Robert Sheppard: The Necessity of Poetics 2: Definitions of Poetics

Metapoetics: Definitions of Poetics

(These are all happily online elsewhere on the Creative Critical website (with a new, 2021, introduction: https://creativecritical.net/gathering-from-the-past/

I reproduce the first few here only)

Poetics is the product of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively casting into the future.

Poetics is a discipline, though a flexible one.

Poetics is a discourse, though an intermittent mercurial one.

Poetics is a writer-centred, self-organising activity.

Poetics is a way of letting writers question what they think they know.

Poetics is a way of allowing creative writing dialogue with itself, beyond the monologic of commentary or reflection.

Poetics exists for oneself and for others, to produce, to quote Rachel Blau DuPlessis, ‘a permission to continue’. (DuPlessis 1990: 156)

... and dozens more for your delight here, right through to:

Poetics should be studied as such.

Poetics can stop being absorbed by the metalanguage of literary theory or criticism by asserting its own claims as a discourse, a language game with its own players, rules and purposes.

Poetics in hybrid, fragmentary, collage, playful, jokey, patapoetical, forms, avoids cooption into the explication of the writing that results.

Poetics’ function is both oriented towards, and in, new form.

*

Return to part one (and links to all 6 parts of this version of The Necessity of Poetics) here.

http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/robert-sheppard-necessity-of-poetics-1.html