Duane Locke lives by an ancient oak, an underground stream, and an osprey’s home in rural Lakeland, Florida.
Present: A 400 page book of his poems, YANG CHU’s POEMS, published in April, 2009 by the Canadian publisher, Crossing Chaos. Can now be ordered, Crossing Chaos on Search Engine, then click on Catalogue, then Yang Chu, then Order Now, pay by Pay Pal.
Recent: Featured poet and Interviewed (23pp.) in Eviscerator Heaven, #4
Past: 6,334 poems published in print magazines and e zines.
The entire issue, Vol. 10, No, 1 of The Bitter Oleander contains his poems
And 92pp. Interview.
Poems and Interview in Mukul Dahal's Pen Himalaya (Nepal)
For further information, click “Duane Locke” on Google Search, 465,000 entries.
Also is in Who’s Who in America (Marquis).
Duane Locke discusses poetry, philosophy, and the subject of his current book Yang Chu's Poems, with Counterexample Poetics editor, Felino Soriano.
Felino Soriano: Duane, I would like to begin in regards to your philosophical nature, which is evident to the philosophically discerning; what form of reality has philosophy facilitated in your existence?
Duane Locke: The singularity of the word “Reality” preconditions misconceptions, misinterpretations, and encourages the substitution of fantasies, illusions—even hallucinations for actualities. If the word “Realities” had replaced the word “Reality” in philosophic and also popular discourse, there would have been less temptation to go astray and posit, impose the absolutism of a non-existent that diminishes and even destroys the existent.
The word “Reality” carries with it as connotation, as well as denotation in many schools asserting metaphysical attributions, a sense of a oneness as constituting and founding the basic structure of being and becoming, and results in believing there is a Neo-Platonic One or a reasonable facsimile. This Neo-Platonic One, developed from Plotinus’ extension and interpretation of Plato’s ideas (forms) and Plato’s concept of the demiurge in his Timeaus, was modified and appropriated by Proclus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, ultimately became converted into Christian doctrine by Augustine.
This Neo-Platonic One, still very much with us, and has many masks and manifestations as in the first principle, the absolute other, the great spirit, the anima mundi, cosmic consciousness, all transcendent deities, Gnostic and otherwise—all those other than the Spinozaean type of god. This One even appears, secularized, In Hegel Zeitgeist and Husserl’s transcendent signifier. It has been replaced in Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger.
This much damaged, dearranged, and diluted Neo-Platonic One dominates the thinking about reality of ordinary and commonplace people, the street-wise foundationist who still believe there is a supreme substance transcendent over appearances, the Buddhist maya. Such a belief privileges the general over the radical singularity of the concrete particular.
I favor the radical singularity of the concrete particular.
I privilege the sensible over the intelligible, but in poetic discourse where language is supreme, thus creating a linguistic reality that when the sense image through contextual configuration overcomes its appearance as a reductive sensible and transforms the dichotomy of sensible and intelligible to become a sensible-intelligible then there is great, authentic and worthwhile poetry.
So many modern, and especially postmodern thinkers, dismiss Plato and even consider his ideal ( conceptual realism) tradition pernicious, but what is most attacked as an untruth and dangerous to eudemonia is what Aristotle interpreted to be in Plato, and dismisses and derogates what he, Aristotle, thought Plato believed. Even Anti-Platonism even extends to poetry when Ives Bonnefoy writes his Anti-Platon, and prefaces his poems with a quotation from Heraclitus. But there is another aspect of Plato presented in his Republic that rarely enters into serious philosophic discourse or graduate student’s beer-blurred intellectual conversations. Plato considers the geometric diagram of a triangle not to be an existent reality but only an maginative aid to discussing actual triangles, and if theological discourse was considered in this manner, we would a new perspective on a segment of asserted reality, what is considered a concrete (although spiritual in essence) reality would not be considered a reality, but a figuration to speak of a reality whose complexity and profundity defies our limited language.
