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ontology of poetic thinking as it serves the goals of feminist philosophizing about otherness. y I focus on Filipino poet Marjorie Evasco s Dreamweavers (1987), especially as it makes use of language in the re-construction of gender.
poetic writing? (2) Can poetry serve the feminist goal of critiquing otherness?
Main thesis
The poetic form can construct an ontology of gender that overcomes the philosophical problem of otherness
been contrasted with each other. The former is perceived to be sensuous and affective, while the latter is understood as abstract and cognitive.
opposing natures of the two are famously articulated by Plato in Book X of The Republic, in which he refers to the ancient quarrel between literature and philosophy.
The poetic
y Concrete y Embodied, sensuous y Emotive y Narrative y Myth, imagery, metaphor y Figurative y Subjective y Intuition, reverie y Aesthetic
writings of philosophers (e.g. Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) who have inquired into the affinities and disaffinities between poetry and philosophy. y This neglect is unfortunate because the lens of gender best exposes the pernicious dualisms of thought and language.
In ACB of Reasing, Ezra Pound describes poetic meaning as taking three primary forms. First, he names melopoeia, a poem s music. Second, there is logopeia, a poem s intellectual component. We come now to this third power: phanopoeia, the making of images.
good poetry carries broad information within brief speech. Image in particular, by gathering many energies toward a single end, creates an intense compression of meaning; it carries into the mind the solidity, particularity, and multifacetedness of actual objects. Such concreteness is a handle: it can be grasped. It must also be turned. That turning opens the reader into a place of enlarged awareness, where different connotations may resonate together. Before the slipperiness of unformed thought, the image offers purchase; to the stolidity of things, it offers imagination s alchemical, stirring powers.
y To be aware of a poem s effects aware of the expectations raised by each new word and aware of how the poem satisfies and changes those expectations throughout its course does not require naming every moment s strategic gesture. It requires only our alert responsiveness, our presence to each shift in the currents of language with an answering shift in our own being.
under different circumstances, I had the chances Nanay Tinay never had. I grew up in many schools which taught me the power of language and the language of power. I was trained too well to look at everything from a distance: how to evoke with words the life in the mountains without holding Nanay Tinay s hands and letting her speak
how to judge the pitcher s form without putting into the picture the village woman s bent back straightening ever so briefly at the well before she is bent over again; how to follow the proper rules of language without even asking why I had to invoke the divine or the human only in the masculine. (page 11)
up my tongue and my dream life into several separate pieces. It is this language that excludes our foremothers from our books, and continues to push us to the periphery of things, render us invisible, separate us from each other, maim our bodies and our spirits. (11)
to the deepest levels of my creative life s fragmentation, I have recently come to terms with the healing art of speaking in tongues. I have remembered our mothers original language, the metaphors of connectedness. No longer is it enough to know how to manipulate the word-thoughts so that they sound clever, objective, universal
integrates the mata (eye) motif and the ancient Asian key design. Both eye and key designs relate to the sense of an integrated SELF. In archaic artmaking that self was expressed as the Universal Female or the Great mother archetype. Our research shows continued use until century of blankets with these designs by female sorcerers to communicate with divinity. Marian Pastor Roces
Conclusion
Is there an essential relationship between the feminine and poetic writing? Yes. The feminine has been traditionally devalued and marginalized in various discourses. Poetry and the literary arts are othered in Western rationalistic philosophy. The poetic sensibility is closer to the feminine-identified set of terms. Thus, to poeticize is to make use of a writing form a way of thinking which is feminine-identified, regardless of whether one is male or female.
Conclusion
Can poetry serve the feminist goal of critiquing otherness? Yes. Poetry provides a new way of expressing gender that transcends, overcomes, or reconciles the dualisms of abstract thought. It does this by way of the literary turning, i.e. a transformation on an old way of thinking into a new one which is accompanied by a shift in being. Evasco s poem Dreamweavers is a case in point.