This morn­ing John Latta quoted a bit out of Jed Rasula’s new Mod­ernism and Poetic Inspiration:

In lieu of its “voca­tion of dis­or­der,” Blan­chot won­ders what qual­i­fies as Roman­ti­cism: “Where it man­i­fests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” The answer: equiv­o­ca­tion. Or, to use a term the Roman­tics them­selves were fond of, the arabesque, the abil­ity to wrig­gle simul­ta­ne­ously toward con­trary poles. Although such wrig­gling can remain intran­si­tive, and the work uncom­pleted, “‘this supe­ri­or­ity of intel­li­gence over the power of exe­cu­tion’ is the very sign of authen­tic­ity” as Blan­chot puts it by way of Valéry. Exe­cu­tion is tac­itly the domain of the arti­san, so the artist asserts author­ity in a sov­er­eign ges­ture of dis­dain, as if the poet, con­ceiv­ing the mas­ter­piece, says to the reader, you do it, where doing amounts to a labo­ri­ous tem­po­ral extrac­tion of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen peck­ing at a sus­pi­ciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resist­ing com­ple­tion can also be deci­sive in its pre­var­i­ca­tion between avail­able means; ter­mi­nal inde­ci­sion is hard to dis­tin­guish from poly­va­lent cre­ative options.

John calls the above “another instance of Paul Valéry’s assert­ing form / invention’s supe­ri­or­ity (the par­tic­u­lar words hardly matter),” and “incredibly spark-throwing,” and a sug­ges­tion of “the mantra of the Lan­guage boys,” which strikes me as thrice true.

But the kind of equiv­o­ca­tion Rasula describes isn’t just about resist­ing com­ple­tion, à la Kafka or Beck­ett or Lan­guage poetry.