from "Speaking Animate" (George Quasha)

from "Speaking Animate"

4: seeing through hearing

(George Quasha)

Now to dowse the poetics of the poem to come.
We hold these principles to be self evident—in order to be self evidence.

Configuration is parthenogenetic. 
We’re talking fate here. 
High flying biology. Bios mating logos. 
Flowering, percipiently imaginarily auto-erotically speaking. 
It sees and knows what it’s doing not a moment before.

We call back to our other us through the air pressed into sound.
I’m just trapping animal life in its resound here.

Our group gives the dream time.
A date’s charge belongs at heart to anytime.

Our only mythical bird is fleeing the page as we speak.
It makes a very very very fast line out.
Sculpting hands in the saying.

Not every finger is instantly intelligible.
Signing principle, it calls itself, and hands itself over.

"Seeing Through Hearing" by poet, sculptor and performer George Quasha is excerpted from "Speaking Animate" and appears online in Jacket 2. A note by the author about the poems: "Preverbs" refers to the work in general but also to a "complex." A complex is an arrangement of lines in a larger unit: first, a numbered unit, like those here, in the given sequence, limited by the length of the page in a Word doc (double-spaced in my working but not here) and which has a kind of title--a name-like verbal unit at page-top after the number.

This is the 8th book of preverbs to date, each book consisting of 7 preverbs-complexes of a variable number of pages. 8 books = 56 preverbs complexes = something like 500+ pages. Only one book has been published to date: Verbal Paradise (preverbs) (Zasterle, 2012), but I'm also publishing preverbs-complexes as short books of which the first is Scorned Beauty Comes Up From Behind (preverbs) (Between Editions, 2012). Another is forthcoming. Speaking Animate (preverbs) is dedicated to Robert Kelly."