Kristin Prevallet

Writing Is Never by Itself Alone:
Six Mini-Essays on Relational Investigative Poetics



I. The Pursuit of Rationality in the Age of the Engineered Apocalypse

Currently in the U.S.A., the practice of intellectual analysis seems like an act of defiance. Fundamentalist logic pervades and is being used to justify many domestic and foreign policy decisions—from the notion that poverty can be controlled through faith-based initiatives, to establishing the parameters of an "axis of evil" that threatens "freedom." To imagine that questioning the larger context of the Bush Administration's policies is considered not only anti-American but a threat to national security should be unthinkable in a country where the Bill of Rights ensures that "we the people" are entitled to have a say in how "our" government handles our interests as citizens. Yet, the pursuit of knowledge as the basis for critical thinking has been suppressed and mocked for many years in this country, as if being "intellectual" is a threat to being "normal." Ordinary people are not considered ordinary if they are too smart—and now we are beginning to see exactly how this habit of talking down to the populace, convincing them of their docility, in fact allows rather terrifying propositions to be accepted as necessary to the status quo.

Propose legislation that reduces air quality standards for polluting factories, in spite of the fact that such standards have curbed emission of harmful greenhouse gasses? Give major tax cuts to corporations that have stolen billions of dollars from pension funds, and then convince the very people whose savings accounts were looted that they should vote for the very politicians who serve the interests of the looters? Send economic aid to Africa to combat an AIDS crisis that threatens to weaken the military backbone of countries such as Angola, while simultaneously supporting pharmaceutical companies' fraudulent handling of AIDS medication on the African continent, and eyeing the oil-rich resources of these same nations? Abandon the 2001 Kyoto Protocols on world climate protection (ratified by some 180 countries), stonewall at the United Nations World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, and still expect the world to passively stand by while we preemptively launch "regime changes" in the Middle East?

The list goes on. And the further into insanity it reaches, the more rational certain conspiracy theories seem: Two liberal democratic legislators—Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Governor Mel Carnahan of Missouri—die in plane crashes in the weeks leading up to major elections in 2002 and 2000 respectively, elections in which Republicans triumph. Many people in power had warning of the 9/11 attacks: There was time for jets to have been scrambled; there were FBI agents who were told not to follow up on information leading up to the attacks; there are investors who made millions of dollars in the massive short-selling of airline and financial company stocks in the days before the attacks. Why would this be? asks the skeptic. And the conspiracy theorist answers: To oversee the emergence of a new Fascist state. Jerry Falwell's October 2002 comment, "Mohammed was a terrorist"—which sparked violent protests in Maharashtra, Bombay—was a part of the Christian Right's plan to catalyze the apocalypse. John Ashcroft believes he speaks in tongues and had himself anointed with oil when he became a U.S. senator. When irrationality is rampant, there is the urge to react in kind.

But, of course, this is no different from the current behavior of leaders who think they will stop terrorism by inflicting more terror in the form of carpet bombings and endless propaganda. What is the saying about fighting fire with fire? Resist the lunacy, or the lunatics will win.


II. The Opposite of Inspiration Is Investigation

Instead of buying gas masks and digging underground shelters (or moving to Canada), I turn my rage and confusion towards poetry, the unacknowledged legislation of worlds unacknowledged, to reveal both systems of knowing (content) and structures of ideology (form). Poetry, the work of radical linguistic, contextual, and metrical articulation, is a way to structure my sometimes perpendicular thought processes, transforming confusion and anger into form and meaning. Luckily, there are numerous trajectories in the history of poetry that active minds in search of some "tradition" can follow and, after careful apprenticeship, claim as their own. My choice for consideration here is the polyvalent tradition of Investigative Poetics and its links with Projective Verse, Relational Poetics, and even Language Poetry, which provide theoretical structures for working with language to reveal both the formal, syntactic structures that make it work, and the cultural, connotative sources that make it mean something. These enabling traditions are, obviously, specific, each with their own histories and cast of poets. And, although there are numerous points of entry into these traditions, the one most relevant to an introduction to Investigative Poetics is Charles Olson.1

