ABSTRACT
In Henri Michaux's authorial commentary on the writing of Mes proprietes, the maintenance of what was termed the 'health' of the subject initiated work on the twin fronts of the real and the subject's implication in the real. The text of Mes proprietes becomes the site of an actual establishment of parameters, of a place that makes existential time possible. The work itself, performing mediation between subjectivity and the object world, takes on the importance and function of a transitional object. It is an extreme, or contrasting, example of what is observable under variable layers of 'real' effect in other writing of poetic experience. The typically 'poetic' moment is a privileged harmony between both – experienced as a transcending of each term via the other. A 'poetic' writing, as the evidence of a subject meeting the real with the fullest effort of its resources, must somehow cut itself short in order to remain possessed of a sense of its necessity.
