Associative Leaps. Object Loops.
Exploring Leap-and-Loop through fractalized poetics.
Poetry isn’t here to just describe the world. It’s here to witness it, experience it, and expose the ruptures in it. To take something ordinary—a glove, a braid, a glass of milk—write through it. Detonate it. Show us the viscera. Show it to us through time. Through emotion. Through movement and association. Through function and connection. The poet doesn’t just name things. The poet destabilizes and recontextualizes them.
This is the strange engine of Leap-and-Loop. You don’t just write about a thing—you turn it recursive. That object? It loops back. It returns. Each time sharper, stranger, heavier with ghostweight. Not a symbol, but a node—charged with memory, motion, implication. A braid isn’t just hair. It’s lineage, confinement, femininity, noose, offering, thread, time. The poet loops revealing a fractalized version and vision of it.
Fractalized poetics isn’t about metaphor in the textbook sense. It’s about mutation and embodiment. Take Andrew Michael Roberts’ poem, “Birds of Paradise” (recopied from The Poetry Society of America here: https://poetrysociety.org/poems/birds-of-paradise)
Across the desert we kissed
and dreamt one-legged of islands.
We were not yet home,
a sea of buffaloes
carried us on its back.
The associations leap line to line: desert —> island —> (not yet) home —> sea —> (carried us on its) back. This poem is like a beautiful fever dream, or a sun-stroked hallucination. The desert morphs into a desert island, where “we” are stranded, “not yet home” on an island surrounded by the “sea of buffaloes” whose stampeding movement, their undulating backs become the sea’s waves. From a certain perspective, it look like an island is riding on the sea, on its back, as if it were a single living creature.
Poetry forces perception into recursion. That means the reader must loop back—again and again—until meaning doesn’t land but accumulates. This is what happens in the work of Terrance Hayes: James Baldwin’s face becomes a landscape, becomes topography, becomes time-weathered ideology. See the poem here: https://poets.org/poem/american-sonnet-my-past-and-future-assassin-seven-ten-things
It doesn’t resolve—it expands. And that expansion is the point. In Leap-and-Loop, we don’t say “what something means.” We say: “how many ways can it evolve?”
This isn’t just a poetic trick. It’s a neurological intervention. The brain loves patterns—but poetry breaks them. It takes your pattern-hungry brain and starves it just long enough to generate heat. That cognitive friction? That’s the birth of attention. Fractalized language spins like a drill—it bores down through cliché until it hits a nerve. Until metaphor becomes marrow.
And this is why a poem isn’t static. It doesn’t stop once the line ends. It keeps echoing—bouncing through memory, triggering new connections days later when you’re folding laundry or looking at roadkill or daydreaming out of your office window. The line reactivates. The object flickers back. This is Leap-and-Loop’s secret weapon: recursive resonance.
Every artform can do this. Painters loop motifs until they collapse into texture. Musicians fractalize a rhythm until it becomes pulse, then ghost, then structure. Novelists rethread an image—a burning house, a father’s watch, the word “almost”—until it anchors a world. You don’t need to write verse to write poetically. You just need to nurture expansion. The method is scalable. Medium-agnostic.
Because here’s the real point: meaning isn’t fixed. It’s not a flag you plant in a line. It’s a space you explore—a field of feedback loops: resonance and friction. If your work tries to explain itself, it dies. But if it keeps becoming, it survives. Meaning that loops is meaning that lingers.
Objects become the access point. Not props, not symbols—but triggers.
Frank O’Hara’s New York City
Jim Carroll’s angel (“I Want the Angel”)
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Dan Nester’s Queen
Ocean Vuong’s photographs
The object isn’t described—it’s activated. It becomes a live wire. An unstable anchor. A portable ritual. Each return deepens its charge.
So, if you want to write like it matters—don’t try to be clever. Be recursive. Let your metaphors move. Let your images return in altered form. Let the objects evolve as the meaning shifts. That’s not sloppiness. That’s fractal fidelity. That doesn’t mean that your writing can’t be narrative, that your painting can’t be realistic, or that your song can’t be pop. The line doesn’t need to explain. It needs to move, to mutate, to embody.
Because the best poems don’t just say something new. They make you feel something impossible. And then they loop.
And then they loop.
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