Relevance to poetizing dialogue, debate and intercourse

Improvisation in Multivocal Poetic Discourse (Part #9)

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Improvised poetry: Insights into multivocal poetic discourse can of course be elicited from the traditional practices of poetic dialogue between several participants -- as is characteristic of improvised oral poetry, whether sung or accompanied by music. The obvious example in the context of this presentation is work on the thriving Basque bertsolaritza is extensive, as documented by Linda White (Orality and Basque Nationalism: dancing with the devil or waltzing into the future? Oral Tradition, 2001). As she notes:

The artists (bertsolariak), often called 'Basque troubadours,' perform in competitions broadcast on television and become regional celebrities. The audience does not need to read Euskara in order to enjoy the 'sport of words,' as it is called.... The verses created by the bertsolari must comply with specific rhyme patterns. When aficionados discuss bertsolaritza, such rhyme patterns are often at the center of their evaluation of an artist's creative production. To the novice, it can often seem as though these oral artists are faced with the onerous task of counting rhymes and syllables as they versify. However, the rhyme patterns and syllable counts per line are an intimate part of the melody being used for a particular verse, and the music is what makes it possible for a bertsolari to keep all these schemes in mind...

Aesthetics of debate: Insights from contexts in which there is an appreciation of the "rhythm of debate" or "rhythm in debate" as in the educational process in Buddhist philosophy. In mathematical physics, Andrew Warwick (Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics, 2003) highlights the unfortunate consequence of the shift from the formal procedure of a disputation (with the rhythm of public debate between opponent and respondent by "Wranglers") to the written examination. Related to this is the significant issue of the balance between qualitative and quantitative perspectives in any adversarial assessment process, as discussed by John Danvers (Assessment in the Arts: qualitative and quantitative approaches):

These differences emerge as the result of the adversarial process of advocacy and argument that characterises most assessment meetings. This process is a mixture of negotiation, rational argument and peer pressure, centred on subjective opinions about the degree to which students have achieved particular learning outcomes, as manifested in the artwork or texts presented for assessment. In most assessment meetings there is an alternating pattern of convergence and divergence of opinions, interpretations, prejudices and insights - energised by the particular dynamics of the group. However this rhythm of debate and open-ended exchange is always constrained by the need to arrive at a definitive single mark, the holy grail of quantitative assessment. In some ways the process would be much more transparent and informative to the student if the marks of each assessor were published and a cluster of marks were awarded for each unit of assessment - not one mark! This would reflect the variety of evaluations and suggest that the process, and the mark, is conditional rather than absolute.

Traditional poetical rhetoric: Insights from that tradition are aptly introduced in terms of historical understanding of the problematic relationship between poets and philosophers by Stanley Rosen (Plato's Republic: A Study, 2005):

The philosopher...uses poetical rhetoric for purposes of persuasion, but at least his or her rhetoric is informed by the truth....The poet... produces copies of the items of genesis, or what one could call simulacra (images of images). The poet thus deludes us into believing that he or she knows the truth, and this illusory knowledge is more attractive to the general populace than is the rigorous and genuine truth of philosophy. To make a long story short, if they are not checked, the poets will become the unacknowledged legislators of society, thereby usurping a role that ought to be filled by philosophers. (p. 3)

This matter is of some relevance given the current appreciation of the "poetic rhetoric" of Barack Obama as President of the USA. However, any implication that philosophers are especially endowed with the truth is radically undermined by their own inability to dialogue fruitfully with each other, as noted by the philosopher, Nicholas Rescher (The Strife of Systems: an essay on the grounds and implications of philosophical diversity, 1985). He responded to their distinctly unintegrative conflict by concluding:

For centuries, most philosophers who have reflected on the matter have been intimidated by the strife of systems. But the time has come to put this behind us -- not the strife, that is, which is ineliminable, but the felt need to somehow end it rather than simply accept it and take it in stride.

It is perhaps the interplay of poetry and philosophy that could be more fruitfully envisaged, through patterns as suggested below.

Poetic resonance: Insights from understandings in relation to the landscape with which any myth of cultural identity is associated and cultivated, notably as highlighted in commentaries on José Lezama Lima's La Expresión Americana (1957) -- who, as a poet, contrasts North and Latin American understandings that are of great political significance. For example, William Rowlandson ('Un mito es una imagen participada', Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 2010) notes:

Periods of history that fail to awaken in the interpreter the awe of la imago fail to achieve the poetical resonance that we see characterised in the historical reconstruction of La expresión americana. Similarly, la imago itself becomes the animistic heart of the poetic (and historic) moment... Furthermore, it is not simply the historical moment that becomes the interactive text to be interpreted; a similar signifying process takes place converting the espacio gnóstico that is naturaleza into the defining text that is paisaje. Much has been written on this process of transformation from nature to landscape... Nature itself is the unwritten text that awaits the creative participation of the subject to transform it into a meaningful entity, and by extension into a cultural construct.... the epistemological dimension of the creative interpretation of both landscape and history. The subjective interaction with nature becomes a hermeneutic process - one of interpreting - and such a process is integrally linked to the processes by which we gain knowledge.

Such perspectives may be valuable in challenging the assumptions of the foreign policy of the USA (and the West in general) regarding cultures like those of Afghanistan (and the Middle East in general).

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