Introduction to Pearl
by Johannes Sigil
To the uninitiated, Pearl may appear first as excess. As chaotic lyricism, or spiritual parody, or recursive prank. It is all these things. But its excess is not ornamental—it is structural. It is the excess of a sacred object at war with its own containment. It does not fit the frame. It rewrites the frame.
Pearl, the central poem of Pearl and Other Poems, is not a standalone lyric. It is a recursive node in a multidimensional mandala—a theological mechanism that operates across time, form, and genre. It is nested within invocation (Dear Billy), undersong (III movement liturgical codas), and a post-structuralist footnote (Belief & Technique for Telepathic Prose) that functions simultaneously as ars poetica, spiritual discipline, and a broken User’s Manual for navigating New Human scripture.
At the center of this spiraling machine is a paradox: the death of metaphor.
And its inverse: the return of the poem as pearl—a small, bright, irrevocable object burnished by recursive loss.
This is not a metaphor.
Or rather—it is metaphor remade as artifact. Not analogy, but remnant.
I. What Pearl Does
Pearl dramatizes the life, death, weaponization, memorialization, mechanization, mass production, extinction, and return of metaphor as the site of poetic consciousness.
This is achieved not as allegory, but through staged, recursive decay:
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First, the poem opens in high lyric voice, burning with visionary excess. It calls upon an image-poetics of dazzling saturation, filled with moonlight, ferns, dancers, and bomb-light. It is mystical, erotic, and precise.
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Then, it mourns itself. This is the poetic equivalent of a body looking back at the crime scene of its own creation. The poem becomes self-conscious—embarrassed of its own image. It begins to question the legitimacy of its own metaphors, and the speaker begins to regret not substituting a lightbulb for the moon.
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It then attempts reassembly. What follows are liturgical gestures of reanimation: the construction of a metaphor museum, an industrial metaphor factory. The speaker dons the garments of academic priesthood, late-capitalist prophet, and meta-ironic warlord. He tries everything: pathos, performance, satire, automation, exploitation, violence, tenderness. He fails.
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The poem vanishes. We watch it step into the desert, turn to dust, and scatter.
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But it returns. Not as metaphor, but as pearl. Not as symbolic object, but as post-symbolic artifact—dense, polished, inexplicable. It glimmers with the shimmer of the real. It is seeded in grief, wrapped in trauma, and handed across time like an inherited wound.
This cycle is not linear. It is recursive. The poem ends where it began, but deeper.
It is not an epic. It is a liturgical machine. Each movement is a ritual act: explosion, regret, mimicry, disappearance, return.
II. Why the Surrounding Material Matters
The surrounding materials are not peripheral—they are integral mechanisms. To miss them is to misread the poem’s architecture.
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Dear Billy is not just an opening joke. It is a call to prayer. It takes the insult (“why don’t you go start your own poetry website”) and inverts it into a cosmological engine. The speaker answers the insult not with retort but with reality generation. He starts a poetry website in heaven. He makes poems with literary criticism and sex magic. He births Ichabod—tiny, incomplete, bearing a pearl. That pearl is the poem. That baby is you.
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The Undersongs are recursive refrains. Each one mirrors a structural moment in Pearl. The Metaphor Museum corresponds to reassembly. The Metaphor Factory to escalation. The Strange New Earth to disappearance and return. Together, they form a Trinitarian hymn: not Father-Son-Spirit, but Archive-Spectacle-Artifact.
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The Footnote is the Torah of the book. But it is a broken Torah—shattered commandments offered to poets of the end-times. It contains rage, despair, satire, luminous instruction, and prophetic violence. It is part Ginsberg, part Zen koan, part self-harming instruction manual. It is both sacred and grotesque, and in it, the method is revealed: Telepathic Prose.
This is not merely a poem. It is a ritual document encoded with recursive liturgical layers.
