 |
| In the left corner, Pierre Joris; in the right corner Adrian Clarke |
My ‘Poetics and the manifesto: On Pierre Joris and Adrian Clarke’ has
just been published by Jacket 2. It begins with one of my pleas for writerly
speculative poetics. ‘The
writings writers write about writing have been curiously misread.’ I continue: ‘Battling the impossibility of being
their own readers, writers are drawn to fuzzy logic when it comes to thinking
and externalizing their thinking about the purpose, activity, outcomes, and
future of writing that results in text that can be unstable in a variety of
ways, and is sometimes difficult to read. However, there is enough commonality
among these writings to group them as members of a discourse, one called
‘poetics,’ and a prospective study of poetics is most revealingly conducted
using examples that orient themselves in form, towards form, and that reveal
themselves as hybrid and playful, fragmented or highly formal.’
Then I contrast
the nomad poetics of Pierre Joris with its contestation by Adrian Clarke. It ends in an odd place: arguing that we cannot argue over
poetics in this discursive way. I was tempted to adopt I.A. Richards’ term ‘pseudo-statement’
to describe the truth-claims of poetics, but opt for a loose hands-off version of Lyotard’s ‘differend’.
And there’s lots of nomadic and anti-nomadic poetics on the way!
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).
