Poetics
is the articulation of aliveness to the extent that it may be written (Quashie,
2021). It is the approximated space that engages the figuring of one’s
existence in relationality. This rhetoric of being and belonging in
relationality supposes that individualism is death in a world that opposes life
(Quashie, 2021). Aliveness is the possibility that movement might happen, the
force of an alive being. When informed by the forces of fear and degradation,
one may be faced with a choice to accept or refuse. In the act of refusing, the
potential for something more than the world’s divisions hangs in the air. The
world is full of fluid existence--being. In the Western scheme of hierarchy and
subordination, the categorical devaluation of some beings over others is
dictated by the dominant and empowered (Wilkerson, 2020; Wynter, 2003). Poetry
poses another way, even the possibility of becoming and undoing (Quashie,
2021). Philosopher Sylvia Wynter suggests that the world needs a new universal
way of being, a mode of experiencing in which every form of life is beholden to
one another (Wynter & Scott, 2000). Through linguistic loopholes and words
of world-making, poetics is the development of theory (Gumbs, 2020). It is an
investigation of what is possible and might be.
