hypothetical post*

Robert Kocik
from Overcoming Fitness
ecopoetics journal, pp 62 – 74

Imagination. I would like to find out more about imagination. Stephen Batchelor has one chapter about Imagination in “Buddhism without Beliefs.” Other than that, I don’t run into much discussion of Imagination in the meandering I’ve done in poetry or religion or philosophy.

I experience a mixture of hilarity and discomfort from reading this piece. This mixture signals a work of Imagination. It feels familiar, reminding me especially of Mary Daly’s Wickedary and Ben Marcus’s Notable American Women.

I like this piece. I want to read it again and again. I had to look up some words. Even words I thought I knew the meaning of: ineluctable and plenitude (actually “implenitudinist” but that was not in the dictionary). The premise is so twisted that words become suspicious.

I like the leaps into the “Key Words.” It adds a sense of depth. The form is interesting also. Not exactly familiar as a poetic form, being a list of definitions followed by a string of Key Words. Why should this be considered poetry, whereas any ordinary manual or a directory would not be? It’s the imaginative energy that lifts it off the ground.

Excerpt chosen because it uses the s word (“solipsism”):

POETRY PRIVATIZATION DETOX

DEFINITION Like commerce, creativity has also been to a great extent ‘privatized’. Ward for non self-interested prosody. Poetry subsumed in other acts.

KEY WORDS poetic poultice jacket, civic solipsism

You would have to think hard about some of these non-existent things to get a grip on them, because everything is backwards. But if you think too hard about them, they might disappear. This mind bending sensation is pleasant.

And yet this kind of thing is all too familiar. Coming up with gadgets, drugs, mechanisms, solutions, and documentation for problems we didn’t know we had.

Robert Kocik also has a website, in collaboration with Daria Faïn, called Prosodic Body. “Our mission is to find and inform through delight. Real research is bliss.” Is it research or is it imagination?

*lifted from Overcoming Fitness. I felt free, because “Any part of this writing may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission.”