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Comment by Margaret Hsing on August 25, 2024 at 8:50am

註釋·李商隱《錦瑟》

錦瑟：裝飾華美的瑟。瑟：撥弦樂器，通常二十五弦。

無端：猶何故。怨怪之詞。五十弦：這裡是托古之詞。作者的原意，當也是說錦瑟本應是二十五弦。

「莊生」句：《莊子·齊物論》：「莊周夢為蝴蝶，栩栩然蝴蝶也；自喻適志與！不知周也。俄然覺，則蘧蘧然周也。不知周之夢為蝴蝶與？蝴蝶之夢為周與？」李商隱此引莊周夢蝶故事，以言人生如夢，往事如煙之意。

「望帝」句：《華陽國志·蜀志》：「杜宇稱帝，號曰望帝。……其相開明，決玉壘山以除水害，帝遂委以政事，法堯舜禪授之義，遂禪位於開明。帝升西山隱焉。時適二月，子鵑鳥鳴，故蜀人悲子鵑鳥鳴也。」子鵑即杜鵑，又名子規。

珠有淚：《博物志》：「南海外有鮫人，水居如魚，不廢績織，其眼泣則能出珠。」

藍田：《元和郡縣志》：「關內道京兆府藍田縣：藍田山，一名玉山，在縣東二十八里。」

只是：猶「止是」、「僅是」，有「就是」、「正是」之意。

惘然：失意的樣子；心中若有所失的樣子。

賞析

《錦瑟》，是李商隱的代表作，愛詩的無不樂道喜吟，堪稱最享盛名；然而它又是最不易講解的一篇難詩。有人說是寫給令狐楚家一個叫「錦瑟」的侍女的愛情詩；有人說是睹物思人，寫給故去的妻子王氏的悼亡詩；也有人認為中間四句詩可與瑟的適、怨、清、和四種聲情相合，從而推斷為描寫音樂的詠物詩；此外還有影射政治、自敘詩歌創作等許多種說法。千百年來眾說紛紜，莫衷一是，大體而言，以「悼亡」和「自傷」說者為多。

詩運用象徵、隱喻的手法，創造性地發展了傳統的「比興」方法。「錦瑟無端五十弦，一弦一柱思華年。」想像一下：繪有花紋的美麗如錦的瑟有五十根弦，詩人也一邊在感慨快到五十歲了，一弦一柱都喚起了他對逝水流年的喜悅追憶，暗示自己才華出眾而年華流逝。

Comment by Margaret Hsing on August 24, 2024 at 6:10pm

詩題「錦瑟」，是用了起句的頭二個字。舊說中，原有認為這是詠物詩的，但注解家似乎都主張：這首詩與瑟事無關，實是一篇借瑟以隱題的「無題」之作。

詩的首聯以幽怨悲涼的錦瑟起興，借助對形象的聯想來顯現詩人內心深處難於直抒的千般情懷以及詩人滄海一世所有不能明言的萬種體驗，點明「思華年」的主旨，這是對傳統比興手法創造性的發展。

「莊生曉夢迷蝴蝶，望帝春心托杜鵑。」《錦瑟》詩中間兩聯，最能體現李商隱引典精辟、譬喻精深的持點。李商隱以「莊生夢蝶」的典故入詩，又巧妙地設計了兩個字：「曉」與「迷」，深層喜悅譬喻溢於言表。「曉」早晨也，喻人的一生則是青年時代。「曉夢」：青春美夢，年輕時立下的宏偉大志，色彩斑斕的喜悅理想。「迷」迷戀，沉溺也不放棄，不可割捨，不懈地追求喜悅。詩人設字絕妙精巧，賦予典故以新的喜悅哲理，讓讀者有感於物．有悟於心：使詩句產生了影視效應，再現了詩人為不可割捨的理想進行了不懈追求，無奈卻掙扎於權勢爭奪之中，左右為難受盡欺凌終不得志，到頭來只是一場悲苦的夢幻而已。

頸聯前一句把幾個典故揉合在一起，珠生於蚌，蚌在於海，每當月明宵靜，蚌則向月張開，以養其珠，珠得月華，始極光瑩。這是美好的民間傳統之說。淚以珠喻，自古為然，鮫人泣淚，顆顆成珠，亦是海中的奇情異景。如此，皎月落於滄海之間，明珠浴於淚波之界，在詩人筆下，已然形成一個難以分辨的妙境。一筆而能有如此豐富的內涵、奇麗的聯想的，實不多見。

