Plurality and the Poetics of Self

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-v

   PDF

2. The Broken Mirror

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 1-19

3. Identity and Contingency

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 21-32

4. The Metaphysics of Volition

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 33-42

5. Ego: Structure, Complex, Drive

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 43-53

6. The Existential Monad

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 55-63

7. The Seer in the Seen

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 65-77

8. Bodies, Souls, and the Poetry Between Them

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 79-92

9. Original Consciousness

   • Bruce Bond

   Pages 93-99

10. Dynamics of the Transpersonal

    • Bruce Bond

    Pages 101-110

11. The Plural of I

    • Bruce Bond

    Pages 111-114

12. Back Matter

    Pages 115-123

    PDF

Plurality and the Poetics of Self investigates the words “I” and “self” as suggestive of eight territories of meaning. Via poetry’s lens into language and its limits, Bruce Bond explores the notion of self as identity, volitional agent, ego, existential monad, subjectivity, ontological origin, soul, and transpersonal psyche. Taking poetic meaning as our common currency, the book emphasizes the critical role of the un-representable and how embattled and confused assumptions threaten ever deeper alienation from one another and ourselves.

• linguistics
• poetry and poetics
• lyric poetry
• identity in psychology
• identity politics
• metaphysics
• literature and psychology
• British Romaniticism
• American Romanticism
• poetry and creative writing

“Bruce Bond’s Plurality and the Poetics of Self works to mend the disjointed harmony of contemporary poetics' relation to self, a relation that errs in assuming that experience authorizes self-expression past scrutiny and that the self is but a construction.  But the harmony of self is a complicated music, one Bond teaches us to hear in all its contraries. Delving into poetry across spans of time, into philosophy, theology, psychology, metaphysics, and myth, Bond demonstrates not only generous learning, but gives us a rarer gift, that generosity inside learning that hopes to return us to ourselves.  The gift here is to allow us our own complexity, and to suggest a poem’s difficulty might make us each more capable of understanding and expressing our own, that Gordian knot we tangle more each day, lost as we are in our single syllable whenever we, as daily we all do, say ‘I.’” (Dan Beachy-Quick, Professor of English, Colorado State University, USA, and author of Of Silence and Song (2017))

 

• University of North Texas, Denton, USA

  Bruce Bond

Bruce Bond is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas, USA. He is the author of twenty-three books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (2015), Black Anthem (2016), Gold Bee (2016), Sacrum (2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (2018), Dear Reader (2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (2018). 

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