Opening with a consideration of the distribution of the two graphic acts — drawing and writing — this article offers a comparative study of Jacques Derrida's and Jean-Luc Nancy's respective exhibitions and catalogue essays on the subject of drawing. Through a comparative examination of what I take to be their central theoretical contributions to the study of drawing — Derrida its ‘rhetoric’, Nancy its ‘rhythm’ — this article moves on to suggest how these concepts inform a theory of poetic lineation.
Like other long poems by Stevens, the composition of his wartime poem "Esthétique du Mal" was partly shaped by the dimensions of the legal notepad sheets on which it was drafted. On the genesis of Stevens' poems, critics reflexively -and rightly -recall the image of Stevens composing his poems on walks to and from work, his lines the product of a perambulatory rhythm and thinking. But equally pertinent to a poem like "Esthétique du Mal" is the image of Stevens as a kind of draughtsman, rounding off his rhetorical flights according to the space of the notepad.Note, for example, the retroactivity of Stevens' phrase in an interview on the composition of the poem, where he explains that he "was writing on a pad of paper and the contents of each sheet became a separate stanza" (12). This is not to say that each stanza or canto ends simply because Stevens ran out of space, but that each section of the poem fits the page in a loose but crucially determined way. This is true of both the composition of the poem and the experience of reading it. From notepad sheet to page, the distinctive one-canto-per-page format of the poem was faithfully reproduced when it was first published in the Kenyon Review in 1944. The page joins other formal elements, like line and stanza, as one of the poem's crucial organizing constraints. While the dividing principle of the page is dispensed with in anthologies like the Collected Poetry and Prose, I want to make an argument for its importance to our experience of poems like "Esthétique du Mal", as a formal, visual, and material element. In its original form, each canto is isolated in its own discrete moment of reading, and appears less a part of a cumulative argument than an isolated instance in an ongoing series. And while some cantos recall and develop earlier cantos, any continuities are qualified by the borders of the pages. In general, unlike a break in line or stanza, the end of the page is an interruption from the outside, a material encroachment upon our reading that requires a manual response.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.