Poetry and 'Poetry'

A lot of the reading I've been doing lately stresses the poetic nature of cognition, both conscious and non-conscious. Our thinking is rife with metaphor, metanymy, and all of the various tropes more usually associated with poetry and this style of thinking is revealed in the language we use, the gestures we make and the objects we construct.. This is the case even with the most straightforward and apparently transparent piece of non-literary writing, including much of physics and mathematics apparently. (Which is not to say that the findings of physics or the axioms of mathematics are any less true, only that what constitutes the understanding and expression of that truth needs to be reinterpreted as a kind of shared, collaborative poem, or as Richard Dawkins puts it 'science is the poetry of reality'). For me this begs the question, if all writing is to a large extent 'poetic', reflective of the poetic cognition which produced it, then what is the status of that form of writing which we have traditionally referred to as 'poetry'? I would guess that the only valid way to approach that question would be to talk about contexts and about categories of experience; a piece of writing can be viewed (sic) as poetry if it gains access to the domain of practice and knowledge that we understand and categorise as poetry.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• poetry
• poem
• poetic
• cognition
• cognitive
• poetics
• stockwell
• Reuven
• Tsur
• metaphor
• lakoff
• metanymy
• synecdoche
• stanley
• fish
• language
• linguistics
• richard
• dawkins
• science
• art