Thomas Lowe Taylor -- Fragment, too

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without a sense of play, of fuckinaround, you can't know the machinations of
the poem, right? you know that already. as well 'the structure of things
revealed' --surely love is more than the sum of all its declarations,
greater than the sum of its parts, more than ALL we can say about it. that
may be true for any generalization, or a reflection on the nature of lingo.

as archetypes, we are spirit-warrior-priests in a pagan land which is given
over to appearances, etc etc. i think we seek to encode and enshrine the
wisdom of the past into our own expressions to make this energy live in us
but as well to collect its living expressions, packing our dead sea scrolls
into caves dug into the hillsides of our culture in anticipation of a coming
'dark age' when the sheer demographics of the planet excuse culture from its humanizing task in favor of mere survival. if we are not to extinct
(fucking ourselves to death, as it were) then we must make some sense of
what will survive 'after the fall'. all extrapolaters (even one's common
sense) imagine a collapse of our toy-generated techno-culture. one day we
will run out of gas. so our mission as artists is to become responsible to
the gifts we have and then gather and collect, hopefully as an entity,
surely more than 'a group,' as a hedge against the natural wildness and
intractibility of man himself. 'life is nasty, brutish and short' some
politico had it 200 years back. so i try to be(come) a purposeful
transcendentalist, that is, to have a program, to have something in mind
behind the machinations of style and form we pursue in our modernity. we
are hostage to the moment, made more so every minute by the obliteration of history made momentary by the video brain. best to lay low and do the work.
nothing to be gained by putting ones self 'out there' but envy and cheap
shots. i remember a rejection slip from way back that said among other
things 'you can't do this', like, i didn't have permission to veer off the
time-honored image-driven poetries based in nostalgia for a present one
can't experience in favor of a cosmic aspiration which aims at getting into
another time and space, also the present. so the contradictions you
experience are part of the work to be continued.

In ‘free composition’ aka ‘free association, composers discover that any two notes next to each other in time will create an overtone which is different from each of the source notes. Similarly, painters discover that any two colors next to each other will leave an afterimage in immediate memory as a part of the decay process in perception. And writers discover that any two words next to each other will generate a composite energy derived from their placement (in time). So in line length and word play, you will accumulate sequences in line (in time) which gatheer energy and release energy alternatively. The metronome is always ticking along (in time) with your heartbeat and your bloodflow as invisible passions and energies course through your body. Too many too similar pairings or word assemblages can cancel the forward flow of energy. Accumulation and discharge along the time line, giving the appearance of forward motion—‘toward something.’ Syntax is the rhythm of the words in a sentence or sentences in a paragraph which basically leads toward a comfort zone, a feeling of arrival—‘being or getting there.’ So in line length, you want to decide how many charge/discharges you want in each segment or line. Two things next to each other shadow a third, the implied resolution of each in its own realm. Two things similar to each other (the same kind of syntactical unit) will tend to cancel each other out, leaving a nul or a void. And just as ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ some new formation will ‘present itself’ for selection. Without a destination in view, either suggested or implied, this rhythm of accumulation and discharge can continue throughout an entire work. A space is described or defined which the writing circles around, like dancing around the camp fire, flame in the middle, heat at the center, your self at the edges moving around and around…..

"Homo Ludens" Johan Huizanga
"The Poet" Ralph Waldo Emerson