Poetry as Apocalypse

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. 
It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. 
My language trembles with desire.”
Roland Barthes

It was an unevenly sultry summer day, during which the bodies that studded my surroundings, including mine, appeared more like wax remnants prone to dissolution than sentient beings in motion. It was one of those moments when stasis gives proportions to the scenery, and absence ripens into the abundance of nothingness. A gentle phenomenon, nevertheless.

Being in a state of indefinite contemplation, I came to think of poetry and its genesis as a process that comes by way of subtraction, mirroring a procedure that ostensibly relates more to the sculptural than to the creative linguistic inception. 

In its most conventional sense, sculpting is an act that, to varying extents, pertains to the erasure of matter, allowing a form to arise as the backbone or leftover, yet not fossilized, from the raw material it belongs to.

A vivid example among art history’s masters is Michelangelo Buonarroti, by all means also a prolific poet, who referred to sculpture as being that practice accomplished by force of removal. In his case, by contrasting it with painting, which is instead generated by adding on a surface.

That is a relatively simplified, albeit fundamental, reading of the intention toward creation, and the classification may appear sharply binary. Undoubtedly, both positions could apply, collide, hybridize, coexist, or intersect. Within the framework of my workshop Poetry as Apocalypse, the reference to the visual arts sphere has served as an ideal tangible projection. For this reason, a schematic delineation was deemed appropriate.

Throughout my lesson, I attempted to draw a parallel between poetry making and the idea of taking away to infuse a poem’s conception with a tactile overtone. Such comprehension relates more to a substantial rather than quantitative approach to the lyric composition.

The sculptor might not incubate any idea of a figure not already in the matter, and only by indulging an instinct of disclosure is the subject extracted. The figure is not visible but exists, encased behind strata. The artist might want to unleash and expose it by capturing the instant of release from the material. Eventually, this enables the work to be utterly dynamic.

Even a draft can be the outcome, somehow concluded in its non-finitude and emerging as a work—or state—hovering between stages of completion. 

Here, a further coincidence with Michelangelo transpires, since he granted us unfinished marble pieces depicting figures caught in the very instant of being, sketches in the making that incorporated the inevitable imperfection of creation. The stone feels pregnant with tension.

Echoing this stance, at a juncture when contemplation transformed into self-persuasion, I recognized that, within poems, language unfolds gravid with anticipation.

Poetry might allow readers to encroach into the suspended meaning unfolding along the verses as if the creative continuum were a handover between the author and the perceiver—a complementary synergy where the textual body is spirited and grows relational.

At that point, the idea of subtraction converged with the concept of Apocalypse. Apocalypse is a word I learned to regard not with its catastrophic connotation of “The End,” a vision dominated by a spreading sentiment of doom, but rather in its literal meaning of revelation. 

Apocalypse (n.)From Ancient Greek apokálypsis, the word is a derivative of apokalýptein “to uncover, disclose, reveal”: a compound whose elements are the preposition apó, apo- “off, away” + the verb kalyptein “to cover, conceal.”

Etymologies hold the core of meaning like the skin shields the flesh. Through their analysis, a word is opened up and vivisected. A term is undressed by subtracting the veil of interpretation with which it is charged and discloses its innermost significance, already present but perhaps, disregarded. Thus, words act as materials to be assembled, sectioned, or deconstructed.

During the workshop, I decided to rely on a few etymological examples (namely, the verb desire and the nouns chrysalis and archipelago) to illustrate these underlying patterns and impart a more palpable edge to language.

The Apocalypse is that liminal event that sheds light—sometimes incautiously—on the rough substance of intimate truths, collective beliefs, and what we allow ourselves to reach and mold through our senses, identities, bodies, and minds. Language is the medium to make the uncovered alive, felt, and transmissible. The result may perform and manifest as fallible, yet the intrinsic condition of forging/wording becomes more emblematic.

In this context, I called upon the participants to engage in a creative writing exercise focused on the process, intending to experiment with the apocalyptic occurrence that might take shape during a poetic composition in free verse. I invited the attendees to delve into the fragmentation of the ordinary, in which the superfluous and the obvious can morph into an incident of disclosure. From there, the self-editing gesture stems as a sculptural practice.

Poetry, for me, explores the potential and the unsaid lurking within the multilayered space(s)-time(s) we perpetually encounter. Its fulcrum is on the inescapability of living in the now through the combination of sentences that attempt to exude—or sculpt—the impracticability of an end. 

Michelangelo’s struggle with matter is notorious and possibly mythicized. For him, it constituted the imperfection of the artwork. A further resonance looms: writing poetry is a visceral path to discerning that the essence of being and expressing might reside in the limits of language itself.

A list of selected readings accompanied the workshop. The chosen authors appeared as inspiring voices due to the disclosing nature of their writings.

• Etel Adnan, selected poems from Time
• Róbert Gál, excerpts from Signs and Symptoms and Naked Thoughts
• Clarice Lispector, excerpts from Água Viva, The Hour of the Star and The Passion According to G. H.
• Bernadette Mayer, selected poems from Milkweed Smithereens
• Sappho, selected fragments
• Sylvia Plath, selected poems