In 1950, Olson wrote an essay called "Projective Verse" laying out the terms of Open Field Poetics in which, among other things, the poem is understood as a "high-energy construct" where "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION" (Collected Prose, 240). Following Robert Creeley's dictum that "Form is never more than the extension of content," Olson articulated the place of what he called "History" in the poem. To Olson, history is a complex organism in which an individual connects to his (her) locale through "what he knows, what he really knows" (Special View, 20). History is what connects a person to space and time; it is not a force that acts upon the individual from the outside. Rather, it is story, imagination, poetry—it is a verb meaning "to find out for yourself" (26). So, instead of allowing larger power structures and forces to act upon you as a passive, helpless object, you act upon them subjectively by expanding your knowledge and writing the story of the universe as you see it—based on the facts and observations that you have collected. Olson's work emerges from the messy materials of historical accounts, notes, and raw information. It is not what Gloucester, Massachusetts, did for Charles Olson in helping to expand time and space within the form of his epic project, Maximus Poems, but rather what Olson did for the dense tissue of reality that is Gloucester, in rereading his town as a site of poetic history, from which a flow of source materials is opened up within the space of the poem.2

In spite of the fact that Olson's poetry has a masculine energy base, a projective, ego-driven fervor that can be read through a Jungian lens as a mythic-heroic quest for self-completion, his project is not exclusively focused on the hero's journey towards truth. He is not so "fixed" in time as to be fixated on singular answers. His is a mind in constant motion. In The Special View of History, Olson defines process as: "PROCESS: 'any phenomenon which shows a continuous change in Time' / MAN IS A CONTINUOUS CHANGE IN TIME / Etc." (33). We ("man") are history and life is our continuum in space and time. All that we know is history. "There is no limit to what you can know. Or there is only in the sense that you don't find out or you don't seek to know" (29).

The Maximus Poems transmutes these ideas of process, and the individual who is always changing through what s/he learns, into poetic form. Maximus Poems is almost impossible to excerpt, simply because the work is so kinetic and formally eclectic. And yet, throughout the book, Olson constantly lets the reader know what he is doing in quotable lyric bits.

I looked up and saw
its form
through everything
—it is sewn
in all parts, under
and over

This fragment, alone on the 8.5-x-11-inch page, follows the vast poem "[Maximus, From Dogtown - IV]." Located in 2000 B.C., the piece asserts the dominance of Heaven and Ocean over Earth, a vision based on particular Greek and Norse mythologies. Seemingly a rant against the idea that the feminine Earth is more primal and universal than the masculine Ocean/Sky, the poem moves through references to obscure wars and sagas of gods and goddesses, finally to reconcile it all through Love "in the figure of the goddess born" (342). So the above fragment, itself a reconciliation of all that came before, stands alone as a statement regarding the larger forces of the universe as part of the smaller, yet no less significant, sediments of the Earth—"sewn, in all parts, under and over." Olson's work reveals the simultaneity of continuity and rebellion, of time imploded and expanded simultaneously. He creates a poetics that is as open to multiple forms as it is to multiple contents; Maximus is a book that cannot be easily defined because it works like an organism in which there are many cells, all in motion, some slow and some fast, some lyrical and posited as arising between a man and the sea, the birds, and the universe, but others rooted in documentary and letters, where nonpersonal, nonlyric sources ground the work in a particular (American) space and (mid-twentieth century) time.


