Monday, June 17, 2013

Praxis and Poetry












Tim Love said...

"Still, a sculpture about a phone call could be something interesting" - I'd claim that poetry is often "being interesting" in this way - it has little choice. Except when replicating dialog or other poems it's always trying to be "about" something outside of itself. When being about a pretty face it doesn't have the fallback option of photo-realism, it just has to struggle on.

I look upon poetry as a mixed-media (or at least mixed-aesthetic) venture. When Hopkins wrote about the "dapple dawn-drawn falcon" he was letting the medium show through. Quotes are like stuck-on collage items. Puns and acrostics conceal extra trompe l'oeuil words. In a sonnet, representation can be warped for the sake of the form, not dissimilar to the way Cezanne's tables weren't always rectangular. And with writing, leaving "bare canvas" a la Schiele is the default. The sentence "A man is in a kitchen" leaves out almost everything that a picture would show you immediately - the age of the man, the era, the wealth, whether it's night or day, etc.

In poetry especially, language draws attention to itself so much that it sometimes "shows the working", and there's more "Poetry about poetry" than there is "Music about music", I suspect, and more poems than symphonies that query the purpose/value of the very medium they exploit.

Adrian Slatcher said...

Agree, though we've had 40 years of reductionism, from Larkin and Hughes, through to the last two Laureates where the poem has been most definitely about what it is in the poem. That's changing again. I used to wonder how music could be "about" something, but I'm more inclined than I was to think that non-verbal forms make it easier rather than harder to discuss an idea. (In other words, language's directness makes abstraction harder, not easier.)

Unknown said...

Aristotle theorized that all human knowledge can be divided into three activities: thinking (theoria); making (poiesis); doing (praxis). That the etymology of 'poetry' can be traced back to the Greek 'poie-' (root of poiesis, to make or create), straddled in between theory and practice, is wonderful to me in light of the entire discussion on poetry and praxis...! Using this device alone, we might gain philosophical insight to the tendentious yet critical relationships between the kinds of knowledge inherent in thinking, making, and doing; perhaps, for example, to imply indeed that poiesis, such as poetry, can only realistically be interrogated on the basis of "what it is about" rather than its "correctness" (theoria) or "usefulness" (praxis). Indeed, Aristotle's forms of knowledge may be seen as a trinity embodying a complex trialectic (three-way dialectic) relationship...e.g. the connections between philosophy, experience and creative production inherent in the praxis of poetry! ;) The little fragment I posted in another comment is an attempt to elucidate some of these ideas in a far simpler and more direct way. (I'd love any feedback you may have, on the verse and/or concepts)