Scatter / ALLEN FISHER

ABOVE:
Scattered, Allen Fisher. 

Painting 2010




Scatter, as from an unextinguish’d hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawaken’d earth

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like wither’d leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

The trumpet of a prophecy!

One letter separates “scatter” from “shatter.” Before the scattering, something has broken into smithereens (cf. the Breaking of the Vessels), but in Romanticism those particles radiate light and heat and consciousness. 

Poems, a metonym for words, a metaphor for “pollen” (Novalis), bracketed between embers or flames and seeds, with poet as gleaner in fields and meadows, take on the asymmetry of the fragment in relation to an overwhelming consequence outside the aesthetic frame and into the community. Perfume of the flowers (Laetitia Landon)—evanescent particles, “send forth odours with the faint, soft voices / Rising from hidden streams, when all is still” (Felicia Hemans). The poet, finding him- or herself outside the world of culture, beyond the “middle ground,” facilitates a near random movement of generative particles. A few may germinate as poems, or start a fire. Poems generate life beyond themselves and in ways and in places no poet can fully predict. Poesis in its radical intention is centrifugal.

Scatter in Shelley is a petition or command for a next stage in which poem fulfils itself in its effect, which may be a renewal either outside or inside poetry. In the former a reader shifts the paradigm; in the latter a new poem or its continuum in a slightly different register may occur (e.g. serial poetry).

The trumpet of a prophecy!

Text by Jeffrey Robinson, from Romantic Manifestos Manifest (2024)

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