I've often referred in this thread to poems by the phenomenological poet Wallace Stevens as ways in which to come into an understanding of the phenomenology of experience of the kind we have, of humanly situated being-in-the-world as both an energizing and ultimately unsatisfactory condition. The following linked page, consisting of two cantos from the long Stevens poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" and two paragraphs written by an unknown reader of Stevens on his/her website --
The Poetic Quotidian: Wallace Stevens, from "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven" -- provides some possible positions that can be taken concerning this existential situation that illustrate how consciousness [which always includes the inscrutable and genuinely mysterious influences of subconscious feelings and ideations] copes with what it experiences in a world not fully knowable or explicable.
Wallace Stevens, from "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
XII
The poem is the cry of its occasion,
Part of the res itself and not about it.
The poet speaks the poem as it is,
Not as it was: part of the reverberation
Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues
Are like newspapers blown by the wind. He speaks
By sight and insight as they are. There is no
Tomorrow for him. The wind will have passed by,
The statues will have gone back to be things about.
The mobile and immobile flickering
In the area between is and was are leaves,
Leaves burnished in autumnal burnished trees
And leaves in whirlings in the gutters, whirlings
Around and away, resembling the presence of thought,
Resembling the presences of thoughts, as if,
In the end, in the whole psychology, the self,
the town, the weather, in a casual litter,
Together, said words of the world are the life of the world."
...
XXVIII
If it should be true that reality exists
In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it,
The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her
Misericordia, it follows that
Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven
Before and after one arrives or, say,
Bergamo on a postcard, Rome after dark,
Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes
Or Paris in conversation at a café.
This endlessly elaborating poem
Displays the theory of poetry,
As the life of poetry. A more severe,
More harassing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
Of poetry is the theory of life,
As it is, in the intricate evasions of as,
In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness,
The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands."
"One could hardly talk about the theme of ars poetica without quoting Wallace Stevens (1879-1955). Arguably, the entirety of Stevens' writing is about poetry itself - or, more widely, about the relationship between the imagination and reality. I could have picked any of a hundred poems from his collected works, as you can tell simply from the titles of some of the other major contenders: "The Idea of Order at Key West", "Poetry is a Destructive Force", "The Poems of Our Climate", "Of Modern Poetry", "Men Made Out of Words", "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction", "The Solitude of Cataracts", "The Ultimate Poem Is Abstract", "A Primitive like an Orb", "The Plain Sense of Things", "The Planet on the Table", "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself" etc. etc. etc. But I chose these sections because his later, meditative mode is often undervalued, and certainly less anthologized than his earlier works.
This later mode finds Stevens pursuing the style and form of, as he calls it in "Of Modern Poetry", "the poem of the act of the mind." Not only is the poem not paraphrasable, but
it is also not separable from the experiences of composition - this is a poetry of process, the very process of the mind encountering "reality," which is to say all that we can know: "Part of the res itself and not about it," . . .
Up to this point I concur with the commentator, but must depart from him/her in some of what follows:
". .words of the world are the life of the world." Perception, rather than being unreal, is reality for Stevens: "reality exists / In the mind ... Real and unreal are two in one". Poetry, then, being perception/imagination/the mind in process, is not an imitation of reality, but is real experience itself: "the theory / Of poetry is the theory of life, // As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, / In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, / The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands"—not mere physical "reality," but life in its lived fullness."
Rather than saying, as Stevens said at one point in this particular poem, that "words of the world are the life of the world" (which Derrida might also be understood to claim), I think, and Stevens also thought increasingly in the later poems, that poetry and the other human arts can guide us in understanding the character of our own a) speaking, writing, sculpting, painting, singing, and composing of music, etc., and also the character of b) our thinking as attempts to express our sensed position as beings living within and indeed produced out of the world's being in time and as moved by our own nature to contemplate and express that which cannot be fully or completely expressed by any of us at any lived time or place concerning the nature of our being or of Being as a Whole. The theory of poetry can be understood as the theory of life only within the limitations of what is knowable phenomenologically, and thus we must become accustomed to remaining always "at the edge" of understanding 'what is', globally/universally, as it includes what consciousness and mind bring forward for vision, contemplation, and thinking from out of things/objects/gestalts accessible in their phenomenal appearances. All perceptions/all things as perceived are perceived perspectivally, within perspectives taken by conscious beings located both spatially and temporally in change. Thus, given the nature of our basis for claimed knowledge, what we can assemble and categorize in thought does not, cannot, 'represent' objects or an 'objective reality' as fully understood, much less fully 'known'.
