Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

My wobble is social, not theoretical. Its point of arrival is quite close to
> its point of departure. It would appear that this is an important point,
> one that in my book is an edge of confluence which resists
> conceptualization, but one which is constantly demanding it.
If I’m right then I would have to say your wobble is social and yet in a wholly
theoretical sense–theory enacted as a social relation. Moreover, your attempts
to resist not only demand conceptualization, they can be intelligible only to the
extent that we (your interlocutors) do conceptualize them.
Is this how poetry operates? That what poems "do" is intelligible only insofar
as we accept this doing as a "saying." That what poems "say" makes invisible
the fact that this saying is also a "doing." Here we return to Charles Bernstein’s
comment on Reznikoff about hiding in plain sight. There’s a Blaser poem too
that comes to mind:
THE TRUTH IS LAUGHTER
Locked out, and at the same time locked
in the look-out what perfect rose could
I say or write the Nietzschean brilliance,
who knew that the best writers understand
form as what others consider content
We’re probably not too far either from the old "How does a poem mean?" line
that I got in high school. But I too would like to write or say the perfect rose.
And why has wobbling got to be so dramatic? What if this very sentence, held
out to you as simply as a plucked flower, turns methodically on an axis, round
some sun of meaning toward its point of origin?