Artifice of Absorption

A Poetics.

Absorption and Impermeability

··· The visibility of wordsas a precondition of readingnecessitates that words obtrude impermeably intothe world |thisimpermeability makes a readerfs absorptionin words possible. The thicknessof words ensures that whateverof their physicality is erased, or engulfed, inthe process of semantic projection,a residuetenaciously in-heres that will not be sublimatedaway. Writing is not a thin filmof expendable substitutions that, when reading, fallsawaylike scalesto reveal a meaning. The tenacity ofwritingfs thickness, like the bodyfsflesh, isineradicable, yet mortal. It isthe intrusionof words into the visiblethat markswritingfs own absorption in the world.To literally put words into Merleau Pontyfs1 mouth:The thickness of writing betweenthe reader & the poem is constitutive for the poemof its visibility & for the readerof the outer limit of his or her absorptionin the poem; it is not an obstaclebetween them, it is their meansof communication. The thickness of writing,far from rivaling that of the world,is on the contrary the solemeans it has to go to the heart of thingsby making itself partof the material world, absorbedby it.

Absorption & its many con-verses, re-verses, is at heart a measureof the relationship betweena reader &a work: any attempt to isolate

this dynamic in terms exclusively ofreadingor compositionwill fail on this account.As writers|& everyone inscribesin the senseI mean here|we cantry to intensifyour relationships by consideringhow they work: are we puttingeach other to sleepor waking each other up;& what do we wake to?Does our writing stunor sting? Do we cling towhat wefve graspedtoo well, or find tunesin each newdeparture.

(Charles Bernstein. An Excerpt from gArtifice of Absorption.h A Poetics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. 86-89.)