[Curtis Gale Weeks]

From
TRIBUTE TO THE ANGELS, Pt. 2 of Trilogy

Invisible, indivisible Spirit,
how is it you come so near,
how is it that we dare
approach the high-alter?
we crossed the charred portico,
passed through a frame--doorless--
entered a shrine; like a ghost,
we entered a house through a wall;
then still not knowing
whether (like the wall)
we were there or not there,
we saw the tree flowering;
it was an ordinary tree
in an old garden-square.

H.D. [Hilda Doolittle, London, 1944]

An excerpt from Science and the Mythopoeic Mind: The Case of H.D., Adalaide Morris, published in <u>Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science</u>; editor, N. Katherine Hayles, 1991:

Scientists have developed several ways of representing the rich coherence of chaotic phenomena. The most haunting of these is the "strange attractor," an odd variety of a familiar scientific abstraction. An "attractor" is any point in an orbit that seems to pull the system toward it. Classical science recognized two kinds of attractors--fixed points and limit cycles--both of which can be illustrated by the orderly behavior of pendulums. Fixed-point attractors are characteristic of systems whose behavior reaches a steady state, like free-swinging pendulums that eventually stop at the midpoint of their arc; limit cycle attractors are characteristic of systems that repeat themselves continuously, like motor-driven pendulums that oscillate from one side of an arc to the other. Both fixed-point and limit-cycle attractors are simple and predictable; neither is "strange."

Strange attractors occur in the orderly disorder of chaos and are more complicated and difficult to understand. A pendulum's swing depends on only two variables, velocity and momentum, and can thus be represented on a two-dimensional graph, but chaotic data like stock-market prices or weather shifts depend on a vast number of variables and are therefore best charted in what physicists call "phase space." Phase space can have as many dimensions as a system has variables: in it the state of a system at any given moment is represented as a point that moves as the system shifts, tracing a continuous trajectory across a computer screen. What phase space diagrams show is that chaos too has an "attractor," a pattern that is neither a fixed point nor a limit cycle but an orbit that always stays within certain bounds without ever crossing over or repeating itself.

"Strange attractors" are the forest that surrounds...fixed points and limit cycles: they are everywhere and everything else. Whether the data charted in phase space come from measles epidemics or lynx trapping, whether it spans a week or a month or a millennium, whether it is local or global, the same trajectory appears again and again: a line that never doubles over itself loops round and round the computer screen in an infinitely deep and complex demonstration of the fine structure that constrains what we have thought of as disorder. The most famous strange attractor is a pattern first discerned in a phase space picture the meteorologist Edward Lorenz made from a set of nonlinear equations for the chaotic rotation of heated fluid. Like all strange attractors, its trajectory is a continuous path of infinite complexity that never runs off the page and yet never exactly replicates itself. The shape it traces is a shape H.D. returned to again and again in her writings...

The coincidence between H.D.'s mythopoeic mind and the science of chaos offers rich and resonant access to aspects of her work that have been difficult to capture through conventional literary analysis. One particularly powerful demonstration of the overlap is the cascade of images that structures H.D.'s long poem Trilogy [cites from Trilogy, New York: New Directions, 1973]. Written in London amidst the turbulence of World War II, this is a poem about forms in motion: in it air thickens, wind tears, rain falls, bombs descend, and roofs tumble into ruins. Like the chaos theorists to come, the poet searches the borderland between order and disorder for the pattern that pulls all else toward it, a pattern that prevails across scales, through time and over space, a pattern whose every recurrence mixes characteristics that are "the same--different--the same attributes,/ different yet the same as before" (105). The poem, though lyrical, is presented as the result of "research" and constructed hypotactically using connectives like "so," "moreover," "but," "however," and "for example": (51, 19, 54). Like Lorenz who sought the patterns that structure atmospheric turbulence, H.D. aimed to discover the "true-rune[s]" which she believed to be "indelibly stamped / on the atmosphere somewhere,// forever" (5, 17).

