246 contemporary poetry
poetics
For our context it is useful to think of ‘poetics’ as a philosophy of
poetry, the ‘thinking’ of the art of poetic composition. Key early
philosophers and thinkers whose work is associated with the crea-
tion and discussion of a poetics are Aristotle, Horace and Dante.
The New Princeton Dictionary of Poetry and Poetics states that
poetics is at its most specifi c ‘a systematic theory of poetry’.
polyphony
At its most literal, the term refers to a work which has more than
one voice and is therefore multi-voiced. Users of the term often
pay homage to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel as a demo-
cratic form of writing ‘saturated’ or ‘impregnated’ with different
types and levels of language, which undermine the univocal nature
of authoritative/authoritarian discourse.
psychogeography
Associated with the French theorist Guy Debord, the term refers
to inventive and experimental ways of representing the landscapes
and cityscapes around us, which extend beyond the way they
are represented in cartography (or mapping). As Debord stated
in 1955 , psychogeography can be thought of as the study ‘of the
precise laws and specifi c effects of the geographical environment,
consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of
individuals’.
terza rima
Associated with Dante’s epic poems, terza rima consists of three
interlocking three-lined stanzas, in which the second line of each
one rhymes with the third line of the successive tercet.