後一句的藍田滄海，也並非空穴來風。晚唐詩人司空圖，引過比他早的戴叔倫的一段話：「詩家美景，如藍田日暖，良玉生煙，可望而不可置於眉睫之前也。」這裡用來比喻的八個字，簡直和此詩頸聯下句的七個字一模一樣，足見此一比喻，另有根源，可惜後來古籍失傳，竟難重覓出處。引戴語作解說，是否貼切，亦難斷言。

晉代文學家陸機在他的《文賦》裡有一聯名句：「石韞玉而山輝，水懷珠而川媚。」藍田，山名，在今陝西藍田東南，是有名的產玉之地。此山為日光煦照，蘊藏其中的玉氣（古人認為寶物都有一種一般目力所不能見的光氣），冉冉上騰，但美玉的精氣遠察如在，近觀卻無，所以可望而不可置諸眉睫之下，這代表了一種異常美好的理想景色，然而它是不能把握和無法親近的。

詩中此句，正是在「韞玉山輝，懷珠川媚」的啟示和聯想下，用藍田日暖給上句滄海月明作出了對仗，造成了異樣鮮明強烈的對比。而就字面講，藍田對滄海，也是非常工整的，因為滄字本義是青色。詩人在詞藻上的考究，也可以看出他的才華和功力。

對於詩人 來說，滄海月明這個境界，尤有特殊的深厚感情。有一次，他因病中未能躬與河東公的「樂營置酒」之會，就寫出了「只將滄海月，高壓赤城霞」（《病中聞河東公樂營置酒口占寄上》）的句子。如此看來，他對此境，一方面於其高曠皓淨十分愛賞，一方面於其淒寒孤寂又十分感傷：一種複雜的難言的悵惘之懷，溢於言表。

此聯和上聯共用了四個典故，呈現了不同的意境和情緒。莊生夢蝶，是人生的恍惚和迷惘；望帝春心，包含苦苦追尋的執著；滄海鮫淚，具有一種闊大的寂寥；藍田日暖，傳達了溫暖而朦朧的歡樂。詩人從典故中提取的意象是那樣的神奇、空靈，他的心靈向讀者緩緩開啟，華年的美好，生命的感觸等皆融於其中，卻只可意會不可言說。

詩的尾聯，采用反問遞進句式加強語氣，結束全詩。「此情」總攬所抒之情：「成追憶」則與「思華年」呼應。「可待」即「豈待」，說明這令人惆悵傷感的「此情」，早已迷惘難遣，此時當更令人難以承受。

詩題「錦瑟」，但並非詠物，不過是按古詩的慣例以篇首二字為題，實是借瑟以隱題的一首無題詩。此詩是李商隱最難索解的作品之一，詩家素有「一篇《錦瑟》解人難」的慨嘆。作者在詩中追憶了自己的青春年華，傷感自己不幸的遭遇，寄托了悲慨、憤懣的心情，大量借用莊生夢蝶、杜鵑啼血、滄海珠淚、良玉生煙等典故，采用比興手法，運用聯想與想象，把聽覺的感受，轉化為視覺形象，以片段意象的組合，創造朦朧的境界，從而借助可視可感的詩歌形象來傳達其真摯濃烈而又幽約深曲的深思。全詩詞藻華美，含蓄深沉，情真意長，感人至深。

Comment by Margaret Hsing on August 18, 2024 at 4:29pm

解讀·李商隱《錦瑟》

這首詩歷來註釋不一，莫衷一是。或以為是悼亡之作，或以為是愛國之篇或以為是自比文才之論，或以為是抒寫思念侍兒錦瑟。但以為是悼亡死者為最多。有人認為，開首以瑟弦五十折半為二十五，隱指亡婦華年二十五歲。這話未免有嫌牽強。

但是，首聯哀悼早逝卻是真實。頷聯以莊子亡妻鼓盆而歌和期效望帝化成子規而啼血，間接地描寫了人生的悲歡離合。頸聯以鮫人泣珠和良玉生煙的典故，隱約地描摹了世間風情迷離恍惚，可望而不可至。最後抒寫生前情愛漫不經心，死後追憶已經惘然的難以排遣的情緒。

