FormX and Spiral Dynamics (Boston Comment 3)

The third question in the Boston Comment roundtable was one I've wondered of some: "do you enjoy reading a collection of individual, unconnected lines?" It's a pointed question, of course. But I think Kent Johnson showed up to play, in other words honestly attempt to answer the question in order to explain and possibly enlighten, rather than merely belittle or goof. I have to admit his response is intriguing:

Anyway, different reading formations will naturally have different backgrounds, aims, and expectations—particularly so, I'd say, where the matter of “pleasure” is concerned. Renga is an example: A typical sequence will likely be complete non-syllogistic nonsense to the reader coming at it without training or context, yet the same poem will unfold the most fractal and beautiful semantic textures to someone seriously engaged with the practice. And this is a genre of “individual, unconnected lines” that goes back more than 800 years. Viva la Avant-garde!

No, it's common sense that there are different ways of making sense, and poems that radically depart from narrative, anecdotal, scenic means of telling--be they from the Tsukubashu anthology or from In the American Tree-- often show how “sense” may be a more complex and dimensioned field than the partisans of expository, “plain language” poetry (traditionally metered or not) would often have it. As Stein says, a poem may be “not unordered in not resembling.”

There is a third way of course. FormX is a second-tier poetics integrating the previous scientific, mythic, and relativistic consciousnesses into a transcendent understanding of all previous poetics. And in that vein, it is not an end in itself but a necessary door into the holistic poetics that await us on the other side. No manifestos are needed though; it just is.

Connect the Dots

A voice is setting in
the east; beneath its warm
inflections gentle waves
create this shore. A storm
will be approaching soon.
Its thunder wakes the moon.

The river stretches on
the wakes of power boats.
The current water-skis
between anchors and floats.
The riverbanks foreclose
its smooth and fluid prose.

I can hear the loons
somewhere on the lake
crying something crazy.
I once was at a wake
and heard such kindred grief
arise in disbelief.

Gregory Perry 2004