___________________________________
Despite
the present prominence of the critic, it is to the poet we must turn for poetics.
With few exceptions, those qualified to theorise about poetry are those who
write it. And the most effective poetics take the form of an apologia
for one particular style of writing – usually the poet’s own. The nature of the
apologia can vary enormously – from the brusque practicality of Pound’s Don’ts
to the introspective pondering of Valéry – but they are all stratagems of
defence, and usually gain in polemical edge for being so. In addition to these
qualities we find, in the finest poetics, a profound reserve before the fact of
poetry, and a refusal to be dogmatic; after all, the great poems have usually
broken laws. (Romer 1982: 63)
Thus
opens Stephen Romer’s review of Jean-Claude Renard’s poetics with a
matter-of-factness that perhaps does not allow for the force of resistance
towards poetics (in this country anyway) and perhaps lacks a sense of the
speculative nature of poetics itself, but it does acknowledge the kinds of
irony and ambiguity that colour relations between poetics and poetry (and
writing more generally). It is this tension that I have tried to attempt to
delineate in the multiple definitions which follow.
I
have drawn on my work as a poet writing poetics, my work as a critic studying
poetry and, increasingly, studying poetics, and on my work as a teacher of
creative writing. While I hope it is obvious from what follows that I regard
poetics as integral to writing, it is also my belief that those of us involved
with radical poetry need to be impinging more upon the world of creative
writing teaching and that the concept of poetics may be our best entry point.
________________
Poetics are the products of the process of
reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past
and from others, speculatively casting into the future.
Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible
one.
Poetics is a discourse, though an
intermittent mercurial one.
Poetics is a writer-centred
self-organising activity.
Poetics is a way of letting writers
question what they think they know.
Poetics is a way of allowing creative
writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection.
Poetics exists for oneself and for others,
to produce, to quote Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “a permission to continue”.
(DuPlessis 1990: 156)
Poetics is not theory in the ordinary
rationalistic sense.
“Poetics don't explain; they redress and
address.” (Bernstein 1992: 160)
Poetics is not practice in the ordinary
empirical sense.
Poetics could be a test of practice; but
practice will test poetics.
To talk of theoretical poetics is not
accurate; to talk of practical poetics is no less accurate.
Poetics involves a theory of practice, a
practice of theory.
Poetics, to take it back to Aristotle,
where the category began, is distinguished from theoria or praxis,
theory or practice, in the primacy of its activity of making. Poetics is
the active questioning, since that time, about how does, how should, how could,
art be made.
Poetics is also to be distinguished from
aesthetics and rhetoric. (1)
Poetics and poetry are only etymologically
linked, dually from the Greek root poiein: to make. (2)
Poetics only makes sense if your sense of
art, artifice, artificer, is concentrated on the act of making, rather than
self-expression.
Poetics is a secondary discourse, but is
not “after the event”; it doesn't simply react to making. The making can change
the poetics; the poetics can change the making.
The aim of literary criticism, to parody
Marx, is to describe writing; the purpose of poetics is to change it.
Poetics is born of a crisis - the need to
change.
Poetics has a history as long as writing,
because writing has always changed.
Poetics may be textually specific; or it
might not be so focussed, not least of all because the “examples” of which it
speaks may not yet (and may never) exist.
“Poetics needn't be understood as
explanations of some prior body of work.” (Bernstein 1992: 154)
Poetics is a prospectus of work to be
done, that might involve a summary of work already done.
Poetics is a speculative discourse, not a
descriptive one.
Poetics says: look back, look forward,
look straight ahead, and cross the page.
“One of the pleasures of poetics is to try
on a paradigm and see where it leads you.” (Bernstein 1992: 161)
Poetics could be a running
commentary, but it might overtake, or equally lag behind.
Poetics' “answers” are provisional, its
trajectory nomadic, its positions temporary and strategic.
Poetics offer generative schema.
Poetics is more concerned with form than
with content, but will not respect that boundary.
Micropoetics: whose domain is the text and its
techniques; everything below the level of the text.
Macropoetics: whose domain is the text and the world:
everything above the level of the text. (3)
One reason to make your poetics public is
to test it, to build a community of writers, or of risk. But the manifesto may
be its gateway or its trap.
Poetics is contained in, and by, the great
manifestoes of art history, both in the sense of being locatable there, and in
the sense of being restricted. A manifesto colonizes the field of literary
production, rather than opens it up.
Poetics can be located in Poe's term
“Philosophy of Composition” as long as it composes, decomposes, recomposes that
“philosophy”.
