Poeta Doctus

Time constraints and temperament restrict many of my thoughts to remarks. Thus, what follows are emphatically fragments, metonymies (parts) of potentially more-extended discourses and drafts (essays) holding the promise of future elaboration…

These posts take their title from Jeffrey C. Robinson’s description of his work-in-progress Romantic Manifestoes Manifest, an anthology of “statements, terms, and jargon from the ‘Romantic mother-lode’ (Anne Waldman).”

RE: “incommensurability”—Art which resists immediate comprehension, “consumption,” and “the commodity form”—BUT all poetry, even the most banal, possesses an aesthetic reserve, infinite in principle, i.e., every textual artefact de jure and de facto possesses an infinity of significance or meaning (not that all of that in every instance is necessarily “interesting,” but even something’s being interesting is always relative in many ways…).—The language of every poem must possess an aesthetic minim even to appear at all: “absolute transparency” = invisibility. And every poem, especially a poetry book, in its materiality is caught up inescapably in the means of production and the market and liquidated in exchange…

Poem as “economy”; poem as “magic” or spel…

The detonation of the A-bomb not as an extension of a Promethean process sparked by the discovery/domestication of fire but as rupture, as a quantum leap, underwritten itself by quantum theory, which, itself, radically, breaks with and transcends the Atomism that governed physics since at least Democritus, marking the mind’s reaching a limit (indicated by the contradiction between the undeniable efficacy of quantum mechanics but our inability to understand or grasp the logic of the reality underlying quantum mechanics), along with Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, all a piece, perhaps, with the advent of industrial capitalism and its exploitation of fossil fuels, which, in turn, push the biosphere to and beyond the Holocene which nurtured agriculture and the consequent division of labour that set some human societies, fatefully, in the direction of the present…

Within the horizon of social media, the “selfie,” what consequences for the poetic genre that puts the self on display, the “lyric”?…