1This paper intends to read three poems on absence in the light of current theories of the object, hoping to exemplify various trends in contemporary poetry’s relation to absence. The poems are “Meditations at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass (1979), “Silverfish, Moth” by Matthew Francis (2014), and “Pipistrelles” by Kathleen Jamie (2004). Those three poems were selected for two reasons. First, they share a contemporary concern for (nonhuman) objects and sustain an interrogation on those objects’ presence: Robert Hass opposes “things” to Platonic ideas, Matthew Francis interrogates the mediated status of his poem’s object as it is twice removed from him, described by an early modern scientist who himself saw it through a microscope, and Kathleen Jamie sets out to make a thing out of a non-thing. Second, they are extremely different in the functions and connotations they ascribe to absence: Hass deplores that “all the new thinking is about loss” and therefore tries to reinstate the presence of things and memories in his poem; Francis locates in the silverfish, “a virtuoso of departure”, a form of presence whose very intensity derives from its imminent absence; and Jamie strives to conceive of the “world’s mind” as an empty enclosure behaving as a positive form of nothingness. An object-oriented approach appears especially relevant to Jamie’s poem as she features a nothingness that nonetheless has a form of presence, precisely because there is scarcely any subject-viewer to compare it to another entity. Such an approach also applies well to Francis and Hass’s poems because of their treatment of words as things – the word being just another thing besides the thing it points at (an idea reminiscent of the “flat ontology” advocated by object-oriented philosophies, which see all objects, human, inhuman, material and immaterial as equally existent). Attention is paid to the poems in their singularity, but three trends emerge from their comparison. First, the stronger the presence of a persona, the more commonsense the conception of absence, as if it required impersonality or wild speculation to experiment with the idea of an absence that is not an absence of. Second, poems preoccupied with absence proceed by flashes, featuring in their structure and their contents the notion of a matter which Jane Bennett names “vibratory” (5) in that it is mostly absent from our human perspective yet discloses itself to us intermittently. Third, language, though construed very differently in the three poems, seems at no point to be conceived as erasing the presence of its referee, or unable to refer to the ineffable: absence, in those poems, occurs in spite of words rather than because of them.
2In order to investigate and compare the workings of absence in those three poems, I would like to bring in a contemporary branch of philosophy specifically concerned with the object. It takes as its postulate that objects exist prior to their relations. These relations may be relations to each other or to their human perceiver. As the introduction to The Speculative Turn states, “All the philosophers here have begun speculating once more about the nature of reality independently of thought and of humanity more generally” (Bryant et al. 3). Among others, proponents of object-oriented ontology such as Graham Harman, Timothy Morton and Levi Bryant, or of vibrant materialism such as Jane Bennett agree on this postulate.
3Two aspects of their theories are relevant to this study. The first one is a form of flat ontology across everything that is, where everything is at the same level. Jane Bennett, commenting on Jean-François Lyotard, insists that humanity is not above other things, but a “particularly rich and complex collection of materials” (11). If Bennett, a political scientist, is concerned with the ethical consequences of treating humans and things equally and therefore qualifies her statement, object-oriented ontologists punctuate many of their writings with lists of heterogeneous things in a style aimed at performing this ontology. For example, Levi Bryant asserts that “objects of all sorts and at all scales are on equal ontological footing, such that subjects, groups, fictions, technologies, institutions, etc., are every bit as real as quarks, planets, trees, and tardigrades” (The Democracy of Objects 32). Flat ontology therefore entails that words and things exist at the same level, or, to express myself in a more object-oriented manner, that words are objects. Thus, Timothy Morton states that “a poem is not simply a representation, but rather a nonhuman agent” (215). A flat ontology also facilitates a new definition of absence, not as opposed to being, but as a being, an object, itself. Since everything is, so must absence be, and not only in relation to presence but as a thing in itself. This form of positive nothingness will prove useful to understanding certain aspects of absence in our poems.
4The second common aspect of those philosophies I will retain is that of matter or being as necessarily presenting itself to us in a vibratory mode. Graham Harman, the founder of object-oriented philosophy, traces his own genealogy to Martin Heidegger (Harman 1), and the Heideggerian vision of a being that veils itself at the moment of its perception is often present in object philosophies. When Bennett describes the epiphany in which she came to acknowledge the life and agency of nonhuman things while contemplating an assemblage of objects she had stumbled upon, she does use this term too: “the items on the ground that day were vibratory – at one moment disclosing themselves as dead stuff and at the next as live presence: junk, then claimant; inert matter, then live wire” (5). The vibratory disclosure of being implies its imminent absence, so that in that sense, too, absence is part of being. We shall analyze the vibratory mode of being at stake in the poems under that light.
