postPata prepositions afield

variable framing

At the end of each new published book of preverbs I’ve given in to thinking about what is being made “in my name,” not as a way of claiming definitive understanding, or going beyond suggestion in telling readers how to approach the work, but as an adjunct or contrary to the process of discovery/configuration. The basic fact is my name feels like “settled identity” but the work remains unsettled and unsettling. There’s a hidden theme: Configurative poetics. The point is not to establish an authoritative critical vocabulary but to indulge my lifelong habit of searching out, sometimes making up, words/phrases/locutions to better expose the singular force of syntactic gesture. Axial poiesis can’t stop trying to configure the unsayable, so it turns to reconfiguring itself; it takes a step outside itself and looks over its shoulder while continuing onwards. For me poetics does not stand above, outside, or in full opposition to poiesis as such, but it does run alongside as a close relative working in a different state of intellectual attention. Poetics intends to explore evidence of the further life of the work. I think of these onsite pre/positions as extratexterial probes.

patalingualty

From early on I was taken by the Confucian/Poundian concept make it new, but I don’t regard the craft-based spin Pound gave it as resolving the issue of how poiesis generates reading experience as new. When Stevens says that “Surrealism invents without discovering” (I don’t agree about Surrealism except perhaps for certain practitioners), he offers the notion of discovery vs. invention as pertinent to poiesis. Discovery’s hardly a well-defined notion but one has a sense of what it means in one’s own process of making new work. It requires continuous new attention to be “authenticated” within one’s actioning imagination. In this context invention becomes more a matter of practicality and problem-solving than imagination or vision; the latter involves a pragmatics of further visioning. But all the terms, especially one’s favorites, lose their precision outside of context. Language can’t be trusted to deliver “truth.” Yet it’s almost impossible not to trust your own most intimate speaking.

Actual new language isn’t thinking about being new. So, “new” is a vexed category for the inevitable novelty of awake languaging.

New is the exception to its own self-rule.

One of the hardest views to sustain is open and unobstructed linguality—the capacity of “natural language” to generate new “reality.” It does so behind our backs, but when we can pick up on its happening we enter a further level of wakefulness peculiar to our state of being in the conditions of our world. This is what I think of as conscious language; but who or what’s conscious, it or me or the elusive us?

between as matrix

Amidst our most thoughtful polylemmas poiesis learns speaking with thinking mind beyond its opinions, rationalizations, philosophies, beliefs, dogmas, physical patterns, preferred behaviors—indeed any kind of sustaining pattern in thinking. It puts language in fluxional step with actual life’s need to shift angles. A preverbial angle protrudes:

Suspending the thrusting automaticities of language creates the calm before the form.

The patapoetic secret is that every occurring state of existence is its own potential vehicle and locates itself through the event of singular language, its voicing of its own possible being. Complexity might serve as an even better frame for “self” than “reality.” A pataperspective hears itself by way of preverbs as unfolding in newly opened language space. It travels by sentence. And the sentence morphs through the attributes of its journey. The poetics learns to adapt to the needs of the journey understood to be long underway. The work of axial poiesis then is to track the emerging possibilities of the aroused psychophysical current that drives the journey. It’s about making contact with what promises to be sourceful for realizing further language in process. That process recognizes precedent in Blake’s reinvention of “Prophecy,” in his special sense not focused on the future but on the absolute present and the work that releases its charge.

in principle

I tend to think of axial poiesis as principle-based and therefore in contrast to Conceptual poetry, although I’m not opposed to the latter, nor any other developed poetic option; but it’s in sharp contrast to the way I work. The distinction is that a concept precedes writing whereas principle underlies it, guides it in alternative ways not especially familiar as cognitive options. There’s coherent order, often despite appearances, but the mind’s conceptualization of what’s happening is always under construction.

The main point is I neither construct lines nor conceptualize what a page contains before or after it happens. (I would never find work in the Acrobatic Form Circus.) Lines come to me, often when I’m least expecting. Never on-demand. Conjured, maybe. The main effort I make is keeping pen & notebook close to hand. Setup is attractor.

