A shameful complicity is enacted when lack of meaning further presses reality into signification, through language. A poet attempts to undo this process by constructing (not describing) a space at the edge of meaning, bared with logic and music whereby language is released back to its neutral non-zero (Higgs) field. Therein rests the poet’s reaction to the boredom and frustration resulting from his or her ongoing inability to distract the self into an extinction of reality - an extinction that has come about because of the democratization of matter and the resulting expansion of capitalization into the personal domain.
Boredom and frustration have thus been put to good use through an impersonality (Simone Weil) out of compassion, not compensation. Unlike pride, compassion includes all, not just the self. The poet welcomes it, having been bored with the self. Grandeur pales next to the tenderness of compassion. One keeps the eyes open to the past, shares its glory and shame because as human one is the beneficiary of both.
Poetry is a voyage with no external goal, refusing the tyranny of arrival, heeding the plasticity and exuberance of intentionality. Letters attain spirit, sound, weight through muscle bound phrases, word combinations and broken lines. The poet is after texture, rhythm, music, after a semblance to meaning, after words in a relationship emptied of content or grammar, ‘how it wants to mean’ prevailing over ‘what it means’ - an event, not the recording of it. The poet approaches this event through privilege, not prestige, without the need to establish voice, reaching for the paradigm as it is being created.
Elytis said "I write because it charms me to obey one of whom I know so little - myself." Myself is an afflicted Armenian-American from Beirut, Lebanon, where a variety of religions, languages and nationalities coexist(ed) in a rare mixture of oriental simultaneity and occidental individualism. I have no mother tongue as my mother tongue has either lost me or is cut off. I implode within this loss, seeking the chaos sustaining the world of languages with a voice that has the body and place of an absent body, attempting to maintain poetry at a threshold above which there is meaning and articulation, below which there is nothing but an emotional map of impaired and ungracious linguistic capacity. The afflicted do not suffer. An attitude of tragicomedy allows me to approach my states of anonymity and confusion over identity, like a retroactive being, dimming the future, shadowing the present, always with an eye to the past, to what happened, becoming what Toufic calls the aparte' - that which is created, not from what has been remembered of an event but from what has been forgotten about it through the historical documentation of it. The afflicted do not suffer.
The text of a poem may feel like an aggression against the reader/listener as it delivers the poet’s choice meaning or lack of it, in addition to the order of meaning that adulterates meaning - thought beyond thought with no center but borders, liminal and luminous, interchangeable. It may feel like a litany, like Scheherazade tales, an all news station, piano bar music or the Nareg (lamentations of Naregatsi, 10th Century Armenian monk, imploring/wrestling with god, talking as if to the computer, the promise of one's own reply in the air). Here, language develops thought. Here are arrivals and events with no arrivals. Composed as if on one note, the text releases without releasing into, turning against language with language in order to restore its incantatory quality. Its space/time relationship is both modern (overlapping, as with technology) and time-honored (multi-dimensional, as in Gnostic text) a continuum towards a derivative of the past whereby the new would occur, hoping the labyrinthine structure of the work will bring the reader/listener again and again to the same spot, time and history abolished because of what escapes or survives the disintegration of experience.
How concepts, rights and ideas are in the way of doing justice to a piece of writing. Producing the proper oeuvre, the one with the (mediocre) notion of rules, the right one, seems to carry the utmost of merit. Still one efforts distracted and weary of the conventional, even as Gemeinschaft (community) gives in to Gesellschaft (society). Occurrence manifests itself, embraces the will of the times towards - poetry??
Why because poetry, like politics, utilizes principles of inclusion and process rather than rejection or criticism to address life issues, whether personal, regional or global. That, however, may be the only kinship thereof, as poetry, unlike fiction or critical discourse, has nothing to say. Art bitten by poetry longs to be freed from reason, said Maritain. Hence the impact of poetry is deeper and more intense, often the desire to co-opt it seeping in, corrupting it.
A mind enclosed in language is imprisoned. When one is victim, one is also accomplice. Yet sometimes in that very simple minded universe that dances in approximations and chaos, words are illuminated when they reflect the inexpressible. One has reached the impersonal stage of attention. Truth and beauty dwell at the impersonal and the anonymous otherwise described as love. That is how one comes to language, with reverence, to serve rather than exploit it. That is how I am put to good use. Reciprocated, matter that I am.