an inaugural lecture delivered on 13th March 2007
at Edge Hill University (that's ten years ago today, so it seems right to post it up, from today, one post for each of its four parts, daily!)
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| That's me delivering the lecture; you'll see why there's a suit in part 4; and my Sony machine was there to play the Sarah Vaughan track I refer to as well. |
Note: This piece, along with others, on, of, or about poetics, appears in my 2024 Shearsman book The Necessity of Poetics. Details here: Pages: The Necessity of Poetics - out now! (robertsheppard.blogspot.com).
I do remember, when I was a barber,
the boss, after having shorn the heads of some particularly
long-haired customers, used to say to them: ‘Now
you look like a gentleman, sir.’
To
which, once, one of them said:
‘And
what did I look like before?’
‘Before?’
the boss said, ‘before you looked like a professor, sir.’
‘But
I am a professor,’ the man said.
In a citation of my book Far Language, Marjorie Perloff, in the
introduction to an essay upon contemporary poetic innovation, refers to me as a
‘poet-critic’.[3] The
assignation surprised me on first seeing it. Its hyphen appears to announce an
uneasy hybrid that looks dangerously as though it has yoked by violence
together two incompatibilities. It suggests that unity is achieved by
pressurised co-habitation, force of will. And yet, it is unity of purpose and
project – but not of product – I would like to emphasise in this presentation
of my work. The unity is achieved by introducing a third term, poetics, not
just as mediator between the scholarly research of the critic and the
practice-led research creative writing of the poet, although it is also that.
Poetics
has been open to a variety of misunderstandings. The first, and apparently most
obvious, is that it has something to do with poetry. Or with poetry alone. I’m
not going to help that impression tonight by almost exclusively referring to
poetry, but that’s because I am a ‘poet-critic’. But I’d like to stress that
while poetry and poetics share etymological roots – they both derive from the
Greek verb ‘to make’ – poetics, as the
thinking about how something is made, can be used with reference to all
kinds of writing (and not just writing, and not even just art). Poetics is as
relevant to the writer of supposedly formulaic writing, like the crime novel,
as it is to the most experimental writing which involves the setting up of systems
to produce unforeseen textual effects. On the one hand you’ve Raymond
Chandler’s crisply written article ‘The Simple Art of Murder’; on the other John
Cage’s performative ‘Lecture on Nothing’.[4]
While
I have offered a sketchy history as well as definitions of poetics elsewhere –
indeed 79 of them, and I’ve written another one since, you’ll be horrified to
learn – I want to come at the concept from a slightly different angle tonight. [5]
I
want to tell you what I think poetics is; I want to show how we might begin to
read one writer’s poetics; I want to share my
poetics; and I want to read some of my poetry that relates to it. I also want
to suggest how poetics might become part of the English Literature curriculum.
I now most commonly call
poetics a ‘speculative writerly discourse’. ‘Speculative’ because I define it against
modes of ‘reflection’ on works already written; its orientation is towards the
next ‘job’. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a reflective component, but that
poetics is primarily, in a definition of American poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis
that is often picked up by my students, ‘a permission to continue’, beyond the
self-evident and the already achieved.[6] It
is ‘writerly’ because it is not a critical activity. Critics may speak of
constructing a ‘theory of poetry’ – Harold Bloom uses this term – but that is
distinct from ‘writerly’ poetics which will remain the concern of writers or of
groups of writers. It’s not impossible for critics and writers to discuss the
same issues, but for writers, the questions will be as practical as they are
theoretical. Poetics is a paradoxical theory of practice and practice of theory. It asks not just what kind of text is this,
but how do I write one like it – or, more probably - one not like it? Thirdly it is a ‘discourse’. By this I don’t simply
mean that it is spoken or written, but that – after Foucault – it is a
discursive practice with a history and rules of its own. The history is
demonstrable. The ‘rules’ are less so, because the discourse is mercurial. Writers
do not often sit down and inscribe ‘Poetics’ at the top of a sheet of paper and
then enumerate an orderly blueprint for writing a particular named text. Indeed,
it is the history that shows us this. Writers’ speculations appear in a variety
of guises. The poetics of American poet Wallace Stevens manifests in a number
of different ‘genres’: from formal essays, lectures and published aphorisms, in
reviews of other writers’ works, in his (private) correspondence, in
introductions to his work and – here is the most paradoxical – in the poetry
itself. Readers of poems, not just Stevens’ poems, not just modern poems, will
have noticed how many poems are about poetry itself – they are metapoems - and
sometimes they speculate their own existence and future into being. Given this
heterogeneity it follows that the discourse of poetics can also appear in
hybrid forms between these recognisable genres: something I encourage students
to explore, although it has its own danger of authorising obfuscation in
lyrical afflatus or collage ‘theory buzz’.
