Wanna Arm Wrestle?

Rhetoric and poetics now seem like my right and my left arms.

I’m right handed and  my interest in artful compositions is more prominent in my work thus far—so I’d say that for me: poetics is my right hand.

Rhetorics, now pluralized, undergirds poesis, as Burke argues—and Jared has already observed—they are inside of one another.

I was struck by a few particular lines in this essay, notably: “man moves not merely for purposes of acquisition or avoidance but also through the sheer delight in being free to move, so in being the typically symbol-using animal he takes a natural delight in the exercising of his power with symbols” (295).  Our freedom of movement, aside from intentionality gives us a kind of unfettered approach to making—one that might rely on the muses, Calliope, for example.  But then, rhetoric seems, for Burke, more intentional—an exercise in power.  The distinction in intentionality is striking then.  I always try to remember that the poetic nature of any composition always falls on a spectrum of intention.  If I try to make my composition beautiful, there will always be forms which arise that lie outside of my own authorial intent.  The spectrum for creativity in the forms of a composition, which always has a rhetorical argument might look something like this:

<intentional poetics—unintentional poetics—intentional rhetorics—unintentional rhetorics>

The rhetorical forms seem to ally with something like conventionality, pragmatism, and clarity.

I have to be so careful in this distinction in my own search for stylized prose, because while style can have its own striking appeal—Burke argues—style alone can tend toward meaninglessness, glossolalia, or babbling.  Burke sees rhetoric developed “for purposes of cooperation and competition” (296), but that poetics “could still be concerned with symbolic action for its own sake” (296, emphasis mine).  I see this as a kind of dismissal, in some ways, of Art for Art’s Sake—which I believe seldom truly exists at all, but also a kind of rationalization for those, like Burke and myself, who have left literary studies behind for something with a bit more agency.  Still, poetics has its influence upon rhetoricians, and I’m here to make sure that those beautiful forms aren’t nudged aside by the grunting march of our “autonomized culture.”