Right now I’m thinking of poems as sensation generating events that rather than concentrate on either on the referencing process, on the narrative or its speaker, the signified or signifier, the phoneme, or any of the traditional corporeal aspects of the poem, concentrate instead on the incorporeal, the phantasms and microphantasms that the body of a poem can project, on its ghosts, ever so fleetingly. What Brian Massumi calls the virtual. Pre-reference. Pre-narrative. Events that characterize emergent and self-organizing systems that happen in far-from-equilibrium conditions. “Dissipative structures,” to take a phrase from Prigogine, that throw off possible-narratives, or possible-nodes of awareness. Something like this (wish me luck; I’ll need it):
Insignia
In the fragile moment of the letter that
calls out your name, in the lift up over sounding
of the medicine quill, tincture at wrist
blue under yellow shaft of flicker
under owl wing sonata, green
ink, copper wall window, colour of
endangered hush. Walk in here, she said, and she
meant by way of the colours, which deepened
as you heard them, bone white, bone yellow, bone
black, coloratura, an insignia embossed
in beaten gold, every door its own
paradise animal, its own eye.