Let me in!' Opacity and illumination in an age of technological reproduction

초록

Predating Plato's ancient quarrel with poets by more than two millennia, Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna's exile songs-the 'ni-me-šàr- ra'-are primal poetic cries at the loss of the real. Rereading Enheduanna's text as a plausible answering call to Ezra Pound's century-old 'Make It New!,' this article proposes 'Let Me In!' as a possible credo for contemporary poets. In this article I investigate two contrary modes, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and lyric poetry, to speculate that a poem can act as either a metatextual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency (L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems), or as enacting illuminatory gestures to guide readers sensorily towards the real (lyric poems), with either mode of material mediation entailing ethical performance. Critiquing a selection of work by contemporary poets Charles Bernstein and Jane Hirshfield, this article proposes to recuperate Walter Benjamin's notion of aura as a concept that enables a rereading of poetic meaning-making as either purposefully opaque (Bernstein) or purposefully transparent (Hirshfield) © Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association 2013.

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