In a continuing consideration of
Nick Piombino's post on the need to
transcend the notion of progress from Saturday, June 7

I mostly agree.

As for positing evolution as
fundamentally endemic to the
mental disturbance leading to
a desire for progress, I

disagree. In my mind, rather, evolution refers to the collective biological machine’s organic ability to bifurcate toward an ever increasing diversity of genetic expression in an adaptive strategy which might enable some organisms to survive and continue despite major catastrophic events. Evolution intrinsically results in a genetic complexity and an organic diversity which to this day remains only partially understood by “scientists.” How many life forms exist which as of today remain undiscovered? In other words, evolution is not an end but a never-ending process of increasing complexity and crucial to the stability and continuance of life, though not necessarily "as we know it."

The pop culture definition with which most of us are familiar merely serves to reduce and simplify mistaken notions of evolution as a biological drive toward perfection leading to “man,” an easy conclusion which is moreover solipsistic, self-serving and, as such, quite human. We like to think of ourselves as the best of all possible organisms, which is, of course, nonsense. If anything, one might easily argue that we are the worst of all possible organisms, having caused various mass extinctions and so on, but that’s not my intent, because humans are after all capable astounding acts of _______________.

I might as well trot out a Whitman snippet here as appropriate from "Song of Myself”:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.) (1324-6)

though I can’t now remember why I thought it was (is) appropriate, but there it is, oh yea, and refracts into what all this has to do with an organic scattering of poetic strategies as something robust and, for me, thrilling.

In any case, I consider the flux of poetry in an equivalent evolutionary light, broadening especially in the closing half of the 20th century, flexible and resilient, originating as culturally specific to the US with Whitman and Dickinson and then with the Moderns (fill in the names here:______________) probing a multiplicity of possibilities, circling around and then simply exploding after WWII and growing into something inclusive and huge and, ultimately, subversive to any simple formulaic approach or singular model. Poetry as such serves a purpose commensurate to human social and political organization as evolution does to biological diversity.

In the final push here, I’m convinced that we arrive at the ideal democracy as dependent on a vigorous poetic community, that which we can see exists and called for better or for worse by Charles Olson’s word, postmodern, and has existed now for well on 50+ years. I am of the opinion that poetry is vital to a near realization of democratic ideals, because it is through such utterances that human speech more nearly approaches an honesty unequaled elsewhere. So too, it probably affects our biological development as perhaps having to do with the brain, but I merely speculate here. Maybe a powerful arrangement of words, as in a spell, has the ability to cause spontaneous mutations in the reader or listener. I like to think so.

I wanted to throw in a Ted Berrigan quote for good measure, but now I can’t find my book. What a mess.