Dear
Ron,
In your response to
Rodney Koeneke you accept quickly, though provisionally, the equation of
spirituality with the unconscious. But consider that that very equation may be
making it more difficult to account for the spirituality evident in much
experimental poetry. Goddess spirituality offers one useful alternative model;
it is immanent and conscious, not transcendent and unconscious. My own essay
"Poetry and the Goddess" explores how the model of immanent
spirituality, as opposed to transcendent spirituality, frees language from the
need to "say the unsaid" and other models that privilege
"transcendent" meanings over actual language. Perhaps the Judeo-Christian
spiritual model being assumed in the discussion with Koeneke is causing as many
problems as the literary model--or more problems, being even more unquestioned
than the literary model.
Yours,
Annie
Finch is certainly right
that Koeneke posed the issue in Judeo-Christian terms, but I’m not at all sure
that a solution lies in an approach that “frees language from the need to ‘say
the unsaid.’” The problem of the apophatic is hardly the exclusive property of
just one tradition: if I recall correctly, Alan Davies invoked the idea though
not the term within a Zen framework in his piece on “Don ’t Know Mind” early in the 1970s. Further, from the perspective of
poetry, Viktor Shklovsky’s expansionist model of the artistic process – his
concept that art as a collective activity proceeds precisely through incorporating
phenomena previously not acknowledged or not thought to be appropriately
artistic – privileges the “unsaid” as the source of innovation & vitality. Where
would women’s poetics be today had it not emerged out of the terrain of the
unsaid?
