‘Let me in!’ Opacity and illumination in an age of technological reproduction

Abstract

Predating Plato’s ancient quarrel with poets by more than two millennia, Sumerian high priestess Enheduanna’s exile songs—the ‘ni-me-sˇa´r-ra’—are primal poetic cries at the loss of the real. Rereading Enheduanna’s text as a plausible answering call to Ezra Pound’s century-old ‘Make It New!,’ this article proposes ‘Let Me In!’ as a possible credo for contemporary poets. In this article I investigate two contrary modes, L5A5N5G5U5A5G5E poetry and lyric poetry, to speculate that a poem can act as either a meta-textual invention which problematizes all claims to linguistic transparency (L5A5N5G5U5A5G5E poems), or as enacting illuminatory gestures to guide readers sensorily towards the real (lyric poems), with either mode of material mediation entailing ethical performance.