Poetics involves “how to” (as in “How To
Write a Melodrama”) as long as knack plays second fiddle to knowledge, as long
as craft stays crafty.
A danger of poetics is that it might
operate as self-justification, but when it does, it will be settling into
argument like someone embedding him or herself into an armchair to bore you
with their monologue, reflections. It has ceased dialogue with the activity of
making.
When poetics stops it becomes theory,
retrospective rather than speculative, definitive rather than open to
infinitude.
Poetics provides a strategy for the
writer. To look for truth value in its articulations may be beside the point
for the writer, though it might not be for you, particularly if you are another
writer. It speaks to a working practice as much as it speaks to you. You can't
read a writer's poetics without his or her creative work.
Poetics is not about creating equilibrium,
but about creating a structured disequilibrium.
“Poetics becomes an activity that is
ongoing, that moves in different directions at the same time, and that tries to
disrupt or problematize any formulation that seems too final or preemptively
restrictive.” (Bernstein 1992: 150)
Poetics may involve strategic
self-deception.
Poetics may mismatch the writing that
results. It is not necessarily a ground plan.
Poetics as snapshots, thumbnails.
Some poetics contain a goodly portion of
gobbledegook; it may be a strategy to get texts moving, to get the writer
creatively into spaces that otherwise might not be accessed, or to divert
attention away from the creative act.
Poetics may not judge the use of
its findings well.
“The test of a poetics,” to adapt Charles
Bernstein, “is the poetry [writing] and the poetic [writerly] thinking that
results.” (Bernstein 1992: 166)
Poetics steals from anywhere.
Poetics finds things by accident, by
mistake.(4)
Poetics takes structural homologies from
science and philosophy, but also from gardening and pinball, if it needs to.
Poetics breathes creative potential into
uncreative material.
Poetics is not just a discourse, a way
of thinking, saying or writing about making, but a discursive practice with
rules of its own.
Poetics can never offer readings of the
writer’s literary works. He or she cannot read his or her own work as a critic.
Poetics, of necessity, makes its practitioners
creative readers as well as writers.
Poetics is a way of reading or misreading
texts (in the widest sense) not normally thought of as poetics: to refunction
their discourses as part of its own. The infuriating magpie descends upon
science or aesthetics, theory or history, rhetoric or popular culture, even the
author's own earlier work. All the discourses that are poetics' Others.(5)
“Poetics as an invasion of the poetic into
other realms: overflowing the bounds of genres, spilling into talk, essays,
politics, philosophy . . .” (Bernstein 1992: 151)
Poetics doesn't always call itself
poetics.
Poetics is mercurial enough for writers to
not know that they are producing it, to think that they are constructing
something else: a letter, a preface, an
apology, a defence, an essay, a memo, a diary entry, even an art work, a
manifesto, a job application, a lecture, a description of somebody else's
poetics, a conference paper, a witty aphorism, an anthology, an editorial, a
biography of the mind, a questionnaire, being tape interviewed, having a drink,
making comments between reading texts to a creative writing group, dreaming,
reading a book, summarising Western metaphysics on the back of an envelope,
pillow talk . . .
Poetics could be a commonplace book full
of favoured quotations.
Poetics could be a sentence from a novel
you use as an epigraph to a half-written project, which you remove once the
project is completed.
Poetics often appears as, results in,
hybrid texts.
Poetics can appear in the creative work
itself, as content, as theme or aside.
Every literary work is a statement
of poetics itself, as a formal statement about its own form, a model for
itself, as it were.
When poetics absorbs a writer's politics,
cosmology, philosophy, religion, it becomes most luminous and individual, but
less communal, less of use, perhaps even to the writer him or herself.
Writers who say they have no poetics
should logically find no continuity between any of their existent texts, but
also no change. That they do is the inauguration of the discursive practice of
poetics.
Poetics disappears at moments of intense
creative fruition, until the next moment of critical reflection and change.
A test to see if you've produced explicit
poetics is to ask of your discourse about writing: is this literary theory or
literary criticism? If the answer is no then it might be poetics. (If the
answer is yes, it might still “contain” poetics.)
Poetics is an intermittent discourse, and
when it is found in literary criticism, it is revealed there rather than
contained.
Poetics could re-read the literary canon
(or any literature) as it re-reads everything else.
Poetics could be a bridge back to literary
criticism, built upon the making of texts rather than upon its rhetoric or
effects.
“Resisting the institutionalization of
interpretation”, says Charles Bernstein, “is a motivation for poetics . . .”
