Compos(t)ing Presence in the Poetry of Carl Leggo: Writing Practices that Disperse the Presence of the Author

Elizabeth De Freitas

doi:10.20360/g23k55

Abstract

This paper was presented as part of the Carl Leggo keynote address at the third annual CSSE pre-conference for the Language and Literacy Researchers of Canada. The paper explores the possibility of deconstructing “presence” in reflexive writing. The author examines Leggo’s “writing as compos(t)ing” as an example of arts-informed reflexive writing that problematizes the desire for presence, and argues that Leggo’s “clown” poetry interrogates notions of transparency in reflexive writing. Reflexive writing traces the presence of the writer in/through the text. It is a form of writing that celebrates the power of personal story to illuminate the intersections between self and society. The desire for presence, however, is never innocent and never without complication. In tracing that presence - in writing reflexively - the writer inscribes silence and absence while simultaneously making her/himself visible.

Highlights

Reflexive writing in social science research has become increasingly popular as a form of inquiry and representation that honours the complex ethical relation between the inquirer and the context of study
Reflexive writing traces the presence of the author in/through the text
It is a form of writing that celebrates the power of personal story to illuminate the intersections between self and society

Summary

Introduction

Reflexive writing in social science research has become increasingly popular as a form of inquiry and representation that honours the complex ethical relation between the inquirer and the context of study. I examine Leggo’s “writing as compos(t)ing” as an example of arts-informed reflexive writing that problematizes the desire for presence. Carl Leggo’s (2002a, 2002b, 2003, 2004a, 2004b) poetry sustains a crystalline aspect on the problematic of re-presenting presence Through poetry, he plays with the tension between a hermeneutics of presence and a form of deconstruction that troubles the desire for presence. Writing as living com(p)osting: Poetry and desire (Leggo, 2002a) contains a series of poems that dwell on the connections between posing, composing, imposing, and decomposing. The pairing of apparently impossible tasks – “to dispel absence” when absence is always already dispelled - and to disclose possibility - when possibility is in itself a dis-closure, point to the contradictions that accompany all attempts to achieve an unsullied presence The awkwardness of his language questions the very possibility of self-presence. Aims for a kind of catachresis of the “self” as source of signification, Derridean deconstruction offers a theoretical framework for making sense of his poetry

Deconstruction and the Desire for Presence

The Reflexive Self

Conclusion