Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education

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Birds are also central to the mythical origin of Sanskrit poetry, according to which the first verse ( shloka) was composed as the sage Vālmīki was happily watching a pair of mating cranes in the river, when suddenly, a hunter’s arrow killed one of the birds, and thereupon its mate gave a piercing, mournful cry and died of grief. Moved by this tragic scene and spotting the hunter, Vālmīki extemporaneously proclaimed the first verse of Sanskrit poetry, which became the model for the structure of the Rāmāyaṇa: You will find no rest for the long years of Eternity Scientific progress, Césaire would call “impoverished knowledge” that can only give us an “impoverished man.” As for Kantian philosophy, Césaire would write, “the asylum keepers are all there. And singularly limiting.” But Césaire would go further. By contrast to scientific knowledge or Western conventional rationality, Césaire wrote, it is only the revolutionary image that allows man to break through the limits: It is very remarkable that in the Poetics, Aristotle restricts both the scope and the substance of poetry under investigation to allow the mimetic model its full interpretive power. Only epic and dramatic poetry are taken into consideration, while the non-dramatic genres, such as elegy, iambos and various types of lyric poetry are ignored. Within this restricted scope, poetry or rather dramatic poetry, is to represent its true subject-matter, namely, “people in action”, how they would necessarily or probably speak and act. With human action constituting the province of poetry, much is excluded from poetry’s sphere of knowledge. From the poet’s purview of divine knowledge that encompasses “things that are, things that will be and things that were” to Aristotle’s “human action”, the whole realm of the divine now vanishes from sight. Furthermore, the poet is restricted to be a mimētēs, speaking not in his own person, but through his characters. Yet at the same time, the mimetic model is transformed philosophically into the basis for a poetic knowledge otherwise not accessible: the knowledge that we acquire from characters in the fictional world of dramatic mimesis. Knowing Authors We may come into knowledge about the world as we attain maturity, but it is a deeper kind of knowledge, which we call wisdom, which remains, and remains the most valuable.

Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics. Négritude is not a pretentious conception of the universe. It is a way of living history within history: the history of a community whose experience appears to be … unique, with its deportation of populations, its transfer of people from one continent to another, its distant memories of old beliefs, its fragments of murdered cultures. How can we not believe that all this, which has its own coherence, constitutes a heritage? Using the example of the phrase “a village in/on the Ganges” ( ga ṅ gāyā ṃ ghośaĥ), Abhinavagupta explains that given that the literal sense is impossible (the villagers would drown), the phrase evokes a different mode of cognition, in which the artistic expression itself, its connotations and affective resonances, and not its denotation, becomes the primary object of an elevated aesthetic experience and enjoyment, in addition to the “decoded,” more literal meaning of “a village on the banks of the Ganges river”: In other words, scientific faith reveals, more than anything, the moral dimension of truth—it offers a genealogy of truth. This is precisely how Gilles Deleuze, in his 1962 book on Nietzsche and Philosophy, will read Nietzsche’s intervention: The will to truth, Deleuze too shows, is a moral quest. « L’homme qui ne veut pas tromper veut un monde meilleur et une vie meilleure ; toutes ses raisons pour ne pas tromper sont des raisons morales. » And to expose this, Deleuze will maintain, is the very basis of a truly critical philosophy—the basis of true critique. We are here, with Césaire and Nietzsche, at the core, at the heart of what Deleuze will refer to as « la vraie réalisation de la critique » and « l’élément critique » : the moral value of truth, the value of values. Zhang, Wei. “Knowing Characters and Knowing Authors: ‘Poetic Knowledge’ in Ancient Greece and Early China.” CHS Research Bulletin 1, no. 2 (2013). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ZhangW.Knowing_Characters_and_Knowing_Authors.2013

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An important way to help learners understand poems is to have them write their own definitions of poetry. Thus, in true poetry, the walls that separate subject and object, self and other, nature and culture, language and reality, the Real (al-Ĥaqq) / ultimate reality / Self and creation ( al-khalq) / conventional reality / self are porous (if they can be said to exist at all), leading to a distinct form of “poetic knowledge” that is clearly described by Bashō: Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo. And in doing so, you must leave your subjective preoccupation with yourself. Otherwise you impose yourself on the object and do not learn. Your poetry issues of its own accord when you and the object have become one—when you have plunged deep enough into the object to see something like a hidden glimmering there. However well-phrased your poetry may be, if your feeling is not natural—if the object and yourself are separate—then your poetry is not true poetry but merely your subjective counterfeit. 68 Encouraging learners’ confidence when reading aloud can motivate them to seek out poems on their own and, as they begin to read out loud more, their speech development often improves dramatically. It is here, though, that Aimé Césaire and others, like Frantz Fanon, who we will study later, offer such insight. And it is here that I will, then, end—at least for now. With George Yancy, who writes:

