Sway Value: Cross Cultural Poetics from XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics

Sway Value: Cross Cultural Poetics

A. A. Hedge Coke

Evidenced in the oraliteratures of Indigenous cultures from around the world, poetics place people in the proximity of presence with purposeful revelatory lingual pluck against a grain of potential plunther.  Cross cultural relationships intermingle human and other mammals, animals, plants; commingle human to humanity; bridge bearings across borders, real and imagined, throughout the planetary embrace we call life. In this platitude of existential and physical endeavor, poetics play a philosophic, intellectual, and spiritual role in narrativising and imaging culture, as is necessary to sustain ourselves as humans, as an average ingle plays the most pivotal physical role in keeping comfort in a wintering lodge night.

Words spoken, written, recited, and relayed, reveal the lingual tinkerings of the isolated emblem, individual consciousness, as a linking variable integral to the patterning consciousness of humanity and that which humanity thrives upon and co-exists with: energy/cosmos. The relative nature is essentially invoked in participatory communicative couplings of beautiful and horrendous knowns and unknowns we deem markers of experience in human life. Poetics warm and feed us; emit insight and surviving substance; nurture our beingness and enhance our revelations with personal and collective experiences, through which we renew and expand our revealings to a greater understanding of self and that which surrounds self: introspective gradient expanding to bear full witness.

As a narrativising gesture, poetics form easy pathways into separate consciousnesses (realities), thereby, bridge portals to other knowns. This necessary oraendeavor is a natural evolution of the communicative processes of our life form and that of life forms we maintain balance and interdependence alongside. The need for encounter, embrace, eventful emotive experience, the need to develop knowledges, understandings—celebratory revelings–toward pleasurable synergism, is as fundamental to what we know as sense of purpose as breath is to life. It is no coincidence when polling eighty international poets individually¹ an extremely high per cent of the poets, when queried as to what poetry is, most responded easily, without conversation with any other poet polled, and without hesitation: poetry is breathing.

Conversely, one might suppose that poetry is an attempt for higher order of reasoning and that sincere supposition may actually formulate in a cohesive manner of truth, yet poetry itself, the poetic interplay of language and experience, or intake and exhalation, of detail and response, or consideration and dwelling, of muse and musings, is as basic to sustaining natural consciousness and thought as breathing is a sustaining force of the body, therefore natural order of reasoning for the poet and for anyone interpreting ingested experience into cognition. Oxygenation of the brain allows for processing, for proper construction and abstraction of thought, and in so much what is good for the body is good for the mind as well, again concentrated on breathing: inhale, exhale. The formation of thought is reliant upon not only the body’s ability to produce a healthily conducive environment for the cranial function, but for inhalation of substance necessary to bring thought into fruition; be it perception, intuition, and/or reason. Thus witnessing detail, sensory impression, available probable elements that, in the correct conditions and circumstantial or purposeful arrangement (order), could become knowledge/known causes instinctive curiosity to concern one with the matter of problem solving and/or puzzling, thus giving way to the rambling over that which muses and tumbling around the elemental processing until something tangible and/or provocation, perhaps profound, evolves from the interplay/engagement.

This musing causes one to form captivating detail to relay that which is intake to the listener, as well as to self for introspective purposes. The engagement with intake and effective detailing further informs the poet to associate knowns and unknowns into the narration to relate the information in such a way that the listener and/or self is credibly encouraged to arrive at the exact same place as the translator of the information, thus simile and metaphor are employed to bring attention to particulars and to open up the evolving imaging of information into something relatable and/or surprising to thoroughly coerce inspiration to flourish and to replicate, invariably bringing the information into a more fully realized development through the translator now acting as transliterator developing that which has been inhaled as information into something one may expand consciousnesses of other life forms with, through the process of exhaling in a changed form: image-ridden verse with challenging/nourishing metaphoric puzzle.

