Rather than exploring all the possible ways in which technology and cultural upheavals are changing the notion of poetry and the poet, I turn the responsibility inward: how am I complicit in the eclipse of one of humanity’s oldest arts? Sure, I write poetry, but when was the last time I attended to a poem with undivided focus? A couple of weeks ago, Pino (Pograjc) posted some of his favorite poems on Facebook, and I read at least two while distractedly scrolling on my overly used smartphone. My attention is now fixed on my long-neglected shelves of poetry. I pull down Bukowski and randomly read one of his poems, about high school. He’s one of those writers I can return to at any time. His poetry feels as natural as air, effortless. Next to him: The Poems of Shelley. In this edition, Shelley’s poems are arranged like a dictionary. The technology of arranging thought into neat lines is here emphasized and made obvious. A much more modest booklet by contemporary Slovenian poet Petra Koršič is squeezed beside the monumental Shelley, with a conservative-sounding title: God Be With Me (Bog z mano). My thoughts almost involuntarily leap to a half-faded memory: back in high school, our philosophy teacher once gave us an exam with a single question—“Does God exist, or does He not?” Perhaps it depends on whom you ask. And what about poetry—does it exist, or not? I suppose, for many, it does not. Perhaps poetry fails to exist for exactly as many people—and precisely the same people—for whom God does not exist.
When does poetry not exist for me? It disappears when I self-servingly slip too deeply into a materialist trance, handling the concrete according to my programming and fuming when it refuses to comply. When I lie and tell myself I must, when I judge and condemn, when I insist on the solidity of my “self” and demand that others affirm it, when I bloodthirstily dehumanize my enemies and cannot see myself in their flaws, when I resist pain so frantically that reality smears into a blur. In such states, everything snags—words, shoelaces, cupboard doors, even my bodily processes. I push against these frictions until I exhaust myself, intoxicated by conviction and fleeing the inconceivable nature of existence, hiding in a hall of mirrors where every reflection is my own.
“Too much ‘I’ everywhere,” said Anne Carson in an interview when asked about the writer as a self, writing about other selves. Entering back into poetry, for me, involves at least a partial dissolution of the self as the center of perception, judgment, and utterance. Hence it appears to me that all denunciations of poetry have something to do with an overattachment to identity. When poetry becomes too much about the focus on the “I,” be it the author, the reader, the point of view, the subject (of the poem), or the ideological position, it requires scaling back. In other words, when the poetic over-solidifies, sometimes to the point of rigidity, it loses its meta-semantic power and needs to be subverted.
*
“Culture is a plot against the expansion of consciousness. And this plot prosecutes its goals through a limiting of language,” Terrence McKenna proclaimed in one of his legendary lectures. “The true potential of language to elevate and unify community was betrayed early in history in favor of producing illusory ideological goods that spread confusion.” Really, every confusion and crisis, McKenna believes, is a failure of the poet (artist) to create a song to which we can all dance in unison. This is why it is extremely inappropriate for a poet to be ideological. Surrendering to ideology captures the poet’s attention in a partial perspective and takes away from their duty of transmitting truth beyond the given view. Okay, but how, then, are poets supposed to use language—so effective in peddling polarizing illusions—as a tool for the common goal: expansion of consciousness?
By chance, McKenna offers an answer in another lecture, where he reveals that during one of his psychedelic trips he discovered the true meaning of telepathy. Telepathy, he says, is not reading another person’s thoughts (as the term is often misunderstood) but rather seeing what someone means. In other words, telepathy does not mean guessing, decoding, or even perceiving but directly beholding the truth that the speaker allows us to access. A truth that lies beyond the words used in expression. (Even if what comes out of someone’s mouth is a deception or a lie, it may still happen that we suddenly perceive in the liar’s eyes the distress they are desperately seeking to escape. Such insight is not something specific to the relation between us and our interlocutor, but rather offers a glimpse of something more-than-human—something we usually try to suppress by clinging to the conventions of communication.) This means that in the ideal poetic situation the words themselves—whether forming a poem, a text, or an utterance—are not really the catalyst of meaning, but only the entry points, the perforations in the symbolic veil through which our attention, when deep and intentional, can penetrate to the “something else,” a hidden truth behind the words.
