And so the semester ends....

... and so we go back to the beginning, to Aristotle, arguably the first literary theorist. He had an expansive idea of what poetry was. From his Poetics:

Speaking generally, poetry seems to owe its origin to two particular causes, both natural. From childhood men have an instinct for representation, and in this respect, differs from the other animals that he is far more imitative and learns his first lessons by representing things. And then there is the enjoyment people always get from representations. What happens in actual experience proves this, for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. The reason is this: Learning things gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but also in the same way to all other men, though they share this pleasure only to a small degree. The reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, "that is so and so." If we have never happened to see the original, our pleasure is not due to the representation as such but to the technique or the color or some other such cause.

We have, then, a natural instinct for representation and for tune and rhythm—for the metres are obviously sections of rhythms—and starting with these instincts men very gradually developed them until they produced poetry out of their improvisations. Poetry then split into two kinds according to the poet's nature. For the more serious poets represented fine doings and the doings of fine men, while those of a less exalted nature represented the actions of inferior men, at first writing satire just as the others at first wrote hymns and eulogies.  [1448b]

I really like the idea of inferiority-based poetics. That's my kind of game. The work that we've been studying/examining/ critiquing all semester thinks of language as a contested space, not a neutral signifier of denotative reference. I think that once we start to understand language in this way, it's fair and just to call any work that foregrounds this contestation "poetic". This doesn't discount other usages of the word, but I think it's important that we dissociate the chain that connects poetry to poetic. One way of doing this is to reclaim the word "poetry" from its narrow academic sense. I hope that this seminar has exposed you (students) to a broader sense of possibility for "language in action," "textured language," "sculptural language," and on and on. 

Read an excerpt from David Antin's reflections on what it means to be avant-garde. He looks a little bit like depictions of Aristotle

Lastly, I'll leave you with these words from Russian Formalist critic, Viktor Shklovsky:  "The technique of art is to make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged."

I very much enjoyed leading this seminar, thank you. 

Remember to call on me if I can be of help to you in your future endeavors. Maybe it's something easy like a recommendation letter, maybe something else. Let me know. Because employment is uncertain, you can always reach me at smithcaseysmith@gmail.com.