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Ars Poetica as the doorway to selfhood

By Danilo Lopez

1.0 Divagations on the formation of Poetics 1.1 I understand Poetics as something based on a personal philosophical stance; a matter of worldview. Poetics is as much made of technical skills, as it is of aesthetics, ethics, and rhetoric. It is made through and of our personality, life experiences, education, skills development, and social context. It evolves with age and practice, with study, criticism, and analysis. 2.0 Divagations on the frames of reference 2.1 The same way humanitys perception of reality went from animistic, to mythic, to rational, to existential, to aperspectival, [Wilber, 141] and integral worldviews [and it will continue to evolve], a writer also goes through different stages. Writers evolve in thought and technique; their texts therefore have different poetics backbones that can be identified. The same reader also evolves, and so does her interpretation or reaction to texts. Contexts evolve all the time, even from one day to the next, from one time to the next, from one culture to another, and within the same day, time, and culture. A text is fixed. Once it is created and thrown into the context, it has the same words, form, structure, and function [authors intention conscious and unconscious]. It is the perception of the text what changes, its reproduction or reception or what Jonathan Culler called the interpretive operations used by [virtual and ideal] readers [Selden, 62]. 2.2 Perception of the same text can be different from one reader to another even when existing within the same cultural context. In this age of information, globalization, and individualization within and across cultures, interpretation and meaning have lost characterization; the conventions are more and more undefined, disagreeable, their frontiers and horizons blurred. More choices are available on everything; people want more customized products and treatment, values and offers. The market has become so segmented that the variety of

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products has been multiplied to the point of balkanization, confusion, and meaninglessness, hence, the required litany of advisories [Heller, 230] to describe reality and prescribe good narratives. 3.0 Not the end of [hi] story 3.1 In the past, theories have stemmed from the writers intentions [Romanticism, Humanism]; others from the reader [reader oriented]; others from the text itself [Structuralism, Formalism, Post Structuralism]; other from social stances [Marxism], and so on. 3.2 What is theory1? Some definitions from Dictionary.com are: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. A coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein's theory of relativity. A proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to wellestablished propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact. Mathematics. A body of principles, theorems, or the like, belonging to one subject: number theory. The branch of a science or art that deals with its principles or methods, as distinguished from its practice: music theory. A particular conception or view of something to be done or of the method of doing it; a system of rules or principles.

3.3 From this cornucopia of definitions, some elements are useful to define a literary theory of narrative: a series of coherent, if conjectural, principles and methods that guide the creation and perception [praxis] of narrative works. 3.4 A literary theory, formulated by literary critics and/or by writers, usually has: A) a relational structure; how author relates to text, reader to text, text to context, etc. B) a domain of applicability on the part of narrative it refers to; what are and what happens within the components of the text, how do readers
From the Greek thera a viewing, contemplating. Literary movements are not necessarily the same as literary theory. Most literary movements arise as a sort of protest against the establishments of their contexts [be it literary, political, social or other], they may have a Manifesto [Dadaism], and may promote a change of the function [Moral Formalism, Confessional Poetry], form [Modernism, Avant Garde], or structure [Imagism, Black Mountain Poets] of literary production. They are based on an ideology, literary theory, or social cause.
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make sense of the text, what mechanisms occur inside the writer to produce a text, how does the social context influence and form readers, authors, and texts, etc.and C) a group of conventions or definitions that coordinate [bridge] A and B. Propps thirty one functions, Genettes three levels of narrative [histoire, recit, narration], Rifaterres hypograms matrix, Aristotles six parts of tragedy, and so on. A similar model is applied to quantum-physical theories [Heller, Michal, 10]. 3.5 Literary theories may have a philosophical origin [Marxist criticism was based on Hegelian thought]. Different theories or movements resort to one or more specific techniques: Modernists to stream of consciousness and exactitude of image; Russian Formalists to defamiliarization, laying bare, and alienation effect; the New Critics to the use of paradoxes; Symbolists to symbols; Realists to mimesis; the Bakhtin School to heteroglossia; Reader Oriented theories to filling the blanks, horizon of expectations, affective stylistics; or the exploitation of simple need and desire [Ramirez, 86] and so forth. 3.6 Most movements have a manifesto that has an implicit theory in disarray or loosely explained. Such are the cases of Ultraism, Futurism, Constructivism, etc. to mention a few. Dadaism is a particular distress call against the Europe that provoked World War I [Tzara, 31]. 4.0 Poetics of the mapmaker 4.1 My poetics is the theory that informs [sustains, justifies, defines] my literary work. Most of my work has been poetry, but there are prose poems, and short narratives. 4.2 In the case of my poetics I submit that A) is given by: Poetics = Writer + Text + Reader + Context. B) Is manifested on my short narratives and poems at three stages or books of my life: Genesis and Other Fantasies [1986], God, Woman & Country [1996], and Dona Nobis Pacem [2003]. I make brief references to three works produced during the MFA program at the University of Texas - El Paso, The Virgin [a play], Chino Morales Last Stand [a creative