I have followed the above figuration approach, the imaginative aid approach, in my appropriation of popular and prevalent language, which I term the language of lies, to create a poetic expression. My poetic expression has secularized the theological intentions of Dionysius the Areopagite’s semiotics. This Dionysius’ linguistics was based on the alterity of a God, but mine is based on the belief that authentic and important poetry renders what is called the unsayable and the unknowable and follows the Dionysian principle of saying, “God is good, God in not Good, God is a hyper good.” So my words should be read in a similar manner, “A Cotton Stainer is a Cotton Stainer, is not a Cotton Stainer, is a hyper Cotton Stainer.” By this approach to language, the illusion of facticity is abolished along with elimination of binary opposition of subject and object, and thus a language that expresses subject-object fusion in consciousness through intense emotive involvement comes into existence.
I might insert that in our textbooks Dionysius the Areopagite is often said to be influenced by Plato, but I think otherwise. He was influenced by Neo-Platonism.
As for “reality” and “realities” and their relation to our feelings, our emotive actuality, the fact of a chair, say a Piero Lissoni chair, whose facticity in popular discourse would stimulate the existent item being called a reality. Such designations are imprecise, disembodied, and trivial. Of course, most popular discourse, ordinary, everyday conversations, is imprecise, disembodied, trivial, and falsities, thus a language of lies that is spoken regularly and daily by the majority of mankind. “Reality” at this level has no emotional underpinnings or auras. Facts at this level are worthless and betake of the illusory, as Nietzsche said that there are no facts, only interpretations.
As for the realities of a Piero Lissoni chair, these are brought into existence by the senses, the emotions, and even conceptions, but the degrees of reality in realities is not experienced through cognition, but through sensuous and emotional involvement. The more we are sensuously and emotionally involved with an existent, the more real it becomes to us. A conceptual involvement creates a ghostly, apparitional fantasy as one of the possible realities.
The majority of mankind only experience conceptual involvement, even in their love or sex life, and thus experience only the reality of an apparitional fantasy and never know the experience of a higher order of reality, the higher interpretations. Most people live life of the living death and never the higher order of real life.
Facticity is minor and worthless; a higher degree of reality is major and worthwhile, and can be through authentic life become a rapture, an ecstasy, and the summum bonum.
If I have never heard of a Piero Lissoni chair, it has no reality for me, even if exists as being for sale in a Moma catalogue which I have never seen, even if it exists an art object I have never seen. Factual existence has no meaning for an individual unless it has some relationship to an individual’s life.
A personal relationship and its intensity determines the degree of reality that the item or a person has for me. If I look at the chair, it may increases its reality by being a source of the experience of beauty and its gratifications. If I sit in the chair, it may become more real to my by providing a place to relax tired muscles. If someone I have loved sits in the chair, its reality still more increase. Sense and emotional responses are making chair increases in its degree of being one of my realities in this world.
When T. S. Eliot states in his Four Quartets, that mankind cannot stand too much reality, I think he means an otherworldly reality, a religious reality, a not-here realty. It is very much like in the Greek religion when a mortal cannot bear to look upon the bedazzlement of Zeus and ignites to be ashes upon beholding such splendor. Zeus has to have his love affairs in absolute darkness or with a blindfolded love.
I am only concerned with the Eliot’s reality, the not-here reality, intellectually, conceptually and not existentially. My concern is with the here realities, not the not here reality. Just as I am concerned with the terrestrial illumination when the earth is finally seen, discovered through intensified corporeal perception and becomes one of the realities through the personal involvement of love. I am only concerned with celestial illumination as curiosities and evidence of misdirected life.
I often repeat along with Rainer Maria Rilke, “Earth, my darling.”
FS: Your stating “Factual existence has no meaning for an individual unless it has some relationship to an individual’s life” dictates the definitional philosophy of the theoretical posit of a needed tangible, sense-related, a type of empirical understanding of an object that affects the life in myriad ways. The subjective reality of one can indeed produce a falsity for another, and a philosophical problem lies within dictating or disputing a universality contained within the this specific dichotomy.
This leads me to, which is a grand subject: your photography. Specifically, (but of course, please discuss in all your reliable aspects) I’m speaking of three brands of your photography that has defined your finding beauty in unconventional matters and mannerisms, and perhaps has paralleled your poetry in this fashion: the importance of your “Trash Alley Art”, “Surphotography”, and “Sacred” photography, that of the beautified insects, some of which are labeled with pejorative preconceptioned ideas. As a follow-up question, you have changed locations within Florida; how has change in this fashion affected your photography subjects?
