Meme Measure

German philosopher Byung-Chul Han defines poetry as “luxury in language,” and where Andre Breton in his Manifesto on Surrealism claims that “only the marvelous is beautiful,” Han states, “I cannot conceive of the beautiful apart from the foreign. All genuine beauty is foreign.” The marvelous, the foreign transport the reader to the experience of being alive. Poetry, for the author, remains an attempt to slow the reader down and pull the reader out of the humdrum world of platitude and cliché of everyday language, providing a foreign lodge, a “house of being” and dwelling with ironic wit: the sublime poem. From beginning to the end, it provides a world of thought to expose the contemporary cynicism and foster vision for tomorrow.

The seventy-four poems in Meme Measure have as an initial impetus Rene Girard’s writing on mimetic theory, mimetic rivalry, and scapegoat. I see the collection as lodges for dwelling on the various implications for us today, while attempting to plumb emotion as subjective and objective within Homo sapiens.