‘Let Me In!’ Opacity and Illumination in an Age of Technological Reproduction

Abstract

Predating Plato’s ancient quarrel with poets by more than two millennia, Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna’s exile songs—the ‘ni-me-šár-ra’—are primal poetic cries at the loss of the real. Rereading Enheduanna’s text as a plausible answering call to Ezra Pound’s century-old ‘Make It New!,’ this article proposes ‘Let Me In!’ as a possible credo for contemporary poets. In this article I investigate two contrary modes, L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry and lyric poetry, to speculate that a poem can act as either a meta-textual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency (L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poems), or as enacting illuminatory gestures to guide readers sensorily towards the real (lyric poems), with either mode of material mediation entailing ethical performance. Critiquing a selection of work by contemporary poets Charles Bernstein and Jane Hirshfield, this article proposes to recuperate Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura as a concept that enables a rereading of poetic meaning-making as either purposefully opaque (Bernstein) or purposefully transparent (Hirshfield).

Keywords:

• L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E poetry
• lyric poetry
• conceptualism
• aura
• Walter Benjamin
• Charles Bernstein
• Jane Hirshfield

Research for this publication was undertaken with the help of a research grant from Sogang University (2012).