June 2003 – Page 8

Kasey writes:

I want to join Nada’s speculations on a “formalism of the emotions” with Ron’s concept of the poetic exploration of natural forms, but I don’t know how.

I think it’s because, KSM, that they are entirely alien concepts. Ron’s poetic exploration of natural forms, at least as it’s played out in his work, is more aligned to mathematics — i.e. copping for a poem the structure of a nautilus as it is based on the Fibonacci sequence. The result is structural containers to be filled.

I have almost never been able to work that way, except when, like a hermit crab, I steal someone else’s structure wholly and inhabit it with my own body. For me this is also a way of stealing someone’s syntax that I covet.

The “poetic exploration of natural forms” seems to me to have some age-of-reason-y, empiricist overtones. Objectively, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s entirely different from my way of working and also of just being in the world. I don’t trust empirical observation at all, although I know nothing could be more logical. Maybe that’s why I don’t trust it.

“The boundary of blur” indeed…

A formalism of the emotions would be very difficult, maybe impossible, to describe empirically, because each subjectivity brings with it its own set of memories, associations, and interpretations.

So maybe it’s a SUBJECTIVE formalism. Is that even possible?

I know that certain kinds of utterances, certain grammatical arrangements, certain words and even phonemes, tend to produce in me corresponding feelings. Those feelings are what I exploit/explore in the acts of writing and reading. Don’t know how likely the same items and combinations might be to produce similar reactions in another.

Gotta go outside — more on this later.

SUNNY DAY, EVERYTHING’S A-OK…