POETRY AGAINST POEMS
or, care contra form ? doors against chairs ?

by )ohn Lowther

"you don't define electricity you see the results of electricity but you don't name it"

an arbitrary hacking place, one step among many possible, and as steps on a stair, transitional—placing the weight now here, where before these words might have slid this way or that——the sandwichboard sign i wore in Prunty's Free Poetry campaign said

                               END
                            POETRY
                              NOW

but the scales have shifted since (i was joking then, provoking, but now…)——i am for poetry against poems or to echo; poetry without poems if necessary——poems without poetry being both the celebrated and reviled commonplace

poetry escapes the poem as we escape photographs, by never being caught to begin with the price of fixity is unintelligibility——— is poetry in the interpretive process ? (this, i'm asked; where?) and if that seems a locale to any, fine, we step where we must, but——place a finger there on a map and say all poetry is here——is this locus an index of why you care_? does any map suffice to lead back to that experience ? to a fleeting, unfixable and hunch-laden knowledge of language as art, as poetry ?

the text is material, is in many cases ink on a page, some concatenation of atoms on a computer screen—if this is it—if this is where the action is—then being a poet is something like being a collector or fashioner of marbles or junk or velvet-seated gold-painted pointless-to-sit-on chairs—somewhere to rest yr ass and feel smug about the details of the armrests—i'd rather keep walking—some poem or another being about as crucial as where i last sat—vs—the horizon(s) available to aim or accident

i'm not against your choice in chairs just tired in the face of endless decor——poetry is thru a door—the best of chairs catch us, implant in us a fuse that at end can throw us thru—changed in the frame——but, mostly these chair-poems are lodged under the knob, keeping the poetry out——if this is read as a simple opposition, an either/or, then all is lost... the sets overlap, interpenetrate (a chair—might be a door but not because it's a chair a picture might be great likeness)

poetry is too easily assumed in the poem, is a trick built into the sound of the two words or our history of associating them (the same trick that makes necessary the connections between poetics and poetry when they are at their most useful merely hopeful, conjectural)—but poetry isn't any more importantly in poems than in sales receipts, the babble of masses on the subways of rush hour, the hiss at a burned fingertip—poetry isn't in poems any more meaningfully than it is in language generally, spoken, garbled, written or remembered—poetry lights a fuse, pulls out the lynchpin, chucks in a wooden shoe—poetry makes things different, has repercussions between widely separated heres and theres, this's and that's—is a mutable and mutating antidote to an ill only recognized in hindsight—these are not definitions but incomplete descriptions—more must always be found

there—is a poet talking and there—a tape playing and there—a painting is involved—and later, with whatever delays will come a written text, a photograph, and some things else brought in or taken away—a hoarseness of voice, a truck full of music schools, a sudden loop that acts as glue, the tornado sirens at noon, even——
                              Where is the poetry ?
               all of it combined is the poetry wrong answer
               the poetry is in all of them wrong answer

in that moment or later and lingering, flipping maybe only a few switches but adding a dimension thereby which doesnt dissolve as one's memory of a turn of phrase, the beats in a line, the set-up rhyme, or the raw materiality of language so often does—poetry doesnt dissolve—it infuses

i leave much crap on the seat of a chair that the conspiracy (habit) of our days calls form—this cognitive affliction isn't hampered by self-consciousness of the chair or by any seated denials, it inflicts itself evenly on any who assume that poetry is obviously in poems (or that theyre captured by photographs)——this is formalism at its most base but the stain spreads upward thru any edifice built upon it

form conspires against poetry poetry——wins out sometimes in spite of well-meant but confused conspirators who think they're supporters, sustainers, partisans of poetry—formalism is the appraisal of the few traits deemed crucial by some viewer/reader/author/auditor/critic and their generalization via comparative or taxonomic strategies into a schema then deployed to evaluate further instances of the target objects/populations—it's handy and dependable in certain respects but the blindspots... —the squish of limited needs that framed the so-called crucial traits —the faith that bleeds out of taxonomy into... what? ——as if picking the killer out of the line-up (safe behind the mirror) says anything about the motive of the murder——form wd make of this manifesto a set of directions, wd say "so what yr saying is that we must do X or Y or Z"——nothing of the sort is being said

form is generally a shorthand (or mask) which functions as or refers to...