Like Lorenz's attractor, the shape H.D. traces in her poem is a looping spiral which is bounded and therefore finite but also unending and therefore, mysteriously, infinite. The pattern appears again and again in a pulsing of hollow spaces within which degeneration turns into regeneration. The mollusc flutters its fans shut and open, the worm spins a shroud, the heart contracts and expands: from the first comes a pearl; from the second a butterfly; from the third, mysteriously, a "tree / whose roots bind the heart-husk // to earth" (8, 53, 35). A tree in a bombed courtyard, "burnt and stricken to the heart" (82), bursts suddenly into bloom; the city, fallen to ruins, becomes a rune of regeneration (3-4). The germ of new life comes from outside the system and throws it into turbulence. Sand cast into the mollusc shell, a grain cast into the heart, a bomb cast into the city, the philosopher's stone cast into a crucible, a seed cast into the womb: each occurrence propels the system from steadiness through turbulence into richly reorganized life. As in a strange attractor, so in the poem there is no end to the loop: the mummified pharoah [sic] in the ruined tomb of the poem's opening becomes the swaddled infant from the womb at its close, and the beginning, which had seemed to be an end, turns into an end which is also a beginning.

Like many chaotic patterns, H.D.'s rune is self-embedded: it repeats itself on finer and finer scales not only in the world but also within the poem. From its largest narrative, argumentative, and imagistic structures through the smallest details of its rhythm and phrasing, every level of Trilogy repeats the cycle of disturbance, disintegration, and reintegration. Even individual words are shattered and reconstituted so that "here" emerges from "there" (3), "mother" from "smother" (30), "word" from "sword" (18), and "ember" from "dismembered" (4). Like all chaotic patterns, the patterns in H.D.'s poem do not replicate each other exactly, but neither are they a jumble. They have a disorderly order that emerges slowly but surely, so slowly and so surely that the reader experiences something like the eerie inevitability one observer remembers feeling when he first watched a strange attractor form on the computer screen: the pattern "appears," he tells us, "like a ghost out of the mist. New points scatter so randomly across the screen that it seems incredible that any structure is there, let alone a structure so intricate and fine" (James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking, 1987). What is crucial to remember, what differentiates this pattern from ornament [is that] these intricate structures are not decorations but discoveries, laws discerned by the mythopoeic imagination.

[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 05, 2002).]

[Richard Wakefield]

Curtis: I suspect that Heather McHugh's poetry, and especially her book "The Father of the Predicaments," is a contemporary example -- and one in which the poet is very likely deliberate in replicating these forms.
It usually makes me a little uncomfortable when someone tries to show laws or patterns of, say, physics at work in art. My concern is that the laws of science are sufficiently general so that they can be found in almost any complex, nuanced phenomenon. However, if I'm reading the article right, these laws are the laws of complexity, not of reductionism... Or am I talking in circles too?
In any case, I wonder whether we have here a striking insight into this poem in particular, or rather a new way of describing what goes on in any complex, self-referential system, including poetry.
Thanks for a provocative post.
RPW

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Richard,

You raise some interesting points. I'm still absorbing the complete essay; indeed, I've been absorbing the book in which it appears for over a year now--in which different writers' methods are analyzed via chaos/order theories, and not always in apparently related ways. (Another particularly striking essay from the book is Modeling the Chaosphere: Stanislaw Lem's Alien Communications, by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., in which C-R analyzes Lem's use of alien contact/language to express the possibility/impossibility of understanding cognitive systems which are mostly or completely foreign to our own--lol, I'm sure many poet/critic communications might fall within this 'sphere!)

I've a few thoughts about Morris' ideas which I can express from my own understanding of this essay, in my own words.

First, I agree that laws of science are general in some respects, but only as they apply to specific phenomena or systems which they are designed to address: Newton's laws were insufficient for describing every physical phenomenon, from Einstein's point of view; Einstein's were insufficient from the quantum physicist's point of view; etc. The idea of "attractors" is central, of course, to this essay; since I'm no physicist, I'll have to hedge my bets by postulating from personal experience the meanings I've found in the essay's discussion of attractors, along with my own grasping-mind's attempts to understand this concept as it is used in this essay.