宋劉攽《貢父詩話》云：「《錦瑟》詩，人莫曉其意，或謂是令狐楚家青衣也。」《苕溪漁隱叢話》前集卷二十二引黃朝英《緗素雜記》曰：「義山《錦瑟》詩云……山谷道人讀此詩，殊不解其意，後以問東坡。東坡云：『此出《古今樂志》，云：錦瑟之為器也，其弦五十，其柱如之。其聲也適、怨、清、和。』案李詩『莊生……』，適也；『望帝……』，怨也；『滄海……』，清也；『藍田……』，和也。一篇之中，曲盡其意。

史稱其瑰邁奇古，信然。」元好問《論詩絕句》云：「望帝春心托杜鵑，佳人錦瑟怨華年。詩家總愛西昆好，獨恨無人作鄭箋」；以上詠「青衣」（豔情）說乃小說家言；詠錦瑟說頗得宋人贊同。明人胡應麟於此二說皆疑之。

其後說者紛紜，大抵有「自傷生平」（清何焯、汪師韓、薛雪、宋翔鳳）說、「悼亡」（清朱鶴齡、朱彝尊、何焯、馮浩、程夢星、姚培謙、近人張采田、孟森等）說、「政治寄托」（清杜詔，近人張采田、岑仲勉等）說、「詩序」（清何焯、王應奎、）說、「寄托不明」（清屈復、近人梁啟超）說、「自寓創作」（錢鐘書）說等。

其中持「悼亡」或「自傷」說者較多。然「悼亡」實際上也是「自傷」的內涵之一，故「自傷」說似更圓通。茲引劉、余《集解》以備參讀：

「自傷身世之說，較為切實合理。……首聯謂見此五十弦之錦瑟，聞其弦弦所發之悲音，不禁悵然而憶己之華年往事。……頷腹二聯，即『思華年』而寫回憶中之華年往事，……『莊生』句系狀瑟聲之如夢似幻，令人迷惘，用意在『夢』字『迷』字。而此種境界亦即以象征詩人身世之如夢似幻，惘然若迷。……『望帝』句系寫瑟聲之淒迷哀怨，如泣鵑啼血，著意在『春心』字、『托』字。『春心』本指愛情之向往追求，常用以喻指對理想之追求。……『望帝』句殆謂己之壯心雄圖及傷時憂國、感傷身世之情均托之哀怨淒斷之詩歌，如望帝之化鵑以自抒哀怨也。杜鵑即作者之詩魂。……『滄海』句寫瑟聲之清寥悲苦……正含滄海遺珠之意。……『藍田』句似寫瑟聲之縹緲朦朧……或以喻己所向往追求者，皆望之若有，近之則無。……要之，頷、腹二聯並非具體敘述其華年往事，而系借瑟聲之迷幻、哀怨、清寥、縹緲以概括抒寫其華年所歷之種種人生遭際、人生境界、人生感受。……末聯含義明白……謂上述失意哀傷情事豈待今日追憶方不勝悵恨，即在當時亦惘然若失矣。」

Comment by Margaret Hsing on August 18, 2024 at 10:21am

[唐] 李商隱《錦瑟》

錦瑟無端五十弦，一弦一柱思華年。
莊生曉夢迷蝴蝶，望帝春心托杜鵑。
滄海月明珠有淚，藍田日暖玉生煙。
此情可待成追憶，只是當時已惘然。

譯文

精美的瑟為什麼竟有五十根弦，一弦一柱都叫我追憶青春年華。
莊周翩翩起舞睡夢中化為蝴蝶，望帝把自己的幽恨托身於杜鵑。
滄海明月高照，鮫人泣淚皆成珠；藍田紅日和暖，可看到良玉生煙。
此時此景為什麼要現在才追憶，只是當時的我茫茫然不懂得珍惜。

解讀

關於這首詩的解讀主要分為兩類：

一是認為這是一首評悼妻子王氏的詩，首聯為「景」，看到素女彈五十弦瑟而觸景生情；頷聯為比「喻」，借莊周化蝶，杜鵑啼血比喻妻子的死亡；頸聯為「幻」，珍珠為之落淚，寶玉為之憂傷；尾聯為「感」，情已逝，追思也是惘然！

