Cark

A collection of poems with critical preface. The author expresses concern for responsibilities and obligations resulting from utterance and offers a means of reading poetry in light of such concerns. Lyric theory and the legacy of Language poetry with regards to the lyric are loci in a discussion of contemporary poetics. It analyzes the work of poets Tomaz Salamun and Lyn Hejinian, in relation to theorists Theodor Adorno and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to articulate a poetics specific to the poems in the collection. The poetics is described via the literary and anthropological uses of metaphor, which are employed to unify text, writer, and reader. The phenomenology of ritual and ritual theory address these contingents to conclude the preface. The collection of poems is divided into three sections, each a distinct, interrelated collection of poetic modes.

Sense-Making Bodies: Feminist Materiality and Phenomenology in Constructive Body Theologies

Constructive body theology provides an ethical commitment to and a set of analytical principles for understanding bodily experience. If we insist upon the theological value of embodied experience, how can we give an adequate account of it? Are feminist appeals to the senses useful in developing theological truth claims based in embodied experiences? Feminist theologies which explicitly seek to overcome body/mind dualisms often reinscribe them when they neglect to attend to perception as a critical element of bodily experience. Phenomenological analyses of perception (such as suggested by Merleau-Ponty) strengthen and refine our conception of embodiment. Grounding constructive theology in experience requires understanding experience as bodily perceptual orientation, as perceptual bodily and cultural acts involved in socially and historically situated contextual meaning-making processes. This shift expands phenomenological concepts such as intentionality and habit, and allows for a comparative investigation of historical and cultural differences in embodied experiences through examples found in sensory anthropology. Body theology, framed as principles, strengthens theological projects (such as those by Carter Heyward and Marcella Althaus-Reid, as well as new constructive possibilities) through opening dialogical avenues of exploration into embodied being in the world. Body theology principles help us conceive of and address how our bodily experiencing--our feeling, tasting, hearing, imaging, remembering and other sensory knowledge --comes to matter in our lives, especially where oppressive forces viscerally affect embodied life.