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by Joseph Acquisto (Author)
What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide? Poets make poems, but they also make meaning and craft a kind of learned and creative ignorance as they provide infinitely revisable answers to the question of what poetry is. That question of poetry's definition invites broader ones about the relationship of poetry to other lived experience. Poetry thus implies something like a way of life that is resistant to definitive statements and conclusions, and the creation of communities of readers and writers that live in ever-renewed questioning.
To resist concluding is to embrace a kind of productive ignorance, a knowledge that is first and foremost aware of poetic knowledge's own limits. Poetry's Knowing Ignorance shows, through an examination of French poetry, how it is this dialogue in response to a constant questioning, to an answer-turned-question, that continues to blur the boundary between poetry and writing about poetry, between poetry and criticism, and between poetry and other kinds of experience.Author Biography
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of six books, including of Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche (2017) and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury, 2015).
