Night Sea Journey

The poem independent of the poet is poised between the abyss of oblivion and the abyss of readership.


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Oblivion negates the poem; a readership atomizes it, absorbs it, excretes it, returns it in the form of a fine, pure cultural dust.


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Culture composts its materials, reducing them to their constituent elements for reuse; poetry breaks down into pure crystal, diamond-dust.


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Left to itself and to the living, the precipitates of poetry are inert, infertile, potentially destructive: abrasive, clogging, ossifying.


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Culturally, the relationship between poem and a readership is transactional, bipolar; gift economy requires a triangle. What is the 3rd term?


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Part of the soul of the poem belongs irretrievably to and with the dead, who supply part of its necessary material and enforce its closure.


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The dead occupy a third abyss: not of oblivion or atomization but memory; as long as we are, they are: of necessity and not supernaturally.


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Collectively our memory is our DNA; it eats individuals; it atomizes them, obliviates them, uses them. Death is not in hell but in the cell.


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Everything in culture is biological, belongs to the body and likewise to the body politic; the dead form the third point to which all tends.


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The dead are the precipitates of the living; they live on in us collectively; the poem is yours and mine, but Poetry belongs to the dead.