5Robert Hass’s “Meditations at Lagunitas” is an extremely powerful attempt at making up for absence (lost memories, loss of materiality in a world where all is language, etc.). It is an endeavour shared by other poems in Praise, such as “Songs to Survive the Summer” which sees “everything” dissolving in the heat of a Summer day. There, the attempt at making up for a void is dramatically ascribed to a young orphan:
The gray-eyed child
who said to my child: “Let’s play
in my yard. It’s O.K.,
my mother’s dead.”
6As in this poem, absence in “Meditations at Lagunitas” is to be made up for because it is an unbearably painful void one must “survive”, a non-presence that has no ontological status. Indeed, the poem begins with the statement that “all the new thinking is about loss”. So is, for the persona, “all the old thinking”, so that the poem presents itself as an anti-rational endeavour to restore a sense of presence within its world. Hass explains that for this kind of “thinking”, the things we perceive signal or even cause the absence of more fundamental and more “real” things. Platonic ideas are opposed to things, an undifferentiated primal being is opposed to a woodpecker, and the word “blackberry” is opposed to a real bramble of blackberry. The poem then sets out to weave together particular memories (a woman whom the persona “made love to”, childhood scenes) with general statements about longing, desire, body and words, thus showing their non-exclusive nature, the coexisting presence of all of the parties, which majestically fuse together in the evocation of the blackberries at the very end of the poem. The absence dealt with in the poem is the classic form of absence: absence as entirely defined, as it is etymologically, as non-presence, a “loss” which the poem stives to make up for.
7In order to atone for this absence, Hass’s poem resorts to what may be deemed a flat ontology. First, it lists “justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I” as things “dissolved” by thinking, and therefore as things whose ontological status is common and must be retrieved. It also juxtaposes various memories, a lover, his “childhood river”, abstractions about the old and the new thinking and the nature of desire, and the evocation of a blackberry and of the saying of the word “blackberry”. Like object-oriented thinkers, whose flat ontology makes the ontological distinction between things and their appearances (and therefore their representations) obsolete, Robert Hass tries to reconcile words and “the body”. He indeed claims in the final lines that “there are moments when the body is as numinous as words”. This stance, together with the earlier statement that with the new thinking (which he objects to) “a word is elegy to what it signifies”, does not take for granted that things are and can be perceived, and that words are never accurate enough to represent things. On the contrary, it posits that words are and that the things they represent are allegedly eluded by them, a consequence which he denies or makes up for.
8However, if redeeming the absence of things through words implies a flat ontology across words and things, it still puts the poet in the position of a maker, and therefore above other beings, as is shown by his evocation of a silverfish:
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed.
9While the presence of most beings in this passage is questioned (the presence of “her”, a “woman [he] made love to”, is wondered at, salt is thirsted for, and the childhood memory is also presented as long past and longed for, with atmospheric features, such as “silly music from the pleasure boats”, as its only remains), the silverfish is qualified (“orange”), acted upon (“caught”), located (“muddy places”) and most importantly renamed (“called pumpkinseed”). Catching it and naming it are two parallel means to invoke the orange silverfish, and they prove efficient as they spare the silverfish from the fading incurred by the other objects. In this instance as in many others, Robert Hass differs from the stance of object philosophies in the function he ascribes to his persona. He will not try to get at things as they are, but will fully endorse his role as a creator and make things exist rather than touch upon them. Thus, if the stance on the ontology of words is resolutely postmodern, the vision of the poet, or at least of the persona in the poem, relies on a Renaissance humanist idea of the artist/poet as creator.
10This alliance of a strong persona and of faith in language as a thing, just as present as other objects, allows the poet to reinstate presence where he believes it has been lost. For example, when he mentions the loss implied by “all the new thinking”, he states: “We talked about it late last night and in the voice / of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone / almost querulous”. The abstract idea he has spelled out at the beginning of the poem, “all the new thinking is about loss”, becomes a physical utterance, located in time and affective networks. More importantly, the “thin wire of grief”, through the metaphor and the assonance in [i] gives the discussion over the “loss” a materiality that is deeply felt by the reader. Presence, therefore, appears all but inimical to expression.
