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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