On further reflection I find I'm still in agreement with Peter's earlier
comments on poems as products rather than processes. However I'd like to
extend this in to viewing poems as systems. So here's a brief sketch of
"Systemism."
In some respects this extends a poems function to both "product" and
"process" and as such is a more synthetic and perhaps more successful model
for analysis. A poem could never have a meaning (singular) and certainly not
one founded solely on its text, origins, or isolation from _all_ contexts.
No outcome could be more or less valid than any other. In my view the poem
as system is not fixed (I'd draw on Pierre's nomadism here) and as a system
may be authored as much as it is authoring, but it would have some
determinates, anchors and references; one might say mechanisms. Although
such mechanisms are infinitely fluid in terms of their systemic confluence.
The mechanisms of the sytems are however closely related in a causal
relationship with other experiential systems.
I think that the analysis of poem as system might yield better results when
considering the interconnected network of processes, products and
by-products (and indeed meta-products) that the system yields. One might
even extend that a systemic view of poetry and poetics would of course
embrace an analysis of complex relations to all human consciousness. There
can be little argument that poetry is language, but a systemic view would
extend the impact of this to aural pattern, glyph, even construction in a
pre-lingual state, or meta-lingual state. It's these subtle and transcendent
systemic qualities that yield other systemic connections which I purport
rather grandly to be the experience of a poem. That is, it is not the
literal meaning of the words or the meaning of what is contained or implicit
in the text, but the experience of extension into new systemic apparatus or
mechanisms that yields the poems function. A function that constantly
transmutes as other systems come into play. In this sense I'd regard humans
as just other systems; systems which agglomerate with poetry. Such systemic
conflux is at the heart of consciousness.
Early days, but there you go.
With best wishes
Christopher
_____________________________________________________
Christopher Hamilton-Emery
Production Manager
Salt Publishing
PO Box 202,
Applecross 6153
Western Australia
email: [log in to unmask]
web: http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/1664/folio_salt.html
_____________________________________________________
Find John Kinsella's website at www.geocities.com/SoHo/Square/8574
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