Reviewed by:

• The Poetic Imperative: A Speculative Aesthetics by Johanna Skibsrud
• Charles Altieri

In many respects, Johanna Skibsrud's The Poetic Imperative is a lucid, elegantly written, ambitious, theoretically sophisticated, and sometimes moving inquiry into difficult and original poets, beginning with Wallace Stevens, extending into Muriel Rukeyser, and concluding with quite recent work by several contemporary poets and two artists (all in 153 pages). Throughout Skibsrud is primarily concerned with the compatibility between poiesis and a notion of "truth" that may be characterized as "an intimacy with strangeness and uncertainty." This compatibility involves "the interplay between conscious recognition and what cannot be either deciphered or named." Given this understanding of truth as a goal for poiesis, she argues that poetic labor must be "speculative—departing from a point of conjecture and desire rather than from prior knowledge" (5). Hence the central roles played in the book by terms like "beyond," "unknown," "infinite," and "transgress." This treatment of poetry as fundamentally speculative provides a home for several contemporary [End Page 125] values involving the importance of the other—in epistemology, in linguistics, and at the intersection between ethics and politics.

For Skibsrud, it matters that we work out a plausible notion of truth in poetry because we can then see how the encounter with the limits of knowledge continually opens us to an otherness that competing modes of discourse have to repress to perform their allotted functions. While other disciplines seek closure, there emerges in poetry's pursuit of openness at least a quasi-ethic (my qualification, not hers) in which senses of possibility continually invite us to reimagine the relations between subject and object. Poetic truth is a kind of knowing of the self that actively stages the capacities of subject and object to penetrate one another so that they can overflow the traditional boundaries attributed to each (6). Further, poems as "active doing[s]" exhibit selves and others interacting in myriad ways (18), so the poetic work frequently establishes senses of possibility even amidst the most desperate of sociopolitical conditions.

Rukeyser, for example, provides an exemplary version of a documentary labor aware of itself as a form of making that opens alternative possibilities for constructing human relationships and "touching upon the unknown" (54). Inger Christensen and Craig Santos Perez are seen, in turn, as descendants of Stéphane Mallarmé's concern for embedding truth "as an ever-present possibility within every act of either representation or interpretation" (58). An "It" which stands for the object of reference becomes a matter of feeling established by "multiple shifts of mood, grammar, form, and subject matter" (61). Thus, Skibsrud conjoins the two contemporary poets' very different modes of discourse with a shared practice of refusing names as a means of arriving at terms of possible exchange.

Next, M. NourbeSe Philip takes the stage with her poem Zong! because of its way of "un-telling" the story of a scandalous case in 1783 when merchants sought to recover their investment in the many slaves whom they threw overboard (79). Only by creating ellipses in the legal documents of the case can Philip reveal the blindness of the various agents involved in the actions—and only in these openings can she use Henri Bergson as a model for projecting possibilities for change at deep levels of the psyche.

Anne Carson's deep distrust of closure and of the cultivation of a stable identity provides a perfect theater for Skibsrud's modes of analysis. Carson's volume Decreation offers the appropriate text for an imagined dialogue between the domains of self and beyond-self. This chapter is more attentive than the others to the work accomplished by specific figures in the poetry, such as the resonance that is possible from references to "edge" as a way of establishing the intricate transition where telling becomes untelling, and the dynamics of call and response in relation to the place of "difference" in our experience. The concluding two chapters, by contrast, are much more sketchy in how they take on very complicated issues, like the relation between praxis and poiesis, in work...

审核人：

• 诗意命令：约翰娜·斯基布斯鲁德的思辨美学
• 查尔斯·阿尔铁里（Charles Altieri）

从许多方面来看，约翰娜·斯基布斯鲁德（Johanna Skibsrud）的《诗意的命令》都是清醒的，优美的，雄心勃勃的，理论上精巧的，有时甚至将研究转向困难而原始的诗人，从华莱士·史蒂文斯（Wallace Stevens）开始，延伸到穆里尔·鲁基瑟（Muriel Rukeyser），最后是几位当代画家的最新著作诗人和两位艺术家（共153页）。整个斯基布斯鲁德主要关注的是诗意和“真相”概念之间的兼容性，“真相”概念的特征是“陌生和不确定性之间的亲密关系”。这种兼容性涉及“有意识的认知与无法被解密或命名的事物之间的相互作用”。鉴于对真理的理解是诗歌创作的目标，她认为诗歌创作必须是“投机性的”。“从推测和欲望的角度出发，而不是从先验知识出发”（5）。因此，本书中的核心角色是用“超越”，“未知”，“无限”和“超越”之类的术语。从根本上来说，诗歌作为投机活动提供了一些当代的价值观念[End Page 125]，这些价值观念在认识论，语言学以及伦理学与政治学的交汇中，涉及到另一个的重要性。

对于斯基布斯鲁德来说，重要的是我们要在诗歌中提出一个合理的真理概念，因为然后我们可以看到与知识极限的相遇如何使我们不断地面临另一种挑战，即竞争性话语模式必须受到压制才能履行其分配的职能。在其他学科寻求封闭性的同时，诗歌追求开放性的过程中至少出现了一种准伦理（我的资格，而不是她的资格），在这种可能性中，可能性感不断地邀请我们重新构想主客体之间的关系。诗意的真理是对自我的一种了解，积极地使主体和客体相互渗透，从而使它们能够超越归因于彼此的传统界限（6）。此外，作为“积极的行为”的诗歌表现出自我和其他事物以多种方式相互作用（18），

例如，鲁基瑟（Rukeyser）提供了一个纪录片劳动的示例性版本，它意识到自己是一种制作形式，为构建人际关系和“接触未知”打开了另类可能性（54）。反过来，英格·克里斯滕森（Inger Christensen）和克雷格·桑托斯·佩雷斯（Craig Santos Perez）则被视为史蒂芬·马拉玛（StéphaneMallarmé）的后代，他们将真理“作为一种在代表或解释的每一个行为中都存在的可能性”嵌入真理（58）。代表参照物的“它”变成了一种由“情绪，语法，形式和主题的多次变化”建立的感觉问题（61）。因此，斯基布斯鲁德结合了两位当代诗人非常不同的话语方式，并通过一种共同的做法来拒绝名字，以此作为达成可能交换条件的手段。

接下来，M。NourbeSe Philip带着自己的诗《Zong》登台！由于它“讲”的方式，在1783年发生了一起丑闻案，当时商人试图收回对被抛弃的许多奴隶的投资（79）。菲利普只有在案件的法律文件中加上省略号，才能揭露参与诉讼的各种代理人的盲目性，而且只有在这些公开场合中，她才能使用亨利·伯格森作为模型来预测心理深层变化的可能性。

安妮·卡森（Anne Carson）对封闭和建立稳定身份的高度不信任，为斯基布斯鲁德（Skibsrud）的分析方式提供了一个完美的舞台。卡森的《论减量》为自我与超越自我之间的想象对话提供了适当的文字。这一章比其他章节更注重诗歌中特定人物所完成的工作，例如通过引用“边缘”来建立共鸣的一种可能的复杂过渡，以及呼唤的动力，可以引起共鸣。以及在我们的经验中与“差异”的位置有关的响应。相比之下，前两章在工作中如何处理非常复杂的问题（如实践与诗意之间的关系）时要粗略得多。