The Process Poetry Movement
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In November 2021 a remarkable conference was held online, featuring participants from different parts of the world, mostly Chinese and Americans.  It was called What are Poets for in the Age of Ecological Civilization: The Contributions of Process Poetry.  It was sponsored by the Cobb Institute, the Institute for the Postmodern Development of China, and the Center for Process Studies. 

I say "was held" but I might better say "is being held," because I write this after the first day of the event, but before the second.  I was one of the keynote speakers on the first day as was a leader of the Process Poetry movement in China: Bai Ya.  His paper titled "Process Theory of Poetry: The Self-Awareness of Poetry in the Age of Ecological Civilization."  His excellent paper made the case that, in our time, there is a need for poetry that draws upon multiple traditions and that helps us recover our sense of harmony with the more-than-human world.  He emphasized the the hope that such poetry can move beyond the sterility and absurdity of both "modern" and "postmodern" ways of thinking into something new, holistic, good for society, and good for the earth.  What impressed me about his talk, in addition to its content, was that it was well received by so many young Chinese poets.  He is a true leader.

In preparing my remarks, I really didn't know what Process Poetry meant; and I'm still a little unsure.  But what I discovered is that the very phrase Process Poetry has a great deal of traction in mainland China, thanks in part to Bai Ya, and that many of the poets who claim the phrase are young, creative, and thoughtful.  They see Process Poetry as something many people, not simply academic elites, can create.  The very creation of such poetry is personally therapeutic; it helps people find themselves.  And it is also socially relevant.  It can help their culture grow past its hyper-industrialized, spiritually vacuous tendencies.  Indeed, for them, the creation of Process Poetry is a spiritual practice, even as it is not associated with any religious tradition.  It is a way of finding your soul in a complex and hurried world.

As I prepared my remarks, I tried to build upon the poems they had written for the conference, as well as the poems Americans had written.  Thus, I developed my own provisional understanding of Process Poetry from the ground up.  I enclose on this page an abstract of my essay and the essay itself.  Perhaps it can help you, too, develop your own understanding of Process Poetry and create some poems yourself.  The Process Poets in China hope that Process Poetry will be a global movement.  Some of our speakers were indeed from around the globe, Russia and Hungary in particular.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step or, better, one zoom conference.  May the journey continue.  

​- Jay McDaniel, 11/20/2021

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​Plants Growing Wildly in Our Eyes:
Twelve Themes in Process Poetry
 
Dr. Jay McDaniel
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​Abstract 

​A process poem, like any poem, is an event, a happening, a lure for feeling.  It belongs the poet and to its readers and listeners.  It is verbal music.  Or, to use a metaphor from Wu Xioacha, it is “a plant growing wildly in our eyes.” 

Many in the process community are especially appreciative of poems that help (1) liberate our minds from predictable cliches and generalities, bringing us closer to lived experience.  As they liberate our minds, they encourage and evoke (2) gratitude for the world and amazement at life itself, (3) honesty to lived experience, both pleasant and painful; (4) a recognition of our embeddedness in natural world and the larger web of life; (5) a recognition of the primacy process itself – passage, decay, and novelty – as part of essence of life, (6) a sense of radical interconnectedness and a capacity to “see the universe in each grain of sand,” (7) an appreciation for the poignancy of human relationships, including love and loss, (8) an appreciation of the pure joy of exploring new possibilities; (9) a capacity to quest for meaning and question habitual assumptions, (10) a recognition of the primacy of beauty, including tragic beauty, for the universe and for human life, (11) an interior freedom or a freedom of the heart that can adjust to new and challenging circumstances; and (12) openness to the sacred or, as Carol Rose puts it, “returning to ancestral chambers.”

​We believe that when poems communicate and evoke themes such as these, they help us become more fully human and better able to help build and sustain what the world sorely needs: compassionate communities, in rural and urban settings, that are good for the earth, for other animals, and for people, with no one left behind.  The poems are wild plants that grow in our eyes and help grow our souls for our sake and the world’s sake.

Remarks

Today at our conference, I want to address three questions.  What is a poem?  What is a process poem?  And how might process poems contribute to a more just, sustainable, and loving world?   