The sound sensibility of poetry comes into play due, in part, to the need to make reverberations of the substance to cause a continuous flow and better the impact of replication and transition for further development/maturity through the listeners/readers. Widening the air channels for full ability to thrive. Alliteration, consonance, assonance—word play—become the employment of diction that allows for flow to be produced, bringing a smooth quality to the verse that both keeps a constant and causes additional engagement/response: sway. This sway, persuades one to move in response, in an intellectual, a lingual and by all rights a physical response to the lingual prowess. The rhythm/beat caused by this employment and leading to repetition and perhaps scheme, bring the consciousnesses toward more blendability and synergistic interchange, interaction—relationship—relativity! The more diverse the engagement, the information, interpretation, and the transliteration, the greater prospect of learning, co-imagining, imaging, the greater chance of developing knowledge, understanding, and the greater possibility of profound and entertaining bridgemaking occurrence. Humans, despite what we are served by the commercialized world, thrive on challenges that result in learning. When one ceases to learn, one becomes quite dull and loses zest and zeal necessary to partake readily from the benefits before us in this life. An opportunity to grow, as it is referred to, is probable cause to partake.

A chief role of cross-cultural poetics is the challenge to the listener and the advancing of knowledge from the speaker made possible (and greatly enjoyable) through the gesture in a non-didactic vessel. Poetics, for the most part, operate with the knowledge that listeners/readers enjoy coming to conclusions along with the speaker versus as instructed to do so. The synergistic quality of poetry provides a meaningful communicatory process in which knowledge is generated, gifted, and received through a lingual relay of actual and imagined multi-dimensional translations, interpretations and transliterations. It is a conversation contingent upon the quality of flow and replication available and enhanced when such is embodied and/or disembodied from the original gist, muse, or impetus.

Culture, the way of being/knowing/maneuvering life as is distinguishable by Indigeneity, ethnicity, racial lineage, historical truths, regional-environmental landscape(s) of belonging/habitat/visitation/diaspora, cosmogonic story, familial ascendancy and descendent current, status of age, gender, socio-economic position (or lack thereof), concentrated scholarship, religious affiliation/doctrine, spiritualness, and any other number of qualifications within human context, creates a beingness in which the sway is inherent to the specific speaker as a discerning mechanism of intake, interpret, translate, persuasion, just as it plays such bearing for the specific listener/reader, including the degree of dissonance to source of origin and possible shared (commonality) variables. Thus, the natural imposition of cultural nuance within any form of communication (speaker/listener) is intrinsic to the variant experience of any interplay.

Cross-cultural could then be defined, in this context, as a speaker/listener exchange. One could argue that cross-cultural exchange could occur between a mother and daughter, who have lived in the same house, attended the same education, adhered to the identical ethno-spiritual affiliations, and share most everything other than generation as cross-cultural speaker/listener in communicative relationship. Thus the poet-daughter read by the listener-mother would essentially transcribe essences of the era specifics within this milieu as is pertinent to her generational sway and vice versa. The influence of cross-cultural communication (poetry) serves to translate, bridge, pathway scene surroundings natural to the speaker’s nature toward the listener’s learning curve consumption. An opening is presented through the communicative process (spoken/written page) and equally significant devoured/inhaled/cultured substance materializes within the knowns/familiarities of the (now learned) recipient. With this truth is knowledge, arguable or relatable. The sway gradation persuading growth, understanding, educative process—relatedness—wielded by the distinctive manner of the pen as decreed by speaker’s intent and generous maneuverings of own culture (curiosities/knowns) for the value of lingual pleasure, personal expression, intellectual-spiritual-emotional growth, communicative desire/need, or any other variety of whim with which creative process occurs—inhale, exhale.

