There Where You Do Not Think to Be Thinking

Poetry. THERE WHERE YOU DO NOT THINK TO BE THINKING speaks from a stock of some 26 "characters," numinous "objects," oddly configured "abstractions" one for each letter of the English alphabet which I imagine as wildly heterological metonyms to display the emergence of all that comes to Appear. In its own terms, the poem literally scries or conjures itself into existence and offers "emergence" as a figure for the productive generosity, as it were, of Being. But the subjectivity of poetry and its obsession with its own nature thereby seems to flip: it is reality that solicits the meaning of poetry, not the other way round. Reality subsumes the very intuitions that it fosters, projecting itself and the writer and reader together onto an intransitive itinerary of pondering, the exit from which can only be Discovery Itself." from Charles Stein in conversation with Derek Owens"