Poetry, Poetry Theory and Poetry Practices

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Poetry usually falls under the general heading of literature. Literature however is a relatively recent concept as well as a recent cultural institution and it seems that one of the main goals of poetry theory of the last centuries has been to give poetry a firm literary profile. Looking at western modern poetry and its reception this goal has certainly been reached, even to an extent that what poetry could and should be is realized in this western modern tradition that turned poetry into words-on-the-page, while writing was never indispensable for poetry before. However, this western modern tradition is just another practice of poetry in the sense that it is a result of a particular merge of two totally independent structures: human language and rhythm. Whereas rhythm in itself seems to defy any literary consideration, in modern western poetry it is usually treated as an icon of the alleged meaning of a poem, thereby safeguarding modern western poetry as a literary genre. But if we take poetry in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance we are able to see different practices world-wide that share more than one feature with modern western poetry, or just one, like rhythm, and we see unexpected lineages of features, like non-human animal lineages of, again, rhythm (birdsong is the obvious example). But it’s not just a question of lineage, in other words the diachronic aspect of the family of poetry. Synchronically speaking many practices should be considered as part of the family of poetry too. Practices that do not need to be able to function the literary set of principles and conventions that fixed a western understanding of poetry. In this course we will first identify and study the different features of poetry, like rhythm, metre, rhyme, texture, syntax, grammar, imagery, etc. Then we will explore and study practices, western and non-western, synchronic and diachronic, as members of the family of poetry