This week on The Poetry Foundation’s blog Harriet, author of Trance Archive Andrew Joron asks: “Why should poets care about aura?” He says:
“If the age of mechanical reproduction did not manage to kill off aura—defined, in Walter Benjamin’s terms, as the glow of authenticity surrounding any original thing—then the age of digital reproduction surely must. However, what counts as an original in the visual arts doesn’t correspond to anything in poetry. A poem doesn’t derive its authenticity from any singular, physical presence.
Poetry was never meant to be confined to one privileged place—and when it is, as in a one-of-a-kind artist’s book or an inscription on civic monument, the object almost always seems to swallow up the words: in such cases, poetry is defeated by aura.
One of the necessary conditions of aura is scarcity. Maybe aura will be returning to our lives as civilization winds down and things become scarcer. Maybe aura will be returning to books as books become scarcer. A point most relevant to the book arts, which recently held its gathering of the tribes at the CODEX International Book Fair near San Francisco. Book artists are united above all in rejecting mass production—their art, like almost any fine art, is premised on the making of limited-edition, often singular, artifacts. Book artists are thus, more or less self-consciously, committed to the project of producing aura.”
Read the rest on Harriet.