          ——a crutch of 'tradition' foolishly defined, to absorb some presumed authority; this is a velvet-backed

louis the XIVth but that might as well be a upturned garbage can

          ——the 'materiality' of the poem conceived as anything from the unchallenged idealization that it's a necessary and interpretable reflection of its historical moment (via economics, culture, ideology etc, any lens) right down to the fact of its being on 20lb bond in blue ballpoint [i don't dispute it—artifacts do reflect their context, but the how of this often dim, ambiguous and certainly distorted reflection is generally neglected in the rush to make the larger claim, such that the conjectural aspect of the association of inked paper to political and economic systems is simply treated as foregone, fact, truism]; in these armrests the tragedy of early inductrial oppression is made manifest

          ——a way to dodge the solipsistic edge that always threatens one's own aesthetic judgements when put out into the world (and which must be threatened thusly if theyre to have any tension, any success against fixity); it's not that i find this chair comfortable, it's form is comforting

          ——a move to assert some kind of transitive relation between a 'form' and a particular political/ideological position i.e., the collage form isn't susceptible to fascist usage; only the righteous ass might rest on this chair

          ——a curious and confused stand-in for "language"; a table and four forms, let's play bridge

form, stop thinking it—unless we are simply talking about the shape of the thing, the choice of margin width—i fantasize of a michelson/morley experiment whereby form might blow the way of the ether wind—in absence of that why not see what changes when the shorthand mask is removed, whether or not what's at issue comes forth

poetry, fiction, narrative——the stakes of these things are ill-served by poems, plays, novels—efforts at ventilating, at letting the air in, at getting them thru the door have helped and some have made a steady practice of such venture, but in their wake has come the confusion, the conspiracy, of form—one chair after another with occasional minor changes mostly cosmetic until the taste of culture of variety of poetry (sic.) is typified by the food court—and like the matter on the plate, tasty as it may be in the moment, poems and novels in most cases across the publishing spectrum, irrespective of the conventional boundaries, simply sit there on the page—anyone engaged in finding or creating the space-of-variable-possibility that underpins fiction must see the novel as chair as well—tho novelists and their readers are often sitters by design—i sit for amusements for a piece of candy perhaps but as ambiguous as any instance may be—as indeterminate as any amount of puzzling will reveal—there's never much question of where theyre at, not the slightest cause for doubt, just a sore ass from being so long seated

genres, like poetry, like fiction are not page-bound—they escape binding as smoke escapes a lasso, as the perfect retort hides on the tip of one's tongue, as why we care isn't listed as an ingredient of the ink—they interpenetrate freely passing thru containers like poems or novels, scores or scripts more quickly and with less contact that we commonly cross bridges with—poetry is a bridge from nowhere

pieces of this puzzle are all around——conceptual art to the extent that it says that the idea, the problem is the art and the material work simply a pointer toward this idea——this echoes the point but is unsatisfactory to the extent that it suggests that the idea is fixed, that the object can lead unerringly to it as down an alley——process art pushes in the right direction by stating that the object is not the point——but an object might just as well function to unhinge us as entering into any process might and so this impulse also tends to miss the mark by fixing it——poetry is encountered—is experienced—in a need—it's discovered as it intersects some possibility of satisfaction tho it might leave you sated or starved, lost or found

given the weight of confusion and the inertia of formalism it wd seem that the only response wd be one which makes plain that the poetry is not in the poem or the talk or the ink but that, with luck these things push into the poetry, kicking open a door that we might pass thru—into—a space of continual opportunity freely interpenetrating housing and being housed like architectures in and on a terrain of language and to the side of it in other sorts of terrain composed of those things we cannot doubt save in language (hence, potentially, with poetry)

this is an arbitrary) hacking place—tomorrow brings another, and contradiction inevitably it isnt the words after all, those objects, like points in a pointilist painting which we tend to stand so close to while forming our grand analyses

© )ohn Lowther. All rights reserved.