what the fuck are poetics?

what the fuck are poetics?

What follows is adapted from my MFA thesis paper; here, I explore in further detail a part of my research interest: this nebulous thing called poetics. I hated this topic, in part because nobody had a good definition of what the fuck poetics meant. There were plenty of essays and books that talked about a poetics of [x], but they were treatises concerned with whatever the hell [x] was and assumed we were all on the same page about what poetics was supposed to mean. I was frustrated, yeah, but more than that, I was curious. This was a thing I wanted—no, needed to know. And, like most of the worst parts of my academic experience, I learned that it was all the fault of some Ancient Greek asshole.

what does “poetics” mean?

Aristotle wrote this book called Poetics in the mid-fourth century BCE. Well, wrote is a generous description; most of what we currently consider his “writings” are, according to Malcolm Heath, really surviving scraps of notes he made on his lectures;

“The process by which they took their present form is unclear; in some cases there are signs of editorial activity (either by Aristotle himself or by later hand); so different versions may have been spliced together, and what is presented as a single continuous text may in fact juxtapose different stages in the development of Aristotle’s thinking” (Introduction vii).

In Poetics, Aristotle explains what a poem is, what types of poetry exist, and how poets create poetry. He spends most of his time discussing the poetic form of the tragedy, but the discussion serves as a model for identifying and describing other poetic genres. All types of poetry are, to Aristotle, “imitations. They can be differentiated from each other in three respects: in respect of their different media of imitation, or different objects, or a different mode…” (Poetics 3). Here, he is straightforward: poetry refers to art where “the medium of imitation is rhythm, language, and melody…employed either separately or in combination” (Poetics 3–4). He goes on to note that “the art which uses language unaccompanied, either in prose or in verse…, remains without a name…” (Poetics 4). So, poetry refers to art that uses language and can be heard, performed, or read. This is incredibly vague and unhelpful; I find it difficult to identify a piece of art that does not fit into this definition of “poetry,” but maybe that’s the point—maybe anything can be poetry.

Great, I’ve got poetry down. Kind of. Now my question is: what the fuck are poetics? In her 2020 book, Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media, micha cárdenas provides a definition that has been essential to my understanding of what poetics are: “Poetics should be understood here as the meeting of intention and expression; all the ways that matter is used to communicate, where matter includes concepts expressed as words, sound, or gesture” (29). This is an incredibly helpful starting point for a discussion of poetics—it establishes that they are the intentional use of forms of expression, with the unstated goal of expressing something. To expand upon this, I turn to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, which states that “poetics may be used as a label for any formal or informal survey of the structures, devices, and norms that enable a discourse, genre, or cultural system to produce particular effects” (1059). In other words, poetics describe the tools and strategies that—and here, poet can refer to anyone creating media that might be considered poetry, whether or not it is verse-poetry—poets use to elicit some effect, or emotional response, from an audience.

what does “a poetics of [x]” mean?

I approach this from the perspective of an artist; this is my understanding of what is meant when authors, critics, and theorists write about a poetics of [x]: there is little explanation of what the fuck a poetics is and, frankly, too much explication of that the hell [x] is. Critics—especially poetic critics—approach this from the opposite direction; they use poetics to identify what genre or subcategory art fits into. If a piece of media appears to engage with a poetics of [x], then [x] is a useful lens to analyze and critique the art through—the media fits into the genre of [x] and can be treated and evaluated as such. But to me, this understanding of poetics feels too nebulous, too hard to pin down.

Fortunately, my understanding of poetics—aided by both cárdenas and The Princeton Encyclopedia and hampered by Aristotle—fits into an existing framework I am familiar with—the MDA framework for game design. In their 2004 paper, Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubeck identify elements that make up a game’s played experience: the mechanics—a game’s rules and parts, the dynamics—a game’s systems and emergent behaviors, and the aesthetics—the player experience. Hunicke et al. also describe two perspectives on the game:

From the designer’s perspective, the mechanics give rise to dynamic system behavior, which in turn leads to particular aesthetic experiences. From the player’s perspective, aesthetics set the tone, which is born out in observable dynamics and eventually, operable mechanics.