I’ll offer my conclusion at the outset.  I suggest that process poems can, to use a phrase from Wu Xioacha, “help plants grow wildly in our eyes.”  We live in a world where we need lots of wild plants growing in our eyes.  Wild plants of compassion, of care, of love for life, of gentleness, of creativity, of honesty, of justice.  Process poems can help.  Process poets do not have to be famous or well known to be process poets, and their poems do not have to be widely read.  What is important is that the poems “help plants grow wildly in our eyes’ so that our souls can grow, too.  We are all, at this international conference, gardeners.  The poems we create, and present are the wild plants, as are our interpretations of the poems.  What makes them “process” poems?   I suggest that they are process poems because, through their imagery and language, they present twelve “process” themes for our consideration: (1) the liberation of language itself, from stale cliches and familiar patterns; (2) amazement and wonder at life particularities of life itself, this tree, this swan, this person, this relationship; (3) honesty to lived experience, including suffering; (4) human embeddedness in, and belonging to, the larger web of life;  (5) the primacy of process itself; including decay, transition, and novelty, (6) the radical interconnectedness of all things; (7) the poignancy of human relationships, including love and loss; (8) the joy of exploring new possibilities; (9) questing for meaning and questioning assumptions; (10) the beauty of the universe and beauty in human life, including tragic beauty, (11) spontaneity and freedom of the heart; and (12) openness to the sacred.  A poem is a “process poem” if it communicates or evokes any of these sensibilities.  In what follows I will say more about each and provide examples from the poets and poems included in our conference. Back, then, to the first question: What is a poem?

What is a Poem?

A poem is an event, a happening, a lure for feeling.  It is a wild plant that belongs both to the poet and to the world.

The Poem for the Poet

A poem belongs to the poet in its act of being composed.  It comes out of poet’s own experience of living in the world. Often the activity of composing the poem has a therapeutic or life-giving value. It purges the poet of difficult emotions; it awakens the poet to deep feelings; it helps the poet understand the world; it offers an opportunity for reflecting on life’s meaning; and offers a way of changing the world ever so slightly.  

Consider, for example Drinking Wine in the Mountains, which is one of the poems presented at our conference.  The poet, Xu Xian, speaks of drinking wine with a friend as a way of escaping the pressures of urban, ambition-ridden life and finding yourself in the healing presence of the “trembling mountains” themselves.  Process philosophers will naturally appreciate the image of trembling mountains, for we do indeed think everything is trembling, vibrating, pulsating with energy. I suggest that composing a poem is a bit like drinking wine and becoming red in the face.  In the act of creating poems, poets themselves become more alive: red in the heart if not also in the face. 
This aliveness is not always happy.  It can include a sense of loss, a memory of what has passed but is no more. 

Consider Back in Suzhou by Zhang Kou.  The narrator of the poem, whether the poet or an imaginary voice, takes us into an urban scene that he or she remembers in its concreteness, featuring grilled barbecue and beer shared with friends, but that seems now in the distant past.  Then the narrator ends the poem with a dream: A dream takes me to the Stone lake, and I rest on a rock/ Mountain becomes temple, the sound of water becomes Buddhist scripture/in which I hear a young man as he bursts into tears. As these lines were being composed, I suspect that a certain aliveness surfaced in Zhang Kou’s own imagination, but this aliveness was connected with loss, not joy. 
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In Whitehead’s language, the act of writing is “intense” but not necessarily happy.  The intensity of composing a poem and resting in the images and sounds of the poem as being composed, is itself a primary joy of the writing.  Composing a poem is like sitting in the presence of a mountain, hearing the water, and bursting into tears.  All poets feel something of this.  As they create, they feel something intense, something engaging.  Even if they burst into tears, there is a joy in the bursting.

The Poem Belongs to the World

Once composed, the poem belongs to the world.  It is released into the world, if only on a scrap of paper or an image on a screen and has a life of its own.  Readers and listeners add their own creativity to the poem as released into the world; and in a certain sense they share in the ongoing composition of the poem by finding meanings in the poem not recognized by the poet.  The poet’s “wild plant” has a wildness that cannot be controlled, and need not be controlled, by the poet.

Spoken Poems as Verbal Music

As an object in the world, a poem can be compared not only to a wild plant but also to music.  A poem is verbal music; its primary medium is language spoken or written. 

Spoken poetry has a special kind of magic, because, like music, it includes sounds that can be heard.  When we are listening to someone read or perform spoken poetry, it is like listening to someone sing.  The style may be hip-hop, folk, rock, or jazz.  Sonically as well as verbally, different poems have different feels, different tones, different styles.  The meaning of a spoken poem is in the sound of the voice as well as in the words. 

Written Poems as Verbal Mandalas

Written poetry is verbal music, too, or perhaps better, verbal graphics.  Part of a written poem’s magic is in the words and phrases that compose it; and part of the poem’s magic is the way the words are situated on the page in relation to the white space.  Together, the words and the white space form a gestalt, not unlike a Buddhist mandala.  The meaning of the poem is how it appears visually as well as how it sounds.  As spoken and as written, a poem is an object in the world.  It is, to use Whitehead’s phrase, a dynamic “lure for feeling.”