(Bernstein 1992: 157)
Poetics could shape the way we read work.
Another danger of poetics is that it could
present the ideological imaginary to pre-judge reading, to offer preferred
reading strategies of literary works to readers, as Jerome MacGann says of
Romantic Ideology. (6) This can be countered by keeping poetics speculative, to
avoid the armchair monologue. Or in formal terms, by keeping the documents open
to future readings, by use of hybrid or discontinuous forms, to internalise the
poetics into their presentation.
Poetics should be written (and read) with
an awareness of its function in the creative process.
Poetics should be studied as such.
Poetics can stop being absorbed by the
metalanguage of literary theory or criticism by asserting its own claims as a
discourse, a language game with its own players, rules and purposes.
Poetics in hybrid, fragmentary, collage,
playful, jokey, patapoetical, forms avoid cooption into the explication of the
writing that results.
Poetics' function is both oriented
towards, and in, new form.
________________
Poetics has a long history: from
Aristotle, through Horace, into (in English anyway) Sidney, Puttenham, Dryden
and Pope (both in verse), onto Wordsworth's “Preface”, Coleridge's Biographia,
the assertions of Shelley's Defence, some of Keats' letters. Onto: Henry
James' essays and Prefaces, and D.H. Lawrence's spirited defences of both free
verse poetry and the modern novel – to summarise the contents page of a
possible volume of historical poetics.
In the twentieth century the discourse has
proliferated, particularly in the manifestoes and documents of the great
Modernist and post-modernist movements from Dada to Situationalism, from
Negritude to Neo Hoo-Doo, from Stein's “Lectures” to Du Plessis' feminist poetics
(7), and, more individually, in literary interviews, to which I shall return.
A well-known collection such as Allen and
Tallman's The Poetics of The New American Poetry (1973) collected
documents ranging from Pound's group manifestoes to Frank O'Hara's patapoetical
one-man movement statement “Personism,” from Lorca's essay on “duende” to
Olson's influential “Projective Verse” essay. America, as if asserting its
cultural autonomy, seems particularly attracted to the discourse, from the
Imagists to the Language Poets. In Britain this has not been the case,
certainly since the Apocalyptic Manifestoes of the war years. To think of Basil
Bunting's dust jacket disavowal of meaning in poetry alongside the critical
corpus of his mentor, Ezra Pound, is emblematic.
I say “Britain”, but the example of
Anglo-Welsh David Jones, in his essays and prefaces, or Scot Hugh MacDiarmid,
particularly in his poem “The Kind of Poetry I Want” (1961), points to another
cultural dimension. MacDiarmid was capable of producing the speculative
discourse I am circumscribing here, and interestingly, embodied it in a poem.
Is there something essentially “English”
about a refusal to theorize in poetics, as in other areas? Is it philosophical
empiricism (which matches the continuing lyric empiricism of the dominant
post-Movement verse culture itself) - or is it the geopolitical centrality of
the English imagination, and its refusals of the necessity of poetics, the defensive
and normative restrictive practices of the colonial centre? It may well be that
a declaration of independence (cultural or poetic) generates more necessity
than an act of union!
With respect to the more adventurous
British poetry, Eric Mottram (1925-1995), in his still-uncollected essays,
delineated a poetics, although his polemics often obscured its positive aspects
and it certainly belonged to the years of the British Poetry Revival
(1960-1975) rather than to the so-called linguistically innovative poetries
which followed. (8) However, he did drag poetics out of dozens of recalcitrant
poets in his taped interviews, chiefly in the context of “Poetry Information”
evenings at the ICA and the Poetry Society during the 1970s. It may well be
that the interview might be considered a uniquely British source of poetics,
though it is undoubtedly a reactive form.
One recent example of partial changes in
attitude is Denise Riley's 1992 edited volume Poets on Writing, which
contains a rare number of essays of poetics as well as a selection from
Veronica-Forrest Thomson's important Poetic Artifice. But tellingly, Tom
Raworth provides a selection of poems from Eternal Sections under the
inviting banner: “The State of Poetry Today” in a typically British refusal to
discursively tackle that very issue!
The only reason to make a personal poetics
public is to share with others, either collectively as a manifesto, or
agonistically as position statement - in either or both cases it is a social
fact, and implies at least community of exchange or risk. These have not been
the favoured British options; there is little explicit work (although it
doubtless exists, implicitly, as private meditation and notebook jottings,
etc.). This is why the work of the Contemporary Poetics Centre is crucial, and
why the pedagogy of creative writing seems central to me.
