someone recently asked
what in my opinion
is theory and perhaps
more importantly
what is my theory
i replied that i did not know
what it is any more than he
i guess it is not
unlike asking someone
what is the grass
only that it is more irregular
prickly and especially riddled
with gnats and noseeums
then after stumbling around
for a moment or two
i told him that i guess
for me theory is a lens
through which meaning
is filtered or even produced
i then added that
i suffered from the blessing
curse of learning poststructuralism
from poststructuralists and
marxism from marxists
i’ve studied semiotics
with semioticians and
feminism with feminists
not to mention critical race
theory and cultural studies
from provocative advocates
i’ve also been taught
somewhat against my will
the absence or avoidance
of theory by those who
were simply and blindly
in the grip of an older theory
unconsciously unwittingly
subject to the hegemonic
despite the detours and road bumps
this diversity of experience
allowed me the opportunity
of seeing each positionality
as a positionality
from within itself
through its own lens and
through the lenses of others
reflexively recognizing
the ideological presuppositions
that finally doom each to
a partiality of knowing
and ultimately to failure
nevertheless these are each
theory on a grand scale
they deal with our relation
to reality and truth
they alethiologically shape
and fundamentally determine
our notions of how
the world is constructed
and thereby deconstructed
so access to so many
world views would seem
to leave one an overwhelming
spectrum of possibilities
leaving us in a state
of brilliant ignorance
of ineffectual enlightenment
in spite of all of that however
it is necessary and it means
i neglected to tell him
however that i have also
been taught perhaps to my cost
christianity from christians
who are the same people
who taught me racism
sexism and homophobia
under the guise of what
i would now call white
privilege patriarchy
and heteronormativity
upon second thought
i wish i had told him
this last bit it’s just that
when you are from alabama
you have to be careful
about the kinds of lenses
you provide people
to see through you
which is kind of like theory
but not really

the world’s a poem
that doesn’t rhyme
it lacks a certain metric
or sense of time
the nature of the world
and how we interpret it
is not what it once was
the act of perception must now
be an act of writing not reading
when conceived as text
the world is an endless string
of signifieds with infinite
possibilities of meaning
so writing is more vital
more important than reading
reading is mere reification
of course we could blather on
in grandiose phrase of how
the world is out of joint
or even how we are out of place
in our interpreted world or
lament what man has made
of man but now in the dawn
of a new century we can
no longer turn to shakespeare
or rilke or even wordsworth
to help us find our way
through the artificial constructs
of the natural world around us
two hundred years ago
wordsworth wrote the harmony
of nature as a simple ballad
a style that might be
at home in an old church hymn
or country music song
and later turned to the ode
perhaps the most contrived
of all poetic forms to explore
his most contrived intimations
of his poetic immortality
now we can no longer see
what he once saw in nature
or in poetry for that matter
a godlike harmony and beauty
and while our world has perhaps
distanced itself even further
from wordsworth’s imagined
state of nature we must
recognize that his accounts
of early spring and daffodils
were always written from
the perspective of outside
observer as though he were
writing while looking out
his window or even at a painting
we can no longer write
wordsworth’s garden
that apple has already been bitten
and we now know that
it cannot be unbitten
if it were ever bitten at all
for nature outside of the artifice
of poetry is really nothing
but the perpetual exercise
of sex and violence
as evidenced here in early spring
amid the ubiquitous pollen
and ever-present signs of easter
and not to mention the kudzu
the dormant kudzu
that covers the world
like grey cobwebs
in a haunted attic
if there is harmony
it is a brutal harmony
wrought of our own writing
like the painting of a landscape