Addendum to "the poetic."

I'm basically trying to see if I can suggest a use for the term poetic that can have some use for me, critically. It seems that if someone says "oh, it's a poetic film," it usually means: meandering, flowery, self-indulgent. Of course, this seems to be playing off of popular conceptions about what poetry is like, or (maybe more accurately right now, as poems themselves have less cultural traction) how poets are.

I'd like to see if I can utilize poetic as a way to describe aspects that I find to be insistent in the poetry that originally seduced me into obsession; not just an ecstatic or even transcendent impulse, but also the sense that an ecstatic or transcendent state could be approached by technical means. The title of Jerome Rothenberg's anthology, Technicians of the Sacred, encapsulates this pretty well, I think.

So the poetic would be something that goes beyond the play of signifiers, or that would utilize the play of signifiers to get at something that seems beyond representation.

I think of montage as a potentially poetic technique: something that one can improve one's technical chops at, and also something that, when successful, makes a kind of whole unit that can't be reduced to either its parts or the relation of the parts, or at least has an effect that couldn't have been predicted beforehand by looking at the involved parts.

I'm really interested in Brent's idea of language-as-such as a crucial element of a triad (see his comment to my last post), and have been wanting to address that, and also your reservations about evocations of the noumenal; I haven't thought it through enough, but my initial reaction is to claim that the promise (or at least illusion) of a glimpse beyond itself is a feature of language-as-such and can't be separated from it.

Or, at the very least, I can see myself coming this close to a pure textualist stance: the textual effects that I label as poetic are most readily generated by the belief that they are not simply textual effects. That is, the cumulative textual effects of the works of figures such as Blake, Swedenborg or Emerson could likely only be constructed by a lifetime of simulating certain beliefs about language (and, at that point, what would be the difference). Maybe this last sentence gets the closest to the m.o. of my writing life.