III. Extending the Document to Meet the Poem

In spite of this systemic perspective, celebration of Olson—along with other producers of twentieth-century American epic, Williams, Pound, Reznikoff, Zukofsky, —has lead to a glossing over of equally important epic poems in this tradition written by women. Susan Howe's Pierce Arrow (1999), Anne Waldman's Iovis (Book 1, 1993; Book 2, 1997), Diane di Prima's Loba (1978), and Muriel Rukeyser's long sequential poem "Book of the Dead" in the volume U.S.1 (1938) stand as premier examples. Rukeyser is of particular relevance here, if only because her work is contemporaneous with the work of the Objectivist/Projectivists, and yet it is often omitted from discussion of the period. In the note accompanying "Book of the Dead," Rukeyser explains that the poem tells the local history of silica miners living along the Atlantic coast. However, these people and the towns they live in "are created by theories, systems and workmen from many coastal sections—factors which are, in the end, not regional or national" (146). The poem embodies these factors and shows that the particular stories of individual miners always occur in relation to larger forces of power—from the courthouse to the hydroelectric dam—that surround them. The section "The Dam," for example, shows how this enormous municipal entity embodies all the elements of its creation—from the corporations who commissioned and profited from it, to the workers who toiled to build it, to the natural flow of rivers that it disrupted.

How many feet of whirlpools?
What is a year in terms of falling water?
Cylinders; kilowatts; capacities.
Continuity: [sigma] Q=o
Equations for falling water. The streaming motion.
The balance-sheet of energy that flows
passing along its infinite barrier.

"The Dam" provides a key for reading the rest of "The Book of the Dead"—it does not simply function as a metaphor for the "factors" of theories, systems, and workmen that exist simultaneously in this small town, but is itself manifest as a presence, in the poem and in the town, around which the people and the larger forces that contribute to their understanding of the world circulate. As Rukeyser writes, "Poetry can extend the document" (146).

Looking back at Rukeyser reminds us how important it is to remember that the inclusion of "history" in the poem was (and still is) practiced by many other poets unrelated to Olson's Black Mountain School trajectory—including Robert Hayden, AimŽ Cesaire, Jean Metellus, Kamau Braithwaite, Langston Hughes. Reading the work of these poets opens up the field "history," demanding an awareness of facts as always linked to specific human experience, and an understanding that appropriating these facts for the sake of a poem does not always tell the whole story. Olson's humanist prescription for the individual who can direct "his" own historical destiny dates Investigative/Projective Poetics, and limits its applicability to current poetics that are trying to incorporate the insanity of our current time. Appropriating knowledge for the sake of furthering one's self is problematic in the context of empire—taking over territories, marking them, and using them to perpetuate one's own interests.

Édouard Glissant is a poet, translator, and philosopher from Martinique whose recent book Poetics of Relation provides a useful example of shifting the focus of Investigative Poetics onto a broader terrain. To Glissant, the word relation incorporates both "relative" and "related." Glissant locates his ideas within the colonial history of the Caribbean, where people were forced to adapt their native languages to those of the colonizer (in this case, the French), and consequently to define new relationships to the interplay between language, culture, and social organization. Beginning with Deleuze and Guattari's image of the rhizome, Glissant discusses what a Poetics of Relation might look like: an enmeshed root system that is strong not because it is a singular stock that nourishes only itself by appropriating all the nutrients around it, but because it is "a network spreading either in the ground or in the air, with no predatory rootstock taking over permanently" (11). Glissant sees the traditional image of "roots" as a metaphor to be avoided because of its centrality to the colonial mind-frame. "Most of the nations that gained freedom from colonization have tended to form around the idea of power—the totalitarian drive of a single, unique root—rather than around a fundamental relationship with the Other" (14). To Glissant, this relationship with the Other can be shaped through the poet's acceptance of "errancy" (wandering, polylingualism, multiplicity), in his or her thinking and interactions with the world. Poetry is an arrow that paradoxically has no clear trajectory, that leads from periphery to periphery, that makes every periphery into a center but at the same time "abolishes the very notion of center and periphery" (29). Glissant cites numerous African and Caribbean writers, including Leon Damas, Cheik Diop, and Segalen, as well as European and American writers such as Rimbaud, Faulkner, and Saint-John Perse, as manifesting this Relational position. If poetry (or prose, for that matter) is "relational" it is not because it appropriates sources as conquered territories, forcing them into the logic of the new text or subordinating them to some notion of perfection or "totality." Rather, Relational poetics looks at texts as being themselves in a constant state of motion, dispersion, and permeability that is inseparable not only from the shifting social and political context, but from the cycles of the earth and the diversity of nature.

