Poetics
Shaping poetry events for a festival, BRWF 2011
My poetics could be described as discursive, anti-formalist, personal and politically engaged, though disengaged from politics.
My PhD "A New Defence of Poetry" examined new ways of looking at the art of poetry from the cognitive sciences to speech act theory, pragmatism and phenomenology.
An essay in the 5 Bells' series 'How Poets Work', appeared in Winter 2009 issue:
‘Poem’, poet’, ‘poetry’ are words laden with baggage. The other day I was looking (online) at Nicolas Poussin’s ‘Inspiration of the Poet’ (c.1630). In an antique frieze, Apollo points to the page (conveying the wrong idea about poetic inspiration). However, the poet, pen in hand, looks heavenward, even ignoring Euterpe the lyric muse, standing by Apollo with one breast bared casually holding her flute. A putto is planting a wreath on the poet’s head. In effect, Poussin is planting the wreath, a boast of his artistic skills. Hubris is a danger to artists, and notions of inspiration, genius and/or the Muse are dangerous, arrogant myths.
A poet should, “not thinke, hee can leape forth suddenly a Poet, by dreaming hee hath been in Parnassus, or, having washt his lipps (as they say) in Helicon. There goes more to his making, then so. For to Nature, Exercise, Imitation, and Studie, Art must bee added, to make all these perfect.”
A warning from Ben Jonson
It's a shame the art of poetry is such a minority sport. We all have a right to poetry. What do I mean? We all believe that a baby born into the world should flourish, that its abilities and capabilities be allowed to develop, or even be encouraged. A capabilities approach insists, in Martha Nussbaum’s words, “that there is waste and tragedy when a living creature has the innate or "basic" capability for some functions that are evaluated as important and good, but never gets the opportunity to perform those functions.” Amartya Sen, from a wider perspective, emphasises the importance of opportunities for people to do and be what they value.
There is value in us having the opportunity to use innate or basic capabilities, two vital and basic ones being language and imagination. I’d argue that poetry is a natural skill that allows us to take advantage of such opportunities.
I hope I’m preaching to the converted but in brief my argument is very simple and goes something like this:
1. homo sapiens is a language animal - we cannot function adequately, let alone optimally, without language which is used both externally to communicate and internally to think about the world, to project beyond the present to the future and the past;
2. language is innately poetic and creative, it cannot avoid using rhythm, tropes etc.;
3. poetry is the art of using language creatively, not only foregrounding language’s materiality, its sensuousness and rhythms, but (as with any art form) investigating aspects of life we often ignore, or take for granted;
4. Therefore poetry is a vital art form.
Notes: Martha Nussbaum, 'Justice for Non-Human Animals', The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, November, 2002.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom, OUP, 1999.
Essais:
I Blame Romanticism - talk from the 2010 Australian Poetry Festival, published 5 Bells Spring 2010 - extract Ecopoetry.
Go for a bushwalk - paper presented at the Poetics of Space conference, UTS, Feb 2005, published Southerly, 2006.
Intelligent Poetry but . . .Working between the poles: commentary on articles by Miles Merril and Dan Disney published 5 Bells 14.3 2007-8
Writing Nature - paper delivered at the Australian Poetry Festival 2001
