Amy Catanzano: “The Imaginary Present,” A Poem & a Commentary from Quantum Poetics

please note. a list of postings after january 12, 2012 can be found here
Nicolas Desprez, Attractor Poisson Saturne

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

contemporary poetry

insert: poem here

insert: essay here call it:

essay-poem insert:

appropriated text

call it: poetry insert:

sound poem call it:

wave score insert:

visual poem call it:

if sound could see

claim: the text is dead

just schrödinger: the text!

insert: tired formatting

like strikethrough

fade: your erasures

use: basic font variations

insert: another footnote

please instead please

insert: some nu-sonnets

inject: the bacterium!

insert: interactive

irony call it: data

plan allow for:

confession perform:

nothing call it or

do not call it: silence

sing: off-key call it:

a speech call the page:

canvas buy: more

hard-drives consider:

a book trailer make:

a movie get: a bit

scientific call it:

quantum allow for:

uncertainty but do not

hesitate never:

hesitate make:

confident declarations

to get the job call it:

criticism stand by:

your assertions

never: waver never:

mistranslate: consciously

multiply: the I write:

reviews never: review

suck: up suck: in curl:

the tongue display:

                                   

                                    a mistake call it:

necessary failure

                                    reject: “Genius”

for “Unoriginal Genius” reject:

“Unoriginal Genius” for “SubGenius”

have: more slack!

launch another:

collaboration

break: the line

never: break lines

reject: poetry accept:

multi-genre accept: poetry

accept: document insert:

a memoir try: hy-bric-a-brac

refute: the subject

have: a subject but never

one subject position

have: one subject position

call it: language gesture:

but do not speak speak:

but do not gesture say:

complicate: say: resonate:

do not be so: quotidian!

set: all of your poems

in the future write:

as if you are from outer

space frame: your

process refute: everything

except procedure call it:

foregrounding

refute: everything

except experiment

call it: kool kitsch

it: up call it: trashy

make: a mask use:

the monster transgress:

culture defy: authority

protest: imperialism

protest: authenticity

protest: artifice reclaim:

agency protest: agency

protest: protest

invoke: aleatoric

construct: constraints

tighten: your form

sometimes: self-efface

memorize: your poems

read from your smart

phone do not under

any circumstances:

read from that smart

phone check: your voice:

check your context

check: your ethics reject:

all ethics check: your

poethics make: more

rules believe: in god

check: your god reject:

god know: your censors!

be: difficult, elegiac, or eco

and non/representational

but never: pretentious

or worse: whispers: precious

revel: pretentiously fake:

your pretenses write:

[note. Amy Catanzano has appeared often in these pages & represents an important move toward the reconciliation of poetry & speculative & experimental thought across the arts & sciences.  Of the work, above, she writes: “The poem represents my attempt to explore what I am thinking of as the poetics of poetics, the varying authoritative directives and propositions within contemporary poetry, including approaches I work with and also ones I want to challenge. I address, for example, Vanessa Place's recent declaration that the text is dead (I say ‘just schrodinger: the text!’) and Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius (I advocate, instead, for the SubGenius).”  Other excerpts from her four-part seminal essay “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light” have previously appeared on Poems and Poetics & on Jacket2 as part of a collaborative poetry/science discussion project.

         Of the present excerpt she writes further: “The poem is part of a manuscript called ‘Quantum Poetics: The Word and Its Earthwork,’ where I insert poems between each paragraph of my four-part essay on quantum poetics. By writing this poem in strikethrough I am trying to challenge both proscriptive reading tendencies and what I see as an unimaginative formal device. To read a strikethrough one must get beyond a physical limitation with the line being partially occluded. However, the strikethrough itself requires little thought and effort to produce (it’s just a click away); integrating it and similar formatting techniques into poems these days without more robust contexts feels, to me, just as generic as centering a poem on a page. By using the strikethrough in my poem and simultaneously critiquing it, I’m invoking a kind of reverse engineering in my process. I’m taking a pre-existing gesture I see as obsolete and repurposing it as a way to explore poetics by starting from the original gesture (the strikethrough that displays a deletion) and deducing more possibilities for the gesture (my poem) without solely relying on former associations connected to the original. The reader might view the strikethrough as an occlusion to transparency, even a metaphor for difficulty, but in my poem I confront it as a tired typographical gimmick. There's a quantum poetics to my logic, a Schrödinger's cat I am embedding into my poem. (Erwin Schrödinger’s wave mechanics, with its more familiar concepts, challenged Werner Heisenberg’s abstract matrix mechanics, though soon after this challenge Heisenberg presented his groundbreaking uncertainty principle, which led to wider acceptance of Heisenberg’s formulation of quantum mechanics. Nonetheless.) Schrödinger's cat is alive and dead at the same time. The poem is readable and not. The strikethrough is simultaneously a gesture and a gimmick. I would argue that strikethroughs have been successfully incorporated into typographical and theoretical experiments in poetry, especially before the proliferation of electronic word-processing programs. What I am questioning is if it and other formatting techniques one finds on the toolbar can be interesting if used in isolation—as they often are—from more complex approaches to visual experimentation on the page, such as what we find in visual poetry or in a score from a sound poem. In my poem I am aiming to explore what forms and processes writers and readers of poetry are interpreting as relevant to contemporary and even future contexts—technological, aesthetic, transhuman.”]