Movement on Poetics of Being Two and its abstract

So, my dear editor at my dear press tells me that the reader's report on the poetics book is just a few days away. After two whole seasons of impatience, I find I am now scared. What, oh what, will the reader report? It's been so long that this process has begun to feel like I'm a murder defendant waiting twelve hours for a jury to come to verdict. As defense attorneys will explain, that's not usually a good sign.

To cheer myself up, I present to you the chapter summaries of the first full length study of 20th Century poetry through an Irigarian lens, specifically that of her ethics of sexual difference. I add, should you have unlucky and never read these poets, go read these poets. They are simply astonishing. Especially St.-John Perse's and his Seamarks/Amers. You did not know that poets would try That!

Also, Well now, kids, to my happy astonishment, someone just dropped by and asked to be apprised of the publication of my book, should that ever happen... So I thought, hmmm, for his sake I should put up the chapter abstracts. Hence here 'tis, but modified as I discovered that the chapter on G. Stein is a whole other book on 20th C poetry, and is not in the present volume. Also said visitor, Paul, runs this cool poetry blog: Wordsalad. Go read it.

Ahem, the book:
Prologue: For Novices and Adepts (22 pp.)

Quick review of the position of Irigaray's work in the larger frame of feminist philosophy.

Introduction: What? How?

Overview of the book’s argument, organization, and style included with this proposal.

Chapter 1: A Tantric Ethics of Sexual Difference (60pp. ds. 11pt.)
This chapter describes the dialogical subject, or Diotiman relation, that Irigaray posits in her ethics and that relation’s parallels in Tantric philosophy. Through detailed explication of the terms of Irigaray’s ethics in terms of Tantra as explained by Octavio Paz, Andrew Harvey, and Miranda Shaw, I show that Tantra is a system in which two complex and nuanced subjects are taken to exist and the complexities of that relation are explored. The conclusion of the chapter shows this ethics to require a spiritualization of the carnal and carnalization of spirit in order for Irigaray’s ethics to address humans in their full complexity. Irigaray’s use of touch, the caress, as an important aspect of her ethics is given close consideration.

Chapter 2: Burn the Panopticon (60pp.)
This chapter moves from the symbolism of Tantra to an explication the central terms of Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference through understanding her work as that of a “symbolist philosopher,” and develops a theory of poetics and the poetic subject (one model of subjectivity generally) in the spirit of that ethics. Imagination, in this ethics, becomes not the flight of fancy, but the risk of responsibly trying to imagine a life beyond the problematics of the postmodern. It is this texture of imagination that allows one to burn the panopticon to see and be otherwise. Having explored some of the sources of Irigaray’s thought outside the Western philosophical tradition, I turn here to the implications of this hybrid thought of sexual difference for poetry, poetics, and the poetic subject as a model for subjectivity in general (as the poet has thought of the poetic subject since at least the German Romantics). The chapter concludes with an examination of Irigaray’s response to Heidegger’s ideas of the poet and of the purpose of that subjectivity of risk and complexity in ethical love for poetry, but also as a site at which poetry can teach us how to be two (and more), that is how poetry can lead to an ethical and vatic sense of our being.

Chapter 3: For the Other in Yves Bonnefoy’s The Motion and Immobility of Douve (56pp.)
This long chapter is both an extensive close reading of Bonnefoy’s long poem and an exploration of how difficult it can be to arrive at a poetics of being two. Exploring the instances of the interval, and examining the subjective dynamics between the voices/characters, I will read this poem as ambivalent in regards to sexual difference. In one direction, its narrative and characters resist any possible trace of such an ethics or mode of being, while in another, theun-dead female figure of Douve presents readers with a textual representation of the sensible transcendental and a respect for the interval like few other figures in poetry. The poem is dramatic, narrative, disjunctive, and surrealist. In this matrix of cooperative, if sometimes dissonant, genres and styles a pair of lovers speak to each other across the abyss of death. Douve, the woman in the poem, is dead, and has taken a disruptive and antagonistic posture toward her former lover. The man in the poem laments the loss of his beloved, associating her with nature and its power, but also seeing her loss as tragedy only for himself in still fairly traditional patriarchal terms. The tension between the two, the insistence even from death that she is not as his fantasy wanted her, the failure to wonder and to allow the other-subject their existence in relation to their gender and their own unique being, threatens not just the integrity of their subjectivities but he integrity of the phenomenal world itself. The poem is examined as an opportunity to meditate on the dangers of refusing being two and on the difficulty of bringing this state of being to consciousness and culture.

Chapter 4: St.-Jean Perse and the Languor of Renewal (c. 35 pp.)
Perse’s poetry is also not yet a poetry of being two, but his sense of language and phenomena, of love and the sensual, and the pleasure and joy often found in Perse’s poems. Working primarily from the Irigarian terms mucous and angels, and her definitions of love of self and love of other, this explication of Perse’s poem focuses on Seamarks. This epic poem registers the complexity of Diotiman relation sometimes by considering human interactions, sometimes relations between humans and nature, and often represents these complexities in the interrelation of symbols and the layers of tension in his poems. Perse is poet of the water, of the wide open ocean, and drop of a tear, and provides an opportunity to explore the Tantric and contemplative paradoxes with which we will learn to live with confidence in a culture of being two: for, in it a city's women march to the sea to demand/pray for a world in which they exist as subjects-feminine, and a pair of lovers take to the sea for a year to be transformed into the founding couple of that world. They layers of Greek drama, Tantric-like cosmology, and frail human risk in the face of always possible failure demonstrate the leap that a culture of two would be, and the difficulty of leaping.

Chapter 5: Jorie Graham’s Parousia (40 pp.)
The close readings offered here focus on the use of multiple simultaneous perspectives, disjunction, and ambiguity to represent the difficulty, and sometimes the success of arriving at a being two. Graham’s work is as encompassing, interdisciplinary, intertexual and ‘difficult’ as Irigaray’s, partly because she working out in poetry many of the problems to which Irigaray applies herself in philosophy. While many of Graham’s astute readers have commented on these propensities of Graham’s styles, none has yet collected those comments into an understanding of Graham’s work as also thinking its way into being two. Jorie Graham is the first poet to write much of her poetry with the concerns and difficulties of Irigaray’s thought in mind. Of the poets I consider in this book, she is the only one to write after Irigaray. Graham’s interest in the stories of Daphne, Cassandra, Penelope, and Eurydice, many of the Guardian Angel poems, the Aubades, and some of her biographical poems directly explore the tension in our culture that Irigaray identifies as patriarchy’s foreclosure of sexual difference.

Chapter 6: This Impasse which Is Not One (40 pp.)
The book concludes by opening onto the wider scene of the present culture. If poetic subjects imply or suggest ways of being human when they are understood as having something to say to ethics and thus living together, this chapter explores, celebrates, decries and laments the trends in our culture at present that might let us move into a culture of positive differences and that frustrate, but do not render impassible, that horizon. This chapter brings the discussion of Irigaray’s ethics out of the “narrow” world of poetics and literary criticism to suggest some of the ways in which the reader might go and engage the world from this Diotiman point of view and where, in addition to Irigaray, feminist and other thinkers are imagining their way into a new world. The work of bell hooks and Ken Wilber and Curtis White, as well as several others, are addressed as to their resonance with Irigaray’s thought and the opportunities for a culture of life they open to us.