Poetics is the
working out of difficult ideas about how writing is (to be) made, without
necessary recourse to logical argument. As Richard Rorty says, ‘A talent for
speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument of
cultural change.’[7] Without ever
explaining the creative writing it
precedes, accompanies and (occasionally) ante-dates, poetics can serve a number
of functions, one of which might be to deliberately confuse the writer about
his or her intentions, rather than to evaluate them, itemise them, convert them
into a programme. Meanwhile the work can generate itself as the writer is scratching
his or her head. Poetics may be an elaborate game of self-deception, rather
than a deliberate manifesto. Poetics is not explication or interpretation,
which are the proper jobs of a reader. Equally it might be that poetics is to
come upon that which one already knows, but with the force of revelation as if discovered
for the first time. (If you’re interested: that’s my recent 80th
definition!)
How can I be sure that poetics exists, as a
‘discourse’, if its intermittent and mercurial nature cause it to take such
strange forms and to hide in so many genres including creative work itself? One
is simply that I recognise the impulse in my own practice. Indeed, many of the
innovations I claim in the name of poetics here at Edge Hill University London Edge Hill
University
What is not on my list of
influences (you might think oddly) is the rapid development of Creative Writing
as an academic subject. This occurred when my back was turned and I was outside
the academy. Let me confess openly, that I was sceptical about Creative Writing,
since my taking the subject on the pioneering MA at the University of East Anglia
Another
effect of the comparatively obscured or hybrid nature of poetics is the
misreading of it as though it were a variety of literary theory or literary
criticism. If you still think they are the same, consult Jon Cook’s excellent
anthology Poetry In Theory – another
product of UEA by the way - the contents
of which fall into three broad (sometimes overlapping) categories: literary
theory (written by philosophers and theorists, which is constructed at a high
level of generality and, it has to be confessed, a low level of specific
textual reference; it is alarming how much Lacan seems to squeeze from one line
of Mallarmé); literary criticism (which is usually textually specific around
themes or authors, such as Barbara Hernstein Smith’s ‘Closure and anti-closure
in Modern Poetry’ or excerpts from Thomas Yingling’s Hart Crane and the Homosexual Text); and poetics, an altogether
tattier affair written by creative writers themselves, often in forms which
evade formal academic discourse, such as Charles Olson’s seminal and expressive
‘Objective Verse’ essay.[12]
But
this still begs a question: if poetics is so specific a writerly response, what is the purpose of reading it, both for
other writers, and non-writers? Who is its audience? And how might this
discourse impact upon Creative Writing as an academic discipline and upon
English Studies generally. In short: why read poetics and how to read it?
