Care Ethics and Poetry

Maurice Hamington, Ce Rosenow

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030179779
• eBook ISBN: 9783030179786
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry

Care Ethics and Poetry is the first book to address the relationship between poetry and feminist care ethics. The authors argue that morality, and more specifically, moral progress, is a product of inquiry, imagination, and confronting new experiences. Engaging poetry, therefore, can contribute to the habits necessary for a robust moral life—specifically, caring. Each chapter offers poems that can provoke considerations of moral relations without explicitly moralizing. The book contributes to valorizing poetry and aesthetic experience as much as it does to reassessing how we think about care ethics.

© The Author(s) 2019

Maurice Hamington and Ce RosenowCare Ethics and Poetryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17978-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maurice Hamington¹ and Ce Rosenow²

(1)

Portland State University, Portland, OR, USA

(2)

Lane Community College, Eugene, OR, USA

Maurice Hamington (Corresponding author)

Email: [email protected]

Ce Rosenow

Abstract

The Introduction sets the context and describes the journey of the book. After a brief exploration of two poems on life and death, the Introduction describes how, although there are no other studies of care ethics and poetry, this project joins a constellation of more recent related works on empathy, ethics, and literature. Several contemporary studies are described. The Introduction then goes on to provide an extensive definition of care ethics for readers unfamiliar with the term. In particular, the definition addresses relationality, emotions with an emphasis on empathy, and inquiry. Care is described as a “performance philosophy” and this relatively new field is described to highlight the importance of performativity. An argument for the significance of the relationship between care and poetry is made. Finally, an outline of the subsequent chapters is offered.

Keywords

Care ethicsRelationalityEmotionContextPerformance philosophyPoetry

End Abstract

Poetry and Ethics

Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.— Christian Wiman (2007, 120)

Can engaging poetry improve one’s moral capacity? Maybe. In a nutshell, that question, and the obfuscous response, is what Care Ethics and Poetry addresses. This is a small and humble book with a potential for significant implications regarding the way we think about ethics. The humility of this project is driven by the reality and complexity of human experience. Although analytic approaches in contemporary theory and philosophy tend toward grand causal claims in an ongoing quest for certainty (Groves 2014, 20), human experience is often marked by inconsistency, partiality, and aggregations that mask clear causality. Specifically, the claim here is that engaging poetry is a species of aesthetic experience that can facilitate the ability to care. The claim is not intended to be absolute in terms of addressing all poetry nor is it intended to be instrumental or formulaic in the sense of reading three poems before bed leads to improved ethics in the morning. The claims in this book do not engage all forms of ethics, but, as the title indicates, the arguments here only address the relational approach to morality known as care ethics. Care Ethics and Poetry makes an unpretentious and general claim about the potential of some poetry to improve the habits of caring.

Consider the potential for caring created in the following two poems:

The world is so difficult to give up,

tied to it by small things,

my eyes noting movement,

color and form. I am watching,

unable to leave, for something

is happening, and so I stand

in a shower of rain

or under a hot sun, worn out

with looking.

(Ignatow 1991, 3)

This poem begins David Ignatow’s full-length collection of meditations on dying, Shadowing the Ground. The poet, facing his own death, details his thoughts, feelings, the realities of late in life relationships and, as the above poem suggests, the paradox of only being able to contemplate dying because he is living.

The poet, Erik Muller, having been diagnosed with cancer, rereads Ignatow’s book and writes his own, Shadowing: A Sequence of Poems, exploring similar themes in poems that resonate stylistically with Ignatow’s yet are also clearly Muller’s. He references Ignatow and occasionally quotes from Ignatow’s work, as in the following poem where the quoted portions are presented in italics:

Ignatow

you accept

ignorance

with balanced stance:

Yes, I do not know.

No, I do.

I live knowing

and not knowing.

(Muller 2014, 20)

Muller appreciates their shared experience of the previously mentioned paradox and honors his mentor’s ability to, perhaps, better accept it.

