Sunday, March 27, 2011

CIRCLES OF POETS

Sent to me by Aad de Gids, who is a poet in Rotterdam, one of the major cities that will be threatened early by the rising sea level caused by global warming and the breaking up of the polar ice sheets.  I’ve left it as sent, though English is not Aads’ first language (he has three) which I like because he finds world/word slants like cnnamatic/cinematic.
At the end Aad is quoting other poets who exchange ideas and work on Facebook.  These are the people Tim was working with for a while before Facebook dropped him.  (Facebook has been dropping MANY people.  They don’t always know why.) Elazar Larry Freifeld, lives with his wife, Lois, in Tel Aviv, where his name echoes a famous Hebrew poet from the past, Eleazar.  A bibliography of his work is at http://unpublishedworks.org/E.L.F.Catalog.htm   The other, Jacques, is Jack Hughes.  Many people have this name, but I think this link is his:  http://www.authonomy.com/writing-community/profile/ad1f3792-0442-4ff3-ac15-a26e4689eb59/jack-hughes/
I don’t know whether these people are reading “prairiemary.” Aad certainly does -- this is a response -- so the serpent at the end is the one in my blog post earlier this week.  They have accepted this paradigm shift into endless, transformative, inclusive new times -- Jacques more than Elazar and Aad more than either.  Aad is an academically trained psychiatric nurse (35 years of service) but also wrote his thesis on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which is not so much the “deconstruction” of Derrida and Foucault as a reconstruction of new ideas.  Recently there has been increasing interest in the relationship between psychotherapy and philosophy, the latter being a bit more detached from the person and more interested in his or her worldview.  
If paradigm shift, as Thomas Kuhn suggested, is a matter of accumulating dissonance -- cultural information and scientific facts that don’t fit what is directly observed and proven, then why wouldn’t the person who sees the problem and comments upon it be chided for being crazy, not conforming to what the culture says is true?  Even science has to fight its way past the assumptions of the culture.
A strong element these poets (including Tim) share is raging indignation at the loss and violence in the world, a social consciousness that becomes an inner fuel for resisting oppression through singing stories, even terrifying rants.
___________
overwhelming submerging
maybe there is a greater sadness here. exemplified, and suffered at first and last,
of course, in japan, maybe we sense a greater loss. it is best described in inclusiveness,
as to appreciate all visions posted here, as we have different generations, but a recurrent 
theme seems to be the spiralling or circling or of recursiveness,
which can be as well taoist as melancholic, eastern as western as experienced in a jiddische profundity of insight. but the sadness remains and,of course,is one of the things evolving 
out of that enormous seismic shift, which somehow,also seems to incorporate a paradigmatic 
shift. a loss of capitalism or economy perhaps. another loss of identity. a shakenness. 
vulnerability. a primal fear to get submerged, drowned, in sorrow, tears, a deluge. this has 
to be interpreted as symbolic as cnnamatic. 
as cinematic,if only to stress that that last word was what it was. cinema picked up on it
real soon,”now”, as i discovered when looking up “honshu” or “fukushima”. the animes were
already made. ready mades. neoduchamp. absorbed in the neonneon of tokyo,the neoneon
of yokohama. 
the sketch of jack also is emblematic. 
partly it comes from the writerly economy of the internet. all of this writing, all 
of this nest-building -- the sense of vertigo when you are shown the long view, the 
incessant circles of nest building, circles like growth rings of a tree....... that sense 
of too-muchness, of each inner tree ring being cut off from the sun by all those 
beyond it... this is an optical illusion... a perspectivism.... it is no different from 
the immanence, the hereness of the present moment...... and yet, it requires a 
readjustment of our spiritual parameters. It is much different than the old model, 
that of patient ascending composition, editing, revising, submission, eventual 
possible approval, that huge cresting wave of the publication, and now the published 
book, the thing done, the achieved..... which is an illusion..... instead now it is the 
sand painting, the mandala, the circle drawn in the sand, the thinker sits crosslegged 
inside it, the sand mandala woven of dropped bits of sand for hours and days.... and 
then, once accomplished, we take it outside, we hold it up to the wind, it blows off 
free and clean..... which is an illusion..... and yet how different these signs may be, 
these metaphors may be.....”/j.
after this i can extrapolate further that,the longer, the more, the harsher we hang on to old
“modules”, ”nodes”, of thoughts, feelings, the more difficult it will be to live in this world
really evidently. paradoxically that may mean: really artificially, virtually, [posthuman],
bereft of our centralist position or positron, geocentrism, antropocentrism, heliocentrism,
perhaps “centrism” alltogether becomes blown away at last. at last,after the finishing of the mandala,”at last", good riddance.
“i've been hearing this demise of the old stuff all my life until i have seen my dear 
modernist friends get old, and their talk. and like the leaf insect eaten by another leaf... everything gets old, Jacques, and not everything dies...i love publishing, i have printers ink in my blood, i am the ghost of 'printer's devil'”./elazar
“i like illusions, i have beautiful loads of it/them. i do agree however with the shifting 
spiritual perspective and quantum thereof...i just don't feel like a drip or mandala or 
circle drawn, Jacques. the bulwark of old or new is foolishness because the passion 
with which i turn to re to redact the better i become a writer, imo. where is the
inclusiveness that we share, if not in taste only”./elazar
the inclusiveness, i guess, sits in the experience of “shift” and a “new “ that doesn’t entirely
excludes “the old” but, swallowed it.

1 comment:

Art Durkee said...

I was reading a poet's commentary earlier today about political poetry, using his own poems as examples. He was chewing on the conventional wisdom and paradox: i.e. if poets really are the unheralded legislators of the world, where's the political poetry these days? And why is it so easily dismissed and ignored? This poet had no answer, he just recycled the dilemma.

When I read what you have here, though, I start to think: well, here it is. Here it is.

Frankly, it works better AS POETRY, because it's specific, even when philosophical, rather than a mediocre poet like Carolyn Forché writing vague generalities about the Holocaust. What Tim does is engage on the front lines with social injustice—which is why he's so threatening to some. It's the vatic mode of poetic prophecy. It's not vague pronouncements about generalities, which is what a lot of poets confuse as being political. Aad's wanderings over the terrain here add up to something, because they're rooted in specific circumstance, a response to the genuine. Psychology gets personal and individual, philosophy can be more detached, vague and generic. That's one reason psychological poetry can be more political, in the long haul, because it connects to people, not just to ideas about people.