the two phrases that keep going through my mind in relation to poetic practise are ‘poets as filters’ and ‘reality, our great collaboration’. I made the thoughts catchy so they were easier to meditate on. Addressing the second to begin with:
joint commitment/ joint responsibility/ full accountability// most importantly: the desire and need to make something useful – to as many people as possible – that serves some kind of a purpose now, and, ideally, onward into the future – whatever that might be. This seems ambitious. I hope so. It stems also from a (sometimes desperate) sense of urgency, in the main pertaining to what we might broadly but vexedly term ‘the environment’. I say ‘vexedly’ because I very much agree with James Sherry that to make any real progress it’s absolutely essential that we scud under the (basically Romantic) separation between ‘Humanity’ and ‘Nature’. Any more advanced and holistic (i.e. Gaian) viewpoint doesn’t allow such easy distinction and disambiguation anyway. However, I realise that saying these things so simply is perfectly reductive as well. Still, as the best poetry pushes at the bulbous glassy edge of reality and attempts to chart undistorted its findings we may as well try and get on with things as best we can. It’s only language, our chosen(?) medium. I would rather a restless, risky poetics than the majority inertia witnessed where apparent ‘realism’ is a stultifying virtue. Documentation doesn’t seem like enough, and didacticism is nearly as worrying as the thought of failure. Coaxing and honing the edges of imagination somehow seems to be the thing. Because it’s a failure of the imagination that will let us down eventually.
Some of these ideas also link to an essay on (the impossibility of) closure by Lyn Hejinian (also) in Jacket. The idea of us existing on and in a continuum I find helpful. This echoes the calling out of the artificial division (the default, atavistic us&them) between humanity and nature/the environment. And again the idea of a collective effort comes through. This is fitting for Likestarlings and for a collaborative clean-up and rescue operation. It points the way to poetry that is less definite in assumptions (but no less definite in its quality) about its immediate purpose (autopilot) and more expansive in its aims – an investigative poetics so to speak. This is poetry that can embrace anything, evolve, adapt – survive (yes). It acknowledges its own transitory nature, the impermanence of its medium and situation, and presents a permeable interface allowing multiple interpretations, trajectories and implications.
These concepts of investigative poetries with permeable edges takes me on to the first-mentioned phrase: poets as filters of information/sensation/ revelation … as a linguistic organ rather like a liver or kidney. Decisions about what to pass over in silence are highly important in this context. Because poetry is open-ended doesn’t need to mean it’s unclear in its aims or convictions. Peter Reading of course, with his wholly linked, inter-referential and remarkably coherent oeuvre, springs very spikily to mind. He’s predicted a great deal of this.
Poetry, it seems to me, is the medium most adept and fitting for considering the ecological crisis occuring now. This is because as a communicative and evocative vehicle it is the most mobile, the most nuanced, the most capable of being honest thing we have. It most closely reflects the fluxious nature of experience. So, poets as semi-permeable membranes creating permeable, evolving works in an impermanent medium! Sounds difficult.
This is much longer than I intended. Does it make any sense? As ever, I fondly (but not complacently I hope) await your elucidation and better ordering of these fuggy thoughts…
DEH