These questions of Relation extend to the very moment of the creative act. How do poems get written? Where does that flash of creativity come from? What is inspiration? The Relational poet simplifies the first question by discarding the last, and rather than sitting on mountaintops waiting for genius to strike, looks around and begins collecting, accreting, gathering. Glissant writes, "We no longer reveal totality within ourselves by lightning flashes. We approach it through the accumulation of sediments. . . . lightning flashes are the shivers of one who desires or dreams of a totality that is impossible or yet to come" (32). This emphasis on the accumulation of sediments implies an apprehension of the world not as an unshaped bundle of materials waiting to be formed, but rather as a diverse and extensive patterning that is already formed and transforming, already imbued with a logic. That which is fixed in form is only fixed because of all that moves around it. Like Olson—who in spite of his epic-heroic quest believed that a poet searches not for truth, but for evidence—the Relational poet is concerned with respecting what already exists and translating the content of the borrowed source into a form that usefully complicates apparently simple truths. This, again, is the crucial difference between appropriation (stealing from the Other to complete oneself) and relation (recognizing that one's self and one's poetics are mutable forms, moving among the multiplicities that constitute the world). So, the poet is not writing above the larger environment, but through encountered and known materials.


IV. Alertness Is Knowing How the Warring Factions Operate
"Half lies, half truths," the writer took "Poetic license."
"Poetic license," he says, "drives me crazy."
Ammiel Alcalay, from the warring factions

Ammiel Alcalay's new book from the warring factions is an example of poetry at the intersection of a Relational and Investigative mediation. His poem is divided into five parts—and within each appears an interchange of forms. There are poems, prose poems, prose documents, poems comprised of cut-up texts, prose that effects a dense exchange of poetic and factual language. The book navigates a complexity of regions, languages, contexts, sources, and poetic traditions in a way that, as Alcalay writes, "brings knowledge and history back in at the point where they have become almost non-existent in our [American] poetic culture" (203). Alcalay is a writer who refuses to estrange himself from that which is too apparently complicated to be understood. Rather, he works within the complexity of both himself and an impressively global knowledge-base, using poetry to give form to what would seem to be an uncontainable content.

Alcalay grew up in Boston, in a Sephardic Jewish family that spoke many languages, including Serbian, Italian, Greek, and German. He spent his early years in Jerusalem learning Arabic and Hebrew, and his poetics draw upon the convergence of medieval Hebrew and Arabic practices (in which, as he writes, "poems are interwoven with scriptural citations" [192]) with American poetic influences—from Jack Spicer to Robert Creeley, Armand Schwerner, Anne Waldman, and Robin Blaser. All of this personal/poetic history is, in his poems, contextualized with larger political and cultural histories—such as the break-up of Yugoslavia in the mid-1990s and the genocide occurring at that time in Bosnia. The book is a mediation of all these materials and influences, using techniques of sampling, collage, and seriality to create a true Composition by Field. There are so many sources utilized in from the warring factions that a list of them takes up four pages at the end of the book. Each section has its own cosmology of citations, including U.N. documents, political speeches and phrases from the Gulf War, and materials pertaining to the 1995 Bosnian massacre in Srebrenica. These documentary sources are combined with fragments taken from poets ranging from Shelley to Zukofsky, as well as Native American and Near Eastern texts. These are cut up and rearranged as poetic fields on the page—blank spaces and different formal patterns rub up against, contradict, and negate each other, offering a reading experience that moves through a variety of different emotional, factual, and abstract fields.