DL: As to the three phrases of my photography, Alley and Other Trash, Surphotography, and the Sacred, since I moved to Lakeland from Tampa in 2003, I think, or it might been earlier or later, the Alley and Other Trash is now obsolete.
Its obsolescence was not due to the dwindling of inspirations, but the absence of subject matter, trash. Lakeland is a clean city and trash is a rarity. In my daily walks over Lakeland, I could find no trash. My friend even me carried to sections of the city where the lower income and quasi-outcasts live, as the poor are rumored to be untidy, but the small amount of debris that I discovered was inferior trash, it had not been aged, as has the trash on vacant lots in Tampa. Lakeland did not have the quantity or quality of trash that encourages the creation of photographic art.
When I lived in Tampa trash was abundant. My photographic art flourished in Tampa. In fact it was the trash on the sidewalk in front of my house on Jefferson Street in Tampa, and the trash tossed in my yard by the anonymous that initiated my becoming a photographer of trash.
When living on Jefferson Street in Tampa, every morning I would find my sidewalk covered with broken beer bottles, broken cheap wine bottles, miscellaneously shaped whiskey bottle, and other varieties of debris. It seemed as if no one ever slept, except me, in my neighborhood, and there were festivities all night. This section was something of a poor man’s Las Vegas, for every night black jack was played on the hoods of parked cars, And dice were tossed against telephones poles and fences. There were even scanty clad dancing girls.
The next street over held the record as being the street with the largest crime rate in Tampa, and I think my street was second. Being first and second in crime is quite achievement in Tampa where crime where crime is prevalent and abundant. A man across the street from me was murdered due to some mishap in the drug business, and two in the next block were murdered and thrown into a vacant lot.
One morning as I was sweeping away the broken glass and other debris, I noticed in the pile there was parts that had esthetic patterns which made emotive statements as does abstract and non-objective paintings. Some of these spatial arrangement and color combination were very small, so with close-up photography, I began to photograph. Soon, I had a collection of art masterpieces, and I began to exhibit and had one-man shows.
Of course, my photos were realistic, in the sense I photographed what is called “real object,” the tops of beer cans, fast food wrappers, smashed hubcaps, tossed away dresses, But I photographed up close so that the objects I photographed are not recognizable And have the appearances of abstract art in which light, line, color, mass and textures communicate an esthetic experience rather the recognition of a familiar object.
Now my trash photos rest in my closet, and are rarely seen.
Since the proper type of trash that could be transformed into equivalents of abstract paintings that was plentiful in Tampa and easy to find was scarce in Lakeland, almost none existent, the clean city of Lakeland forced to find other subject matter than trash for my photography. I developed what I call surphotography . In trash photography, I found beauty by a selection of and close up of what pre-exists. In surphotography I do not have a pre-existence, but have to create an existence. I usually start with a failed photo, and use various computer devices to select and shape colors. It usually take me a long time to create the type of color existence that is emotively moving to my endowed and trained esthetic perception.
Many of my surphotos have been used both for magazine and book covers. Also many have been featured in e zines.
In summary, my creation of trash photography was like the creation of the world by Aristotle’s God or prime mover, as the creation was from pre-existent material; but my surphotograpy method were more akin to Yahweh’s creation, ex nihilo.
My Sacred photography is equivalent to nature photography, as it consists primarily of close-ups of insects. I also do larger objects such as birds, lizards, and one of my favorite subjects, snakes. But mostly, it is insects, butterflies, moths, dragonflies, beetles, leafhoppers, spittlebugs, thorn bugs, grasshoppers, katydids, etc.
I deem these insects sacred, holy, due to my experiential involvement with their lives and beings. In my connectedness with these manifestations of life, I have felt a rapport, a rapture, a joie de vivre, an expansion and exaltation. I could call this one-way communion with a here an ecstasy, but I avoid the word because of its earlier meaning of being out of the body, for in my experience of the here, I am fully corporeal, I am in the body for one of the rare times in a human life. Most people, the slave mentalities, have never been in their bodies, never been corporeal, even when engaged in sex.
