Revised Statement, May 4, 2000
The history of poetry in the 20th century is a narrative of innovation and synthesis. Throughout this century, the innovators have been poets who were able to make significant departures from their contemporaries by synthesizing the theory, poetics, and practice of their predecessors. The Surrealists synthesized the innovations of Symbolism and Dadaism; the Black Mountain School synthesized the innovations of Pound and the Objectivists; the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets synthesized the innovations of Black Mountain and the New York School.
In our time, the major tension in poetry is between the those who posit the traditional lyric subject and those who seek to un-subject poetry completely. This tension presents us with a set of poetries ripe for synthesis: the best poetry of our time should be a poetry that synthesizes objective and subjective methods of composition without falling prey, as Charles Wright says, to either the Scylla of confessionalism or the Charybdis of "mere" language. This poetry should be a synthesis of previous innovations and should make of that synthesis both a program and a method.
Poets and artists who synthesize (we think here of Schwitters, Cendrars, Eliot, Joyce, Man Ray, Pound, Ashbery, Bernstein, Warhol, Cornell, Acker, Picasso, and Burroughs) have always accumulated and reconstituted (not "represented") cultural material. For us, such non-subjective approaches to collecting and organizing the materials are simply the physical embodiment of the two legendary methods of composition: "creation" and "inspiration." The idea of "creation" is a misreading of the mind's facility for collecting, sifting, and reorganizing. And so is the idea of inspiration. Synthetic poetry takes collection and reconstitution as the only activities possible for the poet and celebrates them as fervently as the Romantics celebrated Genius.
As a group committed to writing this kind of poetry, we begin our investigations using the following method:
1. Using a chance operation, automatic writing, cut-up, random selection, or any other collection method, create a reservoir of words and phrases.
2. Arrange the reservoir into a draft of a poem, adding or neglecting whatever phrases or words you choose, using whatever formal organization you choose, or none. We call this draft an opportunity.
3. Take advantage of the opportunity by diving into the language and noting your responses to or associations with the given language. The recording of this interaction in the poem itself adds a layer of personal involvement in the language. Use the opportunity as a starting point from which to improvise. You may also reorganize or restructure if you wish.
4. Repeat #3 until finished.
The reservoir is the starting point, the poetic alpha, the beginning of the synthetic journey; it is the raw seed of potential, the material ground zero from which the universe of the poem is derived, the source of all linguistic and imagistic opportunities.
Crucially, the opportunity precedes the complete thought -- each opportunity is an incremental, improvised exploration of the world the poem is making, and of the information that world contains. In fact, many synthetic poems may not even aspire towards a "complete thought," whatever that may be. Synthetic poetry denies the idea of the intentional premise -- that the poet, for example, thinks "I want to write a poem about how great love is," then with that in mind assembles the poem. We think that most often the successful poem begins with a found line, word, sound, or image. "Found" should be taken to mean "by some method other than creation by force of will." Synthetic poetry begins with the words and phrases, and the poet assembles the poem from the given language.
The above ideas, of course, require that every poem undergo multiple revisions, or what we like to call layers. There is no such thing as a synthetic poem written by sitting down and putting pen to paper in one fell swoop.
The practice of synthetic composition seeks to create in the poem an "intellectual and emotional complex" constructed over a range of moments during the various layers of composition. That said, we should point out that linguistic machines and heartfelt emotion are not mutually exclusive; they can be synthesized to work together in the poem. Our interest in writing poems which start in places other than the heart, soul, ego, or imagination manifests itself in poems that start with language -- mere language, if there is such a thing -- and which then integrate the activity of the poet's mind by recording the poet's interaction and relationship with those bits of language in the course of composition. Once the mind is engaged, emotion, imagination, etc. can't help but follow along and get tangled up in the mix.
Synthetic poems seek to resist two opposing poles: the dry intellectualism of most L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and the weepy self-absorption and -exposure of most post-confessional, mainstream poetry. At the one extreme, we don't see much value in some of those lumps of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E beyond the primarily political aesthetic behind them. Many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, we think, have privileged the process over the product. That's understandable in the postmodern context, but we'd rather equate process and product, since it is the product that engages readers. On the other hand, we're sick of post-confessional junk food. To those poets who privilege emotion, "intensity," "sincerity," and the Self, we say: Words don't belong to you. Your "self" doesn't belong to you. You didn't invent them. Don't treat them like possessions or loved ones. Poems aren't your children.
Synthetic poetry is, perhaps, a kind of meditative poetry, the type of poetry that uses language differently from the way it is used in song , speech, or confession. The best meditative poetry is a dialect/dialectic of musication, association, abstraction, and abbreviation. But isn't it possible to use these strategies more acutely? Meditative poems are allowed to address the spectacular in the mundane and their language therefore tends to glow, but there is also a kind of solemnity and quiet that rules these poems, since for the most part their dialect comes from the languages of prayer, philosophy, and theology. Isn't it possible to write super-meditative poems which are mired neither in those humanistic fields, nor in issues of representation, but which consist of language from all over the mind -- everyday language, conversational language, religious language, scientific terms, names, snippets, talk -- to make poems that participate in life the way televisions and cars and books do?
As synthetic writers, we're working for a poetry that moves beyond Romanticism, Modernism, and even Postmodernism to arrive at the place where ego and the desire to escape ego work together; where the artificial and the organic are two sides of the same coin; where the imaginative and the representational cleave to one another; where collection and innovation complement each other; where word and world bounce off of each other and echo each other -- that is, a poetry that is synthetic both in the sense of not appearing naturally, of being a "made" thing, and in the sense of a coming together of everything that has gone before.
Synthetic poetry is both representational and abstract, reportorial and meditative. We want to write poems which neither reflect nor are about, poems which are pieces of the world and of the mind, the world's mind and the mind's world. We want to take advantage of the incipient energies of modern language, both fractured and continuous. The language constantly renews itself, and so should poetry. Synthetic poetry is full of clarity and light, but can be difficult and shadow-ridden; it borrows (language, images, objects), but it reorganizes, puts everything it borrows, Cornell-like, into a new context and gives it new life; it thinks, but not to the extent of being intent-ridden. The scatological, the scientific, and the commercial are as worthy of poetry as is a landscape. If you want to call that surreal, we don't mind. But don't take it to mean we dislike landscapes.
Brian Clements
Elana Abernathy
Joe Ahearn
Michael Puttonen
Nathalie LaMont
Ray Bianchi
November 1999-May 2000
Dallas TX