for a future treatise, part one

Since I don't trust the gifts of demons of either the ancient or modern breed, I want to know thought went into a poem. Even if the space it explores is more limbic than cerebral, there is no excuse for a sloppy indulgent tour through limbic space when careful tempered tours abound. For a journal entry to be a poem, for example, it should have more than line breaks, as critics have requested. It should have embedded meanings; whether pitched images, propositions and their echoes, discoveries of language or narrative, it should contain words that draw toward ideas, if not exhibit them.

A poem should reward the further study that comes after the early inroads. It should be at some level or another a lesson, though one that seeks valuation where normally one expects evaluation. The lesson need not be and usually should not be directly stated (unless, none the worse for the poem, there is a lesson accomplished in part by the direct stating of a lesson); rather, it can be embodied in the midst of its materials of construction; it can be the statue in the clay. But charming, disarming, or neither, proselytizing or not, tendering a lesson caught as a cat in a mirrored cage or a lesson wild as a solar flare, a poem should be at worst esoteric: never static.

Actually, there is room in poetry for the celebration of static, but too many poems are themselves static. Indeed, celebrations of static as static -- static personalized as the accidents and coincidences recruited to help locate a poem, static cleaving to the edges of the known, static as silence between the signals -- often work with and for a poem. And indeed, generally, both writers and readers of poetry affirm the truism that poems can use language to do something outside of language. They may share a mystery, shed an illusion, carve out a niche for a rare or frequent feeling, transform a thing into its relations, or, needling it in some novel way with the world, empty a phrase of its meaning, or fill it. But a poem is not its parts and aims: A sequence of words that uses neither static nor signal nor their ratio, neither gesture nor syntax nor their relation, to any great effect, is not yet a poem.

You may ask, Isn't the effect in the eye of the affected? And in the eyes of the age, as the spectrum of prevailing orthodoxies? I find myself unable to believe in the project of poetry without answering, Not entirely. And in the balance -- or rather, in the lack of balance between transmission and reception, between perspicuous poem and ready reader -- lies poetry.