The idea of poetry as the capacity to access “something else,” a profound insight beyond expression, crystallized for me in a conversation with the well-known Slovenian poet Karlo Hmeljak, who offers his interpretation of Duchamp’s concept of infrathin as it relates to linguistic communication:
Infrathin is the mismatch in a conversation in which two people try in different ways to articulate the same meaning, fail to do so, yet some “sure, sure” [a shared glimpse of understanding] still occurs amid the failed attempts at articulation. Perhaps we should oppose infrathin with infrathick, i.e., a situation in which some “sure, sure” [an expression of agreement] emerges, but in fact entirely different things are being meant [and there is no real agreement] . . . It has already happened to me that I was speaking with someone and, on the surface (in the words, concepts, carriers of meaning) there seemed to be some agreement, but something was off—you know the two of you are not thinking the same thing . . . And this cannot be detected through words, nor can the disagreement be articulated.
What is especially interesting in this contrast between the infrathin and the infrathick that Hmeljak devises is precisely the idea of attention (and intentionality), which in both cases is directed beyond what is being said. In the infrathin, attention is focused on the same “something,” or at least the interlocutors’ hunch (and the hunch here is essential). In the infrathick, by contrast, although both speakers express some phatic agreement, their attention is fixed on entirely different things. What are these things? I believe that in the infrathick the attention is directed not toward the meaning of spoken words but toward the defense against the interlocutor’s world, into which they are trying to pull us with their linguistic machinations. That is why such conversations, as I have observed, are also physically exhausting: because the speakers are tuned to different frequencies, the main point becomes defending one’s own frequency from being detuned, protecting oneself against the influence of the other, so as not to be sucked into some unknown and unwanted realm. Because of this difference in attunement, no telepathic beholding of the same “something” can occur here, for what takes place is rather a clash of energies—even if, once again, the words of both speakers outwardly express some phatic agreement. As Hmeljak himself adds about the nature of this resistance: “It’s not that in those ‘sure, sure,’ when at the same time there’s a ‘no way,’ you can’t recognize the other’s thought. It’s more that you can’t be bothered, or you don’t want to . . . As if in such situations words were not tools for signifying meaning, but tools for avoiding the expression and confrontation of the difference between the two thoughts.”
In the case of the infrathick, then, we are dealing with a subconscious resistance to being sucked beyond language through the utterance of another—a resistance that uses language not as a portal but as a defense or blockade against that “something else” that exists beyond language. Or, to put the same phenomenon into Martin Buber’s terminology: in such instances of the infrathick, there is a lack of a “turning towards the other,” which is the precondition for dialogue (Buber), or telepathy (McKenna). Examples of the infrathick can often be found in literary reviews that approach a poet’s utterance from moral, ideological, or aesthetic perspectives, where the specialized language of criticism is deployed as a tool to block the portal that the poems open. (Since I mentioned Bukowski at the beginning, let me add here that the miracle of his poetry is precisely how many of these blockades it managed to survive, for his deliberate lack of “linguistic virtuosity,” most often reproached by critics, actually produces the effect of an intense and immediate spiritual (mystical) transportation. And this is also the reason why Bukowski’s poetry is profoundly culturally subversive, while at the same time fulfilling exactly that aforementioned potential of language to raise up the “fallen” and to create community. For Bukowski did not attempt to write poetry (“don’t try”) but lived poetry and was himself poetry. In this sense, the Slovenian iteration of Bukowski could be Dejan Koban, who has also repeatedly been accused by critics of writing “bad” poetry—critics who do not know how to surrender to the telepathy that Dejan so masterfully commands).
