I’ve been thinking about the pedagogical role of essays or manifestoes that accompany poetry. Ones written by poets.

Some well-known ones from a century full of them: Projective Verse, Personism, pieces by Hejinian, The New Sentence.

They often present a constellation of formal attributes and political consequences, and specific objects of abhorrence. Ways of making language use more difficult and emancipatory. They propose that by adhering to a method of difference the world will be affected.

If we can say this about them.

Often something needs to be said, or the poet feels the need to say something outside the poem itself that would clarify the purpose and especially how the form of the poem forces a certain effect.

That there is reason, that it is not freewheeling, that it has a agency.

That the engagement is sensible.

So the reader can learn another register of reading.

These are theoretical and we love their beliefs. We sense a truth to the propositions. We love the counterpart to the poems and the disputed space between the two.

The space that is ours temporarily.

But doesn’t teaching the reader to understand how the form affects her mean that the form does not necessarily affect her?

In other words, are we not being taught how to be affected?

And thus there is a degree of self-fulfilling prophesy to the manifesto.

Or does it refine, through intellection, how it affects her, because it did affect her already?

Maybe the sense was there but without the framework to move into a completer sense.

This happened throughout the last century and continues.

Belief and collective belief our tailwind.

But, still, self-fulfillment.

So that paratactical lines, for example, resemble our world saturated in an incoherent barrage or bombardment of images and words.

But then, on the other hand, paratactical lines might be used not in mimesis of the media-saturated world but in defamiliarization of the world.

Because despite the onslaught of unsynthesized pieces, we are still habituated in our perceptions.

That one thing comes to resemble another is unavoidable.

That a form will have a standard effect on its audience smacks of shortsightedness and artistic hubris.

But it allows us to do so much.

Pedagogical as well as didactic. A shifting horizon becomes more visible in a discourse that accommodates some in order to resist most.

Without which: not so much the feeling of having not been invited as there being no evident entrance.

Yet the horizon, as has been pointed out, is not detached from an ugly support structure.

As a strip of masking tape, one side would be sticky and collect hair and small insects and leaves.

The other side smooth.

And as a strip duct tape, more and larger.

Sticking to itself, ribboning into a mess when handled.

A schoolboy exiting the side door is confronted by the upper leaves of trees separating themselves from the sky.

A breeze you could spend a lifetime standing in, until the breeze becomes excessive, like the voice in a room that carries above others.

Returned from the field trip outside the city, the instructor asks who would like to present first.

A boy comments on having been blindfolded and led to a precipice. He says that he was not scared. Even though he trusted the fellow student whose hand he held, he believed there would also be a net below to catch him.

Another boy comments that regardless whether or not trust had formed between himself and the girl who led him blindfolded, he felt that other safety measures were in place.

In another test group, a girl comments that she could see under the blindfold to her feet and the grass, which was better than having to trust the boy who led her.

Another girl, who often said nothing, comments that the only reason for believing the precipice was there was the presence of all the safety measures. She saw no precipice.

Another comments that at the time she was to be blindfolded she’d already heard from others a detailed account and said she was no longer willing to go to the precipice that was probably not there at all. For this she was asked to sit out.

On some days the teacher would say: It is no open plain, in fact, but a well-traveled path that determines your direction more than you could imagine, and though it looks like you’re getting closer to the horizon, you are in fact arcing back to the school, because, against your own common sense, the horizon is part of the school, and not the other way around.