Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions

During the last quarter of the twentieth century, science has turned away from regular and smooth systems in order to investigate more chaotic phenomena. Rather than being divided into the classical binaries of order and entropy, form now can be regarded as a continuum expressing varying degrees of the pattern and repetition that signal structure. As architect Nigel Reading writes, “Pure Newtonian causality is an incorrect (finite) view, but then again, so is the aspect of complete uncertainty and (infinite) chance.” The nature of reality now is “somewhere … between.”¹ It occurs to me that this shift in focus makes itself felt within literature as postmodernism. In any case, the poetry I am calling “fractal” shares many defining traits of that contested term: postmodern. Since other contemporary poetries show a greater allegiance to romantic, confessional, or formalist traditions, fractal aesthetics describe—or predict, if you will—only one feature of the topography. I say “predict” because I hope these remarks will suggest future vistas. When poets address aesthetics, their own work inevitably shades their views. I write from perceptions of where my poems have lately been and where they’re likely headed.

Earlier drafts of this essay included a few exemplary poems by contemporaries, but these specific instances became points of contention as readers argued with my choices and proposed their own. Perhaps this was inevitable: the short poems suitable for inclusion in an essay cannot illuminate the maximalist aesthetic I describe. And since I am proposing a largely untried poetics, a poetics more emergent than existent, few examples are available.² I hope readers will imagine or build, identify or locate, the representative works themselves. Before declaring a poem “fractal,” I suggest that you ask whether comic, bawdy, banal, or vulgar lines are spliced to lyrical, elegiac, or gorgeous passages. Ask whether resistant (dense) surfaces are juxtaposed with transparent (lucid) areas. Those features seem fundamental. They offer an obvious place to begin.