Emerson writes, To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, and the most beautiful of fables; Susan Howe calls poetry factual telepathy; Comte: ideal representation of fact; MacDiarmid: Wherefore I seek a poetry of facts. Even as / The profound kinship of all living substance / Is made clear by the chemical route; Jabes: all the secrets of the universe are buds of fire soon to open; Stevens: The poetry of a work of the imagination constantly illustrates the fundamental and endless struggle with fact; Oppen: may be said this matter- / of-fact defines // poetry; or even Frost: The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. While Louis Zukofsky reminds us: But to determine the facts does not / mean to give up the struggle; and H.D.: No poetic fantasy / but a biological reality, // a fact: I am an entity / like bird, insect, plant. What can be defined as political or sacred, scientific or philosophical, mythical or quantum mechanical, the poem assimilates and resists, acts upon and resists, is born unto and resists. Its relationship to knowledge and experience is asymptotal as the limits of our understanding shrink and expand—words approximating an ever-evanescent ou-topos, or not-place. Poetry looking back and ahead could be said to have preceded the web link as endless connection into world-information, and yet the poem seems anitipodal to such purposes: its means do not sever and isolate the reader from the realm of personal experience, but rather exists through a deepening of experience in the individual being: it seeks a furthering engagement. The poem, which no longer belongs to any particular area of knowledge, is difficult to net—it is already away, somewhere else, rushing ahead on its ongoing encounter with the real. Paul Celan, or Gennady Aygi, has said something to this effect. Dickinson: True poems flee. What is the nature of the evidence? There are differences. The desert blooms, maps are made of ruins, walls fall and rise in another desert, revealing an Utes energy experiment of carbon-dioxide-sun-drinking algae. To paraphrase Basil Bunting, not a record of fact but the truth of the poem, that is of another kind.

Jeffrey Yang, Vanishing-Line