Katia N’s Reviews > Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins > Status Update

Celan renders the thought in the pithiest form I know: “Art makes for distance from the I.” In German, you can say that in three words: “Kunst schafft Ich-Ferne.” “Art creates I-distance”

Deleuze: “Literature begins only when a third person is born in us that strips us of the power to say ‘I’”; if a writer is to write in a new language, Deleuze says, “the self must be destroyed.”

I can be flabbergasted by what I encounter only when I hold at bay my everyday self, that fellow whose habits and moods I know far too well. “Revolutionary joy is what comes out of great books,” Gilles Deleuze has written, “not the anguishes of our petty narcissism or the terrors of our guilt.”

The blinding of Gloucester or the shriek of the man with the washerwoman (Kafka) can lead me to think that this is more than I can take, that “this should not be.” But then there are incomprehensibilities that puncture me in a different way: I fall in love, or learn that a friend’s son has taken his life ..and in my joy or rage or grief I think: this thing, wholly incomprehensible, should not be; and yet it is.

Emerson: “One must be an inventor to read well,”Walter Benjamin (whose true critic “forgets to pass judgment”), or on Stanley Cavell, who has written: “Describing one’s experience of art is itself a form of art; the burden of describing it is like the burden of producing it.”

On occasion, I can definitely testify to this Cavell’s “burden of describing” when writing on this site.

When the thing Ive made looks back @me, I see neither an expression of the feelings&thoughts w/which I maintain a daily closeness (my “inner life”)nor a testament 2my social embeddedness (identity) but thing strangely familiar brought in2 being by a familiar stranger. It can be a thrill 2 come face2face w/something made by someone who coincides w/me while differing from me: shrewder,more honest, less weak—wiser

poetic work is lumpy: in no place its parts gather into a final form, not because as the product of human beings perfection remains out of reach, but because the work invites participation&continuation-it is essentially incomplete or,as Schlegel says: it is fragmentary. It doesnt settle but keeps working, this makes it a work: a work is a work as long as it works. at diff times or contexts, it does take a diff shape.

We read to be inspired. If that is too mawkish, then say: we hear so that we may speak. And if that sounds too oracular, then: we read—we look, we listen, we feel—to do things we did not know we could or would or should do. Or just: to make freedom.

There are bodies of knowledge I can acquire and techniques I can learn. Often, they aid me, though sometimes they get in my way (and I never know which of these will occur). But they can never prepare me for the moment a poetic work addresses me in a way that surpasses my capacities, the ways it touches a wound I did not know I carried.

You realize that poetry(&any art) is a form of witchcraft, requiring another kind of criticism, one that seeks the truth that poetic making reveals, rather than some knowledge it might glean by asking questions&taking down answers. For “there is no other solution but 2practise it oneself, 2become one’s own informant, 2penetrate one’s own amnesia, &2 try & make explicit what one finds unstatable in oneself.”

Charles Baudelaire, in an essay called “What Good Is Criticism?,” ..declares that “the best criticism is the kind that is amusing and poetic” and that “the best review of a painting could be a sonnet or an elegy.”