Alcalay's poem, however, is not simply an arrangement of appropriated language. Because of the varieties of form that make it difficult to determine whether the voice of a given passage is Alcalay's or another's, the work demonstrates a constantly shifting subjectivity that fluctuates between knowing and oblivion, concise articulation and indecipherable fragments. In other words, Alcalay is not merely filtering collected words and then transforming them into a homogenous entity that wipes out the diversity of his materials; rather, he is relating to them, transmitting and translating them. This conception of the translator as a collector and disseminator of documents may seem unconventional, but to Alcalay translation is as much about respecting the historical and social context of a text as it is about transmitting cultural materials by recalibrating them to "reflect new conditions and interpretations dictated by events, current or otherwise" (187). Like Glissant, he pays attention to the ground where he is walking, collecting evidence. Knowledge is a collective endeavor (and a collector's aim); it is not transmitted via "acts of singular perseverance or genius" (175). Rather, it involves making maps, cutting into the materials, and realizing that the individual cannot be separated from the cultural fabric of the world as a whole. The translator (a.k.a. poet) becomes aware of the cultural transmission of knowledge, becoming "acutely aware of the engineering of texts" (190) and engineering them not to create a superpoem or a superhuman, but rather to allow the texts and the person to open themselves into new contexts. Glissant's rhizome, in this work, becomes a vast, interconnected, and independent system that is self-perpetuating, but not dominating. As Alcalay writes, "Inhabiting the world means there is no 'other' not already in us, no capacities outside the human that can be attributed to anything outside what we ourselves are individually and collectively capable of" (187).


V. Supercorn and the Problems of Homogeneity

In 1970, an unusually moist and warm year, a windborne fungus dropped deadly spores on corn fields in the American south. Eventually the winds changed and the spores threatened corn fields in the heartland, where 85% of America's corn is grown. As Manuel de Landa describes it in A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, this particular fungus was the result of almost 100 years of seeking to achieve what agriculturists call "extreme homogeneity"—a state in which hybridizing techniques eliminate undesirable traits. By eradicating heterogeneous traits, a "supercorn" was produced that could grow faster and more plentifully. Although there has been much recent publicity around the methods of the chemical company Monsanto to patent genetically engineered (GE) seeds and their pesticides, in fact the antecedents of such seeds were thoroughly marketed and dispersed through the heartland by 1944. The successful homogenizing of corn planted in this region in the thirties and forties meant that the crops were unable to fend off new microorganisms and diseases—culminating in the calamity which, in 1970, was diverted only by another change in the winds. Preserving heterogeneity in a crop's genetic makeup is, of course, what protects it from extinction, and, as de Landa writes, the narrowly averted infestation "made clear the dangers of homogenization and the long-term consequences of decisions made three or four decades before" (168).

But the effects of homogenization are not limited to problems with fending off diseases—farmers are personally affected as well. In the current corporatized political climate, Monsanto ranks as one of the biggest threats to national—and international— security. Farms that purchase GE seeds from the conglomerate are not allowed to collect the seeds and replant them the following year; the farms are under contract to purchase new seeds every year (and are strictly surveilled by the corporation). But this does not mean that the GE seeds will stay behind fences. In fact, many farmers from all over the world are finding that seeds from neighboring farms are mixing genetically with their crops. These "super seeds" travel by wind or are carried by birds or other animals into the rich gene pools of unmodified fields of corn. Mexico, for example, strictly regulates the use of GE seeds, and consequently managed to preserve multiple strands of corn that have otherwise been extinguished by hybrid experimenting. In September 2001, however, it was reported that "somehow" (either illegally spread by corporations promoting GE crops, or carried there from the U.S. by birds) GE seeds had made their way into fields in Oaxaca, permanently altering the genetic patterns of several fields of indigenous corn. Also in 2001, in Canada, Monsanto successfully sued an organic farmer whose fields fell victim this same kind of "gene drift," accusing her of stealing the patented seeds. Similar lawsuits are currently being filed against farmers in North Dakota, Indiana, and Louisiana. Meanwhile, Monsanto has admitted that in 1998, in Karnataka, India, they convinced a farmer to plant cottonseeds and spray them with pesticides, provided free of charge. In fact, not only did the cotton grow to less than half the size of plants in adjacent fields, but it became infested with bollworm, white fly, and red-dot diseases which then polluted the cotton harvest of his entire community. Genetically tainted, all the cotton fields had to be burned.

