A Diagram of Pain: The Pointing-to of Indexical Poetics

The inability to describe traumatic events is a central aspect of the experience of trauma itself, a breakdown in the link between experience and words that eats away at the rhythm of everyday life. Reading contemporary poetry written by war veterans can offer a possible way out of the traumatic paradox via a new poetic category, an indexical poetics that highlights the traumatic event not through the frustrating attempt to depict it but through the indexical function of pointing-to. In charging seemingly benign indexical words—it, me, then, and so on—with the force of an unspoken personal catastrophe, these poems manage to point to a traumatic event as well as mark the way it had undermined the meaning of words. The poetic result charts a diagram of a new way of speaking and writing, a new economy of meaning that, like any diagram, creates a world of expression that is inextricably tied to the pull of a very real painful past.