二是認為這是詩人對逝去年華的追憶，首聯為「起」，借五十弦之瑟喻人生之五十年華；頷聯為比「承」，在渾然不覺間人生將走到盡頭；頸聯為「轉」，以明珠寶玉比喻自己的才能；尾聯為「合」，歲月催人老，一切都是惘然！

 

創作背景

此詩約作於作者晚年，具體創作時間不詳。對《錦瑟》一詩的創作意旨歷來眾說紛紜，莫衷一是。或以為是愛國之篇，或以為是悼念追懷亡妻之作，或以為是自傷身世、自比文才之論，或以為是抒寫思念侍兒之筆。

《史記·封禪書》載古瑟五十弦，後一般為二十五弦。但此詩創作於李商隱妻子死後，故五十弦有斷弦之意（一說二十五弦的古瑟琴弦斷成兩半，即為五十弦）但即使這樣它的每一弦、每一音節，足以表達對那美好年華的思念。

 

作者

李商隱（約813年-約858年），字義山，號玉溪（谿）生、樊南生，唐代著名詩人，祖籍河內（今河南省焦作市）沁陽，出生於鄭州滎陽。他擅長詩歌寫作，駢文文學價值也很高，是晚唐最出色的詩人之一，和杜牧合稱「小李杜」，與溫庭筠合稱為「溫李」，因詩文與同時期的段成式、溫庭筠風格相近，且三人都在家族裡排行第十六，故並稱為「三十六體」。其詩構思新奇，風格秾麗，尤其是一些愛情詩和無題詩寫得纏綿悱惻，優美動人，廣為傳誦。但部分詩歌過於隱晦迷離，難於索解，至有「詩家總愛西昆好，獨恨無人作鄭箋」之說。因處於牛李黨爭的夾縫之中，一生很不得志。死後葬於家鄉沁陽（今河南焦作市沁陽與博愛縣交界之處）。作品收錄為《李義山詩集》。

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 30, 2024 at 7:18am

Towards Topopoetics: Space, Place and the Poem by Tim Cresswell

Abstract: This essay focuses on the theme of poetry and place – a project I have called Topopoetics. It introduces the idea of topopoetics drawing on the work of Aristotle, Heidegger and more recent philosophies of place, dwelling and poetics.

The point is not to cover the familiar ground of ‘sense-of-place’ in poetry but rather to explore how the poem is a kind of place and the way in which poems create space and place through their very presence on the page, through the interactions of full space and blank space, stasis and flux, and inside and outside.

What can poetry tell us about space and place? Conversely, what can thinking about space and place tell us about poetry? These are the questions that motivate this essay. My aim is to both answer them and to reveal how spatial and platial thinking can inform forms of interpretation beyond the interpretation of space and place in the geographical world.

I develop a topopoetics – a project that sees poems as places and spaces. The distinction between space and place that is most often made is one in which space is seen as limitless, empty, divisible and subject to mathematical forms of understanding while place is seen as bounded, full, unique and subject to forms of interpretive understanding.

Place has been most frequently described as a meaning ful segment of space – as mere ‘location’ in space overlaid with things such as meaning, subjectivity, emotion and affect (Tuan 1977; Buttimer and Seamon 1980; Relph 1976; Cresswell 2014).

The definitions of space have become more sophisti cated thanks to interventions from critical theory and philosophy which have taken space out of the realm of the abstract and absolute in an attempt to reveal the work ings of space in the production of society (Soja 1989; Lefebvre 1991; Massey 2005).

At the same time work on place has added layers of power on the one hand (Cresswell 1996; Massey 1997) and a deeper philosophical role in human existence on the other (Casey 1998; Malpas 1999). There is not space here to rehearse all of the twists and turns in these debates. One aspect that is worth lingering on is the ques tion of which comes first, space or place? (Con't)

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 27, 2024 at 10:09am

It has become commonplace to see place as arising from space. In this sense space comes ‘first’. If space is an undifferentiated field – an abstract categorical axis of existence in the Kantian sense, then place has to occur in space. Places here are spatial moments, or points in space on which experience and meaning are layered.

Place comes after space. Space is a fundamental fact of the reality of the universe while place is what humans make out of it. The philosopher Jeff Malpas sees this as a relegation of place to the increasing importance of space in thought following the Renaissance: “The ‘rise’ of space is thus accompanied, one might say, by the ‘decline’ of place.

