In remake4, the John Geraets’ poem titled 'one week' includes these lines:

In the §nd nothing means anything much. Or so, at least, poetry thinks.

I’d like to reflect on my poem [untitled] by reflecting on some of the multiple different forces in those Geraets poem-sentences. First, so alluringly, language provides the §. The pilcrow, the section sign. Here, as I experience it, are multiples of time (end, and, section, constative, jointure), of graphemic gesture (snd, ssnd, sand, send, sos, ss, enceinte icon), of non-determinacy (‘In the [lingually non-semantic] §’), and of implied-expected ordinary pointing, what one can take as denotatively indicated: ‘In the end’.

This situation of § is akin to titling my poem [untitled]. I thought of regular titles for it, mostly because I customarily title my individually presented poems. Yet choosing a different font for [untitled] is, or means to be, a kind of titling. Didot is so mannered and architectural a font. So different from the softened yet edgy serifs of Cochin. The juncture of the two re-announces the embodiment of typeface, and of words. Inserted into the domain (a poem’s domain includes its title, even when it is not titled and thus, so often, called by a name that is its first line) is an alternate body. Any title is perhaps like this, so the differences are a matter of pulling out alternate approaches for an interpretive look. 

It might be said that [untitled], standing in the place of a title, also operates as a meta-title – which might be a distracting or side-tracking term until it comes back into view as meaning a body that calls out 'body!'. The somatics of language are irrevocable, irrefragable. The feeling body of the writing human stands with the feeling body of the expressive lexeme and its cousinage. Which is also, in my reading, one of the energies that the § performs in ‘one week’.

Then we read 'nothing means anything much'. Such wealth of inter-braided directionalities! First, 'nothing means' – to be sure. Whatever the quality of nothing is, it is replete with significance. Then ‘nothing means anything’, another fractal gesture (whose directions spread). To mean anything is to bear not only quiddity, thingness – to chime nothing’s thing with anything’s thing – but to sit with potentiality as an absolute. Given both the fractals of language and the fractals of everyday life, potentiality is precisely absolute. When potentiality is ontologically insisted on (with the thing of ‘no’ and ‘any’), then concept and body co-interfere: the somatics of language again. 

But then, then!, we get a backflip enrichment move. Structurally (or post-structurally: functionally the two terms indicate often similar approaches), we can read a double grammatical object positioning of, first, ‘anything’, and then ‘much’. Nothing means anything; nothing means much. With the latter, a word class repositioning is perceptible: ‘much’ is both intensifier for ‘anything’ and also it functions descriptively, like an adjective: subject > verb > adjective <> adjective: X is much: nothing means anything<>much. In this inter-braided word-class energy, nothing is a great deal: it is both anything and it is much. The situation is akin to having infinity+, having more of infinity. 

Were I to begin a similar reading of the next Geraets’ poem-sentence – Or so, at least, poetry thinks. – would the reflective focus come back to resound my own poem? Perhaps if I begin to read it, phrasally or clausally, backward, the reflexive force will make a new sound. When we read 'poetry thinks', what do we think? We stir ourselves maybe to both acknowledge the situational priority of the lingual to think itself in the places of language. We stir our positionality to the relational emphasis that is, non-coincidentally, heard in other parts of the poem ‘one week’. As I have written elsewhere (that dread clause!), language has anima, history, futurity, other plans, tongues, bodies, resonances, surfaces, shapes, and rights. To meet language relationally is to accord it meeting rights – otherwise, well, it’s just a tool. And we know how that works when we think of AI, when we think of genetic engineering, when we think of the lives and energies of the entire planet outside the (constant) anthropocentric gong.  

Given (as an artist fetched by orders that aim to somato-psychically disestablish our ideological, often numb, unfelt, automated immurances) my partial aim to achieve a certain numerical point in this minor plunge into reflective reflection, it can seem that I’m never going to be able to reflect on [untitled]. Or, at least, I can hope that my delight in rendering explicit some of the facets of lingual relation, in a moment of the Geraets’ poem, points to how language writes its tickets when it writes a poem with me, with my embodied histories of languages, feeling, education, bodily drives, thought structures, transplace emergences. I’m full of feeling when I write such poems. Poetry magnifies feeling in the poly-directional thought-bodies of words (graphemic, phonic, morphological: fleshy, soundy, semantic at every turn), of lines (crunchy strata of fulsome geophysics, flaky crusts of yum-yum bakery, haunted retellings of word count layered histories), of layout (blueprints of alternate manifestations, little rooms of attention, maps of atonality, scripts of dramatic lexemes, scores of soundables), and of the soft text whose conjurings pulse, sally, imbue all around. Or so that’s how the poem [untitled], on reflection, operates. And, true, one could fairly title it 'Apotheosis'.