Foundlings: A New Era’s Possibles of Poetic Repair

Douglas Blake Olds, May 2025

“Fragments are not abandoned to the elements; they are the elemental.”

This fragment, drawn from the penultimate section of my forthcoming anthology of poetry, The Inexhaustible Always in the Exhausted Speaks, signals a metaphysical revolt. Poetic fragments and marginalia challenge systems that would divorce knowledge from embodiment, or Heideggerian conceits of situatedness from grace’s proprioceptive and kinesthetic unfolding. Against epistemologies that calcify into dogma or transcendental forms, fragments insist that theology and poetry alike must be lived—not systematized, while pointedly rejecting the impulse.

In this approach, the poetic fragment is not a deficiency but a refusal. It opposes tentativeness without despair alongside fidelity to the unchaining, the emerging, and the incomplete. Rebutting Joan Didion’s claim that it is easier to see the beginning of things than their end, fragments perceive the shards of grace peeking through systematic ruins of architecture, petals amidst the brown grass, the phenology of weathering speech. A poetic fragment becomes the pulled ear working its way to the heart rather than a calculus, a metaphysics of rhythm rather than rule.

Where metaphysics once offered grand designs, fragments offer microbursts of Logos—brief articulations that resist transcendental fixations and secular exhaustion. My work proposes that metaphysics has reached its terminal clarity in conation rather than in absolutes of the strategic mind. Poetics now bears the burden of carrying out metaphysical renewal—not through new systems, but through renewed senses reporting to the heart’s intent. The fragmentary mode aligns not with ideological fracture but with fidelities of grace to the rupturing, the rejected, the unenclosed.

Poetry in this vision becomes theo-philosophical insurgency: its resonance and humanistic value come from refusing form and doctrine that cease to be dynamic: “More should meteorology than cartography a poem” captures the shift: poems trace pressure, movement, temperature, not territory chained by maps of expansion. They should weather the world by claiming the elements of perception (Matt.16:3).  Poiesis is thus the insurgency of immanence against transcendentalizing conceit—a theology formed not by system but by the aftermath of storms, not by hierarchy’s ruin but by breath.

Where technocratic modernity calcifies experience, poetic speech remains porous. This porousness channels divine energy into immanent cultural archives, not as transmission of truths already claimed, but as testimony to presence—the presence of suffering, of beauty, of silence, of testing by and of the holy. In terms of art, renaissance modern is discerned by reworking the honing blade of universal abstraction applied to form, thereby unsettling both as mirrors or foundations for futuring. “Poetry joins—indeed leads—modernity’s reluctance to enter priesthoods of human grasp whence accountability vitiates.” It refuses clericalization of knowledge.

Modernity began as a project of individual accountability—seeking to interrogate and replace inherited traditions, often by pitting Platonic formalism against a more dynamic, energetics-driven image of humanity (Bildung and political agency). But in expanding form outward by categorical logic—detaching it from incarnate expression and relational fidelity—modern abstraction supplanted metaphysics rather than renewing it. What was once the inward call to virtue became the procedural mapping of systems. The ego, newly enfranchised under false flags of freedom (Athena sprung fully complete from the head of the father), found its refuge not in justice, but in curated illusions: buffet lamps and conference rooms where moral clarity is traded for managerial abstraction. What replaced tradition was not truth and goodness but technique and accumulation. Thus, late modernism, once heralded as the age of emancipation and scientific investigation, now reveals itself as a machinery of falsification and moral death—a systemic evasion of Being under the guise of infinite choice.

The moral life under neoliberalism’s offer of infinite material choice is governed by a vulgarized instrumentalism—whether armchair or algorithmic—in which pundits figment a million forecasted futures, stitched from ideology, instinct, or historico- determinist data sets. Strategic finance wields the politician and their sickle and pollinators: collapsing deliberation into partisan identities, they cultivate electoral energies from propaganda that evades accountability and civic progress. 