From this comparative perspective of the formulation of explicit poetics, how poetry was created and the intellectual status of poetic creation, was what essentially distinguished the two modes of “poetic knowledge” in Greece and China: whereas in China poetry has access to knowledge through a rationalizing process of turning incitement into an indicative model of correlation between the internal and the external, in Greece poetry does so through a rationalizing process of turning inspiration into a mimetic model of representing truth and being. It is this difference that essentially defines the “poetic knowledge” constructed at the origins of the explicit poetics in each culture. The second basis is that although the songs were a heterogeneous body of poetry, the Ruists insisted on their uniform character, most crucially in what constituted the poetic experience. This experience is encapsulated in the Major Preface to Mao’s edition of the Songs, which, as we will see, can be considered the end-product of this tradition. [10] Purporting to set forth the commentator’s understanding of the purpose of the canon as a whole, it describes the process by which poetry is first produced and the function it performs: Fifth and finally, the importance of myth. For Césaire, the mythic is the space of poetry and invention. Césaire writes:Poetry is an excellent way to stimulate the imagination of your learners. When they are learning to read and write poetry, they are gaining metacognitive skills that are vital for any reading or writing task. This means that poetry in the classroom can be essential for children to understand the details of language, as well as making the process of reading more fun. As your learners begin to think deeply about phonetic sounds and inflection, they can begin to master the spoken word on top of their writing skills. When your learners are confident about what a poem is, you can ask them to bring in examples of their favourite poems. These could be nursery rhymes or more complicated poetry, such as the children’s poems of Rudyard Kipling. Ask your learners to read these poems out loud, then try and find out what the similarities and differences are between each of them, from subject to sound. Through multiple-choice questions, writing activities, gamified tasks and high-quality prose, learners explore and master the fundamental writing devices they need to thrive in GCSE English, both when analysing texts and when using writing techniques in their own writing. when it appeared, the literature of Négritude created a revolution: in the darkness of the great silence, a voice was raising up, with no interpreter, no alteration, and no complacency, a violent and staccato voice, and it said for the first time: “I, Nègre.” It is also important to create a space in which your class can ask questions about a poem. Especially for younger learners, some may find the new forms of writing and language difficult to comprehend at first. As poetry is often directly related to speaking and performance, some more quiet learners may find these classes most difficult, not only when speaking aloud but also when sharing aspects of the poem they don’t understand. This means creating a space for questions is essential when ascertaining how well a particular poem is understood by your learners. Ask your learners to identify rhyming words, identify imagery and metaphors, and speak openly about meanings they don’t quite get. This ensures no learner is left behind.

And it is here that Césaire’s silent dialogue with Nietzsche was both formative and remains instructive. Like Nietzsche, Césaire “distrusted a priori approaches to knowledge and truth, whether idealist or materialist.” [14] It is precisely that kind of openness that would nourish both his radical poetics and his political commitments. Nietzsche’s anti-foundationalism would foster a vitality and creativity that would nourish Césaire’s writings and endeavors from the first issue of Tropiques [15] to his masterful later plays. It is the critique of Kantian philosophy and instrumental reason that would enable what Césaire referred to in 1944 as “poetic knowledge” and “poetic truth”: a “vitalist vision of recovery, reconciliation, and salvation through poetry.” [16] Later writers, such as Abhinavagupta, explain the process by which this first verse of the first poet came into being as the transmutation of the bird’s grief and cry, in the clear heart of the sage through “a melting of his thought” into the universal form of rasa, which “then like the spilling over of a jar filled with liquid, like the pouring forth of one’s emotion into a cry of lament, this [grief now transformed into the rasa of compassion] found its final form in a verse cast into fixed form of meter and into appropriate words.” 58That is, it took a visionary sage to perceive the universal, underlying structure of reality revealed in the particular event and transform it in the “clear mirror” of his own heart (which was already structured according to the same universal pattern of reality) into the generalized rasa. This state could then be expressed in appropriate speech of poetry, whose patterns of suggestion or resonance (dhvani) evoke the same universal consciousness of aesthetic perception, of rasa. As Abhinavagupta’s teacher wrote: The first has to do with the character of poetic knowledge. Césaire begins Poésie et connaissance with an ode to poetics and diatribe against science. Scientific knowledge, for Césaire, is one-dimensional and impoverished. The sciences classify things, but do not comprehend them. They offer at best surface knowledge. Physics does not get to the essence; mathematics is too abstract and unreal. The sciences are thin: they measure and classify, but give us nothing more. Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is perhaps the most famous of the five Odes which Keats composed in 1819. Meditating on the mute form of a vase from classical antiquity, Keats tries to discover what it means and realises, in words that have become celebrated, that the vase itself appears to offer up the answer and say: ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’, and this is all we need to know: Negative Capability, in other words … At the end of September 1944, the French poet and playwright, Aimé Césaire (1913-2008), traveled from his native Martinique to Haiti to deliver a lecture at an international philosophical congress dedicated to the question of knowledge and held under the auspices of the Haitian and United States governments. [5] The gathering commemorated, in part, the work of “great thinkers” who had been overshadowed by the occupation of France and the Vichy government in the Antilles. In Port-au-Prince, the young poet, only thirty-one years old, an official delegate of the French government, would deliver a powerful and radical lecture, Poésie et connaissance [“Poetry and Knowledge”], that shook the conventional Kantian foundations of the assembled philosophers through a quiet dialogue with Nietzsche.

As learners read a poem aloud, they begin to pay more attention to the sounds of words and how meaning can change depending on how a line is spoken. Unlike some other reading exercises, the rhythm and rhyme of poetry are fun for children to say, and this encourages them to enjoy speaking in front of a class. Like al-Jurjānī, Abhinavagupta describes in great detail the various linguistic and poetic features that produce this kind of heightened aesthetic experience, which he also associates with wonder, surprise, awe, and astonishment; 30he places greater emphasis on the psychological processes that create this elevated aesthetic experience through the unique power of evocative suggestion (dhvani), whose addition to the ordinary denotative functioning of language allows us to “squeeze the juice” out of words, savoring their expressions of the ineffable evoked in our consciousness. As one scholar summarizes Abhinavagupta’s theory: “When language serves art, it neither negates nor dispenses with linguistic apprehension. Rather, it delivers more than language can: the ineffable essence of the subject who experiences love, compassion, grief, the comic, and more, including quietude.” 31