+++The exploration of the poetic image is one of the defining features of the modernization of poetry. The standard use of the image in contemporary poetry can be seen as fitting into a triangulation of three different approaches that emerged out of Romanticism as the early modernisms, each of which offers its own solution to the Romantic problem of the mind in the world.
+++(1) The Romantic image is composed of a speaker's perceptual observations—the data of their senses—that are then abstracted into rhetoric. The romantic image thus contains both the literal sensory image and its abstraction into emotional and intellectual content. This image opened the way for poets to write about the actual world around them, giving them permission to include details from their real lives. Additionally, by dramatizing the role of the mind in interpreting the senses, the romantic image also inaugurates a fundamental problem in modernism: the gap between mind and world.
++++++((1A)) The surrealist image, which is an involution of the Romantic image. It cuts off the external world and instead draws on the subconscious of the writer. Its images are extremely striking juxtapositions, hyper-encoded complexes of mental content that cannot easily be decoded. In fact, their primary beauty is in their perpetual mystification. They embody different tones of mystery and darkness, libidinal or unspeakable or even transgressive forces with the human mind. Here, the gap between mind and world is solved by making the mind the world.
++++++((1B)) Imagism, which strips Romanticism bare of its rhetoric. The image acts as a translation of force from the external world to the inner world, thereby fusing the two. The human speaker is central as the sensory and curatorial force that carves these images out of its perceptual field. Imagism dissolves the gap between mind and world by resorting to an empirical immediacy of the human senses.
++++++((1C)) The objective correlative, which takes the opposite approach to the surrealist image. Here, the image has a definite referent; the writer wants to evoke a specific feeling or idea. Readers are able to pick apart the image and discuss it a classroom. The gap between mind and world is stabilized through the transformation of the world into a symbolic technology for human expression.
+++All three of these sub-forms of the image were developed by the 1940s, and since that time poets have considerably refined them, while also exploring ways to combine or hybridize them. As can be seen in each of these images, however, a certain figuration has remained constant: the manipulation of images by a human speaker.
+++I want to offer a few notes on the possibility of developing new forms of the poetic image beyond this figuration. I don't necessarily think the above triangulation needs to be replaced, or that it even could be, but I do think it is possible to expand it, to add some nodes to expand the triangle into a quadrangle or some higher dimensional space. Alternatively, we can think of the next set of propositions as a separate space, a new arena in which image-making activities can be employed to de-center the individual human speaker, so that a poem can be a become a multi-agent system.
++++++[[2A]] Concretion. Would it be possible to write an image as an actual being appearing in the text as itself? Can we reverse the image so that instead of feeling a real thing tunnel into the mind of the poet, we feel the text tunneling into the mind of a real thing? The way to do this is to understand the text itself as a kind of instantiation of this other being. We do not get the thing in itself, but we get its textual equivalent, its impression or ingression in the text. To do so, we need to let the image model this being's own internal and external relations. The image needs to be allowed to dilate, to expand across lines, to employ everything in the mechanics of language to capture the richness of this being. In order to treat the text as something other than the fabric of the poet's own mind, the text needs to be treated as a separate kind of thing, it needs to be viewed as a different kind of mind, a separate creature from the poet, a hyper-sensitive creature that can register the minutia of the other beings that leave impression in it as images. Thus, the poem itself becomes a kind of meta-creature or meta-being. Every poem is a different creature, composed of the many kinds of beings that form it through their textual equivalents. Images are the textual impressions of real minds the come together to form worlds.
++++++[[2B]] Images of reading. Because of the development of many kinds of text as a result of the internet and post-industrial capitalism in general, the reader exists in a world of many different kinds of reading. Every text is visually presented to a reader and is grasped, either immediately or after a period of reading, as requiring a certain kind of attention and processing. After this grasping, the text itself becomes an image of this kind of reading. We rifle through these different images of reading all day, moving from social media posts to articles to books to signs to emails to poems to text messages to user agreements. However, too often, poets write poems that require only one kind of reading—usually, a slow, focused reading that does not seek too hard for exact meanings. In this sense, they are not making use of an array of reading-images that lie waiting to be deployed. To use images of reading, one must again think of the image as dilating beyond simple phrases. An image of reading is a whole text block. In a traditional book, we can think of each page as an image of reading. But poets can also re-work the page to contain multiple images of reading. The top left corner might contain one image of reading, while the bottom right corner might contain a different image of reading. By doing so, poets would add a new dynamic energy to their texts, a vibrant ability to shift focus that mirrors the structure of contemporary cognition. Different forms of reading are different forms of cognizing worlds.
