Poetry is philosophically interesting, writes Gerald L. Bruns,
"when it is innovative not just in its practices, but, before
everything else, in its poetics (that is, in its concepts or
theories of itself)." In "The Material of Poetry," Bruns considers
the possibility that anything, under certain conditions, may be
made to count as a poem. By spelling out such enabling conditions
he gives us an engaging overview of some of the kinds of
contemporary poetry that challenge our notions of what language is:
sound poetry, visual or concrete poetry, and "found" poetry.
Poetry's sense and meaning can hide in the spaces in which it is
written and read, says Bruns, and so he urges us to become
anthropologists, to go afield in poetry's social, historical, and
cultural settings. From that perspective, Bruns draws on works by
such varied poets as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Steve McCaffery,
and Francis Ponge to argue for three seemingly competing points.
First, poetry is made of language but is not a use of it. That is,
poetry is made of words but not of what we use words to produce:
concepts, narratives, expressions of feeling, and so on. Second, as
the nine sound poems on the CD included with the book demonstrate,
poetry is not necessarily made of words but is rooted in, and in
fact already fully formed by, sounds the human body can produce.
Finally, poetry belongs to the world alongside ordinary things; it
cannot be confined to some aesthetic, neutral, or disengaged
dimension of human culture.
Poetry without frontiers, unmoored from expectations, and
sometimes even written in imaginary languages: Bruns shows us why,
for the sake of all poetry, we should embrace its anarchic,
vitalizing ways.
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