Conference paper
'Say it, no ideas but in things': Poetics as World Forming
Literary Environments: Place, Planet, Translation - The Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature (Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, 17/07/2017 - 19/07/2017)
19/07/2017
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Abstract
This paper will begin with a meditation on the poetic refrain 'say it, no ideas but in things' repeated numerous times in William Carlos Williams' epic poem 'Paterson.' The poem is an exploration of the relation between the city of Paterson in New Jersey, USA, and what it might become when the poet draws from his experience of it and translates it into poetic language; as if what is at stake in the poem is the city's future imagined through the sense of another world emerging as the poem unfolds. In Walter Benjamin's terms, the poet poetizes the city; turns it into another life emerging in-between the real city and the poem itself. I want to argue that poetizing such as we find in Williams' poem offers a posthumanist way to address the human relation to the non-human in the era of the Anthropocene, with the realisation that we no longer control nature but are deeply embedded in its becoming. This insight, which has become an axiom of eco-thought, needs to be seen in the light of another compelling insight: that we are also entwined in the techne that allows us to see things in that way. Our relation to nature is doubly bound up in being part of and separate from nature. Through an analysis of the Australian poet Les Murray's poem 'Strangler Fig', I show how the poetic voice makes us see this double bind as a question of world-forming (Nancy), where the poetic imagination works to release the human relation to itself through techne, thereby opening up new worlds in the more-than-human earth in all of it's cosmic connectivity.
Details
- Title
- 'Say it, no ideas but in things': Poetics as World Forming
- Creators
- Warwick Mules (Author) - Southern Cross University, Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Conference
- Literary Environments: Place, Planet, Translation - The Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature (Griffith University, Gold Coast, Queensland, 17/07/2017 - 19/07/2017)
- Number of pages
- 14
- Identifiers
- 991013180213002368
- Academic Unit
- Faculty of Business, Law and Arts
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Conference paper