Thus, the concept of poetry is, in many ways, akin to the concept of God. Devout atheists often dismiss the theist’s belief as absurd, marshaling arguments against a God of their own invention. To an impartial observer, it is clear that the atheist and the theist speak of entirely different gods: for the theist, God is an entry point into all-being; for the atheist, God is a blockade against that entry. Their attention is fixed on different “somethings.” The atheist can deny God’s existence only by violating the first principle of most theistic philosophies—that God is indescribable, indefinable, unknowable, and inconceivable. The moment God is defined, God ceases to exist, or else must be sacrificed (sacralized). In this sense, the atheist is also right: no God would allow itself to be defined—something Nietzsche knew well as he proclaimed the death of God.
If we now translate this example back into poetry: the moment we define poetry, explain it, dissect it linguistically—that is, direct the attention towards its mechanics—it ceases to exist, for the very point of poetry is to redirect our attention toward the undefinable. In short, the words in a poem are literally the liar’s eyes that pull us into the truth beyond the spoken lie. As the leading philosopher and historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, whom I quote (in the form of a cross, hint hint) in my poetry book Body and Sin (Son) (Telo in sin (greh)), writes: “The symbol ‘signifies’ nothing and communicates nothing, but makes something transparent which is beyond all expression.” And when Ludwig Wittgenstein asked in the Blue Book: “What is the meaning of a word?” he was, of course, really asking to what extent a word can direct us toward the truth that lies beyond language, and how the success of this function changes in line with the context-specific language game. It is therefore no surprise that Wittgenstein had a profound affinity for music and theology, since both fields are intimately bound to meta-semantic communication, which is by nature already a step closer to the “beyond.”
And one more thing: Wittgenstein is said to have had terrible problems with spelling, and in 1931 he wrote: “My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study).” Misspellings, stammering, dyslexia, and other such “irregularities” or “pathologies” in relation to language are, of course, always merely indications that the speaker’s or reader’s attention is beyond language, and that their consciousness is more attuned to the (collective) unconscious, which constantly intrudes into utterance and reading. These “errors” signal the irruption of wild freedom that grammaticality seeks to restrict and contain. People who suffer such slips of attention—let us call them poets, inventors, philosophers (in the true sense of the word)—therefore have a strong resistance to systemically imposed measures and to ideologies that concoct rigid, impermeable schematic arrangements of reality, for they are always gazing straight through these arrangements into some other, expanded reality.
*
The conception of reality that most closely resembles the idea of poetry I am attempting to approach here is given by the Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte, in a segment where he discusses the concept of the “ecological imagination” with McKenna. Whyte starts by dismissing Jean-Paul Sartre’s phenomenological notion of reality as unknowable in itself: “He put his finger on the tree, and he said, ‘Life is absurd because I cannot understand that tree, because I cannot become—I cannot get my soul into that tree.’ . . . And you weren’t supposed to get your consciousness into the tree. You were supposed to pay such tremendous attention to the tree that it came to find you.” And yet, I believe Sartre’s own conception of poetry is involuntarily mystical, for in relation to Mallarmé he proclaims that the poet uses words as things rather than as signs. That is, the poet intentionally alienates words from their habitual symbolic uses and meanings, and turns them into a “thing,” something—remember Sartre’s Nausea—that unmistakably pulsates with being. This shift from words to pure presence of things is precisely what Zen masters call detachment: a mystical state in which deep attention to what simply is creates the portal towards the divine, or the identification with the whole universe. The mountain as nothing but a mountain, unabated by its symbolic significance that is fleeting and unstable, pretentious and context-specific; the river as nothing but the river. And yet it is not the thing itself that is at stake here. It is the fact that the thing acts not only as a portal to existence itself when you pay undivided attention to it, but also as a revelation of the ecology of things in which they are enmeshed.