It is easy for chemical corporations to blame the dissemination of their destructive seeds on natural "gene drift" because seeds do travel with the wind, or with birds, or even with human footsteps. It is in this way that plants have played a longtime role in facilitating colonization—the European plants that were brought to America in the early years of New World exploration were invisible weapons that helped facilitate European migration. Simply by planting staple crops in soil that had never been exposed to their particular genetic strands, new settlers allowed microbes, weeds, seeds, spores, and fungi to quickly move across the land, wiping out many of the local weeds. As de Landa writes, "In many ways, the weed 'colonization front' raced ahead of the human wave, preparing the way" (153). Thistles, plantain, white clover, and nettles are all examples of the kinds of exotic plants that could latch onto the skin of horses or other animals and travel across the country, dropping off their seedlings along the way. And yet, although these plants may have weakened local strands, they did not obliterate the genetic heterogeneity of the plant life around them. GE seeds are predators of a different kind, as they are engineered with one specific purpose—rather than migrating from periphery to periphery, these seeds make every plot of land they touch into a central root system that must obey the rules of a corporation (that, like its seeds, has the ambition to spread across the globe). At the end of the season, these seeds terminate themselves and must be purchased and planted fresh the following year. Bio-machines with a strictly limited range of behavior, they serve the interests of those who would obliterate diversity in order to serve a singular, monocultural purpose.


VI. Synchronicity Is Another Word for Investigative Relation

Synchronicity is a state of mind, an ability to think about more than one thing at a time—or, as the OED officially defines it, "two or more contemporaneous events that are linked in a meaningful manner." The term was conceived by Carl Jung in 1949, in his foreword to the I-Ching: "While the Western mind carefully sifts, weighs, selects, classifies, isolates, the Chinese picture encompasses everything down to the minutest nonsensical detail, because all the ingredients make up the observed moment" (xxiii). Jung's theories imply a universality that most modern scholars would reject. Nevertheless, the core idea of assembling the perceived world into a pattern of one's own design (either by chance, or via attuned observation) offers a valuable mode for analyzing parallels between occurrences. Synchronicity, in other words, might be thought of as the opening of the poem to the possibility that poetry can be written from several perspectives at once. When the practice of Investigative/Relational poetics is applied to synchronicity, what results is not the obliteration of the observed moment into the overall assemblage of the poem or collage, but rather an activated field in which the source appears in spite of its rough edges. It's like making a collage and allowing the tape to be exposed, letting the corners remain jagged and disjunctive rather than seamlessly laminated into the composition as a whole.

However, for a poem to develop rhizomatically along Synchronic/Investigative/ Relational root systems, it does not have to be formally reliant on techniques of the cut-up. There are poems which, while not utilizing specific documentary sources, derive from the more personal perspective of the poet who attempts to see herself as others see her from the outside; who uses the poem to reflect on personal knowledge that in turn reflects everything she does not know. Deborah Richards is a young poet born in London, currently living in Philadelphia, whose parents are from Barbados. Her work encodes knowledge that comes both from within and from the larger historical framework that shapes how she is perceived—and perceives herself being perceived—by the world. In Richards' poem "wan" she crosses multiple strands of cultural, linguistic, and political identities, and questions what it means to be an expert about one's ancestral homeland, while at the same time being removed from it. The poem begins with a declaration:

I am no 'nanse expert
nor spiritual earth mother

do you think I know how
to be an islander insider;

I am not who you think
I forget my islandness

The expectation that a black woman with an "island" accent (at least in print) has inherited the wisdom of her "homeland" is crossed by her assertion, "I forget my islandness." But what begins as an ironic rhyme ("islander insider") expands into another kind of rhythmic structure which takes the knowledge the poet supposedly doesn't have, and uses it to turn language itself into a form of knowing.

it has bunit has macaroni
cheeseit has pig trotter

it has my grannie soaking raisins
in rum for blackcake

it has my grandfadda cutlass
on back terrace it has mutha

with a Sunday smile for those
who doubted her escape

with a dark-skinned man
and a promise of better days

in the land of English ladies
and gentlemen let us pray for those

who do not know the proper
defense against a moving referent.

