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• Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics by Brett Bourbon
• Katie Pelkey

In Everyday Poetics: Logic, Love, and Ethics, Brett Bourbon probes the nature of poetry and its centrality in our everyday lives, working from the ordinary-language philosophical framework associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, W. V. O. Quine, and Stanley Cavell. Bourbon's ideas contribute new dimensions to the elusive concept of poetry and pivots the reader's attention inward: how can we recognize poetry in our day-to-day and why should we? At sentence level, his claims are clear and compelling to readers across disciplines with varying knowledge of philosophy and poetry. This book is thus addressed to "poets, literary scholars, philosophers, and students of religion, and anyone who cares about the ethics of everyday life, about the surprises that punctuate and give our lives form" (p. ix).

Poems themselves are such "events of form," Bourbon emphasizes, which live among us and need not be constituted by words. Wordless poems can be uncovered and embraced through the development of a "poetic vulnerability" to ordinary experiences that are not necessarily wedded to one's aesthetic reaction. Bourbon designates the alphabet as one such example of what he calls a "primal everyday poem"; the alphabet is wordless and consists of a patterned order whose mere form does not encompass its meaning. The ordinary expression "I love you" also falls under this classification; the phrase is a performative poem whose intricate connotation is simplified by common language, yet is not the equivalent of its mere words. Bourbon asserts that, like the phrase "I love you," poems of the everyday cannot be reduced to mere language, conditions, or creative modes.

Of the ineffable nature of poetry, Bourbon claims, "Poetry, like death, is that which we can only know by analogy—by examples—but it has a scope beyond all our examples" (p. 108). In terms of examples, he draws from poignant personal experiences to reinforce his arguments and provide insight into his keen sensibility. In chapter 1 ("Poems of the Everyday"), Bourbon recounts his own dismissal as a young boy of poetry's worthiness until one day while watching an old film, he in fact was struck by the phrase "I love you." This ordinary phrase allowed him to reconsider the parameters of what constitutes poetry and acknowledge the dichotomy of the phrase's formal power constituted by trivial symbols.

Chapter 4 ("Epithalamion") is also rooted in personal experience. Bourbon opens with the flat assertion, "I have never liked weddings" (p. 43), but he notes a difference between a "marriage of forms" and "marriage of intimacy and stability": his distaste is for the former. He believes that a successful marriage can become a poem of the everyday—an event of power and "linguistic surrogacy"—where the event itself fosters more meaning than the words alone [End Page 475] can carry. Marriage can be a poem of discovery that arises from the action of learning what it means to love. But in the objects of the wedding and all its trite, heart-shaped symbols, Bourbon remarks, no poems are to be found.

Bourbon dedicates chapter 5 ("Is a Poem the Same as Its Words?") to his claim that what a poem is cannot be bound by its words entirely or by meaning alone. If one finds each line of a poem intelligible, that does not indicate that the poem's meaning is consequentially understood. Conversely, a reader may not know a poem's meaning with complete certainty; what is said may not illuminate what is meant. In Bourbon's explanation of the sentence as a model for how particular words construct a poem, he says that one must determine how such a sentence-poem would be meaningful through our own reading. He claims that a poem is more than its words and cannot be simplified into sets of sentences or phrases. "A poem, if it is a sentence, is always more than that sentence; otherwise, a poem would not be a poem but a sentence" (p. 67).

Bourbon's latest publication challenges traditional, long...

审阅者：

• 日常诗学：逻辑、爱情和伦理作者：布雷特·波旁
• 凯蒂·佩尔基

在《日常诗学：逻辑、爱情和伦理》一书中，布雷特·波旁从与路德维希·维特根斯坦、JL·奥斯汀、WVO·蒯因和斯坦利·卡维尔相关的日常语言哲学框架出发，探讨了诗歌的本质及其在我们日常生活中的中心地位。波旁的思想为难以捉摸的诗歌概念提供了新的维度，并将读者的注意力转向内部：我们如何在日常生活中认识诗歌以及为什么我们应该认识诗歌？在句子层面上，他的主张对于具有不同哲学和诗歌知识的跨学科读者来说是清晰且引人注目的。因此，这本书是写给“诗人、文学学者、哲学家和宗教学生，以及任何关心日常生活伦理、关心那些不时出现并赋予我们生活形式的惊喜的人”（第 ix 页）。

波旁强调说，诗歌本身就是这样的“形式事件”，它们生活在我们中间，不需要由言语构成。无字诗可以通过对不一定与个人的审美反应相结合的日常经验发展出“诗性脆弱性”来发现和接受。波旁将字母表视为他所谓的“原始日常诗”的一个例子。字母表是无字的，由一种模式化的顺序组成，其单纯的形式并不包含其含义。普通的表达方式“我爱你”也属于这一类；这句话是一首表演诗，其复杂的内涵被通用语言简化，但并不等同于其单纯的文字。波旁断言，就像“我爱你”这句话一样，日常诗歌不能被简化为纯粹的语言、条件或创作模式。

关于诗歌不可言喻的本质，波旁声称，“诗歌，就像死亡一样，我们只能通过类比——通过例子来了解——但它的范围超出了我们所有的例子”（第108页）。在举例方面，他从辛酸的个人经历中汲取经验来强化他的论点，并深入了解他敏锐的情感。在第一章（“日常诗歌”）中，波旁讲述了自己作为一个小男孩对诗歌价值的不屑一顾，直到有一天，在观看一部老电影时，他实际上被“我爱你”这句话所震惊。这个普通的短语让他重新考虑构成诗歌的参数，并承认该短语的形式力量由琐碎的符号构成的二分法。

第四章（“Epithalamion”）也植根于个人经历。波旁以平淡的断言开头，“我从来不喜欢婚礼”（第43页），但他指出“形式婚姻”和“亲密和稳定的婚姻”之间的区别：他不喜欢前者。他相信，成功的婚姻可以成为一首日常诗——一场权力和“语言代孕”的事件——事件本身所蕴含的意义比单独的文字[第 475 页]所能承载的意义更多。婚姻可以是一首发现的诗，它源于学习爱的意义的行动。但波本评论说，在婚礼的物品和所有陈腐的心形符号中，找不到诗意。

波旁在第五章（“一首诗和它的词一样吗？”）中阐述了他的观点，即一首诗的本质不能完全受其词或意义的约束。如果人们发现一首诗的每一行都可以理解，这并不表明这首诗的含义也就被理解了。相反，读者可能无法完全确定一首诗的含义；所说的可能并不能说明其含义。在波旁对句子的解释中，他说，我们必须通过我们自己的阅读来确定这样一首句子诗如何有意义。他声称一首诗不仅仅是它的单词，不能被简化为一组句子或短语。“一首诗，如果它是一个句子，那么它总是比那个句子更多；否则，一首诗就不是一首诗，而是一个句子”（第67页）。

波旁威士忌的最新出版物挑战了传统的、长期的……