11Such a deliberate call for presence through words, even though words might elude presence, also happens when the poem, after expanding on the persona’s longing for a lost lover and a childhood memory, takes a step back and states: “longing, we say, because desire is full / of endless distances”. There, by coming back to the root of the word, Robert Hass gives a physicality to desire, an entity that is not only abstract but also implies a lack, an absence. The endless distances that populate desire render it less abstract, and it has also become so physical that it is “full” rather than the effect of a lack.
12Finally, in the last few lines, Robert Hass’s evocation of “blackberry” fuses together many levels of presence:
There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
13His assertion, “the body is as numinous as words”, is gradually enacted in those four lines. Moving from a clear, hierarchical relationship between time and matter (“moments” are the setting for those material epiphanies) to an equation between time, “days”, and matter “the good flesh”, matter becoming one with linear time as it is “continuing”, the lines allow more and more materiality into the language, a process which reaches its peak in the evocation of the blackberries. While “all the new [and old] thinking” stated that “because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies” here, the sound of the word as we read it three times, the persona’s memory of sounding the word, the visual aspect of the word, the berry it refers to, and the memory of it, all fuse into this instance of blackberry. Levelling different instances of “blackberry,” this fusion follows the notion of a flat ontology: in the evocation of the blackberry, everything is at the same level, without any division or hierarchy between the word, the memory, the thing, etc. The only superior instance remaining is the poet able to fuse them together.
14In those examples, presence is reinstated by what appears as a powerful creator, and absence remains an absence of, a clear antagonist to presence. However, absence proves necessary to the poem’s notion of being in many instances. As mentioned earlier, “the woman [he] made love to” and the childhood scene are elusive, something he thirsts for and wonders at. Similarly, the cluster of presence formed by the instance “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” occurs as a flash in surroundings marked by absence, an impression reinforced by the use of italics. The deictic “those” also marks a distance between the recorded moment and the moment of reading. If this absence is then fulfilled by the very utterance of the word “blackberry”, it nonetheless remains in the background. Thus, being, even when obeying a flat ontology, is vibratory: it only discloses itself amidst a background of absence. This notion, which proves to be a feature common to our three poems, shows that even when absence is dismissed or deemed peripheral, it remains a powerful instance in the depiction of being.
15Absence is fundamental to the way of being of Matthew Francis’s “silverfish” and to the other creatures he features in his collection Micrographia. The sequence is based on a collection of early modern microscope observations by Robert Hooke, about which Matthew Francis notes that “there is something particularly fascinating about that discovery, by Hooke and some of his contemporaries, of a whole world too small to see with the naked eye” (National Library of Wales). This new form of presence, absent for the naked eye yet undeniably there, sets absence at the heart of being in Matthew Francis’s sequence. In “Silverfish, Moth” in particular, even if absence is a non-presence, an emptiness, its imminence, or its location at the heart of things, makes things all the more present. His description of the silverfish is very evocative in that respect. The creature never appears as vivid as when it is about to disappear:
You see it mostly going away,
A virtuoso of departure,
all tail, flickering into absence
Its shine is a non-colour,
the blankness of cloud in a window.
16The oxymoronic structures point at stating a presence (“you see it”) while removing it from the scene (“going away”). A “virtuoso of departure”, the silverfish is best grasped by its absence and its dullness (“non-colour”, “blankness”): its identity is its absence of identity. This statement is then corroborated by the description of the same creature when it is not leaving (because it is captive or dead):
At last I had one, the tapering
torso of linked, metallic segments,
the helmet of head with four feelers,
three more feelers on the tail –
17When the silverfish is no longer on the verge of departure, absence is no longer an imminence but becomes part of its very body: an absence of matter, and possibly of life, prevails in this description of an assemblage of “metallic segments”. Absence, therefore, remains a non-presence, but unlike in Robert Hass, it appears essential to the constitution of being in “Silverfish, Moth”.
18Even the moth, described later in the poem, is described with low intensity and no such oxymoronic structures when fully present (“the plumage differed, like that of bird, / According to the part it grew on”) and only gains intensity and presence when it has disappeared:
Days later I was finding
white specks lodged in my skin, moth-feathers.
19As remains of its body are found on the persona’s skin, the presence of the moth lingers as a ghost, an evocation that resonates all the more as those are the poem’s last words. Like all traces, the moth’s white specks disclose absence and presence at the same time, so that the vibratory quality of being eventually imbues both the silverfish and the moth. This vibratory being is strongly reminiscent of the foundations of object philosophies, the Heideggerian conception of being as concealed as soon as it is perceived, a vision taken up by Bennett’s definition of vibratory being (5). Objects are there prior to relations, but their thereness, possibly because it does not derive from any relative principle, can only be pitched against its own absence, thus creating a form of vibratory being that Francis’s poem literalizes.
