Deep Image

For us, Jerome Rothenberg played (and plays) the role Picasso and Braque did for the painters, and Leiris and Bataille later for the French poets: opening the sparkling world that comes when you crack open literature and see the primal gestures of oral energy and sudden imagery from which it all surges' (Robert Kelly) Deep Image is originally Jerome Rothenberg's conception. Through this vision of experimental writing, he shakes up received ideas of what poems ought to be like. In this full-length work of prose and poetry, I have sought to operationalise this philosophy of l'écriture (also with a tip of the beret to Jacques Derrida), juxtaposing metafiction texts with prose poems, haikus and shorter verse. As for Rothenberg, my own practice as a philosopher brings me to seek out and to create texts which bear a relation to the complex human condition as a deeper presence restructuring the poem and poetics. In our times of contemporary crisis, it is hoped that the writing of poetry and of poetics, as a kind of minor literature, might serve and supplicate as a surprisingly robust resource contra the banality of mainstream culture (whether Spotify, FB or worse). I have also included a recent critical text as Preface, which draws out the genealogy of an ethical and aesthetic counter-culture all the way from the ancient culture of Bashō to our current malaise.