A Poem is a Rhetoric of Substance and Selection

We shape and are shaped by language. It orients who and where we are.

The operational shape of a poem’s plan is always emergent; its layering is a rhetoric of substance and selection:

POETIC LAYERING

discovery – fragmemntary, selective information to exploratoration

preparation – accumulation, positioning of language to methodology

fabrication – progression, elaboration of performance to integration

recollection – emotional, diagnostic and reconsideration to memory

release – convergence of thought/language in execution

Rhetorical layering is not consecutive or sequential in a poem, but rather is organic and nonlinear, continuously composing, persuading, eloquently shaping meaning and experience.

In some ways layering is what the poem does as opposed to means, an important concept that we can get to later.

Layering is a poem’s internally evolving engine of persuasion, influence, organization and pleasure, reflecting the infinitely changing directions the mind takes as it both creates and experiences the poem.

A poem is a neurological product as well as an algorithm of language -- navigating data fields of the brain, the sensory world and technology -- through which images, ideas, and perceptions are filtered and altered.

The mind speaks to us in a language both known and unknown – a language that is always at the edge of thought, but not the thought itself – a language that is the representation of the thing thought or experienced, but not the thing itself.

A poem possesses within itself the structural design of intimacy, a kind of internal, natural architecture that pulls together, assembles and fabricates what is thought. As a product of the brain, it is a hybrid of technological influences.

Every poem poses a question whose resolution, though clearly described within the work, remains stubbornly silent, mysterious and unanswered.

A poem is full of the invented and the real, with no logical explanation as to why or how they might be related. That is its genius and essential beauty, and also is what releases us from needing to know the difference.

Poetry imposes a story upon experience.

A poem creates belief within uncertainty – realizing an assured buoyancy oscillating between confusion and understanding, disorder and symmetry.

When writing then reading occur online, the writer then reader become a part of the altered perceptions generated by the medium through which they are communicating.

The best paradigm for poetry in its creative process and compositional technique might be embodied in the experience we all encounter when searching on Google.

Exploring, seeking for something, we sort through search after search, adding, blending, coalescing layer upon layer of informational segments until some level of knowledge or experience is achieved.

Sometimes the search is a dead-end. Sometimes it is merely prosaic.

Words can fail as something put into words escapes our ability to explain what it is.

And yet, from time to time, that search also can produce something in the brain that shares the characteristics of thought, sensation and emotion where the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. We can’t wholly explain why that is so. Maybe that’s a good thing.

The solution is there in the words of the poem, but can’t be described.

We can come close to articulating its core, but the mystery remains . . . something that is just right and still just out of reach of the language articulating its meaning:

Perhaps  it’s  also  a  point of view  or  perhaps   only  differences  of   opinion  where electric  media   spin   off   digital  provocations   broadcasting  into  a  figure-ground relationship  ending  up  perched    on  a   precarious   limb   ready  to  instantly   steal    

away   like   a    bird    once   unseen  but  now  discovered  so   perhaps  we   are  in  a place  where   every   word   recedes    inside   its  own   distortions   and  where   any personal   distractions  might   overwhelm   an    emotional   quarrel    as negotiations   

will   in  a  heartbeat   result   in  feelings  of  conflict  and  a focus  on  abstraction  so explicit   it  is   in   the   blink  of  an   eye   an  unconscious   subconscious   image   we see   in   one another   our  eager   faces   leaning   deep   into   the   frozen   screen  the  

esemplastic  mind  thinking  that  all  this  is but  another  timeless form  of  amorphous decomposition  a growing  impatient sense  of intimacy  painfully starved of its  shape. 

Every poem presents a question whose resolution, though clearly described within the poem, remains outside of the poem itself, stubbornly silent, mysterious and unanswered.

Tune in to my next poetry post on Friday, April 19 to read, “The Place of Poetry in the Brain's GPS.”