20Absence taking such a central part in the ontology of this poem, it is no surprise that the persona does not present itself as a creator able to bestow presence to whatever it is describing. Unlike Hass’s persona in “Meditations at Lagunitas”, Francis’s persona is more of an observer, as the poem’s first lines show:
One swish of itself and it vanished
into the alley between two books.
There was a twilight city in there,
leather and paper and dust,
where it had eaten itself a home.
21Though the persona is an acute observer, drawing conclusions from what he sees, he admits that “you see [the silverfish] mostly going away”. One could even read self-mockery in “At last I had [a silverfish]”, further in the poem, a mockery corroborated by the seeming emptiness of the silverfish he manages to catch. In the last lines, the persona proves at its most efficient when receiving presence rather than catching or creating it, a perfectly convenient bodily support for the moth’s “white specks.”
22The mode of being thus described in Matthew Francis’s poem is that of a presence laced with absence, intricately tied with the imminence of disappearance (silverfish) or the memory of a lost greater presence (moth). Interestingly, the poem’s vision of words displays the same structure. Just as the silverfish vanished, the pages it has eaten vanish too, leaving a “twilight city” of “leather and paper and dust”. Just as the moth leaves traces that are more present than its actual body ever was, so do the last words, the slightly off rhythm “moth-feathers”, appear as long-lasting offshoots of the rest of the poem. More generally, words and things are, as in the object-oriented flat ontology described earlier, both seen at the same level of material being. For example, the silverfish is said to “[flit] among the pages / having no need for wings”, which could imply that the pages act as wings for the creatures, supplementing it with their own matter. In this poem, words and bodies are therefore equally incomplete or only complete when including absence, and equally consumable (as catching the silverfish or the moth seems to amount to dissipating its essence, if not its life).
23Kathleen Jamie’s “Pipistrelles” features a more radical construction of absence. Here, absence is not only at the heart of things, as in “Silverfish”, but exists beyond the status of non-presence. It is the very object of the poem, a void in the middle of a clump of Douglas firs, which is given materiality (“a tall enclosure like a vase”) as well as a fundamental quality: “the world’s mind is such interstices”. The entire poem revolves around this entity, making absence or nothingness positive, an absence that is not an absence of, and therefore is not the negative correlate of a presence. Already, a few pages earlier in the sequence, the description of a “Basking Shark” comprises this positive form of absence. Unlike Matthew Francis’s insect whose absence helps define it as a silverfish, what Kathleen Jamie points at in “Basking Shark” is a shark that has no qualities, no asperities, whether positive or negative. The shark’s body is positively there, “not void, but a living creature”, yet “dull, dark and buoyed”, and later “peaceable and dumb”. It has none of the qualities commonly ascribed to a shark and, for this reason, attracts the persona’s gaze (“what could one do but watch?”) to a point of rupture (“it all became unbearable”) whereupon the shark leaves. The “shark not-ready” embodies a form of positive absence, an absence of all qualities that makes for intense presence. In “Pipistrelles”, Jamie goes further in the manifestation of a positive absence, as her poetic object is not even embodied in a shapeless creature: it is pure absence, yet an absence whose presence is palpable.
24This endeavour is in tune with object-oriented ontologies, especially if we look at Levi Bryant’s “Ontic Principle” (Bryant et al. 261). Bryant’s main postulate is that to be is to make a difference, but he distinguishes between an epistemic difference (as, for example, in the proposition that red is not blue) which needs an external perceiver and therefore is not real in itself and worthy of investigation, and an ontological difference. The latter kind of difference, “as opposed to epistemic difference is, by contrast, positive, affirmative, and differentiated without being negative. The temperature of boiling water is not the negation of other degrees” (266). If negation is expelled from this ontology, absence, which nonetheless exists as the poem forcefully says, may be something of its own, not just non-presence, in that we should not think of things as defined only by their relations to other things.
