The Posit Trilogy: Dracula on Literature
The Posit Trilogy, which begins with Posit and was completed in 2013 (revised in '17), has its own unique identity as (like Equations) a possible dialectic in poetry/literature. I am looking into the way that Deposit and Re-Posit complete the Trilogy, and attempting to discern whether or not the dialectical form of discourse (thesis/antithesis/synthesis) is properly fulfilled. The Posit Trilogy, in its fanciful sense of characterization and levels of imagination, reads to me like a more advanced, subtler version of Opera Bufa. It is not a conventional dialectic. Illustrative is the absurd chiasmus between Saint Augustine and Dracula, which propels the Trilogy forward; and the manner in which Dracula, who is allowed air-time in precisely two persona poems which end (respectively) Deposit and Re-Posit, girds himself around with rhetorical heft against both Augustine, purity, and confession, and then the purity and potential transparency of major high art consonant literature, as well. This demonstrates that The Posit Trilogy is playing games both with pop culture, with poetry-as-theater and texts as staged, with intellectual seriousness being balanced with playful vistas opening, and with a deconstructive interrogation of literary seriousness itself, on guard against overrating the efficacy of texts:
you don’t feed on
the mysterious disappearance
of the need to do this—
that raw life & blood
would suffice to
satisfy, & gird you
against the grinding
towards sphere-music
you fancy you make.
I’ve lived a thousand
years among human
souls, all in need of
blood, little else, and
words are no blood
at all— what suffices
for such as you is
(as you say) a
simulacrum of blood,
with limited flow-
potential, & as such
I counsel you (if
you ask) to feed on
something more wholesome-
don’t scoff— wholesome
is not relative
for the human species,
& your words are dirt,
feeding no one directly,
& those who feed are
suspect, chilled by
exposure to terminal
frosts, unable to bite
what might suffice in the end…
We may or may not choose to take Dracula’s critique seriously; The Posit Trilogy in steeped in investigations of subjectivity, and Dracula’s “I,” his sense of himself, is manifestly abased by comedic abrasiveness. There is also the sense that the ironies of us, a human audience, reckoning a vampire who hopes to convince us of the obsolescence of textuality, are potent ones: Dracula can stand in, however whimsical he seems, for mechanistic, brutish, repetitive, materialistic society, as a kind of door slamming shut, warning us not to take the textual action here too seriously, that menacing forces hover behind even what texts are germane to our tastes. That, ultimately, Dracula (and those masses he is a synecdoche for) is an “anti-I,” and thus the greatest threat to the poetic “I” when properly employed, is another subtext beneath the whimsy. Equations goes out of its way to make its essential dialectic explicit, which bodes well for its surface-level popularity; like the Apparition Poems in A Dozen Leaking Buckets, written at roughly the same time, The Posit Trilogy reads as shadowy, chiaroscuro. A precise sense of a dialectic is lost in fog and the carnival-esque. When Dracula wins, in a context like this (which loosely mirrors 2019's Listen to the Devil), it may be me channeling a sign of the (recessional) times.
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