University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Synthetic form and deviant transcendence: interfaces between 21st c. poetry & science; & In the crocodile gardens: poems

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Synthetic form and deviant transcendence: interfaces between 21st c. poetry & science; & In the crocodile gardens: poems

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SYNTHETIC FORM AND DEVIANT TRANSCENDENCE:
INTERFACES BETWEEN 21ST C. POETRY & SCIENCE.
&
IN THE CROCODILE GARDENS:
POEMS

by

Saba Syed Razvi

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(LITERATURE & CREATIVE WRITING)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Saba Syed Razvi

ii
Table of Contents

Preface: Abstract Linkage -- How the Two Projects Are Connected + Abstract iii

Part I: In the Crocodile Gardens: poems 1

Acknowledgments for In the Crocodile Gardens 2

Table of Contents for In the Crocodile Gardens 5

Part II: Synthetic Form and Deviant Transcendence: Interfaces between 21st C.
Poetry & Science
70

Chapter 1: The Matrix of the Interface: Formal Invocations of Science by Poetry &
Proxy, or, the Hyperdimensional Appeal of the Paradox
71

Chapter 2: Starlight to Guide the Journeyman: The Structural Function of Orbiting
Bodies in Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors
90

Chapter 3: Plotting Anthropoid Particularity: The Structural Incorporation of
Mechanics in Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City
130

Chapter 4: Poetry & Proxy: Thoughts on Departures from the Page and Paradoxical
Science in Poetry, or, Conclusion
169

Endnotes 181

References 184

iii
Preface: Abstract Linkage: Abstracts for Each Project + How the Two Projects Are
Connected

Abstract –

Synthetic Form & Deviant Transcendence: Interfaces Between Science & 21
st
Century
Poetry is a collection of essays on contemporary writers whose particular engagement with
science in their poems transcends the topical or superficial approach. This trend toward the
structural use of science, in radically artificial ways, has created poems that enact synthetic
rather than organic experiences by cleaving form from content, appealing to a
hyperdimensional sensibility encouraged by the nascence of the digital age. The argument
examines how poetry and science interact within this dynamic, and demonstrates in a case
study of two books, that their connection is a product of the digital age, that it is synthetic,
that it is structural rather than topical and derived from science’s now tertiary degree of
removal from the world it studies. It examines how discussions of poetry and theories of
poetics have interacted to allow a difference between form and content to enable this
interplay of science in poetry, exploring ideas of form and of lyrical content to establish that
they are separate, but connected, concepts. It examines how the digital age and the role of
science and technology in our society have affected our cultural consciousness, enabled this
distinction between form and content and its alliance with poetry and science to emerge, or
at least, welcomed it into our reading experience. And finally, it explores how a number of
poets writing for the page and a selection of some poets writing for new media have
composed works affected by the interplay of these diverse ideas. The included case studies

iv
discuss Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors and Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial
City and the project will expand in the future to cover those books discussed in the
concluding chapter, as well.

In the Crocodile Gardens, a collection of poems, is situated at the point of unraveling of
familiar storytelling threads. The poems bloom out of the dissolution of inherited tales. Little
Red Riding Hood dances a strip tease for the wolf. Melusine recasts her origin and creates
herself a tail. Michelangelo’s ex-lover seeks revenge against him. Cyndi Lauper, the Marquis
de Sade, Skinny Puppy, and Sappho speak as kindred voices. In other poems, the bones and
corpses left behind in a battle speak through the sound of drums, maps open into
dictionaries to interpret the connection between language and nation, demons and nature
spirits speak to lovers about skin, science fictional worlds split open, fairytales speak through
nightmare and burst their own conventions. This collection of poems explores the nature of
transgression in emotionally contractual situations that have not retained their structural
integrity. Through a landscape of amputated branches and swaying human limbs, echoes of
body, place, and voice, through debate with fossils and jungles and the natural cycle of life,
the characters in these poems confront the nature of acceptance and failure, interrogating
just what constitutes an outside force and what can be contained within a promise without
losing the self.

v
Linkage – Artist’s Statement about the Joint Endeavor Between the Projects.

The critical portion of the dissertation bloomed like a mushroom cloud out of a
desire to find the right form for the creative project, an ongoing manuscript titled “Waking
Galatea” in the form of a sci-fi epic about an engineer and his artificially intelligent
anthropoid robot. The creative project engages, by way of departure, sculptor David
Hanson’s desire to refute Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley in robotics. Mori’s
claim is that humans respond favorably to that which resembles the human up until a certain
point at which the appeal turns sharply to revulsion; at some point, later, when the robotic
device is sufficiently different from human, the appeal improves again; the place between
these two points is the Uncanny Valley and Mori claims that in robotics design, one must
avoid those almost human and almost inhuman modes as they overlap. David Hanson, a
sculptor trained at RISD began to refute Mori’s ideas in his own work with robotics that
blurred the line between art and technology, taking up the notion of the Uncanny Valley as a
challenge and suggesting that modern technology eliminates the crude valley of distance;
using his skills as an artist, techniques he learned for robotics movements, and interactions
with those who examine responses to his creations, he began creating life-like faces, testing
where this valley might be in order to remove it. The device does what the man has designed
it to do. So what happens when a device has been designed to deceive a man’s instinctual
revulsion? The poem seeks to explore such concepts.
In seeking a form for the poem, which carries both an awareness of Aristotelian
ideas of techne and poeisis, and Freudian ideas of the dual drives of eros and thanatos, and ideas
about law and transgression as found in Milton’s Paradise Lost; I realized that the project’s

vi
focus would not simply be on the created object or on the creator’s desire, but on the act of
creation itself. And, yet rather than residing mainly within a sense of prosody or verse, the
narrative within the poem carried a strong thread, though not a linear one. I read and wrote a
substantial amount of fiction in order to gauge the correct balance between narrative guide
and lyrical invocation that might serve this poem.
It seemed, also that the poem must exist in parts and pieces, not one long and
cohesive style, simply because the gimmick of a very long poem like this belies the sincerity it
supposes. And, so I began reading about contemporary poetry and the structures and styles
that made it seem relevant, exciting, and dynamic. In evoking the act of creation, one must
consider the place of novelty and excitement, because the joy of creating a thing is derived
from its novelty, or else it is simply copying, mimicking, or relating something already made.
Where is the line between nonsense and sense that makes a thing seem exciting, and does it
dip like Mori’s Uncanny Valley?
The research itself took on broad and expansive dimensions, seeming to unfold over
vast fields and the trouble of depth vs breadth definitely made itself felt. The myriad ways in
which poetry has engaged with science, has employed and considered the concept of form,
has engaged and processed ideas about poetic making were substantial. In reading about
form, content, science, structure, style, lyricism, and the various schools that have
contributed to our postmodern poetic condition, I found certain elements at work that
evoked and enacted concepts embedded in new media texts by way of their medium, but on
paper. And, I began to research the ways in which some poets writing for the page rather
than the pixel have been considering formal strategies and structures in order to remain
relevant in a culture that competes for ever-shortening attention spans in a fast-paced, info-

vii
saturated society. The lens through which I began to see these works sharpened as I
explored these works and the project grew from my observations about those texts
inhabiting this new digital age.
One of the pitfalls of a joint project so connected is that research tends to become
unwieldy and substantial. It is easy to get lost in the minutiae of the project. Robotics is a
vast field. Engineering an even larger field. And, to draw upon the ideas contained therein
requires some amount of discovery and understanding of a number of related concepts. But,
to write a poem too steeped in the language of that science that lends it a sense of realism
and credibility is to lose the poem to the gimmick. I spent several years studying and
reinforcing my connections to the various parts of the world of these characters and the
material they might know and understand, only to come away feeling that the disjunction
between the real and hyper-real is exactly the kind of valley that might make the poem
successful as a poem, rather than an experiment.
While I feel that both the critical and the creative projects have some room for
growth – and I intend to work out the details that will make both projects succeed
independent of one another, after this course of study has been completed – I also feel that
the projects were both labored and slowed down by their connections. The process of
writing Waking Galatea seemed to demand justification at every turn, slowing down the
natural creative process that enables a poem to come to life in the mind of the poet without
feeling labored. The process was counter-intuitive and I found that I completed four other
collections of poetry (“heliophobia”, “In the Crocodile Gardens”, “The Metropole
Walkside”, and “The Book of Deeds”) while working up to this project; “In the Crocodile
Gardens” is submitted here as the creative manuscript for the dissertation because it

viii
succeeded as a poetry manuscript whereas “Waking Galatea” in its current form seemed to
be hindered by its attachment to the literary research associated with it. “In The Crocodile
Gardens” contains thematic and formal overlap with the research on contemporary poetics,
but does not remain enmeshed within it, yielding some interesting observations about the
joint project; it engages notions of culturally programmed ideology, archetype, story, myth,
and a range of concepts surrounding the Uncanny.
The joint endeavor has been enjoyable and also arduous, convoluted but playfully
puzzling in moments where the knots could be undone, and creatively productive. However,
its counterintuitive approach has made it unpleasantly slow in unfolding. I found that while
working on this project, I also unraveled a joint research connection between “The Book of
Deeds”, “Turquoise for the Tips of Arrows” and an investigation on the Vernacular of the
Beloved in Sufi Poetry in Translation, a tangential movement from the idea of coded
language, such as the language of programming code used in AI and also in subcultures
within a dominant culture; however, such a joint undertaking began after this one was well. I
would consider utilizing this method for scholarly and creative work again in the future,
though likely on a smaller scale. The joint research endeavor has, indeed, created a richness
of material and idea that satisfied both the scholarly and the sensual joys of literature that
reminds us of the technique necessary to make the poem and that the poem is a made thing
that transcends its making, too.

1

Part I

In the Crocodile Gardens:
poems

2
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS FOR IN THE CROCODILE GARDENS

With heartfelt thanks to those publications in which some of these poems first appeared:

“Beware: Alligators Do Not Feed Ducks” and “Talisman” in Tahzeeb e Deccan.

“Oil Field. Mine, Field. Afghanistan.” in Voices of Resistance: Muslim Women on War,
Faith, & Sexuality. Editor: Sarah Husain. Publisher: Seal Press.

“This Ascension in the CD Player” in Anthology.

“Dusk Intermediary”, “Nor Equinox Nor Promise”, “An Architecture for Mystery” in The
Offending AdamU.

“Self-Portrait with Wick-Tender and Candle Flame” and “Amphibious Catalogue with
Invisible Stair” in The Loudest Voice Anthology. (Vol.1.)

And, with deep gratitude for my poetry teachers:

Carol Muske-Dukes, David St. John, & Susan McCabe at the University of Southern
California.

Naomi Shihab Nye, Khaled Mattawa, Judith Kroll, & Thomas Whitbread at the University
of Texas in Austin.

Eamonn Wall & Fidel Fajardo-Acosta at Creighton University.

And, with grateful appreciation of those fellowships whose generosity has supported my
work:

The Virginia C Middleton Fellowship at The University of Southern California

The James A Michener Fellowship at The University of Texas

The Fania Kruger Fellowship at the University of Texas

The writing fellowships granted by The University of Southern California and their English,
Literature and Creative Writing Departments.

3

“This island is governed by kings. These princes profess to be sons
of crocodiles, that is issued from the highest origin to which human
beings clan claim. Accordingly, these scaly ancestors abound in the
island’s rivers, and are the subject of a particular veneration. They
are protected, they are spoilt, they are adulated, they are fed, they
are offered young maidens as fodder – and ill-‐‑fortune to the foreigner
who lays a hand on the sacred lizards.”

-‐‑-‐‑ Jules Verne. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas.

5
In the Crocodile Gardens – Table of Contents

Chalked Circles and Circumferences of Breath 1
Amphibious Catalogue with Invisible Stair, 2
Meditation After a Lost Battle: Museum Exhibit 3
Demon: Lover 4
Snow Song 5
A Lover’s Quarrel 6
In the crocodile garden, 7
Lament of the Technosexual 8
Gilded 9
The Map as Spoken Before 10
Promise 11
Predatory 12
Poisonfruit 14
Once 15
Michaelangelo’s Ex 16
In Looking Back 17
Like Red, Dancing for the Wolf 18
caution: no mystery, only curse. Electrical wires. 19
Ever Aftering 20
Oil field. Mine, field. Afghanistan. 21
Beware: Alligators Do Not Feed Ducks 22
Through Albatross Eyes 23
This Ascension in the CD Player 24
Shock & Awe 25
Warning: Breakdancing Defies Laws of Physics 26
Thisbe, Upon Seeing the Lion 27
The Key Club 28
Synthpop 29
Hyenas 30
Siren Song 31
Psyche in Love 32
Prophetstown, IL 33
Persephone to Orpheus 34
A Palindrome for Pleasure 35
Pantomime: A Palindrome for Beauty 36
Out of Clay and Back Again, What am I? 37
Morning Unexpectedly Sapphic 38
Morning After 39
Mercy from the Red Queen 40
The Marquis Slips Into an Understanding 41
Ligeia’s Despair 42
From Inside the Painted Window Frame 43
6
Fury 45
Found Song 46
Fossil Before the Making 47
Exile 48
Cyndi Lauper Rocks My World 49
Blue Heron, 50
Bachelorettes 51
Assimilating Skinny Puppy 52
A Swallow of Gravity 53
Talisman 54
Persephone in the Nights of Spring 55
Aubade for a Seraph (or a Demon) 56
Self-‐‑Portrait as Wick-‐‑Tender and Candle Flame 57
Aggregate 58
An Architecture for Mystery 59
Occurrence 60
Nor Equinox Nor Promise 61

7
Chalked Circles and Circumferences of Breath

– The 14
th
Dalai Lama said, in a 1985 ceremony, that “Shambhala is not an ordinary country…We can only say that it is a pure land, a
pure land in the human realm.”

– In the mid 1300s, Ibn Battuta walked 730,000 miles on foot, more than 29 times the earth’s circumference (24901.55 miles), chronicling his
travels, before returning to his journey’s beginning. Many surmised that he returned only after finding Shambhala.

Go as far north as you can and find snow

Go as far south as you can and find snow

Go as far east as you can Go and it becomes west again, far back as where you began.

Find me a shelf of colored bottles, a votive for a lovèd’s grave, a silent room with tables
waiting for a hot cup or a clean glass.

Find me a colorless flag full of flagpoles mined from every step between, threaded knotted
as many times as steps.

I would not walk 10,000 miles, coming back to another start of ten thousand miles, x times
around the world until home is home again.

Along this way, onward this way, the air reddens, purples, blues into a darkness curving all,
around, a tunnel leaving only the path as far as I can expel a light, spotlight, pocket,
long wail of longing for sleep.

Go as far north as you can Go and find snow

Go as far south as you can Go and find snow

Go as far east as you can Go and it becomes a star, becomes west again, far back as where it
began.

Find me a sheaf of colored pages, a bloom for the baby’s crib, a silent room with a warm
cup, awaiting tables.

At a curve of miles onto miles, find me.
8
Amphibious Catalogue with Invisible Stair,
Or, The Malady of Melusine

I have been standing here a long time at this shoreline in the valley of the singing fishes.
The paint of my toenails has chipped. They surface, from time to time, sucking my toes
when teething and the polish breaks away in flakes on their newling teeth. They are green as
vetiver or a new moon and sometimes, yellow, sick with desire or a premonition of death. I
will stand here until my toes are gone, nibbled away by the iridescent-eyed, scaled bodies
because there is littlewhere left to go. Whither do I wander, wondering, whether anything is
lost. When they are hungry, the waves purple, dusking into a deeper calm. The river is violet
often, never violent enough to blacken or crest and it can be unnerving standing at the edge
of something sometimes stream and sometimes sea. I like to name them, but they rebel and
even my most faithful visitors will vanish once I call them by a Samuel, Solomon, or
Barnaby. It is as if to say: what is hidden is always beautiful, the found never. I was looking
for a death orchard in a flat blank plain and found instead a fountain of shadow, and it led
me here beneath the crescent night. If I grow a tail, may I be a mermaid, then?

9
Meditation After a Lost Battle: Curatorial Statements for A Museum Exhibit

1.

The warrior in the drum folds and stretches
iron in longing. He wears a necklace of human
bone. He wears a swordsman’s calm in his
still, set mouth. He is armored.
2.

The warrior drums in the stretching sword,
folding and unfolding, unhandled and
molten. He is a mandala. He wears a
necklace from a ritual apron of bone. He is
human in a beating hand, a heart like an
open drum

0.
mandala

3.

The mandala in the warrior throbs like a drum.
His heart bears a sword. His sword bears her
name. He wears around his neck her beaded
bones, unfolding down along his waist, still.

4.

The mouth of the drum in the mandala
throbs, folding and yielding open into a
handle of human bone. Between the hand
and the heart is a blade, sheeted still from
mandarin-hot iron. Her heart is bone. The
warrior’s neck, unarmored.

10
Demon : Lover

Ever it begins

by the blue water and the convulsing
of your bones
breaking
to be free of your flesh, freer than
the breath of this wind –

take it in –

greener, sweeter than
these vines,
the shadow of the Spanish Moss
and its tender-rills sun-spilt
over your mouth –

take it in –

this kiss,
water-wet and ether.

Ever. And never. It begun

by locks of long black,
like beckoning fingers in this breeze,
hair
like the shadow of the swimming eel
in the stream.
11
Snow Song

A wolf’s eyes know the jagged terrain of winter,
Like an uncut path

They can discern a snowfall from the tallest peaks,
The slightest shift of white

You are anything but a wolf
Howl, in the Siberian sky, anything
But the anguish of an unspoken wish

A wolf’s eyes are not hungry, but eager,
Mistaken often by men who know
Less of paws than of songs of paws

I know your name by the fir
And pine
And the acorn-smelling air at dusk

And your eyes are yellow,
Tuneless as a black dream unsung in the soil.
12
A Lover’s Quarrel

I’ll be Pierrot and you – Columbine in a red sash,
in a velvet suit, in a lamplit halo of a hat –

Tell me something True?

I was looking for my love in a pixel gallery when the red of 113
days and one year blushed bold across my keystroke thumb –

Was it magic? Was it mood?

And we can find a Mardis Gras on a beaded walk of pebbles,
on a garden filled with only imperfect blooms – for the sin
eater’s table spread! –

If you wish?

We found a screech of such a convoluted construction, through
a pointer and a wave, that it snapped – your mouth wide, your throat
closed, a moment like a stone found in your cream –

Would you take Toast & Tea?

My lips were ivory, clenched to keep my teeth from snapping
through each and another –

If I don’t move, will I always look
to you the same?

Or – you can be Pierrot and I’ll pose as a columbine, androgyne
or gamine, with a sometimes-severed tongue and fingers illumined
in a glittered clench or ringed in streaks of remaindered paint.
13
In the crocodile garden,

my teeth line the killing fields –
glowing orbs hover, each of
a molten light wound like wet string –
where I planted sun seeds on a morning,
on my tongue.

I prefer my moments to be outside of time.

A wormhole is a hole
inside the soil where
light or lightless lack
matters not
to a field of nascent suns.

14
Lament of the Technosexual

Inside this city live the remains of animals,
animals who prepared for two hundred years to be clay.
-Marvin Bell

Sitting in the doorframe of her apartment, where it opens
to the rude glow of moon,
& sidewalk beside grass luminous against its own shadow,
the Technodiva is helpless
against a two-day blackout.

No way to power through the dark her PDA,
or cell phone
to tell the time or date.
&
no way to kill the hours with email
or
bitch about all of this in a blog.
No,
She can’t even switch on her iPOD to listen to Powernoise,
like a Technicolor lullaby.

She writes, in a stiff hand, less used to scribbling than tapping keys,
anymore,
with a rough pencil in a notebook someone gave her, years ago,
until now,
left discarded with the old CRT Monitor in the closet:

The batteries have all died!
15
Gilded

My lover’s thumb fits exactly
along the contour of my cheekbone –
we are one
species, the same, and I am
sick of long-stemmed, orange blossoms
beside the bedside table – uniform
of offering, still. I am sick
of days unraveling into undone tapestries.

Turn me orange as gold, turn me
scaled and sequined, shimmering
like a dying fish
because to gasp is a way of stealing
a slipping life, a way of wanting
to hold on to what is not, still.

Turn me winged as a golden oriole,
song-bellied, song-belied, and rising
from still slumber into the dark – arms
wide as wind.

16
The Map as Spoken Before

“For the true American appears to be ashamed to say anything in the way it has been said before.” – Mina Loy.

1. State of the Word
You might be pleased to hear that we don’t talk of tea
much, but like to have Latte or a Caffeine Fix or a Cup
of Joe. You might not mind that the Trinidadian “dropping
words” is brighter than the way Americans “talk trash,” but
would you mind that all the gossip is gossipped in the same
world’s words? Nothing novel or new, and normally
in the same café that greets you at every corner in the same
words. When did Americans delight in using words with
wit and discretion for a new world? When did the words
of the speaker’s creation begin to emerge from a lack
and not a love of what has not been said before? He
drops his words, not deliberately, but clumsily, like his mouth
is full of too much pretzel. Would this innovation be called
American, too?

2. State of Novelty
Once, to be American was visionary. To be open, to imagine,
to explore. Is it still? I follow your hand’s length this far and not
that, this way and stopping now, but my reach does not change
your grasp. Your bright lines and angles stretched skyward, filled
the blank with shape, and you loved them. You lent your own
body’s surfaces to such a building. Upwards moves now, too,
progressing wider, but samely. Is it the same to move
as to move anew?

3. State of My Self
Thinking myself uncorseted, I spoke a word I had not known
until then. In a picture of a woman hiding in a corner, you saw
not her eyes, but a chance to make another picture. A woman
in her eyeliner, in a flag as a veil. Was it a breaking open of a
freer word, or a hemming in, thereof.

4. State of Action
For the true American is ashamed when he says nothing that was not
said before. Anymore. A step can say as much, a boot, a marching
band of boots as loud as bodied voices speaking disembodied words,
said before. A shot can say as much as a scream, a siren or a single
burst overhead and then a refrain of the same, echoing. The voice that
speaks apart is not a voice, is not speaking in a language that is of here.
A difference in language can be incorporated, but in truth, it is ignored.
17
Promise

Loveless Thisbe, do not mistake the sound
of a voice through the wall for a voice that seeks
a home inside the walls
of your heart.
Every voice echoes.
And there are other chambers less like stone
or crumbling gate, with open doors into their rooms,
with unbarred windows.
What you touch is no more
than the shadow of your hand against your palm.
A hand on the other side of the wall is free
to hold or not hold itself against the farther side,
to say it touches back, whether unfelt or untrue.
18
Predatory

A velveteen sheaf in Tyrian blue on the table and
on it, an assortment of holes and feathers, and
on it an assemblage of glittering shells,
not to steal the moment of death but still its onset for a brief few hours, and
on it the price of risk.
He worries.
Each mask has lived a lifetime
in the shopkeeper’s hands, waits now to try its charm.
What if…[Everything will fall again]

onto the stiff cobblestone walk, if I don’t do this again,
adjust, again, adjust, again like this, and
[leave me alone,]
to keep this safe on our display.
He tells her, go now to the side there
where the wind might drop off,
a piece or two of pretty prices in an instant.
He hurries. Shifting, between tables at his booth,
he turns to her, question for a question, [Annie, would I lie to you?]

And lying beneath the table at the front corner is an empty space,
a blue like a curtain for me to slip under
to see from under,
to watch the walking feet from under
and the hands with small things swinging in transit and in talk.
I take it.
What a perfect cover for a thief, for me,
for a man in brown fading into the shade of ground.
Quick as a brown fox.
Waiting for someone to ask [How long have you been lost down here?]

to caterwaul from color
into my desire to take,
for any thing unlike a thing that announces itself as nothing but itself.
And here a hookah made of ivory and glinting glass, not inlay but a paint.
A desire to break it. Nothing more.
And here a skirt so tight she cannot walk, even
on her legs like stalks of egret limb.
Her fully pantalooned friend says [Gimme the scissor, hammer, flame]

and I can make you a better bit of glass than that
marbling box on the box-shaped table.
Beside the girl, he is clumsy in his stride.
19
A desire to break her. Legs, nothing more.
A chair of fading wood, faded yellow brocade tapestried to the top.
Plastic bags. Of marbles. Yes, colored marbles. Tied
to the rungs between the legs. Small feet walking to Now? [How soon is now?]

And can we open them now? Or now? Then,
fast feet in heavy heels before the stiletto heels wobbling between the stones,
a pair, two pairs of feet. Wobbling beneath warbling high voices.
Orange fingernails holding in one hand a hat made of green Chinese silk
in the shape of a cylinder,
stopping at the table under which I am. Her friend. In red velvet Mary Janes
complains, [How could I be so immature to think
that he could replace the missing element in me? How extremely lazy of me!]

Slippers!
And she angles one foot against the other, lays one over the other.
A dancer.
Ballet shoes in blood red bold, nothing like the blush of modest pink
and pale abalone.
How about this mask?, her friend orangely asks.
No, but this one has perfect blue feathers. Like sky.
The shopkeeper’s voice after she leaves, high like shivering branches and I
slip out behind their talk of [what if
all these fantasies come flailing down? Oh no. I’ve said too much.]

stealthing behind their stillettoed feet.
Now she holds the mask to her face, hidden behind bright plumage.
A feather! When she drops her hand, I will pluck just one streak of sleeping turquoise.
20
Poisonfruit

Seduce me with an apple or a pome,
I will laugh for you –
archetype and nothing more; do you
think that it is sweet,
what I crave?
Wrong-fleshed choice.
Desire, too, has a shadow,
and it hungers.

I am no goddess – no kindness in me –
to be won.
21
Once

A night in paper
shapes of light, when full
of too much
honeyed color, I
reached up on the peaks of toes,
jumping –
and you, holding
my waist with one hand, stretched
with one lean length
of arm and torso
and plucked for me the yellow,
yellowest lemons,
dropping
them unseen into my upturned hand.
The leaves,
higher than the halo of my breath,
were still
inside yours.

Now, the trees are cut
to the rooted stumps.
I reach up
To amputated branches, just
as blank
as if you’d never felt
green
for me, before.
22
Michaelangelo’s Ex

Nights beside the water, she watches
statues. Pale unmoving
forms, liquid under shadows –
here was a slight smile, there
a colored iris, a question inside
that frown. He is marble. His stone
features will break
not into expression, but fragments.
She makes hollow men
to love; one, another, an army,
who will always,
though unmoving and silent,
remain in place.
23
In Looking Back

Hero, you have left me
to rescue myself
from the simple cave
I entered, falling behind
your shadow.

The spider weaves her sticky strands
at the mouth –
to catch around my ankles, bound –
my hands, my feet to your certain words.

My bones could break
through the soil,
into the threshold of the sun,
my toe past a perimeter of heavy dust.

But, still, you will not remember,
to believe: more
than your shadow moves behind you.
24
Like Red, Dancing for the Wolf

a thousand peacock’s eyes couldn’t watch me sane
couldn’t wash the reflection of you from my lidless dreams

in a bed, in a box, is waiting
in birdsong, in bricks, is building

a thousand mornings couldn’t breathe me safe
couldn’t kill the guillotine glint in your incisors or your anger

in a corset, in a quiet room, is velocity
in a skin-cut, in a whip-sting, is violane

a thousand legs to carry me home
and a millipede’s petal-quenched wish
would carry me dancing boot-heeled back –
your jaws, pink-tongued
25
caution: no mystery, only curse. electrical wires

do not dig here, where the quartz protrudes,
long fingers like old fingers, unclutched.
do not dig here where the cracks of earth are
filled, with once-red blood. clay, in the stone,
and in the soil, and in the sun, baking
like earthen bread, they stood once, fallen now
into lines. there is danger in the wood, in this
brooding earth. only wires carrying fire can
still traverse the submerged bones. do not dig
here where the wires like snakes will sting,
will poison with sparked tongues unattached
to coiled vine body. no story lies here waiting
to be told. only, do not dig here, but elsewhere
in the burying earth.
26
Ever Aftering

Dearest Madness,
You are not what I choose, but what I cannot
turn away. The sheer wings of Bluest Morpho,
morphose into peacock feather pattern, into a
single flap of skin left hanging on my skeleton.
Will you not come to me across the miles?
Your –

Are you mine, Muse?
That shielding my windows mightn’t keep you
away? I dreamt of you again, and woke with
the lull of bagpipes in my hair, my skin sore, as
if it had been peeled and pulled back into place.
Tell me, then, what you demand.
Waiting Here.