I want to focus on one well-known text to give a flavour of poetics, an example of the revelation of poetics in literary criticism. T.S. Eliot's essay “The Metaphysical Poets” (1921) contains this memorable passage, which describes the multifaceted complexity he located in John Donne, but in terms which are obviously constructing the poetics of “The Waste Land,” which he was then composing. The slippage from Donne to typewriter is a giveaway.
A
thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's
mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular,
fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two
experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the
typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences
are always forming new wholes. (Eliot 1975: 64)
This is only one revealing example in
Eliot’s work, as J.C.C. Mays has pointed out: “When he writes about tradition
and the individual talent, he described how his allusive method works; when he
wrote about a dissociation of sensibility taking place in the
seventeenth-century mind he described the subject of his own poetry; when he
wrote of the objective correlative in Hamlet, he defined its method.”
(Mays: 115)
Two recent examples in my own research
area of American language poetry and British linguistically innovative poetry
are Allen Fisher's Necessary Business (1985) and Charles Bernstein's
“The Artifice of Absorption” (1986) (Bernstein 1992: 9-89). Without repeating
analyses published elsewhere, (Sheppard 1999b) these two formally hybrid texts
constitute exemplary metapoetics.
Fisher's text is an essay collaged into
interviews with poets. In it, or rather, through it, he manufactures a poetics
for himself, one that others may use and develop (including myself! See
Sheppard 1999a). Similarly, Bernstein, who presents a verse-essay, plays off
the conventions of the essay (footnotes and quotations) against the conventions
of poetry (chiefly linebreaks) to produce an oddly associational and playful
“patapoetics”. It refuses to settle the arguments it presents, chiefly through
a monstrous proliferation of new critical terms and manifold examples. It is
also comic!
Both documents keep the arguments open by
their dispositions in form. They refuse the essay discourse they approximate
and, most importantly, they demonstrate and embody their two authors'
poetic practices, the collage of Fisher and the playful mixture of discourses
found in most poems by Bernstein.
Bernstein himself provides a further model
that it is worth acknowledging. After two decades of consciously producing
poetics outside of the academy, he now fronts the Poetics Program at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, which favours an “interdisciplinary approach
to literary, cultural and textual studies”. (“Poetics” 1999: 1) It focuses upon poetics as “an unruly,
multisubjective activity”. (“Poetics” 1999: 3) Reference to the massive
Electronic Poetry Center website the program administers
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc) reveals it as a model institution, for its many
poetics documents. (Nigel Wood is currently constructing what may turn out to
be its British equivalent.)
This site inevitably includes details of
what has been called Cyberpoetics: how the now not so new technologies may
be used in literary creation. These and other documents may also be found in
the two-volume Poems for the Millennium, which Jerome Rothenberg and
Pierre Joris edited. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 871-829. See also Sheppard
1999c.) That the experience of editing these volumes was itself an act of
poetics is evidenced by Pierre Joris’ recent Towards a Nomadic Poetics
which, like Necessary Business, was published by Allen Fisher’s own
Spanner press. Its millennial appeal to a nomadic sense of “moving & connecting
all contents, languages, bodies, machines” (Joris 1999: 29) may indeed
stimulate some cutting edge discussion. I have seen an unpublished piece by
Adrian Clarke registering a difference or two with Joris. Whatever the
arguments for a nomadic poetics, it is clear that poetics, as I have defined
it, has always been nomadic.
________________
I believe all students of creative writing
should be inaugurated in the activity of poetics, since it is, of necessity, a
self-sustaining part of all writerly process, born of the critical need to
change practice. I believe the higher education student should be enabled to
make this discourse in its most explicit forms and, to some degree, to study
it.
I am often worried, in my teaching at Edge
Hill, by what might be called student dependence upon workshop activities. This
is perhaps an inevitable state among students whose only experience of writing
creatively has been within the undergraduate subject area, especially as skills
and technique teaching produces wonderful, but temporary, results, products
that often surprise student and tutor alike.
But, equally worrying, I have occasionally
found something similar in more mature writers, coming onto the MA in Writing
Studies, particularly those I uncharitably call “workshop junkies”, who are
capable of producing varied and interesting work, but often only as a response
to a stimulus. They seem to possess no integral urgency, as though they are
shells of performance, particularly in the experiential and supportive
atmosphere of the workshop.