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non-fiction], and Squander a Million Dollars [short fiction].And C), the guiding principles, major influences, and methods and techniques, as described below:
Narrative work Intention, ideology Genesis and Other Fantasies
Stylus Publications Miami FL 1986-1992 Get out of the personal shell

Guiding Principles, Sample of Major Influences

Unconscious overt confessional. Primacy of the inner author. Sciencefiction movies, Salvador Elizondo, Thomas Merton, Franz Kafka, Margarit e Buxade [these two last ones are architects] Intuitive political discourse, intuitive ontological questioning. Primacy of the potential reader. Ernesto Cardenal, Augusto Monterroso, William Carlos Williams, Sandra Cisneros, Jorge Luis Borges, Primo Levi, Adrienne Rich

Methods and Techniques

Prose-poems, experimental memoir, experimental fiction, transposition of author into historical figures, exalt the personal and spiritual in relation to society

God, Woman & Country

American Fraternity Publications Plymouth MI 1996-2000 Point the importance of spirituality [not religion] in politics; of love in personal growth; and the immediacy of multi-cultural roots

Prose-poems, memoir-vignetes, picture poems, workshops, translations, popular myth

Dona Nobis Pacem

Tropiculture [Writing Grant] Kearney NE 2003-2006 A criticism of postmodernity, primacy of mysticism over religion, need of moral canon

Primacy of the quartet context, text, reader, and author. Forced dialogue author-reader. Intuitive defamiliarization of context [use of Latin]. Pope John Paul II, Ken Wilber, Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino Integration of author-, text-, reader-, and context-based theories; partial but incomplete holons of truths; revisit of Julio Cortazar, Haruki Murakami, Louise Glck, Frank Bidart, Mark Levine, David Foster Wallace, Scientific American

Explained poems, illustrations, openended texts, photography

Recent [2007-08] works in the MFA program: The Virgin,

Chino Morales Last Stand, Squander a Million Dollars, Kumari, poetry portfolio [The Bridge, Rubrics, Tasba Pri, and others] Importance of technique and craft, awareness of theory and principles, systematic study of social and literary criticism

Playwriting, to look at personal choices in a new light. Creative nonfiction, to discuss social moral dilemmas. Fiction, employing image and contexts within contexts to stimulate the reader. Screenplay, to highlight historical-personal contexts. Poetry, mining newspapers, old poems, and exercises on image, sound, symbol and diction.

5.0 Ive learned that 5.1 Reading is not an innocent activity. Writing for oneself does not cut it. Western philosophy is filled with true but partial theories [Wilber, 52] aimed at grasping one aspect of the phenomenon writer-text-reader-context[s]. Historical

