I'm having difficulty distinguishing Limited Fork Poetics from thoughts I've already had, methods I've already used. "The thing vs. the idea of the thing" and "independant thought." An independant thought is a desire I've had for a thought that is wholly my own, free from all influence. I grant that original ideas exist, unique to each individual, but nothing lacks influence from somewhere or something before. While exploring this thought, I've covered much of what is discussed in Limited Fork Poetics.
I've also explored the idea of the thing vs. the idea of the thing. Something exists wholly within itself. A tree exists and is essentially colorless to itself. We as humans, seeing in the spectrum we do grant this tree a different existence by looking at it. We create an idea of this thing in our head. We define it by characteristics that are merely existing within our brain. The poem (or poam) is often a search to define this "thing" and ends up being an "idea of the thing". Similar to the exploration that Wallace Stevens does in much of his poetry, especially his
Not Ideas about the Thing
but the Thing Itself
At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird's cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.
The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.
It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep's faded papier-mache . . .
The sun was coming from outside.
That scrawny cry-It was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,
Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.
and in his:
The Poem that took the place of a mountain There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
It is through these two texts, primarily
the poem that took the place of a mountain, that I access ideas of memory and perception, experience and reality. Simultaneously observing or percieving a 'thing' I create an idea of this 'thing' within my brain. When I attempt to convey this message I distort my 'idea of the thing', and am also hindered by the means in which I attempt to convey it, creating wholly an "idea of the idea of the original 'thing' ."
It seems to me that much of what we attempt to create in poetry (poems, Poams and poams), if not all, deals with this idea and that viewing it through various structures and folds can both simultaneously open new ideas and limit, or at least detract, from others.
