and a concept without identity) .”