A recent post over at Possum Ego seems to address an idea I floated in an earlier post concerning relations as providing a productive focus for talking about poetry.
Unfortunately, Dale Smith (Ol’ Possum?) uses some opaque language that annoys the crap out of me, such as: “Phronesis is mutable and undefined because it is dependent upon situations that call its wisdom into being for those moments.” We could slice and dice Aristotle to show why phonesis is not wisdom at all, but let’s not.
Look instead at this intriguing statement: “Insofar as contemporary poetry intersects with disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and ecology, linguistics and art history, geography and philosophy, it becomes necessary to anticipate the affinities and differentials that exist in how we talk about our practice.” That is, it becomes necessary to talk about relations, and not just at the language level. It becomes absolutely necessary, in fact, to include the ways in which audiences are affected (or not) by the poems they read and/or hear.
Is this not a way forward from the petty polemics that so disturbingly reproduce the political gamesmanship we see at work in—oh, Washington, for example?