George Quasha's 'Preverb' & Its 'Furthering' Path of Thinking

Compelled by George Quasha's "preverb" books, Thomas Fink writes at Jacket2 that this "development of this new poetic mode ... shaped the organization of his work over a substantial period of time and the persistent metapoetic (even metalinguistic) thrust of the poetry."

Quasha and Fink began a correspondence about the "preverb," which has been described by Quasha in his book Verbal Paradise as a “kledomantic gathering of stray language according to a singularity-centered principle of organization,” working “for the public good” by promoting “the destabilization of naming.” Quasha explains his thinking further:

Language cannot respond to inquiry into its nature without feedback from you. There is no language without person; language uses us to journey through its own nature; beings originate (to invoke Buddha’s idea) interdependently; life itself is sustained by a feedback process which language serves — these are some configurations of the above preverb. You register it in relation to metalinguistics, which is an option that considers the objectification of community in relation to language; at times I follow a related (proto-Bakhtinian) path of thinking. Equally reasonable is a biodynamic dimension: feedback, energy, physical connection between speech act and bodymind, proprioception, and so on. Another perspective is language is alive and self-generative in relation to mind activity. We say that we think in language, but we could just as easily say that language thinks in us or through us. In that view poetry does the “higher” or “evolutionary” work of language. I like that view; it gets preverbs excited; they start talking. I register language getting worked up, a certain intensity gathering in the stomach, a sense of energy rising in the cerebral-spinal column and spreading into the thinking hands/fingers … more favorite configurations. I give myself permission to follow these sudden permissions. I gently restrain my inherited censors. I trust preverbial language to edit itself in process. Trust — an important value within the process — trust of lingual intelligence. The view: I don’t have this intelligence; I’m inside intelligence. And this is a way of elucidating navigation in lingual psychonautics.

There’s a “how to read” (to use Pound’s formulation) implicit in any poetics. Preverbs alert the mind that the will to interpret may easily become a hunt for ideology, or an unacknowledged effort to reify an ontology beyond its occasion. The preverbial poem doesn’t “put things into words” or fail to do that or embody the frustration of the unsayable; it lets word lead mind into “further things.” I sometimes characterize this furthering as the state of poetry; that state has a kind of feeling tone that seems to come of its own accord, but thinking I know what that means does not produce more poetry. A preverb causes the mind to reflect on its own process, but it does not rest in reflection; there are other things for it to (not) do.

Read it all at Jacket2.