Download or read book The Poetics of Alterity: Immediacy and Transcendence in Four Contemporary Poets written by David Reibetanz and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focussing on the work of Pattiann Rogers, Don McKay, Galway Kinnell, and P. K. Page, this thesis explores their development of a poetics that connects immediacy and transcendence, two areas of literary experience with highly problematical implications in modernist and postmodernist poetic discourse. Where modernism often devalues immediacy in a quest for transcendence, deconstructive postmodernism is sceptical both about idealistic approaches towards transcendence and about the capacity to express immediacy.In contrast to these discourses, the writers studied here have expounded in their praxis a poetics that validates the expression of both immediacy and transcendence and that finds the latter within the former. Their poetics parallels a constructive postmodern discourse that arose in the 1990s in response to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ethics, a response to the Other, was grounded situationally in experience rather than theoretically in formal ideational structures. My study approaches the four poets from a Levinasian perspective, arguing that they ground their poetics in a respect for various kinds of otherness. I also refer comparatively throughout to Maurice Merleau-Ponty and David Abram, who emphasize the importance of interrelationships and continuities between self and other, humanity and the non-human world.Within this common framework, each poet offers different strategies for approaching transcendence through immediacy. Rogers' poetry involves a direct reconsideration of some modernist and postmodernist binaries: art vs. science, humanity vs. nature, divinity vs. humanity. Her concept of "reciprocal creation" entails the effacement of distinctions between them, as her poetic practice involves the reader in the creative enterprise of surmounting barriers. McKay's poetry works more explicitly to contravene the organizing capacities of conventional language, disrupting patterns of discourse and response. Kinnell evolves a poetics rooted in physical immediacy in order to make palpable the essentially impalpable presence of the transcendent other. Page views poetry as fundamentally a communal activity, and especially through the glosa form her poetics incorporates the voice of the other in a collaborative visionary enterprise. The central focus of all four writers is the Levinasian moment of Saying, where the immediate other is experienced as a transcendent reality.