This is a drastic misrepresentation of the work and interests of some
20 to 30 loosely associated poets in three generations active in
Cambridge and elsewhere from the late 1960s onwards. This is not what
happened, these were not their aims, there was no "school", the
association was haphazard and intermittent and attitudes to philosophy
among them differed from placing it as central to the poetry to taking
no notice of it whatsoever. Most of these people were more or less in
contact with JH Prynne, which may be thought to have engendered some
kind of convergence of ideas, but some of them (such as Denise Riley)
were not and anyway in my experience the focus was on the practice. It
makes no sense to speak of these things without reference to the
chronology, which would place the philosophical entanglement
principally among the younger and professionally academic poets.
By all means have another conference on philosophy and contemporary
poetry, it's always a valid subject, but surely it could be conceived
without this reductive synthesis of the history. And without electing
poets into a household in which they did not participate.
Why is it that every time I see a brief quotation from Heidegger I
find it so elliptical as to be comical?
Peter Riley
On 1 Sep 2016, at 17:10, Abjy Kurian wrote:
2017 ACLA Panel: Poetic Thinking
Contemporary poets like J. H. Prynne, Denise Riley, and John Wilkinson
have explored the nature and scope of an alternative mode of
‘thinking’ in poetry. Aided by late modernist reformulations of poetic
difficulty, these poets continue the Romantic legacy by reconfiguring
poetry as essentially theoretical. For the Cambridge school, ‘poetic
thinking’ does not involve a simple rehashing of philosophical ideas
in poetic diction, but as Simon Jarvis points out, these poems instead
of accommodating philosophy within their formal structures are in
themselves philosophic. Such a reconsideration of the poem as a
cognitive product affords a metaphysical truth that is at once noble
and transcendent. While the New-York school and the Objectivists
display similar interests in the ‘theoretical’ consequences of the
metaphysical in poetry, the Language poets took to a more literal idea
of ‘philosopher-poet’ where poetry assumed a subsidiary role to
poststructuralist philosophy. This pervasive poetics of the
metaphysical legitimises Heidegger’s claim that poetry is “the letting
happen of the advent of the truth of what is” and only in the
“belonging together of Being and thinking” can truth manifest itself
(Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 72).
At this historical moment, what is the status of philosophy in
contemporary poetry? How can concepts and emotions attain an
epistemological equity within poetry? Can there be a lyric mode of
thinking? Is poetry’s orientation towards materiality a compensation
for its excessive abstractness? How does a kinship of thought and
feeling alter the puissance of poetry? How does recent poetry draw
from and revise Romantic concerns and allegiances? This seminar is
interested in the hypostatic union of thought and feeling in poetry
that is one of the modes of ‘poetic thinking.’ We consider the
animated dovetailing of thinking, sensation, and emotion in poetry
alongside the incorporation of numerous knowledge structures that
establish poetry as an integral site of knowledge production and
philosophical reflection. We welcome papers from various disciplines
that can address the theoretical, philosophical, historical, and
conceptual dimensions of a “poetry that thinks” (Heidegger, 1947).
Contributions are invited from the following areas:
Poetry and metaphysics
The Romantic legacy of the poet-thinker
Poetic form as a species of thought
Poetry and/as Poetics
Abstraction vs. Materiality
Thinking and song
Resisting thought
Please submit your paper proposal of roughly 300 words with a short
author bio through ACLA’s online submission portal: http://www.acla.org/node/add/paper
between 1st and 23rd September.
Queries can be directed to:
Rajalekshmi K ([log in to unmask])
Abjy Kurian ([log in to unmask])
Thank you.
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