The "it" here refers to the larger context of the poem: "let's calculate / the ways of the Caribbean" in relation to "the repayments that require a sacrifice." The knowledge Richards is expected to have about her place of origin cannot be known apart from the history of the colonization of the Caribbean, and its Anglophone inheritance from "the land of English ladies / and gentlemen." Simultaneously, the poem incorporates language from Richard Ligon's A True and Exact History of Barbados (1657), which enthusiastically lays out the terrain of Barbados for English colonization. This is synchronicity. The poem stretches the poet's awkward relationship to her "mother country" ("my grannie soaking raisins / in rum for blackcake") to span personal and historical systems of knowing. Simultaneity as a poetic practice does not rely on history or identity as fixed, but rather treats chronology and displacement as a ball of mercury split by a pin, each fragment retaining the molecular structure of its own, subjective, relevance.

Extending the document into the poem is one way to engage the contradictions and complexities of seemingly utilitarian language, whose presence then allows the poem as a freestanding yet rhizomatic entity to come into contact, into relation, with "the world." Investigative Poetics reexamines this overused and abstract term, reconceptualizing it not as opposite to "the word," but as a large mass of people existing in constant negation and exchange—both interpersonally and via the networks of communication—with products, places, plants, animals, and vocabularies. When a poem chooses to manifest these exchanges through its form, poetry can forge an investigative matrix that charts—that becomes a tool to navigate—the irrationality of our moment in time. De Landa writes,

If we consider that the oceanic crust on which the continents are embedded is constantly being created and destroyed, and that even continental crust is under constant erosion so that its materials are recycled into the ocean, the rocks and mountains that define the most stable and durable traits of our reality would merely represent a local slowing down of this flowing reality. It is almost as if every part of the mineral world could be defined simply by specifying its chemical composition and its speed of flow: very slow for rocks, faster for lava. (258)

So, when poetry intersects with the flow of geography, but also with the flow of plants, people, economies, vocabularies, and histories, it serves as a slowing down of language, fostering attention to memories, documents, languages, and myths, encouraging a spiraling examination of—and thus a taking responsibility for—knowledge and history. In this way, poetry is not made simply from form and content working in closed proximity to themselves. Often regarded as a discipline separate from the concerns of other art forms—much less those of "the real world"—and of concern only to inbred cliques, poetics under the rubric of Relational Investigation signifies the de-homogenization, the fertile contamination, of poetry. Through these practices, poetry is infused with the flow of larger reality, a space occupied with objects in constant motion, and with people—us—who exist in relation to both our personal histories, our political inheritance, and the strata of the land upon which we are standing.


Bibliography

Alcalay, Ammiel. from the warring factions. Venice, CA: Beyond Baroque, 2002.

De Landa, Manuel. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York, NY: Swerve Editions, 1997.

Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

Jung, Carl. "Foreword," The I-Ching or Book of Changes. Translated by Richard Wilhelm, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.

"New Threat To Indigenous People." Rachel's Environment & Health News #743, January 31, 2002. http://www.rachel.org.

Olson, Charles. Collected Prose. Edited by Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997.

_____________. "[Maximus, From Dogtown - IV]," The Maximus Poems. Edited by George Butterick. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983 (II.163-173).

_____________. The Special View of History. Edited by Ann Charters. Berkeley, CA: Oyez Press, 1970.

Richards, Deborah. "wan." Callaloo, Spring 2003.

Rukeyser, Muriel. U.S.1, New York, NY: Covici & Friede Publishers, 1938.

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1 For a discussion of Language Poetry and Investigative Poetics, see my essay "Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source" in Telling It Slant: Avant-garde Poetics of the 1990s edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (University of Alabama Press, 2002).

2 This "Special View of History," as Olson calls it, lays the foundation for Investigative Poetics—a term particularly articulated by Ed Sanders in his 1976 book Investigative Poetry (San Francisco: City Lights, 1976) and later in his pedagogic, how-to essay called "Creativity and the Fully Developed Bard" in Disembodied Poetics: Annals of the Jack Kerouac School, edited by Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994).