The knowns of A´kabal, Akiwenzie-Damm, Alexie, Allen, Armstrong, Belin, Bitsui, Blaeser, Brandt, Cicangana, Cocom Pech, Crystos, Cuevos Cob, Cuthand, Dumont, Dunn, Erdrich (any one of three: Heid, Lise, Louise), Frazier, Gansworth, Glancy, Gomez, Grover, Halfe, Harjo, Hedge Coke (yours truly), Henry, Henson, Hill-Whiteman, Howe, Hogan, Hunter, Jamioy, Jim, Joe, Kenny (George or Maurice), Kleemann, Kowii, Lienlaf, Maracle, McAdams, McDougal, Miranda, Momaday, Moses, Northrup, Naranjo-Morse, Okpik, Ortiz, Rendon, Revard, Rose, Salisbury, Sanchez, Silko, Solano Mendoza, Stevens, Tamez, Tapahonso, Tohe, Toledo, Trask, Turcotte, Twist, Van Camp, Vizenor, Walters and White are as significant a cultural-poetic/cross-cultural interchange between each other (ourselves) as are cross-poetic interchanges between Stevens and Sze, Ortiz and Baraka, Allen and Waldman, Bitsui and Shenoda, Hogan and Troupe, or Frazier and Trethewey. Colloquial vernacular to contemporary realisms, engaged, enraged, endowed, embedded, exchanged and gifted generously for the listener to transform accordingly along with the speaker in verse. And for the reader, the extent of sway affective upon the volume of interplay is as varied as the experience the reader brings to the day of reciprocal reckoning and ultimately necessary for synergistic organization in humanity itself.

So bring on the phenomena we call crossings in all literary pages. Let the words bring a better world for the knowingness of us all. The balance afforded serves to tilt our (kn)own axis of knowns to a place of equilibrium and equidistant means. The phenomena made available by the engaging poetic interchange is surely essential in this world, literary and beyond. Not to mention the response poetry resulting from the read. Slide some moose by your corn soup, salmon alongside your kanuchi; everything seasons as we sway it so.

•A 2009 Pushcart Nomination, has been made by Mark Nowak, for “Sway Value,” published in XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics #20. 2008.

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¹ Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, 2005.

L337 Theory

Travis HedgeCoke just wrote:

L337 Theory
“Theory that the traits of internet memes, txt-speke,and L337 are evidence of a growing tendency towards a global village mentality focused on promoting unified and total non-condemnation based on universally-shared failure and a sense of accomplishment that leads to the promotion of artificial difficulty and intensity in situations of extreme comfort.

The theory also considers that this mentality and social unification is encouraged by constant backtracking, and accepted before-the-fact covering for each other, as demonstrated by continuing to use interesting misspellings, enthusiasm for acronyms and intentional artifice such as LOLcats or affected personae, as well as deliberately ludicrous or only slightly defensible statements such as those defining L337 Theory itself.”

The theory was first published by its original author on a personal page of a graduate student from the University of California:

http://www.myspace.com/travishedgecoke

“The beauty of the L337 Age is that nothing has to be deliberate. ZOMG was undoubtedly unintentional the first time. L337 and txt-speke, the acronyms,shorthands, and frequently resuscitated references to All your bases or The Game are designed not to exclude or be impenetrable, but to deescalate to equalized supremacy. L337 is predicated on covering, not only your own, but everyone’s. Group lying for the betterment of all.

Of course you know how to spell “has” or “be right back” but why should you have to? When Pee-Wee Herman falls of that bike, no matter how he does it, he meant to do it. So, too, now, the world. We look at the extant world and declare, We meant to do that. The Game is a perfect meme in the L337 Age because The Game is impossible to surmount. The only way to win is to not think about The Game and losing must be announced. Our greatness is that we are so great we can be united by our failure. This is why “made of fail” has fallen to the wayside while “ftw” continues strong; why LOLcats detourned LOLcats.

There is no longer any excuse for not coping. We have a massive nonphysical playground to embarrass and shame ourselves with, to lionize even the most minor of events and nothing so obscure it is not permanently rooted and recoverable. Our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s weird robot puppy caretakers will be pulling up a forgotten flash file and an entire generation will have badger badger badger running through their wifi-bugged, UV-proofed heads. “You’ve got suck factor Ha Ha Ha” may be old school mentality, but could you have had cheesing thirty, seventy, or one thousand years ago? Cheesing, being simply doing the same thing over and over very quickly because it works.

Modern military maneuvers and most empires in history, are all based entirely in cheesing. In repeating the same once-effective set of actions in the hope no one will have time to work around it and the situation itself won’t shift and make the action inefficient.

Militaries and the maintainers of empires throughout time have generally not seen this habits, this mindset, as cheesing, though. They see it as the only way.

