12019-03-03T23:44:03+00:00Paul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f121Invitation to Reverie (2018).plain2019-03-03T23:44:03+00:002017082219195720170822191957Paul A. Harris0462def817acd13db43634107b67e5f0f737f3f1
Rockery Reveries are compositions juxtaposing verse and photos that give condensed expression to lines of contemplative reflection spurred during sustained encounters with stones, informed by a poetics that intertwines abstract-conceptual and literal-material semantic registers through evocative wordplay and self-reflexiveness. Rockery Reveries embody what Bachelard calls “that strange reverie which is written and indeed forms itself in the act of writing” (Bachelard 1999, 27) and they aspire to realize Bachelard's claim that “reverie assumes the whole universe in its images; simultaneously creative and natural, its value is indissolubly aesthetic and ontological” (xxxvix).
Rockery reveries express a petric poetics that prioritizes a present moment pregnant with epiphanic potential. So much in a petric poetics depends upon an inverse relation between brevity in form and length of duration demanded to read and reflect. This formal relation has a correlation in content: durational length in reading opens onto a long duree the work evokes; the petric poem places us in a deep time. A petric poetics deploys semantic density, strati-graphic layers, to evoke and entangle different temporal scales. The poem does not represent temporal concepts but presents a present moment within which disparate timelines intersect and interweave.
