A couple years ago, I was sent a copy of a small press poetry magazine with a section of news and reviews in the back. A report on and one paper from a panel at a large poetry conference identified the panel as focused on 21st Century Poetics. The paper focused on the writer's uses of Dante. The over-all feeling, though I didn't research the conference or panel, was that "21st century" poetics was in no way distinguishable from "20th century" poetics and that it was all the very familiar "poetics" of these people. The 21st century was mentioned to make the individuals and their scenes seem to be up to date, to make the panelists and their backers, seem to be "the latest thing". This is the very human way, of course and only a little sad. Calendars are arbitrary marking systems with arbitrary anchor points. But they do affect us, a new century, and certainly a new millennium, does invite resolutions and, perhaps on a good day, re-thinkings. Sooooo, where's a 21st century "poetics" identifiable in some way at some time going to come from? Will anybody sit down and re-think poetics under pressure from the (ever) changing world as noticed at a roll-over point. Will "resolutions" (focuses) be made that aren't old ones polished up a little, probably a very little? Uhhhmmmm.

So, what is this "faith" I talk about spreading, eh? It begins with St. Ezra's, "Make it new!". We will. And not just because the changing worlds change us, but specifically as making poems, as writing poems is changed, as our deepest interior processes are affected by changing writing tools and changing surfaces upon which we write. Does the latter seem weird or just cute? How about Bucky's (Fuller) noting the geometer's fourth tool. Everybody knew the strait-edge, the compass (a circular instance of the glyph 2, the two fingers pointing, and then spread, one revolved around the other) and the scribe, the drawing instrument. Bucky's fourth tool? The surface. Paper, smoothed dirt, whatever. Well, sure, it's got to be there and a good Euclidean, you know it's got to be flat, smooth and able to take your marks and hold them. Early in the 20th century, some new surfaces were tried. A globe or a saddle. And geometry got very, very different. Then, surfaces gave way to spaces and topologies were born....

We work in a "house of mirrors" (and remember my description of "scenes") or, if you prefer, a "house of metaphors" all of which distort the usual views in their unique ways. My playing over and over with images of Juice's Table of Contents as a kind of surface and the clickable poem names as Lewis Carroll "rabbit holes" within which can be whole other, complex, surfaces. I don't know any more than anybody else does how, playing this riff over and over in different keys, with different chord changes, whatever, will affect how an individual "puts together" and, then, "writes" poems....

You know most of what I was doing here, to sharpen an image, a sand-painting in the sands of time, of what you were doing, making an intelligent design of it. But the real poking a faith into the out there, comes at the very end. Self-appointed "definers" of history will ignore this and all else. But some will be bugged by it, others, perhaps, inspired or free'd by its promise or possibility. Who are we to think THIS is a chunk of literary history?! They think in terms of importance, and the players of lit'ry politics labor to gain control of the distribution of importance. I'm talking only of what Juice 2005 is without reference to its importance. It's difficult to pry these apart in our perception. The spreading is assisted by those who are irritated. Those who are inspired, free'd to do things are too busy to worry about it.

Just this morning, I got an e-newsletter from Woody Leonard who's written books on Office since before there was an Office, only Word. His first book had Hacker's Guide in the title. Not the fiends who've taken over the term. His latest book (in progress) is on Desktop Searching (Google and other vendors' products). Look at this paragraph on his book:

Does that sound, just a little, like what I suggested you say when contacting libraries and collections about including Juice 2003, 2004, and "subscribing" to 2005? You see, it's built into the surfaces we're writing and publishing on.... The faith is there and it spreads ...through what we do, how we write and publish. You were doing an evolving edition because you could - and we focused it down to an "editing out loud". Woody did what he had to in order to write a useful handbook on a subject that was continuously changing, and not coming in periodic versions like, say, Office. Both the freeing and the forcing come out of our writing tools and the surfaces we write on or in.