Dear Mitochondria,
I will call you something that I crave until I find
a something else to live by. Writing to you on an
antique fainting couch in velvet, everything sinks.
This morning howled open, as from nightmare and
Jasmine bloom. Aren’t the evenings purple anymore?
Yours.

And what you crave is a child, then, rumpled
Rumplestiltzkin?
This is a tricky game. Perhaps you know something
that I have not touched yet? Tell me what it is. I am,
dying to know.

27
Oil Field. Mine, field. Afghanistan.

Workers below do not work to throw rocks or other missiles.
Workers below are pelted with rocks and other missiles.
Workers before sometimes bulldozed, preventing future missiles,
and un-misled voices, standing guard against the door to home,
scraped away the bones of the unloving and unloved.

No man that is not man needs a guard, no-man
is man that is bluffed by missile. Noman is man that has
become nomad, in tents and graveyards, where a plastered poster’s
picture depicts how to tie a tourniquet when no-man nomad
has stepped through not a missile’s arc but a mine-field.

Once, here, were pomegranate trees, once whooping birds and
Jasmines big as a fist, until a fist took,
shook fistfuls into sand and caves and sand replaced the places
where missiles later sought and demanded misled bones,
bones like those fleshed bones standing in front of bulldozers.
28
Beware: Alligators Do Not Feed Ducks.

The alligators move faster than you
think: waddling sluggish as heat-waves
they could not catch the body among waves
turbulent and thick.
They bask, waiting, like
thieves in ambush, seeking the right flailing
hand to snatch from under the shadow of sun.
Raise up your hands
like that, in repetitive
motion, and scatter breadcrumbs to the stagnant
tide: you will bring forth an armada
of ducks
and beneath their hoarse quacks, the stealthy
pad of gator, out of the bayou and the swamp,
having arrived at your flagrant wave
of meaty arm, an invitation to lunch.
29
Through Albatross Eyes

Perhaps there are things in the unforgiving
arctic ice
beside the frozen hearts of mammoths,
enormous tusks curving like scythes

left behind by stray wanderers.
In the ice underfoot, a necklace made
of walrus tusk, an anklet of
brittle fishbone.

Only a winter sky could rival so
much blue;
slated balance of water and ice,
there stormcloud and wind.

Here the ground will not relent, even
for bootprints and feet,
here is the history of time
in each stilled drop of water.
30
This Ascension in the CD Player

Light scarce in the midnight room,
only the computer monitor flickers
against muted walls

We reach up, arms like smoke to the swirl of soundscape & drum
until in solemn procession they emerge – shadow-play of puppets.

Simple crescendo of curtain hemmed
in beat & stitched by the lyric-
less pulse of voice.

Before the wail of siren reaches our bare bodies, a few liminal scenes –
the storm’s center & the rush beneath Eden.

31
Shock & Awe

That sound cannot be real – but it is, bursting
over Baghdad. Bombs over Baghdad.
Everything turning inward, into ash,
blood, bodies, bricks – now fumes
spreading, the way dye blossoms
in a jar of water, reddening in my hands.
or a burst capillary opens
across the white canvas of cornea. And I
cannot turn my eyes away, my face
damp with the loss of brothers I have
never met, sisters I have never held. I do not
wear a veil
everyday, but today in defiance. I look
from my kitchen, from the small heat
of a gas stove –
how could I even remember to scream, if
the flume of blue kept growing?

32
Warning: Breakdancing Defies Laws of Physics.
with thanks to Andrew Allport

Break the bank of the beat of the break on the stiff
unwhitened concrete, unwashed this side of freeway.

Breakers will usually dance on slick floors
such as linoleum or cardboard
to reduce the friction between their clothes and the floor...

Break the step of the walk of the stride of the man
unseeing where he passes by, this side of glass window.

As the breaker's body turns and spins, their legs fly
out creating a hovering illusion. The body, connected to the legs,
do not allow the legs to follow their desired straight path,

Break for the time that breathes more exhaled than in,
the walking men, hollow men, robot men that think

and cause the legs to swing about in a circular path through the air.
This displays Newton's law, stating that forces will
remain in their state of motion until acted upon by an outside force…

men don’t dance like this,

The windmill is a perfect example
of uniform circular motion, in that the breaker is using his legs
to propel him in a circular fashion.

like coins skipping up off the street, pocket-spilt, like
drops of water bead-bouncing off waxen sheen on cars.

Although he seems to be moving at a constant velocity,
the breaker is spinning, causing a change in direction of his velocity.
Therefore he is constantly accelerating.

Angles of motion made for broken joints or those of us
made masters of the fractured and broken-down so

Dance like this.

His legs are the radius,
and his feet are the points where the velocity vectors
are tangent to the circle.
33

Cautious not of being seen, but unseen as once whole,
and circuitous, whole again.
34
Thisbe, Upon Seeing the Lion

The sphinx is red and like a succubus
desires
to be filled with anxious breath.

The moment of arched back, broken-
waisted defeat
reveals
the torso
of a feline, sinewed and fanged and
claws parting the sheaf of skin
down her rigid spine.

What the riddle answers is stolen, a wish inside
the sphinx’s kiss.
What the night sees is a roar, a bloody pair of lips.

35
The Key Club

Approach the door in my tall, white
dress and glass
slippers. And a man, black in denim,
stands to block my way, silent,
as if to see me,
as if to say “I know your kind
and this is not your place.”
Behind me, a woman shouts through
a megaphone, a man shouts through
a megaphone, and their words are folded
in echo. Then music, riotous, Rage Against
The Machine, without a vocalist. There
is protest in the park. I stand swaying.
On stiletto heels of ice,
I have walked through water. He says,
“You know that story
with the pumpkins; it wasn’t true.”
36
Synthpop

This I own,

a solitary pulse
without
platelets, pigment

a singular cacophony
of step & sway & arching
back

these movements –
joint of sound
& skin

given under weightless
spill of hued light,
your breath,

the expanse of night.
37
Hyenas
(after William Carlos Williams)

laughing to each other in the night
& we

lock the doors,
call our loves in to the lit walled light.

In the morning,
no sound

heralds the hatching sun
but blood –

spilt red against white feathers –
congeals in the raided chicken coop.

38
Siren Song

Why am I so eager to break again
onto you as the surf onto itself,
carried by the weight of its own desire
for an end

that turns again to unbeginning? In
the beginning there was no light and in
the end will be the darkness after light
has splintered

into the colors of birth. To be born
of the sea is to ascend from sharks teeth,
in rows like corn or coral. To be born
of the sea

is to remember a time without sun,
where clay rests on fire. Carry me back
to the ocean when I cannot walk there
anymore,

carry me into the relentless tide,
unwilling
to relinquish its hunger, to let go.
39
Psyche in Love

The stairs of spine lead
not to where you have come
but to where you should have
begun.

A woman with a free heart
& a free soul
is always left
a hetaira –
unowned,
unpossessed in waiting.

It is she
who recognizes her cage
of bones for what it is,
her body –
a temple of bones –
who can claim sanctuary
in the sacred –
this, too, unowned.

40
Prophetstown, IL

It is like the way you feel, driving too fast
on a long highway,
road slipping discretely below the hem
of the upturned sky,

like this road might lead all the way
past Kerouac’s wind-faded footprints,
out to where the coast opens before you,
holding salt in its curling water-fingers,

or else into the flatlands where
one sky looks only like another
and there is no exit.

After too many unfamiliar city
limits, you might begin to wish
for your own Penelope,
not desire, not love,
just somewhere to belong –
it is
the journey that steals and replaces you,
leaves knots in place of gut and only words
in the songs surfacing
through peaks of static on the radio.
41
Persephone to Orpheus

The feverish pulp of your heart
is not enough an offering –
it is your voice that I want.

Echoes burst against the stone,
fireworks in my ears
racing swift along the canyon edge
splitting death and life –
when will your throat dry?

Relinquish what is mine.
42
A Palindrome for Pleasure

a pile of pickled bats and porcupine quills and a half-
dead, decaying baby bird in the pine needles I swept
off the balcony –
a marionette who’s lost its wings, its strings
and I would make a nest of all the unfinished
letters filling up a sheaf of mine bookshelf entire –
but my circuits are burnt
and dust-curdling –
am I Prada, prêt a porte, postmodern sleazy ?
Moby maybe of a best-sell breakfasted morning, oh –
who can bear to unburden a secret, love? tell me
a dream, my darkest,
oh, my darkling –
is my lover more than just a word, a just word, world,
from whom I inherit a bedscape of feathers and feather-
less wings?

43
Pantomime: A Palindrome for Beauty

At the end of a long thread, my throat opens, mouth
tilting wide, head tipping back for the single drop that the Queen of Cups
is willing to give me from the curve of her fingernail.
In a white room,
the walls are made of lights, she is drifting on a cushion on a carpet of
opulence, with jet black and eggshell white ostrich feathers crowning her
shadowblack hair.

I can see nothing more of her but the pink of her
mouth against the plumage.
In acres of organza, she might have once
slept with lions – la belle et la bete – a carpet of jungle tresses and bursting
orchids, a lagoon whispering a Narcissan complaint, compliant of birds.

Here, she cups her elegant fingers from the stalk of a thin wrist
above the pool, hands dripping now with a stream, now shimmering with
beads, each to lull the beast beside her waist, whose long mane carpets
her toes, her thighs, her heavy breasts when she unhinges
her jaws
in the silence of a roar, spilling stream-song by globes of fluid prism onto
the points of her own sharp teeth and the pointed tip of her greedy
tongue.
44
Out of Clay and Back Again, What am I?

(for Dianne Gault)

Bottle brittle, bottle bare,
bottle me up with a fair-
haired maiden in the sea
and send me silverly

into the

Green foam, sea foam, undrentide,
promise me that valentine
will hold the stitches in the heart
and break it with the cold stone part

of seashell splinter
by the colored sea.

Cinder, sand, and driftwood,
call the rabbit from the moon to me,
the Aztec courage in the globe,
volcano-driven, fire-grown.

Abalone, pink and green,
shimmer in the shellèd night.
Slivers, fit in skin to find
the scarred rings of jellytree.

Here a jellyfish on the sand,
placental pink and tendril and
a song of stinging,
like the voice of the oldest man

and the wrongest tree.

There a sharp stone in the hand
to burst the fishfruit over land
and spill the sticky residue
of fingerlust, of silent tongue,

of eggy birth from gill to lung,
from the ballast of the vessel into be

Bottle brittle, bottle bare,
bottle me up with fair-
45
haired mermen sunning on a jetty
by the slumbering tidalled sea.
46
Morning Unexpectedly Sapphic

Stretched supine on a mat,
watching you, she is
playing the oldest game:
she loves me, she loves me not.
Between the hardened leaf
of painted fingernail – the softest
petals. Your breath is small,
the rise and fall of your breasts
is small. But each exacts
a tug of blossom slipping
away from stem, leaving plain
a core. Oh, Kore, she is not bound,
like you, inhaling
you, to continue with
any other iris; and with no silent
sound can dull the pace of quickening
stroke. She will not let you wake
to her while in this room
ripe with the smell of bananas
when all she wants is a peach.
47
Morning After

Just past the green tines of trees
pointing into gradations
of indigo – a satellite blinking,
or a planet, a plane.
Dare I make a transient’s wish?
There is nothing still untethered
that can yield.
48
Mercy from the Red Queen

Oh, and how could I deny her?
With those eyes like Lorca’s women,
in her Alberta Ferretti dress,
I would have killed Venus,
brought back skin for powder.
I would have eaten poinsettias
if my lips weren’t red enough
for her design.
I watched her swing beneath
the laziest branch,
watched her toes drag shapes
along the dust.
Nor did she grace me with one smile,
nor one glance of honest iris.
Those teeth guarded words
not meant to be said.
So, I brought her tongues,
with which to speak to me,
casting aside lips blanched pale with begging,
falling into wordheld casts for reading by, for
in those eyes was wanting.
49
The Marquis Slips into an Understanding

He remembered her in the starlight, hands bound behind her.
She sat, on knees, draped only in long hair, hung like whips of willow
dripping over stoic eyes, a chastity belt, a glass key hung around her neck.

And he thought anhedoniac
And she thought redemption

He
remembered
her
scars
like
spider-‐webs
clinging
to
the
skin
of
her
back,
slits at her shoulder blades where once might grow wings.

And he thought her magic gone
And she thought this silent warmth growing in my belly

She
hung
her
head
when
light
sharper
than
blades,
exposed
her,

longing
for
the
violet
of
twilight
sky.

And he thought prayer
And she thought retribution
50
Ligeia’s Despair

By winter I was dead
like tubers in the ground
left too long untouched
and rotting.

The loosening for my flesh,
toxic, left roots in soil
too venomous for even lyme.

You promised to sprinkle
Licorice seeds over my shell
because I loved blue

But soon, mourning clothes
became too heavy,
my pictures dust-skinned

And once a year something
in your mind said seeds. But
in a new bridal chamber

you had already forgotten
the twisting black ropes
the lonely stained bones.
51
From Inside the Painted Window Frame

1.

Sharp blades of morning filter through the dulling
slats of blinds.

I wake, weave my body on wrinkled sheets,
peel away on them layers of skin –

the epidermis and the cutaneous and the fascias –
idle breath, until nothing but bone remains.

Skeletal and limber so that pebble slips, skips
before me where I walk under bleaching sun.

The silken wind brings a starling wail down
like rain, or dry leaves – cloak for honest bone.

2.

His heart: a jellyfish, soaking in the sun.
Endwise, it will be weighed
against the underworld of water, the fire,
against the sounds it has soaked.
A small coin floating in its center,
has turned duller than a copper moon.

3.

a burst of red berries on the drying bush beside my door:
the green hill, a sacred mound: circled by winter wind,
my own whitening breath: every moment: hatching.

4.

The way water slips down along an icicle,
adding another sheath of cold –

there is no subtlety like that in your kiss –
no shivering like a nascent stalactite learning how to harden.

I woke to a world sharper than light, waited
until the sun spilt like a seam of blood.

52
6.

The lurch
of the heart
is
not always love.

Mind the gap.

53
Fury

Not lips – two magpies

facing eyes, pecking eyes & tails
upturned at edges.

No, not skin – a sheath
of maggots, split in seams like

my!, my eyes just rinds
of spoons, silvery, closed.

Close my eyes & I am closed
inside and night brings

moth wings stopping just short
of flame.

Give me a chameleon’s coat instead,
scales like droplets of water

one beside another.
Not flame, not fluid shifting –

just the color of fire and bluing, I
will cease to burn.
54
Found Song

No words want to be spoken.
It is not the place of song or skull rattle.
Here is the hour of animal,

all fur
and teeth
and sex.

In the wilderness, I found
my barefoot soul in the mouth of Coyote,
the webs of Spiderwoman,

unfolding
in shadow on the path
before me.

The earth’s voice
came from the cracks of quivering ground.
Love.

All things know how
to seek love.
So do you.

Unbalanced, hands open to keep apart

the woods
and
the sun.
55
Fossil Before the Making

Dearest Monster – last night I slept
in the ozone-scented stratosphere,
waking to the lurch and hum of a great
mechanical wing, over sea. Unfurling
and retreating the way a pterodactyl’s
crinolined appendage once hushed
the Vulcan burst of earth, it silenced my
protest against a morning
inside the belly of an aluminum bird.
Around me, rows of dim, upright teeth
and, in place of one, I. Had I woken
from within enamel shell, cracking
against my sinew, tautening tense?
This light grows brighter, but it does not
Call me home – it fixes me, still. –Yours.
56
Exile

Fog descends on the tallest
of skyscrapers, dissolving
them, leaving their roots
exposed,
reclaiming the geometry
of sky.
This is the way snow
might look, falling upwards:
nepenthic.
The union
of stratosphere & horizon
never so plain as in this:
the broad peopled world suspended
half in walking,
half in dream.
Connected this way, not by thread
but breath, speech desists;
distance
broken instead by measured glances,
wrapped in coat-sleeves, folded
arms.
The spaces between & inside things
find voice,
emerging from blood
cells, joints, molecules – listening
for the fall of exuvium beneath spent air.
57
Cyndi Lauper Rocks My World

No color is impossible
next to another

and why shouldn’t lace be worn
with shreds of newspaper?

Greener than your make-up,
the crooning of your throat:

nephilim in walkmans,
screeches wrapped in harpstrings.

Never enough flame in any sun, so
why should your yellow hair ever

fit in?

58
Blue Heron,

how can you stand so –
poised on one leg, as if to say:
two is cumbersome?

59
Bachelorettes

Vine tendrils sprouting from her skull, they are, small
ribbon springs, any number of helix.
She’s turned away beside me, unshattered, all high
cheekbones and waterbright eyes for vox.

My own hair – a porcupine arrangement,
and two curved locks like scythes
to frame the oval of my face. So much dark in the hair
that it surrenders only to the red gore of lipsticked mouth.

Tonight we hunt for boys in bright mohawks,
the colored plumage of unapologetic scowl,
the only way to compromise – a shriek
not lost in noisy crowd.

60
Assimilating Skinny Puppy

Belly dance for me
in your second skin, slick as oil –
you stretch the vinyl well.

We dance like we fuck.

In your curves the year is 1785
& love is never fun
without the crime.

Eyes & mouth sly behind
that hair & you are slipping down,
down, drowning in the sight

of every way I’d like to cut you

loose into this dusk.
There are not enough days to forget
the guileless

sway of your hips, begging,
for a rope, to bind them
from a gaze like mine.
61
A Swallow of Gravity

I carried with me a small smooth stone
from the beach. Something from the sea,
lent to me by my mermaid sister
far beneath
the turbulence of waves.
It is like silk
against the contours of my face, calm
as an egg now resting on my forehead.

White like the moon, like a pearl,
like the teeth of God.
Every perfect moment, broken
sediment.

If I don’t take a coin
for the ferryman, will he let me stand
on the banks
And watch the faces of the dead? I will
take instead this pebble, drifting
with the tide
from my reach.
62
Talisman

Everywhere I look is turquoise

but I am not Julnar of the Sea
with a pearl big as the orb of her eye
in the coil of silver around her finger.

I wear the evil eye to still it, the silver
blade to wrench it from the watchers,
creeping, hooded, into my nightmares.

“What is vision but a sense of sight?”,

their blind eyes and bone limb will ask,
for they are all iris as big as the face
and they speak through our tongues.

I am everywhere, turquoise, but I see.
63
Persephone in the Nights of Spring

There is a pit lodged in my solar plexus – [not an abyss, but a seedling] –
that you left there.

I can feel – [its slow unfurling, leaves as wide as the shadow of banana trees,
stalks as tough, as tender as shipyard rope inside] –
the hard ridges of the stone. – [Is there an almond in the serrated shell
or an orchard of shelled bodies, an army
of ripening fruit ?] –

Around it, I am shrinking – [My blood thickens like syrup; I am drunk on it,
on the honeyed taste
of my own spit.] –

Take it out of me – [take this date seed, olive seed, plum seed from my center] –
until I am, again – [left with the blank of desire, the slow trickle of waiting.] –

Until I am thirsty for a seeded fruit without enough nectar to let me stop
at just one red grain.

64
Aubade for a Seraph (or a Demon)

Wake with a dream, the dream he left you, of a voudon,
in your throat, a blackened hand, a lepers nose and murder
in the strangling hours when the sky hangs low, trees
bowing, branches limbering in awe –

You can ask, then,
for the angels, the thousands of birdwinged bodies without blood,
to still, to bring you
into a sheet behind a cloud –
here, there are rooms, hidden
in wrinkles, in simple folds
here, the slippery skins will
never stop begging for more than is
here, the cold doesn’t slip in
to the uncovered air just between your shoulderblades, or
the anxious curve of your hip,
where his hand warmed once
broad, familiar, palmed, but now
somewhere else in time –

And even the shadows here have tongues, waiting to lick
the length of you, the creases of your ears, the indentation
of the corners of your eyes – afraid to close but too afraid to look
to one place–
it was a hand there around your throat –
and it is a long time before sunrise.

65
Self-Portrait as Wick-Tender and Candle Flame

I am half-starved at the root and stem by being
for another body
the wide opening petals of a plum-red peony.
He is salt-wind on a sailor’s breath,
living on the ever-lit
flame of candle-wick in the window.
My nights are luminous with a far flame
that my face
cannot trope towards, cannot
diminish
though the fever in the darkness begs
to quench an uncertain glow.
Even a sailor can wear a halo
in a room across memory,
but a bloom is ill-spent in tending the solitary light;
the salt takes more thirst than an ocean-wave can heal.

66
Aggregate

Hello dear futurebaby, curled up like a lapis lizard,
lazuli as blue and flecked with gold in my mind’s third
eye. I can see your fast, full beating heart inflating and
deflating your unformed ribcage right against the left
window of my sight. Citing your feat, my dreams
know to tell you not to worry, that my long black cat,
bonier than Bast, will neither eat you nor carry you on
his pink tongue, his mouth remain closed from you
except to make you a new sound. Sound as a bell you
are, still in the far belly of a violet light. Light your
unshed gills on fire, darling, and spread like quickest
silver through my eyelids, through the inside of my
irises so that even in seeing beyond you, I might still
see you, and know that you are mined.

67
An Architecture for Mystery

Inside the size of the word small can
you find small Sarah Winchester and
her small door and her wonderland
of a house meant to make her
smaller and smaller than the small
she already was, so small she might
not be able to feel the grief anymore
that was too big for her to keep
feeling without falling into pieces.
Her stairs led to nowhere to hem in
the aspirations of her undeserving
fantasies, undeserving dreams when
her baby girl, small baby girl, shrunk
to a smaller life and died within her
arms, undeserving dreams dead
tethered to a million ghosts bound
to keep her company after her
husband’s wild ambition brought
their caught souls to an end with his
long, stiff, hard barrel of a cocked
gun. Inside the guise of the word
small would be a woman so small
she could fit through her keyholes,
who could cherish the bigness of a
house that never had to boast that it
was big, of a woman who hid from
flash photo and flash warning guests
alike, preferring the long
meandering puzzle of a labyrinth to
live in, like the minotaur of despair
weaving its way through the vessels
inside her flesh, trying to hide, to
find a home that didn't echo of
blood, of a blunt gun, of a blood-
spill anything but small.
68
Occurrence

Edison’s Dissonance

Optical illusions depend on the angles of
sight to remain slanted in the old habits of
looking long at a thing unfamiliar to find a
thing familiar in it, depend on the angels
of light to refrain from slanted habits
looking in a long looking glass to find the
familiar grace of the unfamiliar shadow,
depend on the size of a thing that hinges
near the size of nothing that casts a
shadow against the slant light of angled
glance. Illusory optics might leave the man
under the arch and the arch over the man
grows to encompass the planet hovering
behind him. Is he like Lucy, upright and
vaguely hominid, or like Lisette, upright
and vaguely hominid? Is she in a shroud
or a gown, or, is she a circumference of
petals slipping open from the stem? The
northern lights like lilypads, like Lily, pad
across the flat terrain of space, like the
lilypads breaking their reflection in the
glistening pond. A wet face like the lit sun
spilling over onto the surface of the moon
that spits back a slanted light borrowed
out of habit, that is an illusory eye opening
in the dark grimace of night, eclipsing
itself behind what it longs to see.

Tesla’s Laboratory

To develop a three-dimensional space
onto the two-dimensional surface of a
page requires first creating the
passageways. Angles that connect the
various planes of a space take light
differently, some slick and glistening,
others absorbing like a secret or a stolen
thrill. Transitory. In transit. Sitting in an
incredibly turbulent railway car, I am
watching the space in front of me where
two stairways are moving in opposing
directions, bisected or bound by this
narrow, unwalled corridor. It reminds me
of a zipper half-closed. I am imaging the
act of drawing it. And, motion? A ghost
descending the steps, a blur with double
edges, its background and foreground
lined more heavily than the fading edges
blending in between. Stylized contours.
There’s no energy calling me there, but I
can imagine standing so, being touched by
a shock of static electricity, my memory
lingering between those unbalanced
planes as if caught just outside of time.
What if I could create those sparks, let
them move across miles, move me with
them? Would it be worth the journey?
Always? Would it?

69
Nor Equinox Nor Promise

If the tide is right and the moon is high enough to carry these waves to shore,

If the boat’s tether is knotted loose and its anchor is gone and its oars are wide enough to
part the crests of these waves as they reach the shore,

If Kilbirnie Kirk there is full of light by stars and by candles and by lanterns that skim off of
these wet peaks and part the dark enough to carry this boat along to shore,

If the green of the hills falls through the moon’s reflection in the loch and opens a passage
on the boat for those who might travel these waves to shore,

If the high ways are clear of men in the hillshades and the boat seats two in secrecy, their
shadows discretely long along the moon’s light as it moves along these crests that reach the
shores of the other side,

If the rope is untied,

If the boat is still, without broken boards,

If,

If the boat’s wood is dark as the loch,

If the oars fit rough hands,

If you come to this green place, sung by the gone, by the there where the wild roses grow
and the moss blankets the stones, beside the sound of the waves and the waves on the waves
on the way high along the way to the shore,

If you wear your mourning black and your beads of jet round your darkening throat and
your darkling hair, shining darkly the moon and the mossy and the roses back into the night,

If you shimmer in your rosy skin, in the thistle-bright sheen of the moon’s milk face on your
moss-given stride,

If you cast your glance aside, behind the fae hum of the night’s dark shade,

If you rose, stone as cold by the fair bell of the moon’s light across the way,

If on the other side of that shore is a new tether, a new anchor, a new rope, nae a footpath
made of old stone and rune stone and an archway not to a land of bones, if…
70

Part II

Synthetic Forms for Deviance Transcendent:
Interfaces between 21st C. Poetry & Science

71
Chapter 1: The Matrix of the Interface: Formal Invocations of Science by Poetry &
Proxy, or, the Hyperdimensional Appeal of the Paradox.

