My Notions About Abstraction At This Moment Poem by Denis Mair

(in response to John Olson's prose poem beginning with the words 'a paint stick accelerates the swirl of paint')
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Abstraction is a laboratory for the rendering or re-assortment of templates and essences...

the mere idea of extracting them poses an embarrassment of choices...

What to do with that delirium-inducing moment when one's own interpretation is not nailed down?

Pirouette on ice skates? Work out a tree structure or red herringbone pattern?

Try to make sure all the extracted templates will converge on the capstone of a pyramid?

When the process gains momentum, there will inevitably be chunks of unrendered material persisting,

so you can't always say how a batch of it will cook up.

The process may deliver a beautiful vision of the bardo in which we are transpiring...

with all the light-bearing rivulets and fragile strands whereby life awakens to its freedom at each moment...

yet there are systems of capture that have implemented settings to make themselves persist...

so the specter of loss casts its dark veins through the picture, making the stakes high.

In the early stages you didn't stint on investing primal feelings;

now that it's gotten more rarefied, you'll have to throw in whatever you can muster...

just to keep it rolling and churning up those surprises you love.