Robert Kocik
\nfrom Overcoming Fitness
\necopoetics journal, pp 62 – 74<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
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<\/a> Notable American Women. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n Excerpt chosen because it uses the s word (“solipsism”): <\/p>\n POETRY PRIVATIZATION DETOX<\/p>\n DEFINITION Like commerce, creativity has also been to a great extent \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcprivatized\u00e2\u20ac\u2122. Ward for non self-interested prosody. Poetry subsumed in other acts.<\/p>\n KEY WORDS poetic poultice jacket, civic solipsism<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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. <\/p>\n 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. <\/p>\n