Review of "Post-ed on Your Mirror"

This is a review of Post-ed on Your Mirror by Linnet Phoenix, edited & published by me for Posthuman Poetry & Prose, & on sale at this link. Editors should not review books as a general rule, perhaps, but I propose to make some observations about the book that are somewhat specialized.

Linnet Phoenix is a phenomenal poet. Poetry is very sickly nowadays. What currently passes for poetry is the modern form of what Heidegger calls Poesie. This was in Heidegger's day the traditionally "poetic" - rhyming verse, doggerel - though nowadays the epigones are all producing little imitations of Bukowski's crapulent ramblings, calling it "edgy". This trash is not the rebellion, of course; it is what must be rebelled against & subverted. Dichtung is the genuine article. Linnet Phoenix is the genuine article.

Dichtung is something totally different from standard poetry, it is the opening up of Dasein that prepares it to receive Being, the Otherness of Being as manifest in beings, it is the "poetizing" that precedes the event of any art & it is present particularly strongly in poetry itself. It not only precedes art, but perhaps any understanding of where Dasein is, where the "Da" itself is. This is what Linnet does. Poesie, on the other hand, is Gerede; empty talk, idle chatter, meaningless. A poem is true not by stating true propositions, most poems don't do that, & it is not their function so to do. A poem is true by giving an insight into the unconcealedness of Being in beings - aletheia is seen by Heidegger as being built from Lethe and the alpha privativum, and truth as thus being unforgetting, unhiddenness. Dichtung reveals truth, Poesie covers over the truth of Dichtung in its nonsensical verbiage. A poem should make the reader aware of the Earth.¹

There is a religious imagery used in Linnet's poetry that is traditionally biblical, adopted from her traditionally Christian upbringing. I shall not go into this, but it is also a traditional strength. I have previously stated that she reminds me of Manley-Hopkins; the religious references connect to that, & so do the frequent hyphenated constructions that are perhaps less evident than usual in these short form poems. The following though is a clear reminder:

I am shipwrecked,
heart hull-holed
in smithereens

This I like to see as equivalent to the pre-Socratics in Heidegger. It is what we need to return to in order to carry on thinking. They still had access to the truth of Being, as Manley-Hopkins still had access to the world-making strength of words.

Thus again, I have returned to the the Heideggerian connection that I see in this poetry. The Earth/World (Erde/Welt) distinction is not one that Linnet deliberately focuses on, but it is very evident in passages like:

This old world howls
in the midday sun
as well as the frostbite moon,
but nobody listens

The old world that howls here is Earth, not world at all, & she is hidden; the average person, the average poetaster, knows nothing of this; it is only for those who are aware of the authentic poetic impulse that it is discernible. The reason the poetry that Linnet writes can be seen in terms drawn from Heidegger, or so I would assert, is that his description of what makes good Dichtung is pretty much correct, & Linnet is very good at this. It is possible to see Heidegger as saying that poetry is implicitly concerned with Being, whereas philosophy is explicitly concerned with it, or has been. But poiesis, so di Pippo argues,² is rather the original means of access to Being that is broader than the distinction between poetry and philosophy & that makes both poetry & philosophy possible. After all, it is poetry that will assist in the task of thinking that comes after the end of philosophy.

We do not occasionally produce poetry in this sense, but dwell poetically. Poiesis is the event, Ereignis, the propriative event that generates the open clearing, the "Da" of Dasein, powered by an original experience of lack & instability & fragmentary self identity, the hiding away of earth & the turning away of goddess. It is there in poiesis that Being is put into beings, the sense of earth & divinity that is so sadly lacking from modern poetry, & particularly from the bogus wannabe poetry of the various flocks of epigones, chattering away like little rock doves, opinionated little pigeons cooing, the fluttering inanity of the "edgy".

Linnet, however, creates a sense of Being:

I thought my shadow left
but she is still here
waiting for us to awaken

the twin bears are restless
clawing at satellites
like leaping silver salmon

Poiesis is not a mirroring of a stable being, a presence, it generates presence. & this naturally brings us to Derrida. Maybe Derrida's depiction of poetry as a hedgehog trying to cross the Heideggerian Autobahn, a reminiscence, a “photograph of the feast in mourning”,3 is not as distant from a Heidegger understood as not believing so much in the function of poetry as revealing earth, unconcealing it,4 as a poetizing that generates world & an understanding of world & phusis.

I once drew with found pieces,
pictures of blue butterflies,
when I was a tiny mouse,
before I roared in raindrops
honest as acid,
sweet as wild-briar lips

The above passage is so beautiful, & it creates its world, it generates a world for us to exist, better than the world of societal ideology. It borrows from the Earth where Linnet stands firm to bless world with these tiny fragments of nature. 

I do think that in Linnet's poetry we how Derrida's argument against the Heideggerian sense of poetry as disclosing unconcealed Being, saying instead that poetry is a nostalgia for a presence that never was, is part & parcel of Heidegger's original argument, the nostalgia is a result of lack, it generates Being, it gives access to Being. The obdurate life of the peasant working nature, expressed in the shoes painted by van Gogh, the struggle buried in the worn leather, the Earth where she worked, these are what Heidegger wants art to show.⁵

Linnet is, in my eyes, a major poet. She is one of those who generates a world. The Being she needs comes from her own productive work, & it is available for the reader in Post-ed on Your Mirror, since very few can do what Linnet does. She will show you how the Earth howls.

Here is the link to her blog. The book is now on sale at this link.

1 Heidegger, M. Poetry, Language, Thought (1971)

2 Alexander Ferrari Di Pippo. The Concept of Poiesis in Heidegger's An Introduction to Metaphysics. In: Thinking Fundamentals, IWM Junior Visiting Fellows Conferences, Vol. 9: Vienna 2000

3 Derrida, "Che cos'e la poesia" in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf. Columbia University Press; see also "Istrice 2: Ich binn all hier,” in Points . . . : Interviews, 1974-1994, Derrida, Elisabeth Weber (ed) ISBN: 9780804724883 (Stanford Univ Pr., 1995)

4 Heidegger 1971

5 Op. cit.