Metapoetics:
Definitions of Poetics
(A slightly earlier version of these may be read
here. I reproduce the first few here only)
Poetics is the product 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.
... and dozens more for your delight here, right through to:
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, avoids cooption into the explication of the writing that
results.
Poetics’ function is both oriented towards, and in, new form.
*
Return to part one (and an index to all parts of The
Necessity of Poetics) here.