“[Ecological imagination is] an imagination where the image itself has many different realities constellated within it. It isn’t an image that you are trying to impose on the world, it’s an image that’s received after you’ve remained quiet and you are willing to pay attention to the miracle of creation as it is.” Everywhere around us we can see evidence that humans have a deep sense for recognizing patterns, an awareness that the world is completely coherent, and that we ourselves have the capacity to attain this coherence. Thus “the poet remains silent, looks out at the world, receives all the images that come in, and tries to say the one word that represents the whole ecology of everything that is received.”
If the word, the verse, or the poem created by the poet succeeds in forging a connection or portal with this sense of all-encompassing coherence, then a similar magic must occur on the other side, in the reader. The reader must literally achieve deep attention directed beyond the habitual meaning of words and attune herself to a similar state as that of the poet in the act of creation if she is to be pulled through the portal. The responsibility is two-sided.
*
Thinking of poetry as a means of breaking through planes of reality also brings to mind Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum, as discussed in Camera Lucida. Yet Barthes is really describing a rupture between two symbolic universes: the first, made up of culturally programmed associations (studium); and the second, subversive one, which is, in Barthes’s words, more “pensive”—punctum. “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” Punctum is that element in a photograph which pierces through the studium and, “by accident,” throws us into another symbolic register—one that the studium both conceals and makes possible. The rupture here occurs within the symbolic order itself, not between language and something outside it.
By contrast, the effect of “poetry” as I am discussing it is not “subjective.” It is not a thought, emotion, or affect triggered in the reader on the basis of their temperament, memory, knowledge, or human condition. Nor is it emotional identification or sympathy. And it is most definitely not reducible to thought. The breakthrough of poetry—the pull into the “beyond,” into the collective unconscious, the all-being, the ecology of relations—requires a momentary dissolution of the subject, a loosening of the ego. Or rather, the pull requires withdrawing attention from the fact that, on the material level, you exist as a separate, symbolically infused entity. True poetry moves beyond even the strongest subjective experience that great works of art can provoke. It does not simply redirect our attention toward the unutterable; it expands attention itself, almost mystically. (The opposite example would be the thought, “I am right, he is wrong,” which only reinforces the ego, or the sympathy, “Poor fellow, he suffers as I do,” which still centers the self. In both cases, the ego persists, affirming itself through judgment or identification.) In the mystical experience of poetry, the need to direct attention at a fixed meaning, the compulsion to define what we witness, vanishes. All-being does not permit hierarchies of information; it does not sustain the illusion of separate subjects.
Telepathy is not reading another person’s thoughts but seeing what that person means. Poetry, then, is a way of seeing the ecological coherence beyond categorizations and distinctions—something a tuned-in being can perceive as readily in a great work of art as in a grain of sand. In poetry as ecological creation, the interplay among signs as things becomes the entry point into the all-meaningfulness of all-being. This all-being is, of course, always here, but our attention is rarely attuned to it, since perceiving it requires a partial dissolution of the ego—an impractical stance for everyday survival. Marshall McLuhan suggested decades ago that the task of the artist is to train people’s attention to perceive the usually imperceptible “ground,” i.e., the web of factors on which the “figure,” the usual focus of our attention, is formed. There are, of course, other paths to this same insight, and all carry a mystical undertone. But poetry—as a linguistic trace—has the particular advantage of granting contact with the beyond through communion with another. And perhaps this is the only way such contact is truly possible, so long as we remain bound to our current form.
Poetry, in its purest form, is the fusion of all subjects. Its trick is to telepathically convey the all-at-once-ness all at once, without fracture, without loss of meaning.
The poet is silent. She gazes into the world, gathers the impressions that come, and with a single word tries to open a portal into the ecology of everything that exists. She hopes that in a single word, in a single line, an entire world may be created anew. Or, in the words of one of the most profound Slovenian poets, Katja Plut: magic isn’t something you should pay attention to / magic you should be // so we were.