“For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was
from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique
of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an
amazing change in our very notion of art.”
i
Paul Valery wrote this in “The Conquest of
Ubiquity”. Walter Benjamin excerpted it into an epigraph in his seminal “The Work of Art in
the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. Now, seventy-five years later, at the nascence of the
digital revolution
ii
, Valery’s words and Benjamin’s insistence still remind us that from
continuity comes deviation and from that deviance comes another way of incorporating the
notion of art as it is enacted, as it is experienced, and as it is received, a way that transcends
expectation enough to revitalize that art for a new age. As we file away outdated definitions
of the precise limits for the literary artistic experience, upgrading our understanding through
exposure to new media technologies and formats, we also find ourselves looking to the
poetry of the page rather than that of the pixel to remind us of the experience often
contained in both new media and old.
We learn from the existence of new media texts that not only is technology
everywhere, mediating our experiences of language, sensation, and information – and how
we read it, but that language itself is a technology, too. Poetry exists within and through the
matrix of the technocracy, an awareness heralded by other words of Paul Valery, from his
manifesto “On Literary Tradition”, hinting toward the idea of such an interface, when he
72
writes, “literature is the art of playing on the soul of others. It is with this scientific brutality
that the problem of the aesthetics of the Word…has been set for our age.”
iii
For Valery, a
science of effect
iv
plays a role in stabilizing poetry, and such a concept resonates onward into
Benjamin’s ideas about authenticity and artwork reproduction and also further into
postmodern poetic ideas about the experiential authenticity in a literary artwork. Such a work
in digital text when duplicated is not simply copied identically, but is exactly the same as the
original when contained in a digital file, unless the text is corrupted. Texts that live more
ephemeral existences than those contained in digital code, on paper in books or on the body
as in Shelley Jackson’s mortal text story “SKIN”
v
told through tattoos on skin, enact an
awareness of the flux of technology and life, its nonlinear movements and its unpatterned
patterns that hint at the larger systems of information in which they are contained,
effectively creating an experiential authenticity for the reader. In the texts with which this
project is concerned, those hints are constructed formally in poems for the page through
various poetic strategies in keeping with the spirit of contemporary poetic theory and also
the spirit of the sensibility that pervades our experience of the world after the digital
revolution – a connection to science and the things of science without a formal immersion
into its disciplines
vi
.
The onset of the digital age has fused man to machine and in removing the barrier
between interfaces has created a removal from the understanding of the navigation of the
natural world that is felt in art, both literary and graphic, that has, in poetry, necessitated a
synthetic shape to hold its resultant hyperdimensional
vii
sensibility
viii
.
Science and technology are everywhere, mediating the world we experience, changing
modes of thought, communication, and reality, and aiding us to navigate the world of
73
information saturation and global connectivity. It is no surprise that elements of science
would find themselves embedded within poetry, too. We can’t ignore that ideas belonging to
the disciplines of science are sometimes incorporated into the realm of poetry, or that this
interaction has been witnessed since the advent of science and poetry, despite the polemical
ways in which popular culture views the relationship between what we think of as science
and what we think of as poetry. Considering how science fits into contemporary poetry in
our culture can decode the relationships between the two in contemporary culture. Poetry
maintains relevance by resonating with the zeitgeist and the current running through this
time is dominated by scientific discourse and allusion.
In a world permeated by forms of technology (products of the application of
scientific principles), we must also consider the form in which poetry appears, in order to
truly consider the effects of scientific discourse on literary culture. Form is, after all,
associated with techne and craft and, so, related to the applied theories of poetics.
ix
Language,
the medium of poetry, is itself a technology, a concept explored substantially through
“L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E” poetry, whose subject is, according to practitioner Ron
Silliman, “situated within the larger question of what it means to be human.”
x
In our digital
world full of technology and visual culture, poetry is sometimes seen as a lofty, remote thing,
full of high sentiment and truth, removed from the mundane experiences of often
automated and info-saturated lives, but it contains as often as not many of those same things
in it and emerges as often as not shimmering up through the mundane and catching us
unaware. It is connected and connective. Postmodern poetry doesn’t seek to separate itself
from the stuff of life
xi
and the stuff of life, in a digital world, includes technology and an
awareness of the concepts and ideas of the science behind that technology, if not its
74
specifics. Sometimes, those concepts are encoded in poetry that seems to reach beyond the
scope of the ordinary, in poems that don’t apparently call to mind the laboratory or the
textbook or the encrypted lines of the programmer’s calligraphic scrutiny that runs our
machines, just beneath the surface, an unseen layer navigating our experience through the
matrix of our interactions. Just so, in some of the poetry collections discussed herein, science
takes on just such a structural function, guiding the reader through the poetry in ways
resonant with the hyperdimensional, info-saturated, techno-mediated world in which we find
our truths and our demons, our loves and our solutions, our gnosis and techgnosis alike.
This dissertation project highlights through a case study of two books, the structural
function of scientific material in poetic formal strategies that reflects the role of science in
our culture in ways that promote this poetry’s relevance. The project aims to discuss
Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors, Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City, Christian
Bok’s Crystallography, Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia & “The Blue Codices”, Kimiko Hahn’s
Toxic Flora & “The Artist’s Daughter”, and Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for
Monsters. In these poems, Reddy makes use of astronomy and particle physics, Wang
navigates through mechanics and engineering physics, Bok plays with geology and
pataphysics, Hillman builds with geology and psychology (or, alchemy), Hahn takes up the
idea of the scientific method and biology, and Kapil investigates technology and methods of
scientific inquiry. The latter four authors will be covered in the subsequent development of
this research topic toward a book, but in the interest of scope & length, a selection of simply
the first two is being submitted, rather than the whole. In these works, scientific concepts
inform the formal components and structures of poetry rather than simply make an
appearance in the poems’ content; this strategy speaks to our hyperdimensional sensibilities
75
that recognize reality in the sense of nonlinear connectivity and pattern and undercurrent
reinforced by the stuff of science in our general cultural awareness.
JZ Fullmer, in his essay, refers to uses of science in poetry by Eliot, Pound, Frost,
Moore, and MacLeish.
xii
He claims that “after reading Eliot’s poetry, the scientist is likely to
feel that Eliot is not uniquely aware of contemporary science, and what is usually called his
science content is much more often his personal metaphysic.” He investigates how these
poets use science, citing some as being more directly concerned with science than others, but
largely demonstrates that their use of science is more topical than structural. This is
unsurprising, as the prevailing scientific sentiment during their time focused around the
products of the scientific method, around man looking at the way he looks at the world, a
concept not oriented in systems but specifics
xiii
. The relationship between science and poetry
is not a new thing, but that relationship has changed, simply because the attitude toward
science and what it is has changed. In the poems investigated here, the science feels like
science rather than like a personal metaphysic, but shapes the metaphysic of the poems as
well.
With the start of the digital revolution, a new method of cognition has emerged.
Various studies have been done on the way the digital revolution, and particularly hypertext,
have affected the way people read and experience texts. Culture itself has been affected,
allowing people (and their consciousnesses) to exist in a space of constant saturation by
information, the management of which has fallen upon science, whose applications have
provided technologies that manage and reinforce this human-computer cyborgian matrix. In
Moran’s review of three substantial publications on the matter, an idea of what has changed
becomes apparent.
xiv
He introduces the issue that “computers force us to see that all text,
76
and indeed life itself, is deeply and essentially rhetorical,” as well as discussing how hypertext
is seen to “free the writer from the linear constraints of the written page” by reflecting
natural cognition and maintaining original thought structures rather than gathering all the
strains together into a singly directed braid or “tree-trunk”. He also brings up questions of
how an immersion in this world of computers and hypertext has begun to affect scholarship
and thought – which, I believe effects experience and its expression in art such as poetry –
by describing a study conducted by Susan Star whose research demonstrates that with the
shift from paper to electronic medium has come the consequence that much of scholarship
(specifically in Clasical Studies) has become broader, but lacking in depth, a change which is
reflected also in reader’s choices or their sense that a writer’s work has connection to their
experiences. MC Goodall
xv
(science theorist and scholar) states, as explored in Miroslav
Holub’s essay on poetry and science, that there is a Third Science, or a Third Age of Science
with a different kind of scientific spirit that has come about with the rise of computers.
Stephanie Strickland, in her hypertext essay “Seven League Boots”, also refers to this idea,
which she describes as derived from Simone Weil’s ideas on the types or kinds of science.
xvi

Goodall’s concepts pick up just after Weil’s to bring the issue into our contemporary
experience. This shift in scientific spirit and a reconfiguration of its effects has led to a world
conditioned to new-media-enhanced information saturation and it has pushed poetry out to
the edges – where it has gained new frames of interaction to remain relevant.
Poetics/poetry after the start of the digital revolution – which led to a consciousness
interested in collaborative meaning-making and directly interactive text
xvii
– doesn’t
seemingly seek to effect a change in culture, but to coexist with it, embrace it. Its forms have
shifted to become relevant in today’s hypermedia world. The binary choice between
77
formalist verse and free-verse doesn’t contain the energy of the modern sensibility and new
formal structures reach the audience, coinciding with both tendencies in postmodern poetic
theory and general scientific theory to frame the impulses of the digital age in a specific
circuit. Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of “radical artifice”
xviii
and Alice Fulton’s ideas of
“fractal poetics”
xix
indicate some of these emergent formal trends and trajectories and they
are apparent in the books this project investigates. So, too, is relevant an understanding of
this matrix of science within which our culture moves, one that is neither specific enough to
be called a formal discipline, nor decorative enough to simply be considered a “theme” or a
“skin” that interfaces our shifts in cognitive programming. Considering Miroslav Holub’s
practical engagement with the overlap between science and poetry, the general theory of
science’s role on society as discussed by MC Goodall and John H Holland, and the scientific
discourse about poetry generated by IA Richards, yields a basis from which this structural
function of scientific form in these poems can be examined. The poets under investigation
in this project and their works do not share political, thematic, or necessarily ideological
concerns, and yet their works seem to share a structural engagement with scientific elements
disparate from, yet linked to particular disciplines. The layer of coding beneath the
interactive interface suggests connection to larger patterns of discourse and systems of
thought without actually subsuming the reader in any scientific discipline, instead, guiding
the reader through a hyperdimensional experience though poetry that feels intimate and
recognizably poetic, connected within the tradition of literature and yet skimming over it
with contemporary energy.

78
The Matrix of the Interface: Ideas About Science

Miroslav Holub, both a poet and an immunologist, prone to using scientific
knowledge in his own works, defines science as “ a complex of activities creating methods
for acquiring applicable information on the world” and from this idea, we can derive an
understanding of the scientific spirit of the times as a contemporary cultural attitude toward
that concept. He reminds us of AE Housman’s idea that most scientific disciplines are
represented by their wording or jargon, or are embedded in their words, or are seen as the
thing said, but that poetry is not such a thing said, rather it is a way of saying it. If poetry and
science use language differently, then how can they effect each other? Poetry functions
through the medium of language, embodying it, materializing it, but science seems to be a
process that uses language as a tool or a framework through which it gathers knowledge
about the world. While poems seek to be in the world, scientific discourse seeks to discuss
the world. In the works this project investigates, science functions within the formal
structures of the poems, coding and guiding the matrix through which the poem is
experienced. Scientific concepts are not simply taken up topically, thematically or
conceptually, instead, they are internalized in a way suggestive of a patterned, disciplined,
process that is guiding the reader through the poem so that the reader can make meaning or
sense of the poem through the comfort of this undercurrent. The experiential reality of the
poems borrows the comfort of the scientific engagement that has rooted itself in our digital
culture, giving a sense of formation rather than strict form. Valery’s idea of the effect of
science providing a foundation for poetry is enacted in this connection between the poetic
content and form, creating a fused but inorganic juxtaposition, a matrix within which to
experience the poem’s materiality. Such a matrix drives the reader’s engagement without
79
raising resistance to a sincerity or formality of form-content connection. Knowing the
scientific material helps to give another dimension to the poems, but not knowing it doesn’t
preclude the reader from enjoyment because that sense of dimension is evoked by the poetic
formal structures whether or not it is understood implicitly.
The nature of the scientific spirit of the times and its relationship to culture, and
therefore the arts of that culture, is better understood by decoding Holub’s inquiry. He asks
if “the scientific paradigm, that is the apparatus of perception and the framework into which
all observations are fitted, [remains] unchanged throughout the last centuries”
xx
and
introduces to us Marcus Campbell Goodall’s ideas about the Ages of Science, a useful model
for considering the issue. The scientific paradigm that dominates social discourse contributes
to the experience of reality within that cultural discourse. So, it is easy to extrapolate that
with a change in paradigm also comes a change in society’s manner of experiencing reality.
Setting aside for a moment the differences between objective and subjective measures of
that reality (a concept woven throughout Wang’s book), one can consider the spirit of
science within a period of time to be the attitude toward science that networks science to
other fields and modes throughout culture. Our digital world is everywhere faced with
science and an attitude about what that is, about how it contributes to the dominant
contemporary paradigm, can be discerned throughout it. According to Goodall, we inhabit
the Third Age of Science. I posit that it coincides with the flourishing of the digital age’s
onset and conditions our experience of reality. It is, then connected to the poetic theories
also prevalent in our time. When those fuse within the formal structures used in the poems
examined in this project, the experienced reality is contemporary and current, resonates a
sense of authentic experience that enables the reader to engage with it fully rather than
80
reservedly. The essays of IA Richards
xxi
and James Longenbach
xxii
might remind us that an
active engagement of the reader without active resistance to the workings of the poem
creates a sense of delight and meaning. I posit that it does so because a sense of authenticity
is reinforced in the experience, one that emerges as a result of the connections between
poetic materiality and formal poetic structures that evoke scientific paradigms.
These “Ages of Science” suggested by Goodall, seem to connect broadly to cultural
ideas about scientific discourse and it’s no surprise that each successive “Age” has
compounded the previous one. Highlighting key elements of postmodern hyperdimensional
poetry can be done by examining the continuity of these changing perspectives. Holub walks
us through Goodall’s argument with a useful summary:
In the First Science, introduced by the ancient Greeks, the method consisted
of forming axioms from which certain theorems could be deduced by the
application of logical systems that would today be regarded as
“philosophical” rather than “scientific.” In the Renaissance, the First Science
was gradually replaced by the Second. This was based on the systematized
observation with the naked eye or with tools developed at that time. It
invented the interrogation of nature through experiments, which in turn were
based on assumptions derived from direct observation, on entities very
similar or identical to the data of every day sensual experience. The paradigm
of the Second Science resulted in an enormous wealth of classifications,
descriptions, and notions of objects and elementary forces. (49)

So, what happened to the Second Science and our use of it? Allegedly, it has broken up bit
by bit, and replacing the idea of the solitary scientist in a lab at night waiting for chance to
strike his prepared mind is the idea of the Third Science whose practitioners are grappling
with “the fluent nature of things.” It seems that:
The world of living things, consisting so far of a hierarchical order… was
dissolved into torrents… regulated by somewhat inhuman forces…
proceeding… from the principle of minimal information to assure the
preservation of that information to the principle of maximal conciseness of
information. A rather “revolutionary idea” emerged “that chance and
81
indeterminacy are among the fundamental characteristics of reality.”…
Interest has moved toward the study of general properties of systems of
information and organization…. The present scientific paradigm and the
organization of modern science provide a precise and lasting world memory
and link distant causes with distant effects. They offer an operational
framework of memory that was missing in the life of societies and in the
culture.” (51-53)

Our digital culture, mediated by hypermediacy and technology, flourishes within a paradigm
suggestive of vast, incomplete systems of emergent data, stimulating a hyperdimensional
sensibility even outside the urging of the hypertext matrix within which much of the world is
lived. In this new Age of Science, particle theory and cybernetics, systems theory and string
theory and conspiracy theory all coexist as kinds of scientific engagement. Information
management falls under the domain of science, so too does the comforting thought that
somewhere, any fact that is worth knowing is being compiled into a system that will
understand it. Both Reddy’s Facts for Visitors and Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City
situate themselves within a world where scientific fact is relevant, analyzable, but each uses
the intimacy of the human gesture and memory in different ways, appealing to an awareness
of this systematized sense of scientific discipline to make very different statements about
humanity.
It seems that the First Science involved man’s direct exploration of the natural world
by logical processes, the Second Science involved examining the world though certain forms
of logical inquiry called the scientific method, and the Third Science then investigates the
way man looks at the way he looks at the world – a tertiary degree of removal from the
direct study of natural object, whose technologies have different cultural effects than a
secondary degree or primary degree might have. This Third Age of Science, coincident with
the digital revolution has created a hyperdimensional sensibility. In Holub’s view, one that
82
this argument shares, the effects of science on culture are not explicit but implicit, that they
have affected how we see and connect with the world altogether through making
technological progress available to people. Now that they have new ways of communication
and connection, there is an increased sense of simultaneity of experience, but also an acute
awareness of difference through specialization of language and field that cannot be translated
into universal language. As poetry and science both use language in highly specialized ways,
but in polarized ways and for completely different aims, a poet does not create works that
are closer to the scientific in spirit by using vocabulary that is recognizably connected to
science. The “network of relations and references” is absent
xxiii
. In some way, it seems that
the influence of science on culture has polarized language and experience so that there is
room for both poetry and science because both inhabit different spaces. Dropping scientific
facts and details into a poem feels outdated, just as selecting a scientific subject for a poem
feels outdated; it isn’t that either of these isn’t acceptable, but that they don’t invoke the
scientific spirit in the same way that a suggestive system of incompletely calculated words
and ideas would seem contemporary and in keeping with the spirit of science in the current
age. It is this sense of system that appears in the formal structure of poetic strategy in the
books examined herein.
Poetry appealing to a hyperdimensional sensibility might be as interested in the
material of the world as in the language we use to engage with the material of the world,
echoing the tertiary investigative degree of engagement our scientific spirit, too, suggests.
Our own digital culture equally welcomes physics and pataphysics. Engaging the natural
world in ways that evoke our experience of reality might mean doing so in a way that takes
into account our culture’s relationship to that natural world; as science has something to do
83
with how we look at the natural world, and our culture seems to be standing at a tertiary
degree of removal from the natural world, evoking an experience of reality that feels real in a
poem, might involve a sense of that kind of connectivity to systems that seems to be
pervasive in our culture. Poetic formal structures that bring this about reinforce a sense that
the poem is rather than just represents. It lends the poem a kind of credibility that allows us
to lower our guards and our resistance. James Longenbach reminds us, “…poetry’s
mechanisms of self-resistance are themselves the source of our pleasure. They are the means
by which a great poem feels always about to be discovered, no matter how relevant its
wisdom may or may not be.”
xxiv
What is it, then, that feels revelatory, or like being at the
threshold of discovery, or like something meaningful? In the digital age, it seems that having
the comfort of the discipline without its constraint might yield that sense, the exciting sense
of idea and discovery that somewhere in all this there is a pattern, though it isn’t detectable
and that might mean that we’re on the right track to something significant. Some of the
poetic formal structures used in these texts do just that, give the reader the sense of
reassurance that comes from repetition and refrain, from patterns that are never quite easily
explained or understood, reinforcing the sense of being caught up in a great puzzle and
always just about to figure it out. In these texts, the scientific material helps to structure and
suggest that sense and it allows the reader to trust the poem, give in to the poem, feel
something for whatever happens to be the substance of the poem. It is the mechanism by
which it gains our trust. And it is linked to this Third Age of Science and its attitude because
our culture is dominated by science and technology, now at the emergence of the digital age.
Holub’s article reminds us that poetic statements approximate truth through a sense of
multiplicity while scientific statements do so through a sense of verifiable singularity; a
84
combination of these elements seems well suited to evoke a sense of meaning or revelatory
experience to those in our hyperdimensional, digital culture.

The Hyperdimensional Appeal of the Paradox: Ideas on Postmodern Poetic Theory

Formal structures, and an awareness of them, is shifting with theories talking not just about
what makes poetry postmodern, in fact, critic Stanley Fish talks about how we are post-
postmodern now
xxv
, but about what formal structures or stylistic elements contribute to the
feeling of novelty that energizes poetry. The digital age encourages rapid constant change. As
information continues pouring in through Twitter feeds and miniblogs, quick updates and
constant connectivity, people become aware of the constant state of information saturation
that surrounds our culture, following not just the ideological trends that seem au currant but
those that capture ones interest. Novelty gains value and currency. Poetry gains a sense of
novelty and appeal by navigating that info-matrix, too. Developments in poetry are not
restricted to relationships with literary tradition because poetry, like any other contemporary
system are not enclosed or self-contained. An awareness of this dynamism is part of the
hyperdimensional sensibility propagated by the digital age.
Poetry seems to be reflecting these changes that are also apparent in other systems
around us. Given our obvious daily connectivity to and through science and technology, it is
no surprise that trends in thought are linked. Alice Fulton, in her essay “Fractal
Amplifications” expresses most of all her excitement and enthusiasm about what poetry
seems to be doing and the possibilities contained within it. While her ideas are more
theoretical, not exactly drawing upon textual analysis, but projecting what might happen in
future poetics, some of her observations seem to have taken shape in recent years, at least to
85
some extent in the works that this project examines. Just as science seems to have turned
away from the binary concepts of order and entropy, “form can now be regarded as a
continuum expressing the varying degrees of pattern and repetition that signal structure”, so,
too has poetry moved beyond the discourse of blank and free verse. In scientific trends, this
is seen as a movement away from smooth or regular systems, systems that are complicated,
and toward systems that incorporate chaotic elements and uncertainty, those that are
complex; the difference is that these systems are not static or closed and instead seem to
demonstrate fractal capabilities. Fulton borrows these concepts from John Holland’s book
Hidden Order, a text explaining complex and adaptive systems to non-scientists, whose
popularity suggests that an awareness of systems theory, however basic, is indeed prevalent
in our culture, not just hinted through our hyperlinked connectivity, but pervasive
throughout the world of thought on some more fluid level. The ideas that she derives as
possible from such a dynamism of form do seem to resonate with contemporary poetic
trends, whether or not her reasons or chronology are authentic.
Much as hypertexts reflects hypertext processes that are incorporated into cultural
consciousness, similar poetic formal structures seem to evoke the cognitive structures that
are becoming every day reality. Authenticity in experience reflects changes and dynamism
and flux, and formally, these ideas can be invoked or built into the poems using elements like
juxtaposition, “riffing and jamming, long asides, discursive renderings, sudden shifts in
diction and tone”
xxvi
, elements that seem to create a sense of spontaneity within a dense field
of text. Fulton reminds us that complex adaptive systems don’t seek to establish balance by
bringing things in, fixing them into some grand theory of everything, but, instead “exist in
the unfolding and never get there”. Resonating with Longenbach’s ideas about how poetry
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invites us by engaging with resistance, Fulton also seems to be suggesting that such a sense
of continuum and unfolding is important in creating a sence of relevance and reality in
poetry today. She believes this can be done formally.
More interesting than her desire to fix this set of formal concepts into a name – she
calls this poetry of irregular, volatile verse “fractal poetry”, spending much energy in
comparing poetry to fractals – is the set of formal techniques she describes that fit within
postmodernist notions of form and that also seem to be capturing something of the current
zeitgeist, both in poetry and in science, maybe because the two are gaining more links in our
hyperdimensional consciousness. Our culture doesn’t need to see the exact relationship
between poetry and science in fixed ways, and instead, enjoys the playful unfolding of
linkages. In the same way, contemporary poetry seems to be playing with this sense of
unfolding and unfixed or unfinished pattern that characterizes the contemporary sensibility.
In this way, the poems “transcend” the poem plane, but always elusively because that is what
feels real. Poems that offer fleeting senses of transcendence in a line or a passage feel less
suspect than those which attempt to sustain that transcendence throughout, evoking the
sense of the system without fixing anything into that system’s constraints. Instead of
belonging or alignment, constructedness is valuable. A sense of constructedness is pervasive
in the digital world.
It isn’t just Fulton who claims that this sense of process, constructedness, and non-
organic, insincere connection, is part of the postmodern (or post-postmodern) experience of
poetry. These elements have found a home in many “post-avant” poetic practices within the
21
st
century already. The American Flarf Poetry movement seems to seek a deliberate
obnoxiousness in order to convey authenticity of experience and newness in this digital age,
87
employing “jangly, cut-up textures” and “corrosive cloying, cute awfulness”
xxvii
, while
simultaneously nodding toward the sense of human process without the relevant hubris that
has in eras past accompanied it
xxviii
, and the Scottish Informationist Poetry movement
xxix

alludes to the human reliance on technology and the computer in increasingly cyborgian
ways. Consider Marjorie Perloff’s ideas about “radical artifice”, that seems to highlight
important trends in contemporary poetry, manifesting especially in that which we call
“experimental” but also radiating into more mainstream and more literary and more formally
cohesive poetics:
Whereas Modernist poetics was overwhelmingly committed, at least in
theory, to the “natural look,” …we are now witnessing a return to artifice but
a “radical artifice,” to use Lanham’s phrase, characterized by its opposition,
not only to “the language really spoken by men” but also also to what is
called Formalist (whether old or new) verse, with its elaborate poetic diction
and self-conscious return to “established” forms and genres. Artifice, in this
sense, is less a matter of…elaboration and elegant subterfuge, than of the
recognition that a poem…is a made thing – contrived, constructed, chosen.

Perloff is also recalling this notion that the artifice, the constructedness, and the process-
aware shapes and approaches of poetic structure are gaining popularity in contemporary
works. Given the changes in cultural sensibility, awareness and relationships to technology,
and relationship with a scientific matrix of awareness that relies on complex systems, the
sense of form without the fixation is a comfort. Poetry that can navigate this field seems new
or at least relevant to our experiences; it appeals to the post-postmodern sensibility
suggested by Fish and even Fulton, the allure of resistance brought up by Longenbach, and
even the “science of effect” heralded by Valery. Poetry that demonstrates links to tradition
through form and content, but also seeks to demonstrate deviance from that continuity in
links between form and content is gaining recognition and acclaim, for it not only enacts
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principles isolated by these “post-avant” movements and new media texts, but brings them
into conversation with the tradition of literary craft and rigor through which poetry claims
not just gimmicky fleeting novelty but a sense of artistic merit through some engagement
with a sense of truth or meaning.
Strategies that organically and fixedly link form with content in poetry seem
outdated, but those that seem synthetically constrained by imposed formality also seem
outdated. Neither the fixed form nor the flexed form adequately captures the
hyperdimensional sensibility of the digital age, and instead, poetry that teases and stretches
our connections, that draws upon a sense of simultaneity, multiplicity, interdisciplinarity, and
achronistic experience, that reminds us it is both thing and beyond thing in a way that
evokes Heidegger and Aristotle as well as that it is revelatory and novel in a way that evokes
Wordsworth and Pound and that it is heterologically part of and beside a contuum of
process in a way that evokes Bataille & Richards appeals to the contemporary experience.
That which demonstrates that it is part of the system and outside of the system at once is
gaining popularity. The works investigated herein do so by way of employing “scientific”
material in poetic structures that guide the text while also drawing upon “humanistic”
traditions of artistic literary technique. These works illustrate the ways in which both
synthesis and deviance can contribute to the relevance of poetry in the digital age, to its
sense of revelatory engagement, and to the ways in which poetry remains connected to the
literary tradition while transcending it. The change in cognizance brought about by the digital
revolution has brought to attention pattern and structure in a way that no longer allows a
satisfactory sense of the fixed formal structure and that equally rejects free verse structure
without a sense of formal pattern, instead, the appeal of paradox seduces the
89
hyperdimensional consciousness. In this way “a poem must not mean but be”
xxx
, but it must
also be made to mean.

90
Chapter 2: Starlight to Guide the Journeyman: The Structural Function of Orbiting
Bodies in Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors

Facts for Visitors, Srikanth Reddy’s debut collection of poetry, is concerned with
scale and cycle, with circle and return, and with the “elsewhere” that is central to notions of
exile and visitation. In it, astronomy and particle physics come together with star-gazing
emotion and metaphysical inquiry to raise questions about what comprises and confounds
humanity. Its experience is that of a self between a telescope and a microscope, looking at
the orbits beyond (in the cosmos) and reflecting on what orbits within (both particles and
ideas). It is a guidebook for “aliens” unfamiliar with humanity (or those alienated from an
unquestioning acceptance of our world’s humanity) as well as that in humanity which has
become estranged from articulation. The conceit inherent in the title suggests that the
volume claims to contain “facts” or pieces of information for those who are “visitors” or
those who are from elsewhere. Later, the speaker mentions that he “knows precious little of
elsewhere”; perhaps those who do can place the “here” of the book in a proper context,
assembling these “facts” into a more comprehensive knowledge. As the book jacket blurb
informs us, “the protagonist of this collection reconstructs a world from the language of
encyclopedias, instruction manuals and literary legacies…from a collapse in the wake of
terrestrial love”. Perhaps this spaceless, outside-of-time awareness reaches the reader much
like the light of distant, long-dead stars, constellations, and celestial bodies, such as those
that feature so prominently in the poems of this collection. Even in the poems that seem to
be about metaphysical concepts, orbits (suggestive of astronomy or subatomic motion) guide
91
the poems’ logic. Thus, the tone is set, allowing readers an avenue into the book's matter,
through an astronomically inflected knowledge of the workings of “elsewhere” and “here”.
The disjunctive formal strategies of the book — made possible by a conflation of
scientific matter revolving around astronomy and particle physics and an interrogation of
language that results from a series of “corruptions” of metaphysical texts — provide a
necessary estrangement from the reader’s sense of the familiar that enables the collapse of
the poet-speaker’s self into an experience of meaning for the reader. Such a disjunctive
implosion into meaning encourages a confrontation of humanity’s relationship with the
world and the place of the individual psyche within it. By using scientific and literary matter
structurally, rather than topically, the book demonstrates a particularly contemporary
expression, in keeping with contemporary theories of both poetics and science.
Despite our culture’s obsessive desire for unifying theories to guide us, much defies
expression and organization into objective meaning. After all, look at a pattern long enough
and it will disintegrate, as Reddy reminds us in his prose poem “Seventh Circle”:
It may be useful to think of a patterned carpet made up of repeating units of
the same design. If one meditates upon any individual spiral, the silence
churns with texture & shape. Viewed on a large scale, however, one swathe
looks exactly like another. In this sense, the universe has no structure at all.
(52).