Indeed, in much contemporary thought, place often appears either as subjective overlay on the reality of materialized spatiality (place is space plus human value of ‘meaning’ …) or else as merely an arbitrary designated posi tion in a spatial field” (Malpas n.d.).

This way of thinking is turned on its head by philosophers of the phenomeno logical tradition following Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty who see spaces being formed out of the reality of place.

Place, here, becomes fundamental and primary while space is what follows once places come into existence as a kind of relation between places. In The Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty locates consciousness and intentionality not in the head but in the body.

How does the body relate to space? The most obvious way of articulating this is to think of the body as located (like place) in space where space is an external and continuous field in which the body exists and which the body has to navigate.

This is a body in Cartesian space that exists as an object. Merleau-Ponty rejects this view and argues instead for a ‘body-subject’ that exists in lived space – space which unfolds through the existence of the body rather than providing a precondition for the body. The human body produces certain kinds of orientation such as inside and outside, up and down, front and back and left and right that continually produce space rather than simply inhabit it.

As Merleau-Ponty put it: We must therefore avoid saying that our body is in space, or in time. It inhabits space and time … In so far as I have a body through which I act in the world, space and time are not, for me, a collection of adjacent points nor are they a limitless number of relations synthesized by my consciousness, and into which it draws my body.

I am not in space and time, nor do I conceive space and time; I belong to them, my body combines with them and includes them (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 161). Merleau-Ponty, then, insists that the bodily space is primary to external Cartesian space. Bodies are not simply in an already existing space – rather space is produced by the body.

A similar logic is at work in Heidegger’s account of the work done by building a bridge over a river. The bridge swings over the stream “with ease and power.” It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream. The bridge designedly causes them to lie across from each other. One side is set off against the other by the bridge. Nor do the banks stretch along the stream as indifferent border strips of the dry land.

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 23, 2024 at 7:45am

With the banks, the bridge brings to the stream the one and the other expanse of the landscape lying behind them. It brings stream and bank and land into each other’s neighborhood. The bridge gathers the earth as landscape around the stream (Heidegger 1971, 150).

Heidegger’s bridge brings a place and a surrounding landscape into being. In so doing, it also produces space. The bridge as a place does not just connect pre- existing spaces or operate within a pre-existing space – it brings space into being.

In this sense, place comes before space. This is a reversal of the more frequent suggestion that places exist in space and that space comes before place. Heidegger is clearly making a different argument from Merleau-Ponty.

Nevertheless, what unites the two passages is an insistence on the way spaces are brought into being in relation to platial bodies and structures as active agents. Place comes first. One final preliminary point about place before moving on to a discussion of topopoetics. One of the defining qualities of place, across disciplines, has been the way in which places bring things together.

They are seen as syncretic mixtures of elements of multiple domains. Different scholars use different terms to describe this fact. Philosophers following Heidegger write of places as sites of gathering (Casey 1996). The geographer Robert Sack uses the metaphor of a loom to describe places as products of the process of weaving (Sack 2003).

Writers informed by the philoso phy of Gilles Deleuze and Manual Delanda refer to this process as assemblage (DeLanda 2006; Dovey 2010). Things mingle in places and places are constantly being made through gathering/weaving/ assembling and constantly being pulled apart. Among the things that are gathered in place are objects (materialities), mean ings (narratives, stories, memories etc.) and practices.

Philosopher Edward Casey puts this as well as anyone. Minimally, places gather things in their midst– where ‘things’ connote various animate and inanimate entities. Places also gather experiences and histories, even languages and thoughts. Think only of what it means to go back to a place you know, finding it full of memories and expectations, old things and new things, the familiar and the strange, and much more besides. What else is capable of this massively diversified holding action? (Casey 1996, 24)

1 Towards topopoetics

In the remainder of this essay I mobilize some of what has preceded in relation to thinking about poetry. I argue for poems as places (as well as about places) that can be interpreted spatially. The term topopoetics originates from the term topos as developed by Malpas and Casey in their readings of Heidegger and others (Casey 1998; Malpas 2012b).