What is a Process Poem?

A process poem may or may not be indebted to process philosophy or to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. It is worth noting, however, that there was a movement of poetry in the 20th century America that was explicitly indebted to Whitehead.  One of its key figures was the early postmodern poet, Charles Olson. 

Olson took Whitehead’s Process and Reality as a key to understanding what it means for a poem to an object in the world.  Its composition needs to be rooted in the poet’s physical breathing, he said, not unlike the way in which a moment of human experience is rooted in what Whitehead called “experience in the mode of causal efficacy.”  Its composition needs to include the poet’s own imaginative experience, not unlike the way a concrescing subject creates something new out of what is given to experience, thus mirroring the momentary and creative nature of human experience in a changing world.  And, once released in the world in spoken or written form, it needs to have a life of its own, not unlike the way in which, in Whitehead’s philosophy, an occasion of experience in human life has a “life of its own” once its subjective immediacy has perished.  It is, to use Whitehead’s phrase, “objectively immortal.”
But today what makes a poem a “process” poem is not that it is Whiteheadian.  It is that it evokes and communicates ideas and attitudes, moods and feelings, that are important to many of us in the international process movement, committed as we are to helping build compassionate communities and ecological civilizations. 

Twelve Qualities of a Process Poem

Let me name twelve qualities that make a poem a process poem.  A given poem need not embody all the qualities: two or three is fine.  And there may be many more qualities than I name.  But here, for me, are twelve important ones that make a poem a process poem. 

Liberated Language: A process poem helps evacuate the mind of cliches, of predictable and conventional ways of thinking and speaking, so that our minds can be more receptive to fresh vision, honest appraisal of the way things are, and new ways of thinking.   Sometimes this liberation occurs through pleasant imagery as in much romantic poetry in the West, Wordsworth for example; and sometimes it occurs through protest and shock, in which something evil is presented in its stark reality and language liberates us from overly familiar comforts.  The shock value is key to the liberation.

Consider the very title of the poem “I Saw Birds Carrying Oxygen Masks in the Sky” by Hou Liangxue, with its image of birds with oxygen masks, or powerful repetition at the end of Hou’s “Water Running” by the same poet: “corpse/dead body/dead body dead body/dead body dead body dead body/dead body dead body dead body dead body/your dead body my dead body his dead body her dead body its dead body all the living things' dead body the dead body of the earth DEAD EARTH”  The value of this language is that it shocks us out of our comfort level and into a more honest approach to how things stand in the world today.

Gratitude for the World: A process poem invites us to be amazed by the world. evoking a sense of wonder.  It helps us see things and feel things with fresh eyes, as if it were the first day of creation. Each of the poems presented at our conference does this in its own way. To be amazed by something is to see it in its uniqueness, its specificity, and to be amazed that it is when it could not be.  Amazement involves a sense of contingency.  What amazes us may or may not be pleasant.  We can be amazed at what is unpleasant or hard.  Indeed, we may be amazed by what remains after loss, as in Ernie Tamminga’s Cherish What Remains: You want to say a prayer/For everything that’s died/But it’s dangerous to care,/So much easier to hide/You want to touch, to bless/Everything that’s dying/But it’s so hard to confess/That your heart and soul are crying./Hold me close, like I’m your child/And I’ll hold you close to me/Let our souls enjoin, run wild,/Let our raging love fly free.
 
Honesty to Lived Experience: A process poem invites us to be honest to lived experience – our own and that of others.  It communicates what people feel in their daily lives.  The feelings communicated may be happy, sad, peaceful, terrified, angry, frustrated, calm, or caring.  What is important is that the poem helps us “feel the feelings.” It evokes empathy.
 
Consider Kathleen Reeve’s poem Washing Away Father.  We read: “I wore my father’s sweater/like a warm hug/fabric worn and thinning/until it could not hold/together anymore/I washed the cigarette smoke/patina from the walls/he flowed down the drain/in the yellow rinse water/his laundry in the washer/cleansed of his scent…”  The poem is painful to read in some ways, but honest to the narrator’s experience of her father whom she needed to “wash away.” 
 
Or Georgette Unis’ Adele Displaced, where the narrator describes what it’s like not to feel out of place where she lives: “Why she lives here is a question/she struggles to answer/with explanatory reasons/Better to savor the fragrance, /gather a bouquet for the crystal vase in her house, a home built of red brick, /as out of place among adobe buildings/as she feels herself to be.”
 