This relatedness to insects, this this-worldly mystical experience in being marvelous, superexcellent, this relationship to a here that occurs in real life and is an actual experience, is similar to the visionary, other-worldly experience of traditional saints and traditional mystics as reported in their personal accounts. I have read so many accounts of saints talking to or touching their God. Well, I have found a similar splendor in earthly love that the mystics and saints have found in an unearthly love. The difference is that the mystics and saints respond to a Not here, and I respond to a here.
I revere insects because of my attraction to alterity, my love of otherness and difference.
I do not approach nature as does a biologist. I am not interested in collecting information and “facts” (biologists’ interpretations). I go to insects for involvement and the concrete experience of having an actual contact with alterity.
My photos are mementos of closeness to something that I find sacred.
I never send out my sacred pictures for publication. I do distribute them among friends, and one has been used a cover for a poetry book.
So many misleading interpretations have grown up around the signifier “Nature” that I would like to expand the comments concerning this designation that I made during the previous discussion of my nature photography. Many of the interpretations that mislead from my interpretation have become orthodoxies and traditional, thus being orthodox and traditional are false. The human race lives by lies. There is the theory that Nature is an enemy to one of its singular species biologically classified as homo sapiens and must be dominated, domesticated, truncated. “Useless oak hammocks, “wild salt marshes,” “redwood forests” are enemies of progressive, post-industrial, post-late capitalism human beings, and must be converted into bareness upon which can be built a construction that can be acquired though a mortgage and thus let the abstraction money make abstract money from the abstraction money, thus preserving the fantasies and phantasmagoria of a social order, a civilization of monstrosities, in which exploitation, alienation, simulation, untruth, triviality, ennui, boredom, no-thingness, and slave mentalities prevail.
Our civilization of monstrosities has resulted both in the destruction of the earth, the destruction of essents that can overpower and exalt, and in the destruction of the potentiality to be an authentic human being instead of becoming a human lickspittle revering the less-than-mediocre, the nullities, the self-destructive, the Trojan horse.
My approach to nature is neither traditional religious or traditional scientific. Both approaches reduces nature from a here to a not here. Religious views have subordinate nature as an essent and the thingness of nature to being a creation of a supernatural, an extra-spatial temporal ultimately unknowable, not here existence, that put on this Earth a “superior existence” to have dominion over nature and to posses a special essence can be separated from his corporeality and animal similarity called the immortal soul which is not shared with other life that is deemed inferior. A past and prevalent, primarily medieval religious doctrine was that nature was a “Book of Creatures” one did not become involved with nature for itself, for its being here, but because it was to teach about a not here.
The scientific approach is similarly dangerous to nature as an essent and its thingness. The Scientific, instead of subordinating nature as a sensible real to a supernatural realm, subordinates nature to cognition. The Scientific in their search for underlying substratum have denigrated appearances into non-existential abstractions, that which can only be conceptually and not empirical or sensuously grasped, when I go into weeds and find a gold and turquoise leafhopper, I go to become involved with this leafhopper, to love the leafhopper, and I do not go as a biologists to gather information that results in knowledge about this leafhopper. I go to participate in the concrete existence of the leafhopper, not to produce abstract statements about its existence. I seek an emotive relationship, not a cognitive one of gathering information.
FS: Your poetry demonstrates your hyper-discerning eye, as it relates to your physical and philosophical surroundings. Within the wide spectrum of surroundings, the created sense of self must be found to acquire our brand of reality, and realize its critical function. Leaning toward this type of reality, the surroundings reality, is leading me to ask, in regards to your forthcoming (from Crossing Chaos) 400 pages Yang Chu’s Poems, which the editor designates as metaphysical, modern zen writings—how accurate is this wonderful definition of these specific poems? Also, these descriptions “metaphysical” and “zen”—if one exists, what constitutes the stipulation to be labeled these, and if accurate, what physical, philosophical or other functions do they contemplate within you?
DL: The Zen aura of my Yang Chu poems is due to my desire to restore the dignity and profundity to Zen that has been degraded and dilutedthrough the commodification of American clowns, posing as disciples, commentators, novelists and poets.
