Genealogy of Embodied Poetics (i. & ii.)

Cézanne 1860

i.

• “The child of the poet is both the poem and the reader: For the reader to intimate with the poem –and therefore understand it in its complexity– they must infuse themselves into the poem by organizing a synchronous equation of intuitions, qualia, and concepts. As a result, if the reader manages to align their perceptions with the pedagogy of the poet, the reader learns about themselves; their understanding of the poem being an eclosion of ideas inside the nest that the poet has systematically fabricated out of metaphysics, reviving buried memories and prodding the reader’s hibernating apprehensions by nourishing them with words –not as a charlatan vomits on his naïve disciples, but how a father guides his son¹.”

ii.

• “The grandchild of the poet is the bearing of the reader’s intercourse with the poem, that is, the reader’s apprehension of the poem’s exuding metaphysic: The poem inseminates the reader’s mind when the reader bathes in the poem’s ætheric waters –which the reader conserves as essences by the phytotelmata in their psyche.”
• “For the reader to have understood the poem, they must have gestated an essence akin to the one the poet originally transmuted into symbols. The poet creates the poem, like Nature’s poiesis of an organism, where both the poem and the reader are holders of genetic code that is subject to mutation in generations to come. The reader’s comprehension, in its idyllic manifestation, consists of miming the poet’s original aesthetic apprehension, together with conceptually fathoming the poem’s semantics –the reader plays the role of the novice alchemist who’s challenge is to match his master’s distillation of an essence; however, this essence can either be engendered through incest, or spiritual unification.”

¹ Horace, Ars Poetica — “The Poet assumes the air of a father advising his son, rather than of a teacher instructing his pupils” (chp. 535).