It’s a sorry
confession, but I think I have wasted time and energy reading poetics in the
hope that it would tell me how to
write. There is a whole species of Creative Writing handbook and textbook and
workbook that claim to tell you how to write, while usually coyly disavowing such
an intention. I am sceptical of these, even as I’ve contributed to one, and
they seldom rise to poetics.[13]
To misread Charles Olson’s essay ‘Projective Verse’ as a ‘how to’ guide – to
fixate on its emphasis on the line as breath, the use of the typewriter as a
scoring device, for example – can work only if one is content to remain a
second or third generation Olsonian. Fortunately, much poetics (including Olson’s
essay) resist being read in this way. Part of the attraction of poetics to
fragmentary and hybrid form is to evade the totalising certainty of a
manifesto.[14]
One exemplary
work of poetics is the notebook kept by the senior and - in my opinion –major,
British poet, Christopher Middleton, entitled ‘A Nocturnal Journal’.[15] A
journal is one of the more obvious modes of poetics, an easy way for a writer
to dialogue with his or her practice, and one we encourage in all our writing
students. It can particularly accommodate ‘speculation’, though Middleton
favours a term he uses of his polished essays as well: ‘conjecture’. This suggests
that every utterance is in inverted commas. Each statement can be read as a
question; it’s like a reversible skirt or jacket. For example, musing upon
Benjamin Fondane’s discriminations between philosophy and poetry, Middleton
asks, ‘What he certainly doesn’t consider is a rather odd fact: no, a question
– Don’t some poets selectively breed only those ideas which promise poems?’ (P 127) It may matter less that the idea
is true (or false) than that the idea is rephrased as a question. [16]
‘The activity of writing,’ Middleton continues, ‘may tend less to father ideas
than to other them, and to gainsay their power.’ (P 127) The poem as an arena for the estrangement of the violating
power of ideation is itself a powerful idea and reminds us that much poetics –
and Middleton’s journal entries hover around the theme as its irresistible
honeypot – concerns a situated definition of poetry itself.
Defining poetry
is a tricky business even for a conjectural poetics. On the one hand, you have Douglas
Oliver, in his book Whisper ‘Louise’, in which poetics arises
periodically, offering an essentialist definition: ‘Poetry is not summed up by
poems…. A poem taps into poetry, a primordial form of knowing emanating
from the “one life” that we share with animals… Poetry is a fundamental aspect
of mind.’[17] In this
view, an individual poem affords access to the basic life force of the
universe, here defined as a mode of thinking. But the individual poem
disappears under a welter of obligations to the cosmos. Another view, that of
Middleton in his journal, takes on board the ‘concept’ – his word - of poetry
as ‘an extrapolation from an infinitely heterogeneous range of possible poems.
Brecht’s graphic poems are no less poems than Mallarmé’s enigmatically
involuted logocentric charms’. (P 119)
In one view the nature of poetry must be fixed à priori; in the second the
nature of poetry is open to modification, that is, to history. Both views
constitute poetics (though I favour the latter).
We overhear Middleton
in his notes asking himself (again), after half a century of practice, to define
poetry. It may be possible that the journal was kept during a period of
creative fallowness; poetics is often born of moments of crisis (which might be
constant) and of the perpetual need to change, in Middleton’s case, as he
entered his eighth decade. In short, his poetics was a provocation to himself.
It speaks differently. If we are writers we read it with a related sense of
provocation to move towards (or beyond) our own conjectures and speculations to
enable our own art, our own ‘ideas which promise poems’.
It is this sense of provocation I would wish Creative Writing
students (or any writer) to read out of poetics, to educate them away from the expectations
of the answers and models of ‘how to’ books, to the questioning of conjectures,
which requires an active response, and which could either be further poetics or
creative work itself.[18]
It
follows from this that much poetics is read wrongly, and not just by writers
looking for knack and wheeze, but by critics who are looking at it as though it
is a theory of writing similar to their own, or as an interpretive tool, or
even – more basely – for actual authoritative interpretations of particular
texts, which they can never be, by my definitions. Critics are often slightly
incredulous at the indirection, the incoherences and inconsistencies of
writerly poetics.[19] But
I would like to wear the glint on this badge of shame as my beacon of faith! I
think that the greatest apologia for Creative Writing as an academic study is not that it produces writers and writing,
but that it poses questions of literariness in this conjectural way, through both
the production and reading of poetics, which is neither blueprint nor theory.