My Zenism is due to my personal inwardness, a constitution of my nature, my individual
approach to life, and not due to my becoming a member of any established or official order.
Several years ago a selection of my poems were translated into Japanese and published in Japan. An article that accompanied the publication suggested that my poems revealed that I had the natural temperament of a Zenist. Perhaps, this was a true observation of my
nature.
So the Zenism of my poem is due to my natural inwardness, and not to my belonging to any order.
My forthcoming book (April, 09), the 400 page Yang Chu’s Poems, published by Crossing Chaos, had been called “Modern Zen meandering,” “Avant Zen,” and Hugh Fox has commented “Locke in a very real way “reinvents” Zen meditativeness.”
I would accept the designation of my poems in Yang Chu’s Poems as being modern, Avant, reinvented Zen as being a perspicacious, intelligent, sensitive, and accurate observation. I most gladly accept the appellations of being of an avant zenist, a neo-zenists, or a postmodern zenists, or a neo-postmodern zenists.
But I am certainly not a Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts Zenists.
The zen atmosphere of my poems that was derived out a of a natural and constituted endowment was encouraged by attraction to Chinese, Japanese, Buddhists poets. Dogen is one person who lived for whom I have reverence and admiration. There are very few who elicit such responses from me. I glance over my shoulder and see in my bookcase, the Shobogenzo, the Eihei Koroku, and a number of books of Dogen’s poems.
I have always had a strong admiration of Koans as a corrective to the distortions and prevarications of the Western rational and logical mind.
But the zen influence on my Yang Chu poems was modified, and reappropriated by many other influences, the Sufi tradition of Rumi, Hafiz, and Lalla, and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Meleau-Ponty, and Martin Heidegger. There were hundreds of poets that influenced me from Enheduanna and her Inanna poems on down to the present day.
As for Yang Chu, who served as my persona, my mouthpiece, my Socrates or my expressive vehicle or narrator for these poems of mine that he did not write or would not have written if he had been a poet, was an actual living Taoist philosopher, who flourished circa 300 BC. He might be called an avant Taoist, or said to have reinvented or even invented Taoistism. He was called a renegade Taoist, and said to have distinct philosophical views from other Taoists, Lao Tzu, Yang Chu, and Chuang Tzu.
Although a force in his time, he has faded to obscurity today. His one extant work is The Garden of Pleasure, a book that probably Democritus, Epicurus, and Lucretius would have admired. The book is now easily available and is free. It has been recorded by Libervox and a printed version can be downloaded from the internet. The translation of both are by Anton Forke.
My attraction to Yang Chu was that he is reputed to be “the discovery of the body.” I have always felt the American Mind was appalling, ignorant of the corporal, and misunderstood, misinterpreted, and misused the body. This ignorance, this misrepresentation, and distortion of the nature and function of body has been reinforced by many religious sects, Playboy magazine, pornography, and Nudist colonies.
Blake’s “human form divine” has been denigrated by American popular and prevalent beliefs, as well as by the exceeding popularity of the dirty joke.
Also Yang Chu does not posit as a truth the lie of the binary opposition of body and soul, with the soul being privileged over the body since it a self-existing separate substance that is immortal and not subject to death as is the body. Yang finds what is called “a soul” to be a function of the body--not a distinct essence, or the substance that is imprisoned in transient and degraded corporeality.
My attraction for Yang Chu is similar to my attraction to Maurice Merleau-Ponty who asserts that human existence is carnal, but this his carnality has never been understood. Instead of trying to understand carnality, it has been degraded or trivialized. As Merleau-Ponty implies the body is neither subject or object, not res extensa or res cogito. The body is interiority and exteriority, subjectivity and objectivity. Neither reducible to the other. The body is an entre-deux.
In my use of Yang Chu as a spokesman, I never try to duplicate his personal beliefs, but transforms his beliefs or others into the texture and structure of my poems. My poems are personal appropriations and not exposition of other philosophies. Perhaps, a Zen attitude, mixed with a Taoist, a Sufi, the Dagara tribe of West Africa, a Nietzschean, Merleau-Pontyean, Martin Heidiggean attitude, prevails.
