Abstract

My goal is not to analyse the sacred – to analyse it is to kill it. The objective is only to explore different ways of approaching the sacred through looking deeply at the nature of poetic language. In our contemporary society, the sacred is the other. And so is the feminine. Our culture often rejects these modes of experience, but poetic practice gives them both a time and a space. My overall argument is that poetic practice creates an approach, a site and a possibility for the sacred to manifest itself phenomenologically by breaking through from the other realm into human experience. Poetic practice holds an intention, creates a direction, a dimension, a state that can approach the experience of the sacred and honour it, be open to it, invite it and allow the subject to suspend the habitual control and instead adopt a surrender mode. Thus, poetic practice itself becomes a sacred activity that teaches us about different kinds of knowledge, experience and insight and invites us to experience a different mode of being in the world, in language, with ourselves, and with each other. Instead of detachment and alienation that permeate our culture, instead of separation from and the resulting objectification of nature, poetic consciousness offers us a more primal mode of being that pre-modern man used to call sacred.

Highlights

  • We are entering a dangerous zone of absolute power and absolute control, of absolute totalizing grids and absolute surveillance

  • Conclusions far, in this chapter, we have been exploring the relationship between poetic process and the sacred, and at this point, i think, we can venture a hypothesis that the process of poetic creation is not other to the process of sacred creation

  • What this chapter has attempted to demonstrate is that access to the sacred can be gained through a variety of language mechanisms, all of which challenge the unified and solid position of the transcendental subject. This transgressive passage is achieved, in short, through “altering of the thetic position – the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one” (Kristeva, Revolution 59). Kristeva defines this process as signifiánce and explains that society represses it precisely because it threatens the boundaries of the subject, the accepted signifying system and of society in general through the awesome transformative power that is so dangerous because it contains potential for engendering a revolution: What we call signifiánce, is precisely this unlimited and unbounded generating process, this unceasing operation of the drives toward, in, and through language; toward, in, and through the exchange system and its protagonists – the subject and his institutions

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Summary

Introduction

Exigency Our modern culture is plagued by anxiety, alienation, and the delusion of the Godcomplex. A radical poetic practice challenges common everyday patterns of meaning making by questioning the symbolic process and introducing elements of the semiotic disposition that shatter the symbolic order of language, uncovering the untapped potential for healing and renewal of the subject’s existing symbolic cultural contracts In their attempts to reconnect us to the repressed elements of culture – the feminine, poetic, and the sacred – artists provide an alternative to the modern technocratic paradigm. For Nichol, writing is a sacred activity and reveals itself to be a combination of belief, faith and action His passion for and commitment to his relationship with the sacred is impossible to miss, and the connection he makes between a spiritual quest and searching for a new, more feminine form of language deserves more attention than it has received in the existing scholarship. A sample reference might look like this: (TM, Bk. 1, II, “Saint Reat”)

Chapter 1. Exploring the Sacred Other
Chapter 2. Writing to Revive the Feminine Sacred
Chapter 3. The feminine in Nichol’s poetry
Chapter 4. Poetic Language as the Other of Language
Conclusions
Chapter 5. Poetic Writing as a Sacred Ritual
Chapter 6. Subject Transformations in Nichol’s Writing
Chapter 7. Writing as a Sacred Activity
Conclusion
Chapter 8. Writing to Redefine Literary Practice
Chapter 9. Writing to Change the Economy of Thought
Chapter 10. Writing to Reveal the Nature of the Poetic Process
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