Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics (Bloomsbury Studies in Philosophy and Poetry)

"Locating poetry in a philosophy of the everyday, Brett Bourbon continues a tradition of attention to logic in everyday utterances through Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell, arguing that poems are events of form, not just collections of words, which shape everyone's lives. Poems taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst, albeit unknowingly. Bourbon resurrects these poems to construct an anthropology of form that centers everyday poems as events or interruptions within our lives. Expanding our understanding of what a poem is, this book argues that poems be understood as events of form that may depend on words but are not fundamentally constituted by them. This line of thought delves into a poem's linguistic particularity, to ask what a poem is and how we know. By reclaiming arenas previously ceded to essayists and literary writers, Bourbon reveals the care and attention necessary to uncovering the intimate relationship between poems, life, reading and living. A philosophical meditation on the nature of poetry, but also on the meaning of love and the claim of words upon us, Everyday Poetics situates the importance of everyday poems as events in our lives."-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Contents 8 Preface 9 Acknowledgments 13 1 Poems of the Everyday 14 2 Interruptions 26 3 Can We Speak a Poem into Existence? 42 4 Epithalamion 56 5 Is a Poem the Same as Its Words? 68 6 Poems and Bombs 82 7 Crucifixion Can Seem Like Standing in Air 98 8 Does Poetry Exist? 110 9 Where Are Love and Death? 124 A Conclusion in Two Parts 142 Part I: Odds and Ends 142 Part II: Intonations of Form 146 Appendices 154 Notes 179 Bibliography 188 Index 192