The Force of What’s Possible

It seems to me that, taken as a whole, The Force of What’s Possible answers its own question. This answer arrives particularly via the juxtaposition of experimental essays with the more plainspoken ones, and it looks something like this:

If the goals of experimental writing are themselves intelligible, they’re not being met by writing that is not intelligible; championing the avant-garde on the basis of claims that can be articulated might be a losing battle. But if there is something more at stake for experimental writers—something beyond the scope of our normal language, of “Empire”-taught and -sanctioned thinking—they’re doing it, whatever it is.

As Melanie Rae Thon writes, “through the fusion of meaning and music I can travel beyond my own limits of language…I can begin to sense, to know, to render the mysterious diversity of experience through the poetry of other beings.” If the essays in The Force of What’s Possible are to be believed, that “mysterious diversity” is mysterious precisely because it is not immediately accessible. These 400 pages of writing on the subject, however complex and mottled and at times downright abstruse they are, epitomize the difficulty in diversity—and remind us that embracing it anyway, no matter how frustrating the process, is the purpose and the mystery.