The Shape of Poetry to Come

A TRACE1 OF IMPROVISATION2

AFTER AN ELEGY3 

ON A PLASTIC SAX4 

(or of Miraculous Accidence)

“Harmolodics could be i5 

—a crow on the wind6

composed7 of [chromium, 

oxygen & tungsten]”

Ornette Coleman8 (probably)

1 To chase “a complex figure in a Persian carpet”?

2 “How a diamond comes into a knot of flame”

3 “The only moving thing was the [i] of the blackbird”

4 The square root (note) of -1, an i lined in kohl,       

but lost in a moment of anicca or anatta?

5 Si as Apophenia notes a crow in the key of aye?

6 “to make the point/ that the soul is [not] a captive”

7 “Lonely Woman”—as an echo but—knot or net?

8 dark morning—a rooster’s cry rises as a crow

“If [a self] means something else in another language, 

and it’s spelled and sounds the same, that’s very harmolodic.”

Ornette Coleman (Jazztimes 1995)

How does it feel to be the i in desire? Can you see the i as candle? What does it mean to be “the i drawn by kohl? Is the mindful I the same as the italicized I or more than an imaginary unit? Or put another way—does consciousness emerge perpendicular to the physical plane? Is Quantum Bayesianism a type of improvisation? Is improvisation ever more than a series of miraculous accidents? I consider this poem to be (among other things) an Ars Poetica of a style I call HyperQBism. The poem as a tesseract of text meaning the poem as a tesseract of communion or communion as a type of superposition. Could the future of poetry be hyperQBist? At the heart of it is a colorpuntal (ghost poem + host poem) and an alchemical acrostic (chemicals symbols of elements in brackets form key words), a hyperform (a form which only exists superposed with another form) plus footnotes —which themselves can contain poems. This poem is also what I call an Iceberg sonnet (where the bulk of the lines are submerged below the “text” of the poem). Both the body of the poem & the notes contain references to the Periodic Table of Elements and the chemical symbols & atomic numbers of the elements listed in the poem can form additional text. What difference does it make that the chemical symbol for Silicon is “Si” or that its atomic number is 14? I’m counting the footnotes as part of the poem even though I have other sonnets with footnotes where I don’t count them as part of the sonnet itself. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” Does this mean that the I in italics might be a figure in a Persian carpet?