Extramission

Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. Religion & Spirituality. "That the poetic cannot extricate itself from myth, as indeed neither can the philosophical, is sooth. There is a configurable complementarity between myth and reason; for the philosophers resort to myth when they are at the end of their wits, and the poets court reason, if gingerly, to hold in yoke the contradictories when the energy the contradictories generate drives them that way. I know I do. As poet and philosopher. Ontological configuration can take as its instrument the poet's voice. The prototypes for such operations have not yet faded utterly: the choice of form or measure, not as constraint but as scrying stone, magic mirror. These means are available along with wikipedia and the occupation of everything by informational simulacra. But the secrets are hidden in plain sight, as ever. The point is, the use, the possibility, (the imaginally possible-to-be-believed) depends not on proof-bringing or dialectic, but the formative power of the utterer, the concrete matter brought, and the intervals of its internal distribution which structure one's configuration. Sufis. Shamans. Because of the very availability of what once were 'secret doctrines,' the role of the poetic configurator resumes an ancient office: to conjure by giving form; to order by giving form; to transmit by giving form. And form is never other than extension of content sayeth the Elders to whom I continue to pay some obeisance; even when that content is its own conjuration; i.e., when form is the means by which content is summoned, not only the means by which it is ordered. Or precisely there and then..."—Charles Stein, from the Prefatory Note