The poem moves on to discuss the sub-atomic particulate composition of celestial objects
— “mankind carried out a detailed audit of the Coma Cluster. They found that one quarter
of its weight was made up of baryons…our cosmos is largely composed of invisible
particles.” (52) — and the transparency of man — “Therefore it follows. To render yourself
transparent, it is needful to fashion a small image in the form of a man.” (52) — ultimately,
allowing what is beyond and before the self to collapse within the seeking self — “On a
92
starless night, write the following characters with a needle upon the skull. What remains is
unseen.” (52). Reddy suggests that the quest for knowledge always and inevitably folds in on
itself, beginning with pattern and ending with largely empty space.
While the poem, alluding to Dante’s Seventh Circle of the Inferno, references
popular articles of magic and sorcery — which might be expected in a poem about the
Eighth Circle — it is important to remember that the Seventh Circle houses the violent,
including those who oppose order. This poem, asks us to consider the ramifications of
disorder, or empty space, and of transparency of the self. Not only does Reddy deliberately
corrupt the idea of who belongs in the Seventh Circle of hell, but he forces the reader to
question why such references might be made in such “corrupted” ways, warning against
systems of imposed order that obstruct the quest for knowledge. Even the corruptions
reiterate the notion of cycle as the book opens and closes with a poem titled “Corruption”,
its first instance following a sort of prelude that is a prayer for the dead — itself, the closure
of a “cycle” of life.
Elaborating on the corrupt cycle by example, Reddy also draws upon the work of
several philosophers, in this previous instance reminding us of Simone Weil’s words that,
"We know by means of our intelligence that what the intelligence does not comprehend is
more real than what it does comprehend." The cyclically-collapsed self opens to the
incomprehensible, in such poems and in others throughout the collection, by way of a
meaning constructed through the postmodernist artifice of recycled notions of language,
philosophy, observation and form that engage the reader. Without a sense of scope, of both
scientific examination (particles and planets surround people) and philosophical investigation
(peopled by the ideas of Augustine and Dante among others), the self would have no
93
mechanism for sensing the story of humanity, it seems. Reddy’s “guidebook” alienates and
invites readers, allowing them an opportunity to become explorers and investigators of a
hyper-contextualized world that can offer them insight into their own.
It’s useful to think about why the corruptive pattern matters. Firstly, the relationship
between science and objective truth is no longer in tact in society’s estimation. Ideas of
science have changed. Additionally, as ideas of “form” have been influenced by science, the
outdated concept of the binary distinction between order and entropy is seen as false. She
claims, “form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern
and repetition that signal structure.”
xxxi
So, if the way we think of form has changed, in
general, then just thinking of formal verse and free verse isn’t really helpful or true. Or,
rather, it isn’t useful to discuss structure in such binary terms. Even to call a thing
“postmodern” in form is contentious. Fulton claims that some contemporary poetry is
“fractal”, demonstrating postmodern elements that take advantage of this rejection of binary
ideas of structure and that this “fractal poetry” possesses increased dimensionality of poetic
experience, which appeals to readers because it seems to echo the nature of our
contemporary experience of reality.
This intellectual texture is a key component of “fractal poetics”, but I think it also
ties into Perloff’s ideas of “radical artifice”
xxxii
. In her book Radical Artifice, Perloff reminds
us that postmodernism often represents “the breakdown of the paradigm of the ‘great
divide’ (Andreas Huyssen’s term) between the high are and mass culture.”
xxxiii
She reminds us
that common perception is that poetry’s function is no longer to translate experience into
the sublime or the high from the ordinary or the low and she raises the important
“rapprochement between poetry and theory” by giving us the reason for this pervasive
94
connection: “the central fact…is that we now live in an electronic culture…[W]e have yet to
understand the interplay between lyric poetry…and the electronic media.”
xxxiv
And, Perloff
reminds us that literature is and will be changed by the immersion of people in this
electronic media. Reddy’s collection clearly exists in this world of electronic media (as poems
like “Acid House” which references electronic music’s structure of experience remind us)
and, if not drawing explicitly or excessively from theory, deconstructionist or otherwise, it
does engage an aspect of what Perloff calls “radical artifice”. Reddy’s poems seem to fit into
Fulton’s predictive poetic strategies, just as they seem to draw upon the “radical artifice”
noticeable in postmodern poems. That Reddy’s poems are postmodern and possibly fractal
is not particularly insightful, but recognizing that they fit into the poetic tradition in this
manner (and, recognizing that this context is changing and influencing both poetry and the
theory that poetry is increasingly aware of) allows us to examine the things that make up the
pattern and also the way in which the “artifice” works upon the reader. It is through
disjunctive measures within these patterns and these pronounced elements of procedural
play that the poem begins to mean something to the reader beyond just a set of clever links
between words and concepts. And, these disjunctive means seem to involve scientific
concepts in crucial ways.
The disjunction that is important to meaning in these poems is caused by a
conflation of science and metaphysics, but the poems aren’t making some kind of a
statement about science. Instead, the scientific material clashes with metaphysical material
and this clash is being used to create a structure for the reader’s experience. That structure
creates the space (allowed by an estrangement, perhaps) to question certain ideas raised by
the poems, ideas that might be at the core of already familiar texts, like Weil’s essays and
95
Augustine’s confessions, like mythology and social studies, that Reddy references in these
poems. However, the space created here forces us to see questions in these texts that are not
immediately apparent. For instance, when we think about science or scientific engagement,
we think of specificity of inquiry or an awareness of systems of thought, analysis, or
evaluation. When we, as a culture, think about science, we think less about inquiry and more
about product or the technology that such scientific inquiry will provide. When we think of
metaphysical texts, we tend to think about culture or ideology, but we don’t always expect to
immediately enact those ideas into policy or practice. The focus is shifted slightly and we can
apply a novel kind of mindset to this investigation, a kind of mindset that results from the
interaction of these many fields of thought. This disjunctive conflation is a structural
strategy, as can be understood by considering Fulton’s ideas of “fractal poetics” and Perloff’s
ideas of “radical artifice.”
Disjunction is a key strategic element in the poems of this collection. Elements such
as scientific concepts, metaphysical meditations, references to analyzable data regarding
subatomic particles and astronomical phenomena, and pieces of a literary heritage are fused
together here (in this collection), but, neither are they a patchwork nor a pastiche; their
invocation flows in a way that doesn’t suggest assemblage or highlight separateness.
Something emerges from the constructedness. The poems never quite seem to fixate on any
of these single elements, but, patterns emerge in them, patterns whose disruption (or
disjunction) are crucial to the poems’ effects. In fact, the conflation of these disparate modes
of thinking helps keep the reader’s attention in these poems. At times, Reddy’s speakers may
lead us into sentimental and familiar territory — territory that we might be inclined to ignore
on its own, only to shake up the momentum with words or concepts that have to do with
96
astronomically-aligned objects or a relation to scientific concepts about particles that have
little to do with sentiment. At other times, Reddy’s speakers seem technical, logical, focused,
or methodological in observation, but, just as suddenly, will disrupt that mode with the
inclusion of moments of heartbreaking empathy or a longing that derails that methodological
movement. These disruptive and disjunctive approaches keep the material lively, fresh, and
interesting; without this dynamism, the poem would be less likely to seem meaningful to a
reader.
Reddy mentions, in interviews
xxxv
, the deliberate choice to include “corruptions”
xxxvi

of metaphysical texts. Even this idea contains a sense of the importance of disjunction in
these poems, as these “corruptions” are departures from a previously stable understanding
of extant texts. His belief that the “fetishization of the visual aspect of a poem is often
accompanied by a corresponding neglect of the content of the poem” (page 3) and his belief
that poetry is “made of language” and “immaterial” (page 3) indicate that his use of
disjunctive strategies is part of how one of his poems comes to mean a thing. He does seem
to indicate a separation between content and form/formal strategies by which that content is
expressed
xxxvii
. If the form is overly emphasized and the content neglected, the poem suffers;
conversely, if the content is emphasized at the expense of awareness to form, the poem will
suffer. A good poem, then, should take both of these things into account in deliberate ways.
If concepts are being manipulated in the content of these poems, we can imagine that the
formal choices are deliberate and for a purpose. Departures from the expected mode or flow
of the poem, then, can be seen as deliberate strategies. For a “corruption” to be significant,
the original understanding or context has to be recognized. The manipulated language or
material then, is significant to the meaning of the work. Language, after all, is part of culture,
97
a culture that contains many things, whose language often gains meaning through context.
But, the dual strains in Reddy’s poems (for instance, science/sentiment or content/form) are
not false binaries; they are more like connected things, drawing attention to a psyche that can
hold both kinds of knowledge in context to enhance comprehension.
The book opens with “Corruption”
xxxviii
and it ends with “Corruption (II)”.

CORRUPTION

I am about to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my expec-
tation extends over the entire psalm. Once I have begun, the words
I have said remove themselves from expectation & are now held in
memory while those yet to be said remain waiting in expectation.
The present is a word for only those words which I am now saying.
As I speak, the present moves across the length of the psalm, which
I mark for you with my finger in the psalm book. The psalm is writ-
ten in India Ink, the oldest ink known to mankind. Every ink is
made up of a color & a vehicle. With India ink, the color is carbon
& the vehicle, water. Life on our planet is also composed of carbon
& water. In the history of ink, which is rapidly coming to an end,
the ancient world turns from the use of India ink to adopt sepia.
Sepia is made from the octopus, the squid & the cuttlefish. One cu-
rious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, it’s body begins
to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity
a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can
read by this light. (7)

In “Corruption”, the poem moves through a sense of history, merges with the
experiential understanding of that history, and falls into a scientific inquiry of the details of
that history, ultimately yielding a technology –“ You can read by this light”; the poem
structures the experience of the reader by framing the reader’s sense of time through a
zooming in and out of detail and focus. The moves are simulatedly technical, the language is
reportlike, the topic is historical, and the experience of meaning we get has nothing to do
with technology, but everything to do with what it means to read something meaningful, as
98
the poem is ostensibly about the experience of hearing the recitation of a psalm in a manner
that defies a linear understanding of time and scale.
We can see, here, that the poem employs disjunctive strategies which invokes, with
an epistemological discussion, questions about what we know and how we know it,
specifically with regard to what technology shapes our knowing of what we know. By noting
that the “history of ink…is rapidly coming to an end”, he brings up the issue of digital text;
suddenly, we are aware that how we read a thing, the medium of that text matters. While ink
is connected to us in that we are both made of carbon and water, our connection to the
printed text is somehow alive. If the history of ink is dying out, is the connection between us
and the printed page also dying out, and, if so, how will we then connect with the words that
we might hear or read? At the end of the poem, we hear that we can read by the dying
cuttlefish body’s glow. It illuminates text for us, bringing us into an acute awareness of
mortality, or the glow of the screen that also illuminates the text for us lifelessly, and of the
mortality of ways of knowing and experiencing the world.
The human condition has been framed in the space of this poem by the lens of
religion, scientific inquiry, and ultimately at the end a sense of uncertainty about what
follows. Repeating words and concepts resonate in the mind of the reader and suggested
patterns create senses that the reader longs to connect, to find a pattern within, that the
reader senses have some embedded sense. By employing disjunction in multiple places, the
poem generates significance and meaning. In this poem, we also focus on what sight can
reveal to us. Light matters in this book and many poems seem to involve an awareness of
what the light reveals and how the cast of that light changes our understanding of what is
revealed.
99
In contrast, the closing poem seems to be picking up the sound of a recitation and
following its trajectory not philosophically or biologically, but physically into distant space
and time. Consider the poem:
CORRUPTION (II)

In one of Grimm’s stories, a little tailor defeats a giant in a throw-
ing contest by lofting a bird in the air. Happily ever after arrives,
but the bird never lands. She flies straight out of the tale. Tonight,
a vessel catapults through the heavens with a gold-plated phono-
graph fixed to its side. In less than forty thousand years this craft
will drift through the nearest system, bearing greetings in fifty-seven
languages, including the encoded song of the humpback whale. By
then our tongue will have crossed into extinction or changed ut-
terly. Lately, I have taken an interest in words like “here”. Here was
a chapel, for instance. Here is a footprint filling with rain. Here might
be enough. Could not the same be said of elsewhere? Yes, I suppose.
But I know precious little of elsewhere. (58).

“Corruption (II)” doesn’t question how we know things, but instead raises issues of
the familiar by referencing folktales – “In one of Grimm’s stories…Happily ever after
arrives…” – only to twist them into a contemporary journey, one which takes us not on a
journey into the psyche but which sends snippets of our culture into the space through the
use of technology. How our fairy stories have changed.
The poem ends by asking us what comforts us enough to inhabit acceptance and to
impose limits on what we consider knowledge. He says, “Here might be enough. Could not
the same be said of elsewhere? Yes, I suppose. But I know precious little of elsewhere.” We
draw our lines where we must and just as our knowledge is limited, our desire for it is
limitless, until we recognize the irreconcilable gap between desire and fulfillment, between
reach and grasp.
100
Our technology in the expanse of this poem evolves from carefully crafted folktales
using orally transmitted words to phonographs made of precious materials that capture and
share those words to a high-tech recorded “greeting in fifty-seven languages” that focuses
our compressed words to a point in time and distance at which our words and language have
become extinct or unrecognizable; such is the fate of our technology, our words. And, while
this change is unending, we must find limits to place on it so that we can constrain our
understanding without losing it to the infinitely large or infinitely small.
Through this timespace journey of our words, our technologies, we see the scale
against which we much measure ourselves.
xxxix
In this poem, we also focus on sound and the
way it travels to its destination. A sense of circularity helps bring closure to the journey of
reading the book of poems as a sound begins and ends it, an awareness of presence and
spatiality begin and end it, and as the ideas and concepts that have been shining through
various other planes of text (poems) take on a different significance against the awareness of
the greatest hopes for communication that our culture can dare to express.
As in “Corruption”, clutch the possibility of reading as long as there is light by which
to read and in “Corruption (II)” we send our words beyond the reach of ourselves, as far
into the darkness as we can see in the hopes that it will reach and enlighten some elsewhere’s
understanding of our long-ended expressions. The resonant ideas and concepts matter
because they are constantly interrupted, leaving us the sense of a pattern without an ability to
trace it. Not only in the structure of individual poems, but also in the structure of the book
does disjunction take on meaning, making significant a number of things by disrupted
connection that might not matter in a constant or fluid expression.
101
Throughout the collection, scientific concepts exist as topics, subjects, and ideas as
frequently as do metaphysical or humanistic concerns, emotional frameworks, and
interrogations of culture. The poems seem to be confronting the divide between human
logic and human emotion, the individual’s desire and his connection to a larger world. We
must wonder if embracing the multiplicity can yield something more significant than a
uniform approach to knowing — and idea suggested by many poets writing in a culture that
is so peppered by diversity of idea and broad gestures of inclusivity that yield more breadth
than depth — a hypertext consciousness.
xl

In Reddy’s collection, disjunctive formal strategy engages the art/science division as
well as the tradition/innovation division directly in order to counter resistance and generate
a receptiveness to meaning. Looking at how science functions in these poems and to what
end this scientific material is employed might yield a better understanding of how these
poems come to resonate within the reader’s own understanding.
The "Circle" poems seem to be formally scientific or technical, while the "Sun" &
“Star” poems are topically so. The former employ an emotive disjunction to break the
resistance to the stylized, mechanical form. The latter tend to employ an intellectual
disjunction, injecting scientific organization principles, tropes, or concepts in order to break
the field and flow of feeling and sentiment that forms the poems. At any rate, disjunction
takes into account these elements and so, in order to look at the function of science in these
poems, we must first look at disjunction and how it yields meaning.
The role of disjunction in poetry is examined in Longenbach’s The Resistance to
Poetry and considering his ideas may shed light on some of Reddy’s formal strategies. He
distinguishes between kinds of it, categorizing a “dry disjunction” which chooses language
102
and intellect as the site of disjunctive movement and a “wet disjunction” operating on an
emotive level. “Wet disjunction” seems to choose dramatic, bardic styles that yield to the
illusion of unified feeling which “dry disjunction” keeps at bay by using methods that stake
their “authority on the constructedness of human feeling;” One guards from feeling with an
awareness of that constructedness, and one asks us to yield to the allure of the illusory nature
of that construction.
Longenbach seems to imply that the two are separate, with one or the other being
the dominant mode in a poem; however, he does not explicitly say that the balance must be
so, and Reddy’s poems in Facts for Visitors seem to use both kinds of disjunction liberally,
on differing conceptual levels. While the subject matter that Reddy uses might seem heavy,
overdone or syrupy, at times, the use of more scientific and specific terms and approaches to
idea distract us from feeling it. We might otherwise resist it; after all, the concepts of love
and anguish are not infrequently encountered in poetry. While some of his subject matter
will seem too cerebrally gimmicky — such as deliberately “corrupting” canonical texts and
ideas or meticulously structuring and forming the Circle poems, using hardly fresh forms
such as the villanelle or sestina — the overall sweep and gesture of that reach toward and
into the heritage, history, and heart of the humanity that demands this formal stylization and
stiff movement counters any sense of the impersonal. The sense is an importance of
memory as well as novelty, which allows us to conquer our resistance of the literary familiar.
The structure, incorporating both the use of scientific tropes and concepts and the
use of degenerated or corrupted humanistic thought, seems to keep us in a tension that pulls
neither to the far reaching dreams of the planets, nor to the innermost atomic particles, it
pulls us neither solely into the realm of cerebral reflection on a humanity made wholly alien,
103
nor into a sticky trap of nostalgia for all that corrupted and ruined humanity that we crave.
In thinking about IA Richards’ concept of poetic experience — as expressed in Poetries and
Sciences, in which he explains that two streams of consciousness are operating in order to
structurally shape the experience of meaning in a poem, one a passive, intellectual stream
that works mostly with the content, and one an active, emotional stream that works mostly
with the form — we can claim that Reddy seems to be using disjunction with both streams;
his scientific tropes and ideas disjunct the immediate flow of the intellectual stream, while his
scientific approach to information management and organization seem to disjunct the
nebulous clouds swept along the emotional stream.
Reddy engages with postmodern poetic theory by engaging in the debate between
lyric and language poetry, hybridizing his gestures.
xli
He employs an engagement with
tradition, but, one that subverts our expectations of that tradition and the truth it contains.
Neither is science a container for truth, nor is art. This engagement with tradition provokes
the usage of Villanelles, Sestinas, and Terza Rima — but, in a way that doesn’t demonstrate
strict adherence to the expectations of the closed forms. Additionally, it manifests in the
ways in which Reddy draws upon Dante’s infernal circles (primarily in the circle poems and
the eclogues), Augustine’s “Confessions”, and Weil’s essays (in the “Corruption” poems
specifically). These corruptive strategies, both with form (Dante and literary tradition,
Villanelles and Terza Rima as closed formal strategies) and with philosophy (Weil &
Augustine in the “Corruption” poems) both serve to minimize resistance from the reader by
increasing novelty and subverting expectation. Also important here, with his references to
Dante, is what’s happening with the use of astronomy and how it relates to form. Dante
used Ptolemaic ideas in his structure; but Reddy has taken and manipulated our inherited
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response to Dante’s circles. In doing so, he is asking us to consider what we think of as
“true”. Unlike Dante’s references to astronomy which are cohesive, Reddy’s are contrary.
In the poems in this book, there is a cohesive resonance. That resonance reminds us
that the world in which we live is a world which engages both art and science, that engages
both the analytical and the intuitive. By thwarting our expectations, disjunctively moving our
experience toward meaning, Reddy reminds us of this duality. As Miroslav Holub wrote,
“the scientific theme implies as much light as possible, the poetic one as many shadows as
possible” (55). By engaging this tension in his own strategies, Reddy makes these poems
immediately relevant, giving us the stakes that we must consider while investigating what
values it is that humanity is preserving in its culture and whether visitors from “elsewhere”
might draw the same conclusions from facts about that culture. Highlighting that cohesive
resonance and openness within it is disjunction. That is, disjunction is used to create an
estrangement from that which is familiar in order to inspire meaning. This cohesive
resonance contributes to this experience of meaning in the poem.
In order to better examine the disjunction and the role of science within it, it is
important to make clear the definition of meaning that is being employed. Reddy’s poems
choose not to give us one set truth or answer or even statement; after all, what good and
complex poem can easily be boiled down into a short statement and still retain its beauty or
significance? It is the experience of the whole and not just some message coded within the
language that matters. In that way, while form and content can be seen as separate, one
shouldn’t simple assume that one is no more than a vessel for the other. In Reddy’s poems,
the form is important, as the content is important. Both contribute to the meaning of the
poems.
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In her book, Midnight Disease, about neurological responses to writing and
psychological motivations regarding the writing process, Alice Flaherty raises the issue of
“meaning” by examining the way it is recognized in the brain. Flaherty makes a distinction
between “meaning” as understood by the cerebral cortex and as understood by the limbic
system, a distinction which might further elucidate the structure within these dynamic
poems: “Usually, cortical meaning and limbic meaning are interdependent: facts affect our
emotions, and our emotions affect not only our perception of the facts, but the facts
themselves” (221). Is this, in some way, at the core of Reddy’s own design and sentiment?
Flaherty’s ideas seem to evoke a sense of both IA Richards’s dual strains and also the
relevance of the disjunctive strategies in Reddy’s poems.
Perhaps this sense of “meaning” can be clarified by considering some of her
arguments. Flaherty investigates, in her book, the connection between writers and writing,
both discussing psychological impulse and neurological activity. She references the opposing
drives of metonymy and metaphor and how they affect different parts of the brain. She
enhances the familiar old discussion that art and science use different brain hemispheres by
connecting both t a discussion of writing and ins reception in reading. In a chapter on the
limbic system, she discusses why writers write and what happens in the brain when they do
so. Here, she writes about a drive to create an understanding of reality, asserting that at
times, narrative can create a coherent sense of what is observable in reality; she wonders also
if the tight squeeze of scientific thought on reality doesn’t also deform it in the
understanding. The following passage expands on it:
In the end, using writing to give cognitive meaning to events may parallel an
equally deep human need, the need to give meaning to an existence that is
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opaque. The universal desire to feel that life has some purpose is perhaps
stronger in writers, whose occupation instills in them a mania for meaning — a
desire, as Paul Valery put it, ‘to erect a minor monument of language on the
menacing shore of the ocean of gibberish.’ This noncognitive notion of
meaning, a sense of emotional importance or ultimate goal, is independent of the
more traditional semantic notion of meaning as definition or intellectual content.
This [is a more] emotional sense of meaning…Is there any scientific content to
the notion of meaning in this noncognitive sense?…I propose that meaning in
the sense of importance has a great deal to do with valence, the pleasure-
displeasure, good-bad dichotomy that I argue earlier is the most basic aspect of
emotion. This sense of meaning has its origins in the limbic system, as opposed
to the linguistic meaning encoded primarily in the cerebral cortex’s temporal
lobe. Within the limbic system the amygdala, with its ability to label stimuli as
good or bad, is especially important The interaction between temporal lobe
meaning and limbic meaning reflects what has been called the tension in
language between the dictionary and the scream. Without the former, we would
have no ability to communicate; without the latter, the need to express our
needs, we would have no drive to communicate…The limbic sensation of
meaning may be the feeling that makes music seem to be not words without
meaning, but meaning without words. (220-221).
She goes on to describe the limbic meaning as the psychological sense we get when we
understand what someone is saying, a thing which is absent when we hear a foreign language
that we don’t understand. She also claims that limbic meaning is what is lacking when people
say that words have lost their meaning or when writers are blocked as the semantic
understanding is still there, as is the technical ability, but the drive or the element that
connects doesn’t seem to feel present (221). It can be inferred that meaning can be either a
psychological sense of understanding or a discrete intellectual concept.
Interestingly, the limbic and temporal distinction seems to resonate with Richards’
ideas of the active and passive strains of thought that operate while a person correctly reads
a poem. It would be simple to say that in our culture of hyperstimulation and information
saturation that overly familiar concepts, ideas, or movements of thought will not create a
significant sense of meaning and that they might need to be made fresh or interesting by
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altering the approach to them.
What we see, here, in Reddy’s poems is just that kind of disjunction, just that kind of
weaving together of kinds of meaning. Our sense of the familiar is broken and estranged by
the interjection of language that is not characteristically similar to the moves we are making
and when that disruptions causes us to pause, we tend to mentally re-calibrate the material
that follows, making a space for the familiar and the familiar-made-strange alike. Suddenly,
the material isn’t just a rehashing of metaphysical concepts or a vague stargazing notion of
looking at the world of stars and planets and particles — all of which feel familiar and
therefore limbically meaningless to the reader — it exists in a different space. We have a
sense of meaning that emerges. The language becomes familiar and foreign at once, but the
desire to make sense of it arises in the reader, pulling us in to the poem.
So, the disjunctive moves reach out to us and bring the reader in, asking us to seek
meaning. The poem’s thread can matter because we allow it to matter, because we can
recognize or experience something within a kind of structure made from the two different
kinds of language that allows us to explore something more. Meaning, then, isn’t an
intellectual concept that can universally be extrapolated by all readers; that is, there isn’t one
singular way to read the poems that is right or wrong. Instead, the sense of meaning
generated by the poems is an experience itself. Just as “a poem shouldn’t mean by be,”
xlii
we
find a sense of meaning in the experiential medium of the poem rather than recognizing
some discrete, measurable truth embedded within it’s lush and strange language.
Richards asks us to break down the experience of reading the poem into a number of
things, discussing the way active and passive strains of thought work to create meaning and
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highlighting the distinction between form and content, whose relationship yields a structure.
He implies that structure binds logic and emotional relevance together to yield a space for
meaning.
In nearly all poetry, the sound and feel of the words, what is often called the
form of the poem in opposition to its content, get to work first, and the senses
in which the words are later more explicitly taken are subtly influenced by
this fact.…Thus the form often seems an inexplicable premonition of the
meaning which we have not yet grasped. … It is never what a poem says
which matters but what it is. ….The words, as we have seen, are not simply
the effect in one case, nor the cause in the other. In both cases they are the
part of the experience which binds it together, which gives it a definite
structure and keeps it from being a mere welter of disconnected impulses. (
Richards 31-34).

What is said is comprised of statement and meaning, how it’s said demonstrates
overt structure and other formal elements? Both engage passive and active thought. When
attention is drawn to the difference between the what and the how, there is not an organic
sense of connection, but a disjunctive one. We fill in the gaps that we need to make meaning
of the material given to us in the poem. The poem’s experience isn’t something that is
related to us, it is something that we are invited into. The words and the content together
create a structure for us in which we can experience/understand the poem’s meaning.
Richards also makes clear that poems do not have just one singular articulable
meaning in the sense of intellectual concept as do statements of science (33). He reminds us,
after all, that it is not what a poem says, but is, that matters and we should recognize then
that the meaning in the poem isn’t like that in a statement of science. “For if the mind is a
system of interests, and if an experience is their movement, the worth of any experience is a
matter of the degree to which the mind, through this movement, proceeds towards a wider
equilibrium. … What an individual responds to is not the whole situation but a selection
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from it, and as a rule few people make the same selection. What is selected, and thus the
relevant environment, is decided by the organization of the individual’s interests.” (Richards
36-37).
Does an effective poem, then, succeed by creating a simulacrum of such a system
through artificial forms, speak to us by replicating what feels like reality? In this case the
system will have to draw from the cultural consciousness that conditions our individual
systems of interest (i.e., minds). The poem creates a structure for the mind to be able to
locate or experience meaning; that structure comes from the creation of a form that depends
upon the cultural influences that guide the formation of our systems of interest. If the formal
strategies and utterances can replicate that sense of multiplicity that we experience as reality,
we can more easily engage with the structure (form+content) of the poem in a way that
allows us to experience it without resistance. If we can experience it without resistance, we
have the possibility of understanding meaning. The structure, then, must have some affinity
with the cultural consciousness of the reader, as that cultural consciousness will have, to
some degree, help shaped the system of interests that is the mind of the reader; doing so will
allow many readers to find points of access into the poem’s experience.
The formal strategy of disjunction employed by Reddy in these poems allows an
estrangement from the familiar or expected which creates that sense of comprehension. The
cyclical, orbiting nature of some of the thematic material in individual poems and
throughout the book, also reinforce the idea that there are patterns, corruptible patterns, that
might hint at something significant. Revisiting Flaherty’s assertion that facts affect
perception and perception affects fact, we can see the cyclical nature of any kind of
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understanding, how any orbit ends at the same place where it began and yet the orbiting
body is not exactly the same as when it began in that place.
In addition to keeping us guessing about the proper placement of human values and
observations, these orbiting elements serve to guide us while forcing us to consider whether
we have indeed returned to the beginning. We follow an expected path, but come to an
unexpected place or conclusion, as if we can never be certain about both direction and
position, at once, as if we can never be sure of our observations of life and our
understanding of it, at once. Reddy accomplishes this constant uncertainty by way of other
methods of disjunction, as well, imposing scientific language into emotional forms and
infusing emotive flourishes into mechanical forms.
In poems like “Acid House” (54), nature and science are associatively conjoined:

ACID HOUSE
after George Issakidis

You may stretch a note culled from the call of a ruby-throated
warbler into some banshee’s unspeakable song. Likewise, extended
events like this recording of the Qur’an can be digitally compressed
until surrender sounds like one beat of a kick drum, Every beat is
the kingdom. Every beat is a helix of clusters of verses on various
matters – how to kneel, how to keep bees in the desert – each verse
implying the unearthly system even if it can be sung in one breath.
It has no beginning or end. It is infinite, or rather, a window onto
the infinite. It is daybreak. The window is cracked & so is the sun-
rise beyond. In here it’s all darkness & everything rattles to mono-
liths booming on tripods. We sway though no harlequin raves in
the slab. (54).

