In Between Out

Nick Piombino. "The Aural Ellipsis and the Nature of Listening in Contemporary Poetry" in Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word ed. by Charles Bernstein.

The effect of the "aural ellipsis" in poetry allows that, at certain points, the poem may exist within an indeterminate site of significant verbal experience that is simultaneously physical and mental, objective and subjective, heard aloud and read silently, emanating from a specific self yet also from a nonspecific site of identity, coming toward comprehensibility and disintegrating into incoherence.

Piombino then maps this inbetween space onto the "holding environment" of Winnicott's transitional space. This seems plausible. However when he then reaches for Walter Benjamin's work on the "aura" he appeals to Benjamin without admitting that Benjamin was in any event critical of the appearance "aura" — this a view that is absent from Piombino's appropriation (which progresses by way of a celebration of archaic magic incantation as being like "aural ellipsis").

This of course makes me want to reflect on the geometry of inbetweeness. And whether it is apt. And to consider at least just how many oppositions can be aligned along continuums. Stripped of the allure of "aura", the transitional space accommodates (sometimes without mapping into opposite pairs) a heterogenuous content. The ellipsis holds a lot. And it hold this lot without the appeal to oppositions. There is room here for the transversal à la Guattari.

And so for day 315
25.10.2007