Dreamtime by the Ganguji & Semblance by Bernstein

Charles Bernstein: Semblance

“The Interconnectedness and cohesion of all things” is to the Ganguji people of Aboriginal Australia, dreamtime. Dreamtime is not an unconscious, at dark, regenerative rest, dreamtime is our lives comprised by the totality of our experiences. Everything has a purpose. It is impossible to de-engage the cohesion and interconnectedness of all things.
Bernstein emphasizes word, like Hejinian, and words in combination to tonify and charge the accompanying language. The perceptional dimension arises – the word on page, not in referential context, but as special entity. A subtlety of perceptive feelers to connote poetry wherein the poet uses intentional spontaneous discernment – called nailing down a word. Through referential vectors arise Bernstein: “fills vats ago lodge spire”. Achieved here is not banal word/stimulus image/response but rather these vectors in spatial dimensionality’s possibility. The point: release “energy inherent in the referential dimension of language” to now re-create rather, the very conditions that prior to now were created through “meaning”: connotation/denotation of word in medium to now paint on a canvas of auditory receptivity in the absence of self and culture contained definitions. Words redefine themselves in an inherent indefinable “vector” of their own palpable reality. Words redefine without definition and are vectors in space time continuum of sound and patterning of sound together. Poetry functions in hyperspace; poetry creates poems in hyperspace. Hyperspace functions different than Earth here – Earth is more the limiting possibilities as sentences narrowing themselves in and of passages, through expository and narrative qualities, limiting themselves the same. Poetry follows less this pre-de-rangement patterning; poetry allows for an openness which to Hejinian is free-unhampered access. Hard to experience Hyperspace when stuck to the laws of Earth’s time continuum, ask anyone who recalls Astral Plane or pre-existence or has used psychoactive drugs or hallucinogens. What do these dimensions have to do with poetry? All is a manner to break down the walls we as a people have put up so long ago. Breaking down structures and thought forms. Poetry does not have to follow preconceived thought forms, it is only thinking that births the present into being. Our thoughts create our reality. Our thoughts create our poetry. We create our reality and so to think differently is to perceive and thus to be, reality, different. Re-patterning ourselves to be open to more than the pre formed structures as used in programmed language and pre-framed society.