7 Poetics

This chapter reviews a selection of the books on poetics published in 2012. Taking as its point of departure the variety these books display in their aim, approach, scope and even object of study, it considers the possibility of identifying commonalities between them. The chapter begins with discussion of two books published in the Verbal Arts series (FordhamUP), Kiene Brillenburg Wurth’s Between Page and Screen: Remaking Literature Through Cinema and Cyberspace and Jacob Edmond’s A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature. It then makes some tentative conceptual distinctions, before attempting to orient against these distinctions a wide range of books, including several that are not obviously related to the study of poetry. It then turns to the fourth edition of the Princeton Enyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, identifying some differences in its conception of the field of poetics with respect to previous editions of the Encyclopedia. It concludes with discussion of Alexandra Socarides’ Dickinson Unbound: Paper, Process, Poetics, Peter McDonald’s Sound Intentions: The Workings of Rhyme in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, and Reuven Tsur’s Playing by Ear and the Tip of the Tongue: Precategorial Information in Poetry, on the basis of which it makes some tentative suggestions as to the relationship between poetics and its object of study