The Body of Poetry

In a fast-paced world, what value does poetry hold? What good is it, since as Auden famously opined, "poetry makes nothing happen." Of course, this was meant ironically in a poem celebrating W. B. Yeats upon his death. What poetry does offer is a different manner of seeing and being in the world. A slower way of apprehending our place. A stubborn way of opening to what is. This essay draws on Charles Taylor's critique of modernity, and suggests what religion and poetry have in common--and what distinguishes them. Both share a longing for a kind of transcendence that we find in the ordinary grit and rhyme of our lives, something "other" that moves us toward the world, and more deeply into our own lives. Poems offer us what George Steiner calls the "shining through" of epiphany, though one that comes to us in indirect or mediated forms. Or, as Adam Zagajewski puts it, "poetry searches for radiance." In an age of saturation, of excessive but thin 24/7 "presence," that is gift enough to warrant our attention and capture our imagination--which, finally, is the singular gift of poetry, and why religion that is too prose-bound is finally less adequate for the work of praise.

This conference poses the question “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” I suggest that this question is roughly the same as that asked in the title of Dana Gioia’s 1991 essay, “Can Poetry Matter?” If literature and literary study make any substantive contribution to the common good, it must be because both poetry and criticism are bound up with the active life in much the way teaching is, as a traditionary and culture-making work. The cultural moment that leads us to ask such questions as “Has Fiction Lost its Faith?” and “Can Poetry Matter?” is also the moment for which poems such as Holderlin’s “Bread and Wine” were written. As those who concern ourselves with poetry “in lean years”—also translated “the destitute time”—we will certainly want to take counsel in the matter. Beginning with the unlikely pairing of Martin Heidegger and Francis Schaeffer, and picking up some guidelines from St. Thomas Aquinas, I hope to identify some of the material conditions for a poetry that keeps faith and matters. [...] In a culture experiencing “the destitute time,” poetry can matter when poets called into close contact with the definite and plurivocal nature of the sacraments wrestle with the implications of that understanding for every part of life. Our culture’s rapid political and epistemic pendulum swings merely perpetuate the “divided field” of human reason that Schaeffer correctly diagnoses, but cannot cure with univocal propositions. It ought to be possible, however, to engage in a poetics of adjustment to the status of creature that richly explores analogical language and the allegorical understanding of history and lived experience; this should be most possible for those richly engaged in the sacramental life of the Church.

Academia Letters, 2021

Proceedings of the European Society for Aesthetics, 2019

In the 20th century, philosophy of language and aesthetics seem to have agreed on one point, namely that of placing poetry away from the centre of attention. In philosophy of language, poetic utterances have been considered ‘deviant’ or ‘non-serious’. In aesthetics, attention has turned towards visual arts, music, or literature (mainly in the sense of the novel), thus leaving poetry as a rather peripheral subtopic. This leaving aside of poetry has led to considering it without force, and this at various levels. Two examples: for Austin, poetic statements are without any performative force and, for Sartre, poetry must be distinguished from literature, the latter having a political force and the former not. In my paper, I aim at reinstating the force of poetry by showing it has a linguistic, philosophical, and even political force (and this as much as the novel). Against the idea that literature (as novel) can teach us facts about the world, I argue that literature (as poetry) teaches us a different way of seeing the world and that its force resides precisely in its capacity to bring us (or force us, perhaps) to see things differently. In this sense, poetry is not only doing something with language, by also doing something to language. To rephrase Austin’s famous title, and thus reverse his evaluation of poetry, poetry might not reveal us How to Do Things with Words, but how to do things to words.

Poetry, one of popular genres of literature, has regularly fallen in and faced different types of debates from the early times: be it in its composition pattern or contents to be taken. The founding father of western literatures and philosophy, Plato, who is supposed to have made systematic percolation of academic and scholarly discourse, was said to have negatively remarked over poet and rated poetry as the substandard type of literatures. He accused poets of emotionally misleading people so then demanded the banishment or exile of poets from the nation, theoreticians believe. Explaining about such negative impression of Plato over poets, Habib writes, in his term Plato thought that-" Poetry in its very nature is steeped into emotional transport and lack of self possession " (22). This statement somehow assures that poems though not condemned were not even paid respect too, by the author Plato. Slowly, the concept was revisited and in course of time, people happened to be impressed with poems. Later, besides many of authors/ philosophers, Shelly regarded poetry as the best expression of the best art and defined it as supreme from of all the knowledge then wrote, " Poetry is indeed something divine. It is the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all sciences… " (526). Such an admirations over poetry helped people to regenerate and regain faith over poems. Later, William Wordsworth said, " The principal object, then proposed in these poems was to choose the incidents and situations from common life… language really used by men " (438) and tried to connect poetry with normal and common citizens. Wordsworth led a movement called Romanticism, which is believed to have left an unparalleled psychological boost up among aspirant poets that initiated a new and wide avenue for composing poetry. Henceforth, how to compose poetries and systematize their structures have remained as a contentious issue. As per the time and situation, many philosophers ideated it and brought-forth varying assumptions and convictions. Such flexibility in poetry compositions somehow encouraged people to engage in creative enterprise with better and alternative spirits too. Despite facilitations for innovations, most of the poets still remain much conscious to use conventional trends hoping that the creation will be of standard as such. Even people ideating theories on poems do stress over the conventionality. Renoir has coined the term "oral formulaic rhetoric" (275) to focus the conventional nature and the stylistic effects of poetic diction. Renoir argues that the shift in emphasis over compositional structure is inadmissible because that decimates the standard of poem. Similarly, Oxford English Dictionary says that poetry is

International Journal of English and Literature, 2014

Journal of American Studies, 2020

MultiMedia Publishing, 2014

Introduction in poetry: nature of poetry, tools, history, terms (periods, styles and movements, technical means, tropes, measures of verse, verse forms, national poetry... Poetry is traditionally a written art form (although there is also an ancient and modern poetry which relies mainly upon oral or pictorial representations) in which human language is used for its aesthetic qualities in addition to, or instead of, its notional and semantic content. The increased emphasis on the aesthetics of language and the deliberate use of features such as repetition, meter and rhyme, are what are commonly used to distinguish poetry from prose, but debates over such distinctions still persist, while the issue is confounded by such forms as prose poetry and poetic prose. Some modernists (such as the Surrealists) approach this problem of definition by defining poetry not as a literary genre within a set of genres, but as the very manifestation of human imagination, the substance which all creative acts derive from. ISBN 978-606-033-099-8

Croatian Journal of Philosophy, 2021

Against the apparent casting away of poetry from contemporary philosophy of language and aesthetics which has left poetry forceless, I argue that poetry has a linguistic, philosophical, and even political force. Against the idea that literature (as novel) can teach us facts about the world, I argue that the force of literature (as poetry) resides in its capacity to change our ways of seeing. First, I contest views which consider poetry forceless by discussing Austin's and Sartre's views. Second, I explore the concept of force in the realm of art-focusing on Nietzsche's philosophy and Menke's Kraft der Kunst-and the relations between linguistic, artistic, and political forces. Third, I consider how the transformative force of poetry can be considered political by turning to Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language and Meschonnic's conception of poetry according to which the poem does something to language and the subject. To illustrate this transformative force of poetry, I analyse Caroline Zekri's poem 'Un pur rapport grammatical'. I therefore think of poetry not only as doing something with language, but also as doing something to language. To rephrase Austin's famous t itle, and thus reverse his evaluation of poetry, poetry might reveal us not only How to Do Things with Words, but how to do things to words and, through this doing, how to transform and affect the world.