The Seeming Semiobject, More than Seen

Geof Huth, "In Their Collected Beauty # 12: ROCK GARDEN PHARMACY" (2012)
Every poem is hermetic. Every response to a poem is a personal. We view the world through two holes out from the head we think within. We hear that world through two holes punctured through the sides of our holes, but again from the inside. We live inside our own respective skin, and there is the color of our own thoughts upon everything we encounter.

I think of how I make a poem: I make it for myself to see, because I don't know how anyone else's eyes work. Every poem I make is a reflection of myself, and in most of them there are phrases, connections, even individual words that I expect no-one to comprehend except for myself.

The hero of this story is Hermesis.

A thought there is that universality is required of a great poem. But maybe it's the opposite. Maybe nothing is universal. Maybe only the multitudinous differences of us all are the only thing nearly universal.

So I think of a little poem of mine that lives within the skin of a bottle and looks out through that transparent skin with my eyes, and yet also into my eyes. It is a poem in a series of poems created out of objects I'd collected over the decades of my life, so each object holds meaning to me that it won't to others.

I ate the salt and pepper that once filled this jar, I know where the pebbles in this jar are from, I found the prescription bottles inside this jar behind a wall on the third floor of my house, and the information typed onto the labels for these bottles was typed with the same semi-cursive typewriter font that my maternal grandmother used to write letters to us.

Meaning inhabits things just as it inhabits humans.

There's something else about these object poems of mine, which I often call semiobjects, because they are semiotic objects, because they are half object and half not. I realized that many of my object poems (though not so much this one) don't exhibit well, because I didn't intend them for exhibition. I didn't realize this until I'd seen my pieces on exhibit, but I made all of my semiobjects to be held, manipulated, touched.

I am a poet of the body, so I want these semiobjects to be experienced as much by the body as is possible. The become alive if they are treated also as bodies, bodies of thought, bodies of objects, bodies in motion. So these poems are made to move, designed to change by your looking at them. The poem are made to be felt, seen, heard, even smelled, though none is quite designed to be tasted.

These are poems of the senses and the word because we are beings of senses and the word.

Someday, I might get these right, but if I rattle this poem a little I can hear, though still too faintly, the sound of an ocean unfurling itself over a layer of pebbles in many colors.

ecr. l'inf.