Overview

Against the busy background of the ""information age"" and the ""anthropocene,"" where's poetry? It might seem invisible, irrelevant, but Demonstrategy proves it as salient as ever, and more urgent. In paired essays about poetry in the world and the world in poetry, Demonstrategy finds poetry's pulse steady and strong.

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9780999753415

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Poetry is not dying for want of an audience, H. L. Hix boldly opens his meditation on the why and wherefore of poetry, Demonstrategy, but rather, humanity is dying for want of poetry. His argument for the necessity of poetry, its ethopoesis, as Hix theorizes, is a capacious inquiry into what comprises a poetry adequate to our cultural need. Chapters focus forcefully on matters both urgent and cerebral (poetry against patriarchy and tyranny, poetry for reparation and dissent). Drawing on a wealth of ancient and modern thinkers about language and poetry (ranging from Herakleitos to the astonishing Jan Zwicky) to investigate various aspects of the field, Hix builds a brilliant case for poetry's cause. Like T. S. Eliot's Tradition, which alters with the publication of the new (the really new) work of artistic genius, the set of great philosophical defenses of poetry must now move over and make room for H. L. Hix's scorching-smart Demonstrategy. --Cynthia Hogue, author of In June the Labyrinth In an urgent use of a broad erudition, Hix brings us to a precisely contemporary interrogation of the value and place of poetry in critical writing that teases a non-dualistic embrace of the necessity of poetry. Opening questions such as the much used term craft, we are invited to consider whether progress is real or imaginary, whether the truer state of poetry is that of an eternal existence, one that is embodied in the mind as the mind evidences itself in language. This is a timely work, one that should force poets to take the not so occasional and unnecessary walk to the woodshed, and therein to dwell on these matters of why this art persists, or why it should persist and how reality is defined or defied by poetry's ever deepening intersections inside the interstices of thought. --Afaa M. Weaver, Spirit Boxing

Author Information

H. L. Hix is the author of two previous essay collections from Etruscan, As Easy As Lying and Lines of Inquiry and his 2006 poetry collection, Chromatic, was a National Book Award Finalist. He is currently a professor in the Philosophy Department and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Wyoming and resides in an 1880s railroad house in Laramie Wyoming.

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