Book of the Week: The Vanishing Mediator by Adam T. Bogar

What if a philosophical book were hiding haiku in its sentences?

That is the intriguing premise behind Adam T. Bogar’s The Vanishing Mediator. The twenty monoku in this chapbook are found haiku, created entirely from words culled from Slavoj Žižek’s The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters. Bogar tells us that the poems were assembled from this single philosophical text, with some having appeared previously in Frogpond, Presence and weird laburnum.

The result is an unusual meeting between philosophy and Japanese short form poetry. Bogar does not add words to Žižek’s text. Instead, he discovers possibilities that already exist within it. The poet’s role becomes one of selection, arrangement and attention.

The opening monoku immediately establishes the strange territory of the collection:

the primordial dissonance of my reflection

p. 1

There is no conventional haiku image here, yet the line has the compressed suggestiveness we associate with the form. “Reflection” can be physical, psychological or philosophical, while “primordial dissonance” introduces a tension that remains unresolved. The poem asks us to sit with the contradiction rather than explain it.

On p. 4, the language becomes almost playful:

fingers crossed fill out an empty set

The familiar gesture of crossed fingers collides with the mathematical phrase “empty set.” The result is wonderfully ambiguous. Is the speaker hoping to make something out of nothing, or is an empty set being populated by desire itself?

Another monoku turns on the instability of interpretation:

in the other reading je ne sais quoi

p. 7

The phrase “je ne sais quoi” literally means “I do not know what.” Placed after “the other reading”, it becomes a small meditation on the slipperiness of meaning. A different reading may reveal something, but it may also leave us with something we cannot articulate.

The title poem appears on p. 12:

third draft tension of the vanishing mediator

The phrase has the density of an academic argument, yet “vanishing mediator” becomes surprisingly poetic. Something exists between two states, performs its function, and then disappears. The “third draft” also introduces revision into the philosophical idea. The poem becomes a meditation on transition, mediation and the writing process itself.

Perhaps the most accessible example comes later:

deepest night the deadlock dissolves by itself

p. 17

Here, the philosophical vocabulary suddenly gives way to an image almost anyone can enter. The darkness becomes the setting in which an impasse resolves without intervention. There is something reassuring in that “by itself”. Not every problem requires an answer forced into existence.

Bogar is a Hungarian haiku poet, independent scholar and translator based in Folkestone, UK. His work has appeared in Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Bones and Presence, and his earlier collection was The Feynman Lectures in Haiku.

For readers interested in found poetry, The Vanishing Mediator is particularly worth exploring. It demonstrates that the raw material for a poem need not always be generated from scratch. Sometimes the poet’s work is to recognise the poem already hiding inside another text.

Try this yourself while reading. Pick a sentence from a prose book and remove everything except the words that catch your attention. What happens when you rearrange them without adding anything new? You may discover that reading can become a form of composition.

You can read the complete collection in the THF Digital Library. The THF Digital Library can now also be easily found through the carousel on the home page, making it simpler to explore the books, journals, and other treasures in the archive.

Do you have a full- or chapbook-length book published in 2021 or earlier that you would like featured as a Book of the Week? Contact us for details. Book of the Week selections are made by THF Digital Librarian Vidya Premkumar and are featured with permission.