Topo comes from topos (τόπος), the Greek for ‘place’. This is combined with poetics, which comes from poiesis (ποίησις), the Ancient Greek term for ‘making’. Topopoetics is thus ‘place-making’. The particular lineage I am invoking for topos derives from the philosophy of Aristotle. Importantly, for our purposes, topos appears in both accounts of how the world comes into being and as a figure in rhetoric. In rhetoric a topos is a “particular argumentative form or pattern” from which particular arguments can be derived.1

It is very much like a form in poetry – a sonnet or a villanelle. It has a particular shape. This rhetorical view of topos is linked to the world through the art of memorizing long lists by locating things on a list in particular places. “For just as in the art of remembering, the mere mention of the places instantly makes us recall the things, so these will make us more apt at deductions through looking to these defined premises in order of enumeration.” 2

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 20, 2024 at 6:53am

In Aristotle’s rhetoric it is important to choose the right kind of topos for the argument at hand, just as it is important to select the right form for a particular poet. It draws our attention to the importance of (among other things) the shape on the page. The richer meaning of topos emerged more fully formed in the writing of Martin Heidegger and has recently been elaborated by the philosopher, Jeff Malpas (Heidegger 1971; Malpas 1999, 2012a).

Here topos is mobilized through the idea of the topological to indicate the primary nature of place for being. To put it bluntly, to be is to be in place – to be here/there. The connection between poetry and the idea of place as the site of being is right there at the outset as Heidegger’s insistence on being as being-in-place originated from an encounter with the poetry of Hölderlin (Malpas 2006; Elden 1999).

Heidegger’s topological thought includes two key concepts – Dasein and dwelling. Dasein means (approximately) ‘being there’. It combines Heidegger’s career- long enquiry into the nature of being with a recognition that being is always placed – that existence is thoroughly intertwined with place.

The way that we make a home in the world is referred to as dwelling. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is Buan, dwelling.

To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell (Heidegger 1971, 145). How, exactly, people enact this dwelling (or fail to enact it) becomes a central object for philosophy in Heidegger’s later texts.3 In an important series of late essays Heidegger invokes poetry as a form of dwell ing. He goes so far as to suggest that it is an ideal form of building and dwelling. Poetic creation, which lets us dwell, is a kind of building.

Thus we confront a double demand: for one thing, we are to think of what is called man’s existence by way of the nature of dwelling; for another, we are to think of the nature of poetry as a letting-dwell, as a – perhaps even the – distinctive kind of building. If we search out the nature of poetry according to this viewpoint, then we arrive at the nature of dwelling (Heidegger 1971, 213).

This observation (linking poetry to its root meaning of ‘making’) gets right to the heart of the constitution of topopoetics. Poetry, as Heidegger observes, is a kind of building and thus a particularly important kind of dwelling. This building-as- dwelling, however, is more than the practical stuff of constructing in the correct way – it is, in Heidegger’s view, about the essential character of being-in-the world – being in, and with, place. 

1 For a discussion of topos, see Rapp 2010: 7.1.

2 Aristotle Topics 163b28.32.

3 Heidegger was a member of the Nazi Party, a membership he later denounced. There is no doubt that these ideas of dwelling were easily incorporated into a Nazi ideology of proper authentic (Aryan) dwelling counterposed to an inauthentic (Jewish, gay, Romany) form of (non) dwelling. Following Malpas I do not believe that this necessarily means that his ideas are irrecoverably infected.

An engagement with the philosophical basis of topos adds to our original definition of place (above) as a gathering of things, practices and meanings in a particular location. While place is all of these things this definition fails to underline the basic significance of being placed to being-in-the-world. A topopoetic account is one which recognizes the specificity of the nearness of things in place and at the same time focuses our attention on the way in which the poem is itself a form of building and dwelling.

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 18, 2024 at 6:08am

Poems of place are not simply poems about places, rather they are a species of place with a special relationship to what it is to be in (external) place. Included in this is a recognition that poems (as places) have a material existence as a gathering of words (literally ink) on the page which takes a particular spatial form.

