Poetry and Philosophy (no. 1)

I started this blog partly because I wanted a formal self-encouragement to write about poetry and philosophy. It was particularly reading Lyn Hejinian’s The Fatalist, being utterly floored by it, and feeling like it would be a real waste if I didn’t write about and study that book, that got me to begin posting in the first place, but that project has been deferred for a long time (for one thing, my copy of the book was on loan for the last six or seven months). This post will begin a (hopefully) regular series of investigations into poetry that I think of as genuinely philosophical, by which I mean poetry that does original philosophical work. The tautological aspect of that definition is fine as a starting point, though I’m sure it’ll be refined and particularized as this project goes on.

After some initial considerations here, I’ll start with The Fatalist, which should take some time—it’s an astoundingly rich book—and then hopefully examine the work of Rosmarie Waldrop, Leslie Scalapino, and others (Barrett Watten, Kit Robinson… a school essay on Heidegger and Silliman may get revised and posted as well).

Some general questions I’ll be thinking about during this project (these are just starting points; there will be countless others, many of them specific to the work under consideration):

1) What is the relation of expression (of some thought that can be considered as existing independently of what happens in the poem itself—discursivity is one kind of expression), example (where a particular piece of poetic language stands in for a more general concept or conceptual nexus), and enactment (where the philosophical work is first produced or performed by the writing—it need not be directly stated, but can come about through juxtapositions, etc.)? These three factors are, of course, always operating in any poem (what’s expressed, exemplified or enacted needn’t be philosophical—that’s just my focus here), and can slide into one another. In a given work, which, if any, is primary, and when?
This is a question about the function of language at any point in the work.

2) Given these relations, what do they do to each other?

3) What’s the relation of general & particular, concept & object, abstract & concrete in the writing? One reason “doing philosophy” in poetry is attractive to me is that poetic writing isn’t stuck with the discursive and abstract approach that even the best philosophy seems to end up with (on the other hand, I want a philosophical poetry that’s “philosophically rigorous,” not a watered-down or merely “poeticized” version of philosophical thinking, in which the matter of thought isn’t really thought through).

4) What is the philosophy of a given work of “philosophical poetry?”

5) Is the language/ style/ vocabulary/ logic of the work “philosophical,” in the sense of quoting or parodying a genre (or genuinely becoming a more-or-less discursive work), or does it do its philosophical work without “sounding like philosophy?” If both, then how does it negotiate between kinds of language?
Actually, that deserves its own point:

6) How does the work negotiate between different kinds of language?
A subquestion here bears on the status of the sentence.

It's also going to be important, in specifying what "philosophy" means in a given instance, to distinguish between fundamental philosophical approaches. One such distinction is that between a primarily "presentative" mode of philosophizing (where we're given the results of thinking) and an "investigative" mode that focuses on the "path" or process of thinking (Heidegger is the most prominent example of the latter--late Wittgenstein, too, to a great extent--but they're both usually operating in a given philosopher's work, at least when that philosophy is of any interest whatsoever).

Back soon with first stabs at The Fatalist.