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

[John Carl]

Arlo,

On 9/3/15, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> [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?
>

Jc:  First, that particular statement was not a "criticism", it was a
caveat.  The criticism comes later.
Second, poetry is different from painting, music and sculpting in that
it requires a higher-order brain to comprehend.  Anybody can hear
music, or see a painting or feel a sculpture, and have a good sense of
what they are - empirically speaking.  But poetry depends upon
linguistic and cultural interpretations that can be different for
different listeners.




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

Jc:  I probably should not have used the term hollywood.
Technologically formed and shared entertainment is much more broadly
distributed today.  But Hollywood stands for the industry as a whole,
in my lexicon.

>
> [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.
>

Jc:  that sounds like a better way of putting it and a better
discussion to have.  I definitely agree that cinema with its use of
music, image and words can have a more powerful affect than even the
best poetry.  Furthermore, the shared spectacle contains subtle social
reinforcements which the lone reader of poetry does not.  So it seems
to me that poetry has been largely outmoded by the modern "art of
cinema".




> [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.

Jc:  yes, and it really is an ongoing problem - the vocabulary frames
the thinking.  How does one think new thoughts with old vocabulary?
How does one put new wine in old wineskins?  It's a long-standing
dispute.

I'm speaking of a simplified dichotomy between MoQ and SOM.  I see
those intellectual patterns, as having different social followings.
Is there a problem with that?

Arlo:

>
> 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.
>

Jc:  Poetry as practice, practice as poetry.  I dunno, Arlo.  It seems
to me like something very shallow, parading as if it was deep.  All
poetry is practice.  Not all practice is poetic.  I'm not sure what is
being added by the academic dissection of either, to either poetry or
practice.  It doesn't seem very poetic or practical, because for one,
it depends upon a line created through "expertise" and thus is all a
bit self-seving.  But I might be wrong.  it was just a gut reaction,
of my own.






> [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.
>
>

don't.  I have plenty of time, and little useful to accomplish.  I'm
more concerned that you're wasting YOUR time, Arlo.  I appreciate you
spending it upon the lowly likes of me and the unheralded and silently
echoing halls of MD.

As to my interest in philosophical discourse on poetics, etc, yeah, I
admit to that degenerate vice.  But far better to be actually doing
poetically, than talking about it, neh?  But nevermind me.  I'm doing
neither so I can't talk.

John

PS:  And i'm not real comfortable with Foucault.  I dunno why, yet.


>>
>> "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?