Ann Lauterbach


Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment

Theory & Event, Volume 3, Issue 1, 1999 (Article)

" is precisely out of the flaw or excess in an equation that meaning springs"

        Barbara Johnson "Disfiguring Poetic Language"


When you pick up a piece of old crockery in a second-hand shop, often there is a

white tag on which the price is written, along with the phrase "as is". "As is"
indicates that

the object, say it is a cup, has a flaw: a crack or a chip or some other anomaly
testifying to

past use. If the object in question is a textile, say a slip or a sweater, "as is" indicates
a rip,

or a stain. As is suggests the distance from perfection from which the object has

through the course of time, its fall from Platonic grace or virgin purity; "as is" is a

of "as if", the way in which desire ineluctably turns into fulfillment or
disappointment, and

in that turn, "something" is simultaneously lost and found. As has become

clear, and not to overstate the obvious, contemporary poetic practice negotiates this
terrain and its

recapitulating dualities --- presence/absence, materiality/tranparency,

and so on, more insistently than any other current human activity.


The lost/found place of "as is" thus could be seen as a poetic methodology, through
which we

might revise the modernist "fragment". The poem now is rendered as an address

eschews totalizing concepts of origin, unity, closure and completion, and is
construed as a

series of flaws or openings through which both chance and change register a matrix

discontintiuous distributions, where contingency itself is offered as an affective
response to

the "is" as is. Meaning is rendered as an unstable relation to objective and
subjective value. The reader/listener participates in the construction of significance
not by filling in the gaps and elisions, but by appropriating whatever fragment is
"useful" to her. The hope is that the relation between epistemology and power is
kept regenerative.

When President Clinton remarked "It depends on what the meaning of the word Is
is" he

unwittingly allowed us to witness the flaw between the reified "is" of

an imaginary but knowable present and the imperfect or furtive is of the actual as
is. Between the

first and the second "is" is ---however inadvertent on the President's part --- an
acknowledgment of chronic interpretative vigilance which

the generation he and I (we) share came to understand as the only possible
negotiation with reality

and the ways in which language pictures or captures it.


For a while I have been interested in the notion of a whole fragment. This fragment
is not

one in which one laments a lost whole, as in Stein, Eliot and Pound, but which
acknowledges the fact

of our unhandsome condition, where we suffer from having been being, and in that

acknowledgment foreground, or priviledge, what is: the abraided and indefinite

accumulation of an infinite dispersal of sums. In this construction, meaning abides

or arises exactly at the place where "use" appears, use here as both pragmatics

and as wear. It is my desire or intention to construct a poetics in which meaning is

within the terms of such a vagrant contingency.


The consolation of a distilled or stabilized "reality" is nothing if not an illusion of

syntax, where syntax stands for any logic of recognition. I share a love for this
construct of

a normalizing stability, but I recognize its habit of formulating, at the least impulse,

categorical imperatives which obscure and resist the actual conditions, posssibilties

complexities in which we find ourselves.


The world constellates significance out of habits of congruence, continuity, and

These signifiying terrains elude and evade my own sense of being on a flexible and
indeterminate boundary or frame, even ones which eschew frames and boundaries
to "celebrate" upwardly mobile margins.

I think world presses on language and language on world at every point, and by
world I mean material,

spiritual, political and cultural presence,


a continuous flux of is recouperated as is.