Antonia Pont

An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice via Deleuze

In what follows, we will propose a new theory and delimited definition of practice, where the latter can be understood as a “strange” (but not uncommon) register of action. It aims to clarify a conceptualization of what practice is and how it works, as well as to introduce a more assured vocabulary for its articulation. Understood simply, practice can be approached as a “strange” mode of more usual doings—a mode that is woven into the quotidian fabric of living but not technically “of” that register. Furthermore, the definition of practice proposed here, while delimited, also arguably works to include differently. With not every mode of action satisfying its criteria, and with other surprising examples falling within its definition, this approach brings out of solution a clearer understanding of what practice for our purposes does or does not include, and why.

Borrowings; or Ways of Making Poetry by Taking, Working and Returning: A Study in Creative Practice

The collaborative poetry project ‘Borrowings’ investigates and theorises some of the processes of poetic composition. Two collaborators, by making use of incepts from each others work, have generated new poems by exploring the nature of intertextual genesis. This paper presents key ideas generated by this activity and, in doing so, applies Deleuzes analysis of games to its consideration of the nature of poetic composition, along with his contention that ‘[t]o pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression … It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes’. The project explores some of the ways in which poetry makes ‘sense’, both to the writer and reader; as well as questioning the extent to which poetry depends on its authors ‘decision’ about what to write. It also teases out some of the implications for how we understand authorship if authorial decisions may be generated by incepts of one kind or another that occur to the poet apparently randomly, or may be given to them by a line or phrase that they encounter while reading. This papers ultimate wager, and one put to the test in the project itself, is that limitation has an expansive effect on the generation of creative work.