Using Poetry to Unfold Whitehead’s Modes of Becoming
Course Summary
The “vivid suggestiveness of the poets” can deepen our engagement with process concepts that have been well-developed yet also limited by conventional theological or philosophical thought. In this class, we will use poetry to animate felt understandings of several of Whitehead’s key ideas.
Course Description
How do we continue to feel experience while thinking about it? What are, as poet Brewster Ghiselin calls them, “clear sayings of the unsystematized,” and how can we use them to keep freedom and concreteness in process thought? It may seem unusual to think of poetry as a tool of understanding abstract concepts, but it can “be of use” in profound ways. A poem is a little engine of meaning making. It can resist “misplaced concreteness” in ways philosophical and theological language may not, necessary as those modes also are. As processes of their own, poems can participate in complex ideas, without simplifying them. A poem can do this, because it heightens language into a living entity. Like music, it can open in us realms where shared longing and grief and history shape life.
In each hour and a half meeting of this class, we will consider a single aspect of Whitehead’s thought by reading and discussing one or more poems from diverse poets. This is not a comprehensive look at process cosmology. Rather a sampling of how to engage poems as modes of experiential understanding of an idea. How to think without leaving parts of our humanity behind. Poems, with their own architectures and pleasures can precisely open and make accessible each concept.
So, a poem might do marvelous things, but what if we are not comfortable reading poetry, ”don’t get it?” The poems in this class will be opened like doors. The class is for experienced poets who want to begin to understand Whitehead’s worldview, and the class is for process theologians and philosophers seeking fresh ways to experience process ideas. It’s for anyone who wants an adventure in thinking and feeling. The course can be taken as an independent 4 week class or as part of the 3 course series on Unfolding Poetry and Process Thought. “Doctrine has never sheltered” the “vivid suggestiveness of the poets.” Therein lies something of sacred experience when we use poetry to meet the world and its ideas. Doing this may reveal otherwise unnoticed or unspoken philosophical insights. We may encounter a process worldview without losing how “meaning passes like wild nightbirds.”
