Global Telelanguage Resources develops innovative modes of writing via new techniques and concepts of language use consistent with a genealogy of poetics. Since Samuel Taylor Coleridge made his oft-cited distinction between the faculties of “imagination” and “fancy,” definition has emerges as an aesthetic practice in its own right.
By differentiating two terms once considered synonymous, [Coleridge] capably established new categories of description exclusive to poetry (and art) as a mode of interpretation. Definition thus allowed Coleridge to re-invent poetics as an active method of constructing knowledge about the world. If there were systems of thought or ways of understanding exclusive to poetic practices, Coleridge was determined to isolate and define them, much like any scientist who may require their own terminologies and specialized languages to comprehend the world around them. Global Telelanguage Resources / LexIcons: The Art of Definition
Many modern poets have come to realize how vital the art of definition is to poetic practice. Global Telelanguage Resources cite poets dissimilar in their approaches:
T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Jackson Mac Low owe much of their respective importance within the canon’s literary modernism to a distinctly “aesthetic” understanding of lexicography, conceiving their work as a critical opportunity to re-imagine the very capacity of language to create and communicate.
Here is the beginnings of a collection of artfully differentiating definitions culled from the genealogy of poetics (to add more comment on this post):
“Words are of two kinds, simple and double.”
Aristotle, Poetics
“Because he speaks, everyone believes that he can also speak about language.”
Goethe, Maxims and Reflections
“Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, or course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”
T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent
“This is a sentiment not a sentence.”
Gertrude Stein, How to Write
“Writing is displaced on the broken line between lost and promised speech.”
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
“Criticism is prone to invent authors.”
Jorge Louis Borges, Ficciones
“Deconstruction is the child of an information age, formulating its theories from strata pushed upward by the emerging substrata beneath.”
N. Katherine Hayles, Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers
other islands in this text-fed stream
