from/for A.C. Evans
Salvation. Oh, yes, I know I am a spiritual flaneur,
a damned poet and (eye roll) a ‘lost poet’ and
(eye roll) a ‘lost soul’. To be damned is to be modern,
absolutely human once and for all. The human condition
evolves too fast yet the horizon of change is fear,
and the closer we are to the horizon the less we care
about rhyme or reason: blank verse for blank reason.
And that is why traditional models of perfectibility
or divine purpose can be seen as a promethean affront
to the established order or as a way of repossessing everything
stolen from us by the Enchanter, a neo-shamanistic antithesis
of enlightenment and salvation. I know the difference between
fact and fiction, between sleep and waking, between dream
and reality, between consciousness and the unconscious,
between inner and outer space. It is too late to get unreal,
grounding poetic practice in the ontological matrix
dissociates poetry from cultural-linguistic literary discourse,
from the dreary, enervating world of fake self-referential
experimentalists obsessed with all those innate processes
of inner integration and perspective. The poem itself appears
as a by-product of therapy, propaganda or entertainment.
As I penetrate the archaic heritage and the archetypal forest
of symbols, it is the compulsive activity of inspiration,
the process of self-discovery, that is the prime factor:
it is this that dissolves those artificial barriers between
the enigmatic sphinx and the ancient alchemists. Beauty
is invoked by the transformation of the material of creation;
the essence of my poetic practice is active imagination.
Only language remains. Everything depends on language.
Being is literally indefinable in extra-linguistic terms,
my creativity is an innate psycho-active phenomenon.
I write certain words across blank pages of empty space,
consign metaphysics to oblivion. What has this to do with
oblivion? What has this to do with me? Everything.
The closer we are to the horizon the less we care.
© Rupert M Loydell