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criticism [Emory Elliot] studies context-text, text becomes a work that is selfcontained, coherent, beautiful, even spiritual, the author is a genius; biographical criticism [Arthur Mizener] studies author-text; social criticism [Marx, Freud, Eagleton] studies context-text; psychological criticism [Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner] studies writer-text or reader-text; archetypal criticism [Jung, Friedman] studies context[s]-text either in characters, situations or symbols and associations; new criticism [Wimsatt, Tate, Penn Warren] gives primacy to the text alone; structuralism [Saussure, Levi-Strauss, Genette, Bal, Eco] studies the rules that give form to the text but from the viewpoint of linguistics2, independent of meaning; post-structuralism [Barthes, Derrida] studies the text, but in the relationship language-meaning; reader-response theories [Iser, Lacan, Holland] are concerned with the reader-text relationship, some add the context in later versions of the theory [Fish, Suleiman]; new historicist criticism [Focault] studies reader-text-context, but defines context as culture, discourse, ideology, self, and history, making it the cradle of Marxist, feminist, ethnic, and post-colonial criticism. In Postmodernism literature is a social construct, arbitrarily defined by critics and media marketers; the author becomes another product of society whose intentions are co-written by the context and the reader, and whose intentions are both conscious and subconscious. Most readers are passive consumers. 6.0 I believe that 6.1 Post-Modernists have put the whole of literature the whole of Reality in fact, so that relativism becomes a dogmatism [Ratzinger 45] in a colorless, meaningless flatland like in the movie The Matrix. If their intention is to change the unjust structures of domination regarding class, race, and gender, presenting such a bleak landscape with no solutions but to Deconstruct reality, is to me detrimental to their cause, to their desire of intervention for the awareness of the masses and no alternative to change to. Even Marxism offered
Literary criticism or social criticism are known as semiotics [the study of signs], or in other words structuralism. To many authors, including some structuralists and post-structuralists theoreticians, these are a playful exercise in structural analysis [that] should not be taken too seriously. It is only a game [Levi-Strauss 201].
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an alternative: (t)he works of art are materializations of premonitions [Trotsky, 110]. 6.2 This apparent chaos brought about today forces the need of a new poetics, which will not for sure be the last. One cannot exalt the text over the reader, or the writer; one cannot exalt the writer at the expense of the context or the reader. All and each element of the poetics [writer, text, reader, and context] has an important role and cannot be marginalized or minimized much less deniedover the others. 6.3 An integral view, a holistic approach, one that takes into account all spheres of knowledge, must be considered. All theories may have a part of the truth, all are necessary to comprehend the totality of being; each has become [what Jakobson called] the Dominant at one point or another. Each originates from the four components and each tells a part of the great mosaic of consciousness and ought to be considered. For if we suppress the writer, who will produce the texts? If we suppress the text what will the reader read? If we suppress the reader, who will read, interpret, enjoy, and re-create the text? If we deny the context, what guarantees the meaning and all its intricacies, twists, and turns? Any other subtleties, like Barthes assertion that the author is dead belong in the dominion of practical reason manipulated to the extreme to make a point; it is a kind of philosophical defamiliarization. The author is pretty much alive, both as archetype and as individual. 7.0 The tetrahedron of literary constructs 7.1 The term Writer needs expansion. The broad sense is any one who produces a text [artifact or device in Bals terminology]. So the writer could be a painter, a musician, a playwright, an architect, a writer. Lets use the term Artisan, to be in tandem with Artifact. A writer is the sum of all [his] histories [Greene, 111]: his past experiences, his past contexts. Text is an artifact produced y the artisan: a painting, a symphony, a play, a building, a novel. The text is subject of myriad interpretations each time is it read in timespace. The

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Reader is whoever reads, experiences, observes the artifact. Readers have several levels of depth in their perception, interpretation, or re-interpretation which is based on their different experiences, education, skills, and personality. Context is the cultural, economical, societal, geographical, historical, and environmental sphere surrounding the text, writer, and reader at any given timespace. Contexts are in continuous change. So are readers and writers. Once created and released into their contexts, texts are fixed; it is the perception of them what changes3. 7.2 I believe writers can and must write according to their own process 4, conscience and ideology. My conscience tells me I must write to co-make a better world, one in which there is less and less space for me and more for us. Writing can be used to contribute to this mission working within the tetrahedron: a) as a writer, improving craft and technique that communicates the message to and engages the intended readers; b) with a text, that is physically and intellectually accessible [reproducible, recreate-able]; c) to readers of different skills, experiences, interests, languages, needs, and education, capable to read within the heteroglossia in the text the heterogeneity of their constituency; and c) in contexts that represent archetypal entities who share cultural values. 7.3 I believe that the ars poetica is both, a door and a process to reach selfhood and others.

Works Cited
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Buildings are an exception, they can me modified easier than other media: they can be repainted, added to, have their finishes replaced, the lighting modified, etc. In this statement, I will concentrate on literary texts, for that is the domain of the devices I produce.
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Borges had a liberal process: Empiezo por divisar una forma () Veo el fin y veo el principio, no lo que se halla entre los dos. Esto gradualmente me es revelado, cuando los astros o el azar me son propicios (del Prologo a La Rosa Profunda).

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Borges, Jorge Luis, Ficcionario, Una Antologa de sus textos, in Monegal Rodrguez, Emilio. Mxico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1985 Greene, Brian, The Elegant Universe. New York: Vintage-Random, 1999 Heller, Michal, Creative Tension. Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press, 2003

Heller, Michael, Uncertain Poetries. New York: Salt Publishing, 2005 Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Jealous Potter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988 Ramirez, Sergio, Mentiras Verdaderas. Mexico, D.F.: Alfaguara, 2000 Ratzinger, Joseph, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005 Selden, Raman and Widdowson, Peter, Contemporary Literary Theory. Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1993 Trotsky, Leon, Literature and Revolution. New York: Princeton University Press, 1925 Tzara, Tristan, Sept Manifestes Dada. Jean Jacques Pavert, editeur. Barcelona, 1972. Wilber, Ken, The Eye of Spirit. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1997 Wilber, Ken, A Theory of Everything. Boston: Shambhala Publications, 2000