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Again using the prose poem format, Reddy allows sound and meaning to emerge from a
dense block, creating a sense of dimensionality through which we can reconcile the cycles
and the orbits.
At the start of the poem, the song of a bird or the song of a call to prayer can ring
out into eternity, compressed technically into another sound. Initially, we think of this as
associative, his gestures alluding metaphorically to the natural world. For instance, we might
think that the bird song, like the recording of the prayer suggested in the poem, are sent out
into the sky, which is a place of birds and planets and mythical gods. However, within a span
of two lines, the metaphor becomes something else, something technical, and the idea of
digital compression of sound as data is the thing floating up into the air, into the infinite
expansion of the universe, in which is embedded a sun which we notice at the end of the
next few lines as a sunrise at a window from which we are watching this simultaneous move
into infinity. Ouraborous and orbit.
The turn from the romantic natural world to the empirical natural world is sudden,
slippery, and indicative of the ways in which Reddy interjects scientific words or concepts
when we least expect them, the ways in which he uses inherited form and corrupts them
when we least expect it, both as a means to instigate inquiry into the human values from
which we may very well be estranged. Both elements contribute to the necessary disjunction
in this poem and the others in the collection.
It may be useful to recall that “acid house” refers to a kind of music. House music, of
which acid house is a subgenre, is a type of electronic dance music based on a systematic
four-beat structure and utilizing a series of electronically produced sounds. Acid house tends
to use repetition to evoke a trance-like or hypnotic state and prefers samples or spoken
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language to lyrics that are sung by discernable voices. The suggestive nature of this kind of
statement embedded in a piece of acid house, framed not just by its echoes but also by the
underlying structure of expectancy in the beat, is not unlike the way a sense of
comprehension reaches us in Reddy’s own poems. Issadakis, the person mentioned in the
dedication that follows the title (a dedication that clues us in to the fact that we are not
talking about the corrosive substance known as acid nor the physical structure known as a
house), makes techno music in an effort to move us out of our ordinary states. House music,
specifically, is meant to lull the listener or participant into something outside of his everyday
experience and the trance-like nature of the experience of participating in a piece of house
music; in some ways, this is an energetically lateral movement to the experience of dancing in
a club or other location where, undoubtedly, the sonic structures and influences are
enhanced by flourishes of light or laser or disorienting space. Such contraction, expansion,
and movement of spatial awareness is reminiscent of the moves of any wave of sound
through the distance of spacetime, something that Reddy suggests to his readers when he
mentions the transcendent or spiritual sound traversing the darkness of space in a
compressed manner.
It isn’t that Reddy is trying to make an ordinary experience sublime – after all, one has
to understand the context of acid house and the reference to Issadakis for this connection to
become apparent – but, that Reddy is utilizing strategies of sonic cohesion similar to what
one might find in acid house music, allowing us to experience something through the
structure. The images in the poem turn over and into another and by the mid-point – “each
verse / implying the unearthly system even if it can be sung in one breath. / It has no
beginning or end. It is infinite, or rather, a window onto / the infinite. It is daybreak.” – the
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sense of turning becomes a sense of orbit and we are drawn into the orbit of the Earth
among the other celestial bodies in the universe, a sense of connection and context that is
definitely connected to an astronomical awareness of the various bodies in the cosmos and
the vast distances between them. Sound and meaning pull us from the image-plane and that
meaning comes from disjunctive clash. Small and big extend infinitely beyond and within
and by focusing on sound, we can find a cohesive resonance that keeps us tethered to an
immediacy in which meaning can be located; image stretches on in each direction, science
and stargazing are both embedded in the visual. A confluence of senses, mixing these images
with the sense of sonic impulse implied by the title and dedication of the poem, allows the
reader to experience a sense of understanding.
The disjunction, here, is based on frames just outside the poem’s matter, references
that cycle around each other. One who is familiar (or chooses to do any small bit of research
on the figure of Issadakis will note his role in a group called “Micronaut” and discover in
their works (and his solo work) other words of a similar sensibility, again reinforcing a sense
or connection between macro and micro concepts, a conflation of distances, a blurring
between cosmonaut and astronomy, between the microscope and telescope. These
references, just outside of the poem, set up an important platform of concepts. The
suggestive nature of these references – sonic, conceptual, and structural – suggest the use of
a great deal of framing and structuring is necessary to understand the core of this poem. The
poem, of course, can be enjoyed for its imagery and sonic qualities on its own, but, in
keeping with Richards and Fulton’s ideas, the meaning in the poem seems to come from an
intertwining of experiential faculties. In a culture such as ours, which is so saturated by image
and by the visual, sonic strategies that enable a dimensionality become valuable ways of
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evoking meaning and activating the disjunctive elements here that are subtle and suggestive
rather than blatant.

Meaning comes from a collapse of the speaker that is enabled by this disjunction. It is made
apparent by an experience of luminosity or revelatory discovery in these poems, either as a
literal description of it or as a sense of lit up passages and sections within the denser plane.
Topically, this ties into both particle physics and astronomy because, well, light is how we
detect particles and it is also how we detect stars and planets and other celestial bodies. It is
also often a symbol for clarity or understanding and it signals a kind of opening in the
structure that houses something meaningful. That which strikes a luminosity of expression in
these poems channels our attention. Perhaps that is the main element that creates thematic
cohesion in the book, while the disjunctive darkness allows that light to have some
significance or meaning.
Consider the use of formal and structural strategies in “Raven & Eclipse”(15), in
which the great and small collide profoundly as “we” examine a solar eclipse through the
film of an x-ray image, especially the use of image and sound.
RAVEN & ECLIPSE

The raven we’d trained to say Love stretched one bony black foot
to the scale. You said it looked like a tipsy mortician boarding a
lifeboat. I laughed but I wanted to see what it weighed. Later we
prodded until it stopped moving. As usual the X-rays were incon-
clusive though beautiful & made a fine sunshade for viewing the
next day’s eclipse. I asked what exactly would be blotting out what,
but you said it depends. Can’t see a thing, can’t feel a thing. Think
Spring & things singing things. Did somebody say Nevermore? If
even the sky’s darkest plumage keeps flashing fresh streaks of lilac
& hummingbird-green, how can I finish her likeness with only this
ocean my inkpot? (15).
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Strictly formally speaking, the poem is one dense block of text, one dense chunk through
which certain words, phrases visual images and ideas are shining upwards toward the reader,
emerging through the darker opaque plane. That sense of emergent meaning is reinforced by
the rhythmic, linked sounds of the words themselves, some which might even seem too heft
or overused in poems in general, but in this way seem alluring.
The sound of the poem itself channels the focus elsewhere so that the poem can play
its trick on the imagination of the reader in the realm of image. Resonance between repeated
words and sounds suggests a pattern that needs finding, pulling us away from simply locating
image-based patterns. Alliteration in the poem lulls our guarded resistance. Repeating
patterns of words, alliteration and partial rhymes — “Can’t see a thing, can’t feel a thing.
Think Spring & things singing things.” — bring a cohesion to the poem, especially at the
end when the barrage of images —sky, lilac streaks, hummingbird, green, ocean, flashing —
difracts our gaze deliberately. The sonic cohesion helps us maintain some path within the
active comprehension and experience of the poem that allows us to come to the meaning of
the poem.
The images themselves are many; they don’t bring the reader to a sense of epiphany.
But the way the sound lures us into the dimensional experience that is represented by these
patterns of image allow us to be the bulb emitting the light, to see the patterns the light is
making, and therefore to enter into the experience of the poem. A sense of sense is also
required to move the reader through the poem. Thematic and tonal playfulness keeps our
interest, preventing the pattern-sense from seeming formulaic; for instance, the ironic
allusion of raven and nevermore, of the lifeboat, weight of the soul, and inconclusive
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examinations of the value of a life after the life has gone ask us to consider trajectories of
energy and light. The speaker, even directly queries about the relevance of such trajectories,
stating, “I asked what exactly would be blotting out what, but you said, it depends.”; any
immediate sense-meaning is elusive as readers have a tough time pinpointing precisely what
depends on what, as well. Psychic distance, too eludes the reader, for example, we begin with
a “we” and an invitation to an intimate experience much like a confession, but we end with
a disparate sense, with “I” and “her” and a directly demanded interrogatory address, “how
can I finish her likeness with only this ocean my inkpot?” The last moments feel frustrating,
but sublime, circling back to the recollection of the love-saying raven’s x-ray likeness and the
impression of eclipsed sense with which we began.
We ourselves, as readers, are experiencing the eclipse and the xray structurally, the
macrocosmic and microcosmic collapsing into the self that is collecting patterns of meaning.
Such meaning-making, with attention to the constructedness of the poem and to the
deliberately stylized artifice might lessen resistance to the experience of the poem for a
cultural consciousness that is largely influenced by hypertextual conditioning and increased
immersion in the world of the visual, which cause the placement of greater value on
dimensionality of experience and less on the visual impact of the singular image.
The use of astronomy in the book creates a macrocosmic sense of attention to orbits
and gravity and particles, creates a sense of investigation of celestial bodies and the effects of
those bodies; light plays an important part in detecting these distant and perhaps long past
celestial bodies, from which many interpret signs and symbols. The element of luminosity
appears in both macrocosmic and microcosmic contexts throughout the collection, creating
a cohesive sense that unifies the poems. In Reddy’s book, the x-ray matters because it ties
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microcosmically to other particles; light plays an important part in interpreting and seeing
the x-ray image. In “Raven & Eclipse”, the x-ray image is experienced in much the same
way as an eclipse is experienced. In the poem, the eclipse demonstrates a negative
impression (seeing it by seeing what’s not there) on a macrocosmic scale, presenting us with
a view of the world that is affected by these larger cosmic bodies. Much as the image of the
eclipse witnessed by a viewer is the pattern detected by the eclipsing of one object by
another object. In the poem, the eclipse itself is seen through x-ray prints of a lifeless raven.
Those prints themselves indicate the pattern detected from the eclipsing of some elements
and not others. What the poem narrows into is the effect of the pattern on the pattern, in
one instance presenting a macrocosmic scale (solar eclipse) and in another instance a
microcosmic, subatomic scale (selective eclipsing of particles to produce an xray image).
However, the images themselves — individually, or together — do not solely
contribute to experiential meaning in the poem; they do not simply contain meaning, [as in
the deep image or the works of the imagists — however powerful those strategies are,
Reddy’s apparent strategies regarding the use of the image differ from them]. The images
used in “Raven & Eclipse” are striking, but they are only striking because we have a larger
body of those kinds images present within the rest of the book to give that experience
meaning; they become resonant. The images alone doesn’t contain or access a meaning for
us — the reader or audience, that is, as one image would not so uniformly have meaning in
our cultural context for all of us. The images don’t present themselves as apertures for
meaning. Instead they allow us to experience another point that resonates with the visual
cohesion throughout the book.
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Such a strategy is less tidy and more messy, asking us not to look, for example, at one
bulb projecting light and how the light reflects from that bulb onto things in the scene, but
to look at how many bulbs might fit onto a string (or, not the star itself, but, a constellation),
how the light from the many might stretch in many directions and fuse in other places, how
the patterns cast by that multiplied light create a sequence or a pattern themselves. The
attention isn’t on the bulb and the light that emanates from it, but is removed outward onto
the pattern external, another degree removed. Again, however, the focus isn’t just on the
many bulbs of light, either, but on the intersecting patterns created by the reflected light
beyond them. One can ring a string of beads around the edge of a thing, framing it, and
thereby select the focus of the gaze onto the object, dictating how we see it. It may be a
powerful image, but the sense of dimension is lost in seeing it thus framed. If one, instead,
lays a curtain of beaded strings over a thing, one can still witness the immediate presence of
the object, still see it, but the focus is different now and the frame is different now. Like
Calvino’s concept of fluidity, contour and perception allow the audience to see the
dimension in it.
Image, then, becomes more complex and not still-frozen in a frame, isolated.
Instead, a dimensional experience of that object demands our attention to, not just the
object, but the world in which that object is situated, as well as our relationship to both
image and world of image. It is the disjunctive formal strategies that create such dimensional
space in the poems. Repetition and rhythm are key, here, in creating a sense of
multidimensionality; with the aid of sonic strategies, what is sensed by the reader is more
than just a scattered bunch of loosely related but disparate images. The impact doesn’t come
from a deep examination of one image, as the images are flat; the meaning comes from the
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web of images that connect to each other, or rather, the constellation of orbiting images in
the poem.
In the poem, we don’t just look at a raven — we start with a raven on a scale; we
imagine it on a boat personified; we imagine it dead and prodded; we imagine it in an x-ray;
we use the x-rayed image of the raven’s internal structure (or skeleton) as a deterministic
physical screen; we imagine/hear an echo of a it in a raven from literature (Poe’s,
“Nevermore”); we examine the characteristics of the once-live raven’s physicality by
superimposing them onto the celestial/the sky; and, ultimately, we fold onto a “she” which
could be the raven or the “you” of the poem or something beyond. This moving sense of
the image of the raven forces us to fixate on the light shining through or around it,
ultimately, asking us about how we can confront a question at all when limited y mortality’s
cycle — a cycle which ties into the sun and other stars.
Much like the way a double-slit blind/light experiment indicates certain truths about
location and position, the experience of meaning created by this poem does the same. The
meaning doesn’t come just from two separate strains of thought appearing ultimately in the
mind of the reader from two different sets of ideas at two different positions or locations,
but from the pattern of concepts generated by the thoughts that filter through two such sets
and intersect in the mind of the reader. Incidentally, it can be argued that the poem’s
meaning comes from making claims about location and position of the living and the loving
as indexed by a particular frame of time, the concept of time-bound life being reinforced
through the use of a bird that is often a harbinger of death in many cultures as the pattern
through which the pattern of the eclipsed solar light, which brings life to plants and
therefore indirectly to all life, is seen by the viewers in the poem. But, just considering the
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image (of the eclipse, of the xray image, of the raven being xrayed) itself wouldn’t allow such
a focus or such a complexity of meaning/insight. The reader’s attention is diffracted, in
parts, through other elements, as well. Other structural elements in the poem that create an
intellectual texture — and, therefore, a receptiveness to the experience of
multidimensionality in it — redirect the luminosity in the poem toward where it might be
detected as parts of a pattern of meaning made by the interplay of light, image, sound, and
sense.
Interestingly, the poem “Waiting for the Eclipse in the Black Garden” (35) that occurs
later in the book employs a wholly different (opposite?) strategy, highlighting the structure of
both itself and “Raven & Eclipse” and drawing the reader’s attention to what can be
understood by a manipulation of structural strategies.
WAITING FOR THE ECLIPSE IN THE BACK GARDEN

It takes long.

A wind comes worrying the candle-tip.

Our servant’s teeth flicker.

His jawbone flickers.

Once I watched him cut open a goat.

Now no one can breathe.

The black disc locks into place.

Listen. Listen.

Under that box is a snake.

Listen while the unlit places hollow you out. (35)

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Unlike the dense block of prose from which we must de-tangle a sense, from which a sense
rises up and forth to us, this poem isolates each image for us. The difference is as much as
that of a whole cluster or constellation vs. a planetary map on which items are labeled. Our
guiding principles and structural frameworks are different
In this latter poem, each image is highlighted, set apart from the others, framed
individually on a line that is itself a stanza. Each line is punctuated by initial capitalization
and end period marks. Each image seems to layer a sense of meaning onto an event
referenced in the title, but not actually depicted narratively in the poem itself. Again, in this
poem, repetition of sounds and words is important. “A wind comes worrying the candle-tip”
brings the “w” sound into focus, while the use of “our” in the poem associates that sound
with “we”. The sound occurs in the circumstance of the title “waiting…”, in the second line,
in “once” and “no one” indirectly, and then, in “while” in the last line — which is longer
and more dense than the previous ones, carrying the only imperative or command the poem
has given throughout the poem to the reader “listen…”. The “l” sound also occurs
frequently, in “black”, “long”, “candle”, “flicker”, “lock”, in the thrice-uttered command
word “listen”, and, again, culminating in the last line — “Listen while the unlit places hollow
you out.” which seems to be a sentiment made from the layering of both images and sounds
in the poem, which seems to be a locus for meaning in the poem, and which also forces us
to revisit whatever we may have learned from “Raven & Eclipse” with its very different
approach to eclipses, light, and darkness.
A very different sense operates in “Sundial” (14), which seems, almost to be the
inverse of the eclipse poems.

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SUNDIAL

In the hanging gardens of sleep,
they dismantled my sleep

singing from cages at daybreak.
So I entered the gardens of care,

where a boy carved in stone
kept watch on a broken stone

sundial. Care told me his story.
Had it ended sooner,

it all could have ended.
I’d have forgiven you

turning to stone without me.
When I blink, I see the blank

I carry inside me no matter
how long I keep watch.

Unfolding in often enjambed couplets, filled with double meanings and resonant nuances,
the poem uses both refrain and repetition to isolate images and create cyclical movement.
Unlike the Eclipse poems, in which meaning or sense rises up to us like a glow in the
darkness, meaning resides in the shadow of the objects laid exposed and bare in this poem; it
is sought as not comfort or knowledge, but as respite and obscurity.
The overall sense of the poem is of brightness, an intense light that exposes the
things it bears down upon, not the illuminated but an awareness of the source of
illumination and also the sense of scale alongside it — the “stick” of the sundial casting a
shadow, the man casting his own shadow, and calibration of it. The structure isn’t immediate
or obvious, but certain elements guide the reader through the poem. In addition to the
recycling image throughout the poem, there is a recycling of both sound and sense.
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The celestial bodies in the dark have long been tools for both navigation of location
and a measuring of days, time in calendars, but measuring time during a day carries a very
different sense of scrutiny and scale. The poem begins with the idea of the sundial, an
ancient mechanism for timekeeping which pays particular attention to a shadow relative to
the bright light and a sense of “watching” which is encapsulated in the word “watch” which
has replaced the sundial in modern timekeeping tools. The modern concept of the “watch”
is a shadow against the sundial that we are watching, alters our sense of time as discrete
instead of relative. Looking at a watch, time can seem like an isolated number, removed from
the bigger sense of our planet and its orbit around the sun. In the poem, there is a sense that
the celestial bodies have some effect on us and our actions, beginning with the daybreak’s
presentation of the sun that has “dismantled…sleep”. Direct consequences are addressed in
the poem, "had it ended sooner, // it all could have ended. / I'd have forgiven you" -- the
"it being the story of the boy "[keeping] watch on a broken stone / sundial. ..." and indirect
ones because their movements are related to our time-keeping and calendar-keeping records.
Indirectly, the rising sun has broken the experiences within sleep in such a way as to leave a
blank or a void, a darkness that stands contra to the brightness of day that the speaker
invokes in the last lines “When I blink, I see the blank // I carry inside me / no matter how
long I keep watch”. Even in this indirectness there's a lot of turn and return.
The meaning seems to gather through the lines from repeated words in different
contexts, in, for example, the repeating usage of words that eludes an obvious formulaic
pattern. The first two lines each end with the words "sleep". The first and fourth lines
contain the word "gardens". The fourth and seventh lines contain the word "care". The fifth
and sixth lines end with the word "stone" and it appears again in line eleven. The word
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"ended" appears in line eight and nine. In addition to the idea of a watch or clock, ghostly
shadowing the whole poem, the word "watch" appears in the last line and in the sixth. The
word "you" ends line 10, while "me" ends line eleven. Just when we think we can figure out
the pattern, we lose it and we orbit circularly through the small seven couplets toward the
last point. Similar slight adjustments or fractures of pattern include "blink" and "blank" in
line twelve. The word "sundial" appears in the center of the poem. Again, the meaning
culminates in the last line when "long" "keep" and "watch" take on a special significance.
It's almost as if this poem is the inverse of the Eclipse poems. The sense of presence
is almost oppressive. The repeating words keeping us in place, in a cycle that we can’t really
resist and can't really anticipate/predict. The sun casts its light down directly and not
hesitatingly. We experience it fully, bask in the awareness of consequence and endurance.
Unlike the Eclipse poems, which seem to meditate of fixate on shadows and the pressing
impulse of death and dying, the sundial poem seems to bring everything under scrutiny,
occluding little but bearing the structures of the poem boldly. The lines occur in pairs, a
tick-tock, sense of the clock and time, but also like the sun-rise and sun-set duality. While
most of the poems in the book contain the comfort of darkness, its soft and sometimes
dangerous shadows, in occulted messages, and the distant light of the stars, planets, eclipses,
and glowing fish, the poem "sundial" is the only one in the book that seems to bare itself
open in the "garish light of day".
Another poem, called "Everything" (18) also contains a sunnier reference to the sun,
watching a solar eclipse through a piece of broken bottle, and links the bottle to a sailor far
away -- a sailor who will likely navigate by way of stars, not the sun. "Fourth Circle" centrally
features a coin, one could say revolves around it, that evokes the image of the sun, much like
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"sundial", but there doesn't seem to be an immediate counterpart to "sundial", as if this
intense brightness can only be beared briefly — and, as if this intensity is a central concern
around which the other poems seem to orbit.
Keeping in mind Richards’ ideas about poetic experience, we can consider the role of
structure. It seems that a poem is made up explicitly of form and idea, that together the form
and idea create a structure in which the reader can experience the meaning of the poem. The
poet has a bunch of impulses that make him put words down on a page; the reader takes in
those words and, in the right structure, those words will create a similar set of impulses to
those that the poet had when composing the poem. The experience itself is composed of a
passive intellectual stream and an active emotional stream, which together engage the reader
and enable him to make meaning. Meaning seems to be constructed by both the poet and
the reader, then.
We can say that structural strategies, then are ways the poet has deliberately
manipulated the formal elements and the words to create a structure that will be receptive of
the meaning he intends. The reader must feel challenged and stimulated, but he must not
feel needlessly thwarted, so structural strategies must connect with a sense of the reader’s
cultural influences, too, or that sense of meaning is left out. If the reader is increasingly
resistant to the poem that seems too sincere or too likely to convey a fully formed
experience, then the formal strategies must urge the reader along other impulses and streams
in order to combat the tendency against the intellectual stream. The disjunctive strategies
employed by Reddy seem to keep the reader’s interest from wavering on those counts.
Richards writes, “The business of the poet, as we have seen, is to give order and coherence,
and so freedom, to a body of experience. To do so through words which act as its skeleton,
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as a structure by which the impulses which make up the experience are adjusted to one
another and act together.” ( Richards 57). Structure is the way form and content act together
— or, are designed to act together — to present an opportunity to gain meaning and insight
from the poetic experience. Since the scientific material being used by Reddy is part of a
disjunctive formal strategy, The function of this scientific engagement, then, is actually
structural rather than topical or thematic. It contributes to the disjunction by which the
poem can provide an experiential meaning. The structure is meant to create a space to access
meaning.
Considering Holub and Goodall’s ideas about science and it’s relationship to
objective truth, here, this speaks to contemporary readers with minimal resistance. If we
agree with Richards, and with Longenbach, then resistance is related to how we come to find
meaning in a poem. That is, the mind that does not resist the structure of the experience
being provided by a poem, is awakened “to the possibility of emotional experience instigated
through ordered words”, to the possibility of encountering meaningful understanding in that
structure (Richards 48).
This disjunctive gesture to provide meaning, made possible by the scientific matter,
seems to be a contemporary phenomenon (though probably not exclusively), especially in
some ways as links to discussions of poetic theory, like fractal poetics and radical artifice. As
such, it seems to be a rather contemporary engagement with disjunction, like the engagement
with science in these poems.
Ultimately, we are finding, in Reddy’s book, that science isn’t just an idle topic or
part of the world that we consider in the poems. It is actually being used deliberately, in ways
that evoke the new understanding of science in our culture, in a structural way that enables
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the reader to find meaning in poems that would otherwise be about overly familiar topics.
After all, can anyone say that stars, ravens, love, and literary tradition are new concepts? No,
but they are “made new” in these texts and we are made to see these concepts in ways that
matter in our interrogation of our existence in the world (our world) in which these poems
appear. In this way, we can all be “aliens” finding a fresh and resonant experience of life and
human connection in the detritus and excess of culture’s dismantled pieces that the
postmodern condition seems to imply surrounds us.
In the 19
th
century, Samuel Taylor Coeleridge wrote, in Definitions of Poetry, about the
connection between Poetry and Science: “Poetry is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to
science. . . . The proper and immediate object of science is the acquirement, or
communication, of truth; the proper and immediate object of poetry is the communication
of immediate pleasure.” Keats might have had something to say about this, with his famous
words on truth, but his words on the connection between science and poetry, that “science
would unweave the rainbow” might bear more upon the connection between the two fields.
Perhaps science will unweave the rainbow, but the postmodern sensibility might find just as
much beauty or pleasure in experiencing the act of unweaving as in witnessing the in-tact
rainbow itself. Edwin Morgan, writing at the start of the 21
st
century about the connection
between Poetry and Science, tells us: “Links between poetry and science, far from being rare
and strange, are actually quite hard to avoid, if one takes the whole history of poetry into
account. Well-known names line up to be considered: Lucretius, Dante, Milton, Goethe,
Shelley, Leopardi, to which you might add Omar Khayyam, famous in the West as a poet but
more famous in his own country of Persia as a mathematician and astronomer, and Virgil
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whose Georgics is a fine poem but at the same time a manual of agriculture and animal
husbandry…” (27).
xliii

At the core, both poetry and science are ways for humans to understand the world
and while both might have different aims and methods, they share something of their cores
in common. As science aims to improve our understanding of the natural world, poetry
seeks to bring an awareness to our experience of it; in our world, science is a very real factor,
resulting in the technologies that shape our conditions and the media through which we
interact with them, forming a substantial force of influence in our societies, and affecting
opportunities for experience. As the ideas of what science is trickle down into our cultural
consciousness, the way in which we understand our culture is also shaped by the presence of
such ideas. Einstein’s ideas had an impact on both the culture and the literature of the
Modernists and Postmodern culture and literature will similarly be shaped with the big
discoveries of science in our time. At the start of the 21
st
century, we hear much about both
the Hubble Telescope and the Hadron Collider; so, the modern astronomer faces ideas
about planets and particles in much the same way as Galileo’s contemporaries might have
been aware of the heavenly bodies and a pervasive sense of Heaven as a place.
The postmodern condition makes room for poetry in science and for science in
poetry and while this can’t exactly been seen as “new”, we can consider the ways in which
this interaction is demonstrated in poetics today as related to the understanding of each field
in the minds of a relevant readership. As postmodern theory and an awareness of science
suffuse the cultural consciousness of the poetry readership, we can expect to see certain
kinds of interactions between the fields that are based in the character of the consciousness
or the zeitgeist. The notion of structure seems to be a major force of our culture, a culture
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that seems to value systems and management and patterns in the face of information
saturation. Goodall’s Third Age of Science seems to be flourishing in this, the Digital Age
and, fractal or not, Reddy’s poems definitely do engage a use of scientific material that in its
structural function seems to be an extension of the contemporary ideas on both poetics and
science.
As the Hubble telescope can detect light in the farthest reaches of the dark spaces of
the universe, it seems fitting that the path taken by that light to reach us has shape some
aspect of the poetry that describes it.

