Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Out of World Poet:

Must, 1, be willing to embrace the poem as both dissonant truth and beautiful lie-- the truth/lie being the poem's leniencies outside of its design, where it's patterns yearn for destruction of patterns, where it's oblivious self-destruction signifies its yearning for order. Where its call to order is its own, where its disobedience is its purpose.

Must 2, contemplate the following:

If I am the poet, I am being the poem I write,
in that
my maker earnestly made me not as I can make myself

and I desire to make myself, in the absence
of how I am designed to be, truly
what I am meant to

-OR-

reject what the writer is to the poem
and care not.

Must, 3, view himself/herself/itself as a creator incapable of designating interpretation; A beginning of a process, a participant in eventual reapplication of the process, but not the process itself. The provider, a one provided for, but never the providence. To construct art "to be for the sake of institution" is no more creating "institution" than simply creating being. To create art with a function is to remove from the art the function of art.

While art can serve a function, its function neither exhibits the purified intention of the creator or the intention of the perceiver. While a crate of unavoidably damageable goods can be carried from one continent to another, it is neither purely the packager of the goods nor the receiver of the goods that contributes to the shape of the goods. The vehicle in which the goods traveled from one destination to another is not merely a distance, but something of material.

Must 4. See poetry as an opportunity in which the material intended (in relation to material understood) predestines the creation of counter ground. No matter what a poet seeks to employ in his/her poetry, success or failure (as it is wrongfully sought out) can only be witnessed from a moment separate than both creation and re-perception. The poem, when existent on the page, has become a separated clone of the writer's intention (an Out-of-World) (a construct of both its replicated half and a new half gained though its separate existence).

Must 5, realize the relationship of what was internal and what has become the externalization of what was internal, as neither the pure externalization of the internal or an externalization, but also an alternate "internal" based upon its exhibitionist quality. What is accomplished on a stage is not merely what was intended for the stage or the arena (the stage) where what was intended happened. Instead, a poem has the capability of being a third area (one which is created through the unavailability of a solid transfer). The concept of "the poem" becomes more or less, less in the more, more in the less, more in the more, or less in the less "the poem" when it becomes "the poem." The conscious materialization of poetry is not materialization of poetry, but the synthesis of material that materializes itself.

Thus, the Out of World poet, who seeks to better understand the inner world of poetry as an outsider, must 4, allow the poem to materialize itself. How the poem materializes itself in the minds of multiple others (though direct relation or through relationship) must be upheld as the creation of a successful, organic, self-sustaining creation. An act as simple as denying the poet's self is not the correct course of action, as this negates the poem's ability to relate to its creator.

Yet, understanding the poem as a mere relationship between artistic consciousness and page is restrictive to the unique relationship the poem comes to obtain through being perceived. The Out of World poet should not merely produce to understand self, as the poem is an opportunity to create an alternate self much more easily understood, and thus, of much more consequence.

1 comment:

  1. I enjoy the tone you've taken up in your manifesto. I get a little caught up in the language at times, mostly because it grows a little dense. Particularly around the last few paragraphs, all the words start to catch up with me and I have to reread. I do rather like the style, though, all the same.

    The most successful point, in my opinion, is the second point which appears to be stanza-ed. I don't think I would mind if all the points were stanzas. The second point looks and reads cleaner and clearer than the rest of the piece and I'm drawn to it for this reason. It's a bit of fresh air in the middle of what is a complicated, almost scientific theory. If you didn't want to make the entire manifesto a poem (understandable) perhaps you could write a poem to illustrate each point and then elaborate on it in prose?

    Another wonderful moment is the third point, second paragraph, in which you explore the "traveling conditions" of poems--very eloquently put and also just a wildly interesting concept to think about.

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