Honesty to lived experience is essential to a process point of view because it is experience itself, of whatever sort, that is the bedrock of reality.

Finding our place in nature.  A process poem evokes a sense of felt connection with the more than human world: with hills and rivers, trees and stars, plants and animals.  We become more attentive to the beauty of nature, both to sublime and the particular: the mountain range and the dragonfly wing.  And we feel the pain of nature: the reality of decay and dissolution.  To what Whitehead called the “perpetual perishing” of things.   

Consider the poem Ernie Tamminga, “They knew me by name.”  He is speaking of the web of life itself as family: There seems to be/the mem'ry of a place and time/when I was not the only creature/to sing a song to a passing breeze,/to lift my face to the rising sun,/to share a secret with the whisp'ring trees/-- No, no, I was not the only one.../I had sisters and brothers 'most everywhere/They swam the rivers, they flew in the air/They walked the green Earth, and I did the same/They taught me of living - they knew me by name.”
 
Also consider the eco-poetry of Jiang Changrong in Swan and Lakefront.  Here the aim of the poet is to critique industrial civilization and its world of concrete and steel, so cut off from any kind of felt harmony with the natural world, and to invoke and evoke the possibility of living in harmony with the world.  In Lakefront the reader is invited to imagine herself as a bird among the reeds of the laker, having moved beyond the humanly created world of steel: “I would be a late bird, /far away from the cold cements, /far away from the strident steels, /Being isolated from the world/Crooning my song among twigs like a minstrel.”  And in Swan we find ourselves identifying with a swan, originating in heaven, and fleeing the cold for the warmer climate, releasing our shadow onto a lake wish shards of holy light.

Appreciating the poignancy of human relationships.  A process poem helps us feel special poignancy of human relations: friendships, romantic relations, family life.  With help from a poem, we better understand the longings, the cravings, the tensions, the losses, and the depths of human relationships. We better understand what it is like to be with others.   

Consider, for example, the poem “Time” by Zhuang Mengyuan, as it links the sense of time’s flow (see below) to the poignancy of tender relationships of love: “

Openness to process: passage, decay, novelty. A process poem gives us a sense that the world itself is a process of becoming, that nothing is static, that all things are fluid and changing.  It helps us realize that being is becoming, that every moment is a new moment, that the past can be remembered but not exactly retrieved.  It gives us a sense of process.  

Exploring New Worlds. A process poem takes us into new worlds.  The poem may do this by inviting us to see ourselves and the world in new ways or by inviting us to explore worlds that are imaginary and imaginative, that deal with what is possible even if not actual.  A poem helps us see that possibility is as real as actuality; those ideas are as real as mountains.  

Mutual Becoming and Interconnectedness.   A process poem helps us gain a sense of the radical interwovenness of all things: sensitive both to the uniqueness of each thing and to connections of all things.  It does this through concrete images not abstract concepts.  It does not say “everything is connected.”  It shows the connections through particular objects: “this wheelbarrow,” “this face,” “this moment in time.”  To quote William Blake, it presents the interwoven universe in a grain of sand. 
 
Consider Dick Bunce’s poem about sitting in the waiting room of a hospital, as they show how the whole can be in the part and, for that matter, in each face: “An older man/motionless, eyes fixed/on a wall, blank/colorless, the wall/but not the man/with face/of many things/despair, hush/weariness,/confusions/of the soul’/A chronicle/of the world/bruised/brooding.

Tragic Beauty:  A process poem evokes a sensitivity to beauty, including “tragic beauty” that combines sadness and joy.  It does not let us rest in mere happiness but gives us a sense of a peace that surpasses happiness and includes the tragic. 
 
Consider the sage advice offered by Zhu Lingai in “Life Creates Crystal.”  The poem speaks to a beauty that we can create with our own lives, not by following pre-ordained paths, but by letting our footsteps create the path.

Questing and Questioning: A process poem is often a quest for meaning, and it inspires us to undertake our own quest.  The “quest” of the poem will include questioning, doubt, and struggle, and we ourselves can partake of that questing spirit.   

Consider, for example, Maying’s poem “There.”  The poem offers the image of a grandmother who has become a ghost, and the poem then asks questions about what it can mean to be ghost: I don’t know if a ghost had ever sunbathed, or ate   green peppers and chrysanthemum buds, held a job, or had wishes and ideals/Would two ghosts fall in love? /In that world, how would we calculate a ghost's age? Would a ghost grow old?/Did my grandmother continue to weave there to maintain her best charity?/Had the dead Begonia and Henna in the courtyard found her?/I want to know whether she met her infatuated husband who died more than 20 years before her,/whether the hard work of raising four sons all by herself had been thoroughly unloaded/whether the villagers who passed away one after another recognized each other in there. The very asking of these questions, themselves unanswerable, makes this poem a process poem.

