Pharmapoesis: Fifteen Chemical Assays

Whitman said "Who touches this book touches a man." I say "Who touches this book touches a pharmacy."

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Poetry is as elusive as the cure for the common cold; the poem is as ordinary as aspirin.

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A given poet's body of work is uneven? The inventor of aspirin also invented heroin.

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The "necessity" of the poem is a consequence of the condition of an individual consciousness: what do I lack that only the poem fulfills?

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Poetry has no utility for individual consciousnesses and only hypothetical utility for the zeitgeist. What the oversoul lacks: Poetry?

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And yet the formulation and distillation of the poem--its extraction and crystallization--follows from the poet's sense of imminent need.

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The pharmacologist attends to doctors' descriptions of need; the poet attends to a chorus of pain, the blues refrain of the body politic.

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The self is a creation of that aggregate of selves that is the body politic, which is itself a creation of aggregated selves.

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Knowingly or unknowingly the poet hears the interior voice of the body politic and attends to the gaps, the lacunae, the abysses in it.

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If the poet succeeds, the poem does not fill a void but entangles the boundaries of a targeted gap, so that the one side mirrors the other.

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In this transaction: no benefit in the material or therapeutic sense; how can the "vision" of a single cell affect the health of the body?

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Corollary of Whitman: entanglement between individual bodies and the body politic is a necessary condition of the existence of the zeitgeist.

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Body politic is a "necessary fiction," even from Whitman's perspective; it exists only as a "quantum" mirroring of broken individual selves.

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"For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives/In the valley of its making," a ghost dreaming of a greater ghost, the valley the gap between.

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The muse exacts/lithiums, prozacs--/The ghost in the machine/needs its dopamine.