Shara Claire
POIESIS VI has arrived!
The sixth annual issue of POIESIS has just come back from the printers’, much to the pride and delight of the production crew.
This special issue, “Re-Imagining Trauma,” is bigger and more colourful than ever before, and ready to be sent to your mailbox!
The original plan for this issue of POIESIS was to include a special section on trauma and the arts. However, the response to our call for papers on trauma was overwhelming, and the entire issue took on the theme of “Re-Imagining Trauma.”
The following is an excerpt from Stephen K. Levine’s Editor’s Introduction:
“Is this The Age of Trauma? Sometimes it seems we speak of nothing else. Trauma fixes our gaze; we are caught in its Medusa stare, petrified, immobilized, unable to escape the memories which repeat themselves: insistent, involuntary, unvarying. Always the same: the camps, the bomb. We name them: Auschwitz, Hiroshima. Yet, have we said anything at all with these names? Are they empty signifiers that take away the horror? How can we speak of the unspeakable?
“Trauma forbids representation, or so Adorno implied in his famous statement, “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” But to name the unnameable is already to take on the responsibility of language. Our task then becomes to speak in a way that does justice to that of which one cannot speak. What kind of language can carry out that task? Perhaps only a language that carries an awareness of its own difference from that which it designates. A poetry (and by “poetry” we mean all forms of artistic representation) that gives up the attempt to become the Real but rather recognizes itself as artificial, as art. Such poiesis knows that memory is always already imagination, that there is no way to overcome the past except to see it anew.”
From psychoanalyst Michael Eigen to philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, exploring both intimately personal experience as well as wide theoretical perspectives, this sixth annual issue of POIESIS intelligently and critically looks at trauma and art-making from the varied perspectives of Expressive Arts Therapy and Media and Communication, as well as from their places of overlap. More poetry and artwork are in this issue than ever before, and we’ve made a jump to a 100% glossy interior!
POIESIS’ price is $29.95 Cdn, or $22.95 US., plus shipping. To order yours today, please contact us. A limited number of journals are available for sale!
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