An involvement with poetics might allow
both categories of student to project, to integrate the skills and techniques
into an ongoing practice that is concerned with change. The satisfaction with
the product might grow into the self-questioning of the process, for these
students to interrogate what they are taught more explicitly and continuously.
It would particularly enable work in linguistically innovative or explorative
forms, but poetics is important for all writers, I believe. (9)
The most important justification for
poetics, is that, writers, once armed with a speculative impetus, as well as a
battery of skills and techniques, should have the confidence for independent
growth, to possess, or “own” as the jargon now has it, “a permission to
continue”. (DuPlessis 1990: 156) To
become independent learners so that when the waterwings of workshops and
courses and peer appraisals and deadlines and assessments are removed, they
will become their own teachers, their own peers. No longer Students “taking” a
course in creative writing, they will have become Writers. (10)
________________
I have glossed over a number of works of
poetics in this piece; it has been less my desire to evaluate Sidney, Eliot,
DuPlessis or Joris, than to situate them in a continuous, continuing discourse,
that may be both studied in its own right and developed in terms of creative
writing learning (inside and outside the classroom). It would be easy to take
issue here and there: but that seems almost beside the point, if we fail to
read those ideas doubly. We must recognise, as Mays did of TS Eliot, for
example, the relation of poetics to writing inherent in what are still too
willingly taken to be literary critical constructs.
Read in this new way these ideas lose
nothing of their power - a discourse is a power construct, of course - but
neither do they achieve a measure of invulnerability. They simply need to be
discussed in the spirit of poetics, where use and permission, experiment and
play, are as important as philosophical cogency or the (mis)matching of concept
and product. Finally, I hope that any study of poetics is concerned not just
with furthering the study of poetics, but also with the active
production of poetics as a speculative discourse for writers in order to
further the arts of writing.
________________
1. “Poiesis,” writes Gerald F. Else, of
Aristotle's Poetics, “is the actual process of composition . . . is the activation,
the putting to work of poietike.” (Aristotle 1970: p 79)
Poetics is not Aesthetics. Aesthetics is a
contemplative analytic of art: what is art? what is beauty? what is the
sublime?
Poetics is not Rhetoric. Rhetoric is to do
with the laws of composition, not with the lore (or lure) of writing.
2. Poetics within literary studies is used
by structuralists like Todorov (Introduction to Poetics), or by Bakhtin
(The Problem of Dostoyevsky's Poetics), or even Harold Bloom, to speak
of a theory of making that properly belongs to literary criticism. (It is
common to read of the poetics of the novel, or of feminist biography, in this
sense.) Poetics has also found many uses to describe various non-literary or
even non-artistic kinds of making: in psychiatry to describe the making of self
(autopoesis); in musicology to describe the compositional (poietic) dimension
of music. Titles like Bachelard's The Poetics of Fire adorn philosophy
shelves.
3. Bernstein writes: “Equally at play in
the context of poetics is the political and social situation, including the
social configuration of poetry [writing] in terms of distribution, publishing,
capitalization, jobs, awards, reviews.” (Bernstein 1992: 157) In theory I would
extend the realm of macropoetics to cover these areas, but for the sake of this
argument I will leave them aside.
4. Looking for a book to put the slips of
paper containing the above “definitions” of poetics safely in, I took down one
containing some uncollected essays by Robert Duncan. One, entitled “The Poetics
of Music: Stravinsky” (1948) begins with a slightly overpassive definition but
one which reminds us of the term's use in the other arts: “Poetics is the
contemplation of the meaning of form: it is what is common to painting, music,
sculpture and poetry. Poiein, Stravinsky reminds us, means to make.
We might keep in mind that in the days of William Dunbar the poets were the
Makaris.” (Faas 1983: 335)
5. Poetics at one limit is apoetics,
formulations that deconstruct poetics, as the continuous lower case typography
on the extra titlepage of Bernstein's A Poetics suggests: “ a p o e t i
c s”. (Bernstein 1992: vii). In this sense, poetics must eat itself! At another limit is anti-poetics, a
discourse that accompanies the practice of not, or no longer, writing, as in
the pronouncements of Laura Riding (see Seymour Smith 1970) or John Hall's
“Writing and Not Writing” (in Riley 1992: 41-49).
6. MacGann argues that “Literary criticism
too often likes to transform the critical illusions of poetry into the
worshipped truths of cultures”. (MacGann 1983: 135) In poetry, “we can to a
degree, observe as well our own ways of thinking and feeling from an alien
point of view. That alienated vantage, which is poetry's critical gift to every
future age, permits us a brief glimpse at our world and our selves.” (MacGann
1983: 66) Perhaps a similar critical function for the writer of contemporary
poetics might reside in the historical poetics outlined above.
