Some reflections on a Bachelard quotation:


"If meanings become too profuse, it can fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. The true poem awakens an unconquerable desire to be reread."

Avoiding profuseness and a too clean, too neatly compressed language use is a poet's mandate. True. The danger is in not allowing language to skirt middle options since the middle is always the poem's true origin (in medias res)...But I'd like to make distinctions—though none exist really— preferring to see the poem as a "body without organs (BwO)" (after Deleuze) and the desires a poem awakens as flights and intensities skimming lightly over its smooth planar surface. Intentions and works always intersect transversely. Even if thoughts cause unseemly striations, the effect is too free us from stultifying "totalizing" designs and delight in the almost infinite multiplicities the text can now reveal to us.


Wherever you begin in a poem both a beginning and potential for infinite flows and "reflows" can be assured. In Deleuzian theory (as in my acceptation of that term) the BwO is not a metaphor: it's rather an 'abstract' machine universally applicable to any concrete writing project or, more properly speaking, a radical text-becoming that unleashes creative vectors (after Charles Olson) or can, if necessary, disclose the turning or twisting force of prosodic language (after Ron Silliman). I believe Bachelard may have anticipated this postructuralist rethinking of the primacy of "flows" in poetrywriting, pointing the way to a true radical heterogeneity of meaning.