#poethics

I love you, childhood. I love you who are neither mother (forgive me, mother, I prefer woman) nor sister. Neither daughter nor son. I love you—and where I love you, what do I care about the lineage of our fathers, or their desire for re-productions of men? Or their genealogical institutions? What need have I for husband or wife, for family, persona, role, function? Let’s leave all those to men’s reproductive laws. I love you, your body, here and now. I/you touch you/me, that’s quite enough for us to feel alive

Literature (in contrast to journal writing) is an entry into public conversation. At its best it enacts, explores, comments on, further articulates, radically questions the ethos of the discourses from which it springs. Hence my use of the word poethics. Every poetics is a consequential form of life. Any making of forms out of language (poesis) is a practice with a discernible character (ethos). Poethos might in fact be a better word for this were it not for persistent sociological contentions that matters of ethos are inherently value free. We can disagree about their implications, agree on their contingency, but values are an inextricable dimension of all human behavior. Our values are what we care about; they are always contingent; but there's too much at stake for values to be arbitrary.