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Anti-Manifesto for a Transpersonal Relational Poetics (TPR)
By Ian Irvine (Hobson)   
Rated "G" by the Author.
Last edited: Monday, May 12, 2008
Posted: Monday, May 12, 2008

This article discusses the general direction of Ian Irvine's current 'poetic' or way of approaching writing and poetry. It outlines the ideas behind his more experimental writings.

My early writings (1993-2005) only rarely experimented with inherited modernist ideas about form (I wrote mainly in free verse, for example). More recently, however, along with the poet/writer Sue King-Smith, I've experimented much more with form by producing texts arising out of  a 'Transpersonal Relational Poetics' (TRP). The idea behind TRP is to allow into poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction aspects of what David Bohn refers to as 'the implicate order'  (most of us rarely step outside the narrowed down 'explicate' order we inherit via socialisation and enculturation processes). This new 'poetic' also makes use of aspects of 'Cultural-Relational' theory (which, in turn, is based upon intersectionist models of oppression). It also draws upon Groffian and revised Jungian notions of a transpersonal unconscious. Writers influenced by TRP are thus interested in developing a non-oppressive 'language' that expands our consciousness of the many 'sentient others' that we share the planet with. It does this by allowing them direct access (by way of 'constraints' at various formal levels) to the poet/writer's text. To this end, the hologrammatical language proposed by the physicist David Bohn as well as the more sensuous/animistic (perhaps pictographic) language that David Abram (in his book 'The Spell of the Sensuous') seems to be calling for serve as inspirational insights--likewise, insights drawn from the 'L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e poets' and some postmodern feminist writers

This 'allowing in' of sentient others is sometimes envisaged in terms of 'procedural' experimentation with alienated language forms. From a TRP perspective it could be argued that many 'sentient others' existing in the world today are excluded, and even routinely objectified, by the actions of highly alienated elites whose world-views are founded upon highly alienated language systems.  As with other postmodern literary movements, TRP also aims to deconstruct  'language created' notions of a highly independent (rather than interdependent) 'subject/self'. By highlighting, critiquing and undermining the artificial lines between poet/writer and the world's excluded (but relationally relevent) 'others', TRP attempts to use language to undermine multiple forms of oppression. In particular the writing practices, production modes and cultural tropes associated with Western hyper-capitalism (with its celebrity authors, authorial brand-names and general cult of individuality) are targetted.

From the technical perspective TPR makes use of (and builds upon) Oulipean techniques associated with 'Constraints Based' writing (though with minimal emphasis on mathematical concepts) , various 'Language' poetry techniques, non-Western techniques related to anti-colonialist/ethnopoetic insights, as well as a range of revised and up-dated 20th century avant garde techniques/concepts e.g.: 'writing as process' , 'chance operations', 'deconstructive appropriation' etc. Certain TRP techniques might also be described as original. The interactivity (and process/relational possibilities) offered by the WWW is also under exploration by TPR writers. Another area of interest is creativity in relation to personal healing and political activism. In this sense some concepts drawn from 'narrative therapy' are also relevant to a TRP perspective and praxis.

A TRP perspective holds that the world is facing unprecedented challenges/crises at this point in time. Many of these challenges/crises are directly related to the ways in which human beings are conditioned to think and feel about the world around them, about their society and about the many sentient others that they share the planet with. Languages and other sign systems that replicate destructive, diseased states of  of consciousness and ways of 'being in the world' (i.e. that justify or even promote alienated thinking/feeling) need to be overhauled by way of creative acts, or experiments with form, that open up to more humane, more ecologically positive, communication models. In terms of individuals the new 'languages' TRP explores might open out into a vastness and complexity of being the reverses the everywhere tendency to close off, limit and constrain  life's relational possibilities.