Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics

Poems are events of form that shape our lives, according to Brett Bourbon's book Everyday Poetics. He argues that poems are not just collections of words but are formalizations of the everyday poems we live amidst. 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.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 200 pages
Publication date: 21 September 2023
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Brett Bourbon carries on a tradition of paying close attention to logic in everyday speech by drawing on the work of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Cavell. He contends that poetry is not merely a collection of words but rather an event of form that shapes our lives. The poems that are taught in class are formalizations of the everyday poems that we encounter without realizing it. Bourbon resurrects these poems to create an anthropology of form that centers on everyday poems as events or interruptions within our lives. By expanding our understanding of what a poem is, this book argues that poems should be understood as events of form that may depend on words but are not fundamentally constituted by them. This line of thought delves into the linguistic particularity of poetry, asking what a poem is and how we know it. By reclaiming arenas previously dominated by essayists and literary writers, Bourbon reveals the care and attention necessary to uncovering the intimate relationship between poems, life, reading, and living. Everyday Poetics is a philosophical meditation on the nature of poetry, but it is also a reflection on the meaning of love and the power of words. It situates the importance of everyday poems as events in our lives.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781350265509