Poems are various approaches,
arcs shot towards the asymptote
of knowing, which can never be

reached, else once breached,
cannot be returned from.
The words I shape to transmit

are embodiment of a kind
of somatic knowledge, multiform
for the very evergreen reason

that any constitution of “voice”
holds the subconscious intention
of parodying itself unknowingly,

as well as the virtuoso’s avowal
that no expression, extant, bent,
or heretofore unrealized,

should be summarily forbidden
to profligate acts of creation,
which has the imagination

as its furthest horizon. The poem is simultaneously musical relic, tool for contemplation, embalmed missive, inspired litany, proof to define the nature of reality, confabulation of/ in/ for the divine, vestigial as a spiracle and just as sculptural, a political retort, pounce and jouissance, utterance drawn from inner depth like well-water, else an exploratory collage that tilts the gears and wheels of language to the light. It is, in Celan’s words, “a making toward something”; in Bachelard’s “a bud attempting to become a twig”; in Hejinian’s “under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information.” The very thingness of the thing, the pith of the wood, the release of the pressure is at stake, and the making is a marking, transfiguring and unmasking, a reformulation majuscule in its music, unsustainable in any form other than that which moves it forward, removing or warding off the hindrance that sloughs in awareness, never to compost and give root to vines that will accrete sun and intoxication in thin-skinned, translucent orbs that can be crushed into wine. Sure as no day is sure but just as profound. Necessary.

Back to PoetryNet