To think about achieving new cosmologies, to think outside the geometry of the known (or presumed) universe, we must first come to the understanding that rule-based thinking is designed to leave us with thoughts that re-affirm the underlying preconceptions, the rules…

The artist, the poet, learns to sketch free-hand, trusting that there is more life, more truth, more expressive capacity, in the traces left by a free hand than in the paint-by-numbers standard copy we might be tempted to produce (as if to show that we can or to demonstrate reverence for the conventions that elevate their proponents); the scope of the free hand is broader, so its ability to find its way is more evolved…

Dialogue works best this way as well: when two parties get beyond the vices of convention and expand outward into another sort of interpretive momentum, where the quality of the leap between one phrase and another is enhanced, and more of the previously unseen can be revealed…

A new utterance, or better, a new mode of utterance, is a de-structuring (or a deconstruction) of already standing structures through which utterance once has been known, and in that, it is a critique, an undermining and also a contribution…

In invention, there is a judgment about the frail and fluid nature of what is real, what is final, and as Joseph G. Kronick writes, in Derrida and the Future of Literature:

Such a judgment fails, however, to the extent that it obeys a law and does not reinstitute or reinvent the law in a new judgment. IT is a matter of doing justice to what is to come, the other, to singularity, to the singularity of the coming of the other, an impossible but necessary task, for the “other” is a name for what can bear no name, not even (and least of all) “Being.” It is to come precisely because is does not have the status of a present being, nor is it an object of knowledge. The other is what calls for a response.

To write is to engage the world in new terms. To create is to find shapes and voices new enough to seem a new world or a new standard, beyond the known. And to think toward the future is, of necessity, to engage something that we do not yet know: it requires invention, openness to shifting of sands, monuments, bodies of law and manners of parsing every x into its y and z, every memory into its offspring…

We find ourselves renovated by engaging an imagined future. Wisdom resides in the other as it resides deep within, not showing signs unless we embody the poise and patience to feel how it flows. Creating must be a work committed to being against the ravages of entropy, against disintegration, so we venture out into the de-structuring of the known, in order to write the next, and find synthesis, connection, coming together…

• Originally published 27 May 2009, at Elindulnék

The art of the rhyming couplet, the frenetic ebb and flow of iambic pentameter, sometimes seem in today’s language environment more a distraction than a vehicle for delivering meaning across time. Poetry now resides in subtler places in more intricate and interrelated forms. It seeps into political discourse, into rap, into the dialogue between two characters on a movie screen, often for brief moments, then pushed aside by a mass of prose and fact and circumstance. But this is not new and it is not hazardous to poetry’s survival as a concentrated art-form fashioning new molds and opening new horizons.

It has always been the case that the oracular function of poetry, looking deep within or to the far reaches of the known and knowable, happens at the edges of the prosaic, at the fringe of our collective normalcy, in a place where in direct proportion to the intensity of the vision we confront those basic truths of our existence we often prefer not to engage.

The impact of poetry on the dexterity and relevance of meaning, in all other areas of linguistic or even expressive activity, broadly, is not lessened by the frequency with which we now change topics, shuffle from style to style or distance the moment’s future from the once most-desired vision of it. On the contrary, poetry fits the moment, always, in some manner, precisely because far from having to evolve to suit the moment poetry’s function is to drive meaning deeper into the core of all that is swirling around us.

We must first remember that an art must be judged by its best practitioners, not by the common trend. From this vantage point, we can see that the ancient vanguard of the written word continues to infuse our core realities with meaning more efficiently and cogently than any other related art-form, filling its host environments with the casual essence they might not otherwise have noticed.

• First published at Helium.com, November 2008 (you can rate the article there now)
• Republished 17 November 2008, at CafeSentido.com