it does or does not affect other people, whether or not other people are aware of it, I am responsible. Even in a circumstance where no one else knows that I set the forest fire, I still am accountable for setting it. Ethopoesis is more like what Socrates resigns himself to in the Crito, a life formation inseparable from the larger human community, so that it is not a matter of individual conscience alone. Even though Socrates was condemned for something he didn’t do, the condemnation applies. He ought to accept the penalty imposed on him, because it is a part of, or is an effluence of, the whole in which his life has been and is enmeshed. The larger-than-himself, the entirety, is definitive, rather than he himself, the part. Socrates has an individual conscience, but it is not what governs in this matter.
In ethotechnical matters I am called on to obey. The rule not to leave campfires unattended describes something I should simply do. I am duty-bound to obey that principle. I am essentially passive in relation to it, and my obedience occurs, for all practical purposes, in isolation from anything else. The attribute required of me by the ethopoetic is something larger, that, not exhausted by obedience to a rule and not defined by its relation to a nation-state, includes my own judgment in relation to natural constraints, the judgments of others, and so on. I am in active, reciprocal, responsible relationship with global warming, a relationship inextricably linked to other aspects of my thought and life.
Louis Mackey’s distinction between a problem and a mystery applies here. A problem, he says, “can be solved. The terms in which it is stated define what will count as a solution. Confronted on a math test with a problem that cannot be solved, the student has every right to complain that it ‘isn’t really a problem.’” A mystery resembles a problem in being “an indeterminate situation that begs to be made determinate,” but, unlike a problem, “its indeterminacy is such that the description of the mystery does not specify conditions of resolution and closure.” A mystery “cannot be fully described. Faced with a mystery, you can never be sure what will count as a solution, or even that there is one.” The ethotechnical offers itself to us in the form of a problem, the ethopoetic in the form of a mystery. As a result, in the ethotechnical there is a solution available, at least potentially or in principle, but the ethopoetic, because it is a mystery, is not offered in terms of problem and solution. Confronted with a problem, I can discover (or in principle I can discover, or I seek to discover) a solution. How do I keep from causing forest fires?, I ask myself. Oh, I see: I’ll thoroughly douse my campfire before I leave my campsite, and carefully stub out each of my cigarette butts. I need only act in a manner adequate to an occasion. Confronted with a mystery, though, I cannot simply find the right switch to flip. No occasion offers itself; I and my conditions must be remade. When I ask how I can keep from causing global warming, I must imagine an alternative self and alternative conditions.
In relation to forest fires I ought to exercise my capacity for what the Greeks called techne, but in relation to global warming techne is inadequate, and I ought to draw on my capacity for what they called poesis. The techne/poesis distinction in Greek bears some resemblance to the craft/art distinction in English, and indeed “techne” is often translated “craft.” The invocation of the capacity for poesis offers at last a succinct way to state the case toward which all along this exploration has aimed. The Greek word techne is of course the etymological root of the English word technology, and poesis the root of poetry. The understanding of contemporary life I seek to contest, the one which holds that technology has displaced poetry, takes for granted that everything can be treated as a problem. If that were true, then indeed techne is the appropriate means for addressing our concerns, and it is right that technology, as a useful aid to problem-solving, should displace poetry. If, however, as I contend, the most pressing current concerns of humankind (such as global warming) and the perennial concerns of humankind (such as war) and the most important concerns of human individuals (such as love) are not problems but mysteries, then our greater need is not technology but poetry, and the increased prominence of technology in contemporary society is deceptive, masking the continuing greater importance of poetry.
1.2: Poetry Against Poems
As commonly conceived, craft orients poetry by and toward better, but the counterconception I propose, “metacraft,” recognizes also the possibility of orienting poetry by and toward otherwise.
I take the former conception as prevalent enough to count as common sense. Asked why she was teaching a workshop on craft, a poet likely would reply that such a workshop would help her students become better poets. Asked why he was taking a workshop on craft, a student likely would reply that he was seeking to write better poetry. Either might add of course. It seems obvious, even self-evident. But that common-sense conception of craft takes for granted that writing poetry is a skill, acquired by approximating a given standard, and achieved by realizing in poems that standard. To hone my craft is to make my poetry more poetic, to make my poems look more like poems.
That common-sense conception of craft, though, makes poetry inherently conservative, by definition the preservation of structure already in place: to approximate a given standard is to approximate a given standard, to reproduce a status quo, reinforce an establishment. Besides, it does not account for all the phenomena. Paradise Lost, say, does “look like poetry”: presented with an unidentified reproduction of a page from Paradise Lost, in a context that created no prior expectation that poetry would be presented, any contemporary reader of English would recognize it immediately as poetry. But presented with, say, page 115 of Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, which simply lists names of pharmaceutical companies, or with page 45 of Jena Osman’s The Network, which gives a chart tracing several seemingly unrelated English words back to a common Latin root, or with pages 56 and 57 of Lisa Fishman’s Flower Cart, which offer a photoreproduction of two pages from a workbook called “Trees I Have Seen,” partially filled in with handwriting dated 1910, the same reader of English would be unlikely to identify it as poetry. Without context, the reader might call the Rankine page a list, the Osman a chart, and the Fishman a photocopy, but probably would not call any of the three poetry until offered cues such as surrounding pages from the book, or the book’s self-identification as poetry.
By “metacraft,” I mean to name and describe a sense of craft that accommodates both Milton and Rankine and Osman and Fishman, a sense that recognizes both poetry’s capacity to fulfill existing standards and to contest those standards. The common-sense conception of craft is realized by making one’s poetry look more like poetry; metacraft adds the possibility of making one’s poetry look less like poetry.
In On Ethics and Economics, Amartya Sen suggests that “economics has had two rather different origins,” one concerned primarily with “ethics” and the other primarily “with what may be called ‘engineering.’” The two traditions, he says, focus on different questions. The ethics-related tradition asks about human motivation (posing such questions as “How should one live?”) and about social achievement (posing such questions as “What is the good for humans?”). The engineering-related tradition, in contrast, takes its ends as given, and seeks only “to find the appropriate means to serve them.” Sen affirms the value of both traditions, but in his own work he gives more emphasis to the ethics-related tradition because “the nature of modern economics has been substantially impoverished” by keeping the two traditions separate and focusing almost exclusively on the engineering tradition. There is an analogy to be drawn, in connection with craft in writing. It would be typical to take for granted that in the study and practice of craft, the point is for us as poets to get better at what we do. But that assumes that what we do is a given, and the only relevant aim is to do that given thing better than we are doing it already; and that corresponds to what Sen calls the engineering-related tradition. Here I highlight the additional possibility, the one corresponding to Sen’s ethicsrelated tradition: in it we might seek to write not better than before but other than before. In a chess camp or a basketball camp, rather
