The Poet

Author: Tanner Menard

Publisher: Post-Asemic Press (2024)

It is impossible to say that a poem begins or ends, or to strictly define it. Anyone who tries, by nature, is bound to fail or delude themselves and others. In our current age, we are transitioning from the dense, brute mechanics of the 19th and 20th centuries into a glittering future of unspeakable high technology. This era increasingly defines us by our ability to manipulate and continually update our presence within an algorithm—a tool primarily used for surveillance. Yet, despite this, our humanity, and even more so our essence as beings of eternal light, transcends the abstract and conceptual dimensions. Poetry emerges from these dimensions into our 3D reality, returning in some unfathomable way to the voices that speak it from beyond. What we miss in this glittering age is the potential for the human being to live by intuition, to develop the ability to sense and experience reality in its complete depth. To know what we know by being present rather than distracted. To develop, that is to say, a poetics of telepathy.

I first intercepted some of the ideas that ultimately led to The Poet around 2017 during a lunch with CA Conrad, who gave me a sip of water charged by their crystal grid. Soon after, I started a notebook of poems written by experiments in plant telepathy while living with my friend Ramona in her home of ceremonial instruments, murals, poetry, and myriad influences of syncretic wonder. I was writing a book I couldn't finish about developing tuning systems, angels, and Indigenous Gods; in 2018, Julian Brolaski sent me a copy of Jack Spicer's collected works. I loved the idea of a poetry of dictation, downloading poems, or letting poems come out of me like, as Jean Mitchell would say, an "Action Stroke." I started a poetry salon, fell in love, and struggled during those days. Contrapuntal poems that looked like tuning forks began to emerge.

Then, the quarantine happened. I got more devotional about my kundalini practice and started using a particular optic nerve meditation to download poetry. People I care about came and went, and I used these meditations and the act of poetry to rewrite my thinking patterns and mental intrigues about these people I have known across multiple lifetimes. Ariana Reines, who I was fortunate to work with privately through her Invisible College offerings, a fellow kundalini practitioner, helped me to develop a lot of the ideas that had come out of a question that I had posed to our late teacher Guru Jagat, "How Can I use Kundalini to get poetry." Her answer still informs everything I do and every word in the poem. Karl Kempton, Sherwin Bitsui, a few others and all those unnamed gave it shape.

This is not a dictatorial poem, but a telepathic poetics that ultimately is a love song to the divine through a meditation on another. It is non-linear and contrapuntal, and the catharsis happens in the opening lines. It is structured in a sonata-allegro form, and therefore, though it climaxes at the end, it is resolved in its opening.

I wrote this poem as an action stroke. Something came to me, came through me, I called it, I did it, I didn't do anything at all. It was me, it wasn't me, but it wasn't not me. I felt something. Science wasn't perfect enough to name it. I touched it, and it touched my mouth, my pen, my fingers, and the electrons of my so-called computer made it so. All of this is The Poet in between worlds.