Aristotle’s Poetics is a cornerstone of the “Western canon.” Considered a foundational text of the theatrical arts, it lays out a set of rules for storytelling, using the great Greek tragedies (along with a few Homeric epics) as its source texts and exemplars. The purpose of tragedy, according to Aristotle, is to evoke pity and fear in the audience, cleansing us in the process; the greatest tragedies, in his estimation, are constructed around a character who makes a single, fundamental error (with its consequences). His arguments continue to occasion robust reading and debate, especially in the fields of drama and philosophy.
Notably, the Poetics is not widely read by contemporary poets.
There are a few reasons for this. Most modern poets do not write plays (although some poets certainly do). This means that our concerns and goals are rather different from Aristotle’s; we’re working in a form that is usually shorter, often less narrative-driven, and more kaleidoscopic.1 Aristotle’s consistent insistence on hierarchies is also jarring to a contemporary reader: he is forever trying to sort people’s writing into piles of “best” and “also-ran.” In this age of rich literary multiplicity, such an approach feels unnecessarily self-limiting.
But I grew up with the Poetics. I have professional actors in my immediate family, and this text is part of my personal lexicon. Taken as a whole, the Poetics constitutes advice I have had to grapple with as a poet. This is a familiar conundrum for writers: we must learn to sift through feedback from our peers and teachers in order to discover which advice is useful, which advice can quietly be ignored, and which advice is destructive.
The Poetics, I have learned, is full of all three kinds of advice. I appreciate what Aristotle has taught me about story structure—but then, I often veer away from the narrative impulse in my own work. Reading Aristotle as a professional librarian, I am also skeptical of his assumption that there can be only one best and right way to tell a story.
And finally: when Aristotle (in Anthony Kenny’s vigorous translation) casually informs us that “there is such a thing as a good woman and a good slave”—a door slams violently shut in my mind.
Why must so many of our foundational texts do this? Why does Great Thought ™ so often go out of its way to shut half of us out? I don’t care if the writer was “a product of his time.” I want better for us.
If the Poetics continues to be part of the conversation—as it is, and should be—then let us also talk back. These pages are my attempt to do that. By redacting and erasing Aristotle’s text, I have attempted to wring writerly advice from it that is weirder, more feminist, and more unruly than the advice of the original. In my work on this project, I have also vandalized the text; I have erased it in the same way that the text (in that one throwaway sentence) attempts to erase me. The result is a very personal document carved from a much larger and more generalizable one. I hope its blank spaces and its blackout redactions can serve as an invitation for the reader: how might you fill them in?
“What is poetry, how many kinds of it are there, and what their specific effects?” asks Aristotle in his opening sentence.
Poetry, I answer, is how good questions start.
1For example, in my own poetry I tend to treat memory, and the stories I tell about my life, as something of a raggedy-edged collage, since this approach is what feels most honest; the unified narrative so important to Aristotle often feels out of my reach. Fortunately for me, I lack experience with hamartia, the fundamental, unifying error that changes a life irrevocably. My errors are many, and more quotidian, and smaller. So far.