Thursday, July 29, 2010
the poem as experience?
An endearingly formalist professor once defined a poem as “not primarily sentimentality, emotion, or elaborate language but rather the meaningful relation of an experience.” My paper is a reaction to this definition, that, for a long time, was adequate for me. This paper in many ways charts my own journey through the poetics of experience as its troubles not only its reduction of what a poem is but also of how this definition places limits on what counts as “experience.” I argue that traditional definitions operate from an assumption that there are only a certain number of stock experiences that are considered “poetic,” and only a certain type of person, therefore, can have these kinds of experiences and render themselves poets. Drawing on our own experiences in concrete poetry, language poetry and digital poetry, the paper explores poetics that attempt to disrupt the poem/poet relationship and challenges the traditional role of poetry as referent to experience. Part of this paper will be a discussion of how embodiment relates to experience in poetry, taking into account that every poem, even if it does not “meaningfully relate" an experience, still has the potential to produce an experience itself and to give its (w)reader/perceiver an experience that is of the poem. This argument repositions poetry as a creative and evocative force that has implications for voice and audience as well as the body in poetic space. The paper ends somewhat as it begins—in a classroom, considering the ways in which educators might re-imagine a poetics that empowers students to create experiences that may not fit nicely on the traditional line.
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Thinking tangentially with Vanja's post, do you think the formalist definition you begin with is tied to capitalism as the language poets do? You could pick up the line of how the new poetics you describe at the end may or may not fit in with / change the academy. Is experience viewed as a usable "asset," and how might we topple that idea?
ReplyDeleteI think the Bernstein we read toward the beginning of the semester might be helpful, too--that's who talked about the poem as transmitting energy, or doing "work," right? Is it a change in how we define experience?
ReplyDeleteJustin
ReplyDeleteThis paper topic looks really great! I think it takes on the honest look at avant-garde where we look at the traditional vs. experimental. I like how your conference paper takes a look at praxis of how we deal with poetry (or rethink) in the classroom as an experience for poetry itself. My biggest comment would be to define the problematic traditionalist idea in detail as to estabilsh whether you feel that that idea is wrong or right. That would really help propel the paper topic.
Katherine: Excellent topic. You will critique the idea of a poetry of experience. I suggest focusing mainly on one movement/argument from the course. Choose concrete poetry or language poetry, or one of the others, and firstly use it to argue against a straightforward or unproblematized view of experience in the poem; secondly show what model of experience there is in the movement (there must be some model, even if it's purely negative); 3rdly, discuss a more refined understanding of experience in poetry. You mention embodiment, so you might focus on concrete poetry, or how about du Plessis' essay plus a few of the language essays (perhaps Hejinian's essay on closure)? This latter would provide a good take on current notions of embodiment in poetry. Now, if we refuse or critique the idea that experience is tied to certain stock experiences or poetic topoi, we are left with several possibilities. 1) Poetry conveys no experience at all. Language is alien to human experience and the notion that it is experiential is a kind of facade or effect. 2) Or, there are experiential effects that are the result of the operation of signs, so language provides us an intra-linguistic experience, an experience of culture through language. 3) Or, experience is arrived at through linguistic means but not referentially, perhaps through sound or through repetition or etc. 4) Or some combination of these? Finally, I think it's smart to set this all in terms of the classroom -- pragmatically, how can a view of experience that is filtered through language poetry (for example) aid the teacher?
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