by Ed Simon
Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If you’re interested in seeing close readings on particular works of literature or pop culture, please email me at [email protected]
A short lyric can be an ingenious device, a clever mechanism, an engine for generating multiple meanings – that’s the first axiom of my argument. The second axiom is that all truly great poetry is, at some level, about poetry itself (if not about the individual poem itself). Robert Bernard Hass’ “The Metaphysics of Presence,” which was published in the December 2023 issue of Poetry magazine, is an exemplary example of both of these aforementioned principles; a lyric that ironically draws attention to itself, to “Your hipster cynical voice” and to “clever puns,” but in the deferral between ultimate meaning and surfaces suggests a far more profound, if ineffable, lesson than the playfulness which the work itself initially implies.
The title of the work is consciously foreboding, with “The Metaphysics of Presence” sounding as if something that would be emblazoned on the spine of a door-stopper of continental philosophy. It’s not incidental, however, for that’s precisely and literally what Hass’ poem is concerned with, which is to say the relationship between what language represents and the thing-in-itself, between the sign and signified, the presence and the inevitable absence of words falling short of ultimate reality. To that end, “The Metaphysics of Presence” is a love poem. Hass even says so, writing in as straightforward a manner as is conceivable at the tenth line that “You’re in the presence of a love poem,” which is both accurate and not, and an example of a literal declaration in a poem that has fun with the incommensurability of literal declarations all while gesturing to something that lay beyond language.
Hass’ work is an immaculate example of a self-referential poem, a work that is about poetry itself, and about this poem itself. If a love poem, than the poem works as a blazon of itself. Fourteen lines long, “The Metaphysics of Presence” is a love poem (or a poem about love poems) which harkens towards the most popular form for expressing such sentiments. Though matching the simplest definition of a sonnet, Hass doesn’t necessarily adhere to expectations of rhyme, rhythm, and meter in that regard. This isn’t necessarily a Petrarchan or a Shakespearian sonnet, Spenserian or Onegin. Rather, the formalism is more abstract, born not in the relationship between sounds and sense per se, but in the interaction between the words-themselves and what they’re supposed to mean. A nifty, metaleptic formalism that breaks the fourth wall of the lyric.
So, for example, as Hass begins the poem with the first two words of his first line, he writes the punctuated sentence fragment of the words “A fragment.” What follows the caesura in that first line before the end-stop is “To be followed by an infinitive phrase,” which is of course an infinitive phrase. It’s the second line that begins with “Your hipster cynical voice,” an interjection of lyrical narration at the third semantic beat of the poem, when the reader has intuited the conceit. The pronoun is particularly interesting; composed in the second-person, we’re to wonder if Hass is referring to himself, to an idealized poet, perhaps to the reader as a partner in the penning of the work. There is, almost, a sense that we’re to read this as an instruction manual of sorts, a type of poetic Mad Libs where the aspiring versifier is to plug in their own word choices (indeed at line eight, half-way through the work, he presents an actual spatial gap, to which I’ll return). As if to affirm the conceit after drawing attention to the irony of the piece, Hass concludes the second line with “One. Then Two. Then three words,” all of which obviously refer to themselves, the first sentence fragment composed of one word, the second of two, and the third of three.
“The Metaphysics of Presence” continues with its metaleptic trick; by the end of the fourth line we’re told to expect the “obligatory foreign phrase,” which is dutifully supplied in the form of the German-word “Sprachspiele” a line later (to which “obligatory foreign phrase” has also included alongside it “And obscure allusion”). An appropriate obscure allusion, for “Sprachspiele” is one of those untranslatable Teutonic words that fulfills a need, in this case roughly translating to “language game.” That word was popularized by the Austrian analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein his second major work Philosophical Investigations, with the thinker in some ways the haunting presence of Hass’ poem. Wittgenstein, who made language his life’s work, explained how words relate to existence in two radically different theories in his only two works, famously writing in his 1918 tome Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus that the “limits of my language are the limits of my world.” This is the same theme of Hass’ poem, that there are “spaces/Between letters, between words, the distance between/You and me, the god of the gaps.”
In this manner, Hass has presented an anti-poem, a self-referential work about the failure of language in general and of poetry in particular – what critic Stanley Fish calls a “self-consuming artifact.” The “language game” of the poem is the awareness that words are capricious and lines mercurial, that there is always a “gap” between reality and representation. Indeed Hass’ deployment of the phrase “god of the gaps,” which normally refers to the manner in which theology has often been deployed to explain that which the natural sciences (currently) can’t explain, does dual service here, a gesture towards the concept of inexplicability as well as the jocular invention of a being that acts as a deity for these pockets of nothingness. Following the invocation of this god of the gaps Hass gives an actual space of whiteness, a capsule of nothing the space of an indentation, the absence of language speaking to the titular metaphysics of presence, before writing “The present/Absence so rich in irony” (note the homophonic pun that generates a logical paradox in the form of “presence/absence”).
Two lines later the poet writes “By now you may have guessed/You’re in the presence of a love poem. Or maybe you see/Something more.” What is this “Something more” (the enjambment necessitating that ominously significant capitalization at the start of the line)? In the following fragment Hass provides an answer – “The futility.” The futility of what then? Of what the poem claims to be about, about properly being able to name love, or anything else for that matter. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes that “Even when all the possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” Apophatically speaking, those are the subjects which remain the purview of poetry, of “Whatever it is, it elides meaning,” as Hass writes. The poem – poetry – must always fail, yet in its failures Hass suggest that there can be a necessary playfulness, the endless deferrals of the Sprachspiele. If this is a love poem – and it is – it concerns the failure of communication, where words are by necessity even more abstract than the painting that declares “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” below the image of a pipe. Despite this, even though language games may be games, they’re where we’re able to construct our own meanings, for they leave “you alone to make of it what you like,” a space in which love – that singularly ineffable thing – can exist. A love poem not about a beloved, then, but about the very possibility of love.
Ed Simon is the editor of Belt Magazine, an emeritus staff-writer for The Millions, and a columnist at 3 Quarks Daily. The author of over a dozen books, his upcoming title Relic will be released by Bloomsbury Academic in January as part of their Object Lessons series, while Devil’s Contract: The History of the Faustian Bargain will be released by Melville House in July of 2024.