Life Lines: Poems, Poetry, Poetics

Abstract

Life Lines:Poems, Poetry, Poetics Marion Picker (bio) and Elke Siegel (bio) The title of this issue of the Modern Language Notes––Life Lines––speaks of something vital in a situation of urgency. It also suggests, following the colon (Poems, Poetry, Poetics), where to look for it. Although insinuating a general direction, the visible and invisible lines composing poetry (in the larger sense of Dichtung) invite us to dwell on their loops, breaks, and turning points; to follow curvatures mapping out worlds; to ponder the interplay of these lines with infinitesimals, geometry, and algebra; and to reflect on the erratic affects or politics they command. Poetry speaks in lines that impart their intricate temporalities to anyone engaging with them. In this sense, they come with their own urgency. Does that make poems, poetry, and poetics socially or politically important in any immediate way? Most likely not. Poetry cannot be recommended as a cure-all and, when tested through immediate application, it easily turns skeptics into detractors denying its relevance and accessibility, not to mention its vital necessity. The call "Du mußt dein Leben ändern," You must change your life, this notorious fragment of a poem's last line (Rilke 557), doesn't give any specific advice that could easily be put into practice. Strictly speaking, it isn't even an imperative, although it might be as empty as the categorical one. Rochelle Tobias is one of those readers who take the call of poetry seriously—an attitude that should not to be taken for granted, even in the profession of literary criticism. And she does so without pretense. Her writings, time and again, convey a conviction that poetry should be for everyone and every day, a renewable and yet singular resource. One line of thought permeating her work, both written and delivered orally, is the question of poetic life-giving, be it in the form of "Virgin [End Page 483] Births" or "The Life of Stones" (examples of her often evocative, if not to say tongue-in-cheek course titles), in her forays into the phenomenological lifeworld, or in the thought her book Pseudo-Memoirs explores: life follows fiction. Hers is a sober prose that gestures towards the salutary, however placing anything salvific between brackets—"Health and Healing beyond Theology," as another course title would have it. Rochelle Tobias's work demonstrates what an engagement with poems, poetry, and poetics can engender in terms of a life of many engagements ("engagements" as in "engaged in conversation"). The most conspicuous of these engagements is with "nature," surfacing in various contexts of Rochelle Tobias's work: with Hölderlin's rivers, Celan's "Gespräch im Gebirg," ecology, and climate change, to name but a few. "Nature" inhabits Rochelle Tobias's writings not as an object, but as a concern. By creating lines between the urgency of poetry and other urgencies, she insists on the time of the other, and on other temporalities. What she writes—in a collective piece of writing with her colleagues at Johns Hopkins, the anthropologists Naveeda Khan and Deborah Poole—about the humanities and social sciences in general, holds particularly true for poetry: … climate conversations may benefit from this quality of slow, deep, even untimely thought produced by the humanities and social sciences in so far as they explore how the future is already within this and previous presents. This MLN German issue, in its first two parts, brings together essays by friends and colleagues of Rochelle Tobias on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. They speak of the subtle but incisive mark her careful writing and lucid thinking have left on us, of shared concerns, friendship, and gratitude. It seemed appropriate for us to recall one specific quality of Rochelle Tobias's writing and teaching by structuring this issue around the opening verse of a Hölderlin poem "An Zimmern": "Die Linien des Lebens sind verschieden" (922), The lines of life are various. It is followed in the second verse by a simile that relates the lines of life to traits of a landscape: "Wie Wege sind, und wie der Berge Gränzen," As paths are, and as the mountains' borders. Strictly speaking, the relation...