Me-an-ing Mac-hi-nas

Poetry and Poetic-Prose: Why this Sublime and Revelatory Medium?

How does the medium of poetry act as a vehicle towards the revelatory or the sublime? Our group wanted to explore and interrogate, to raise the “if,” the “why,” the “how” to a level where there is no answer, but rather where there are more questions. The readings I discovered in my research helped elucidate the quiet power of poetry. In The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets, James McCorkle frames the beginning of his book with an Adrienne Rich quote: “What kind of beast would turn its life into words?/ What atonement is this all about?/and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living/” (1). Rich’s words here reveal a tension we explored in our project, the concept of representing life and self in words. Yet, perhaps where we stray from Rich is around her notion of atonement. Our project, for me, was more about extending the self out into the public sphere; atonement may have been a byproduct for some of us, but my own personal experience with writing poetry and responding both creatively and scholarly through the active application of intertextuality brought me to a place of the sublime.

McCorkle later writes that the self is always provisional, splintered, impoverished, but also copious (4). I wrote in our online discussion that “in writing poetry, the self is scattered, broken down, but is also disseminated and has potential for living elsewhere, outside the body.” This is very much what we did in our project. In our public posts of original created poems/poetry-prose, on Scalar, we scattered a bit of ourselves and in doing so, released the potential to control meaning. As we each responded twice to each other’s creations, we picked up the tatters, consumed them, and created new works in response. Creation here begets creation, and layers upon layers of meaning produced a meaning machine that weaved together our mini revelations.
     
In her chapter in Literacies, Learning and the Body, Grace Enriquez defines reader-response theory through another scholar; Louise Rosenblatt explains that “readers have the powers to envision alternate ways of viewing the author’s topic, and they exert that power when they read from a critical stance” (par. 4). Reading is a form of performance; responding to a work post-reading by writing is also a performance in itself. Rosenblatt’s use of the word “exert” connotes a physical effort. If poetry has the potential to act as an agent to induce mental and physical effort, than our act of reading, responding, and posting was a performance itself. Although there may be a sense of failure in misunderstanding the author’s own connotations, there is a success in the poems “living elsewhere, outside the body.” In our project, we perform the failure of authoritative intent; in our performance, we find the sublime through the act of extending ourselves and then letting go.  
            
                                                                                        Works Cited
Enriquez, Grace. "Reader Response and Embodied Poetry." Literacies, Learning, and the Body: Putting Theory and Research into      
     Pedagogical Practice. Ed. Elisabeth Johnson, Stavroula Kontovourki, and Christine A. Mallozzi. Routledge, 2015. Print.

McCorkle, James. The Still Performance: Writing, Self, and Interconnection in Five Postmodern American Poets. Charlottesville: U of
     Virginia, 1989. Print.