every poem must open itself to the possibility that it will no longer be a poem
Mais avec Baudelaire, la poésie française… s’impose comme la poésie meme de la modernité. But with Baudelaire French poetry imposes itself as the very poetry of modernity.– Paul Valéry, 1924
La poésie ne s’impose plus, elle s’expose. Poetry no longer imposes, it exposes itself.– Paul Celan, March 26, 1969
“If Celan’s recourse to French constitutes the double gesture of at once amending Valéry’s estimation of Baudelaire and skirting Heidegger’s notion of the poet as the founder of the sacred word and a nation’s historical destiny, then Celan hopes to avoid on the levels of both theme and language, the gesture of authority and imposition that drives the tradition from within. He does not suggest that the poetry of his time, and thus his own poetry, is more imposing than the work of his precursors. A poetry of exposition does not inaugurate, institute or found— it does not impose— a new tradition or genre. Rather, it sets out and exposes itself in a way that leaves the effects of this exposition radically open and suspended. To belong to a poetry of exposition, a poem must expose itself also to the possibility that it may cease being poetry; become external, or other, to poetry; stop making sense; and no longer be either poetry or exposition at all. The gesture of the poem must be disruptive and break with existing traditions, genres, and histories. In order to be such a beginning and an exposition, every poem must open itself to the possibility that it will no longer be a poem, or that nothing at all will follow, or that the poem will so radically expose and unground itself as to suspend the possibility of its comprehension and its historicization. ‘To expose’ may mean, ‘to abandon,’ as someone in need may be abandoned. But to expose may also transcend this negative valence and signify an act of revelation. The very word ‘expose,’ in fact, seems to renounce any claim to a single unified meaning and surrender itself to a kind of centrifugal semantics. Celan’s poetry, which is the poetry of his and our time, is inescapable because it exposes, and abandons us to, an openness— or reveals an already existing openness to us— that demands response. As poetry of exposition, Celan’s poetry seems to suspend the distinction between the openness of an abyss and the openness of existence.”
p 162-163 from Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Ulrich Baer
We have to be, have to be errant 