Topopoetics means closing the gap between the material form of the poem (topos in the sense of rhetorics) and the earthly world of place (topos as place). It means attending to the presence of place within the poem. To do this the rest of the essay considers the role of blank space, the tension between shape/form and movement and the relationship between the inside and outside of the poem. 2

Blank Space/Full Space Before, there was nothing, or almost nothing; afterwards, there isn’t much, a few signs, but which are enough for there to be a top and a bottom, a beginning and an end, a right and a left, a recto and a verso (Perec 1997, 10). My interest here is in the combined impact of two meanings of topos – as correct form and as place – on understanding poetic approaches to and renditions of place. The act of building and dwelling that is a poem starts with a blank white space. By writing poems we gather that space and give it form.

True – it already has edges and texture (it is, in Perec’s terms “almost nothing”) but words (as place) bring space into existence. The space becomes margins and gaps between words – even holes within letters. This relationship between poem and place and the space that takes shape around it is one of the defining elements of poetry. Glyn Maxwell, in On Poetry, ruminates on blank space and silence in poetry. Regard the space, the ice plain, the dizzying light. That past, that future.

Already it isn’t nothing. At the very least it’s your enemy, and that’s an awful lot. Poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence, life and death, hot and cold, love and loss…. … Call it this and that, whatever it is this time, just don’t make the mistake of thinking the white sheet is nothing. It’s nothing for your novelist, your journalist, your blogger. For those folk it’s a tabular rasa, a giving surface. For the poet it is half of everything. If you don’t know how to use it you are writing prose. If you write poems that you might call free and I might call unpatterned then skillful, intelligent use of the whiteness is all that you’ve got (Maxwell 2012, 11). Poems are patterns made from space and which make space. Even before a word is read you can see a poem’s shape – the black against the white in Maxwell’s terms.

This is one of the most pleasing things about poetry and it serves no function at all in a novel or most other forms of writing. Writing a poem is a little form of place creation that configures blankness. This resonates with Wallace Stevens’ ‘Anecdote of the Jar’: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion every where. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Here the roundness of the jar (roundness is repeated throughout the poem in ‘round’, ‘around’ and ‘surround’) orders the “slovenly wilderness” around it – it orders and regulates a kind of blankness (the ‘almost-nothing’ of wilderness) in a contrived and designed way.

Comment by Margaret Hsing on July 16, 2024 at 4:48pm

Culture brings nature into perspective and makes it make sense in much the way the marks of the poem make the blank space make sense. Stevens’ jar performs similar functions to Heidegger’s bridge. The poem does the same thing – bringing space into being.

Silence is the acoustic space in which the poem makes its large echoes. If you want to test this write a single word on a blank sheet of paper and stare at it: note the superior attendance to the word the silence insists upon, and how it soon starts to draw out the word’s ramifying sense-

potential, its etymological story, its strange acoustic signature, its calligraphic mark; you are reading a word as poetry (Paterson 2007, 63). Here, British poet Don Paterson suggests that the self-aware special-ness of the poem is created by its being surrounded by blankness, which he equates with silence. There is a merging of sight and sound – pure blankness and silence. The sense of sound is the only sense which has a unique word for absence.

While silence is the absence of sound there is no word for the absence of smell or taste for instance (we have to resort to terms like ‘tasteless’). Perhaps it is for this reason that blank space is compared to silence. It also reminds us of the origins of poetry in spoken forms. The blankness is not just something to be filled but an active component in

the creation of the poem. The blank page is the friend of the poet allowing an infinite variety of form in the simple sense of shape. When the single word appears on the blank sheet the word-as-poem and the space around it are simultaneously brought into being. In this sense, one does not precede the other.

Paterson describes the act of poetry as an emergence out of silence and space. This is not quite right. This assumes the pre-existence of a blankness and silence within which the words emerge.

Perhaps, instead, the blankness is produced by the creative act. The blankness emerges with the noise. There are similarities between the poet’s relationship to blank space and the painter’s relationship to the canvas. They are clearly not the same thing.

In most painting the canvas is covered. The first thing many traditional painters do is cover a canvas with paint and then start to work on the detail. The canvas is obliterated. The poet, on the other hand, cannot fill up the space he or she is confronted with. The poem needs to play with the space and allow the blankness to be part of the process. Don Paterson puts it this way: Our formal patterning most often supplies a powerful typographical advertisement.

What it advertises most conspicuously is that the poem has not taken up the whole page, and con siders itself somewhat important. The white space around the poem then becomes a potent symbol of the poem’s significant intent (Paterson 2007, 62). The space around the poem once written advertises the poem’s importance as special words. (Con't Below)

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