The two poets share similarities, writing later in life about their experiences while knowing that their death is nearer on the horizon. They used plain language, often in shorter poems. Each honed his craft over many years and published widely. Ignatow’s work circulated under the imprints of established publishers and his biography included prestigious awards and positions. Muller, from a staunch philosophical commitment to small press and small print runs, often self-published, distributing only through local, independent bookstores and in hand-to-hand exchanges with his friends. Both approached their “shadowing” projects when they were in their seventies. Both lived lives committed to poetry.

Given their similarities, it is not difficult to infer why Muller would be drawn to reread Ignatow and to “shadow” Shadowing the Ground. But what do readers in markedly different life situations, including but not limited to age, health, and gender, gain from reading these poems?

Revisiting Ignatow’s opening poem offers some insight. Knowing one is dying does not make “giving up” living any easier. In fact, it may lead to a heightened awareness of one’s surroundings and of life taking place all around. Yet, as Ignatow writes, this tenacious attention to living, to experiencing all that is happening becomes compulsive, something beyond one’s control. Ignatow’s diction, “tied” and “unable to leave,” suggests an inability to free oneself, and the speaker becomes “worn out/with looking” at the living world he will eventually leave. One can learn through the poem some of what a person in this situation experiences. Certainly, readers cannot completely know what the poet or the speaker in the poem is feeling. As Muller’s own poem suggests, even in his similar situation, his mentor may have a more “balanced stance.” Muller cannot fully inhabit Ignatow’s experience. Some approximation, however, to another’s feelings or situation is made available through the poem. From the perspective of care, this approximation can lead to caring knowledge and possibly more caring habits . In short, it can contribute to an epistemology of empathy that ultimately encourages caring behaviors.

Care Ethics and Poetry is centrally concerned with the relationship between the aesthetic experience of poetry and the care it can create. In discussing his relationship with poetry, award-winning and heralded Scottish writer John Burnside captures in part the spirit of this project:

There are poems that have, literally, changed my life, because they have changed the way I looked at and listened to the world; there are poems that, on repeated reading, have gradually revealed to me areas of my own experience that, for reasons both personal and societal, I had lost sight of; and there are poems that I have read over and over again, knowing they contained some secret knowledge that I had yet to discover, but refused to give up on. So, at the most basic level, poetry is important because it makes us think, it opens us up to wonder and the sometimes astonishing possibilities of language. It is, in its subtle yet powerful way, a discipline for re-engaging with a world we take too much for granted. (2012)

Note that Burnside does not make a universal claim that all poetry has changed his life or that the impact of poetry for him even came on the initial reading of poems. Burnside describes poetry as potentially provocative, not as escapism but as a means for reimagining and relating to the world. Care Ethics and Poetry explores one way that poetry might change the way we listen to the world in preparation for our moral responsiveness in caring.

Of course, exploring the relationship between ethics and poetry is nothing new. Plato famously questioned the morality of poetry, banishing it from his ideal state because it has the power to harm the good: “the imitative poet produces a bad regime in the soul of each private man by making phantoms that are very far removed from the truth and by gratifying the soul’s foolish part, which doesn’t distinguish big from little, but believes the same things are at one time big and at another little” (1991, 605c, Book X). Although few are as harsh on the morality of poetry as Plato, the question of the social-ethical role of poetry is still a live one. The late Professor of Education, Robert W. Blake, begins his exploration of the subject of poetry’s morality with a bold claim, “One of the great moral issues of our time is the place of poetry in our culture” (1992, 16). Interestingly enough, rather than the explicit ethical message of poems, Blake’s answer lies in the unique epistemological position of poetry that resists abstract rationality. We agree. He describes poetry as the great teacher of human culture. In this sense, poetry provides an indirect route to moral consideration through what it can teach us about humanity rather than direct pronouncements about what is normative . Neither Blake nor Burnside point to poetry’s explicit ethical content. The late Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary critic, Tzvetan Todorov, goes so far as to claim that poets should avoid moralizing:

Poetry brings a twofold betterment to the world: first, by adding beauty to it, in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Poetry and Habits of Caring Knowledge
• 3. Poetry and Habits of Imagination
• 4. Habits of Encountering Singularity Through Performances of Poetry and Caring
• 5. Care, Poetry, and Moral Progress
• Back Matter