ABOVE/BELOW
Event Horizon by derek beaulieu and Rhys Farrell
“Reason,” says Blake, “is the outward bound and circumference of energy.” Reason here equates to form, not an abstraction imposed upon a content but something of the mind that responds to an otherwise unshaped material forcefield. Circumference is fluid, pliable, a sunrise of mind, the root and blossom of systems of thought.
These poets seek to discover the divine within the mundane: “Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge. . . . It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought” (Shelley). Extent, dimension, space and distance, the conventional character of the divine and heavenly, collapses through poetry into the proximate. “My business is circumference,” says Emily Dickinson. And Philip Sidney two centuries earlier, the poet “goes hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging within the zodiac of his own wit." The poet’s words, says Marina Tsvetaeva, come from a long way off. But “circumference” compresses form as congruent with visionary horizon.
derek beaulieu writes:
Event Horizon
Through others we become ourselves. Writing is a public act; we must learn to share our work with a readership: see our work as worth sharing, our voices as worth hearing. Release your grip. Writing builds community through gift and exchange, through consideration and generosity. Devour films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. It’s not where you take things from—it’s where you take them to. Don’t protect your artwork, give it away. Embrace the unexpected. Encourage circulation over circumference. Generosity is always sustainable. Just as logos continuously wash over us, let poetry do the same; part of the written landscape we occupy. Create reflections and distortions that work to keep poetry current, in flow, a fluidity refusing to solidify around power. Create the liquid and languid; flow and gather, drip and congeal, slide off the page. Embody the immediate present, the place where poetry is using the language of contemporary existence. Write not just in the margins, but in the kerning. Imagine a poetry that learns from the internet, learns from mass media, and starts to assume different forms of distribution: the website, the tweet, the post, the logo, the advertisement, the targeted ad. Create the slogans for imaginary businesses and promote a poetic dreamscape of alphabetic strangeness. Poems are the street signs, the signage, the advertising logos for the shops and corporations that are just beyond reach. Writing is not about something; it is that something itself. Remarkable words with letters bigger than aqueducts ringed with quicksilver, flamboyant and shocking. Poetry is not the beautiful expression of emotive truths; it is the archaeological rearrangement of the remains of an ancient civilization.
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