I will close by quoting from Yang Chu’s circa 300 BC book, The Garden of Pleasure:
“Dead people are not concerned whether their bodies are buried in coffins, cremated, dumped in water, or in a ditch, or whether the body is dressed in fine clothes. What matters most is that before death strikes one lives his life to the fullest.” “Life is full of suffering, and its chief purpose is pleasure. There is no god and no after-life; men are the helpless puppets of the blind natural forces that made them…….. .”
FS: You stated use of Yang Chu as a spokesman for this collection of poems, the Yang Chu’s poems. In your investigation into Chu, his dominant philosophical disposition guaranteeing your want to embody, in a way of a current, but poetical Chu, disavowing the apparitional quality that has been used to channel interpretations of past poets in some current writing; in transforming his beliefs into poetic bodies, how much of your own philosophical texture entered into, and intertwined with what Yang Chu embodied as a philosopher? And, to augment this question, how important are writing series of poems to you? Before this current Yang Chu series, you have written several others, such as “E Mail to Damniso Lopez”, “Poem for My One-Legged Lover, the Wine Glass”, “Movie Script”, “Philosophical Visitation”, among many, many others. What about poetic series motivates such a large output from you?
DL: Since the extant writings of the reputed actual Yang Chu are so few, only a few pages, there is not much philosophy available with which one could intertwined his own views. Since my philosophy as it become embodied in the sound texture and artistic expressionisms of the poems is more a feeling, an emotional response than a Systematized, logically, rational construction. In poems language changes from truth assertions, statements, to truth presentation through sound and figuration , configurations of imagery from other than conceptual cognition to the reception of resonations, emanations, and feelings that are beyond the classification systems of the scientific mind, the psychologists. My “Yang Chu’s Poems” is not a philosophical disquisition or even a philosophical poem as Lucretius’ De rerum natura, as he expounds philosophies of Leucippus, Democritus, and Epricurus. My poems are not philosophical even in a Dantean sense. Dante’s La commedia divina had a medieval system of scholastic philosophy that was fixed and traditionally sanctioned. Also, as a foundation my poems do not have a stable and popularly accepted tradition as do The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman or John Milton’s Paradise Lost. My poems are anti-foundationists and anti-meta-narrative. My poems are this-worldly and terrestrial mystical involvement with what is here.
I have not the least interest in creating a neo-spiritual artistic universe as Kandinsky did in his painting, an artistic reality that hovers above hereness to become anti-material and abstract reality, but my concern with this-worldly hereness and finding a language to express hereness and my involvement with hereness. The naïve and ignorant who called my poems “abstract” do not understand “abstraction” or my poems. Very few people understand what they are talking about when they use the word “abstract.”
I would surmise, one can never be certain of their influences, that the philosophers most influential on my “Yang Chu’s Poems” were Friederich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
But I would not discount the influence of Dogen or Ryokan.
I feel a strong affinity with Heidegger’s, not Derrida’s, deconstruction of Western philosophy, the Platonic-Cartesian tradition, the Buddhists’ non-dual perception. With Nietzsche, I strongly feel we need a transvaluation of all our beliefs and what we accept as truth.
Also, I was writing in an age, the post-postmodern age, in which the intellectual atmosphere is srill pervaded with the somewhat new type of thinking of Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jean Baudillard, etc. Some of their thoughts might have unawarely or even awarely crept into my poems, But not so much as thoughts-in-themselves but thoughts that were instrumental in forming my feelings, my emotive responses to being in this world that resulted in the engenderment of language of my poems.
I just remembered before the commencement of the writing of these poems, I had just read all the books then available by Richard Rorty.
The fictional writers I was reading at this time were Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, Umberto Eco, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf and their writings might have had an influence.
The main reason I selected Yang Chu, a radical Taoist philosopher who flourished three hundred years before Jesus, the founder along with Paul, of Christianity, was born, was his rejection of the binary opposition of soul and body, in which the former is privileged over the latter. I have always been emotionally opposed to binary logic, and think that the structuralist Levi-Strauss made a grave error when he imposed this appropriation from Saussure on anthropological understanding.