25Therefore, although object-oriented philosophers do not formulate this positive absence as “primary absence”, I believe that Patrick Fuery’s use of the term in his Theory of Absence is consistent with the idea of a positive absence which this article is formulating in relation to Jamie’s poem. Fuery initially states the need for a reevaluation of absence in a society where “presence is valued, held up, invested with power, and so can be said to have a pervasive quality” (1). In this regime of thought, absence is entirely dependent on presence, seen merely as a denial of it. Fuery sees this idea as problematic since he considers absence as constitutive of many parts of being, namely the Lacanian subject, desire and signification. Therefore, he strives to theorize an absence that is not merely a non-presence, by distinguishing secondary absences, non-presences, “those which are always derived from a state of presence”, from primary absences, which “exist outside of any relational context of presence […] in their own right, independent of any sense of presence” (Fuery 1).
26As they allow for the emergence of a form of absence that is positive, these theories prove very useful to understanding what happens in “Pipistrelles”. The poem revolves around a void, an entity in the middle of a clump of trees, revealed by bats flickering around it, and giving rise to speculations about “the world’s mind”. This entity is featured already in the very first lines of the poem:
In the centre of the sheep-field
a stand of Douglas firs
hold between them, tenderly,
a tall enclosure like a vase.
27This absence in the midst of the trees proves a very complex image. It is not a setting against which the trees stand, it is not dependent on the trees to exist – the trees do not shape it – it is tended to by the trees, a relation of care which does not involve total dependence. The use of the Scottish verb “to hain” to express this relation already hints at an absence, the absence of meaning, as most readers will not be familiar with this verb which means to preserve or protect and is used especially for the action of protecting grass from cattle. This absence is however all the more present because of this void, as the word stands out just as this strange new form of absence does in the midst of the trees. Besides, the material shape closest to this absence appears to be a vase, and presumably an empty one. The container, in turn, contains more void, so that the image does not point directly at what is at the heart of the trees (and the poems). In the second stanza, the vase becomes “a clear, translucent vessel, tinted like citrine”. Slippages from vase to the polysemic vessel, from container to ship, from clear to translucent to tinted, from one comparison to the other (the void is “like a vase” which is “like citrine”), all point at the elusive nature of this presence. This mysterious nothingness does not have a correlative presence (it is not an absence of trees or of anything else), and is extremely difficult to grasp: in that sense, it resembles the primary absence posited by Patrick Fuery. Naturally, it is just as difficult to perceive for the persona. “How could we have missed it” she exclaims, before focusing on what has always been perceptible:
What we noticed were pipistrelles:
cinder-like, friable, flickering
the place hained by trees
till the air seemed to quicken
and the bats were a single
edgy intelligence, testing their idea
for a new form,
which unfolded and cohered
before our eyes.
28The flickering bats and the quickening air embody a vibratory mode of being, simultaneously hiding and disclosing itself “before our eyes”. Like epistemic differences in Bryant’s “Ontic Principle” (Bryant et al. 266), it is a mode of being based on negation (presence / non-presence) and requiring a beholder (“before our eyes”) to exist. It also partakes of secondary forms of absences as defined in Fuery’s theory, since it is an absence that exists only in its relation to presence. For Fuery, such absences play an important part as links to primary absences:
To divide the idea of absence into primary and secondary forms is not to establish distinct types - an important feature is that secondary absences provide a connection between the operations of the presence and all forms of absence. Although this does not provide a continuum between pure presence, that is a presentness, and primary absence, it does permit a reading of absence in terms of a relational context of presence, which, in turn, allows the continuation of a primary mode of absence, independent of any sense of presence. (Fuery 3)
29“Pipistrelles” literalizes this link as the bats, in all their flickering relativity (standing for secondary absence) are heralded as messengers (“is that what they were telling us?”) carrying the news of this inexpressible primary absence at the heart of being (“The world’s mind is such interstices; […] is that what they were telling us?”). Without them, primary absence, too independent from any kind of relation, would not be expressed. And indeed, when the bats vanish at the end of the poem, the trees become “mute”.
30Besides, this idea of a primary absence, independent of any form of presence and at the heart of being, necessarily questions the relevance of a perceiver. Speculative realism, which is intertwined with object-oriented ontology, admits that understanding objects’ existence outside their relation to the human is necessarily a speculative endeavour on the part of said human (Bryant et al. 3). Likewise, a persona that does not posit itself as omniscient and almighty is of the essence when trying to render it poetically. And indeed, Jamie’s persona is by no means a god-like creator as in Hass, not even an accurate perceiver as in Francis. It is failing to perceive the primary absence (“how could we have missed it?”) and to understand the signals the bats were sending about it (“is that what they were telling us?”, “but they vanished, suddenly, / before we’d understood”), enacting the negation of one’s perspective that is necessary to reach a form of absolute.
