'In my view a good poem is one in which the form of the verse and the joining of its parts seems light as a shallow river flowing over its sandy bed.' Basho








"Pound said that poetry could be divided according to three essential elements: phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia – the play of image, music, and meaning. In his manifestos for imagism and vorticism he advanced a poetry stripped of all nonessential elements, where every word makes a necessary contribution to the poem, “which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time."

Bernstein.

Reference--call it bedrock.


derivations:


"Meaning is not a capitalist construct, as they claim, but meaninglessness is, and 9/11 was an explosion of meaning in the prevailing media-fantasy unreality of the nation."

http://poeticinvention.blogspot.com/


"Romanticism marks the shift from thinking of poetry as a “craft” (and of the poet as “maker”) to thinking of it as a provoker of consciousness, even a creator of consciousness."



If poetry is particularly the domain of the “inner life,” then it is precisely not the domain of the I. The notion that poetry is the domain of the I comes from the ideology of individualism—a term whose etymology insists that we are “not divided.” If we are individuals, then of course we are most authentic when we speak from the point of view of our individuality, from the point of view of our I. But what if the I is in fact multiple, divided, full of many contradictory elements not all of which are even recognized? What if the I is not the unity that the word I presupposes it to be? What sort of poetry is generated by such a conception of the “inner life”? What was the “Romantic” stance about such matters?

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2010/02/reconfiguring-romanticism-37-jack-fo ley.html


yet we are dealt this hand:

"Data in the 21st century is largely ephemeral, because it is so easily produced: a machine creates it, uses it for a few seconds and overwrites it as new data arrives. Some data is never examined at all, such as scientific experiments that collect so much raw data that scientists never look at most of it. Only a fraction ever gets stored on a medium such as a hard drive, tape or sheet of paper. yet even ephemeral data often has ‘descendents’ — new data based on the old. Think of data as oil and information as gasoline: a tanker of crude oil is not useful until it arrives, its cargo unladed and refined into gasoline that is distributed to service stations. Data is not information until it becomes available to potential consumers of that information. On the other hand, data, like crude oil, contains potential value.”

Roger E. Bohn and James E. Short, “How Much Information? 2009: Report on American Consumers”, Global Information Industry Center, University of California, San Diego, December 9, 2009

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/04/a-textual-ecosystem/



From Silliman's "huts"


192. A friend, a member of the Old Left, challenges my aesthetic. How, he asks, can one write so as not to “communicate”? I, in turn, challenge his definitions. It is a more crucial lesson, I argue, to learn how to experience language directly, to tune one’s senses to it, than to use it as a mere means to an end… [which] is, in bourgeois life, common to all things, even the way we “use” our friends… But language, so that it is experienced directly, moves beyond any such exercise in despair, an unalienated language. He wants an example. I give him [Robert] Grenier’s
thumpa
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pointing out how… it is a speech that only borders on language, how it illumines
that space. He says, “I don’t understand.” (Huts 63)



"how it illumines that space."
(fills an "Emptiness")
The direct experience of the "thing"--in this case,
language. might be said, that Mr Williams, and Mr.
Silliman fail admirably. No harm in trying I don't
suppose--but the wheelbarrow bears the entire
weight of the human endeavor on its back,

John Browns Body In repose
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thump.