In the case of the pendulum mentioned above, I'd call the "fixed-point attractor" the set of influences which draws the pendulum toward rest at the midpoint of its arc. (Velocity/momentum in conjuntion with gravity/friction in conjunction with the actual object of the pendulum.) The "limit cycles attractor" would be the set of influences which cause the mechanical pendulum to continuously move between the two points at the top of its arc, on either side of the midpoint, without stopping. (I suppose this type would add to the set of the fixed-point attractor, the machine.) To re-image these two types of attractors, I'm going to leap into uncharted waters knowing that there be ravenous monsters lurking there, and use the examples of one poem's operation and the operation it might have had, had it been edited slightly from its final form before being published. I would like to note beforehand, however, that I agree with you that any complex system such as a poem might exhibit "strange attractors" as well as fixed-point and/or limit-cycle attractors (indeed, they must certainly do so, but I'll get more to that later); but I'll also posit the notion that most poems heavily use one of the three types of attractors over the other two types in the manner in which they are constructed by the poet; and, as in Morris' description of the working of Trilogy's "narrative, argumentative, and imagistic structures through the smallest details of its rhythm and phrasing," any type of attractor might be used for the creation of each of these structures--possibly using one type of attractor for imagistic structure, another type for argumentative structure, etc.

<u>Fixed-Point</u>

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

I think that it's not too surprising that Frost said, "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting."--This is another fixed-point system, where the parts of the system are circling the frozen nature of the ice and the melting influence of the stove until the system comes to the final resting point of the ice's complete dissolution. (Yes, now there's steam, but "ice" has ceased to exist.)

I chose this specific poem because it clearly exhibits a pendulum-type of swing. Phrasing: out in rain—and back in rain; call me back or say good-bye; neither wrong nor right. Imagery: there's the looking down the saddest city lane vs. the dropping of eyes (i.e., dropping is "not looking"); there's that lane and the [an]other street; there's the city light and the moon; there's the walking and the stopping still; etc. Argument: there's the declaration of L1 and the following examples of this acquaintanceship; it's the nature of these examples to provide a pendulum movement between the truth of the opening statement and its possible falsehood. Sonics: There's the meter and rhyme, of course.

What makes this system's attractor overwhelmingly a fixed-point attractor is its argument: All these oscillations within the body of the poem circle the fixed point of the idea of L1. Most bluntly, this is done by opening up the poem with the thesis statement of L1 and closing with its repetition: I have been one acquainted with the night is the pendulum at rest, the ice melted, around which everything else revolves. (One could say that the opening statement revolves around the rest of the poem, literally by beginning and ending the poem or argumentatively perhaps; but this is still a self-enclosed system at rest: perfect balance.)

<u>Limit-Cycle</u>

Poem X

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

Suppose the poem had been written this way originally. Suppose you'd never known the original thesis statement because it was never made in L's 1 & 14 nor in the title. What would this poem be about? The other oscillations would still be present (albeit with a slant rhyme on light/beat...lol, give me a break, here), but the fixed argument would be missing. Certainly, we know the actual version, and that relation of acquaintanceship with night still exists in this version, but we don't know in this version that that is the speaker's primary interpretation of his/her own situation described in the poem; perhaps this speaker is an outcast of some sort, a criminal or member of a lower caste, a boy out on a forbidden late-night excursion...any of these, who discovers a kind of mournful nihilism at the end of the poem.--E.g., I have passed by the watchman on his beat / And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain might be a young homeless boy's unwillingness to explain why he--someone so young--should be out so late unaccompanied; in the ending, the boy's perhaps saying that the trek has been fruitless, nihilistically. Interestingly, without the original opening line's I have been one, this version could be taking place in the present: e.g., that boy (or criminal, or wife) has done all these things, but [now] one luminary clock against the sky // Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

This version is still as closed as the original, but its structural devices oscillate continuously around a tropography: the thing being drawn is far more general than in the original, which was closed around one fixed-point because of L1 & L14 & the title. One could argue that the original contained all the possibilities of the revision as past occasions of the speaker's acquaintanceship (i.e., is the original speaker an ex-homeless child?), but even if this is so, the original as a whole would still be focusing on the relationship to night as expressed in the title, with these specific images/occurrences being incidental. The revision's tropes never reach a fixed state, but point to an order (or, structure) which, being indefinitely defined, is one of constant motion: The limit-cycle attractors of the revised version are these tropes in collusion with the poem as a whole rather than a thesis statement such as the original's fixed-point attractor; the continuous oscillation exhibited by the tropes and the poem is limited-cycle. (I.e., the poem surely isn't about doggy doo, but is instead about the relationships between these tropes.)