++++++[[2C]] Words as images of letters. The contemporary use of typing has redefined our relationship to spelling. Misspellings have become a common element in the process of using language. Spelling, spacing, font, abbreviation, emoji/emoticons, slang, and neologism have all become everyday elements in how we express ourselves in textual language. As result, how we type something becomes an image of what we want to say. When I use an emoji in a text message, the emoji does not exist in some separate order from the letters. The emoji is both picture and symbol, and it exists right inside the text message because the text is also picture and symbol. When I read a word, I receive the word’s content, but I also see the letters that compose it—and, most importantly, I almost see its content through those letters, in the same way that I can see through the gloss on a photograph to the image beneath. Or, the way I see an image focus through the movement of the lens. It as if the spelling (and all the other visual elements listed above) are part of that focusing apparatus, in a way that allows that apparatus to be seen through its shifting. There are infinite beauties to be found in non-standard typing. Typing embodies the process of becoming before a world is fully present.
++++++[[2D]] Form as Image. One of the defining elements of poetry is that it cultivates the reading of form. Reading form means reading what is not strictly there. For instance, reading iambic pentameter involves a kind of virtual gloss in which the infinite subtleties of intonation in language are reduced to a binary system, a kind of lattice or grid that is imaginarily overlaid on the page: the system of scansion. The ability to read the form of iambic pentameter involves this invisible overlay. Iambic pentameter, then, is form as an image. In our contemporary era, there are many more ways to think of form. The use of concrete poetry in the middle of the century was only one of the most obvious and literal ways to do so. Poets can manipulate language in different ways to cultivate new ways of reading form. Form is the way in which a being and its world solidify themselves as continuing to exist.
+++One element these directions all have in common is that text itself acts as the image. It is not completely non-referential, though the meaning of reference has definitely been altered. Many of them focus on dilating the image, so that rather acting through a couple of words, the image now appears as longer swaths of text. This is appropriate for our time period, in which text itself has gained the capacity to act as an image, and images having gain the capacity to work within and as text.
@@@@My book Four Concretures applies some of these principles, although they had not yet been framed explicitly at the time of writing. My initial spur to writing this book-length poem was to apply some of what I had been doing with organic beings in my poetry to an inorganic system or object. This was back when I still lived in New York City, in Sunnyside, a neighborhood in Queens. During the pandemic, we rarely left Sunnyside. The main facet of our week was walking from the apartment to the Saturday morning farmers' market, a few blocks north of us. Traversing the ground between the isolated, interior world of our apartment and the chaotic market, with its vegetables encrusted in dirt (their leaves lacey with bug holes or studded with dried larvae carcasses) and its almost primitive exchange between farmer and denizen—this meant, as ever in New York, navigating corridors of stone and concrete. Concrete tends to be portrayed as the lifeless stage upon which the dramas of the city are played out by the mammals and birds as they transit from one organic way station to another. But I started wondering if we could think of it differently.
@@@@During the pandemic, I had also been studying analytic theories of panpsychism. These theories—though rigidly inflexible and somewhat unimaginative, as much analytic philosophy of mind tends to be—offered a new conceptual groundwork to build on. I want poetry to be capable of representing non-human perspectives and for it to be possible to see a world as entirely constructed from these perspectives, so that there is no thing that is not experiential in some way. This could be called "panpsychism," though, as I hope Four Concretures gets at, the notion of mind that "-psychism" or "psyche" gets at is flexible enough to extend to beings that don't really have minds at all, though they are still made of something like experience.
@@@@That is why they are "concretures"—concrete creatures, creaturley concrete, the living and experiential concreteness of being at all. In this book, I depict concrete as composed of four beings along two parallel axes. First, there is the "concrete concrete" axis, the two "physical" beings that form concrete—Cryssle, which stands in for the molecular structure of concrete, and Cemend, which is the macroscopic structure, the perceptible slurry of concrete that eventually hardens into a surface we can walk on. Then there is the "virtual concrete" axis, the non-physical beings that are nonetheless part of the fabric that enables a world to come to be at all. Mixrrr is the possibility for discursive understanding, a name inspired both by concrete mixers and the soundboards used to balance all the levels of recorded music into one track. Moldture represents the possibility of formal understanding, the mathematical structures of interaction.
