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An adventure that you can neither embark on nor finish. You are, therefore, under duress, even within the illusion of a borderline, evergreen clearing. All you need do is work. Wanting to and, at the same time, not. By a causality that’s not a matter of will. It is a matter of principle. That principle instantaneously gives rise to a will by means of which you are liberated from the principle. You go up in the world, you gain faith, but you mainly take pleasure in losing more than you could possibly have lost.
To stand before chaos “out of which everything emerges,” you need to live in the present, not simply to relate to the present as one aspect of a descriptive system. Poetry is not framed by a narrative but by the poetic capacity and, therefore, by the poetic nature. It does not make sense through the absorbing of the shock of some kind of rhetoric or schematic ploy (which is the exact opposite of the shock created by the content, irrespectively of form) nor with the citing of chosen stylistic consequences. Even, that is, if you stand before chaos, you are at a disadvantage in relation to the one who eventuates, who continually emerges out of chaos. The present which assimilates the future.
Parthenogenesis does not exist, although “parthenophany,” the pretension of virginity, does. You go to sleep being the one and you wake up being the other. Nor will there be an outcome if you do not conceive why you went to sleep as well as why you opened your eyes again. You may close them once more.
Yet, what the thing is that one needs to depend on what you do or (predicated by a short-lived “unfortunately”) what you count on doing. By what penetration does the need ensue for this discussion? Is there more significant priority than the ability of mental penetrating, that is, revelation? Why be concerned with parthenogenesis when there is nothing virginal around? Since we presume nothing virginal has existed apart from what was created in order to concede the virginity of its reality.
So, then, how can the poetic revelations matter, since even a minute before you experienced them, you were a mere novice? And a novice every time, for the umpteenth time. Does this phenomenon make the poetic awe lesser or greater? This is also a state of virginity. A figure of poetic speech, or a statement in a poetic way, the sense of which is indebted, which may only exist as a trope, waiting in line to be shocked at yet a deeper level, in order to become dimensional and substantial. Even the foolishness of advanced experience could support more importance, where all these facts may sound amusing, where nothing is heard while one could be longing for a break of poetic silence. The so-called absent preexists. Poetry forges the senses into consciousness though not as metals. As molecules of air. Winged words of empty promises issuing out of ignorance.
Essence or beauty, depending on how you name the supremacy of the sacred, has been portrayed in words through the endless wandering in the alleys or the highways of basic notions, and the consecutive reading of such notions. These alleys and highways gradually become chains of the poetic naturalness. The real poetic erections are stretching these chains. If the chains do not resound, it means that the poet neglects or breaches his naturalness. When such a thing happens, all the traits of the basic notions, of the poetic state (that is, the void), dismiss its meaning, dismiss the inner bond with what is humane in poetry.
Then comes a pandemic of idle info-lovers, who invent pre-approved confrontations in order to use them as literary “ideologies.” Beguiling insinuations of a foundation under fate’s feet; that is why noble rivalry is so rare nowadays.
The more poetry resigns to itself, especially for no specific reason, the more it is empowered. The more it is recreated thanks to the providence of poets, the more the poets belong to the Arcanum. The poet illegitimately enacts his deadly nature so as to become a newborn crucial dead; i.e. deriving from within his poetic essence, not concerning his essence.
What is born is condemned to death and to being absorbed by the newly born. The newly born is more specifically regulated by death. The newly born is the exchange value of death. Life, is the daemon – poetry, is the teaching of the absolute nullity. The irreversible perforation of what has been poetically affirmed by those who are still spendable.
I observe an immense difficulty in the intellectual movements of most of the people who write poetry, a difficulty within flow. That difficulty is very important. Yet it can’t be dealt with by writing poetry. Poems may be created once people have become attuned with flow. In a similar manner, man can return to a developmental trajectory, to a tradition which, despite the rough patches, won’t be the heralded dystopia but some other, less preordained future necessity.
The fate of poetry rests with the fact that it doesn’t need to seek assessments of its testimony. Only human degradation requires something of that sort, since it itself constitutes the dominant factor, which claims to be transcendence: the labor of Sisyphus, but without the rock and the landscape. Where speech is not born out of transcendence, a macabre dismemberment intervenes. Everything crawls, everything is fragmented and scuttles away to form layers in the outer extremities
Most contemporary poets say, or imply that, they have conquered the ways of poetry, so everything can function as a prototype, everything can fend off the stereotype. Luckily though, the time of the signifying insinuation has been and gone, when it was occasionally expressed through the artful deterrence of paying extreme attention to it; as long as one is nowadays knowledgeable about the dichotomy between the mirror and the mirrored, so as to create poems rather than massify. Might as well, then, consider the plot of this story finished, along with all the rest of these disturbing facts; unless some imbecilic craving for legitimacy turns us into “chatterboxes of the universe.”