Aside: if taken individually, the line Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right would be a limit-cycle structure, one which oscillated between/around "wrong" and "right." In the original poem, the motion of this line is constrained by the thesis.

* * *

When you say, "...these laws are the laws of complexity, not of reductionism...," I would say, yes. In a system which is shaped by a "strange attractor," there is no fixed-point around which the poem revolves, nor is there a limit-cycle through which the poem oscillates. I'm reminded of Emerson's statement in Goethe; or The Writer: "It is the last lesson of modern science, that the highest simplicity of structure is produced, not by a few elements, but by the highest complexity." But rather than being random, as in the case of many (but not all, I would guess) attempted L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems or various other "experimental poems," strange-attractors actually create structures, I think, by plotting chaos in minute details which are not apparently related. In the two examples above of Frost's words, each trope, image, etc., is quite obviously meant to play off the others and this is apparent in both versions. H.D.'s poem does not appear to be chaos as we normally understand it, nor as randomness; however, its variant tropes are separated from one another by not necessarily being used with one another...or, are not meant to signify a specific relationship with one another. For instance, in the first line of the lines cited in my original posting, Invisible, indivisible Spirit, there is subtle wordplay in the first two words, but: 1)their primary roots are not etymologically related, 2) syntactially, they can only be loosely related if we assume the association that we are not able to divide things we cannot see 3) their syllables mislead us into assuming a greater association even so, and 4) they are not nudged by the poet into any greater association; in fact, the punning relationship would not even need to be seen in order for the words to give those lines meaning enough to justify the lines' existence. As a reader, I am thrilled by the possibility that "indivisible" might be parsed into a combination of "individual" and "visible," and it's possible that the poet intended this, but it's not necessary to the meanings of those lines.

Here's a little more of that essay (it is much longer than this, even...)--

H.D.'s mythopoeic writings pull seemingly random or disorganized phenomena into dynamic relation by discovering patterns which repeat across scales or recur one inside the next. Chaologists call these patterns "scaling" and "recursion," locate them in price charts and gene development, and give them mathematical formulation (Gleick, 115-16, 179) H.D. locates them in the events of autobiography, history, and mythology and gives them mythopoetic expression...Things "come true" for H.D. not when they can be empirically verified or logically deduced but when they display symmetries between scales or within interlocking levels of a system. Examples of scaling in H.D.'s writing range from the repetition of universal mythologies in local events to the reiterated structures in a seashell's whorl, the swirl of sparks from a bonfire, and the whirling of stars in a galaxy; examples of recursion include the many symmetries that link a poem's sounds, rhythms, images, and poetic or narrative structures to the "laws" toward which they drive. For H.D., such patterns are not metaphors substituting for something similar, nor are they metonymies associated with something analogous: they are templates for particular shapes of matter or forms of behavior, the mythopoeic equivalents of the laws of chaos theory.

* * *

One final note: I mentioned above the idea that all poems will have "strange attractors" of one sort or another. One specific sort I meant: because poets can't predict the reactions of so many individually complex readers who have diverse linguistic skills/histories/cultures, the things which poems communicate cannot be predicted. This complexity is akin to the complexities mentioned above of stock market prices, etc., and so I must assume that the added variable of audience will involve "strange attractors" in the poet-poem-audience system...hmmmm.

Curtis.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Originally posted by Richard Wakefield:
Curtis: I suspect that Heather McHugh's poetry, and especially her book "The Father of the Predicaments," is a contemporary example -- and one in which the poet is very likely deliberate in replicating these forms.

