"Linguistic Unease"

Denise Riley.

There is a lyrical guilt as well as a linguistic unease-- "I" lies ( lIes)

57) declarations of the I-- self-description and naming-- very grammar of language of self-reference seems to demand or guarantee an authenticity but also cancels this possibility-- for "I" belongs to everyone-- is universal

58)stripped bare of ownership not only linguistic dispossession-- also plentitude/proliferation but "I" is a necessity (so this isn't only the fault of the word itself)

--in poetry: refreshing not to possess I's voice or to resemble oneself

63) words are everyone else's--

Dickinson on letters: "A letter always feels to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral power in thought that walks alone." (Riley expresses discomfiture then at seeing her own writing-- like glimpsing her own death)

65) for Heidegger, naming isn't bestowing identity but calling (invocation, bidding, calls into the word)-- which guarantees a lively distance (rather than subjugation, I suppose?)

64) Am I, in practice, written?

65) stillness=fullness, and its peal is bidding or invocation. To hear becomes dynamic, a concentrated attentiveness. Then "Language speaks". It's not repressive but it is in charge, calls into the word.

Heidegger again: "Man acs as though he were the shaper and master of language, while in fact language remains the master of man."

66) lyric "I" advertises simulacrum of control under the guise of form

67) being written through-- energetic materiality of words

68) "'When the mind is like a hall in which thought is a voice speaking, the voice is always that of someone else' describes one impression of being spoken through. But there's also a less straightforward directionality, which is not 'through' the writer as a conduit but across." (This makes me think of Spicer's definition of the word metaphor, "traverse across")

68) Riley-- we're neither completely in control of language nor only the "vatic mouthpiece through which language frolics"

70) Jakobson says poet's metalanguage may lag far behind his poetic language-- where does poetic choosing then come from? intuitive verbal latency like in implication to "the remainder of language" (but affected by timing and temporality)-- which is just another way to answer this question of "where does it all come from" and "how much agency and control do we really have, anyway"-- so here poet is in more control, maybe, but still receiving all this stuff from outside-- but here, outside is culture, conversation, etc.

72) similar sounds-- homophony-- bring up different shades of meaning

***would be interesting to write a poem that had to be read aloud/spoken for its semantic purposes-- and/or one that must stay on the page to be understood

73) Stevens-- language evolves semantically through a series of conflicts between denotative and connotative forces in wors

79) you angel!-- no. moot cries on the street are accusatory

89) 3 factors from "outside themselves" all entail puzzles about agency; Adorno: subject sounds forth in language until language acquires a voice

90) unself-consciousness of the subject submitting itself to language

91) nothing is ever for the "first time" (okay, but what about ritual or rites of passage?-- why is lyric poetry so geared toward the individual experience that then translates to some universal rather than a sense of communal experience?)

"your writing on the page arrives largely from the outside"-- but again, what if individuality isn't the goal?

in short: Riley says: it's language and culture that create this stuff