Eight Extremophiles

The dream of the poem is of an explosion creating unalterable change in its environment; what good is a poetry that does not change geology?


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The fact of the poem is a microscopic entity in the upper atmosphere, only discoverable by a superlight vehicle soaked in liquid neon.


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Between Auden's "Poetry makes nothing happen" and Milosz's "What good is a poetry that does not change nations" walk the ghosts of all poems.


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The space where reader meets poem is a wrecked zone in the ruin of cultural memory, in the ghetto on the south side of the medulla oblongata.


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To extract the enzyme that carries the poem from the mind of the reader to the mind of the body politic requires the centrifuge of the muse.


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Poetry is one strand spun in the double helix of the DNA of the body politic; each poem is a molecule thereof.


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The DNA is an aggregator, selector, interpreter, and reviser of experience; the poem is a form of experience, unavailable elsewhere.


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The creature emerges from murky water, crawling, and discovers--by having a shape that can crawl--there is such a thing as a shore.