Direct composition in daily sessions requires sustaining a kind of inattention in favor of an empty space of alert receptivity, a certain tension in the field of awareness, like tuning a string instrument, senses on alert. I feel in tune with Cage’s notion of unfocus while I don’t use systematic or “chance”-based procedures. (I don’t believe in chance, even when I can.) My constraints are simpler and pervasive, such as line & page as limits, etc. I have thought at times in terms of indeterminacy and uncertainty but not in a strict sense as in physics. For me engaging such words stirs ideas with almost mantric effect. Related to what I’ve long been calling gnosemes, any verbal unit can indicate semiotic impact of a situational gnosis.

zero point poiesis

Among the powerful terms of use to poetics is zero point. A few decades ago I made a connection of axial poetics with zero-point physics and quantum field theory/Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Zero for me was already connected with emptiness/shunyata. Most concretely serviceable to me has been the Taoist/t’ai chi principle of full release into “stillness in movement”—related to “releasement” (Gelassenheit). This means axial poiesis arises as much from the body as from the brain. Olson gave generative force to this thinking. Yet the discovery of the basic principles of this poetics of axiality and torsion began with my reading of Blake. It lures further language ready to give over into meaning, to come to completion.

Zero point is the state in which nothing does not mean nothing.

Zero point language/axial poiesis/preverb happens at the point before determination. In another vocabulary it’s the (non)time/space before the First Distinction.

The view here is that theorizing itself is configurative poiesis. And it partners with desire, an active wish for lines to happen, a live invitation, an intentional state of occurrence, an event. It’s easy to see how poietic intent con/fuses with magical practice. It gives me the feel of a life choosing to engage its riches of the possible, even as the “real world” appears bent on destroying itself. (If tyranny succeeds in suppressing art by dominating mind, “they win.”)

The work counterbalances in a relational field. But axial poiesis eludes its own successes, just keeping healthy, moving on as itself.

The work is endless expressing the inexpressible.

Once when I was delivering proofs of his book Themes & Variations (Station Hill, 1982), Cage allowed me to sit for part of an afternoon during his composition of drawings involving systematic chance operations. Before each pre-defined action (using a brush or pencil or stone, say), he would tear off a little printed tab with the next systematically determined I Ching “choice” and perform the action. Sometimes following the action he would sort of throw up his hands in vocal delight like a happy child and say, “Isn’t that wonderful!”

Cage’s unselfconscious naturalness had a curious shock value. It showed a freer degree of immediately feeling spontaneous enjoyment through work that otherwise is viewed as boldly “experimental.” Free, that is, of inherited notions of struggle for perfection and “getting it right.” The enjoyment reflex is quicker and, in some sense, truer than thoughtful mind. It offers a contrary to the tradition of a poet’s struggle to perfect the work. One gets to see how the process of making work feeds on incompletion, as against the “death wish” of getting it over with, perfected. Not aiming for the perfect poem, going on knees to support that coarse myth of “belatedness,” but merging with the event of continuous completion itself. Complete in each gesture now.

Complete is not end but the point of transformative transition. The title of this book, Hilaritas Sublime, carries the probable affective range from delight/levity for hilaritas to transfiguring terror/gravity for sublime. The intensity is in the tuned oscillation between probabilities. It spontaneously selects for its moment, and takes form.

Each line tends to suggest not so much non-dual as a seeming intradual dynamic, which doesn’t itself resolve into proposition; neither does it prevent anyone from trying to do so. It aims to remain in appropriate preposition. No coercion. Being in close contact, no push, no pull, just reading. Poetry is not religion (except when it is) so why make it perform liturgical behaviors (except for enjoyment)? Ditto philosophy. Nothing gets resolved. Tradition, especially as canon, ends up imposing approved behaviors. In my view a precedent usefully offers the intention to motivate its kind, not rule a world. Axial poiesis would inhabit without inhibiting.

axialities, or thinking in spirals

My prepositions are questions in disguise which are revised quests creating discovery zones of uncharacterized awarenesses in consort arrangements (writer/reader never continuously clear which is which) fully active in the present moment of language configuration, despite appearances. Agency is a spectrum of interactivities cohering to a point of enaction. Specters line the discursive lanes. Suddenly they say themselves with the clarity of silence.

The above preposes little more than its own instantiation, and something less substantial yet.

Poiesis is language rescuing itself in the residual gaps of its own assertions applied.

