"THE WHOLE BEYOND THE HOLE"

Just read a really interesting -- and wise -- poetics book (tho the author don't call it a "poetics"). Thing is, I've seen some of this poet's poems...and have found the poems to, as they say, lack the urgency of necessity.

What is it that leads the most profound poetics to manifest itself in the most ... banal poems?

If the answer is that Poetry is inarticulable, well, okay. But that's been done. Poetry, it seems to me, always asks: what happens post-End?

Art is difficult ... so that, often, wisdom doesn't suffice.

*****

Yes, the poem transcends autobiography.

Yes, the process is often what's significant.

No wonder the dreams have returned -- of turning poetry books into something else. Something else, usually in my dreams to be sculptures (for sculptures rise above the one-dimension of a page?) -- like a favorite being the planters with books stacked to look like they're trees growing out of the planters (aren't there sculptures like these framing the entryway to Beyond Baroque?). Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, trees to paper to trees...

The last couple of times I read from The Light Sang As It Left Your Eyes, I tore out pages and tossed them at the audience.

Shortly after releasing The Light... I determined no more books for a while. Yet I have two more books coming out within the next 12 months. Now I understand that, paradoxically, I'm prolific, book-wise, but for another reason than releasing books.

*****

I have this in-progress conceptual project -- in the seeming form of a visual art exhibition -- of taking the physical bodies of poetry books and reconceptualizing it/them into something else. My thoughts aren't fully formed, but my envisioning of the exhibition space (right now) is where one enters through the gallery door to immediately face a poetry book set like a jewel within an over-the-top ornate gold frame.

But from that opening of privileging the poetry book, you move on into the gallery to see all sorts of ways in which the poetry book has been "degraded" into something else.

Because, you see, relatively few people read poetry books (not bemoaning that; such has always been the case, yah?) and yet the Poetry exists. The Poetry perseveres.

The Poetry perseveres and, sometimes, things happen and it is only later that people recognize them for the Poetry that they were.

*****

I'm reprinting this photo below that will be on the cover of my forthcoming book, THE BLIND CHATELAINE'S KEYS because it provides Moi with much cheer. Besides, what happens when the key is not fixed?

What happens when the key is held by the blind?

What happens when the key is as solid as identity?

What happens when the chatelaine is just heavy with so many keys and yet so few doorways exist?

What happens when the chatelaine tires of always always always borrowing the power that forms identity?

How might the chatelaine write "the whole beyond the hole" again ... or for the first time?



Photo of dancer/musician Caroline Cabading of Palabuniyan Kulintang Ensemble by Rhett Pascual/Your Exquisite Photos.