Poetry, consciousness and community / / Christopher (Kit) Kelen.

• Superior document: Consciousness, literature & the arts, 23
• Author: Kelen, Christopher, 1958-
• Place / Publishing House: Amsterdam ;, New York, NY : : Rodopi,, 2009.
• Year of Publication: 2009
• Language: English
• Series: Consciousness, Literature and the Arts 23.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (199 pages).
• Notes: Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

The process of poetry has importantly intuitive aspects and poetry embodies an ambivalence towards consciousness and towards those activities of thought in which it is constituted. It was ability to favour doubt over the productions of the rational mind that led Keats to associate poetry with his ‘negative capability’. Consciousness is – like poetry – a floating signifier, a term of wide reference, and with a range of implications in the various disciplinary contexts in which it finds currency. Poetry, consciousness and community is about poetry, consciousness and community, about their reflexive relationships in process, and about how these relationships matter to the world today and to worlds to come. This book is interested in the nature of poetic, as opposed to other, thought; it is interested in the critical application of these forms of thought to each others’ productions, and in how poetic thought might or might not be subject to its own regime. Poetry – as practice of testing the limits of language – entails a reflexive goal: that of understanding the journey in words made possible for, and by, the poem. Poetic meaning and truth are revealed between languages (likewise between genres, between texts, between subjects); it is in this inter-subjective and inter-cultural space that the limits of language (and so of conceivable worlds) are found.

Table of Contents

Preliminary Material -- The Scope of the Work -- Poetry and Consciousness: The Scope of Indirection -- Over the Border: The Everyday Lapse -- The Tropic and the Iterative: of Haunting and of Laughter -- Witness and Habitation: Waking up to Ourselves -- Community: The Word is a Window -- Bibliography.