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Chapter 3: Plotting Anthropoid Particularity: The Structural Incorporation of
Mechanics in Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City.

“Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City is a work of genius. It is intended to
be so,” writes Lyn Hejinian, whose review also references the multiplicity of elements
embedded within this book that comes from that sense of genius — melancholy and fear,
comic and desperately happy moments, grids and culture, counters to catastrophe, and a
sense that the book escapes characterization of genre just as it escapes the paralysis of
turbulent confrontation through clever inversions. She reminds us that the book references
“multiple trajectories” from fields as diverse as “math, mechanics, phantasy, music,
film…and dreams (or nightmares).” The reader navigates these many trajectories through a
changing notion of a few concepts — line, time, and the way we define a thing: all parts of
the book’s structural approach, which, through a journey of a multitude of things, ultimately
confronts the traumatic memory of the 1989 Tianenmen Square Massacre (TSM). Just as
reports on the event differ in perspective & leave differing traces on social memory —
within China vs. outside of China, the experience of reading Mad Science In Imperial City
suggests that conflicting perspectives about shared experiences might yield a fuller
comprehension about an event when compared to reveal points of overlap, agreement, or
discord. In its four parts, the book presents a number of such shared experiences, a speaker
in front of an audience, a person in dialogue with someone from his past, the conversation
between reader and text, and a person interacting with a traumatized space to get past it —
all of which give the impression that inquiry matters toward the making of some sense.
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Kristin Prevallet refers to this act of re-construction in her own review, in which she
reminds us that Wang uses this “work of art-in-language which breaks new territories of
poetic form” in order to address the “fractured personal and ideological loss” that emerged
during the political turbulence that culminated in the Massacre and which is “materialized [in
the] shattered effects of cultural history on the mind of the poet who is trying to piece his
life together in its devastating and unresolved wake”. Such a confrontation seems to require
a consideration of subjective, personal temporal experience, as well as a sense of physical
representation of objective movement through time and space. Anne Waldman suggests that
this confrontation results from a unique combination of “Wang’s engineering genius
[brought together with] his genius for new magical/radical language”. Wang manipulates
linguistic complexity, tonal & topical multiplicity, and ideological inquiry to urge forward
certain ideas of knowledge and conflict. He advocates, in interviews, an integration of
subjective and objective knowledge. In Mad Science In Imperial City, such integration serves
to transcend the paralyzing plane made when traumatic experience plots the intimate
subjective experience and the impersonal objective experience together, represented through
the book by extended conceptual metaphors based on the line as a graphed representation of
movement and the line as a journey through past, present, and future. All of these concerns
take on a heightened sense of context and relativity, to which the collection also speaks in its
engagement with literary tradition, social convention, and genre separation. The collection
challenges the conventions of poetic tradition and those of genre differentiation to bring us
an awareness of its concerns.
The book guides us through the authors concerns as a political activist, scientist, and
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poet by creating a multivalent structure of parts from these concerns and it asks the readers
to research the concepts and connections they does not know, to uncover these concerns;
this essay intends to illustrate that dynamic through a discussion of the poems. Arrangement
and the sense of emergent (if not explicit) pattern are important and the book signals that it
has been deliberately organized in such a way that invites analysis or investigation. The
collection, according to an interview with Wang, utilizes the number 7 and 4 regularly,
referencing the date of the TSM. The collection itself contains 4 parts. 3 of those parts
derive their titles from concepts in fundamental mechanics as used in physics and
engineering. The poems themselves, however, do not seem to engage the concepts of the
title topically as subject matter. Instead, each title serves as a conceptual metaphor for the
material of the poem. Additionally, each poem manipulates a sense of the graphed line that
connects to each other poem analogously to the way the titles are related, each subsequent
poem expanding the notion of an additional spatial dimension (line as vector, curve, &
fractal). The poems also consider the line of personal movement through time (line as
journey from past, through present, into future), as each subsequent poem engages an
additional temporal dimension (dialogue in present in poem 1, between present and past in
poem 2, between future, present, and past in poem 4). Working relatively with the idea of
objective analysis of personal experience (dialogue between people charted by points across
various axes) and subjective investigation of personal facts (conceptualizing a poetry reading
as a mechanical process and friendship as a math problem), Wang seems to be asking the
reader if different methods of inquiry might yield some overlap that enables us to be freed
from the paralyzing grip of a traumatic past. Can we come to terms with the atrocity of the
TSM if we chart it differently?
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The structure of Mad Science incorporates the fundamentals of mechanics, the
changing nature of the graphic line, and the consequences of traumatic memory on an
experience of temporality; it does so by toying with poetic theory’s notion of radical artifice,
the structural movement of the “line” as an implicit central conceit in three sections (with a
fourth section investigating how to commit to a construction of that conceit), and a puzzle-
conscious evocation of scientific material that draws attention to the ways in which the
reader constructs parameters only to transcend them, ultimately.
* * *
One of the most spectacularly brave moments that emerged from the footage of the
Tiananmen Square Massacre included a single man confronting a series of four military
tanks: one point, facing a bold, aggressive line. Tank Man, the famous resister came to be
called. It is no great leap to recognize that the line has particular relevance in this book, that
it brings an awareness of the long tradition of shaping knowledge in a context and in a
formation. We can consider, in this regard, Longenbach’s assertion that “[the poetic] line
cannot be understood by describing the line alone: the music of a poem — no matter if
metered, syllabic or free — depends on what the syntax is doing when the line ends.” (xii).
Just so, this book leaves out the syntax, the point at the end of the line, Tank Man, and
instead unleashes lines upon lines in an effort to come to terms with the enduring memory
of that aggressive line of attack carried out against the dissenting students, reminding us that
context is vital, that structure upholds things, and that pattern must be studied if we want to
uphold the integrity of our social consciousness.
Our spectacle-based society (made more so through the technology of the digital age)
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looks at trauma through the lens of either the visual, the objective, or the intensely intimate
and personal (one way of defying the public, the spectacular that so inundates us; also a main
consideration in TAZ and flash mobs which consider similar relationships between
significance and nonsense, order and disorder); so, in dealing with the T Square Massacre,
the main way that society can address or cope with it is to either gawk at the horror that a
person actually witnessed it and ask for painful insensitive details (which we see in the last
section of the first poem), or try to express the horror of it through the depiction of the
spectacle (which is modified in the last poem). Society tends to favor the spectacle and even
the intimate personal experience becomes the spectacle (such as what happens in the second
poem). This is especially true when narratives of history are involved (as we can see in the
third poem). Nationalism often cuts out the parts of public memory that don't suit its
agenda, often manipulate and shape the elements that remain fit its agenda, and suddenly,
there is a rift between the experience of the person or people that doesn't correspond to the
state's version and one haunts another, preventing the movement along what was before a
direct path, what became a curved path and which is now a path that is interrupted by a huge
abyss/rift/rupture in memory and temporality. Tank Man is a spectacle, a way for the world
to understand what happened in one symbolic moment. However, the narrative surrounding
Tank Man differs in China and outside of China. Now that the Internet has made access to
dissenting opinions possible, more people question the official story and its resonance. Of
course, the personal encompasses something radically different from the spectacle that
speaks to society, and this voice lingers in the memory and in the individual beyond a
moment, beyond a sense of past, and lingers throughout the future to come. This book
addresses many of these concerns -- the tyranny of narrative vs lyrical mobility, the form vs
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the content within it as seen in the challenges to conventions of the prose poem and the line
itself, and the tension between subjective and objective expressions of experience as
encapsulated by the tension between art/literature and math/science in this appeal toward
an integration of those knowledges and approaches as a means to contend with the ruptures
created by trauma.
Consider these lines from “T Square”, the last section of the book: “The intersected
and interlocked projection extension dimensioning lines blotched the three views and
quickly lost me. They made interpreting my design an impossible task, let alone throwing it
over to the manufacturing line to the assembly line. They formed a wire-frame model of the
prison cell for my temporal flirtation. Lines made of words projections of 3-D mechanical hell. //
From then on I was never able to grasp a poetic line.” (116). And these: “The war goes on in
every imperative, in every question mark. // It simply happened. An event without answer.”
(121). And the last lines, which also end the book but which do not end with a mark of
syntax, which do not include the point facing the line: “there is no point I see no point in
further interpretation I smell the last lily of June I usher my lady of flower into my secret
glass garden of budding black mushroom I feel an itching in the back of my knees spreading
horizontally backwards and vertically downwards at the same time I don’t want to go let me
go”(132). It is imperative to consider the importance of the line in this collection. The poetic
line, so brought into the awareness of the reader, reinforces the conceit of the line and the
way that line develops structurally throughout the collection.
In Mad Science in Imperial City, the poetic line is conflated with the idea of the line
graphed among a number of axes. Events and experiences are understood through both of
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these means of addressing them. Wang believes that people should be as expected to be
aware of major ideas in science or math as in literature and art, and he brings that
perspective to the way he structures this collection. The line is a formal component of the
poem, but it is also a formal component of the graph ; each contributes to the expression of
an expressible phenomenon. By creating certain axes through which we should be able to
chart the lines of experience, and by deliberately challenging the notion of the lines’ function
in the poem, he seeks to confront serious cultural trauma through the shared dialogue
between science and poetry. As a very particular kind of prose poetry, one structured
carefully by numerical and scientific conceits — structured fractally, one could say — the
book blurs boundaries and genres to question the means through which we gauge and
understand experience and the answers that can be yielded through those parameters.
As James Longenbach tells us in “The Art of the Poetic Line”, “Poetry is the sound of
language organized in lines…[and]…we wouldn’t be attracted to the notion of prose poetry
if it didn’t feel exciting to abandon the decorum of lines.” (xi). Many reviewers have
mentioned that this collection (Wang’s) blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose —
most readers will tell you that it certainly does so, as well as crafting deliberate formal
structures within the prose-poem aspect of the narrative — but, it’s defiance may well be
rooted in certain attitudes adopted by the poet writing the collection. Wang mentions in an
interview that he believes society should be as knowledgeable about science as Shakespeare
and his awareness of context in a social forum is made clear. He considers himself an
activist, an occupation which involves increasing the awareness of certain actions within a
particular context and framework. It seems logical to suppose that a sense of context and
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defiance of convention, might be built into the lines that shape this discourse about
language, connection, and revolution.
This awareness of the line itself also invites the reader to question the structural
dynamics of the poem. If the line break (or ending) isn’t the key structural feature, if it isn’t
meter or rhyme, or rhythm, what gives the poems in this collection the necessary form?
There is a patterning at the heart of this collection, based on the numbers 4 and 7, based on
ideas of math and nanotechnology that construct the poem fabric and prop it up. The long
lines push us over and over this structure, become the medium through which we travel the
structures of this book. And, if we consider Jane Hirschfield’s ideas on memorability in
poems, we can see that this sense of a pattern is important in the collection, especially
important in building a momentum with which the reader can progress from the past,
through the present, and into the future in a way that isn’t disrupted by the traumatic rift of
trauma that haunts memory in the collection. The markings and the medium leave us to
wonder about what kind of messages or impressions we are asked to face in the book, and
what’s at stake is a multifaceted set of observations and ideologies.
At the heart of this deeply structured, complex arrangement of multiple trajectories
and topics, are questions about how people engage with art and with experience and what
resulting revelations from those encounters might mean for social consciousness. What’s at
stake in the book is actually an idea about how we carry our knowledge and experience into
the world, how it shapes us and our interactions, and a question about our responsibility
regarding it. What’s considered in the text is the responsibility that knowledge comes with
and how we use it to understand and respond to situations, specifically those with charged
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context, and how context is defined and what’s been excised in order to stabilize parts of
that context into an objective understanding of any event that can be analyzed. Embedded in
the framework of the book is Wang’s belief that art and literature should just as important as
science and math
xliv
and that people should have a basic grounding in both. The things that
are cut out to make space for rigid objective understandings leave ghostly impressions that
linger extradimensionally over the stabilized understanding that has disregarded them. We
can sense this impression in “PVD”. The things that never move directly and operate
without fixed beginnings and ends, only subjectively relevant, are forever elusive. We can
sense this longing in “J Integral”. Neither the line nor the curve can give us the whole of the
experience alone. We see in “A’s Degeneracy” what risks are involved in stabilizing a
memory but putting it down and giving it shape, and we need this awareness to consider the
confrontation that is “T Square”. What happens, then, when we consider the ruptures of
trauma in memory? The traumatic causes a rift in memory and experience which cannot be
expressed by direct line or by curved line and must instead be traversed by an awareness of
dimensionality that encompasses what both of those perspectives have left out. Consider the
fractal manner in which we find curves and patterns when the image suggests none — give
us an infinite boundary around a finite space and you might find a way to cross a rift, after
all, carry that rift with you instead of stopping your movement into the future, instead of
punctuating it with the past of the paralysis of the present. Understanding involves cohesive
knowledge, a context that takes into account the complexity of the world in which the event
has lived, and in order to reconcile the impossible beauty and cruelty of the world, one must
find a way to make boundaries between them, but also to find paths through those
boundaries. Just as Wang demonstrates the importance of balance in knowledge in his claim
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that Science and Math is as important as Art and Literature, he also demonstrates that the
past and the present are tied into the future, that the line cannot begin or end but must be
considered through beginnings and endings imposed onto the line, that narrative cannot
rigidly encompass the whole but also must permit the freedom of rebellion within it to
preserve the integrity of the complex interplay between subjective and objective through
which any event must seek stability and, therefore, become fit for analysis, understanding,
and action.
Not only does the book (as echoed in its structure) have to do with the direct line of
experience, but also the relationship of the world around it, and also the ways in which those
relationships intersect in webs of meaning. The poetic line evokes the literal line, the graphed
line, the boundary line, the line of demarcation in physical spaces. How we determine what
falls on either side of that line determines how we interact with it. Can we reach what is on
the other side of the line when the line is a massive rift, a scar left from substantial trauma?
The book invites such investigations through its structure. There are four sections, the third
of which is disproportionately large in comparison to the other three. Three develop the
central conceit, while the large section presents to the reader the significance of questioning
that conceit. In one section, the conceit of the line is a vector, a direct line from one point to
another; in another section, the conceit of the line is a curve, navigating around some
obstacle as it moves from one point to another; and in a third and ultimate section, the
conceit of the line is that of a fractal, an infinite boundary around a finite space, one which
involves movement and complexity to enable a subject to navigate through the grid of
interacting lines of experience and expectation embedded in society that surround him. A
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penultimate section, the heftiest in the book, examines the concerns inherent in considering
how to fix a paradigm of lines and what responsibilities and challenges one faces in doing so.
However the book ends with the fractal section that implies possibility, a spectacular
transcendence from the plane on which human behaviors function, leaving us with the hope
that is inspired by possibility and the freedom of defiance and not trapped by consequence
and the rigidity of obedience.
* * *
“PVD” deals with the line and how it is received, the angles and such. But, in doing
so, it brings up the issue of orbits, axis, and materiality. The poetic line itself is also
important here because of the prose poem format that is used here. Also, because the
conversation engages the idea of kinds of text — it is unclear whether the speaker is reading
a poem for workshop or a paper for a science journal in PVD’s narrative — and the
reception of that text, it also engages with how we create a framework for understanding and
expressing experience. The sense of the present is most immediate, though it is apparent that
the memory of past and concerns for the future do shape the way that the present is
experienced. Materiality is important; tangible sensory impressions that are kind of axes or
boundaries, but which are engaged with more immediately here. Dimension might just be
linear. Movement is in the present. The line moves from one point to another — a vector.
“J Integral” contends with the curved line and the boundary and the contained space.
So, it’s not a line that moves in a linear fashion along an axis and comes back to itself and
how we see it along that axis, like an orbit. Instead, we are looking at a line that isn’t direct
and linear, that doesn’t obey the rules of one single axis, but that curves or bends the
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expectation that the line be straight. The curve represents a lot of things, not just the
inability to create a distinct boundary of solely straight lines, but also an awareness that when
we try to force a straight line instead of a curve, we are cutting off parts of whatever might
have been contained within the space naturally. This is interesting, too, if we think of formal
aspects of the poem. The poetic line is a line and while enjambment and other things shape
how that line is received, how exactly does one make that line into something that is like a
curved line? I suppose one does it by bending the line, making it so long that it is several
physical lines, like what you might find in a prose poem. The axis becomes more
dimensional, I think. It’s not just one axis, but two that are being manipulated. This suggests
a relationship between past and present because the poem does seem to move back and
forth temporally between the past and the present. Abstractness is more relevant than
materiality here, you have less of the tangible, more of the thought and the memory. The line
moves from one point to another, but must navigate around an obstacle — a curve.
“T Square” deals with the line as an infinite boundary around finite space because it is
a fractal. The idea of the fractal permeates the form of the poem and the ideas in the poem,
as well. You have lots of lines, not just curving around space, but forming pockets and
fissures and replicating elements and making patterns that aren’t just direct and immediate
but are definitely patterns. Fulton’s idea of the fractal form in poetry could be applied here,
rather directly. There are patterns, suggestive and discrete, within the text that could fit the
formal idea of movement within lines and formal structures that sort of elude or work
alongside the poetic lines. The concept of the fractal and what the fractal contains works
throughout this section. At the end, we are unbound — that is, the last line of the book is
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actually not punctuated and also contains an awareness at the beginning and end of lack of
closure or punctuation (much like a parenthesis) and contains three separate images which
are like blocks so that the impression or impact we are left with reminds us of the line of
three tanks with tank man standing against them, but actually gives us the three tanks and
tank man’s absence (though we remember this image in which he was there, the punctuation
that represents him is gone). We’re caught between objective and subjective awareness in the
evocation of that image. The line in this last section is complicated — not linear orbit, not
complex delineation of curvature, but now an infinite boundary around a finite space as a
fractal. The poetic line is also interesting because it begins almost tied to a narrative in the
first half of the T square section, but changes once we get to “Angularity in Note G” which
is the second half of that section. We are not sure if these are chapters, if they are different
but linked poems, or if they are just sections of a long poem, but they could be all of those
things. The formal challenges are deliberate. Syntax and punctuation are used in the first
half, but disappear in the second half (Angularity). Even the idea of angularity is important
because it seems to resist the idea of the curve, but even in a T Square fractal, the suggestion
is that a curve can emerge as a haunting pattern even though the imposition of straight lines
and angles (think of a square) seems to suggest that it won’t be there. The axes are slightly
different, too, because we think of a sort of persistence of both past and present which is
indicative of future in this section and we also have a definite sense of past and of present
infused with that past. So, the sensibility engages these ideas. There’s more abstractness and
xyz-ness, with the materiality; that is, we see tangible material stuff, we see abstract stuff that
ties into material tangible stuff, and we see something else too like a sense of pattern or
persistence. This feels more multidimensional as a structure, more expansive, more like there
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are consequences for the movements in one line or space across many lines or spaces. The
line is now a boundary that borders space in a complex way — a fractal.
“A’s Degeneracy” engages the issue of how to fix the lines in place and what dangers
await that fixture. This is what fills the rupture, the chasm, caused by trauma — the
seemingly unending questions about how and why that make up an quest for understanding
from which is sought comfort for loss, the lingering rift in the memory that complicates the
personal experience of movement from one point to another which makes both the vector
and the curve impossible, putting the end point so far in the future that it cannot be reached
because the movement through the present is haunted paralytically by the past.
* * *
“PVD”
We can take “PVD” to mean a lot of things, but three ways of thinking about it give a
resonance to the title and subject matter of the poem. The ambiguity is important because
the reader is meant to puzzle out and figure out and find the correct placement for pieces of
information gathered throughout the book; no information is transmitted transparently with
an eye toward sincere or simple representation because part of the book’s method is tasking
the reader with making connections himself so that the significance of context becomes
more personally important for the reader. If we take it to mean “posterior vitreous
detachment”, we are mindful of a condition in which the vitreous humor detaches a little
from the retina, causes floaters and flashes of light to be seen in both peripheral and main
vision; vision is disturbed, but there is no pain, so that the idea of being haunted by
something that isn’t creating an immediate sensation in the present is raised with this
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association. If we take it to mean “personal voice deposition”, we are mindful of the
experience of recording for later evaluation or reflection the personal expressions of a
moment or on a topic; in this circumstance, we consider how the meaning of some
impression or expression will take on more or less significance under differing conditions. If
we take it to mean “physical vapor deposition”, then we are mindful of a process like
electroplating in which vaccum tubes and processes are used to coat nanotubes with a
substance; one can think of this as a process by which a skin is thickened, sensitivity being
reduced a bit and toughness being increased, and one can discover that optical microscopy is
used to evaluate the condition of that coating or to discern scratches or patterns on it.
Interestingly enough, all three of these allusions could be detected in this poem and the way
it unfolds, but the last one is probably closest to accurate in terms of the poem’s structure.
The poem seems to begin with a particular narrative and then it breaks into some kind
of Q & A. We think of a conference paper presentation or a reading after which discussions
open up to increase the understanding. We think of public statements and interrogations, the
way that answers become highly pressurized in charged situations. We think of expression as
moving outward and forward, lines of sound, lines of thought, lines of expression, reaching
ears and being evaluated by the minds connected to those ears. And, the section at the end
directly references optical microscopy. Ostensibly, a subject is reading some material before
a group of people who might be the participants in a workshop and afterward a session of
questions raises the issue of subjective experience and how accurately it can be expressed.
Early in the book we realize the importance of context, of personal interpretation, and that
objective evaluative methods are doomed to reduce subjective expressions of experience into
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something reductive or distilled or only relevant in terms of what it covers that can be taken
in by the other.
Consider the facts of organization in “PVD”. It is a prose poem, uses punctuation, has
72 stanzas, whose 68th stanza is in a traditionally lyrical format and whose other stanzas look
like paragraphs but contain sentences which are sometimes fragments or words and which
defy traditional prose grammar. It contains one titled subsection at the end which could be
one stanza and which is formatted like a list of 84 questions for an interview or interrogation
or analytical inquiry: each line is a question, each question highlights a more reductive
perspective with regard to an event under consideration that happens to be the subject of a
text which is presumably a poem, 12 lines are italicized and 72 are not. In general, the
stanzas are variable in length, the shortest is one line (actually 7 words) and the longest is 10
lines. But, the pattern doesn’t lie in the facts, even though we can recognize a pattern
through the objective facts about the poem’s structure and also that the reinforcement of
that pattern is significant.
Whether we read this by asking “what’s at stake in the poem and how it’s read” or
whether we take it as a metaphor for an experiment in memory, the poem reads like a meta-
narrative of a person presenting a piece (a poem called “Terracotta Warriors Quartet” or a
Physics paper named in P3 that cleverly makes a statement about the audience in the poem
itself) and being aware of both personal investment and public reaction. Its as if that which
is displayed must be interrogated and analyzed. Then, the analysis follows as workshop
Questions at the end.
The poem teaches us how we should regard it. It gives us an experience and many
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opportunities to repeat versions of that experience so that we become familiar with the ritual
of it and can find an outcome. We go through a number of revolutions or turns through
varied and lyrically charged material and then eventually come to a statement or a phrase
which is more direct and resonant, something that could be seen as a coating on a surface —
suggested already by the title and its reference to “physical vapour deposition”.
The first stanza is just a line. Repetition figures substantially, “to turn”, “my turn”,
“utter”. The last part of the line, functioning as a unit separated by syntax and breath is the
statement “But I am at a loss to utter.” (3).
The second stanza is two lines, its alliteration revolving around S and R, ultimately
yielding from the heavy S and R sounds at the end of the line, in a section separated by a
comma and suggestive of a breath-pause, to the phrase “to recover the loss of lines of
utterance.” — a phrase which echoes with only a slight change or two the end of the
previous stanza.
The third stanza brings up the idea of two totally different texts, both equally codified
and yet wholly different from each other — a poem titled “Terracotta Warriors Quartet” and
a paper titled “Nanoscale Prototyping of Anthropoid Integrated Circuits”. The poem’s
fictive poem title is reductively related to the central concerns of the book itself. The poem’s
fictive paper title is somewhat humorous and could be referring to the idea of analyzing the
concerns of the audience hearing the matter read by the speaker. At any rate, the ambiguity
between the two sets up the idea of integrated information and also of how much impact the
codification method of knowledge impacts the manner of expression of any singular
experience; a subjective version and an objective version have incredibly different standards,
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customs, and expectations, but the truth lies somewhere between the two — a line vector,
maybe. The ideas and parallel ideas revolve around each other here, interrupting or forcing
momentum, as they will later with somewhat narratively disjunctive thoughts that seem
outside of the immediate concerns of the narrative, but still relevant to the direction in
which that narrative travels. It is unclear which text (poem or physics paper) is being broken
down into bits by the speaker (he takes them in from his pages) who is sending out their
sounds to the listening ears of the audience (as he reads aloud the words from the pages).
The speaker even wonders where the misplaced text actually is — “Where did I
place/misplace the manuscript?”, indicating the importance of locus and placement in this
poem.
The fourth stanza brings up over and over the concept and word “turn” referring to
the turn of a person in a group to do something, the physical turning of the body, and the
idea of something turning from one thing to another as in metamorphosis. The concept of
rotation and revolution here are useful and important. We think of particles with parts
orbiting some central core, we think of planets orbiting a sun, we think of circular groups of
people which each have a role to play as the rotation of tasks proceeds. And in the next
stanza, we come to understand the experiential logic of this structured material.
The sixth stanza begins with “Across River Y” which rhymes with the line and stanza
ending of the previous stanza, “I sigh” separated from the rest of the stanza by an ellipsis, a
caesura in syntax. In this stanza, we find a lot of internal rhyme that is suggestive of line
breaks without actually imposing any : “Across River Y that pours down from heavenly sky,
every early July we boarded the train home from the ancient city;”. The density of the text
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suggests a reading more like this:
Across River Y
that pours down from heavenly sky,
every early July
we boarded the train home from the ancient city;
in which the sound gathers momentum as it revolves and turns, giving the last portion of the
line an almost syntactic, punctuated emphasis on not the borders and boundaries but the
actuality of destination or location within those boundaries. The next portion of the line
reads:
midway, I changed to another while he continued
on to the capital.
It would make sense to hear or read the line break after “midway” “he” and “the”, but the
logic propelling line has changed a little, indicated by the sound and its alliterative density, by
the less tangible movement of the words following July, following the semicolon. The
momentum has built up around the alliteration so that we recognize that what’s relevant in
the section isn’t the turning that moves us through the whole poem/section, but that the
turning builds a momentum for the line that follows, as if the line that follows the turns is a
vector from the beginning to the end. This concept is reinforced by the questions in the sub-
section “Near-Field Probes of Optical Microscopy”, which humorously conflates the idea of
workshop-mates as elements of an analytical method of discerning cracked patterns on the
surface; they seem to want to know “what’s the point?” as if less concerned with how we get
from point A to point B and more concerned with what the line between them actually is.
Also in just this first page, we pick up a narrative thread that isn’t fully illustrated
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beyond hints in this poem, a narrative about a “he” who plays violin and which creates a
matrix of space for us to consider waves, music, and sound in general, giving us a highly
charged sense around these other elements in the poem. The 5th and 7th stanzas reinforce
this narrative, as well. While the scope of this paper limits an ability to talk about the book’s
narrative itself, it is worth noting that the narrative thread is developed lyrically, cohesively,
and compellingly without owing any allegiance to linear expression. However, the
playfulness within the narrative exist within this structural framework that moves the reader
through the collection and often reinforces that structure, so it will only be touched upon
lightly. Upon raising these charged issues, we become aware not only of revolutions and
turns but also cycles of movement. Waves are physical and sonic and mathematical
representations of the sonic and also a metaphor for feeling and also relevant in mathematics
or physics when graphing and analyzing data. So, in just the first page, the poem teaches us
how to regard it, how to read it, how to experience it, and how to make sense of the
experience we are about to have.
Throughout the poem, the sense of revolution and alignment along axis is important.
As the title refers to the coating of a carbon nanotube, we can understand why the sense is
structurally relevant in this poem. Once we learn the poem’s logic, we understand a little of
how the poem is depicted; this is a structural element and it contributes to the message of
the book because it is one of four ways in which we approach the thematic matter, a
manipulation of which in each of four parts is how the book expresses a statement of
meaning/political activism/ poetic concern about knowledge that is its message.
The idea of revolution works along the major axes in the poem, but works on different
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planes of expression in order to ask to keep in mind the various ideas that are tied into those
elements.
We spin through experience and fall into a vortex, our material world not offering
enough anchor. For instance, Wang writes:
I fumbled my way in the glowing boulevard of diction; I was brutalized by
policemen wu zhuang dao ya chi (armed to the teeth) in the dark alleys of
syntax. In the new world of words, a worn ballpoint released by terracotta
warriors traveling over earthy maps with English legends, targeting the
demons of June (7).
This sentiment is echoed in the last lines of the book, and we can see it’s relevance
embedded within the importance of both language and literary tradition here. This book
references itself just as it references many other texts, things such as the foreboding of
Cavafy’s barbarians, the grim allure of Dickinson’s deathy images, and Plath’s contained
mechanically-useful bell jar — all indicating that we cannot trust the anchors we can locate
to guide us reliably through this experience. Neither can we trust these tangible things not to
turn on us:
Is it due to their innate infertility, or the immense river of voids, which
devours all words rushing out of mouths before they ever make it to the
other bank of ears, or the fact that there exist too many words that we are
too afraid to utter, in order not to be hurt or hurt? (8)
Nor can we ignore the importance of turning as an aspect of change, important for
both experience and for examination. We cannot know a thing by one angle alone, after all.
In lines like “Revolution, a revolving illusion about a virtual axis”(10), we recall the
importance of the revolution and the axis, even as we are considering how to chart the “it”
and even the “I” and the “you” through them. We consider the changing experience of the
“I”, as well, discussing the state of being, as well as the state of experiencing, in both
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subjective and objective ways, as we read:
I am the test subject for a new experiment of PVD (Physical Voice Deposition)
onto the marble stage. It is the rotary mechanical pump and multistage diffusion
pump located somewhere outside the hall that have been chattering to attain the
ultrahigh vacuum indispensable for the deposition process (10),
and then on the following page in a manner that combines the concepts:
I stand alone on the rotating stage…glued onto the marble table, spinning and
spinning, about an axis not of its own, while you are at peace in the other world,
in the world of others. Are you? Where are you? (11)
The plaintive question asks for relative context. Where is the I and where is the you?
Locating them involves spinning and it involves charting of movements, and somehow, it is
unanswerable in the wake of the mutable text being read by the speaker in the poem’s
narrative and also being recalled in the speaker’s memory. The personal relates to the visceral
and material Y axis, drawing upon rivers and stones.
We spin through an understanding of circular movements, our sense of guidepost
insufficient to hold us in a straight line
xlv
. These lines roughly correlate to lessons and
memories of Professor Z and the abstract that distances the reader and offers no defense
from exposure to the revolutions within the poem.
And, we fall, spiralling in with poetic reference and personal memory and professional
(science) training. The movement of the “it” asks to be charted through the poem, referring
to the memories of the speaker, both expressed and repressed, the concept or conceit of
PVD in this context, and also the narrative thread of the experience of the poem’s present,
the presentation being given by the speaker. The “it” is never stable and yet, the way it is
referenced, it seems to be something definite, rather than merely referential. By building a
momentum of repeating “it” in similar, subjective ways, the feeling of rotation and
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revolution is reinforced and asks to be charted along some defined axis. :
“Counterclockwise, it starts to turn”(3)… “After rapid dry run it pauses its
rotation…It turns into a musical stage”(3)… “It follows from well-established
fact that elastic material undergoes thermal expansion or contraction when
temperature fluctuates” (4)… “It resumes spinning…Burdened by the
solidification and desensification of its own memory and the difficulty of telling
it faithfully” (4)… “Yes, it is music. It is classical music…Across, it’s a
wonderland…you played it in the smoky beach bar” (4)… “it never really
happened if you can’t write about it, even once…”(4)…”It has halted again…It
is an elevated Ping-Pong court” (5)… “It bounces off the sweet spot of the
racket into the air, flies along a perfect parabola…”(5)… “It spins again” (6)…
“It stops again…It becomes a chessboard”(7) … “It revolves with
abandon”(8)… “It is such a singular security between the ordered pair”(9)…
“It screeches to rest”(9)… “It turns again, clockwise, its renewed
determination defying any doubt about or attempt to reverse the direction of
motion”(11).
These lines are most closely related to the ghostly X axis, signifying that which we seek and
which eludes us.
The poem asks to be charted, implies that the anguish and anxiety expressed through
the poem can only be responded to with a charting of details to seek an answer. In doing so,
it teaches the reader the importance of the feeling of charting, tracking, pattern-seeking or
knowledge-coding in the collection. Not only does the reader need to be aware of the sense
of movement — as suggested by the awareness of revolution and turning, carrying some but
not sole allegiance to this sense of axes in the poem, but the reader needs to be aware of
what those guiding boundaries or lines might actually be. An awareness of those lines and
what they signify seems to matter.
“PVD” gives us a definite message, through its experience — that which haunts us
also propels us. It is like an invisible axis that exists outside of the material and the
metaphorical, allowing memory to move through and connect to both. The material is often
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metaphorically represented in poetry. The metaphorical or the abstract is often related to a
study of the material in science. In modern day physics, the lines of now and then are
blurred by the confrontation of memory, a confrontation which can (in a traumatic
haunting) linger and spin, making a vortex of what is and was and should be. In “PVD”, the
reader moves through 3 axes: The Y is the River Y and appears as tangible, earthy, sensual
elements; the Z is Professor Z and all abstract notions and ideations that appear throughout;
the X is the unknown of experience and it is propelled by a haunting ghost of memory that
weaves in and out of the experience of time in this poem.
In many ways, PVD comes first so that we have a sense of how to navigate the rest of
the book. The poem/section is instructional and invitational. It definitely tells us that
structure matters a great deal in this book.
Reinforcing this idea is the very deliberate manipulation of both line and punctuation.
We can see a more traditional lineation appear at the very end of the paragraph-structured
lines and just before the sub-section shaped like a survey:
Marble goddess, cracking of our naked
smooth ionic chest beneath parading mass,
sang our secret song of fusion fancied,
shaky in the dawn the brimstone fireballs. (11)
The combination indicates that the prose poem manner was a deliberate choice of
form, not a default setting. Just as alliteration, consonance, and rhyme bring us a sense of
cohesive flow through the section, punctuation makes us pause, (a caesura?), to consider
placement and unit and connection, reminding us that where we draw the lines of distinction
does make a difference to how we come to know, experience, or enact any thing. Just as the
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book attempts to confront the trauma of the T Square Massacre, it reminds us that
fracturing and sequestering are not only ways of protecting and preserving, but also ways of
defining value and meaning. It asks: what lines are uncrossable? What axis determines our
movements? And, how can our understanding shape or characterize it? Are there
consequences for kinds of control? And, who determines the structure and content of
memory?
If a major event like the T Square Massacre can be erased from history so that modern
Chinese Students are unaware of the gruesome story that differs from the official version —
or, aware of an alternate version that makes us question which one is more “true”, then what
else is being cordoned from knowledge? And, how do we define that knowledge gets
fixed/stabilized as truth and which isn’t? If we want to understand human experience, we
must know both material and metaphor, both poetry and physics; we must know the point at
the end of the line. And, in order to know it, we must know what propels that line, what
contains it, and what shapes it. Then, the point at the end, the punctuation of any ending can
take on a meaningful significance.

