[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR]

[John]
Well thanks, I guess.  Altho "poetry' is a category fraught with opportunity for misinterpretation...

[Arlo]
How is this 'criticism' any different than painting? Or music? Or sculpting?

[John]
You could call hollywood's ouput "poetry" I suppose, and thus illuminate the way in which new ideas influence social patterns.

[Arlo]
Or... we could call Hollywood's output "cinema" and have a separate dialogue about the way the art of cinema (like any "art", including "poetry") can introduce dynamic elements into static dialogues.

[John]
But who talks like that? Certainly not "us" and certainly not them.

[Arlo]
It baffles me that this brief call for abstracts hits you as 'them' speaking in some manner different than 'us'. Does the author of the call below use Pirsig's terms? Or course not. But I certainly feel like I 'talk' more like 'them' than whatever your conflation of 'us' would imply.

To note, the idea of "aesthetic exercise", as introduced below, really seems aligned with Dewey's notion of "art as experience". Indeed, when they put forth "a broad conception of 'practice,' both spiritual and aesthetic", I can't help but think this expansion of 'practice' is identical to the thesis in ZMM. 

[John]
So I'm not sure whom you are addressing, but I do appreciate the effort.

[Arlo]
My assumption is that most people here are interested in discourses that circle, overlap, parallel, or dance with the specific ideas put forth by Pirsig. If a philosophical discourse on the poetics of lived experience doesn't interest you, John, I apologize for wasting your time.


>
> "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"
>
> The philosopher Pierre Hadot worked throughout his career to locate poetry,
> particularly Goethe’s, within forms of “spiritual exercise” grounded in
> western philosophical and religious traditions. For Hadot, spiritual
> exercises (or practices) are forms of thinking, meditation, or dialogue that
> “have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world and the
> metamorphosis of our being.” While Hadot’s thought on spiritual practice
> found its widest audience through Foucault’s work on “care of the self,” it
> has recently resurfaced in Gabriel Trop’s Poetry as a Way of Life (2015),
> whose title echoes that of the 1995 English translation of Hadot’s
> Philosophy as a Way of Life (quoted above). Drawing on Hadot and Foucault,
> Trop argues that the reading and writing of poetry can be understood as
> “aesthetic exercise,” a form of practice involving "sensually oriented
> activity in the world attempts to form, influence, perturb or otherwise
> generate patterns of thought, perception, or action.” Though Trop is careful
> to distinguish his ideas from Hadot and Foucault, we might argue that poetry
> allows the aesthetic or spiritual practitioner to “struggl[e] against the
> ‘government of individualization’” (Foucault, 1982) and to enact “a way of
> being, a way of coping within, reacting to, and acting upon the world”
> (Trop, 2015).
>
> Our seminar takes as its starting point a broad conception of “practice,”
> both spiritual and aesthetic. We seek proposals that consider poetries and
> ways of reading as forms of practice or that challenge the premise
> altogether. Some questions that might be considered:
>
> • Trop suggests that religious poetries (e.g., Greek tragedy, the Divina
> Commedia) are conducive to “aesthetic exercise.” In what ways do poets and
> readers within religious/meditative traditions enact disciplines/practices
> of the self?
> • Poets associated with avant-garde movements often make strong claims about
> the urgency of their poetics. In what ways can “poetry as practice” help us
> understand their reading and writing practices? Can non- or even
> anti-avant-garde poetries be understood in similar terms?
> • How might the notion of poetry as a “way of life” help us understand
> contemporary lyric poetry?
> • Trop argues that late 18th century German poets, including Novalis and
> Holderlin, used their poetic practice to constitute themselves as
> non-normative subjects. What other times/places/poets might we see as
> concerned with poetry as a form of self-constitution?
> • George Oppen suggests that “part of the function of poetry is to serve as
> a test of truth.” In what ways can Oppen’s poetics, or those of similarly
> engaged poets, be understood as enabling spiritual or aesthetic exercise?
> • How might the concept of spiritual/aesthetic practice contribute to
> current debates about the relevance of poetry to the
> social/economic/environmental justice movements?
>