31Finally, in a poem equating the essence of being with absence rather than presence, words appear inefficient. The bat’s message, thought in terms of oral speech (“is that what they were telling us?”) does not come through, their utterers are not timely (“they vanished / before we’d understood”), the primary absence itself is “mute”, and the persona’s attempts at describing it, with all the slippages mentioned above, manage at best to hint at it. Words, as in the other poems, follow the fate of presence, except that here, as in Fuery’s theory of absence, presence is no longer the fundament of being. Therefore, words are relegated to the margin of being, just as presence is.
32Three images emerge from these analyses: a weak or strong persona, a perception of being as vibratory, and words being as present as things. To take the ubiquitous silverfish as a thread, one can see that Hass’s persona in “Meditations at Lagunitas” catches it and names it, while Francis’s persona in “Silverfish” catches it to no avail because it then becomes an empty or inert body, and lets others name it (“they call it bookworms”). We could imagine Jamie’s persona letting it go completely, as she does let the bats go. It seems, therefore, that the more the persona presents itself as able to achieve, the stronger the emphasis on presence rather than absence, and the more traditional the vision of absence (as mere non-presence). This correlation is in line with flat ontologies seeking to displace the human from its status as a unifying principle of perception. If things do not exist only in the way they are perceived, then negations are no longer relevant, since one needs a viewer with previous knowledge of a given thing to state that it is not there. Then, absence, which, as seen in the poems, always exists to a certain extent within being, cannot be just a negation of presence. It becomes something in itself, construed either as part of being as in Francis’s “virtuoso of departure” or constitutive of being as in Jamie’s “clear vessel” in the clump of firs. Fuery’s theory provides a complementary approach to this correlation between a weak, unreliable persona and a strong form of absence. He posits that primary absence is part of being, and especially of the self, the Lacanian subject and its experience and modes of communication (desire and signification). In this frame of thought, which bestows much more importance to absence than its being a mere non-presence, the equation between self and presence can no longer be perfect: there is absence in the self, or there is absence in the presence that is the mode of being of the self. The weaker personas in Matthew Francis and Kathleen Jamie’s poems could very well translate this different conception of self as not almighty or even very present since it bears absence at the heart of its being.
33Our three poems also feature the disclosure or perception of being as vibratory. Robert Hass brings in elusive memories and blackberries coming back in a flash; Matthew Francis shows creatures on the brink of departure, or already departed; and Kathleen Jamie’s flickering bats point at a deeper level of being. This veiling and unveiling of being signals that absence consistently finds a way to position itself as essential both to being and to its perception. Absence therefore highlights the tension, ever-present in poetry, between acknowledging the necessity of a singular perception and reaching things as they are, beyond any perception.
34Finally, Robert Hass can be reassured that in his poems as well as in the two others, a word is not “an elegy to what it signifies”. The three poems work towards conflating words and presence, as we could suspect poetic language may always be doing, trying to retrieve a form of adamic language. Words are on the side of presence, and follow the definition of presence put forward by the text. Robert Hass sees presence as the ultimate mode of being in the full, and the words “blackberry, blackberry, blackberry” beautifully enact it. Matthew Francis sees presence as enhanced by imminent absence, and the broken words of the first stanza appear particularly efficient when contradicting themselves and displaying signs of “brokenness” (see, for example, the syntactic breaks in the stanza describing the silverfish). As for Kathleen Jamie’s poem, it construes presence as anecdotal. In her poem, real being lies in the primary absence figured by the “tall enclosure like a vase”. Words prove just as inadequate, as the bats’ message does not reach the persona and as the primary absence itself is “mute”. We might have imagined that in a culture privileging presence yet aware of the linguistic straightjacket, words might be considered a hindrance to presence, a generator of absence, unable to express the ineffable; on the contrary, they turn out to be on the side of presence, proved inefficient only when absence takes more importance in a text’s ontology: absence happens in spite of words rather than because of them.
35This statement could further explain the importance of absence in contemporary poetry. Indeed, if tracking the ineffable is one of the major aims of poetry, and if presence is no longer ineffable as words are no longer seen as removed from it, it might be by increasingly emphasizing absence, through, among other features, a conception of the disclosure of being as vibratory, that they regain the sense of wonder at the ineffable that is so essential to poetry. This, together of course with the deplorable absence of silverfish in our third poem, “Pipistrelles”, could lend itself to further investigation.
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