@@@@The beings are not described by a human speaker in the poem. Rather, they appear as themselves in a textual medium. See this excerpt for an example. This is what I mean by concretion. Beings do not appear in the text through description, but by emerging as words, letters, and symbols cohering dynamically through form. The words that compose each concreture are not descriptions of those concretures; they are the closest linguistic equivalent to what it is to be those creatures. Going one step further, insofar as we want to stick close to the text, we could see these as purely textual creatures that are non-representational even though they are not abstract but concrete. They are right there in front of you, you just need to start reading (even if it's only a kind of looking-reading) to get them animated.
@@@@I would like to think that, ideally, Four Concretures uses the four types of images noted in part one: Concretion, Images of reading, Words as images of letters, and Form as image. Furthermore, by putting these types of images in the context of Four Concretures, I hope to begin to switch from talking about images of to images as. That is, a poetic image acts as a being, rather than forming a representation of a thing. In this context, the main activity of the poem is not the creation or observation of images by the human speaker, as in a traditional lyric poem—though it is still possible to acknowledge the role of the human poet in image-construction. In this acknowledgment, however, the human stands off to the side, like an engineer next to a machine, a parent on the sidelines, or a bee hovering at the edge of the ecosystem its travels have partly propagated. The human poet remains deeply implicated by, and perhaps imbricated in, this system and all the systems that make them human—but the human speaker is no longer its imaginative center, or even the main source of emotion or mor(t)al stakes.
@@@@The mode of image-making summed up by "concretion" is thus one that replaces cognition of the other, which is the fundamental requirement for a human social order, to cognition as the other, which must eventually lead to our ability grasp the extra-sociality of all beings as they network into worlds. This extra-sociality is the ability to imaginatively construct other viewpoints, an intelligent simulation within oneself of others—not as statistical bundles, but as cores of being that form various scales of existence. This is already partly done when I grasp the other as the "other," as one that is like me but not me, a me-not-me. However, in traditional cognition of the other, my concern in imagining the other's viewpoint is to figure out how I should relate to them, to figure out what I am, now that I know they exist. In contrast, cognition as the other means to throw one's viewpoint fully into another world. It carries what was latent in the earlier "of" form of cognition to an explicit "as" form in this new version.
::::::Communism bounds the horizon of our imaginations. In its intuitive, subconscious form—the one that lurks at the bottoms of our brains, grounding our depression at current conditions—communism "solves" relations among humans, at least on an economic and political level, in the same sense that a game like Go can be solved, extrapolated towards a resolution, achieving a kind of algorithmic stasis beyond the jostling of self-interest and conflict.
::::::At the same time, we wonder if, and doubt that, it will ever come. Capitalism barrels on ahead to such a degree that we question if it is even "capitalism" in the same sense it was 200 years ago—if the levels will ever be just right to effect the transition to the thing haunting our minds, when everything will be better. And after communism? How does an enlightened planetary society (or post-society, meta-society, or non-society) relate to other species, and at what point does the notion of species begin to dissolve, throwing the finally solved organization of human need and desire into another crisis?
::::::And perhaps, at this point, the slowly dawning arrival of cognition-as-the-other to this finally communist planet is no crisis, but more like a gradual adjustment to the majestic light of right relation, of the well-prepared mind's readiness to see what is there. Beyond the bubble of solved human relations lies the rest of the planet, where the ethical is once more thrown into turmoil, where the relations of power and distribution of resources are once again at their most unformatted, un-cognized, un-politicized. Or so it seems, while we adjust to the light. And while this virtual future history may never come to pass, still the mind is compelled to think it through, or think other futures through, like extending lines along a ruler towards a focal point. Poetry has its roles to play in this.
::::::Nothing could be more cringe, it seems to some of us, than to read a poet writing about economics or social theory. Is that what just happened, in the above paragraph? I will have to return to this question later. First, let us consider what is criticism as practiced by a poet. In our time, one encounters many complaints about the state of literary criticism. There are two forms of criticism that capture the contemporary mind. One is the puff piece, which is expository, and often laudatory, in form. Its flaws are self-apparent. It is done to boost one's friends; it recites facts that could be gleaned from wikipedia or the back of the book; it does little to push along the discernment of taste or develop new aesthetics. That said, its basic strength is often overlooked, because it has become so obvious in our contemporary era: the bare existence of the review may lead more people to read a book that will otherwise go unnoticed in the underground-of-the-underground that is the world of good contemporary poetry.