7. These documents and more may be found
in Rothenberg and Joris (1995; 1998),
but heed my warning about manifestoes in my definitions!
8. But see also Eric Mottram’s Towards
Design in Poetry (1977; reprinted many times and currently in print) for an
extremely wide-ranging and less polemical investigation of poetics.
9. Of course, creative writing students
often are already encouraged to produce an explicit discourse to accompany
their writing, but this is not poetics (though it might contain it.) It is -
again, this is my experience - usually a retrospective trawl through the
already used, even discarded, writing processes, and is often of no further use
to the writer, and it is often revealingly called a “commentary” or a
“reflection.”
At worst some MA students, in particular, think
the function of commentary is to use literary theory to produce an analysis of
their work as though they hadn't produced it themselves, instead of reading the
theory as a possible poetics. Writers, in any case, are notoriously bad at
reading their own work. It has been cogently argued by Dr Victor Sage in an
unpublished paper that it is impossible for students to criticise their own
work in this alienating way so that the poetics becomes prescriptive. Indeed,
that writers deliberately misread their own work in the service of speculating
about future works is a constituent of poetics.
One advantage of the term poetics in the
pedagogic situation is that it is as old as writing. It seems to me that a
recent term, such as Graeme Harper's post-structuralist tinged “Gramography”,
might be said to contain and reveal poetics, particularly in his sense of the
“opening up of trajectories of thinking rather than fencing in of reflective
opportunities” (Harper 1997: 21) but it is principally concerned with “the practice
and the theory of creative writing” as a subject with a professionalized
pedagogy still to be developed. (Harper 1997: 27) Whilst not opposed to
Gramography, poetics is a writer- (student-) centred term and activity, aimed
at reducing student dependence, outlined earlier. More crucially, my sense of
the necessity of poetics is in its continued operation for students beyond
the pedagogic situation.
10. If students are taught explicitly what
poetics is and does, and to situate themselves in a field of cultural
production, through non-literary critical exercises like Reading as a Writer,
and even to study a particular writer's poetics, if they are asked to use and
feed these activities into a writer's journal and in the self-assessment
process, and if this has a more pronounced role in the explicit recording and
developing of poetics, any “commentary” or “reflection” that results will be
automatically more poetics-oriented, and more use to the writer.
But we could go further. The hybrid and
intermittent nature of poetics outside of the pedagogic environment suggests
new possibilities for the making of hybrid texts within it, particularly for
the production of works which heal the creative writing-literary theory split.
This might seem to contradict my demand for an explicit study and production of
poetics as a bracketed discourse, but I think it can also (perhaps at an
advanced stage) open itself to the existing condition of much poetics, such as
Bernstein and Fisher. Their forms are as explorative as much creative writing
itself.
I accept that the wild body of poetics
might need taming for the purposes of assessment but I have read (and assessed)
commentaries that were as creative and hybrid as the creative work. (A theorist
such as Gregory Ulmer with his experiments in applied grammatology in the
production of the “mystory” in Teletheory [1989] demonstrates a similar
hybridity in the production of critical texts.)
Finally there is the question of
self-image. In producing poetics, one always speaks as a writer, explicitly
identifies oneself as a maker of literary works. It is itself an act of
self-definition embedded in a process of self-organisation, that makes a
permanent mark upon the page.
________________
Allen, D., and Tallman, W., (eds.), 1973, Poetics
of the New American Poetry, New York: Grove Books.
Aristotle, (trans. Else, G.F.), 1970, Poetics:
Michigan: The University of Michigan.
Bernstein, C. 1992, A Poetics,
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
DuPlessis, R.B., 1990, The Pink Guitar,
Writing as Feminist Practice, New York and London: Routledge.
Eliot, T.S., 1975, Selected Prose,
London: Faber and Faber.
Faas, E., 1983, Young Robert Duncan,
Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
Fisher, A., 1985, Necessary Business,
London: Spanner.
Harper, G, 1997, “Creative Writing in
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________________
An earlier,
pedagogically oriented, version of this text was delivered as a paper at the
Creative Writing Conference 1999 at Sheffield Hallam University, and was first
published in the Proceedings of the conference. Ship of Fools published a
shorter version, emphasising practical uses for students, in 1999, solely for
distribution amongst Writing Studies MA students at Edge Hill College of Higher
Education, Ormskirk, Lancashire, UK..