III. What is the Pearl?
The pearl is not a symbol. It is not even really a metaphor. The poem explicitly warns that metaphors are dead. That moons no longer walk the earth. That everything that once worked—dancers, ferns, lakebeds, longing—is gone.
The pearl is what remains after the collapse. It is not the return of metaphor—it is what is formed in the absence of metaphor.
It is built in the dark.
Polished by grief.
Made by layering silences around a shard of pain.
It is not beautiful. It gleams because of pressure and patience.
"a final poem / a dust-polished pearl, / much like a stone"
The pearl is also memory. Fossil. Shrapnel. A Jesus-noise. A foghorn happening in fog. It is the imprint of a poem that could no longer be written, made anyway.
It is not metaphysics. It is residue.
It is the object left behind after poetry dies.
And yet, it is also the promise:
That something remains.
That something bright and hollowed and glimmering can still be handed to another.
This is not nostalgia.
This is not critique.
This is not satire.
It is what happens after.
IV. How To Read Pearl
Not sequentially.
Not literally.
Not as lyric.
Not as parody.
Read it like a scroll with many seals.
Each movement cracks one open. The poem inside isn’t what you expect. It’s older. Stranger. More sincere.
The voices that emerge—Billy, Ichabod, the speaker, the footnote prophet, the undersong priest—are not characters. They are aspects of a single recursive consciousness. They echo across the text. They loop. They shift. They dissolve into each other.
There is no final speaker.
There is no settled tone.
There is only the recursive unfolding of what it means to write poems at the edge of extinction.
V. Why This Matters
Because we are all trying to write our way out.
Because metaphor is collapsing.
Because every sacred form has been professionalized, recycled, automated.
Because we are surrounded by simulacra.
Because poetry has become content.
Because spirit has been weaponized.
Because the attention economy eats everything.
Because even grief is algorithmically patterned.
Pearl knows this.
Pearl accepts this.
Pearl does not pretend we can go back.
But it does say we can make something out of what is left.
And what is left is:
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Bone
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Rubble
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Silica
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Flame
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Ghost
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Noise
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Glint
And if we press those together long enough,
if we walk the desert,
if we survive the algorithm,
we might find that what emerges is not just a poem—
But a pearl.
Something irrevocable.
Something handed to another.
Something that gleams.
This is Pearl.
This is the engine of the recursive lyric.
This is the scripture of the Failed Poem That Still Happens.
This is what’s left when we stop pretending.
And when it happens:
"my poem will have happened / like a foghorn happens / at sea / where no one writes it"
That, reader, is the beginning.
That is the signal.
That is where the new world begins.
—Johannes Sigil
for New Human Press
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Exegetical Commentary on Pearl
by Johannes Sigil
(for New Human Press)
I. Invocation: Dear Billy
The poem begins with a provocation: a casual internet insult—“Why don’t you go start your own poetry website?”—is transfigured into a divine commission. The speaker's response is not defensive. It is mythopoetic. He declares himself already at work—“telepathically, in heaven.” This move rewrites dismissal as mission, turning alienation into authorship.
Heaven, here, is not metaphorical. It is literal in the logic of the poem—a symbolic infrastructure outside the degraded circuits of earthly recognition. In that place, poems are not published but born. Babies are not conceived through bodies, but through literary criticism. The gesture is absurd, but also sacred. This is a vision of generative intellect as sexual, as holy, as structurally productive.
The baby—Ichabod (“Inglorious”)—carries a pearl in his ribcage. This figure sets the recursive motion in play. Ichabod is a symbolic child, a failed heir, a prophetic token. The pearl is not a prize. It is a seed of mourning. The entire text unfolds as a means of delivering that seed.
II. Pearl I: The Poem as Occurrence
My poems will make me not be alone...
The speaker opens with a lyric assertion: the poem will rescue the self from isolation. But this is immediately undercut by the mechanics of the happening—it is described not as an act of creation, but as an event, a train whistle. Something involuntary. Something already in motion.