Rereading just now McHugh's "After You Left," I'm seeing what you are saying, but I'm not sure of the degree to which that particular poem might be approaching the "endless spiral" type of system Morris meant. Every good poet is deliberate, of course; but I'm looking for structures that are not so obviously drawn into apparent (or even, glaring) analogies. The speaker in McHugh's poem, for instance, uses these lines while holding and observing a starfish in her hand (and having already bluntly stated the comparison of the starfish's five radials to fingers on a human hand):

...so maybe it was dead? It took
a while for me to look, after I claimed to see:

I turned the matter over, and beheld
its thousands of minute transparent

footlets, feelers, stems,
all waving to the quick, and then

the five large radials beginning
gradually to flail

in my slow sight
and then (in my thin air)

to drown....

and the double meaning of "I turned the matter over" creates for me a limit-cycle kind of analogy. In fact, the poem is built around analogies not bluntly stated in every case but bluntly drawn. Had the speaker merely stated that she "turned the body over," such an image would still resonate in collusion w/ the primary system without tugging that system so relentlessly into the limited/fixed analogy between its two poles of considering the starfish and/or considering the limitations of observation, reaction to indistinct reality. She is very good at what she does, however; I love the poem.

Morris mentioned the difficulting in understanding "strange attractors." I think the difficulty lies in the nature of the unfixed-point/the limitless-cycle nature of these attractors. This particular poem might create for me a feeling of nebulousness invested with meaning--some of its analogies are not as clearly drawn--so perhaps I'd spiral in conjunction with it in my attempt to grasp the meaning; but this would be the result of an injection of the auditor/reader into the system, and how am I related to the poem, what does it mean to me? would thus become the "strange attractor," composed of the written (fixed) poem and my experiencing of the poem. (However, this stance of poet-to-poem doesn't necessarily approximate my actual stance-with-this-poem.) Had McHugh not so bluntly displayed the attractions, her method might have approached an unfixed/limitless structuring; but the overwhelming bluntness makes this reader fall into a fixed appreciation of the poem, in this case. Similarly: had she used the often used L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E method of being almost entirely indistinct, this vagueness itself would be a bluntness, obstructing my experience/controlling my experience.

Am I talking in circles, here?

I am thinking of pointillism, of a sort: The individual points of "strange-attracting" systems are distinct & separate, apparently unrelated until the system is viewed from a sufficient distance and the points are seen to draw the structure into what appears to be an endless, unrepeating spiral characteristic of a plotting of chaos. If these points are drawn as obvious disharmonies (graywyvern's " spinach-pigs ," for instance) the disharmony itself is a fixed/limited relation/system. If these points are drawn as obvious harmonies, they're still fixed/limited because they are joined.

Perhaps the gradient shifts imperceptibly, however, and appears to be obvious harmony or disharmony up close. I first began cogently considering the idea of "strange attractors" before I knew the term, before stumbling upon Adalaide Morris' essay, when in seriousness I began to study Gary Keenan's style of writing about two years ago. Our first online meetings were combative--I accused him of writing obliquely on purpose, of assembling mishmash into meaningless/useless things he called "poems"--and although I suppose that he and I are still not in complete alignment, his technique has fascinated me for what it can do. Here's a poem he posted at Eratosphere in early November '01: <u>Wrench</u> . The poem has a quality of wrenching expressions, associations, etc., as its argumentative/imagistic structure, and would appear to resolve into a fixed state at the ending if not for these associations. Perhaps not all the devices in the poem, taken individually as a dots of pointillism, are "strange attractors;" but as a whole, can you tell me how every association which seems to be blunt in the speaker's voice associates with the conclusion? One of the features of a "strange-attracting" system, I propose, would necessarily be the attraction between disparate but not opposite points of that system; another would be the attraction between each of these points and the system as a whole. I criticized this poem elsewhere, telling Gary that at some point, a poem's method becomes the meaning (it is so apparently disjointed; it's named "Wrench"); but now I'm thinking that each individual point in a "strangely attracted" system must be distinct, separate, fixed--as in the case of pointillism. So, a poem might contain individual fixed-point or limit-cycle systems but as a whole be "strangely attracting."

