Essay: Significant Potential, Image & Independence.

Featuring a republished poem: "Shrapnel pyrics of this atmosphere"

On American Independence Day, 2022, I published a version of a poem I authored called “Shrapnel pyrics of this atmosphere" on Substack. I took down the publication, because I sensed the poem still needed more revision. The process of writing the poem was significant in my life for several reasons, a few which I will elucidate. A republication of the poem follows this essay and is accessible for paying subscribers. 

I began to discover for myself that it is unlikely there will be a time in life wherein I feel completely free or liberated in any way. I began to understand that Independence Day, charged with a promise of independence (from what?), really might be just as aptly named “Dependence Day,” given that the day commemorates: 1. the inception of a new state by a group of conspirators (the founding fathers) 2. a new paradigm of subjugation for the populous of that incipient state (though it isn't advertised in those terms) and 3. a new mode of dependence or interdependence enforced by a contract ratified by a cadre supposedly on behalf of millions of people. It is ironic that on Independence Day we might be reminded that the modern state is the arbiter and protector of our freedoms, freedoms which are purported via the state's own terms to be inalienable and endowed by divine right, yet only seem valid  when granted through the divine right exercised through them. 

If an arbiter can grant freedom and take it away does this undermine the value or even the legitimacy of the supposed freedom? I know that literally July 4th marks the beginning of the United States as an independent sovereignty divorced from its colonial supervisor Great Britain. Yet, like words, the event, or the original definition, can become mangled and changed in connotations through time. Our reckonings with defined objects contract and expand. 

Today Independence Day, if even still a celebration of American liberty, is for many people just an excuse to party with friends and family on a day off. They celebrate the state in abstract because they offer a brilliant spectacle on a day off, so it is convenient to cursorily praise stateliness anyway. These days off are rare for many Americans. Yet in some days off like Independence Day or Memorial Day, our eyes are offered to attend pageantry. As I tour through many regions of the United States this year (currently I am in Texas) I realize all the ways in which people do seem "free" compared to other countries I have been and the ways in which people here seem incredibly bound — even to their concepts of what it means to be free. 

Today is an opportunity to reflect on the aspects of American life that are worth genuine gratitude and admiration as well as it is an opportunity to reflect on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of what we call our "independence." The central conceit of this day is freedom, and the way in which American liberty is emphasized reveals the constraints of our considerations. Many of us celebrate before we begrudgingly resume our bound lives. If you want to read a great poem on the subject of freedom, I recommend you check out the excerpt "On Freedom" from Khalil Gibran's "The Prophet." 

Today seems as good a day as any to contemplate the true significance of independence. What are we really liberated from in our lives? Who are our true liberators? Could our true liberators really be anyone other than ourselves? Are the arbiters and "protectors" of our freedoms today the arbiters we may wish to be liberated from soon enough? Could it be that concepts of liberation are formed from and with each oppressor? Is there more “liberation” perhaps in being “liberated” from needing to acknowledge state liberty as some kind of true liberty? 

I usually refrain from disclosing what inspired the poems I author; I generally fear that such disclosures limit the significant potential available to a reader. 
However, today I deviate from my vague principal which leads me to stray from divulging. If I've done my job of writing a poem properly then the reader should not require me to provide further commentary or images to complement the piece. An artist or a curator might append an essay next to an abstract painting to contextualize the work. Sometimes, depending on the quality of the presentation of information, the significant potential of the work is expanded via the provision of contextual knowledge. 

Often the information presented to contextualize a piece hinders the creative inception of new nexuses between reader and poem or viewer and art-object by limiting the scope of the work and asserting that it is definitely about something. 

I try to express in “Shrapnel pyrics of this atmosphere" that we as humans are more likely to find liberation through regarding the constrained inheritance of what we call "nature" than we are to find liberation through the process of lauding the actions of states and through the process of feeling gratitude for a national inheritance that many eschew on all other days of the year. Most states use "nature" and "God" to justify regimes; we might as well return to their vague referents on such a day as today for our inspiration. 

I define “significant potential” as the poem’s ability to mean. I think of this ability as an emergent phenomenon between the objective poem as it is expressed on the page, the subjective interpretation or delivery by the reader and/or reciter, and the subjective interpretation by the author who ascribed that meaning of the poem. 

The significant potential of a poem is limited by what is supplied by the author and what is supplied through the reader by the limitations of accrued symbolic or significant associations within their mind; this includes the limitations of the words themselves and the limitations of the reader's understandings of the words. 

Often times through the evolution of language the meaning of words are dulled. I am prone to feel and reason that increased precision enables greater expansion of the mind than is available with the use of language that seeks to be "accessible". 

In my estimation, the poet should deliver the reader with lyrics capable enough to render powerful images in the mind which cannot be contained by the static image; the reader will ramify within the parameters of the poem. 

I tend to view the pairing of image next to a poem as a kind of subconscious contamination, like how one’s perception of a character in a cherished novel is altered when the character is portrayed by an actor in film: if the book is reread, often times the image of the character is irrevocably altered. 

I want my poems in some sense to be “independent” from image, yet of course there is always a spectrum of independence. I don't mean independent in the sense that poems shouldn't aspire to conjure images in the mind. I mean that "Queen Cobra" shouldn't need to be accompanied by a stock image of a Cobra. If I haven’t helped the reader imagine the Cobra as I saw her in all her liquid variety through the chosen expression of the poem, then I have failed my expression. 

While there have been myriad poets who have used their own illustrations (such as William Blake or Khalil Gibran) to complement their text, I am not also an illustrator. I have an extreme appreciation for the visual arts, but I have very little interest in being an illustrator or even trying to advance this skill. 

If there are artists who respond to my poems enough that they want to illustrate complements to them, I may be moved by this. Reach out! But for now, I am content to use the bone appropriations of the "Of Flightless Doves" logo. This method has a clear branding purpose which I will explain. 

You could make the rebuttal that because I post thumbnail images that I already condemn my readers to the fate I abhor. Some of you who view my newsletter on the Substack application may notice that the photos I adjoin with my poems are alterations of the image used to brand “Of Flightless Doves,” an illustration by my friend Willem Hilliard (see his sketching work here). My reason to only have the images next to my poems that are extracted from the logo (literally the fractured vertebrae and rotting wings of the illustrated object) is to serve the purpose of reminding readers that the image serves only to accommodate the aesthetic unity of the newsletter I author. It  serves this reminder: as the logo is analogous symbolically to the world of my work which I share via this newsletter, each poem represents a different vision of this world. This hesitance to use varied images is to also acknowledge the inarguable power that image has to sway our interpretations of the written word. My choice to experiment with only retaining images as thumbnails that are edited fractions of the logo is my compromise to exist in a landscape which encourages image to contextualize or accompany word. 

If today is to be a day wherein the concept of independence and the struggle for independence is to be taken seriously in a human heart—and not just a day wherein one revolution is saluted—then when we fail to contemplate the true meaning of independence in our own lives, perhaps our hearts today are anathema to the independent spirit which is supposed to animate this day.  

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Shrapnel pyrics of this atmosphere

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