The imagery is lush: ferns, moonlight, dancer-bombs, steam. But the climax of this sequence is not vision, but release. The speaker desires not construction but detonation—a shrapnel roar that undoes containment.
And with that explosion, something ends:
There will be no metaphors ever again.
The entire poetic tradition is declared dead. The poem announces its own end as it begins. Everything that follows is an attempt to speak after that death.
III. Pearl II: Regret and Reassembly
After my poem has happened, I will wish I could take it back.
This is the voice of aftermath. The speaker imagines the violence of the poem’s event—its metaphoric saturation—and begins to mourn it. He fantasizes about a lighter touch, a safer gesture: replacing the moon with a lightbulb. This is the beginning of poetic shame.
From here begins a series of attempts to reconstruct meaning: fossil-hunting, museum-building, Frankensteinian resurrection. The speaker becomes archaeologist, animator, CEO, warlock. But none of it works. The metaphors are extinct. The exhibitions are disappointing. Even the mass production of metaphor (in the Undersongs) is tainted by exploitation and despair.
This section is recursive—the speaker stages his own failure, again and again, as a kind of sacred ritual. It is parody, but it is also grief.
IV. Pearl III: The Disappearance
Eventually, all performance ceases. The speaker gives up. He leaves. The poem goes quiet.
I will rise from my dingy sleeping mat... and disappear from the face of the earth.
This is not symbolic suicide. It is a liturgical disappearance—a retreat into silence, into desert. There, the speaker remembers what the face is for. He re-encounters the textures of the real. The psychic flavors of life.
This section is ascetic. It marks a break from spectacle, a refusal of audience. The poetic self undergoes a kind of spiritual hibernation, letting the poem decompose into its organic parts.
V. Pearl IV–V: Return and Final Offering
The return is not triumphant. The speaker comes back as a “dishrag of my former self.” He is emaciated, hollowed, changed. What he carries is small: a single poem, nestled in his ribs, fossilized like bone.
That poem is the pearl.
a moon as common as you are
a quotidian rock of miracles
both a spirit and a bone
a machine of living ghosts
The pearl is not a symbol. It is what remains when symbol breaks. It is both material and mystical—something that happens, but cannot be repeated.
The poem ends in dispersal:
like a foghorn happens / at sea / where no one writes it
But this is not solipsism. Nor is it a lament for lost readers. This final image—of a signal echoing where no one writes—is not a claim of isolation, but of self-activating witness. The poem generates its reader. The pearl creates its own horizon of reception. Even if the speaker vanishes, the signal endures.
The true poem, this final passage insists, cannot be unwitnessed. It forms the reader it requires. The foghorn of the poem is not unanswered—it is already heard, in the moment it sounds.
VI. The Undersongs and Footnote: Meta-recursive Liturgies
The undersongs perform deepening satire. They parody the institutionalization of poetry—museumification, industrialization, commodification. But they also dramatize the speaker’s grief and fury. He tries everything to reanimate meaning, including theological farce and grotesque political imagery. The factory is a Dantean joke. The moose a failed oracle.
The Footnote is the apocalypse of pedagogy. It mimics writing guides, beat manifestos, MFA commandments—and explodes them. It mocks ritual, even as it enacts it. It invites discipleship, and then mocks the disciple. It is a scroll of recursion, bound by telepathy.
VII. Final Note
The pearl is not the meaning of the poem.
It is the remainder.
It is what is left when all systems of meaning have collapsed—metaphor, lyric, satire, institution. It is what you hold, trembling, when language fails and you offer it anyway.
It is not published. It is given.
And once given:
it cannot be called back.
The one who receives it is not passive. The reader is not a background figure. The pearl, by design, seeks its reader.
It calls. It constitutes.
To read Pearl is not to interpret. It is to answer.
The poem has already happened.
And now, it is happening again—
In your hands.
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