MODERNISM enjambs form, modern dance is enjambment that is responsive and prophetic, relational and individual, perichoretic and cosmic, released from form( Deleuze: “rigid configuration”...illuminated and accented by optics, perspective of privilege and individual” from God or from culture?) like a caged bird. High modernist poetry then can only have the flow of dance unboxed and unformalized, exploring the cosmos in music and rhythm, anticipation of the whole artistic realm of body and band, members and limbs. Unboxing the pugilisitic, but also returning what has boxed to the source, the tree, by which the boxing can dance itself alive again. in Goethe's telling Faust [=Herder?] is ultimately redeemed-not through regressing to antiquity or even crude Christian guilt over the loss of innocence, but by becoming a universal man of praxis and repair, uncaging what is caged.

Fragments such as “The Attribute negates the Appropriating” or “Language unbankrupts when freed from debt-chaining authority of forms” confront metaphysical tyranny with brevity and precision. These lines bear witness to a Logos that flows, calls, touches—not compels. In this current, neologism itself becomes not linguistic novelty, but a theological act: “A neologism is a wormed barb jigged by an unknown wrist. The bait is either taken off the hook, ignored, or is lipped and enfleshed to drag somewhere else.”

In a theology of immanent grace, poetic virtue is contextualized in the metaphysics of the heart’s centrality, not by an ego-directing mind. Immanence is kinetic, accountable, embodied, enfleshed. It manifests in acts of repair, in relational improvisation, in the unchaining of speech from its prior debts. “A sermon from sustaining proprioceptive chi—like massage or sandwich made by another’s bettering hand.” Here, theology returns to the body—not as limit, but as site of transmission.

A fragmentary mode also speaks to time. “Entropy ever gestures for endings; righteousness is grace’s filibuster of renewal.” Time is not seen as linear degeneration nor cyclic return, but as a field where poetic and spiritual resistance can unbeach chronology playing in the sand, interior trivialities singing of withdrawal and the sardonic self. “Sin chains time for the sake of position, grace unbinds and relaunches both.” While yearning is humanity’s poetic nature, the journey toward its human essence proceeds by investigation, assiduously seeking the source from which repair fountains forth.

The contested strands of history making have abandoned metaphysics for secular science and become the foe of teleology: “History is composed in the emergent, rather than defined by normal, by the peacemaker rather than the general. All other historicisms are false.” Such fragments cast suspicion on the conventional frame of history as artifact rather than vector. History breathes from the same Spiritual atmosphere as poetry—to be read through the gestures of care and the patterns of rupture that lead toward peace.

 “Fragments of hope divorce from irony’s effete perch.” Nor may they be nostalgic for dogmatic wholes. They call for a kinesthetic theology of striving—a theology of movement, relation, mutual dwelling. They point to Providence as the choreography of grace, to the Spirit watering the seeds of dormant imagination, to the Logos calling and making room, not compelling.

This is not language as ornamentation, nor even as confession. It is language as salvific material, offered not to codify but to stir. These fragments are shards of metaphysics—but they are also seeds, prayers, and barometric shifts. Their purpose is not to complete thought, but to sound its opportunities for resonance.

“Not abandoned to the elements—fragments are the elemental.” That line returns in closing. It reminds: the fragment is not what breaks from a whole; it is what endures when the illusion of wholeness breaks form. It is not what failed to become a system, but what refuses system for the sake of grace. An orphan to be covered by grace and its own genius. That which speaks the Logos in its still-expanding arcs and harmony.

Where speech is unprogrammed, where form is broken open to breath, and where grace bends the failing lines of metaphysical inheritance toward some new horizon—that is where poetry speaks again. Not to answer with appropriating power, but to remain with by attributional kraft. Not to chart, but to sail, trusting, into what has not yet been starred or stirred.

And lest you conclude, no summary found here:

Fissured runways

 Living between the cozening

transcendentaries of molten dawn

And dusk’s release of sighs

over seas’ reproach

where resentment usually leads

 

comes a green flash of repentance:

a rare and savored launch to land.