hegelian honeymoon, memory

Apart from the protest, the only other thing which has given me comfort over the past 36 or so hours is Nick Piombino’s Hegelian Honeymoon, which arrived in the mail early this week (actually, it probably arrived earlier than that, given the great volume of paper-based spam that ejected itself from the mailbox). I’ve probably read each of the tiny poems about 30 times since opening the book, each reading more enjoyable than the last. (I find Nick’s work in general works this way for me – what’s being expressed comes into sharper focus less through digesting one moment and then moving onto the next than through repeated readings of the whole). Some of the poems work like haikus, others like aphorisms; each offers something of both forms.

The sometimes deceptive simplicity of the poems stands in sharp contrast to a peculiar paradox: for the most part, the language has been stripped of anything that would tie the poems to a particular place and time, to that irreducibly specific detail – so often considered, it seems to me, the atomic “unit” par excellence of poetic production -- that speaks the moment-as-world. And yet the poems are full of content, each one speaking clearly and strongly, each one fully constituting its own substantial world, its own particular personality. While non-specific in terms of descriptive detail, the relation between moments, words, and concepts manages nevertheless to be quite specific.

In this sense, the collection calls to mind a metaphor of memory that, I believe, originated with Aristotle in On Memory and Reminiscence:

The process of movement (sensory stimulation) involved the act of perception stamps in, as it were, a sort of impression of the percept, just as persons do who make an impression with a seal.

It’s as if each of these poems presents such an impression, a “stamping in” – not so much of percepts, but rather of those spiritually intensive moments in which we achieve an understanding of who we are.