Freedom.  A process poem invites us to appreciate the gift and pleasures of personal freedom: a freedom that often comes to those who are out of the mainstream of society.   

Consider Jian Yi’s poem “The Angler,” with its presentation of a fisherman who will never receive acclaim from the world but who has the freedom to let his boat float where it will at night, eventually resting in reeds.  One night a thief steals the boat and uses its materials to create a flute.  The angler gets up in the morning and “picks up the flute carefully, at the shallow shores of the river.”  I can’t help but think that he then plays the flute.  The point is that he will, in the words of the poem, “never be a dignitary,” but he will indeed be free.  As will his wife, who tells the story in the poem.  This freedom often comes, not when we force the world into our own molding, but when we accept that the world itself is water-like, and that we must learn to flow with it. 
 
Consider “Uneasy Water” by Jia Jiajian. The poem reminds us that water has a freedom of its own, and that it is uneasy when forced into containers and tubules.  It then invites us to imagine that we ourselves can go with the flow, and that, to our surprise, it may incline itself in needed directions.  In this poem we hear the sounds of creative simplicity, of wu-wei, as an invitation to us all.  We claim our freedom, not always by forcing the world to meet our ends, but by flowing with a deeper current that is healing.
 
Openness to the Sacred: Returning to Ancestral Chambers. A process poem gives us a sense of the sacred, whether understood as God or the Holiness of nature or simply the beauty of human relationships.  For some this holiness is found with help from a religious tradition, for others it is found apart from such traditions. 
 
As a vivid example of the former, consider the Jewish sensibilities of the poet Carol Rose as she presents her feeling of The Sabbath: “this is where/i come alive/this every friday night/at sunset   with candles/welcoming me/from weekday cares… this is where/I return     always/to the Sabbath/dancing my way back/to ancestral chambers 
 
Or, for another example, consider Andrew Davis’ “Journey Back to Journey Forward” where he speaks of how we might regain a sense of inspiration and passion for life.  His advice? “Journey back through the recesses of the mind. /Back to the state of inspiration. /A reversal of the passing time. Back to what made you feel fully alive. /When the color of the sky made you pause. /When the subtle touch of the breeze brought smile to your face. /Reach back to that which arose you in the morning.”
 
When poems communicate any combination of these themes, they are “process” poems. They evoke and communicate the process spirit.

Why is this important?

Process poems are important because they help foster the twelve capacities named above.  Thus, they help us become the kinds of people who can live meaningfully in our lives, in the here and now, and do our best to help build compassionate communities and an ecological civilization.   A sustainable community is not just as community that is good for the earth, it is also a community that is good for people.  It helps them feel more alive and included, valuable to one another. 

It is sometimes thought that an ecological civilization depends primarily on objective states of affairs: agriculture, governance, politics, urban design, architecture, banking, and education, for example.  But it also depends on how people think and feel and talk, and on whether they realize their potential to be fully human.  Inspired by process poetry, they know that, once basic needs are met, the purpose in life is not to acquire more material possessions but rather to acquire a more expansive and sizable soul.  A sizable soul is one that embodies the twelve sensibilities mentioned above.  It is “wide” in scope and depth.  Today the world needs wide souls.  Process poetry can play an important role in the widening.

- Jay McDaniel

​Process Nexus
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Process Nexus

"​The heart of the Claremont Process Nexus is a network of organizations that share a common commitment to process-relational ways of understanding and living. The Nexus came into being out of the work of members of the Center for Process Studies (CPS). CPS wanted to promote interest in process thought, especially that of Alfred North Whitehead, among philosophers, scientists, educators, lawyers, and so forth. The Nexus builds on and expands that by providing a way for members of the process movement to better communicate, collaborate, and support one another.
 
Joining the Nexus does not mean that you need to take on anything additional or that anyone will tell you what to do. It does not mean that you commit your organization to any set of beliefs or practices. It does mean that you are comfortable relating to other organizations with a similar heritage to yours, at least on some topics.
 
As a member you will learn about other opportunities, and be invited to attend events about which you would not otherwise know. We hope there will be occasions when you support others and others support you. Some of you as individuals may enjoy discussing specific questions or new books. Others may be interested in finding resources or connecting with like-minded individuals. Our aim is for this endeavor to benefit all who participate."

- from the Process Nexus website