One of the typical forms of foulness of those pretending to be poets is the persistence of dishonest empiricism. Instead of decollectivizing and transforming concepts, they merely revise them. Essentialists, dedicated to the martyrdom of their monophonic identification with poetic practice, are not poets, even though their texts be considered “poems.” The subjugation of difference lends cohesion to their views, that is, the tendency to assimilate everything, the sacred offspring of fanaticism imposed via misrecognitions. In most of their writing, those far from naive petty tyrants care mainly about one thing: the condition of their self-definition in a construction of words.
They have given up life and are doing art, which is why they have neither. The texts are written to play the part of a bribed juror. The outcry of people who deserve an outcry. Criticism by people who need criticism. An attempt to enlarge the mouth that silently gapes so that it appears to swallow everything up, so that the subjugation can appear benevolent; so the spirit can be fettered at goodwill.
Yet, being right, just like being wrong, is a macabre means of consent in that those who bow to their spiritual tyrant (whether that is oneself or another) have also worked hard to establish him in power. Because although the process of denudement can often be understood, the denudement itself cannot.
Poetry is middleness, as much chaos as it mediates order. It only offers what is lacking and it is defined by the abolition of the dilemmas of creativity. The definition of poetry is fluid and risky, resembling its nature. The way of its attainment is equally fluid and risky because although poetry is a permanent thing, it avails itself of contingencies, through which it is sought and out of which, simultaneously, it proceeds.
Poetry is not a theory about things, or a danger-free method for approaching things. It is a non-theory: a practice, a structure and, alongside these, some, at least, of their records. The constitution of a poetic subject is possible only as an intervention. Imagination rather than philosophy. Wisdom rather than morality.
A text without qualms is the clear imprint of a person. A text full of qualms, that is to say a text that casts shadows on its own naturalness and serves up the imprint of someone else, though it may find easy acknowledgement and recognition, is nobody’s imprint. This evasion of an imprint gets a response through the readers’ already formed habit of being supportive towards imitation, copying, towards what is a permissible, i.e., widely acceptable. This is particularly the case when the “poems” are by the hand of a “specialist.” The text will be received as major because it will be satisfactorily occupied by the readers’ generic truths and, also, will full-heartedly contribute to the ongoing barrage of likeminded individuals.
If an imprint exists, it will wake up in the reader the consciousness of existence, which, as long as I find out, is neither pleasant nor desirable. It will automatically strand the reader without supporters or allies in the quagmires of information and sociability. And if a desire for an imprint manifests itself, it happens to the extent that the reader is allowed to control the text through his own way of thinking, so that, in case of emergency, i.e. when he comes face to face with poetry, there is always an escape hatch available.
But how can an antimetathesis{{1}}[[1]]Ιnversion of the organic antithesis.[[1]] in the void work with anything that pales before the void? Even a remarkable style will come undone if it does not remain exposed to the forces that fuel it. Just like, for instance, an implication or an allusion can very well come to reliably augur boundless sentimentality if it fails to discern that honesty is the summit of transformation. Honesty forces you to address others only if you have already addressed the most dangerous otherness, yourself.
Almost everyone thinks that poetry is a buoying encounter of subjectivities, a transcultural narrative of existing encounters, yet that is not the case. If it were, the art of poetry couldn’t be the carefree endeavor which continually advances the unattainable; in contrast to strictly academic writing, slam poetry, hip hop ranting, poetry committed to ideologies, adherent movements, etc.
All kinds of accentuations reveal the extent of the familiarization which besets human nous: the familiarization with the thing represented, which stands for familiarity, of both the accentuation and the aforementioned division of the roles that are necessary for discharge; the intermezzo, the predetermined recycling of the entire phenomenon.
At a time when original, individual poetry, affects a non-ideological anarchism; it reveals the conjunction of aesthetics and ethos (which are the same thing) in the void. It enjoins without confusing and it distinguishes without dividing. A live address to what has escaped the notice.
—Yannis Livadas
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Yannis Livadas is a Greek poet, born in 1969. His work constitutes the idea of experimentalism based on “organic antimetathesis” — the scaling indeterminacy of meaning, of syntactic comparisons and structural contradistinction. He is also an editor, essayist, translator of more than fifty books of American poetry and prose, and an independent scholar with specialization in American modern and postmodernism literature, plus haiku. He contributes to various literary magazines, both in Greece and other countries. His poems and essays have been translated into eight languages. He lives in Paris, France.
This essay is an excerpt from his book Anaptygma: Essays and Notes on Poetry (Koukoutsi Books, 2015).
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Surely poetry matters precisely because of its irrelevance to things that most people find relevant, and therefore has the potential to undermine the shallow things that have beome ‘norms’ in Western culture.