Poetics
can heal the creative-critical split of some Creative Writing programmes,
render the boundaries between them porous, or – most radically – erase the
distinction entirely.
It
follows that, in addition to teaching writing students how to write poetics,
poetics should be studied in the academy, and that we must learn to read and
use it in ways not yet developed, or only partially developed. This is miles
away from calls for Creative Writing to be regarded as an adjunct to English
literature teaching, to promote conventional reading through so-called ‘creative’
exercises. As English Studies becomes more affected by the presence of Creative
Writing, with a growing student body alert to the potential mobility of text
and to speculative ideas about
textuality, then it will have – perhaps unforeseen – effects. Poetics should be
at the heart of Creative Writing, which in turn should be at the heart of a
reoriented English Literature, which might rediscover questions of literary
value and resistances to what Derek Attridge calls ‘instrumentalist’ readings
of literature.[20] We need
poetics journals, centres, conferences, networks, poetics research groups,
teaching modules and further academic study to explore poetics and how to write
it and to read it. Practice-based research in poetics and academic research
into poetics (both of which are in their infancy under those designations) need
to acquire a language to talk to one another.
Part two follows here.
Part three may be read here.
Part four (the last part) follows tomorrow. What a week!
[1]
Themerson, S. (1967) Tom Harris, London
[2]
‘It is because writing is inaugural … that it is dangerous and
anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from
the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is,
primarily, its future.’ Derrida, J. (1978) Writing
and Difference, London Henley : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 11
[3] Perloff,
Marjorie, new book LRC
[4] In Chandler London California University of California Press
[5] See my The Necessity of Poetics, Liverpool : Ship of Fools, published in 2002.
[6]DuPlessis,
R.B. (1990) The Pink Guitar, Writing as Feminist Practice, New York London
[7] Rorty,
R., quoted in Spahr, J. () , ,
[8] J-F
Lyotard, J-F, (1984) The Postmodern
Condition, Manchester Manchester University
[9]
Sheppard, R. (2005) The Poetry of Saying:
British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000, Liverpool :
Liverpool University
[10] The full report, Supplementary
Discourses in Creative Writing Teaching in Higher Education, which was
written by myself with research assistance from Dr Scott Thurston, may be found
in full on the English Subject Centre website, at: www.english.heacademy.ac.uk/archive/projects/reports/supdisc_cwrit.doc. Sometimes this link doesn't work it's best to Google: it IS still out there.
[11] I also followed another example of linguistically
innovative poetry, which I pass onto my students: I published it from my own
small press Ship of Fools.
[12] Cook,
J. (2004) Poetry as Theory, Oxford
[13] ‘Try Something Different’ (with
Scott Thurston), in eds., Graham et. al, The
Road to Somewhere: A Creative Writing Companion, Basingstoke ,
Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, pp. 207-16.
[14] I remain sceptical about the role of manifestos as
poetics, though they often contain it.
[15]
Middleton, C. (2004) Palavers & A
Noctural Journey, Exeter
[16] Of
course, such ‘selective breeding’ may be yet another definition of poetics
itself.
[17] Oliver,
D. (2005) Whisper ‘Louise’, Hastings:
Reality Street
[18] I would
like to acknowledge Cliff Yates, a member of the Poetry and Poetics Research
Group that has met here at Edge Hill since 1999, for emphasising the term
‘provocation’ in his poetry and poetics PhD
[19] Ian Gregson is one critic who see this. Indeed, he
writes of Middleton: ‘Throughout his career he has formulated theories about
how a poet should ideally write but has also been aware that what actually gets
written is different.’ Gregson, I. (1996) Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism:
Dialogue and Estrangement, Basingstoke and
London
[20]
Attridge, D. (2004) The Singularity of
Literature, London New York
