A 'Poetics' of . . . . How do we use that word again?

Course-correcting a misused term, and what it has to offer us.

Some of my favorite writing is about “poetics,” and so is some of my least favorite.

But it’s a term worth understanding because “poetics” can make us better readers, less impressionable, and better able to see through some of the spittle that passes as educated thinking.

Someone who grew up in the 1600s would feel at sea among the uses to which the term is put today. We read of the poetics of social action, of gender, of religious devotion, of physical spaces, of work, and even of abstract concepts. A 20-year-old Bill Shakespeare who found himself flipping through the pages of a 21st-century literary periodical would imagine that he landed on Mars. Donna Haraway’s poetics of Cyborgs? Poetics and the “brokenness fetish?” A poetics of silence and “lacuna worship.” Doctor Who has some work to do.

By the same token, I can imagine that the many young chappies popping around the hauls of comparative literature departments at research universities today would feel a little scandalized at the notion that “poetics” can, in fact, be about poetry. Actually, you don’t have to look very far to find critiques of the poetics of poetry, as if it’s masculinist or racist.

“Poetics” can be a slippery term. It comes from poieisis, A Greek word for the act of making or creating. Unlike its friend, mimesis, which means imitating, poieisis is concerned with the process of producing something, of generating it.

In the opening of his Poetics, Aristotle organizes his comments on poetic genealogy, plot, character, magnitude, and spectacle around a work’s function:

“I propose to speak not only of poetry in general but also of its species and their respective capacities; of the structure of plot required for a good poem; of the number and nature of the constituent parts of a poem; and likewise of any other matters in the same line of inquiry.”

The “good” of a work is judged by how well it moves the audience toward collective behaviors that are desirable.

In modern phenomenological and cultural writing, poetics is treated as an instrument for thinking about modes of being that are hidden in the ordinary ways things are described. On the one hand, poetics offers an “ontological amplification” of phenomena, while on the other, it makes matters more concrete, “as a sort of applied poetic, in the sense that engineering is a form of applied mathematics,” to quote Charles Bernstein.

It would be a fool’s errand to attempt to settle a definition of poetics, but the more familiar understandings of it simplify its range of meanings. In textbooks on how to read literature, the term often refers directly to distinct ways of viewing poetry—the Romantic, the Augustan, the Modern, and so on—while in textbooks on writing it can refer simply to the techniques for making poetry.

And in my opinion it is this combination of poetic meaning and poetic making that poetics finds its best usage.

We can use “poetics” to help us think well about genre.

If you’re a reader of this Substack, then you’ve heard me talk about genre before. “Genre” simply refers to a “kind” of thing and specifically a kind of writing. We know how to read something by understanding its genre, that is to say, what it is for. For example, we know that an Elizabethan tragedy is a kind of cautionary tale. And we know that a classical epic is a kind of sense-making myth. Both tragedy and epic are literary genres.

If we explore the “poetics” of a thing, we look at the presentation of that thing in the context of the function of the kind of work it is.

So, for instance, we might ask about Aeschylus’s poetics of clothing in his trilogy, The Oresteia. I know that this might sound like the topic of a senior’s college thesis, wracked with ChatGPT hacks and brown-nosing to the professor. But “poetics” can help us think intelligently about details of literary works like this one.

To ask about the poetics of clothing in a work means to cross reference the patterns of character development and symbolism attached to clothing (poetic meaning) with the intended uses of the literary work in its own time and place (poetic making).

Here are some notable presentations of clothing: the dark robes the Chorus wears; Agamemnon refusing to tread upon royal robes out of fear of the gods; the amor Athena wears in the final play; Orestes’s disguise as he returns to Mycenae to avenge his father; and . . . the one anyone who has read these plays is thinking of . . . the malicious straight jacket in which Clytemnestra and Aegisthus entrap Agamemnon and murder him. There’s a pattern here. Clothing represents power, and specifically it differentiates between the power one ought to wield and the power one ought not to yield. In other words, clothing reminds of what is natural and unnatural — the great moral distinction for ancient Athenians.

