Rare Angel

Biochemical investigations—concerns with the shapes and meanings of bodies— are inseparable from poetics. Experience in all times and spaces is the mainstream. The ability to sensorially perceive without the constraint of traditional, modern proportions is the joy of the yogin, the adept, the poet, and the scientist of meat.

Michael McClure’s foreword:
“Rare Angel tracks vertically on the page and is Oriental in that way. The selves that compromise our whole being may play over this poem, as if it were a tape, and make prints and new codings. The selves can reach out and speak as the pages move past. The book gives birth to itself from the substrate by writing out muscular and body sensations which are the source of thought.

Rare Angel is about the interwoven topologies of reality. It reaches for luck—swinging out in every direction. It is about the explosion going on.

Walking the city streets the old buildings sink into non-existence and the new buildings rise up. The flow of change is palpable and exciting. It is thrilling to be in this waste and destruction and re-creation. That is one of the sensualities of American culture. Our primate emotions sing to us in the midst of it. No one grants credit for the brilliance we burst in.

Whitehead says, “But when mentality is working at a high level, it brings novelty into the appetitions of mental experience. In this function, there is a sheer element of anarchy. But mentality now becomes self-regulative. It canalizes its own operations by its own judgements. It introduces a higher appetition which discriminates among its own anarchic productions. Reason appears.”

—And Rare Angel appears like an organism with its dark eyes, and bristly spotted fur and shining teeth. It is compromised, as our cells are, of Pleistocene hunts and toy umbrellas.”