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From Annie Finch's proposed thealogy: "The Body of Poetry"

During the same two centuries lyric poetry, like the other arts, has come partially to fulfill the role of religion in the spiritual lives of many educated secular humanists. As the individualized self has increasingly taken on a quasi-religious significance through the Romantic and Modernist movements (compare how ancient or even medieval poetry centered itself in social convention and allusions rather than the individualized perspective of the self), the structural bases of poetry have been reorganized to reflect a new emphasis on the experience of the individual soul, and on an aesthetics of transcendence as opposed to immanence. So, ironically, lyric poetry has itself taken on key spiritual and metaphysical characteristics of the dominant religious tradition. These unspoken assumptions have come to dominate both mainstream and "avant-garde" contemporary poetics, a situation with implications not only for the content of spiritually-oriented poetry, but also for poetics on a level deeper than that of religious content.

In contemporary free-verse anecdotal poetry, that mode which Ron Silliman, following Edgar Allan Poe, has called the "school of quietude," the apparent sincerity of the individual self, or soul, becomes the central transcendent poetic criterion, a site of spiritual fetishization. All other factors—form, diction, image, subject, tone—are subsumed in the service of this effect. On the other hand, in the case of much avant-garde poetry, including such experimental-spiritual poets as Fanny Howe and Ann Lauterbach, the spontaneous shapes of an increasingly disjointed poetry are conjured as a means to invoke the transcendent-inexpressible, a grace that defies and overwhelms language.

Both kinds of poetry gain authenticity in the reader's eyes to the extent that they appear to leave behind, or transcend, the "poem" as artifice, a crafted piece of language with its conventions of diction and rhythm and distinct, recognizable structural characteristics. Whether the spiritual self or its transcendent object is the center of a contemporary poem, in either case the sensual "body" of the poem, and the language that builds it, is beside the point, for both mainstream and avant-garde critics. Whether purged with Puritanical zeal of anything that disturbs the mundane linguistic flow with the reek of the "poetic" on the one hand, or "fractured," "fragmented," "ruptured" with tireless violence on the other, the poem's body has come to be despised by literary culture.

In what I have come to name as a Goddess-oriented spirituality, the attitude towards the body is the opposite to that in the mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition. Dirt, blood, sex, soul, earth, death, animal are not destined to be transcended; as direct embodiments of the immanent sacred, they by extension are sacred. The traditions of Christianity, Buddhism, and other religions may tell us mystically that God is present in everything ("I draw water, I carry wood; that is my prayer," said the monk in one of my earliest favorite stories), but the notion of the Goddess actually constitutes a physical presence. Not only is the Goddess of the world; the world is her manifestation. Though the transcendent god and the immanent goddess are complementary sides of the same human spiritual coin, their resonances are fundamentally different.

In a poetics of thealogy as opposed to theology, connections of shape and identity within and between poems are not accidental embarrassments, but crucial kinships. For one thing, the skeleton of pattern that creates coherence gives the ability for the self to let go of a single, ego-oriented identity within the larger identity of a patterned shape. Transcendence is not the only way out of the self; there are several ways to skin a soul. And the connection and difference between various poems' forms and shapes, like varieties of species, make evident the polyvalent nature of the sacred. In this context, to write a poem as a separately formed individual poem, united to others only in relation to a single abstract formlessness, would be to sacrifice the texture of specificity and the multiplicity of patterned and formal structures for what amounts to a sort of free-verse monotheism.

(read the whole here)

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Assuming that whatever corresponds to form corresponds to body, though all this dualism is, as ever, duplicitous. I don't believe it. You don't either. And the connection and difference between various poems' forms and shapes, like varieties of species, make evident the polyvalent nature of the sacred.

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Trystan proposed that he and I write a collaborative book-length poem called Wax. "A goofy thing with six lines in each section," he said of it. While we're on the note of "authenticity": would the real writer of poems in the house please take over? I'm retiring. --Don't read mine. Read the odd numbers. Those are his.

1-
His wax is a pain relief kind of wax. The kind of wax that she has is ear wax, igyou!

She wishes that she had the kind of wax that he has. And then her wish came true,

now she had a pain relief kind of wax, just that she wished for. The next day, he came

to her house for a sleepover. He watched TV, she took a nap, then it was night, then

she heard something, she woke him up, it was a bear! They thinked suddenly,

they had an idea! He threw his pain relief wax at the bear, it killed the bear! It was the best sleepover ever!

2-
He worried about the wax in his dream, the wax of dolls' eyes and chattering wax teeth

and yellow statues melting in the heat of his hands because he held all of it in his hot hands,

the hot hands in his mind where the dreams made everything creamy. His feet melted

against the sidewalk in the sun, and his ankles, and his knees and femurs, and his hamstrings.

They were big soft lumps in a soft yellow puddle of his own body wax. Dear me, said his head

as it looked down at his torso floating in the soft bone puddle the hot hands in his mind made up.

3-
The wax that he used last night was a very amazing night. Then he said shesh, what a night! Then he gave her

a ring that said, Wax Forever. And she said, What a Beautiful Ring. Then they went to the airport to go buy rich wax.

There is rich wax at London, Paris and Tokyo after 1 full day! They went to the Tokyo store to buy rich wax.

They saw only one bin of Tokyo's rich wax left. They were very rich, after they paid $1,000 for a $100.00 bin of rich wax.

They had $2,000 total when they got $900.00 back. When they flew home on flight 1,257, they

watched a movie when they got to their house, now that they have rich wax.


4-

The movie was really a rhinocerous commercial. It waxed on and on about rhinocerous horns and rhinocerous

plates and rhinocerous nonstick waxless bakeware until one of them decided they wanted

the waxless rhinocerous bread machine and picked up the phone and dialed 1-800-WAXLESSRHINOWARE

and said, "yes, one waxless wonderman bread machine please, rhino-plated, yes?" The woman on the t.v. screen

said "oh you must be calling from California. We don't sell anything waxless in California." And she smoothed the hair

on the rhinocerous's head. Why not? they asked. "Because," she said knowingly, "in California they grow wax by the sea."

5-

The wax is going to charitiy, at Washington state. He has a bandana over his head, he, the one who called the charitiy to pick up his wax.

He went to WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. He wrote a song 2 weeks after he ordered the wax at WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. 1 week later,

the charitiy came with the wax. And he said, Why did it take so long for my wax to get here! Because somebody else ordered at

WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. Then he took a trip with his wax. then he said, I am W.M.W that means, WITH MY WAX.

Later, he was in Paris and then, somebody said, Bonjour, somebody named, Pierre, and he said, I was the one that

created WWW.WAX CHARITIY.COM. Then Will said, OK. And Pierre said, What do you have there? I have wax.

6-

Years of booking wax and shelving it as soon as it arrived and the man could no longer find room

in the tables for the multiples representing the pounds of wax on paper. Any number he chose led back to negative

stores of wax, the wax slipping into grams, milligrams, then zeros, though the shelves were full

and the warehouses across the city, his cities, reeked with the smell of lanolin, paraffin, vanilla bean,

wintergreeen mint, grease-stained cardboard wrapped around blocks of sallow wax. A single box arrived

that day that smelled of rubber, of whitewall tires, of elastic bands. That's when the wax began to melt.

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