Now cross reference this pattern with the purpose of the plays. They were performed at the festival to Dionysus as part of a competition. They were interactive in the sense that the Chorus represented the Athenian citizens. And the trilogy as a whole reinforces Athens’ commitment to self-governance.

We could say then that the poetics of clothing in The Oresteia is a constant in a world of change. It is like the thumping bass line of a jazz piece, over which the trumpet improvises, reminding the soloist of where the harmonies lie. Nature is represented through the poetics of clothing.

Nothing about what I said has anything directly to do with “poetry” in the conventional sense of the term, as verse. Instead, poetics considers how and for what something appears.

There are two modern explorations of Poetics that I love.

One is Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. This book teeters just on the right side of the edge of intelligibility for me. But some patience with it pays off.

Bachelard considers how and for what space appears. His focus is on the house, or home. And he uses memory, dreams, and intention to investigate how spaces of the homes we live in are more than floor plans but facilitate life itself.

Just take a look at his table of contents:

I don’t know if that strikes you as the outline of a brilliant imagination or of someone, as my 10-year-old would say, who has “crud in his brains.”

For Bachelard, poetics takes its cues from poetry itself.

But the poetic act itself, the sudden image, the flare-up of being in the imagination, are inaccessible to such investigations. In order to clarify the problem of the poetic image philosophically, we shall have to have recourse to a phenomenology of the imagination. By this should be understood a study of the phenomenon of the poetic image when it emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man, apprehended in his actuality.

Here we encounter the bugbear, “phenomenology.” For this purpose, though, phenomenology simply refers to studied reflection on how a thing appears to us, including the conditions through which it appears. So when Bachelard says that a drawer or lamp or nook “emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of heart, soul, and being of man,” he’s trying to remove the image from the restrictive habits of observation — beyond what it’s made of, how it’s measured, and what it’s structure is.

The spaces in which we live cannot be detached from the lives that we live. In a sense, where your children sleep is just as much a “nest” as is the bundle of grass and detritus where the bluebird hatches its eggs.

The other modern work of poetics that I love is Robert Farrar Capon’s The Supper of the Lamb.

No book that I’ve read connects food to the life of the spirit, family, friendship, and body as much as The Supper of the Lamb. Capon (funny name given the topic) was a retired Episcopal priest born in Queens in the 30s. In the book, he meticulously cooks a dinner of lamb. But every detail of the preparation is a reflection on the poetic meaning and poetic making of dining.

“Man's real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are.”

That means looking really really carefully at the things we cook at eat. Chapter Two is about the onion. He makes the observation that onions are vertically asymmetrical (don’t know why I never noticed) and therefore should be treated that way. They figure upward, like a flame.

Another gem:

“Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful.”

Healthy folks today like to say, “food is fuel.” Capon couldn’t disagree more. The pleasure of food reaches into the deepest realities of human living — our social and generational bonds, our experiences of love, our place in nature, our inborn need for intermediaries. Before “theopoetics” and “sacramental poetics” became trendy words in academic writing, there was Capon’s lamb stew.

What do a breakfast nook and a lamb stew have to do with ancient tragedy?

Scientifically, almost nothing. Poetically, very much.

I hate it when academics like myself take good ideas into the realm of the outrageous and nihilistic. When I teach students, one of my goals is to demystify technical jargon and encourage students to experiment with more sensical uses of ideas.

For many, “poetics” has become at a lazy stand-in for “a cultural critique so labyrinthine that I won’t try to articulate it … and neither should you.” The mode of cultural criticism that still dominates the humanities and social sciences in the academy has a way of absorbing good ideas into itself.

But let’s not let poetics get sucked into the abyss. Think about poetic meaning and poetic making when you read literature or watch movies. Read Aristotle’s Poetics if you haven’t. Follow along with Capon and make a lamb stew.

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