ABSTRACT
In the cacophony of our world, the flower opens unseen, the bird’s song drowns, the fountain’s water runs unheard. But the poem
stops language in its tracks and prohibits its squandering in the vast commerce that is the world today. Against the obscenity of “everything to be seen” and “everything to be said,” the showing, polling, and commenting on everything, the poem is the guardian of the decency of the saying […] the poem is a delicacy of language against language; it is a delicate touching of the resources of language.
(25) Alain Badiou seems to suggest that the genre of the lyric poem is intrinsically gentle. Quoting lines from Mallarmé’s poem “Saint,” Badiou implies that a lyric is no more than an “instrumental featheriness/being the silence’s musician” (25). Sheltered within the silence of their margins, even when they speak up, poems speak shyly. Most people don’t hear them. A poem prohibits, guards, and touches delicately. It falls gently on deaf ears. On the loud stages of the world, a poem is not very convincing. We skip it in The New Yorker. It has no rhetoric. If it wanted to contest, convince, or convert, such effects would have to come about fortuitously.