You invest in the concept of cheesing when things are felt to be otherwise too easy. It isn’t about simplification or efficiency, it’s about encouraging inefficiency for the sake of pride. But it’s inefficiency only in things, in situations, that do not actually matter. It’s a pick and choose vigor linear cultures and mindsets have trouble with.

L337 Theory, then, has as its basic principle, the reasoning that given our current supermarvelous conditions of culture, technology, and potential, it not only entertains, but particularly behooves us to anticipate and presume from any and all, absolute and deserving deification. We must GOD ourselves. As well, we must behave accordingly. The raising of self, of simultaneously raising all individuals in anti-damnation, to this level and expectation has, or should have, no detrimental or derogatory effect denying any individual the same elevation.

Thus, is language to be perpetually shifted – we are all capable of still interpreting proper and functional meanings, regardless of flaws or variations. Music, dancing, sex and socialization must all be made anew. This, then, is a perpetual extropic state, which in, the only stabilizing response is to enjoy; to make of anything not humorous, a joke. To establish methods to transfigure all sufferings or attacks to being toothless, ineffectual, and then watch them fade to nought.

It’s anti-gnosticism, L337: no hylic realm: no inbuilt evil violation of good: everything is transubstantiated to paradisiacal levels: ideologies need not even be losable. This may be the first time we have a chance to not sacrifice or excise based on ideological incompatabilities, simply by recognizing that ideologies are not physical things occupying the same space, and that if you can fake it ’til you make it, you can make it ’til you fake it.

In the L337 Age, I do not have to actually care about the Rangers when I watch the Cup play-offs waiting for them to lose. Wanting the Rangers to lose, wanting any team to win or lose anything facilitates the enjoyment, but the elements themselves are enacted without having to be true, without a requirement of validity to back intensity. Definitive realness is lost and we all become Warholian prints. Space is not the place, but the appearance and behavior of place. Taste, texture, tint and tonality are superior to any innate realness that ever could be.

L337 is McLuhan’s global village, not some monocultural corporate complex of chain-stores and mass-produced t-shirts. Because L337 validates the validation. It validate – and it mandates – absurd declarations and mythic proofs. It allows, encourages, and makes irrefutable that this is the case, whether anyone ever intended it or not. Artifice is no less a thing than anything else, and it’s very frequently prettier and more badass than many other stuffs.”

Some Talk of Poetry

Some Talk of Poetry

by Professor Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, Reynolds Chair of Poetry and Writing

In a world amiss with red flares, a time where reservoir waters recede from developed land back into the earth and glacial throes make life unbearable for the Polar Bear and Walrus, language and our need to communicate become key in rendering what may inevitably become the most significant pain of the planet in the modern era.

One only need read the news, traveling from town to town, to note cataclysmic environmental evidences. Global warming, finally, no secret amongst the wealthy, but as common a knowledge as those knowledges passed down through the generations of Indigenous peoples from around the globe forever warning us all to take heed—do no harm—respect the planet as we would our mother bearing all gifts for our survival in this plane.

In a world where people still amazingly managing to live as they always have, traditionally, in the mountains, in jungles, remote valleys, despite the effort of the economic, industrial machine, poetics are perhaps their purest. The oraliteratures of knowledge, of precaution—destiny—mark well the daily song and story with a poetic voice so human any hearer enters into the realm of knowns as if they were there all along. And surely they are.

Poetry is a voice inside each of us. The inner self, the spot of humanity speaking for the sake of survival. Coloring the world in beauty, despite the horrendous. Taking the horrendous and making it something malleable for all to witness and grow from. Educating us before we make the mistakes that cause cataclysmic results for the young we bear and, thereby, need rely upon as we grown older. Poetry causes one to consider, to learn. The poet simply bears the privilege of considerate wisdom within a lingual gift ultimately given to encourage additional thought and consideration in the readers’, or hearers’ witnessing of knowns and subsequently developing further conversation thereof.

In this vessel, this creative process, pondering, and conversational consideration for the sake of engagement in humanity for humanity’s sake, the soul is virtually allowed free range. The very spirit of humanity persists by reaching out to calm, collect, converse, convey and to cajole realizations in the individual receiver as well as the masses of humankind itself.