(“MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research” 2)

This describes how a game designer—a game poet, if you will—can design the systems of a game in order to evoke an emotional response from the player. Games are poems, their designers are poets, and these poets use many types of poetics, but especially a poetics of play, to make their audience feel something. 

So when people talk about a poetics of [x], what they mean is that by using [x] as a design guide, they can create media that elicits a specific emotional and aesthetic response—one that is in line with the emotional and aesthetic values associated with [x] as a genre.

how are poetics useful (if at all)?

This is where I’m really starting to deviate from the trail I followed in my thesis paper. I had a rough understanding of what poetics means, but I was more interested in exploring the queer gothic genre I was trying to work within. But here, outside the context of a graduate program, I can dive deeper into this weird topic and as the tough questions, like who the fuck cares?

Poetics are a tool for artists and critics to use to facilitate either the creation or analysis of art. But let me problematize that word, art, for a second.

what is art?

What are the boxes something needs to check to qualify as “art”? I’m going to answer these questions with another question: why the fuck does it matter?

Art is, in my understanding, a piece of media that was made or designed. It can be made in any medium (which is why I will use the words media and art interchangeably) and there are no other qualifications. So long as someone can argue that a piece of media is art, I will agree with them. This does not mean I fully and wholeheartedly endorse all pieces of art. What’s that thing Oscar Wilde wrote? “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (The Picture of Dorian Gray 3). I’d like to challenge that. There is no such thing as a piece of art that is, by itself, either moral or immoral. However, a piece of media—regardless of the technical skill that went into creating it—can be (and often is) a vessel for the beliefs of its designer(s) and, as such, can be considered malicious, hopeful, or, yes, even immoral. Some books are born bad and some books are twisted by their readers. Art, or media, is thought given form; some ideologies are fundamentally incompatible with a cultural understanding of what is good and right.

This is all to say that The Picture of Dorian Gray is a good book with serious flaws and [generic magic school YA series written by a TERF] are bad books with serious flaws. But just because, say, Harry Potter sucks and so does its author, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still art. It is; it’s just shitty art that erroneously believes it’s both good and moral.

Anyways, back to the essay.

back to the essay

Poetics: what are they? As I was saying, they are a tool for both artists and critics.

For artists, they help guide the process of working within a medium to evoke an emotional or aesthetic response in an audience that is tied to, you know, whatever the poetics are of. Using a poetics of space, as explicated by Gaston Bachelard, an artist can play with the affordances of both three-dimensional space and relationality between objects as well as the affordances of the materials they are using to construct their work to effectively convey or evoke a set of ideas or beliefs or feelings in the (potential) audience.

For critics, poetics are a framework or a lens through which they can interpret a piece of media. Using the same poetics of space, a critic or analyst can interpret how, say, a piece of architecture engages with the affordances of the medium of concrete and metal and such to convey or evoke a set of ideas or beliefs or feelings in the people who are moving through the (negative) space of the piece of art that is the object of construction—be it a building or a sculpture or a gazebo or what have you.

So are poetics useful? Yes, but their usefulness is determined by a few factors: primarily how well a poetics of [x] has been explained, how well a poetics of [x] has been interpreted, and how well a piece of media interacts with [x]. The explanation of a specific poetics by a theorist, their interpretation by an artist, and the interaction between them and the specific piece add up to the overall usefulness of poetics as a lens for creation and interpretation of a piece of media.

works cited

Aristotle, and Malcolm Heath. Poetics. Penguin, 1996.
cárdenas, micha. Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media. Duke University Press, 2022.
Hunicke, Robin, LeBlanc, Marc, and Zubek, Robert. “MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research.” 2004.
Preminger, Alex, et al. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2015.
Wilde, Oscar, et al. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Penguin Books, 2020.