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Poetics as Conjecture and Provocation

In a citation of my book Far Language, Perloff (2004: 155), in the introduction to an essay on contemporary poetic innovation, refers to me as a ‘poet-critic’. The assignation surprised me on first seeing it. Its hyphen appears to announce an uneasy hybrid that looks dangerously as though it has yoked by violence together two incompatibilities. It suggests that unity is achieved by pressurised cohabitation, force of will. And yet, it is unity of purpose and project but not of product I would like to emphasise in this presentation of my work. The unity is achieved by introducing a third term, poetics, not just as mediator between the scholarly research of the critic and the practice-led research creative writing of the poet, although it is also that. Poetics has been open to a variety of misunderstandings. The first, and apparently most obvious, is that it has something to do with poetry. Or with poetry alone. I’m not going to help that impression tonight by almost exclusively referring to poetry, but that’s because I am a ‘poet-critic’. But I’d like to stress that while poetry and poetics share etymological roots they both derive from the Greek verb ‘to make’ poetics, as the thinking about how something is made, can be used with reference to all kinds of writing (and not just writing, and not even just art). Poetics is as relevant to the writer of supposedly formulaic writing, like the crime novel, as it is to the most experimental writing which involves the setting up of systems to produce unforeseen textual effects. On the one hand you’ve Raymond Chandler’s