border has become a frozen marker of a failure of politics around
which people attempt to go about their daily business. In the poem
both time and place are presented as unhinged or frozen which has the
effect of disrupting the temporal and the spatial. The ëanytimeí of the
poem is imagined in terms of fixity, and in this way, the place of the
poem becomes ahistorical or a place captured for a moment that is
timeless because it does not move. The place of the poem operates in
an historical vacuum in which people move on bicycles, yet ëstifflyí as
though they are trapped within a tableau.
On the one hand, the territory in the poem is a fixed landscape
locked in a certain failure of history called the Partition. On the other
hand, the landscape becomes locked into another fixity that is the
frame of the poem itself where history is also made to stand still. The
place of the poem affects the imagery of human figures as they appear
like mechanical silhouettes, as shadows on the horizon of an Imagist
landscape or as stick people from the paintings of L.S Lowry. The
poem introduces a fascination with the pictorial and audible aspects of
poetry, as it is presents a static scene like a painting that is ëscannedí
by the watching poet. ëLine on the Grassí is a poem on the edge that
initiates an exploration of political and aesthetic borders, the limits of
vision and representation, and the fixity of time in the peculiar
atmosphere of a no manís land.
At the Borders of Conception
Paulinís poem ëWhatís Naturalí from Walking a Line leaves concerns
with territorial lines and plays with the different meanings of walking
a line on the edge of delirium, communication, abstraction and desire:
Taking a line out for a walk
ought to seem ñ well
second nature
like the way you laugh or talk
ñ though both speech and laughter
have to be learned
inside a culture (p.55)