Truth is all that which is
And poetry is whatever the hell you want it to be
But the written poem must be comprehensible
And all we know of truth is what we know
Which isn’t much
And I don’t want knowledge anyway
I want truth

Knowledge is seeing
And writing is technology
The disparity of hands and eyes
Frustrates
In the fatal or frustratingly near-fatal
Failure of hand-eye coordination
Knowledge frustrates not because we don’t know all
But because we know next to nothing
And precisely not nothing at all
And writing frustrates not because we can’t tell the truth
But because we must tell it slant
So since I can’t write perpendicularly
I want poetry

Wouldn’t it be great if it were easy
But there’s no obvious conduit
Between the poetic and the true
And so the task is one of seeking and not of finding
The improvised communion
Of two partial less-than-objects
And thus the poem as fragmentary
Incomplete defeated if you must
But just as total truth is boastful bluff
So too the finished poem
Is never more than first attempt
And since the writer never knows
What the reader does not know
The must in must be comprehensible
The ideal wild compulsion
Like the Great White Way
Or the Bridge of Sighs
The path of broken hearts
Hearts already filled to the brim
And even above the brim
And hands that reach and eyes that seek

There is no literal substrate
No truth-telling prior to figuration
I say I comprehend something
And I employ perforce the manual metaphor of grasping
Or more crudely a leg under me to stand on
Hominid tool use and the upright posture
And the mad cosmos of the neocortex
The new bark on the brain’s old tree
All of which allow the language-ape to see more deeply
And more colorfully than the quadrupeds
And confabulate about what’s out there
Kudus and sacred springs and moon-seas
Lutes and windows and burning lovers
Who can’t be satisfied

It doesn’t help to fabulate the clash
Of an army called mind
Against another called body
Wishful thought congealed into doctrine
Manichean utopia
Better a peaceable modesty before the truth
Here is a hand with which I grasp
That which I see before me
Here are lips tongue a larynx lungs
With which I fracture breath into articulate speech
And sad and lustful song

The claim is perfectly comprehensible that
I see and sing
For seeing is knowing and singing is speaking
Albeit here in that technological simulacrum writing
But then the poem goes on
By my own eyes inspired
Not what I see but that I see
Inspires me
And metaphor goes all the way to myth
For of course only a god or goddess
Could breathe into me
The light of truth or the life of light
Wherein I awaken
And open my eyes
But in this decadent age myth is falsehood
And the only permissible seeing
Is that of concrete objects
Potentially exploitable for profit
And thus for the materialists sleep is death
And the phantasmagoria of dreams nullity

The truth is that everybody dreams
And I can’t say within earshot a blue horse
Without your envisioning that imaginary thing
How crass therefore to synonymize unreality and insignificance
Or imagination and untruth

To seeing and speaking we must add breathing
And though speaking involves breathing
The breath seems to come from without
The invisible work of a goddess or god
Here there is no light
Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown
Wherein the poet constructs an artificial darkness
The better to perceive the light
That moves upon the air
Of imaginative inspiration
Technique manipulates language
Working with the cortical hand
To transmute breath into speech
And speech into song

But an age that insists on the objective
Lionizes uninspired technique so that
True wit is nature to advantage drest
What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed
As if the second instance of the thought
Were the same as the first
And Mr Pope in his Essay lays down the law
As to what might qualify as good expression
In the objective age
Certainly felicity of expression charms
And poetry falls flat without the charm of style
But the truth of nature or the thought thereof
Is but a small portion of the whole truth
And truly the career of atoms
And indeed the whole sweeping vista of phenomena
Provide little sustenance
For a being driven and torn by passion
And a better disposition for the passions
Hurtful though they are
Must materialize than suppression
For suppressed passion returns vengefully
And the only song worth hearing
Is that which burns with life
And exalts the hearer with the sublime

And while some truth is better than none
Some truths are more truthful than others
And don’t suppose that I claim
One truth for Alexander and another for John
And others for Trixie Ned and Nancy
For on the contrary those swerving atoms
Are the same for everybody
And for everybody too the inner being
Is a muddy mess of desires
Though the composition of the mess
Varies from person to person
Hence subjective intelligibility differs from the objective
And thus there are more dimensions than the phenomenal
And more fitting for poetry
Especially in differing or clashing subjectivities
Namely the drama of human cruelty
And the idylls of struggling love
And so for most of the time
The psalm of life is the poem of suffering

Since the whole truth lies out of reach
Then poetry becomes the quest for significance
Or less romantically
The act of finding what will suffice
Or rather settling for seeking and not finding
And for a long time poets thought
Or wishfully thought it a matter
Of a man speaking to men
The neutral transmission of thought
As if through some substance called mind
One could see and sing
Grasp and manipulate
Without the intervention of the breath
And so I reject the poem of the mind
That spectral residue of worldly renunciation
And reject also the poem of the body
The inarticulate cry of pain and appetite
But I extol the hand and the eye that reach into the world
The terrible world
In a blessed rage for coordination
The beauty of the beloved and the work of noble note
And I embrace the poem of the breath
Both the warm moist exhalation
And the deep enlivening inward flow