On Poetic Confusion

A well-informed confusion is, and must be, the basis for all poetry that seeks to tilt its expansive lance at the contemporary fissions and joinings that link man with environment. We must risk being obtuse, we must risk risklessness and abstraction: for in truth, we as poets today no longer have a better world to coyly reveal, but only doubts and criticisms, and especially the clinging, cloying doubt that applies to our own endeavor.

I have been lately delving into the world of Buddhist doctrine and thought-criticism, and in my search uncovered the allegory that I use to explicate and conceptualize my own work. In the Tathagatagarba sutra, we find the principle of Dharmakaya, the Buddha-body or Buddha-nature, the eternal Self. In fact, this seems to be the entire thrust of the discourse: to establish this True Face, this mirror of soul, which we must cleanse of distraction and abstraction in order to see the world pure. But this flies in the face of one of the most basic Buddhist tenets, the characteristics of the world: Dukkha (suffering), Anicca (impermanence), and Anatta (Selflessness). One of Siddhartha's most important early philosophical positions was to deny the Eternalism of Hinduism and the progression of an unchanged Soul: Anatta very literally means "No-Atman." There is no Self, in classic Buddhism, besides the psychological characteristics which condition our consciousness; these characteristics may carry over through rebirths, but they are qualities, differentiated qualities, and as we all know, all differentiation, qualification, and conceptualization is false. There is no Self. And yet, according to many schools of learned masters, there is a Self; there is a mirror from which to wipe the dust. In this, one of the greatest systems of terminology and discourse which the human race has ever produced to discuss being and consciousness fails. And it fails in a way which seems unforeseen, but which truly could not have been any other way.

Rather than syllogism, in Buddhist critical theory we have a fourfold application of truth value: something is (affirmation), something is not (negation), something both is and is not (affirmation & negation), and something neither is nor is not (neither affirmation nor negation). Aristotle would be confused. Now, with a couple thousand years of philosophizing under our belt, we can see that Buddha was speaking on the space between signs and their referents: my word "tree" in no way corresponds to the tree outside, except by artificial consensus. It both is and is not a tree, and it also neither is nor is not a tree.

But even this I'm not sure about.

There has been quite a bit of thought lately about the nature of meaning and sound: after all, the Word was with God and all things were made by him; without him was nothing made that was made. DNA is a system of signs that generates life. The Hindus and related schools have long said that the universe is composed of sound, or as a modern physicist would put it, we are all just vibrations on strings.

But what are the strings?

Does the tree have some type of inherent linguistic value? A point on the grid of language?

I read massive amounts of modern poetry. Many deride the state of affairs in the Poetry Biz today, with PhDs and Institutional Approval everywhere, and much of the anti-culture stuff like Spoken Word being simply bad. Tarn vocalized his discontent, saying that though perhaps there was better poetry being produced now, in the twilight of his life, than ever before in the world, still it was impossible for him to sort through the vast jumble of bad poetry to approach the quality work. What he decried, I applaud: the democratization and equality of poetry. Even if you have a MacArthur fellowship, you're still just some guy writing poems. It may give you the commercial go-ahead to dedicate a significant amount of time to thinking about poems

but really

we who labor not for success as a commodity nor strive to have the label of 'genius' affixed to our resumes by a publicly-funded gallery or institution

are free to say what the fuck we want

to question the often-frivolous art world and literary world

to laugh at our heroes

and be comfortable in the assumption that if you write bad poems, no one will care to read them; but if we take care of poetry, she will take care of us

I am thus absolutely not comfortable taking any position that resembles a stand in my work, and I am not able to valorize anything but what is already privileged: the Question. This doesn't matter, anyway, because I cannot affirm something without simultaneously sowing the seeds of its destruction; the human mind, the writer's mind, the Mind that is & is not just doesn't work that way.

So I will mythologize things that arise from the convoluted, twisting ball of sameness beneath myth; I will gloss emotions that are dull, or bright, or anything but glossy; I will discuss things that cannot be subjects of discussion; sex will be the creativity inherent in all matter and the illusion that must be banished; technology will be the excretion of Nature and Nature will be the vomit of the mind; I will vault over language to see God's face

and in it

to see my own.

Goodnight and God Bless.