Chandos Ring Poems
America's First Successful Long Poem in the Modern Idiom
Chandos Ring is the first epic poem in the modern language. Chandos Ring is a science fiction epic poem by Mark Chandos (writing previously under the pen-name Mark Staber Kobo), a modern American poet, famous for his best-selling poetry book Greatest Living Poet: Strange Gods, Bulk Prophecies.
The strangness of Chandos Ring
Mark Chandos
Chandos Ring fits into no other known genre of modern American Poetry. The first half of each volume, titled Chandos Grid, consists of essays on western story and literature, seeking to establish a new Western-world philosophy. The second half of the book, titled Chandos Ring, is an epic poem. No other contemporary author has written a book combining philosophy with a modern epic poem. This makes Chandos Ring unlike any other book in the modern world. His audacity makes a bold new space for American Letters.
The Philosophy of Chandos Grid - Thesis
The collection of philosophic essays, Chandos Grid, serves as an introduction to the poetry (Chandos Ring). In Chandos Grid, the author introduces the thesis that all of perceived human reality is a function of human story-making. He insists that each reader can prove the concepts of "Story Theory" by his or her own experience. Consciousness, he explains, is inseparable from story-making. Therefore the human, a creature of conscious being, is inseparable from story-making. When the human attempts to describe his consciousness, even in the first syllables, he cannot avoid making a story of his consciousness. Mark Chandos suggests that it would be impossible to find two persons whose account of consciousness is the same. This is the key discovery of how the human mind actually works - it makes story. These are just a few readily discernable phenomena that prove the validity of "Story Theory" as an honest philosophy of the human condition. The author makes the statement that he is the only modern writer to have made an advancement on Plato - that is, concerning the discovery of what is human. He continues a ten-volume discussion showing the implications of "Story Theory" for the future state of humanity.
Chandos Ring - Significance
Chandos Ring is a projected ten volumes of science fiction epic poem telling the story of future men that have left Earth to continue the human race at the moons of Jupiter. Each book is divided into ten cantos containing, in turn, ten stand alone poems. The reader is therefore not forced to read long pages of unbroken lines of poetry that never seem to have an end - as are found in the traditional long poems in classic literature by Homer, Virgil, Milton.
Chandos Ring attempts to make innovations in areas of American literature that no other long poem has ever attempted. First, it is a poem of science fiction. Most traditional long poems are an account of an event, such as a battle, from the distant past. Chandos Ring is projected into the future - and contains no battles - the battles have already happened. Second, Chandos Ring is one of the first poems, ever, to have found a way to seamlessly integrate poetic descriptions of technology. Most poems, even modern poems, either avoid modern technology, or mention it with reluctance or as a resort to prose. In Chandos Ring all forms of technology must be mastered with poetry at the same level of all created things. Third, Chandos Ring is an epic poem in an age where long poems telling a narrative story are rare in the extreme. Any one of these achievements of Mark Chandos would be enough for any poet seeking to make an innovative contribution to American literature. To perform all three is daring, and perhaps, in the mind of most contemporary poets, an impossible task.