Curtis.

P.S. The problem I have with naming McHugh's poem "strangely attracting" is the fact that such a speaker would not phrase these associations so coyly (pointedly) during normal consideration/speech. Morris' essay on this subject has elsewhere the notion of hysterics as being a psychological system which is chaotic like the weather or stock market prices; Gary's voices often come across as being "hysterical" in one way or another.



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 07, 2002).]

[RCL]

Curtis, on the off chance you haven't seen it, one of the Toms posted a link to Paul Lake's essay that talks about fractals and the attractors you're discussing. On the accomplished members thread?

------------------
Ralph

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Thanks, Ralph; I'll look it up.

Curtis.

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Ralph,

Paul Lake's essay ought to be retitled, In Defense of Formal Verse. He's hijacked chaos theory for the purpose of asserting this:

Through parallelisms of syntax and similarities of metaphors and sounds, free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but with fewer rules and less feedback to amplify and vary its constituent elements, it generally fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling we find in the best formal verse. Drawn into being not so much by a strange attractor as by a series of provisional judgments and mechanical operations such as hitting return and space keys on a keyboard, free verse can only imitate the most superficial aspects of living forms like trees.

This summation of his essay is pitiful. He is careful elsewhere to point out asymmetry which exists in formal verse structures as being necessary to strange-attractors, but here, he's deriding free verse because it "fails to achieve the same degree of self-similarity and scaling we find in formal verse." I.e., according to Lake, meter and rhyme are the primary way of achieving similarity/asymmetry--indeed, that they are fundamental to a "strange attractor"-shaped system--and free verse ain't got 'em. It's interesting to note that Lake derides Pound in the essay, considering the association of Pound with H.D.

Lake's not entirely wrong, however. I agree that fixed-point and limit-cycle structures might exist within the total structure of a "strange attractor," so I agree with his interpretation of the workings of meter and rhyme in formal verse and say that formal verse is capable of creating systems which are "strangely attracting;" but I'd say he's way off base when he says that the symmetry and asymmetry between parts of a poem are examples of "strange attractors." In fact, the example in his essay of Craig Reynolds' "boids" is remarkably typical of any fundamentalist's argument: In that experiment, 3 rules had to be established to dictate the activity of the "boids!" I.e., these rules were fixed-points, so no wonder the "boids" were drawn into circles around those rules...and, as each "boid" was following rules shared by all, of course they'd flock together eventually into a fixed-point--consider rule #3: [each boid must] move toward a perceived center of mass of boids in its neighborhood along with an unnamed rule, the field--computer screen--must be finite. There's also the problem of designing "chance" encounters with a computer...I think Lake's point's not all b.s., because even in "strange attractor" systems, those systems are being shaped by "strange attractors," or points toward which the parts (and the whole) move, but these points need not necessarily be stable themselves.--Note also from the citation of Lake's essay above: free verse can sometimes attain isolated expressions of self-similarity in its parts and approximations of order in its overall design; but..." "Approximations of order?" Lake's argument against free verse is that it is not formal, ordered enough, period. How does this fit in with chaos theory? In fact, many chaologists would tell you that ordered structures occur spontaneously (as in Lake's description of the poet's writing process) within systems which are primarily chaotic: as "bubbles of order." Perhaps Lake wants us to believe that formal verse has "wrinkles of chaos" within the order in his mention of "asymmetry."--But these concepts of "symmetry" and "asymmetry" are looking at the structures too closely; they're seeing the individual points, not the forest; they're seeing fixed-point attractors and limit-cycle attractors.

I'd like to note, all these issues aside, that I don't think a poem must be built as a "strange-attracting" system primarily, or even have many "strange attractors," because the introduction of an audience will bring these to the poem. Is the poem merely the words on the page, or is it the poet-poem-auditor system? (Actually, I'm thinking it's both; i.e., that there are two systems, and these together form a third.)

Curtis.




[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited February 07, 2002).]