I reach the real through the dream. I
invent you reality
- Clarice 'Hurricane Clarice' Lispector
Academic and other definitions of poetry as
‘literature’ displace the act of poetic creation from the interior
psycho-biological universe to an epiphenomenal world of cultural-linguistic
constructs where ‘communication’ is all.
Do I write poetry to communicate? No.
Is my poetry a spiritual exercise? No.
Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, in their different ways,
consigned metaphysics to oblivion. What has this to do with me? Everything.
Does this mean that only language remains? No.
I will never concede that poetry is literature. The cultural-linguistic paradigm presupposes that everything depends on language to the extent that Being is literally indefinable in extra-linguistic terms: very convenient – if you are a linguist, a post-modernist - or a plumber. Yet, as we all know, 'the map is not the territory' (Korzybski).
I know my creativity is an innate psycho-active
phenomenon. The raison d’etre of my
paradigm is transformation, the ‘circumstantial-magical’ convulsion caused by that particular Beauty, ‘the only beauty that
should concern us’ (the enigmatic sphinx, the marvelous precipitate of the
ancient alchemists) invoked by the transformation of despised prime matter into
pure aesthetic gold. Fantastic? Romantic? Symbolist? Surreal? Pop? Subtopian
Materialism? But, of course!
The raw material of creation,
rather like a chance encounter in the street, is not so much language but me as poet,
my ego and all: and the essence of poetic practice is active imagination, even though it is through language that we unleash the vision thing from another world. It
is inevitable that poets, in pursuit of inspiration, will engage, in some way
or other, with all those innate processes of inner integration, those ‘inner
workings’ that surely exist. From this perspective the poem itself may appear a
by-product of the procedure; an exercise in therapy, propaganda or, let’s face
it, pure entertainment. Take it or leave it.
For me, as I penetrate the archaic
heritage, that archetypal forest of symbols; it is the compulsive activity of
inspiration arising from the process of self-discovery that is the prime
factor: it is this that dissolves those artificial barriers between fact and
fiction, between sleep and waking, between dream and reality, between
consciousness and the unconscious, between inner and outer space… Thus the poem
is quasi-autonomous; it partakes of the de-familiarizing power of symbolic
Otherness. Is it too late to get unreal?
Grounding poetic practice in the ontological matrix
dissociates ‘pure poetry’ from the cultural-linguistic, epiphenomenal
foreground of ‘literary’ discourse, from the dreary, enervating world of
career-writers and fake self-referential experimentalists obsessed with
brownie-points and prizes.
I know that unilateral engagement on an aesthetic
basis with the principium individuationis
does not accord with traditional models of perfectibility or divine purpose;
perhaps it can be seen as a promethean affront to the established order, or as a
way of repossessing everything that has been expropriated (that is to say,
stolen from us) by agents of the Mysterium.
This is not some kind of spiritual exercise but a way of accessing, as a
psychonaut, the mythopoeic domain, the Enchanter’s Domain: a neo-shamanistic
anti-quest that is certainly the very antithesis of enlightenment and
salvation. Oh, yes, I know I am a spiritual flaneur,
a damned poet and (eye roll) a ‘lost’ soul.
To be damned is to be modern, absolutely modern; and
to be modern is to be utterly damned once and for all. The human condition
evolves too fast or not fast enough, yet the horizon of change is Fear, and the
closer we are to the horizon the less we care about rhyme or reason: blank
verse for a blank generation. Eye roll and U bend. And that is why.
Revised version of an article from Stride Magazine, 2002
Illus: Visionary Or Nothing II, 2009
