In the ethic in wonder, where the other and the object of the poetic subject will change, shift, the dynamic of desire, the poetic tension, between the subject and the other will change; syntax, poetic structure, and the subject in discourse will have to respond to this. In an ethic in wonder one does not determine the object, one engages with it but is at all times accountable/responsible to the Other--responsible for its relation to the world. It is this problematic in postmodern poetics that affords me (and us?) the possibility of new intrasubjective, poetic, political, sexual and cultural relations and systems--requires an ethical imagination.

Poststructural psychoanalysis and postmodern thought have come to understand discourse as symptomatic of subjectivity, thus it is in discursive practices one can determine the workings of desire and imagination which any given subject performs in relations to its objects and others. As Antony Easthope has shown in Poetry as Discourse, discursive acts have two moments, the ènonciation which is the act of uttering/writing, and the ènoncè which is the utterance (43). There are two subjects here, the I of ènonciation, or the speaking subject of which its discourse is an incomplete symptom, and the I of the ènoncè, or the subject in discourse placed syntactically in relation to an object or other, Lacan's split subject from the mirror-stage. The form or structure of this discursive act can be read as symptomatic of the ethical relation of the I of Čnonciation to the Other/object through the subject's utterance.

In the poetic practice of poets such as Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian, or even Gertrude Stein, this ethic has implications for how poetry is ènoncè, and therefore for the act of ènoncè and its imagination. Because in phallogocentric language the Other is supposed to be known, located, still. In a discourse of the ethics of wonder, since the Other or object is not restricted to functioning as the ground for the predication of the I, the sentence, the structure of a poem, the use of metaphor opens up to include more in a poetics of the possible. The process of linear time, the thrust of the subject's desire, no longer is the soul determinant of language or experience, because the Other can move in its own becoming and open up the process of predication, the working of imagination.

What happens in poetry is that one metaphor, one logic in a poem, no longer determines the movement of the poem, but several metaphors and logics come into play in order for the poem, the act of enunciation, to recognize that the Other moves like a subject. Imagination becomes no longer an unethical process of subjection, and overdetermination, but a process of exploring the multiple dynamics of relation between an I and its world, the metaphors needed to express that relation, the opening of time to more possible outcomes and all that means new modes for the self and how it can act. [Appendix]

In order to show what this all means in poetry, I'll read a selection from Jorie Graham's poem "The Region of Unlikeness":

Even though there is an unclosed movement in time, logic and in relations to the world, memory, addresses and remembered Others, there remains a unified speaking subject, but one that must move and adjust to its Others in time and space in order to allow itself and them freedom in becoming. The associative play even allows the poet to render the reader more active than usual in that there is no attempt to say, "This is what I want you to understand, to see."

In the last stanzas of the poem, the speaker is no longer thirteen, and the promise of time in the line "He will overdose before the age of thirty/someone told me time/ago," is fulfilled, the reader may choose to read the middle stanzas of the girl's run home as a memory, but time in the poem jumps, becomes simultaneous moments in the becoming of the I in the Čnonciation:

In the flow of one stanza into another, as with "home. / Twenty years later," two distinct moments occupy the same place, overlap in the poem, both thematized and formalized, as a new ethic would need to be. The process and purpose of memory here is one of putting the former self as self into question, to try to understand it in relation to others then, a relation in which that self disregarded its others. Consequent to the question in memory, the present self as a manifestation of becoming is put under the pressure of the question. This self's questioning barely begins in this poem, though, in the call to wake up, the sense of danger in the something in the ground and air. While the physical situation of the speaker is resolved for the reader, the closure, the encircling of meaning (and by analogy of the other/this self), its overdetermination is put off, refused. Leaving the poem with the speaker waking, remembering Rome, would close the poem as a full circle of contemplation, the self resolved in its identity. Instead, this poem opens back out to some other relation between subject and world, some new and urgent dynamic which will redefine this recent definition. The envelope, in Irigaray's terms, expands for the speaker to include this new relation with "something that waits." In terms of ethics and the I of ènonciation, the speaking subject, the poet in this case, by virtue of this being a lyric poem, that subject too is placed in this new dynamic, this uncertain and extraordinary "something," with its otherness and possibility.

In another of Graham's poem's, "What the Instant Contains," this dynamic in space-time is more strongly thematized. The situation in the poem is that the speaker is in a room with Lyle, a friend who is dying. Most of the poem is made of huge sentences in a formal attempt to render the complexity of a moment. But, in the opening stanzas, where the "rules" of a free verse poem are established, the reader finds short, one-line sentences. Some but not all of these set up recurring images in the rest of the poem. One of the most startling and important of these recurring images is "the dust starts inventing the afterwards" (5), the immanence of after Lyle's death, and pressures it put on the speaker's thinking. Later in the poem this dust and afterward become connected to a "shield in the air but you cannot see it, / it's the thing the dust makes when it's cast up" (124-5), and to Circe, a kind of shield on the other side of the mirror, of death:

This is one moment where the poem both reconnects with itself, like some expanded sestina, and moves beyond itself into the revised myth. By and large the poem moves from consideration of the helpless alterity of Lyle in his dying and the situation of the speaker there to help him die to formal and thematic considerations of time and relation as in:

Here is a poetic version of Irigaray's dynamic of desire, one in which there is two-way motion, two-way predication, which is happening in an interval, the time it takes Lyle to die, and an envelope, the room, the relation of the speaker with Lyle, which makes a body, an envelope.

Formally, in the poem each new element added, each new move on the speakers part in metaphor or in the room, demands a shift in the poem's direction, a shift then of the speaker's position. Everything is strange and rare here, contemplated in wonder, granted its affect. Graham also works with two moments of self, an I and a you. The you is the possibility of the I, "If you sit here, / if you sit in your attention watching him sleep, / if it is still sleep" (33-5) and performs the imaginative work such as the Circe section. The I is of action in the room, the I will "When he wakes I will give him some water" (44), and at the end of the poem, "and then the blue vase I'll put [the irises] in for a time." This self and other of self replace and overlap each other in an affective way that the I who will give Lyle water moves into the You, forms a "we" who will "try to drive back into the body / what roves around it" (54-5). There is a fluidity of becoming here for the poet, the poetic subjectivity and its imaginative relations to the Others in the poem. Everything and everyone here has their place, their limits. The tone may be a bit contemplative instead of ecstatic, but this is an ethics of wonder nonetheless.