“J Integral”
In thinking about this section, the title again is important. It gives us an idea of how to
contextualize or understand the experience of the section and it raises for us certain ideas
that might not be easily understood. For instance, those readers less familiar with advanced
mathematics might immediately determine what an integral is and what kind of integral is
classified by the letter J. Any rudimentary search will reveal what a “J Integral” is and we can
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see that there is a connection between the way the experience of this section plays out and
the definitive understanding of a J Integral overall. The idea of the integral, loosely, involves
assessing a certain area bound by a graphed line. So, we can understand that the conceit
works on many levels and that, structurally, we may want to be aware of those many levels in
order to fully understand the significance and meaning of this section/poem. Structure is
inherently tied to meaning and linked to physics, which relies very much on math and
science. And, we understand from reviews and interviews of the poet that the idea of
integrated knowledge is important to him personally and also important to the message of
the book.
The section itself isn’t just an integral, it is actually written in words, lines, stanzas, and
employs key elements of poetic structure and form. So, we can understand the conceit
inherent in the title and also recognize that a number of ideas may well be conflated into the
conceit, the formal structure, and the meaning of the section. And, we understand, as
readers, that if we don’t have a basic understanding of mechanics (interesting that the section
also plays with the mechanics of grammar, itself, while drawing upon ideas of mechanics as a
structural basis), that a brush up of physics might give us insight into the poem in ways that
won’t be immediately accessible without it. Beyond just a topical engagement with physics,
though, we are aware that the poem is playing with our ideas of referential knowledge,
teasing us to find connections to the cryptic choices and presentation of certain poetic or
literal elements. J also ties into June, the month of the Tiannanmen Square Massacre. The
section is one of 4 that comprise the book and the date in June of the event was the 4th. The
sense of connection isn’t continuous in a narrative manner, but, invites an investigation into
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the patterns of recursive thoughts. When we move from one section to another, we do not
expect to pick up where we left off, but expect to find a new revolution or formulation or
perspective on some element of what we left behind us. We are aware of the change of
information and attitudes toward it through the progression of time and so we are aware the
context changes the pieces of information just as it changes our understanding of connection
between those pieces of information.
We leave “PVD” with an understanding that Optical Microscopy is a method for
examining the scratches in the coating created by a PVD process. In “J Integral” those
scratches and patterns of scoring become actual fractures. The significance of those
scratches is deepened and it makes us question what caused them and whether or not they
can be repaired successfully.
A J Integral, according to the ideas of mechanics represents a way to calculate the
energy used or released upon the fracturing of a surface based on each fracturing unit. That
is, it allows us to quantify and understand the breaking of a surface as it breaks, and we can
measure the cracking and breaking apart in discrete units. When dealing with a two-
dimensional problem (and we can understand “PVD” as charting experience and expression
through one dimension, “J Integral” through two dimensions, and “T Square” through three
or four dimensions, as previously discussed), the energy release rate is connected to the
fracture toughness in measurable ways. That is, the amount of energy that is given of when
something is fractured is related to the kind of energy it takes to break something, indicating
that when something is broken, a measure of its toughness indicates a measure of what is
gained by the one doing the breaking. Ideas of toughness and endurance are found
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throughout the section, looking not only at the physical aspect of strength and endurance
but also at the figurative aspect of strength of self and endurance of memory. The section
asks the reader to examine how all of these are related.
Consider that an integral is essentially the expression of a physical depiction of an area
bounded by the graph of the function along the designated axes and between two defined
boundaries. In this case, the graphed function could be the experience of the T-S Massacre,
the boundaries of time being that of the day and month, becoming relevant now that the
event occurs in the past but still haunts the reader’s present. The integral then is the
depiction of the area bounded by that experience and that time. So, in some ways, the title
suggests that what the poem depicts is the effect of a particular event. It doesn't suggest that
the time span is limited in terms of effect, so it is possible that the poem is discussing the
effect of the experience along the ongoing axes that make up the personal experience of the
person in life after the event. However, the sense of the integrated experience, rather than
the singular one, is immediately invoked in the first stanza:
Today I am sick of the abundance of I in my story, capitalized or not, because
the voice of this I, in its futile effort to win its case by sheer numbers, is chaotic,
impotent, equivocal, ad contradictory. Instead, I go to others’ stories, to hunt for
the hidden specter of the hidden form of my story, lurking in the hundred-year-
old narrative forest of how to say I (19).
The poem demands that we confront a number of questions or factors if we intend to
understand what we are reading, what we are faced with. This sense is reinforced by the
“optical microscopy” we have just faced in the previous section. The questions include, is
this a definite integral where some parameters are limited? Can one actually define function,
axes, and intervals? Is the person the variable? Wang writes, “I meet K on each page I read.
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We unite in words over and over…You get the picture of the state of the affair. Together we
are a given in every story. But X is a rare species….X and I stand side by side in this
contextless heap of words, 75% of the time…Why can’t we always show up together in
stories? I turn the pages of my math books to look for him, solve for him” (19).
These ideas are also reinforced by the investigation of the speaker into the pronouns
and their significance, their mutability, and their connections. For instance, Wang writes at
one point:
“Or I have always been confounded by the similarities and differences between
she and he. From pure appearance, she is different from he only by a serpent-like
letter S. So she is the Sed he and he is the unSed she. S. The bond between he and
she. The sine wavy suture sewing he and she. I ride the surging wave to catch our
lost fish and wonder who is in the air and who is in the water, she or he. I glide in
both air and water because their interface has no thickness” (19)
In addition to the engaging dialogue about the context of gender and gender dynamics, we
also get an understanding of the experience of two people in this poem, as opposed to the
one person that was most significant to “PVD”. While “PVD” does include a number of
persons, the most significant person or expression is from a singular source. In “J Integral”
we notice that the experience or expression is that of two sources, more specifically, the
bond between them. One could say that the Integral represents the bond between those two
individuals and that the experience of the reader through this poem/section is one that
invokes the bond between the he and the she in question.
Consider, too, the relevance of the letter S. In remembering the history of the integral
in general, one must recall that Leibnitz adapted the integral symbol from an elongated letter
s, standing for "summa" which in Latin means sum or total. So, the poem suggests that the
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sum total of experience has something to do with the bond between these two individuals
and that the experience between them is not a direct line, but one which veers around some
sort of obstacle or boundary. The reader could question the role of the axes of the graph,
determine what boundaries dictate the analysis of the experience. Temporality seems
significant. So does mortality. K could be toughness and is also possibly the “she”. Wang
writes:
I say she when I say K, and he X, or vice versa, as if I am positive about which
should be he and which should be she. But in my speech I hopelessly misuse he and
she, and she as he. Because in my mother tongue both she and he are pronounced as ta,
with identical syllable and intonation. (19).
The interchangability of K and X and he and she also reinforces the idea of the bond
between the, the bond that could be tied directly into the S, the curve, the integral, the sum.
X could be a variable factor for which one is solving, but it is also sometimes the “I”. Wang
writes:
Today, I am sick of the abundance of I in my story, capitalized or not, because
the voice of this I, in its futile effort to win its case by sheer numbers, is chaotic,
impotent, equivocal, and contradictory. Instead I go to others’ stories, to hunt
the specter of the hidden form of my story, lurking in the hundred-year-old
narrative forest of how to say I (19).
We understand that the speaker is “hunting” in other stories to find the haunting thing that
speaks to his own experience, so we understand that there is something to this I that isn’t
quite an axis. It seems that the K and the X might form the axes and that the Integral
represents the area bounded by those axes within the space indicated by the graphed line of
their bond. The reader can see that the structure is deeply important in figuring out the
matter of the section/poem and without that awareness or acceptance, much is lost in the
meaning of lines like these:
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I meet K on each page I read. We unite in words over and over. K and I. For
example, kith and kin, drink, pick, kiss, kink, kill. You get the picture of the state
of the affair. Together we are a given in every story. But X is a rare species … I
know X and I joined each other in no less words. Like Xi’an. Or existence, matrix,
climax, anxiety, exile, extinction, Quixote, sphinx. X and I stand side by side in this
contextless heap of words, 75% of the time. Very encouraging. Why can’t we
always show up together in stories? I turn the pages of my math books to look
form, sole for him (19).
One gets the sense that these words, important in their materiality and in the worlds they
hold that overlaps the situation of this poem/section, are also important as points plotted
along the axes of this graph, points that are relevant in understanding the line of the bond,
the line that bounds the area of shared experience that is being “integrated”. How one hunts
for the variable that is the I or the X depends on where one considers the relationship to K,
to axes, to mortality and temporality and memory. Interestingly, K also represents toughness
in the equations that determine fracture toughness, bringing us back to the fundamentals of
mechanics in physics, while we are wandering through the linguistic mechanics already.

“A’s Degeneracy”
The purpose of the section is essentially to pose the question/issue “How to Write”,
which comes up in many convoluted and differently configured ways throughout the section.
The section engages Stein, somewhat through Hejinian’s work which was influenced by
Stein, and in keeping with Wang’s approach to literature which was sort of inverted in that
he started reading literature after he started writing rather than writing in response to an
engagement with literary tradition that inspired it.
So, his use of literary tradition is less indicative of the idea that tradition is the place
from which the fundamentals are learned and that expression must be through the codified
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methods and elements presented by that tradition and more suggestive of the idea that
different modes of codifying experience and understanding should be integrated so that
experience can contain more integrity that considers both subjective and objective means of
evaluating the event and expressing observations and experiential understandings of it,
specifically when the event in question is one that ruptures the expected modes of
expression and evaluation, one that is traumatic and that creates a rift that the expected
vectors can’t exactly continue through.
For instance, let’s say you are walking along a path and the beginning and end are
clear. That vector is clear and you can go from one point to the other in a straight line along
one plane. Let’s say there’s a big obstruction on that path between the beginning and end
points. Well, one can still keep a more or less direct vector, but one might engage other
dimensions now, curving around the obstruction along the same plane or going over or
under it along another plane, introducing another axis for consideration and therefore
another dimension to the whole event/experience/expression of experience. What happens
when the obstruction is so big, though, that one cannot go around it and cannot jump over
it, either? Let’s say that a massive earthquake occurs and creates a huge rupture in the earth
along which that path is constructed, a rift that extends from horizon to horizon. How can
one then move forward? If the line that represents one’s walk from one point to another is
the present, and the points are the past and the future, then what happens when one is so
stalled in the present that one cannot move forward into the future, but cannot even escape
being haunted by the past?
In the book, the structural arrangement of the sections follows the condition of that
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line and what it means. It engages both the poetic theory concerns of what the line and the
form can do and also emotional concerns that tie into language and its limitations and its
uses. The concepts, however, also gauge the idea of knowledge, specifically that an
integration of knowledge might just be the thing that allows a solution to come forward in
some way. We can no longer consider the lines from the limited frames of objective analysis
and we can no longer consider them only through the immediacy of he subjective experience
of temporality and the present. Analogously, we cannot think of lyricism without considering
narrative. We cannot think of art and literature while disregarding math and science. Cutting
off parts of knowledge or experience in order to make them fit into the frames we choose to
impose upon experience, expression and social control (for this ultimately dictates the
manner in which we understand and regulate social control) limits our ability to cope with
the traumatic rift or rupture that appears when some impossibly disturbing event breaks the
path along which the present is walking from the past into the future. For this reason, poetic
and literary artistic traditions take on a charged significance by having determined a sort of
path from past into present and suggestive of future. For this reason mathematic and
scientific analytic traditions also take on charged significance by having determined the way
we chart path and progress and evaluate success or failure or a need for a change of course.
With an integrated perception, incorporating both kinds of knowledge and experience, it is
possible to traverse a canyon with a hang-glider, a hot air balloon or a gravity defying leap,
or, it is possible to recognize that the canyon is there because we see the disruption in the
vectors from the beginning point to the end point of the journey.
The process of the book ultimately walks us to an understanding of the fractal, which
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gives us an infinite boundary line around a finite space. The process by which that
“integration” occurs, the method that is used in bringing us to that point, the work it takes
to get to that concept, is done in the section called “A’s Degeneracy” which demands that
we take a look at how we write, or how we confront, or how we contextualize and
understand things and the world of things and our role in that world of things. The section
engages language, poetic theory, and a number of scientific and mathematic concepts
surrounding physics, nanotechnology and engineering to bring us to an acceptance of how
we might be able to cross the rift. The section itself is hefty and large, being a rift itself in the
path between smaller points that are largely similar in size.
The section, as a whole serves to tell us how to process or consider the issues raised
about experience and knowledge as represented by the line and dimensionality in the other
three sections. It also gives us an experience of what that integration of knowledge or
experience might feel like and what is at stake in choosing not to integrate this kind of
knowledge by showing us what haunts us when it is excised from inclusion in these modes
of analysis or expression. Of course, the section is not didactic, nor instructional and only
tells us “how” in the context of the material of the book, again reinforcing the significance
and importance of context in the expression of experience, especially as when it is part of
any kind of social engineering or politically relevant social domain.
Moments of radical artifice are at play in this section which presents us graphs and
charts, equations and calculations, even a menu for an imaginary Chinese restaurant that
serves poetry. This poem is the densest and longest of the book and allows the readers a
chance to work out the problems that we encounter in “PVD”, “J Integral”, and “T
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Square”. However, discussing this section in detail would not fit within the scope of this
project; a future literary analysis might touch more intimately on its workings.

“T Square”

“T Square” contains a number of ideas that are seen as fractal, seen as repetitive
without being arranged in a simple pattern. Jane Hirschfield, in “Nine Gates”, when writing
about memory and translatability, a relevant concern in a collection that translates between
English and Chinese and between literary English and the English language jargon of
Physics, suggests:
Repetition lies also at the heart of other linguistic devices we associate with
poetry’s beauty and sensual pleasure. The parallel structures and balances
sentence patterns seen especially in classical Chinese poetry…lists, especially
those using anaphora, in which each part begins with the same word…lead the
mind…from one word to the next…helping to shape where a thought is going
by the recall of where it has been. (179-180).
These concepts make sense in this poem, where the haunted past is important and where it
seems to impede movement forward beyond the rift, but which can only be crossed by
repetitive links that move a little more forward each time. The infinite boundary around the
finite space provides a lot of room for repetition and pattern to emerge, giving flourish and
edge to what is otherwise somber, straightforward, direct and also a path beyond what is
broken in its direct movement as a result of trauma.
In this poem, the humorous parts — such as a discussion of breaking the flat plane of
the ground using personal jet propulsion, or farting, breaking the plane and crossing the rift
with an anti-gravity jump, and even referencing the situation as a people hemmed in like a
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hockey puck or billiard balls — serve to remove us from the grim, from what could be an
overly insensitive response to a highly charged topic. Think about how indelicate the
questions in “optical microscopy” seem when considered against the impossibly vivid
subjective experience of the person who has witnessed such atrocities and when weighed
against the irreducible personal experience of that speaker; they are in so many ways
impossibly intimate, demanding, and dehumanizing.
These moments of humor allow the reader a sense of respite, a sense of removal
which forces him to consider that the person is more than just a witness, more than just a
bag of trauma, more than just a piece of a historical event, but a person who is scarred and
moved and changed by this event, but whose life contains so many days that are not this
event but that might yet be haunted by it. That kind of complexity is crucial and it comes
from an integrated understanding of knowledge, a consideration of subjective and objective
perspectives, a consideration of narrative momentum and lyrical departure, a sense of
temporality that is not just the linear movement from the past to the future, but also one that
is aware of the experiential sense of the present.
The experience of this section is that of the line as the fractal, the infinite boundary
around the finite space, and all the structural devices reinforce a playful and defiant sense of
transcending the paralyzing plane by embracing a fractal sensibility, not one fixed in linear
sincerity, nor in earnest skepticism, but in irony and uncertainty, in multiplicity and
hyperdimensionality.
* * *
Thoughout the collection, the pressing conceit that of the line. The structure revolves
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around the changing nature of the line, how the changing of that conceit throughout
signifies the urgencies in Wang’s collection, and what it alludes to about knowledge,
memory, and responsibility. This feeling of multiplicity and hyperdimensionality is
particularly current, resulting from the ways in which we are aware of our awareness in this
digital age that recognizes information management as science’s domain, but recognizes also
that art’s appeal to life must involve and yet transcend this immersion in scientific objectivity
and abstraction, yielding a multivalent and playful approach to language and subject matter
as demonstrated in this collection and in the others I’ve examined.
Longenbch tells us that “poetry is the sound of language organized in lines” and
Wang’s collection is not only organized intricately in lines but also around reflection about
how lines are drawn around knowledge and experience. Wang intends us to think about the
significance of those organizing principles, demanding with his carefully arranged structure
and framework that we reconsider the lines which define our ideas and also those that
express them, echoing George Oppen’s words, “the meaning of a poem is in the cadences
and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines”. Not
only is experience and expression important in this collection, but memory itself as a guiding
principle between experience and expression is, too. Hirschfield’s words on memory remind
us of its function in Wang’s collection. She writes, “ if the threads of memory are spun of
the sounds and structures of individual lines, physical embodiment and narrative are the
loom on which the epic’s astonishing garment is woven.” (181). The line is a thread weaving
memory. In that way, the line in the book holds more together than just breath, just formal
element, just analytical element, but also a narrative element indicative of materiality. If you
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consider the oral tradition, the old bards (Hirschfield writes specifically about the 20th
century Serbian guslari but it still makes sense to consider it) drew from “storehouses of
formulaic metrical phrases”(181), which hints at something more analytical or mathematical
behind the lyrical appeal. She reminds us that the “formulae were then woven into a web of
narrative themes” (181), that “the formulae are the words of oral poetry: words that, taken
together, form a specialized kind of language created to fulfil the needs of
memorability.”(182). Mad Science in Imperial City engages the question of memorability
intimately, weaving line into pattern and calling memory into knowing. The ghostly
narratives and formulaic patterns in the collection tie these concepts into a sense of tradition
without tethering it there. In “PVD” we can see that the formula exist but don’t need to be
manipulated. In “J Integral” we begin to consider the metanarrative behind the suggestion of
formula. And, in “T Square”, we are fully aware that the formula is constantly being
manipulated and twisted through metanarrative in order to command memorability of
experience and push past the traumatic memorability that haunts movement through
narrative. Important in all these sections and to the message of the book, is Hirschfield’s
suggestion that “narrative, then, uses the structure of time to defeat the ephemerality of
time”(183); and only by disrupting movement, momentum, narrative, and temporality
through the deliberate manipulation of structure can we defeat some aspect of this traumatic
haunting that lingers through the unintegrated condition of experiential knowledge in our
culture.
Mad Science in Imperial City, with its linguistic and genre-defying playfulness, with its
pattern-centric awareness of the framework within which phenomena must find a place, is at
once a poet’s collection of poems and a scientist’s collection of poems. It engages with the
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world candidly and directly, with both indulgence and restraint, challenging its readers to see
a definite thing through an unexpected frame of reference. In these moments during which
the reader experiences the limiting defiance against restraint or acceptance of the freeing
acquiescence to restraint — a tension directed and frustrated and complicated throughout
the collection for effect, both the poet and the scientist can find a transcendence of the
trappings of their fields and a reverence for the strange novelty of seeing a familiar thing
anew through the artificial awareness of both. If, at the end of the day, “a poem must not
mean, but be” (as MacLeish reminds us in his ars poetica), it must be in a world where
knowledge cannot be fixed into a binary of objective and subjective, starting point and
endpoint, or even experience and expression; it must recognize the traumatic rift that comes
from too much a fixing of that knowledge and it must “unweave the rainbow” (as Keats
feared science might do) even as it walks across the bridge that band of prismatically
segmented light has created over that rift.

