absent magazine

Postulate the opposite of the obvious thesis—such a methodological strategy for expanding the range of cognitive research exists.

Poetry has kept punching-bag like possibilities in mind for a long time. But has it gone so far as to recognize them as today’s necessity?

What if that’s the most important—a readily available procreative atom [the klinaman]? To one extent or another, this character has traditionally been interpreted as an irritant and defect, something not to be kept in the background, not smoothed over, not shamefully pushed aside to the periphery. The procreative atom acts by means of a central poetical principle: one goes at him full tilt to the end.

This seems so true that it’s even banal: infirmity ennobled to limits of natural innocence. If some verse feels the inconvenient influences of barbarism, it should become entirely barbarous verses. If cinema lacks plot, it should transform into radically plotless films.

Naturally, it’s possible for such a decision to be considered as an attempt to conceptualize a scudding of the Great Wellsprings of Art or a smuggling in of the talentless. Consequently, one slays in the name of a certain stylistic cleansing. But what if there is not even a trace of cleanliness, and never was; if it was only standing guard over the present emptiness: the reputation of a naked king which under the arrangement or habit, under thoughtlessness or intention seeming to be vested in sacred clothes. The actual deal: in the moment of noticing this nakedness not just to blink, but to gouge out one’s own eyes—they had erred for so long.

The demolition of a language, for example, that of poetry really occurs because of an intrusion of alien impurities, but poetry is built of out of this same antimatter. When what has been predicted by the signs of the prophets starts to fill all of the promised land…of the genre. Yes of the genre. But that’s precisely why we should allow for it—and infinitely. There is no alternative way for us.

Most importantly, this antimatter may show up through a reversal of dates and seem to be thrown out as a new form of oppression. We have no special right to avoid it. (It is probably even necessary to recall Rimbaud’s imperative and consider any criticism of contemporaneity as reactionary). We should rush into the whirlpool of antimatter, aspiring to pass through it and come up on the other side, taking lead in hand. Anti-matter must not be allowed to become a new item in the toolkit of oppression.

Those who shunned will sooner or later be touched all the same (only already in the form of a reality); how many would they strengthen in the pastoral hothouses.

Brodsky said that poetry is what language (or culture) does by means of a subject. In my opinion, poetry is what the subject does by means of language—the collective (and especially marginalized) subject, not the airbrushed subject possessing centripetal acceleration. At the center of hell language only hollow blisters could flounder congesting the reputation of the vanguard. These blisters are more likely to be born out of a surplus of language than on a surplus of reality (and its corresponding lack of language). They overdose on language. New experience certainly is born ad marginem, at not staked out by language territory, which consequently has been traditionally registered as the “lowest”, as tongueless. For that matter, linguistic gentrification similarly increases not only the area of the whole city, but also the old parts, the ones absorbed by normativity: the petty-bourgeois big village of poetry (that leads to discomfiture—this happened quite often in twentieth century poetry when, as a result of rapid development, seemingly new structures found themselves as tumbledown).

And so only un-knowing toungelessness induces an invention. The dully diligent study of the list of phenomena inclines one to the roles of a songster of catalogue, and peevish librarian.

The realization of the permanent secularization of poetry is a unique opportunity for its further development (when the subject of this process is a figure). In actuality it always goes hand in hand with the disintegration of traditional perceptual spheres and with the increase of «teleological-existential entropies» (when the object of the process is an discouraged observer). A realization of the proximity of these two processes arouses some doubts about the respectability of the project of secularization. From time to time the artist is given “the role both of the gardener and the flower” (Mandelstam), or the artist may even entirely throw off the gardener’s mastery, hoping to be rescued by the unpretentious role of the flower—actually that is only a moment of becoming artificial.

Recently, the fear of wolves has kept us from visiting the woods. No one has any notion that wolves have already flooded the city because the woods have not been colonized, and now the call to refuse journeys into the woods is especially looked at very suspiciously. It looks like the post-colonial.

As opposed to the reactionary centripetal dynamics of texts that proclaim the authenticity of experience and as much as possible avoid stenograms and cultivate “abnormality,” the indigestible, or radical incoherence as a mortgage of authenticity, there is a presumption of the presence of sense in breaks in the text. However, the production of the texts predisposed to a wide distribution and opened for reception dooms them to understanding. Those texts full of «social allusions» also give pleasure through their unrecognizable genre-stylistic, estrangements of form.

Besides, the strategy of the poetic statement cannot any longer be restricted only to writing poems. The strategy of the poetic statement should also include (within itself) tactics of distribution. Alongside of a developmental level of a means of mass disinformation there is no room for any hope that the history (only of literature, after all) will highlight all the key points. The main goal of mass media is to outlast this paralysis of history by bringing down a lot of pseudo-information on an individual (as if it is now free and limitless). In situations of abundant media-production the dominant discourse does not so much satisfy informational needs as form them, creating “repressive,” weed forms of informational need. Certainly, some quantity of critical statements in the system could allow for a reputation of pluralism. But no liberalism could stretch its practice to one that is self-injuring.

Nevertheless the (most likely confusing) rapprochement of concepts such as that of the reception of the poetic statement and those regarding the procedures for getting information is a direct condition of the secularization of poetry. Hanging on to the indirect requirement of special “religious rites” and the hint of the unordinariness of poetry, on the other hand, also allows the hallucinogen of media-discourse to last. Today there should be nothing more everyday than poetry.

The most powerful potential of the poetic statement should not be abashedly hidden in the shelving of history (which in any case appears to be locked up with a key) for technologies’ sake (these are too easily becoming conductors of the dominating ideology); it should be released from archaic vestments, having transformed itself into a mobile diagnostic tool and influence on reality.

In fact, if one looks a little bit further into the woods, it’s possible that what is most important in poetry is to look into precisely this wood: how many poetry has not fed.