The same that never is and not, relationally speaking:

Preverbial preposition proves irreal by propulsion with appeal. It hits you, you take it or don’t, reflex or not, end of story, beginning of this—next—always now.

Axial meaning is eventual.

self-motivated motivities

Poetics doesn’t have to answer this question but ponder it must: Why do it?

A possible perspective on axial poiesis as mimesis sees life/nature as a vast and often turbulent field we filter to optimize for value—such as making sense, protecting ourselves/others, suffering/enjoying.... Poiesis intervenes to locate values by interruption and use: Seeing valued particulars brings them into conscious action. In practice I orient to relaxed alert listening when possible, an open field of distinction. It encourages a field of self-regulating activity seen as “chaos.” Interruption of linearity can become radial in force, radiant of source. Axial poiesis is performative of the process in such a way as to induce its action in the reader, always initiating in the perplexity of liminal meanings.

Chaos is the absence of poiesis.

nettings

A line has a cast and curves. There’s netlife. It nets in lengthening. Lines in series carry the net out. Lines are together because they work together, co-workers. And further out the bounding outline joins in other fields: of other poems in the series, the series in the book, the book among other books, musics, paintings, bodies—all converse, and the language has netting. The breathing net is coproprioceptive, intravestibular. The energies, impulses, signals are in conversation at multiple levels possible to engage in reading.

A life work works the life.

For:

Poietic states alter becoming conscious.

When the space of poiesis sees itself as field and network, it’s open to receiving “content” from more than one source/direction/dimension; it’s like a coming together of matter in a Klein-form environment. We are continuously interrupted by unlived portions of ourselves, surfacing. What we experience is what we fail to filter out.

Axial poiesis aims to sustain a mode of writing/reading engagement that optimizes the interruptive field, now able to recognize innuendos of previously unknown levels of intention. It enters a field of self-regulating chaos—a language field, a sound field, a visual field, a haptic field, a gnosemic field, any interlacing of the above in our enactment. At the core of poiesis in this moment in time is the recognition of the interactive roles of poet and reader—indeed their virtual mirroring. Reader as poet has come out.

patascripture and rebound

When I publish a book of preverbs it becomes quite immediately other to me; I read it as mine and not mine with equilibrating but fluctuating force. Over time it becomes less and less “mine,” and I encounter it again with originary attention. It gives unexampled feedback. Unfiltered oscillation and its intensities.

Poiesis journeys the mind.

I escape my identity as poet. I stand for an instant outside identification—identity ecstasis. Poem offers untrammeled non-familiarity. And holes that even rabbits won’t go down reveal their darkened marvels. Idiolects of the still unrecognized.

An idiom at the tip of a lingual wave signals otherwise.

things I can’t prove but think now

1 Axial poiesis reveals implicate order in its variable mode of behaving.

2 A preverb has probable configurative meaning known by its trace resonance.

3 Poiesis is a radially receptive event that “learns by going where it has to go.”

4 All poietic fields are inside and outside other fields they co-reflect and alter.

5 Preverbs have love/hate relations with other preverbs continuously in oscillation.

6 None of this waxes strictly true without the reader’s collaborative intervention.

7 Preverb-reader interaction has as many moods as minds and minutes.

8 Poetics studies poiesis to locate further conceptual pressure points.

9 Preverbs push buttons, the poet’s pressure points, anything with mine in it.

Now is never the same.

10 Axial poiesis sets limits to the absurd, site specific, impermanent.

11 A poem knows itself like the song to sing as the ship goes down.

12 Axial poiesis tells jokes it hasn’t learned to laugh to.

13 No matter what or how many poems, the message knows it’s just getting started.

Writing this way helps me get a view of the poietic situation here. It’s a take what you get situation as the price paid for anything goes, just the way it goes. The poem is a field learning how to listen to itself. What it hears is what it’s able to let be said.

The poem means what is attended.

The intention manifests in the attention sustained. The source is the question following any answer. The discourse is how intention reincarnates itself intentionally, as linguality.

I’m aware that my effort to write what I think in relation to what’s written in this book has veered into an alternate track. For me talking about the book seems to catch its drift (or its virus) and become what it is beholden to. The verdict is in: Whatever it is it can’t stop being itself.