Foucault's Priniciples in Poetry

The Way
by Albert Goldbarth October 13, 2008




The sky is random. Even calling it “sky”

is an attempt to make a meaning, say,

a shape, from the humanly visible part

of shapelessness in endlessness. It’s what

we do, in some ways it’s entirely what

we do—and so the devastating rose



of a galaxy’s being born, the fatal lamé

of another’s being torn and dying, we frame

in the lenses of our super-duper telescopes the way

we would those other completely incomprehensible

fecund and dying subjects at a family picnic.

Making them “subjects.” “Rose.” “Lamé.” The way



our language scissors the enormity to scales

we can tolerate. The way we gild and rubricate

in memory, or edit out selectively.

An infant’s gentle snoring, even, apportions

the eternal. When they moved to the boonies,

Dorothy Wordsworth measured their walk



to Crewkerne—then the nearest town—

by pushing a device invented especially

for such a project, a “perambulator”: seven miles.

Her brother William pottered at his daffodils poem.

Ten thousand saw I at a glance: by which he meant

too many to count, but could only say it in counting.


Aside from being a cool poem, this poem illustrates how and why language defines reality. Without language to imbue the world with meaning and significance, it doesn't really exist for us. And Foucault goes one step farther and explains that using language to make sense of the world, makes the world exist. So the questions isn't if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there, does it make a sound? Rather if no one is there to make sense of the sound, does it make a sound? And for Foucault the answer is no.