No Object #4

For Kipling

If
the assumption is that the world is badly screwed up,
If
we realize that both social relations and personal relations are screwed up by the social system of capital investment and growth,
If
we get it that this is what makes even the environment steadily deteriorate,
If
the sense of relations sweeping thru the social, personal, and environmental also extends to the inner (intra-) personal,
If
language can be seen to be a focus at the core of all this,
If
consciousness shows thru as the very core,
If
consciousness can be changed by experience of awarenesses playing across language and other perceptual relations,

then

poetry matters, especially where it can stop objectifications from reifying "the world."

No Object #3

Nicole Brossard writes in French but has her books readily translated. In her most recent in English, there is this that fits this project:

in each language our violence is intact
we inhale it with its collisions
its t/errors and small print
then in 3steps in a Neues museum
stroke of the bow
an image deflects our attention

This is a section from a serial poem called "Piano Topology" in a series of poems called "White Piano" in a book called White Piano (Toronto: Coach House, 2013). It deals with the image on the cover of that book too, a photo of an installation called Missa that is made of many identical pairs of shoes hanging all in the same walking pose from wires, piano wires perhaps to be bowed. The resonance "deflects our attention" and calls it toward resonances. This is the no-object theory at work with and beyond imagery. Now you see it and you don't.