::::::The second form is the urbane review, in which the writer employs sophisticated prose, refined taste, wit, and perhaps a dash here and there of snark, gossip, or even the ad-hominem remark. In other words, the writer is a Critic, and criticism is an Art unto itself, fans will insist. This is undoubtedly the harder form of the two to write. We all are appreciative when we encounter such a piece in the wild, at the delicious moment of its contemporaneity. As for flaws: at its most base, this criticism represents an almost dandified retreat into one's own caprice. It is a liberal mode of lionizing the highly trained individual, whose deeply sensitive interior world must be trusted, rather than replicated. The hater is made sacred in the name of conversation, discourse, etc. That said, this form of criticism can be yoked to a politicized, leftist, and/or theoretically based approach, at which point it starts to intersect with a third approach that will be elaborated shortly.
::::::Still, there is a deeper flaw, which is that this criticism is most interesting when at its most subtle and negative—when the critic is hard to impress. Yet writing negatively only makes sense if the reader was predisposed to like the book, or even to read it at all. In other words, this kind of criticism tends to be practiced on books that are already popular (and the mechanism for producing popular books of poetry these days, even disregarding criticism entirely, is a sad one indeed; perhaps it always has been). It makes no sense to write a negative review about a book no one would otherwise read; it would seem more like an act of cruelty towards the author, rather than a judicious use of the critic's attention.
::::::There is another flaw with this urbane approach: here, the critic is not a poet but a critic, and their interest is in the display of their skills as such; they have no poetics. There is no underlying theory, no set of passionate goals for where they want to push the art, apart from the critic's own complex inner workings and whatever frameworks they have inherited from past generations, such as Marxism, Romanticism, or the sensibilities of past critics—apart from the general idea of wanting more better poetry, whatever "better" means. This will not do for the poet writing about poetry, because to proceed simply by one's gut alone—without recourse to concentrated questioning and construction—means to fall back into directionless jostling, to arbitrariness.
::::::And perhaps we are afraid of doing any more than this, of having a poetics we can frame to ourselves without recourse to any of the platitudes of the day. That is: of explicitly combining a deep reason within ourselves, with a deep reason in the world, and a deep reason in the art to move in a specific aesthetic direction; of creating this tri-fold reason for concertedly exploring new means of writing; of risking the utter embarrassment of spending years and years on exploration no one else may laud.
::::::But I want to argue that writing about poetry as a poet should be theoretical in nature, or at least have an element of theory informing it. Such writing should be at least an implicit exploration of one's own poetics. A poetics, we must admit, that is always in development, never fully articulable, always erupting and demanding more, threatening to destroy itself as soon as it is "solved," but which at the same time does allow for a degree of rational articulation that represents, at its best, the radical birth of something new on this planet. This would be a constructive criticism in the sense it is trying to create a new means of thinking about, reading, and writing poetry. In some sense, not really criticizing at all.
::::::Such writing, then, is a mode of guiding the mind into what challenges it, confronting ambiguities, negotiating—almost as if for the first time—the relationship between what is meant by "poetry" and what is meant by "the world." That is why we cannot say tout court that the poet should not write about economics, or that when poets write about science, theory, etc., it is embarrassing. Even if it is. Because we have to set ourselves the task of learning to write about these things better, to inhabit them better in our poetry and prose, to better incorporate the systems of the world into our poetics—which means better understanding those systems, and re-imagining what we think poetry can do in light of that knowledge.
::::::The idea of "good" and "bad" poetry, then, gets couched within the interplay between the writer's and the reviewer's poetics. Only after making the poetics of the two parties as explicit as possible can we begin to talk about what the book does or does not accomplish. How can we say this line is good, this poem is bad, if we don't even understand what's going on? If we don't even understand what's at work in ourselves as we read? The half-baked knee-jerk reaction is the stuff of MFA workshops, which is both encouraged and made more invisibly pernicious in those programs, and is one reason for the reaction away from any judgment at all in the puff piece review.
::::::Not to mention that the economics of adjuncting and general financial precarity among writers has led to a need for good vibes and fellow feeling, as we do our best to boost each other up. A good vibes bubble is generated, whose sheen glosses over the roiling resentment and competition. This then leads to nostalgia for the urbane review, even for the hit piece, which comes roaring back, bursting the bubble, flooding social media with pent-up ferocity; a pile-on. The writing community must periodically sacrifice and consume one of its own in order to survive. A kind of cope: we begin to derive satisfaction from inflicting pain within the social network, chopping off a major node, feeling ourselves move up the hierarchy a little. This, perhaps, could be a substitute for poetics, we begin to think. Or maybe this carnivorousness of the poetry world is poetics!
::::::And yet, out of all of this, nothing gets made! No poetics is developed. We poets must learn new ways to write, to think about others' writing; a criticism that constructs.