We live in a narrativising culture. Herd mentality we heed. One yawns, the rest yawn in staggering unisons. One speaks, the rest dialogue in associative leaps of engagements and relative elements of knowns, or unknowns, which gather together our group awareness and educate us respectively as individuals. The traditional humanness within all of us who are healthy enough to have the sanity of available human relationships understood at a level of reciprocity. The human family motivation we all seek in this manner, though somewhat on different levels of assignation.

Poets, writers, artists in general, tend to have great calling to solitude. Not to say poets are not social, as the poet is often called to discover something witnessed of human nature from her fellow humankind and is, after all, very human herself, but to suggest that the workings of poetic and creative processes oftentimes take the impetus for socializing to a different level of engagement and the intensity must be alleviated within the quiet of the mind. In solitary retreat one contemplates. One considers what may be relevant to the larger conversation in humanity, in poetics and literature, so that one may add something relevantly significant to forward the conversation of humanity to a higher level of participation. Circumspect revelations must be seeded with specificity and fully dwelled upon to be thoroughly understood for presentation purposes. The resulting details intrigue the reader, thus causing the reader to seek the challenges of metaphor and simile set up by the poet-writer to inveigle the reader to come to the exact terms of understanding the clue delivered so that the readers themselves come to the terms of revelation (new known) alongside the sayer, seemingly in a simultaneous manner during the read. Thus, poetics and literary writing give a promise of gained knowledge in entering into the conversation of speaker-hearer through the reading, rather than devouring a didactic doctrine of opinionated truths, suddenly overbearing in that the delivery leaves little room to excite the reader to come to terms with knowledge and absorb its variables as if they were knowns all along.

In so much, poetry and creative impetus surround us all in each waking and dreaming moment of life. The memes are around us always. We collide into them and render what we may toward a thorough understanding of our reasoning, our involvement in living, our humanity and coupling the beautiful and the horrendous of life into the lingual presences we reveal and revel in come what may during our lifetimes. Through this vessel, those we reach share in our own revelations and move forward in their own as inspired by shared thought—human.

So here I challenge you to come to meet your own revelation of the day, through considerate witnessing, colliding into the memes surrounding you thoughtfully so that you may deliver to us, your masses, the though we need to be inspired by to deliver our own and ask you to consider the words of a traditional oraliterature poet from the Camentsa People of Putamayo, Colombia, Hugo Jamily Juagibioy, written in Kamsa and Spanish and as translated into English by the amazing American poet Juan Felipe Herrera, Tomás Rivera Endowed Chair of Poetry at the University of California, Riverside:

The Reality of Your Dreams

Grandfather

now that light arrives

at the house of my reason

I ask:

Could it be that as I bring to light

my dreams

am I not destroying yours?

I want to tell you too

that in my dreams my children reside

extending your root-threads

And now I ask you:

Do you see in them

the realization of your dreams?

Published in Columns: Campus Voices University of Nebraska, 07/08

Something of Time

Something of Time

Allison Hedge Coke, Fellow, Endowed Reynolds Chair, UNK

Wings whir, flutter, extend, stroke, stir, shuffle breeze by notion, subtle intent. Blackbirds sweep sky each shift of light, every natural temporal measure, glint or dimming eve. Resplendent black. When light glides spectrum, their ebb wanes then fills openness with wing, rising. In this gathering force blackbirds endure cold, relieve hunger, coerce energy from air, prepare themselves to rest, or begin anew—together. The structure of their spirals steadily unifies effort to combined, near effortless, notion. Currents merely strummed in harmonic coincidence, pitch perfect. Despite the fleeting variables, they rise. Something in their motion causes longingness amongst humankind. Those of us caught in the notion that life could be lifting, if the proper shift occurs, forget time. Time, as we know it, a construct we choose to enter in and out of when it suits our governing purposes. Lifting the lid of memory to regulate presence. In truth, only solar and lunar rises resemble shifts we know as day/night. Blackbirds, their momentum, their gathering congregations generate stimulus, rousing potential possibility, inspiring flocks below to attempt new reason. Divine unknowns in the greater swarms: cosmos.