As I have stated many times, I think most of all popular and prevalent beliefs are lies. People, for centuries, have been speaking a language of lies, and the purpose of the poets to take this language of lies that the people, transform it by some means, into a language of truth.
Now as to my objections to binary thinking-- using the binaries, body-soul, as an example: The naïve talk as if reality actually corresponds with their statements about reality, and actually, their statements, “their truths” are only approximations of what they are talking about, and in most cases, people with their imprecision and vagueness do not know what they are talking about. I would say that most people talking about “body,” really don’t understand what constituted the totality of the body, and are completely ignorant of the history of the meaning of the word soul as it was has been used throughout Western thought from the PreSocratics on downward, and the people talking about “soul” know even less about the complex and profound meaning of the concepts corresponding to soul in oriental thinking. There is no “body” as it is popularly understood; there is no soul as it is popularly understood. The statements I just made were the thoughts that I attribute to Yang Chu, and thus my choice of Yang Chu as a protagonist for my poems. These thoughts are what form the emotional responses of Yang Chu in my poems.
Now, the philosophical implications of emotional responses might be those of the 300 BC philosopher Yang Chu, or they may be mine. Sometimes the philosophical implications arising from the emotive responses are not even personally mine. They are artistic creations and are often the opposite from what I personally believe. Shakespeare certainly did not personally believe the philosophical implications that could be deduced from the emotive lives of Iago, Othello, and Desdemona.
John Keats’ “Negative Capability” also applies to a philosophically inclined poet.
Yang Chu is a spokesman, he speaks, but he does not necessarily speak the philosophy of the actual 300BC Yang Chu, or even my philosophy. Although the philosophical influences on me quasi-determined what my poet Yang Chu spoke, if not fully. But on the other hand, if I had had different philosophical influences, he would have perhaps spoken differently.
Now as to my writing of poetic series, I have never before thought about this tendency of mine. You mention some. There are many more, Homage to Edgar Lee Masters, Paradise Tossed Away, Marianne’ Diary, Foam on Gulf Shore. There are probably some I cannot remember.
I suppose Foam on Gulf Shore, written in 1978, was the first series of poems. The book sold for $2 then. It now sells on Alibris for 6.84 to 21. 00. It was composed of 7 poems loosely unified about seeking the mysterious and marvelous woman. I was slightly influenced by all those exotic and erotic women in Mallarme and by Yves Bonnefoy’s Douve. It was philosophical, as the Yang Chu poems, are philosophical, based on Heraclitus, everything flows. On Buddha, the self is a process, not an entity. I remember when I used to give poetic reading quite frequently, I always closed With section 5, “Alone on a Shoreline.” It was then my favorite piece of writing, and still is. I like because it is so lyrical. I have revised it somewhat from the book form.
It has a refrain that is repeated:
Come come
Come
Like the living light from a dead star
Come
Like limestone like coral
Come
From the death of what was once
Tender and fragile
What closed its eyes and trembled
What was ardent and afraid
Come
That was written a long time ago, 31 years ago. It was when I was breaking away from the Immanentist movement that I founded. The Immanentist Anthology, published by Smith is still around. My first book, From the Bottom of the Sea, 1968, is now selling for $50 on Amazon.
I think one reason why I write series is because I do not believe in generalizations, universals, and absolutes. I do not believe in the actual, self-contained, reality of a Platonic idea, or a Neo-Platonic One, or any transcendental, non-empirical concept. Generalizations, universals, absolutes, Platonic ideas, the Neo-Platonic One, or transcendent non-empirical concepts are all reductive, limiting, restrictive, and thus reduce the many, the multifarious, the varied, to a oneness and thus closure. I believe in the radical singularity of unique concrete particulars and in processes rather than entities, and this belief assimilated into my behavior gives me an openness.
When I start writing about something, I don’t exhaust my writing by reducing this something to a oneness or a general principle. I discover differences in what is purported falsely to be a sameness.
Take the poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” now if the author believed in an absolute, universal Blackbird, his poem would have been “One Way of Looking At a Blackbird.”
Read poetry by Duane Locke, published in Counterexample Poetics HERE and HERE.
This interview was conducted electronically between 3/2/09 and 3/26/09.
