INTRODUCTION
1. The word clinamen comes from Epicurus's disciple, Lucretius, whose Rerum Natura is homage and exposition of the Epicurean philosophy. The Greek word for swerve, parenclisis, doesn't appear in extant Epicurean fragments. I use swerve and clinamen somewhat interchangeably in the essays that follow. [BACK]
2. Titus Lucretius Carus, De Rerum Natura, trans. W.H.D. Rouse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 113. [BACK]
3. The Epicurus Reader, trans. and ed. Brad Inwood and L.P. Gerson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1994), 54–55. [BACK]
4. Ibid., 54. [BACK]
5. Ibid., 32. [BACK]
6. The questions and distinctions Huizinga discusses are invaluable, but his insistence that play is irrational and ruled by narrow game logics that cut it off from "external" realities and ordinary life would deprive it of its primary role in all aspects of the invention of culture. [BACK]
7. Serge Schmemann, "U.S. Walkout: Was It Repudiated or Justified by the Conference's Accord?" New York Times, Sep. 9, 2001, 16. [BACK]
8. Ibid. The last two quotes are from comments by President George W. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice. [BACK]
9. See Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995). [BACK]
10. I'm indebted to Leslie Scalapino for the phrase "rim of occurring" in her Objects in the Terrifying Tense Longing from Taking Place (New York: Roof, 1994). I discuss this location of meaning in her own poetics in "Essay as Wager." [BACK]
11. That work resulted in three of the essays in this book, as well as the volume MUSICAGE (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). I later learned of two other uses of "poethics": one that I was told had to do with literature but that I've not been able to trace; the other Richard Weisberg's Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). Weisberg wants an Aristotelian "poetic ethics" in which truth is recognized as inextricable from beauty of rhetorical style. Although I don't agree with the conflation of beauty and truth or with Weisberg's frank neo-Aristotelianism, his starting point is the important insight that, since law is made out of language, the style (which Aristotle parsed into ethos, logos, pathos) of that language is always significant. [BACK]
12. Nussbaum's sociopolitical ethic is posited on the idea of an essentially rational universal human nature with capabilities that should have the right to develop as fully as possible. The problem with this construction is that it fails to acknowledge the contextual contingency—and alterity—of the aspirations of those who are not part of Western rationalist value systems. For a full critique of Nussbaum's neo-Aristotelian universalism see two excellent essays by Jane Flax, "On Encountering Incommensurability: Martha Nussbaum's Aristotelian Practice" and "A Constructionist Despite Herself? On Capacities and Their Discontents." Both are in Controversies in Feminism, ed. James P. Sterba (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), 25–57. [BACK]
13. Interestingly, multinational economics has reinvigorated the major cities of the world. In their heterogeneity and power they have much more in common with the historical city-state and with each other's cultures than they do with the small town and rural areas in their own countries. [BACK]
14. "Form of life" is Wittgenstein's phrase for dense cultural practices that can be identified by their "language games"—rule- and use-governed linguistic habits. By foregrounding such practices, one might analyze just how parts of Bourdieu's habitus work. Foucault's analysis of "docile bodies" in Discipline and Punish is another productive model. [BACK]
15. I discuss this question in the last essay in this volume, "UNCAGED WORDS." [BACK]
16. Humorous here, as elsewhere in this book, connotes a connection with its ancient and medieval definition linked to fluids—in this case, fluid conceptual principles that in their propensity for shifts enable invention and change even in the midst of the most difficult and chronic struggles. [BACK]
17. It's become fashionable in sci-math circles to refer to this as complexity theory, but I like the idea of chaos with its history of redefinitions from (in Western terms) at least the first millennium B.C.E. on. [BACK]
19. An observation I owe to Brian Rotman's extraordinary book, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero (New York: St. Martin's, 1987). It is from the starting point of his discussion of the vanishing point that I constructed my idea of the grammatical punctum as vanishing point toward which the syntactical momentum of sentence and paragraph race. See, e.g., "UNCAGED WORDS" in this volume. [BACK]
20. This idea is implicit in many of the essays in this volume; still on the level of an elaborated hunch, I attempt to give examples of how this works in the essay on Gertrude Stein. [BACK]
21. I elaborate on this in the essay "The Poethical Wager." [BACK]
22. "Composition As Explanation," in A Stein Reader, ed. Ulla Dydo (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 495. [BACK]
23. Throughout this book I use D.W. Winnicott's notion of "in-between zones" as the location of cultural poesis. [BACK]
24. Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, 53. [BACK]
25. Ibid., 56. [BACK]
26. For an illuminating discussion of some new forms of reading that recent poetries demand see Juliana Spahr's Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001). [BACK]
27. Nietzsche's aphorism #146 lurks here: "He who fights monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into the abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee" ("Apothegms and Interludes," from Beyond Good and Evil, in The Philosophy of Nietzsche, trans. Helen Zimmern [New York: Modern Library, Random House, 1954], 466). [BACK]
28. Theodore Roethke. "The Waking," in The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 108. [BACK]