A feral praxis

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes the concept of the ‘feral’ as a mode of thought characteristic of creative-critical writing. Reflecting upon the experience of writing a poetry collection, it draws upon the work of Paul Valéry and Simon Jarvis to argue that poetry utilises a distinct way of ‘thinking-through-making’ (Jarvis, Simon. 2010a. “For a Poetics of Verse.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 125 (4): 931–935.) that is not paraphrasable and not analogous to prose. Taking up Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm, it argues for the ferality of all creative endeavours in their shared experience of interiority’s fluidity during practice, and goes on to assert the critical validity of such an oscillating mode of thought, observing that the ‘feral’ does not so much challenge binarised conceptualisations (interior/exterior and critical/creative being the two most relevant to this enquiry) as fail completely to recognise them as relevant. This paper argues that creative work is valid in its own right as an act of intellectual enquiry and that asserting its alterity can only be fruitful to those of us working on our creative projects within and/or without academia.

KEYWORDS:

• Poetry
• creativity
• writing
• Merleau-Ponty
• Simon Jarvis
• Paul Valéry

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Meryl Pugh has a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia and is currently developing a creative-critical project around the concept of the ‘feral’—as well as writing a novel for young adults. A poetry collection is forthcoming from Penned in the Margins in early 2018. She lives in London and teaches creative writing for Morley College.

Notes

1 This paper features the writings of Simon Jarvis, who was convicted of child pornography offences in early 2017.

2 A clarification at this point: I use the term ‘poetry’ where Jarvis might prefer the term ‘verse’, in order to retain critical precision when discussing its distinctness from other forms of literature. However, Jarvis’s ‘verse’ and my ‘poetry’ are so closely aligned as to be indistinguishable:

Wherever I use terms like poet, poetry and poem, I am primarily thinking of the verse-making practice, performed by both writers and readers of verse, of cutting up language into segments. (2010a, 932)

I would argue that this ‘verse-making practice … of cutting up language into segments’ (932) is an apt definition of poetry. Whether metrical or in free verse, or written with any other compositional principle, it is distinguished from prose by its language segmentation. My expanded concept of ‘verse’ then, enables me to substitute ‘poetry’ where Jarvis has used the former term.

3 This holds as true of a poem like this, where relationship to white space, fragmentation of utterance and layout are its key compositional principles, as of a poem where the iambic pentameter line and the stanza inform its writing. Both methods would still fall within the parameters laid down by Jarvis as ‘verse’ as discussed earlier—or indeed described by Jarvis himself later in the same paper, when he argues for understanding

the entire history of verse meters, rhythms, instrumentations, intonations, italicizations, punctuations, gaps, breaks, and absences as that extraordinarily intricate record of thinking through making. (2010a, 935)

4 My assertion is strengthened by the fact that this phrase is not unique to Jarvis. Tim Ingold has written extensively about ‘the relation between thinking and making’ (Ingold 2013, 6), naming ‘the way of the craftsman’ [sic] as ‘an art of inquiry’, in which ‘the conduct of thought goes along with, and continually answers to, the fluxes and flows of the materials with which we work.’ For Ingold, ‘These materials think in us, as we think through them’ (6–7).