Once, in the Catskills of upstate New York, days prior to a lunar eclipse I was consciously unaware of, I dreamed the phenomena was arriving. Dreamed of other far away planets in perpetual eclipsing. Of pulsing daylights on planets in dimensions near here, and not. The sense of time fluttering with each flare in ways we understand as day and night, yet only momentarily. The flickering light instantly fulfilled some urgency of knowns and unknowns within me while the dream deepened with armless swimming in surges, rising and falling, like a seal might maneuver deep waters, or wings might lift and give off the sides of some swarming avifauna. Shimmering stars, known by ancestors in visions, dreamtime, and ceremonial stellar observations would become apparent to stilted vision of modern gazers. Their existence would trickle now into accepted knowns. They would be admitted into recognized and endorsed thought. Though they may have dwindled eons ago, their presence now finally a colonizer’s legitimacy, probably labeled with a Euro-nomenclature, despite the Euro-less base in the place of origin, here, or there..

When I awoke, the notion of modern vision and authenticity appeared as suspect as it had in a well-fathered Indigenous childhood. Concocted notions of time introduced for the sake of making the workload pay out for big business and empirical enterprise. There is no surplus in daylight, no way to conspire economic prosperity in a truthful manner, save harnessing the solar power itself and selling what is free for all by nature of the universe.

I recalled stories my father detailed of the creation of the modern time affecting my youth in elementary school surplus and savings notions. Of the railroad industry authorizing authenticated time zones five years after my Grandpa Vaughan was born (b-1878) and a year after the birth of Grandma Maria Louise (b-1882). This time was made law three years before their ninth (and last) child, my father, was born. Made mandatory measurement, ordinance, along with daylight savings in the eco-planning to allow for greater use of worklife. Repealed a year later, the intent to regulate work hours beyond the passes of sun and moon, the order was instituted law once again by the time my father was leaving for World War II and my mother was working in the John Ingles War Factory in Toronto as her first husband was being shot down in France. Not long after, an atomic clock was created for more mass uniformity. Suggested the same year Hiroshima and Nagasaki were pummeled to devastation.*

In the gas war years of the seventies, Congress enacted the savings again, backing it up further than before into the wee hours and milking whatever was available for a couple of years. By the time my first child was turning seven, the dates of savings initiation were pushed to the last Sunday in April and left extended to the last Sunday in October. Again, a few years ago, during the midst of yet another war, the start and end dates changed by law, and again they changed in 2007. Thus, the notion that man can legislate time, can maneuver something before known as continual, into something made. Into a Charlie Chaplin world, where our beloved tramp is terribly trying to keep from getting tangled in the cogs of industry with homelessness being the apparent choice for those who cannot conform to Modern Times. Not so strange the correlation to war and eco-crises, to the notion of control of surplus despite the non-cooperative earth, and modern man, rather than gather for rise must not join together and cannot link toward a goal unless the bond is self-enforcing—capitalistic.

Sometimes I want to call time—time out—from the need to control and time for considering that need as unnecessary after all. We work enough. War enough. Find ourselves in energy crises enough. End up homeless when we least expect it. Especially the nonconformist. Yet recall this: we managed for all of time, so to speak, without the manipulated measurement for workday here in the Americas, despite the supposed need to regulate workdays of populations in the Eastern Hemisphere. And in this moment here, now, again returning to witness blackbirds lift, lift, a moment has befallen and within it a piece of the past in the present in all there is—timelessness.

*Dates of Daylight Savings Time referenced on:

http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/daylight_time.php

Something of Time

Sundial definition:

course measurement beyond

what man may maximize.

Tilt occurrence shifting shades

on this roundabout looping

seemingly forever, but not.

Where on the sundial,

solstice needle, chimney rock

does leap year evidence appear?

Where does time begin, Man end?

Must man maximize?

Even Sun leaves his high at noon.

Dusk, Dawn, Blackbirds

Blackbirds catch creases

bend with wind winding wildly

in seamless coordinates—flight.

In their ebbing, Earth tingles

like liveness crawling napes

when duet pitch is perfect, nigh.

In their rising, something of us glides.

Eclipse

Somewhere beyond realms

Stars pulse daytimes

whilst one passes

turning all

opacus.

Published BEI Newsletter Fall 2007