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Chapter 4: Poetry & Proxy: Thoughts on Departures from the Page and Paradoxical
Science in Poetry, or, Conclusion

In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote about the ways in which the aura and originality of an
artwork had changed given the modes of mechanical reproduction available. At this point, in
the digital age, in the 2000s, it seems just as important to note that attitudes toward
information and knowledge in artwork, especially literary artwork, have changed as a result
of processes of distribution and access have become more readily available to all people.
Increased connectivity between people and concepts, with a decreased emphasis on the
narratives or disciplines that bind them, have had a democratizing effect on knowledge and
information. Increased access to published texts or ideas and to the publication of ideas has
given a shifting notion of value to received and distributed information. With the click of a
few buttons, anyone can distribute information without review by peers or much
consideration; immediacy, self-regulation, and a low threshold for uninteresting concepts has
also become more common as people become more guiding by personal interests and
agendas and less likely to surround themselves with the same information matrix as those
around them, segregating some aspects of socializing experience across culture and
enhancing others. As human reliance on technology has increased, our ability to know how
our technology does what it does has not increased, which has privileged those that are the
keeper of standards and relevant knowledges, while devaluing others. Anything that is
considered “truth” runs the risk of being incredibly relative to a number of factors, clustered
by that which separates and signifies their importance to smaller groups while linking
notions of continuum in discourse and values. In poetry and other literary art, structures that
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reinforce a sense of pattern without allegiance t it, that demonstrate hyperlinkage of concept,
and that imply multiplicity of perspective and outcome gain value and currency. Formal
structures move well beyond the binary ideas of relationship to form that are called into
question, reveling instead in those aspects of experience that transcend the binary. The world
is increasingly run by binary code and increasingly reminding us that it is human to transcend
it.
Donna Harraway reminds us, in “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women” that “We must be
acutely aware of the dangers of using old rules to tell new tales…[as we] both learn about
and create nature and ourselves…Sciences also act as legitimating meta-languages that
produce homologies between social and symbolic systems…In a strict sense, science is our
myth.
xlvi
” We are beyond the age of the machine and in the age of the system, and out
languge and experience reflects that pervasive mediated reliance between human on machine
in order to navigate the world. Perhaps, in art, such a mechanism reminds us that the search
is not for relevance or certainty or even authenticity, but simply agency through the system,
simply presence.
* * *
This lens of paradox and hyperdimensionality seems suited to a discussion of not just the
two books included in this study, but can be extended to fit the others suggested in the
introduction.
What formal strategy is organic to the poem’s content no longer, in our culture,
necessarily evokes a sense of experiential authenticity. Yet, what is synthetically constructed
and dissolves completely also brings up questions of sincerity that hinder the poems’
resonances. Somehow, the juxtaposition of two disparate elements, form and content, that
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are both apparent, seem to present a space in which the reader’s experience does seem to
yield the reader’s submission to the poems’ meanings. So, what components accomplish
such an immense task? Fulton claims:
Diction, surface textures, irregular meters, shifts of genre, and tonal
variations take center stage as defining formal elements. Function words
(articles, conjunctions, prepositions) assume schematic importance. The
content of fractal poetry’s form (yes, the content of form) also dismantles
assumptions concerning “the natural.” Form’s subversive or reactionary
possibilities are recognized rather than denied. Holland’s Hidden Order notes
that when reading formal structures we decide to call some aspects irrelevant;
we agree to ignore them. This has the effect of collecting into a category
things that differ only in the abandoned details…We examine properties that
define [the form] and disregard properties that fall outside of this definition.
(116)

The pieces used in a construction of formal structure then are, according to Fulton, “the
disenfranchised details, the dark matter of Tradition: its blind spots, recondite spaces, and
recursive fields” (116). These particular elements come to the surface when the difference
between secondary and tertiary attitudes, as connected to the Second and Third Ages of
Science are considered.
According to Fulton, when the structure is imbued with substance, its form itself
makes certain statements because its political explorations are embedded in the structure
itself. The subtlety of this engagement, rather than louder didactive or discursive statements
that would otherwise engage a polemic, appear within pronouns, gendered expressions,
punctuation, ellipsis, and absence or negation. By discussing kinds of fractals, she explores
how such a poetics would engage high and low ideas of art. Srikanth Reddy’s book Facts for
Visitors implores such an interrogation of tradition and authority by deliberately engaging
particularly traditional formal structures in unusual ways. His maximalist impulse is informed
by ideas of cosmology and astronomy, form and orbit, subjectivity and gravity, can present
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themselves in geometrically fractal forms throughout the book. The book’s structure itself
can be seen such.
Consider the ways in which the tertiary degree of removal from the natural world which
characterizes scientific spirit in this age is manifested with regard to the relationship between
content and form. The poem must evoke meaning not by allowing form to dissolve into
content, not by allowing content to come up through a traditionally inherited form, but for
the form and discernable content to interact in ways that inspire a sense of meaning for the.
Alice Fulton describes this interaction by way of contrast with organic connections between
form and content, suggesting that “organic aesthetics, by definition, try to match the poem’s
cadence with its emotional content, [while] fractal aesthetics, in contrast, refract the poem’s
surface in order to make its linguistic materiality more evident. As free verse broke the
pentameter, fractal verse breaks the poem plane” (118-119). Such a transcendence can be
seen in several of the books discussed herein. Particularly literal instances of this breakage
seem apparent in Brenda Hillman’s Cascadia, in Christian Bok’s Crystallography, and in
Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City. In Cascadia, structural elements stand in
physical contrast to the words inside the poem, meaning residing in the clashing of the two.
In “Blue Codices,” the separation between the top and bottom sections evokes a sense of
process that informs the “finished” upper poem with a meaning that can only be sparked by
the clash between the two within the whole poem. Bok’s work in Crystallography does this
with the constraint of “lucid writing,” in Eunoia with deliberately lingual Oulip constraints,
and in Mushroom Clouds with the clash between the sound poem itself and his own
statements of poetic intent that inform the sound-poem. Wang pushes up against these ideas
by investigating the space between prose and poem, pushing these definitional questions
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against the constraints of form, then again against an arrangement of matter that questions
issues of witness in quantum physics against issues of witness in the Tiananmen Square
Massacre, while sifting the entire concoction through highly structured, numerologically
significant patterns of expression and nanotechnical concerns. Mullen’s works explore,
through Oulipo concerns, the linguistic atmosphere, code-switching, and cultural meaning,
while being structured against the concept of a definitional text, the dictionary. Similarly, in
both Hahn and Kapil’s works, broad systems based on scientific inquiry are brought into
conversation with intimate and personal details of observation, perception, and experience.
Further development of this project will investigate these links, applying the lens utilized in
the sample chapters to discuss the ways in which poetic formal structures invoke scientific
concepts in these works, as well.
This second age of science described by Goodall, is “metaphorically represented by
scientific libraries bulging with wisdom, aspiring to contain…the world for man…and by the
reality of scientific laboratories where uninvolved observers ask their questions and
manipulate disparate objects, dissect them and rearrange them in chains of facts and
abstractions,” (49). is precisely what Kimiko Hahn refutes in her poem from The Artist’s
Daughter, “Exhume.” By taking up a process much aligned with the ideals of second science
as her poem’s formal structure, she seeks to explore the failure of such a process to yield
meaningful results, asking us if we might be asking the wrong questions, or might need to
reshape the answers we get in order to understand them. By doing so, by manipulating the
formal and structural components of the answers, she seems to ask the audience to
reconsider whether the means by which they understand the world are truly responding to
what their consciousnesses are demanding. If the new science involves information and its
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management, a lack of authority or certainty, then her use of a previous scientific model (and
a display of its failures) as a formal structure, forces readers to reconsider this new way of
seeing and analyzing information and even their expectations of what answers might look
like. She is virtually demonstrating for us the shift that has occurred in consciousness.
I don’t mean to imply that Hahn is directly responding to Holub’s essay, but instead to
demonstrate the pervasiveness of the concepts he has presented. I intend to examine Hahn’s
poem more extensively, later on. While we still think of labs as part of science, something of
this characterization feels outdated in the era of the particle accelerator and the mobile
medical diagnostic lab, as if it is some precursor of the world of systems theory, cybernetics,
computer science, complex adaptive systems, chaos theory, which in some ways it is, much
like the computer that once took up an entire room that does less than the smart-phones we
carry in our pockets, relevant in legacy and crucial to where we are now, but somehow
locked in a chronology behind rather than alongside us. Kimiko Hahn takes up this idea in
“Exhume” and then also in her collection “Toxic Flora” taking as a constraint or gimmick
the idea of taxonomy and biology and calassifications of science and experience and then
transcending them by way of the humanities.
Consider Holub’s argument that the relationship between science and poetry is not a
direct one-to-one correlation or a simple parallel because the differences between the fields
of poetry and science are not parallel or directly paired. He claims that the essential
difference between art (and by extension, poetry) and science is that “art is based on the
immanent inadequacy of its means, while science insists on the adequacy, or at least the
temporary adequacy, of its means.” (55) This distinction can be seen in all of the poets
whose work I am investigating. Hillman’s textual and symbol-based structures in “Cascadia”
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create what can’t be stated simply in words and her “Blue Codices” demonstrate spatially the
importance of revision and reconsideration of what has been “revised” out of the final
product of precipitate, preserving some element of process that would be less easily
discerned simply in the words which convey meaning in reference to a product of pure
science. This revisitation and revisioning of words insists on that inadequacy of words in
Hillman’s, Wang’s, Bok’s, and Mullen’s works, as well. However, the inadequacy of words is
not extended to the inadequacy of the formal representation of the links between those
words that is a poem, in each of these writer’s works; that is, the poetry has been influenced
on a structural level by scientific means, though its attitude about “words” as units of
meaning may differ immensely.
This is how poetry gains credibility or trust. It makes us see the things we are aware
of but don’t necessarily trust, so that we’re on the same side as the poem, that we’re able to
let our guards down and experience the poem and what it means or is. If we interact directly
with the natural world, it feels quaint, but trying for a scientific method-yielded framework
of fixed notion seems passé and constrained. We begin to think of deficiencies in abilities to
engage with the whole vast world. We also begin to think about ethical problems. If we are
not responsible for our discoveries and how they impact others (Goodall’s ideas from
second book), then, how can we trust that what we are doing won’t disturb the balance of
the world or our own places in it? It’s as if it reminds us that we know too much for our
own good, too much and not enough. If we settle back into a sense of pattern and
connection and complexity, but never give ourselves over to it, if our engagement with the
natural world and the ideas of humanity never quite falls into fixed systems or disciplines,
but reminds us that there are links out there that can be analyzed and discovered and
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enjoyed and manipulated to some end, if we choose, we get a sense of freedom…the
comfort of the pattern without its constraint…and then we can experience the poem as a
real thing something within our reality, a made thing but a thing that is rather than just a
thing that represents for the purpose of fixing into some system that we doubt and distrust.
Directly apparent as a systemic conversation is the use of words in Mullen’s Sleeping
With the Dictionary, through which the dictionary and the system of the lexicon is
deliberately engaged with stories and sounds. Its moves can be highlighted as volatile and
constantly evolving. The roughness and alternation between smooth and jagged that Fulton
cites as structurally designed “spontaneity” in keeping with the fractal aspects of complex
adaptive systems whose unfolding of patterns “never quite get there” is apparent in Mullen’s
book “Sleeping With the Dictionary”, as well as in Wang’s. Both writers slip in and out of a
range of possibilities of the experience of meaning, allowing these frictional points to
contribute to the overall structures in their poems. Mullen’s collection gains value and force
because it’s not a one gimmick in one poem. Her strategy is connected to the entire alphabet,
the dictionary, the keys of language and we get a sense that the whole system of language
that we use is also effected in ways that radiate outward from the gimmick of each poem
The strategy is stretched to a whole system, implying that just as our words gain meaning
from history and our stories get meaning from context, so do our words and how we use
them to relate to one another change what they mean and what we mean when we use them.
We define a thing by other things. So, by rearranging those things, we can rearrange how we
define the stuff that guides our thoughts and lives. The book’s effectiveness is amplified by
its connection to a system of words, to a science. That allows it to resonate for us, to feel
real as an experience of the book, but also to feel like a “truth” in the world, as it can be
177
connected to scientific processes. It isn’t that science gives poetry credibility, but that by
using science in this way, that is, by connecting to a system, the poetry enables the reader a
chance to become immersed in the dynamics of the poems, without feeling lost. The system
offers a comfort or a security, so the formal structures serve as guides without demanding
allegiances beyond the experience of the poems. We can experience world-changing truths in
the poems, as we look at how the world is defined through the words that represent it, but
we do not have to feel bound to risk anything but openness to the experience itself. The
open-ended sense off connectivity threads us through the lexical fields through which the
book takes us, speaking toward a consciousness that is free to click hyperlinks into whatever
tangents represent an exciting turn, without the limit of the page and it’s static narratives and
constraints.
* * *
Throughout this document references to “mean” and “meaning” persist, playfully
bantering Macleish’s statement in “Ars Poetics” that a poem must not mean but be. How a
poem chooses to “be” says something unique about its time and its place in cultural
consciousness, because it must somehow exist within the context of the culture that contains
it and also exist outside of the time that contains that culture. It is an interesting gesture for
an age where space and time are theoretically, if not practically, malleable and the pieces with
which we discipline the natural world are in as much flux as the world itself. By raising the
question of meaning, or the experience of meaning in a poem for the reader, I don’t mean to
suggest that any poem has one single meaning that is being transmitted through the shape of
the vessel that contains it. After all, the truth of poetic statement is evoked through
multiplicity, unlike the truth of scientific statement with its singular locus. Like the person
178
clicking on fixed points of hyperlinks in order to navigate the vast network of cyberspace,
the experience of the consciousness isn’t restricted to one dominating narrative or system.
Poetry gains its power not in the experience that is represented to the reader, but by
invoking the experience for the reader. In fact, I believe that is the key difference between
poetry and fiction. Fiction gives us a narrative that guides the reader through an experience
embedded within that narrative vessel or logic or unit, it represents an experience for the
reader and it takes the reader along on that journey. However, a good poem does not just
take a sentiment or concept and pour it into a formal vessel, nor does it anymore grow
organically into a form vessel or grow a form vessel exoskeletally around its content, it
invokes an experience for that reader, immersing the reader into an experience which
together with the reader builds the poem’s “meaning”. It’s in keeping with Valery’s concept
of the process mechanism of the reader who is making meaning within the poem’s reading
and also with Richard’s exploration of active passive strains of experience and even
Longenbach’s resistance. The formal structures, and narrative can be one, guide the reader
through the poem, but do not tether the reader to themselves. The poem gathers force and
meaning through multiplicity and simultaneity, not singularity (like scientific statements) and
theirin lies the “truth” of poetic statements, the sense of some kind of revelatory meaning
that marks a good poem. A fictional narrative binds the reader to it, mediates the experience
of the reader, but a poem should not leave the reader feeling constrained or trapped because
the revelatory moment that marks a good poem would not exist. So, narrative, like other
formal structures must only guide the reader through the poem, but not hold him captive.
The fractal hyperdimensional experience of contemporary poetry enables that kind of
partially guided freedom by reiterating elements that feel patterned without forcing the
179
pattern in place and tying down “meaning” into something overly mediated by the structures
of the text. The reader transcends the text. The reader is immersed in and then transcends
the text and therein lies the feeling of play, procedure, discovery, revelation, novelty, and
movement that makes a poem good. It’s no surprise that most of these texts, in addition to
using the elements of scientific discourse and idea, also seem to play with formal structures,
including genre conventions. Each of these books chooses to bend genre conventions in its
service and each does something beyond the genre conventions to which it appeals.
This sense of partial continuation and then departure speaks directly to the
hyperdimensional sensibility, that linkage that isn’t guided by any sense of a master narrative.
Other new media texts also invoke this idea to some extent, but seem to be doing something
different, as well. These texts, however are highlighting key facets about the
hyperdimensional sensibility that emerges through the digital age and reflects them to us by
remaining on the page and yet transcending it, by inviting readers to examine how it is doing
so.
Further development of this project will include a chapter to investigate cine-poems
and skin poems, hypertexts and unfixed texts, pitting them against some mainstream poems
that do simply take up scientific idea and concept and place it into a narrative shape or
formal vessel in order to mediate a meaning or message. Poets like LaDonna Whitmer ,who
makes film-poems, Shelly Jackson, who makes mortal poems, and Stephanie Strickland , who
writes hypertext poems, poets who test the very notions of literature by writing it on
differential media, line one side of the field. Poets like Mario Petrucci, who uses poetry to
talk about the devastating nuclear effects of Chernobyl, or A Van Jordan, who writes about
quantum dynamics as a subject, or like many winners of the Rhysling Prize for Science
180
Fiction Poetry, whose quirky engagement with science fiction spills over into poetry, poets
that take up issues of science in ethics or imagined science in poetry that doesn’t seek to
push formal conventions or boundaries line the other. In between is a kind of
hyperdimensional sensibility revealed in poems written for the page, but using deliberate
formal structures and ideas spreading through the cultural zeitgeist about poetic theory and
scientific discoveries and ultimately discussing not the thing through which they are looking
at things, but discussing the human condition for which all these things are relevant. Here at
the edges of post-human and para-human and meta-human conversations are questions
about what it means to be human, which is at the heart of poetry – our desire to transcend
the mortality that contains us.

181

Endnotes

Chapter 1
i
Illuminations: Essays & Reflections. Benjamin, Walter. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. Harcourt Brace: New York, 1968.
ii
Though Wikipedia is not a scholarly source, it useful for some general information. From its entry on ‘The Digital Age” I
have gathered this definition: “The present age is variously known as the Digital Age, the Wireless Age and the Information
Age. 1980-2035. The digital age arguably began with early computers such as the Atanasoff-Berry Computer and ENIAC.
Computers became household appliances in the late-1970s with the introduction of models such as the Apple II,
Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80. Personal computers became more or less ubiquitous by the late 1990s.”
Alternatively, one might want to refer, instead, to the Information Age, a period after the 1980s when rapidly propagated
information became prevalent and which has caused our lives to change as our perception of our world changed. These
issues are coincident. Consider this note a nod to the great hypertext that is The Internet.
iii
“Paul Valery’s Blood Meridian: or, How the Reader became a Writer.” Todd Cronan, Emory University. nonsite, Article,
Issue #1, 4/8/2012. http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-1/paul-valery-from-author-to-audience .
iv
See discussion of “science of effect” regarding technique in Cronan’s essay.
v
“Skin”. Shelly Jackson. http://ineradicablestain.com/skin-quilt.html . 4/8/2012. Each person becomes a living word and
part of the lived story and no complete compilation or record of words that are the story exists, except for those who bear
the words.
vi
Accoring to the Collins Dictionary 10
th
Edition (2009), science is 1. the systematic study of the nature and behaviour of
the material and physical universe, based on observation, experiment, and measurement, and the formulation of laws to
describe these facts in general terms 2. the knowledge so obtained or the practice of obtaining it 3. any particular branch of
this knowledge: the pure and applied sciences 4. any body of knowledge organized in a systematic manner 5. skill or technique 6.
(archaic ) knowledge. Definitions change, however, and the reader will encounter refined definitions of “science” and other
terms throughout; the most general and natural definitions of “science” in culture will be sufficient to pose these questions.
Additionally, it might be useful to consider that the same dictionary says that poetry is 1. literature in metrical form; verse 2.
the art or craft of writing verse 3. poetic qualities, spirit, or feeling in anything 4. anything resembling poetry in rhythm,
beauty, etc. Again, the definitions of poetry and science will vary between practitioner, theorist, and person.
vii
Hyper – prefix meaning "over, above, beyond, etc.…" + dimensionality – of, relating to, or dealing with the sense of
measurement in space, time, or scope scope. “hyperdimensionality,” then, is the sense of multiple "dimensions" and an
awareness of links between them, as might be conditioned to those aware of looking at the world by way of systems. While
famous psychonauts like Terence McKenna, astrobiologists, parapsychologists, or noeticists and might use this term
figuratively to discuss things to do with "extraterrestrial beings" or "supernatural entities", I am not suggesting that we are
looking at "post-human" or "para-human" involvement in culture, but suggesting a sense of changing scope and
connectivity that has been enabled or conditioned by a culture that has been impacted by things like systems theory and
cybernetics, hypertext and globalism, and other legacies of this digital age in which we are existing.
viii
Not all poetry being written today is hyperdimensional. That which is, however, seems to capture a particular moment
and sensibility that is worth investigating. Apparently linear texts that behave hyperdimensionally clue us in to what makes
our experience of reality feel real or feel current/contemporary.
ix
Both poetry and science seek to reveal truth. According to Heidegger’s “Origin of the Work of Art”, truth isn’t just the
relationship between representation and reality or that of the relationship between form and content. Such a concept is
easily evoked by the hyperdimensional sensibility that reminds us that links between the two are never directly or simply
correlative, but belonging to networked patterns of contexts.
x
Poems for the Next Millenium. Eds Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris. “Introduction to Language Poetics”, pp 662. See
discussion about form, poetics, & Language Poetry as continuation & divergence from Modernist Poetics.
xi
Poems for the Next Millenium. Eds. Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. “Introduction to Language Poetics”, pp 662. See
discussion on form, poetics, & language poetry as continuing from and differing from Modernist Poetics.
xii
“Contemporary Science and the Poets” JZ Fullmer. Science, New Series, Vol. 119, No. 3103. (June 18, 1954), pp. 855-859.
xiii
Discussion about the Ages of Science follows. See Holub’s “Poetry & Science” in The Measured Word.
xiv
“English and Emerging Technologies.” Charles Moran. College English, Vol 60, No. 2. (Feb. 1998), pp202-209.
xv
Marcus Campbell Goodall is known more for his ideas about science in culture than for his theoretical science
background; his 1965 Science & the Politician aims to discuss these elements; Miroslav Holub draws upon them in his essay
about science and poetry’s differing uses of language, “Poetry and Science” in The Measured Word. Ed. Kurt Brown.
University of Georgia Press, 2001.
xvi
Both Holub’s and Strickland’s ideas can be found in The Measured Word. Strickland’s essay, “Seven-League Boots”
engages the concept of hypertext poetics, reminds us of the role of resonance in “quantum reality” our computer-mediated
reality (105).

182

xvii
Eastgate, distributer of hypertexts & new media texts, even promotes and offers programs to help writers compose in
directly hypertextual rather than linear environments, demonstrating an emerging change in both experience and a capture
of that experience as might become woven into literary arts.
xviii
Perloff’s characterization of “radical artifice” highlights important elements to consider in these texts, though her work
often engages texts that might be considered more radical than my own selections in some of their visual play.
xix
While Fulton’s poetics in practice may be considered more conservative than the ideological engagement she presents,
her excitement and enthusiasm about formal possibilities, as discussed in her “Fractal Amplifications” suggests a strong
current of formal play throughout the field of poetics to various degrees, not simply resting among the “experimental” or
avant-garde productions, but also running beneath more traditional forms and approaches. Indeed, the books I’ve selected
seem at once radically experimental at times and also conservatively traditional in lyrical themes, at others. This
juxtaposition contains networked potential between form & content, reception and expression.
xx
The Measured Word. pp 49.
xxi
“Poetries and Sciences”. IA Richards. Norton: 1970.
xxii
Resistance to Poetry. James Longenbach. Norton: 2004
xxiii
See Holub’s essay for a discussion of specialized scientific language and it’s relationship to poetry. pp 53-55.
xxiv
The Resistance to Poetry. James Longenbach. Preface. University of Chicago Press: 2004. xii.
xxv
Consider several of Fish’s lectures since 9/11, in which he discusses that because of 9/11, we are in a post-postmodern
world. He seems to be suggesting that we are beyond deconstructionist thought. Some of his ideas seem to flirt with the
relationship between literature, philosophy and science. While it is beyond the scope this project to take into account the
validity or relevance of his argument, it is important to note that Fish does have an impact on many students of literature
and does seem to inform some aspect of the modern understanding of the relationship between these fields. See this NY
Times Opinion piece and related discussion for more: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-
in-america/#. 4/8/2012. Also, see this article from Harper’s Magazine regarding his discussion of postmodernity in warfare
especially after 9/11. While 9/11 isn’t a concern in this dissertation, it is obvious that the event itself has become a fixture
of our age and embedded within the background of our digital world, something to recall.
http://web.pdx.edu/~tothm/religion/postmodern%20warfare.htm. 4/18/2012.
xxvi
“Fractal Amplifications”. Alice Fulton. The Measured Word. Ed Kurt Brown. pp 113.
xxvii
Joyelle McSweeney’s article in the Constant Critic.
xxviii
Dan Hoy. “The Virtual Dependency of the Post-Avant and the Problematics of Flarf: What Happens When Poets
Spend Too Much Time Fucking Around On the Internet”. Jacket, #29, April 2006.
xxix
The term coined by Richard price in 1991 in Interference, encompasses inheritance from Oulipo constraints, play with
linguistic registers, and a the evocation of a sense of process and mechanical linkage. See Contraflow on the SuperHighway,
edited by Richard Price and WN Herbert, published by Southfields, 1994. See Peter MacCarey’s “The Syllabary”, too:
http://www.thesyllabary.com/ 4/18/2012. The movement seems to include Robert Crawford, David Kinloch, and traces
roots back to Edwin Morgan and to Hugh MacDiarmid’s political Scots poetry regarding information and technology.
Contemporary associates of the movement tend to publish extensively on links between contemporary science and poetry
and Crawford’s popular and seminal text on the subject highlights key connections between not only the contemporary
association with this trend, but also a sense of relatedness to technology. In contrast, the North American engagement with
science and poetry seems to be more theoretical and broad and experimental, especially as seen with Bok, Mullen, and
Hillman. Whether this distinction between North American and European poetry constitutes a trend would be worth
considering in future research.
xxx
Archibald MacLeish. “Ars Poetica”.

Chapter 2

xxxi
“Measured Word”.
xxxii
Radical Artifice by Marhorie Perloff. Preface xi-xii: “Or, to put it less pejoratively, the demand for a natural or
transparent poetry (Pound’s famous “direct treatment of the thing”), a demand that was at the cornerstone of modernism,
has given way, for reasons unclear, to the artifice one associates, not with a robust modernism, but with the nineteenth
century fin-de-siecle. For reasons unclear, a significant body of poetry (or what claims to be poetry) has been produced that
is unnaturally difficult – eccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form…
Perhaps what I shall call here the poetry of radical artifice will just disappear. Perhaps, but in the meantime, it keeps turning
up like a virus…” While Reddy’s work isn’t questionable as poetry or questionable in terms of its merit, it does tend to
demonstrate some of this eccentric syntax and obscure language, not to mention a definite sense of constructedness or
artifice that certainly doesn’t seem to be clear or direct. Reddy’s poems definitely do exist in this world of electronic mass
media, as well the scholarly scientific and theoretical material that is made readily available to those electronically connected
and inclined to seek it.

183

xxxiii
Radical Artifice by Marjorie Perloff. Preface, xii.
xxxiv
Radical Artifice by Marjorie Perloff. Preface, xii.
xxxv
Interview “The Sentinel”; include full citation.
xxxvi
Reddy also mentions in his “Notes”: “The ‘Corruption’ poem occasionally adapt, or ‘corrupt’, language and ideas from
Saint Augustine’s Confessions, WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and Simeon Weil’s essay ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’.
xxxvii
quote also from “The Sentinel” Interview.
xxxviii
-- after a brief introductory “Burial Practice” in which we let go of what we know so that we can make way for what
we didn’t accept that we could know before.
xxxix
“Burial Practice” comes before but isn’t exactly a “start”. It puts us in a post-alive place from which we can investigate
that which we acknowledge to be alive and relevant.
xl
An argument in “The Shallows” notes that usage of the internet has made our tendency as a culture more broad and less
deep in experience.
xli
The cover jacket informs readers: “Mobilizing traditional literary forms such as terza rima and the villanelle while
simultaneously exploring the poetics of prose and other “formless” modes, Facts for Visitors renegotiates the impasse
between traditional and experimental approaches to writing in contemporary American poetry.”
xlii
Archibald MacLeish, “Ars Poetica”.
xliii
From “Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science.”
xliv
Interview with Nathan Brown and S Wang.
xlv
[“To locate the Cartesian origin and to feel the surface texture of true love, I’d make love to a stone.” (9). Also, stanza 1
page 5, stanza 5 page 7, stanza 2 page 8, stanza 7 page 10, lines 5 and 8 from page 12]
xlvi
xlvi
Donna Haraway. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routlege, NY: 1991. pp 42.

184
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Creator Razvi, Saba Syed (author)

Core Title Synthetic form and deviant transcendence: interfaces between 21st c. poetry & science; & In the crocodile gardens: poems

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Literature and Creative Writing

Publication Date 08/06/2014

Defense Date 04/30/2012

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