A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text: Poetics and Politics of Witnessing

Signing, sealing, divulging, unsealing. This will be about bearing witness.¹ And about poetics as bearing witness—but testamentary witness: attestation, testimony, will. A poem can “bear witness to” a poetics. It can promise it, it can be a response to it as to a promise in a will or testament. Indeed it must, it cannot not do so. But not with the idea of applying a previously existing art of writing, nor of referring to one as to a charter written somewhere else, nor of obeying its laws like a transcendental authority, but rather by itself promising, in the act