Bio

I am currently interested in that area where the poetic overlaps with the social. That is, where the poetic ‘experience’ can be understood in relation to a transformation of social conditions.

The poetic experience can be one which lives also ‘off the page.’ It can be experienced, as Owen Barfield puts it, as a “felt change of consciousness” – moments when the everyday prosaic consciousness is able to wake-up in a poetic field, changing the whole configuration of consciousness thereafter, and with it one’s relationship with the world.

I am interested in a waking-up in this poetic consciousness and, as a consequence, I’m concerned with the way we are able to act poetically upon the world out of such a field, so that whatever we do bears the stamp of the poetic upon it.

More specifically, I have been writing, researching and working with the poetic experience as it unfolds out of poetic consciousness in a whole arc from page poetry to creative writing groups, to poetic social processes with one other or many others, all the way to a poetic re-organisation of the social organism according to its own inner lawfulness.

I see this whole application of poetic consciousness in the social arena as a gradation of colours, almost rainbow-like. It is fluid and dynamic, with no clear boundaries. Its working is not clear-cut, not prosaic. It is at once deeply scientific, artistic, social, and ‘religious’ (in the true sense of the word).

I have observed that much of the poetic experience in relation to the social necessitates a reversal of the will in order to make a space for that which is ‘not yet’ but that is seeking to be – the poetic nature of the other, of a group, of the social organism as a whole (but, essentially, everything).

I am also working towards a new language in order to clothe the experiences of the poetic field. If we are able to talk out of such a field in a way that is itself able to attain a kind of imaginative objectivity, then we are better able to talk with that which is wanting to be in the world, that which is wrestling to be born like a sunrise from the decay and rubble of a world that has come about as a result of traditional, dead structures and the traditional, dead thinking that created them.

I am interested in moving with Parzival’s realisation – of going beyond the conventional and the polite carrying on of customs, to a wording of that which we know wishes to sound forth from the realm of our true poetic speaking: “What ails thee?”

Grail castles and Grail kingships can be the only consequence.

John Stubley, PhD.