(poetic thoughts)
The fundamental experience of the poet is dissociation—dissociation of one’s consciousness from the known, dissociation from the limits imposed by the body, the senses & the physical world. Only this awe-inspiring realization of the infinity of reality and existence can offer enough perspective for an individual to accept the fundamental complementarity between life and death, between impermanence and permanence. This is the very revelation which awakens a poetic, a prophetic mission within an individual: the necessity to light up the divine sparks asleep in humans.
The surreal and the nonsensical are as equally ideal for a poem as a truthful anecdote, as they capture the logic and the insane camp of the brain’s expanding synapse-territorialization during any given thought stream. The weirdest combinations of the weird purify poetry.
The subject of a poem must not appear through deduction or interpretation. It must not speak about beauty, ingeniousness, or compassion; it must be beautiful, ingenious and compassionate. It must not speak about god; it must be god’s voice. Art must not speak about the universe; it must be the actual voice of the universe. Abstraction should be earned through understanding; the reader should find it smothering beneath pillows of specificity.
It’s easy to write a poem about the terrible phenomena of human living, but it is cruel to the reader not to dilute overbearing tragedy with punch lines, non sequiturs, or at least childish wordplay.
A single word or phrase is as heavy as a sentence — work in a “phrase matrix” to isolate in columns anything from pairs of words to blocks of deadpan phrases, forcing the reader to make connections between elliptical ideas. The results produce an almost catatonic trance and even unintended, unforced meaning.
Verse is posed to illustrate meaning that is rooted in a reality preceding our conceptions. The poet uses abstractions to represent beauty and fear, which exist before and after human consciousness.
The universality of childhood, landscape and ecology presents an unsolvable riddle to be examined thoroughly and inconclusively by any follower of negative capability.
Enjambment is not an end-stop, and left alignment is a coffin nail — poetry built around white space for aesthetic differentiation of phrases and the isolation of interesting fragments. The words must be presented as a visual art.
Anything is artistic when it expresses the qualities of permanence: equilibrium, self-realization, generosity, and self-confidence.
The surreal and the nonsensical are as equally ideal for a poem as a truthful anecdote, as they capture the logic and the insane camp of the brain’s expanding synapse-territorialization during any given thought stream. The weirdest combinations of the weird purify poetry.
The subject of a poem must not appear through deduction or interpretation. It must not speak about beauty, ingeniousness, or compassion; it must be beautiful, ingenious and compassionate. It must not speak about god; it must be god’s voice. Art must not speak about the universe; it must be the actual voice of the universe. Abstraction should be earned through understanding; the reader should find it smothering beneath pillows of specificity.
It’s easy to write a poem about the terrible phenomena of human living, but it is cruel to the reader not to dilute overbearing tragedy with punch lines, non sequiturs, or at least childish wordplay.
A single word or phrase is as heavy as a sentence — work in a “phrase matrix” to isolate in columns anything from pairs of words to blocks of deadpan phrases, forcing the reader to make connections between elliptical ideas. The results produce an almost catatonic trance and even unintended, unforced meaning.
Verse is posed to illustrate meaning that is rooted in a reality preceding our conceptions. The poet uses abstractions to represent beauty and fear, which exist before and after human consciousness.
The universality of childhood, landscape and ecology presents an unsolvable riddle to be examined thoroughly and inconclusively by any follower of negative capability.
Enjambment is not an end-stop, and left alignment is a coffin nail — poetry built around white space for aesthetic differentiation of phrases and the isolation of interesting fragments. The words must be presented as a visual art.
Anything is artistic when it expresses the qualities of permanence: equilibrium, self-realization, generosity, and self-confidence.