Poetic Bricolages. Invention, Intervention, Poiesis

Abstract

What happens to the notion of poiesis in the 21st century? In this essay, I argue that a strand in contemporary poetics conceives poetry as a form of bricolage, highlighting its transformative nature. This conception is not a radical departure from the etymology of poiesis, making or creating, but shifts the focus from creation to fabrication, from invention to intervention. The notion of bricolage finds its conceptual roots in the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Derrida, and has been translated in French contemporary poetics as «poetic documents» or «poetic dispositifs». In such works, poets highlight saliences that they find in the original material to transform it into something poetic; they rearrange pre-existing texts to produce a new discourse. Building on my reading of Frank Smith Syrie, l’invention de la guerre, I show how poetic bricolages create a space of generation of significance, which is not only poetic, but also political as this space is the place where poetry encounters the everyday.

Keywords: Bricolage; Contemporary Poetry; Poetics.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21747/21836892/fil42a4