AXIAL POETICS : George Quasha [BeeHive 05:01]

I have a theory, or, as I actually think it, there's a principle that has had a grip on me for decades:
In time everything turns itself around to know its repressed, suppressed or excluded other(s). This may happen unconsciously and with uncertain, even unknown results, or it may happen consciously and with a definite thrill of recognition, radiating outward until, for one charged instant, nothing seems unchanged or unchangeable. Of course things do not remain turned around, but, once turned, they retain a trace, a possibility of further turning - as if already in communication with their future. If the turn is unconscious, fear clings to everything valued; if conscious and willing, excitability rises in the site, showing movement within identity. You might say, in the latter case, things breathe freely, even as a spirited stillness gives over to the torque of awareness.

Language tends to take on the condition of things in a world, and especially the active view that holds a world together. One's own language perpetuates one's world; indeed, this may be a primary function of language, world-preservation. To assess the condition of one's world, one might examine the state of one's language, its degree, for instance, of flexibility. It follows that the very possibility for conscious change can be read in the functional range of one's language. Poetry, then, is an art form of this possibility, registered in the sense of verse as intentional turning, including conscious reversal.

This theory of inevitable turning (around) has the functional status of principle rather than concept, which means that it translates easily into personal practice, but does not imply a particular style or technique or any other "self" defining orientation.

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That's the general view, and in time I intend to write further about the role of intentional turning and conscious reversal in poetry at large, particularly as the AXIAL and its specialized execution as POETIC TORSION. For the moment, I'm concerned only to discuss how the principle operates in a particular work of my own. This statement is created to accompany publications of The Preverbs of Tell: News Torqued from Undertime and their alternate version as Preverb Posters. Let me say once and for all that, for me, the purpose of theory or a particular poetic principle is not polemical but dialogical, by which I mean "metapoetic" - the non-exclusive principle by which any given poetics is an imagination of possible poetry. Or as Blake said: "All things possible to be believed are images of the truth." Poetics, or metapoetics, is the declared (non-competitive) space in which all possible poetics are in conversation.

This is an ongoing work currently comprising some 4,000 self-contained lines (Book One in four series complete, Book Two in progress), The "structure" of the Preverbs as a sequence of lines is open and never definable beyond certain basic formal agreements: e.g., each line is complete in itself; it is not a product of energetic process as evolving sequence, but begins as close as possible to "zero momentum," so that the energetics is individuating and site/situation specific; and each line comes to an end before running over at the end (in the basic six -inch word-processing line). Thus, despite evident sequence which sometimes seems locally resonant, the absence of reliable or binding sequential connectedness leaves every line radically open in resonant possibilities. The title, in one aspect, expresses the work's connection with Blake's "Proverbs of Hell" (from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) - the template of proverb (single line wise sayings), an always surprising, heretical and antithetical view, including general unpredictability.