Epistemology and Karla Kelsey

Upon reading Mathias Svalina's review of Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary the philosophical nature of Karla Kelsey grows and develops in ways which intrigued me. Svalina jumps right into Kelsey's work with what she calls "poetic epistemology." Moreover Kelsey's work grapples with philosophical questions of how knowledge is acquired and "possessed" through the poetic vehicle of language. By taking language, harnessed with the accumulation of connotation and subliminal messages, and bringing us into its essence Kelsey creates a profound sense of awareness.

Svalina especially notes that "[Kelsey's] poetry arrives at meaning through a participatory process." We are indeed her parts, as Kelsey's poem, "I Was Working the Free Radicals" implicitly states. The reviewer comes to enlightening point that "not only are we entering the poetry media res, but that we will never be able to enter the full lyric experience." Here Svalina bring us into the incessant philosophical problem of infinite regression. Let us take knowledge as the product of truths and beliefs, in purely philosophical terms. As justifications are based on beliefs, one must ask for justification of the belief, leading to a never ending sequence of justifications and beliefs. Yet Kelsey circumnavigates this problem. She both immerses us in her emotions and metaphor, and attacks the possession of knowledge. As we noted in class Kelsey enacts her emotion, moving beyond the sticky, wax of time and relationship. Here shown in Aperture 2:

rich orange

inflourescence portends

making way back from

the Atlantic---symbol

of the flower after

blooming

Here Kelsey's deliberate questioning of language also appears in her augmented word "inflourescent," the certainty of its definition remaining poignantly ambiguous. Svalina also notes Kelsey's use of metaphor over sensory data. This point follows tandem with Kelsey's disruption of possession. How well do our senses really pick up the world around us? How do we make our assumptions based on them? Possession seems weakened at the end of Aperture 2:

coda of the olive tree, pure, pointed under radio frequency we can hear meteors and that

abandoned city wasting in the valley of white sands, fed under the flares gone tracing

another life, held here, tied, the kite string to metal elements rusting

Slavina gives us a review which encompasses the philosophical power of Kelsey's work through the lens and focus of her poetic discovery. Kelsey brings us to a more heightened sense of awareness by opening us up and throwing us against the brick walls of possession. Nevertheless she leaves us with a sense of security, "I breathe, and I assure you / something happens."

Kelsey's Dismantling and Reinterpretation of Accumulation

In Karla Kelsey's Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary our notions of knowledge, recollection and experience find themselves liberated from "soft" entrapment, from passively accepting their accumulation. Kelsey begins her onerous journey with a quote from Plato, most importantly "will [the possessor of knowledge] describe the 'catching' of [knowledge] and the original 'possession' in the same words?" The answer is a resounding no. Kelsey's work again and again articulates the need for a "re-catching" of knowledge, that knowledge is always in flux. In addition she harkens to pre-Socratic philosophy which breaks down and complicates our conceptions of identity and existence to their core.

Furthermore she inherits Plato's metaphor of the "aviary" where "man" keeps the (once) "wild birds" of knowledge. Thus in the bird's lack of wildness alone the aviary already seems incapable of providing a meaningful idea of knowledge. Kelsey's poem "Of Under Ash And So" shows the weakness in simply holding knowledge:

Then paler blue then something approaching

white or nothing, the page, the bone gone back to the originary plan of

an aviary built with mesh siding, illusioning the possibility of flight. Soft

walls, soft keeping us here

Here she draws clearly the limitations of the aviary while showing the change and flux inherent in language. Kelsey's use of "originary" and "illusioning" show that language will always undercut the dexterity of the aviary, that words will constantly shift (they are indeed wild) and rearrange. Kelsey's poem "I Was Working the Free Radicals" moves this idea further and shows us the beauty of reinterpretation and openness:

Allowing a "her" into

the abstraction arrests it for a moment. This abstraction has been arrested

as a form of grace, light in ash-dense air gilds trees.

The abstraction, perhaps an "aviary," is not open enough to encompass ideas such as feminism. In the second stanza Kelsey gives us the beauty and joy which comes out of dismantling abstractions.

For if earth is the center of the body, heaven in the center of the

soul, with its planned moving, mutability conceded for the pattern, for

a constant assurance of species and parts. Orange-red. We are her

species. We are her parts. The abstraction loses its arrest and we wake

to the story of the flying bird, now held in her hand and slit down the

middle.

Here we are amidst the workings of knowledge, the wild bird is open to us. Thus in the interdependent "we" Kelsey often employs she works with the plurality of our existence, strings of reference and attachment, codas echoing the familiar fugue. Yet she weaves between the walls of our associations, cutting off the certainty of definition so that certain echoes never truly have the same language (Aperture 3). Kelsey challenges our assumptions in one of the most philosophical, complex, enriching and beautiful ways we have seen.

More Conversation and Discussion on Greenfield

Both in the roundtable discussion and from reviews by Andy Frazee and Joshua Corey Greenfield's move away from the autobiographical mode of A Carnage in the Lovetrees is apparent. Moreover Greenfield's Tracer works tirelessly with notions of self-effacement while employing content rooted in the description and metaphor of weapons and war. In Tracer Greenfield immediately begins this dialogue. As in our roundtable he said in a draft he deleted all of the "I"s in his poem, the aptly named first poem "Speaking For" complicates both the authority of the "I" and even the role of the reader:

I am the reader there, reading aloud, deploying a plan as a voice as

an imagined moral presence in the listening devices and oscillating

sprinklers that automate into shadows, because

Here Greenfield critiques the traditional reader, using militaristic language present throughout this book, as a "planned" "imagined moral presence." He moves on to work with the notion of self:

Already I am we,

the small rectangles of all the backyards of all of us, our washed

sidewalks, our sweeper nozzles--our detritus colludes at the ends of

the driveways, the leaves in the neighbor trees glisten, the utilities

hung high in the air between houses.

Thus here the I is no more the I. In our current complex, connected existence the I is part of a collective "detritus." The I can no longer (or maybe never could) speak for the whole of America.

In addition Greenfield works with the intersection of the public and private spheres. For instance his poem "Bastion" especially details this. As he spoke earlier this afternoon, Greenfield seems struck by our current connection, that we are connected to the war through the internet and CNN yet have no real feeling of it. Therefore his seepage of the public into the private forces us to look more closely at the world around us:

inscribing one's name in the unfeasible

thrall of the moment, no one is

so real, judgement is its own prison:

now we pay to get into the public space;

Similarly Greenfield makes his militaristic description depict the everyday. Poems such as "Rapier/Ravine" and "Maverick" (the name of a weapons system) find their way into the public sphere.

Tracer moves Greenfield's work into discourse more concerned with poetry in its complication of the self and dialogue into the complex nature of our current "connected" existence, perhaps setting Greenfield's work on a stronger path towards meaning.

Thoughts and Questions for Colie Collen

As our knowledge of Collen pertains to her role in Fence I think my questions would arise from the poets and themes we gathered from the magazine. In addition perhaps more logistical mechanical questions pertaining to the publishing process might come up at the roundtable. I would first ask her about the role of the past in the issue of Fence:

The artwork here superimposes the surreal or Dada onto the lithograph. Does this juxtaposition of earlier artistic ideas with modernist ones perhaps work into the idea of challenging assumptions which moves throughout Fence?

I would follow this past/present/challenging assumptions question with one about the abrasiveness of content and attack on decorum. Moreover, how such an abrasive quality works to reinterpret language and its connection with meaning, or present lack thereof.