Demonstrategy
Also by H. L. Hix
POETRY
Rain Inscription *
American Anger *
I’m Here to Learn to Dream in Your Language *
As Much As, If Not More Than *
First Fire, Then Birds *
Incident Light *
Legible Heavens *
God Bless *
Chromatic *
Shadows of Houses *
Surely As Birds Fly
Rational Numbers
Perfect Hell
TRANSLATIONS
Juhan Liiv, Snow Drifts, I Sing: Selected Poems, trans. with Jüri Talvet
Eugenijus Ališanka, from unwritten histories, trans. with the author
Jüri Talvet, Of Snow, of Soul: New Selected Poems, trans. with the author
Jüri Talvet, Estonian Elegy: Selected Poems, trans. with the author
Juhan Liiv, The Mind Would Bear No Better, trans. with Jüri Talvet
On the Way Home: An Anthology of Contemporary Estonian Poetry, trans. with Jüri Talvet
Jüri Talvet, A Call for Cultural Symbiosis, trans. with the author
Eugenijus Ališanka, City of Ash, trans. with the author
ANTHOLOGIES
Uncoverage: Asking After Recent Poetry
There’s This Place I Know…
Ley Lines
Made Priceless: A Few Things Money Can’t Buy
New Voices: Contemporary Poetry from the United States
Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation *
THEORY AND CRITICISM
Lines of Inquiry *
As Easy As Lying: Essays on Poetry *
Understanding William H. Gass
Understanding W. S. Merwin
Spirits Hovering Over the Ashes: Legacies of Postmodern Theory
Morte d’Author: An Autopsy
* Also published by Etruscan Press
“Poetry is not dying for want of an audience; humanity is dying for want of poetry.”
In the age when everything has a price tag, Hix explores and exposes the polarity of poetry. The book takes us on a journey deep into the beast of humanity, the underbelly of civilization, the core and foundation of what makes/marks us as humans and beasts. It’s a book of paradox, riddles, exploration, play, and imagination.
What does poetry do? Nothing and everything, like air, water, soil, like birds, fish, trees, like love, spirit, our daily words… It lives within and without, all the time, and we are too often oblivious of this gift. It’s a poet’s job to bring this gift out and back, this gift that makes us human again.
Two thousand years ago, Confucius told his son who whined about having to study and write poetry every day: “Without poetry, how do we live?”
Hix’s Demonstrategy goes further: our humanity and civilization needs poetry to survive and thrive. Everything may be tagged with a price, but not poetry.
—Wang Ping, author of Ten Thousand Waves
In his ambitious and learned study of poetry, H. L. Hix proposes a new poetics, ethopoetics, for a new posthuman world. Rather than a poetry of privatization, with its emphasis on exceptionalism and the enclosure of intellectual gain, he calls for an “implicationist” art that, by valuing hybridity and difference, can speak to all. The strategy’s daemon is a generative spirit that erects no monuments, but broadens like a field of interactive root systems. Rilke’s admonition, “You must revise your life,” becomes valid, both for poetry and citizens of the Anthropocene. Hix is especially trenchant on poetry’s uses of ambiguity: “Poetry, by embracing the paradox in which language is immersed, works with the language rather than against it.” Poetry is a moral force, never demanding a final statement of truth, but rather enacting truth’s complexity. Demonstrategy confirms that poetry does matter; indeed, it is central to our lives.
—Paul Hoover, author of The Book of Unnamed Things
Demonstrategy
Poetry, For and Against
H. L. Hix
© 2018 by H. L. Hix
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher:
Etruscan Press
Wilkes University
84 West South Street
Wilkes-Barre, PA 18766
(570) 408-4546
Published 2019 by Etruscan Press
Printed in the United States of America
Cover image: Victor Babu, Untitled, 1990, Porcelain, black slip/glaze and resisted sprayed glazes, Collection Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas
Cover design by Lisa Reynolds
Interior design and typesetting by Todd Espenshade
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