The sound in which one's individual folly is spoken is first of all that of one's own voice. The integrity of that voice is profoundly at stake in the AXIAL. Poets are often obsessed by "finding one's own voice" which usually means something like distinctive style or a sounds-like-me tone. Success in this direction can be effective, charming, even powerful. It promotes the sense of a stable self. In the AXIAL, however, the notion of knowable stability of self is continuously in question. Yet the actual voice individuates, in unpredictable ways, as if its source precedes the known personality. AXIAL utterance aims in any way possible to revive that source at the surface of speaking awareness, or to keep the channel open. Perhaps primary poetic function may be just that maintenance of the open.

In meditating this possibility of openness I have come to a notion of ZERO POINT VOICE, which stands for the point of origin in speaking that allows an optimal release, negligible pre-patterning and minimal momentum. Each line is generated on the spot from an energy arising just now. In my theory this "point" (of course not really a point) accesses what I call the UNDERTIME of the poem, the non-temporal "time" that runs "below" any formalized rhythmic time, perhaps a sort of ur-time, but in any case a full-potential time that allows radical particularity in any given line. This degree of particularity serves a METAPOETIC PRINCIPLE that allows every poetic act the possibility of an original poetics and, therefore, is non-exclusive as regards poetic possibility.

With respect to "minimal momentum", there may of course be actual momentum in the carryover from line to line. (I am speaking here of AXIAL lines grouped in apparent sequence, as in The Preverbs of Tell.) On the other hand, there also may not be any line to line momentum; there is the continuous possibility of zero momentum. So the AXIAL as poem space has no built-in principle of beginning or ending or even continuing. It is open, in a potentially unlimited number of ways. The mystery of continuance, then, is particular and ultimately arbitrary from an aesthetic point of view--leaving only an ontological or somehow magical possibility. The line therefore can be AXIAL in the sense that its center of gravity is open, locally reversible, and variously in motion. Because everything is locally reversible, gravity is complementary to levity. What weighs in a voice gives rise to it.

The actual energetic base here is the physical voice, and where there is intentional engagement at the level of what I am calling AXIAL POETICS, there is a complexity of voice-urge - what makes it begin. It arises out of itself, as it is, where it is and in relation to anything whatsoever, with no obligations to continuity, logic, or any other principle of linkage/necessity, therefore open to all continuities on an immediate basis. In practice, this means that the voice gathers itself anew in each line. There is uninterrupted risk. The wish is to avoid stabilizing and intrinsically coercive forces such as stylized voice, e.g., literary/musical elevation, "personal voice" as carrying the thrust of personality, etc. The voice arising from its zero point is in some sense transparent to complex intentionality, and optimally avoids manipulating in the direction of fore-given aesthetic. The key here is "optimally," and the interest in OPTIMAL POETICS or a "poetics of the optimal" is not purist but open - that only in the condition of openness can a thing be optimally itself. Hence the AXIAL, which is the condition created by an open matrix. In an AXIAL situation the voice can perform itself, its "presence" in multiple ways within the verbal matrix.

The notion of ZERO POINT has a range of implication, especially with respect to poetic function in the environment, however defined. To be conscious of it implies a discipline of attention that goes beyond a conceptual focus on the zero point itself. It implies a state of listening to and through the voice that returns at every opportunity to the condition of freedom from extraneous momentum. I am suggesting that, as is argued in Zero Point Physics, the zero state paradoxically holds the greatest energy potential, and in that way is the foundational state of poetry itself. Poetry in this view is the result of a discipline of attention that draws on what is available in the actual voice before constraint by "form" or technique; it could be called an intrinsically charged speaking with listening. This attention allows a potential deepening of participation in the undervoice and the source of the rhythmus, a radical reformulation of the rhythmic impulse itself as singular event. One taps in to the self-refining nature of a poem's energy, which is stepped up energy in many degrees of living intrinsic modulation. To be able to go with it one must discover the special attention appropriate to the poem by joining in the poem's own listening. Its listening requires its zero point. Optimally, poet/reader in each instance entrains to the voice of the poem as close as possible to its zero point. This involves a kind of release into the source of voice itself.

The intention of this release is to induce a state of AXIALITY. The underlying assumption would be something like the view that freedom of movement, at root (or point of branching), is the STILL POINT / ZERO POINT of primordial possibility. In this state the "wisdom impulse" is AXIALIZED, which means that it is introduced to its basic, you could say primordial, energy in such a way that opens dogma and indeed thinking to being itself. And that could be an original role of the poetic.