Bryan Sentes | Dawson College (original) (raw)

Papers by Bryan Sentes

The motivating question of the present work is: How can poetry and philosophy be synthesized? ... more The motivating question of the present work is: How can poetry and philosophy be synthesized?

Each piece or group of pieces _embodies_ a particular way of answering the question. Approaches represented are both actual and fictional, traditional and experimental. Collectively, the pieces offer no single, dogmatic answer to the question. Rather, they are pseudonymous and make up an anthology collected by an equally fictive editor in order to emphasize their exploratory and provisional nature.

The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, 2011

In this paper I essay to delineate and describe what I perceive to be the dominant audiences and ... more In this paper I essay to delineate and describe what I perceive to be the dominant audiences and the poetics that appeal to them according to their own terms of self-definition, namely the poet’s ethos, the form and subject-matter of the poems, and the primary medium of delivery. I term these schools and their audiences (not without motivation) Mainstream, Spoken Word, Pop, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Neoformalist, and Sui Generis. The work of expatriate poet Peter Dale Scott exemplifies this last category and will be given special consideration.

Nova Religio-journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 2000

talks by Bryan Sentes

At the same time the Secularization Thesis is being subjected to increasing scrutiny and skeptici... more At the same time the Secularization Thesis is being subjected to increasing scrutiny and skepticism, the poet Peter Dale Scott, particularly in his Seculum trilogy (published between 1988 and 2000), develops a profoundly complex post-secular vision, trenchantly critical of secular, calculative reason and boldly comprehensive in its articulation of “what is missing” from the present world order. Enlightenment is both “outer” and “inner”. Its “outer”, social and political, manifestation appears as “development”, the rational workings of constitutional democracy, and calculative reason. As development, it has been perverted by its complicity with the covert, imperialist machinations characteristic of American foreign policy, such as the regime change in Indonesia in 1965, the topic of the trilogy’s first volume, Coming to Jakarta. As constitutional democracy, it has been further subverted by these same “deep political” forces as well as the influence of the hyperwealthy. As calculative reason, secular Enlightenment subjects itself and the world to an atomizing analysis whose “objectivity” leads to a moral anomie and all-too-often an obfuscation and reification of the existing, unjust status quo. Seculum might be said to deploy “the mystical” (the unsaid, unspoken, and unsayable) to root out the suppressed truths of our political order, to free “inner” Enlightenment from the analogous personal repressions of our being implicated in this order, and to point to the limits of language-dependent Reason. By the third volume, Minding the Darkness, the Yin to the Yang of Enlightenment appears as the voice of the global poetic canon fused with that of the world’s major religious traditions in a kind of universal wisdom literature, restoring the anchor of tradition and the orientation of moral value. In Scott’s next volume, Mosaic Orpheus (2009), this post-secular sensibility finds fluent expression in poems with titles such as “The Tao of 9/11” and “Secular Prayer”.

I essay the representation of urban nature in three English-language poets from Montreal, Carmine... more I essay the representation of urban nature in three English-language poets from Montreal, Carmine Starnino, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Norman Nawrocki. The work of each is arguably representative of more general poetic tendencies in North America and, as such, provides salient examples of how poetry both articulates and fails to come to terms with urban ecology.

The motivating question of the present work is: How can poetry and philosophy be synthesized? ... more The motivating question of the present work is: How can poetry and philosophy be synthesized?

Each piece or group of pieces _embodies_ a particular way of answering the question. Approaches represented are both actual and fictional, traditional and experimental. Collectively, the pieces offer no single, dogmatic answer to the question. Rather, they are pseudonymous and make up an anthology collected by an equally fictive editor in order to emphasize their exploratory and provisional nature.

The Cambridge Companion to New Religious Movements, 2011

In this paper I essay to delineate and describe what I perceive to be the dominant audiences and ... more In this paper I essay to delineate and describe what I perceive to be the dominant audiences and the poetics that appeal to them according to their own terms of self-definition, namely the poet’s ethos, the form and subject-matter of the poems, and the primary medium of delivery. I term these schools and their audiences (not without motivation) Mainstream, Spoken Word, Pop, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Neoformalist, and Sui Generis. The work of expatriate poet Peter Dale Scott exemplifies this last category and will be given special consideration.

Nova Religio-journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, 2000

At the same time the Secularization Thesis is being subjected to increasing scrutiny and skeptici... more At the same time the Secularization Thesis is being subjected to increasing scrutiny and skepticism, the poet Peter Dale Scott, particularly in his Seculum trilogy (published between 1988 and 2000), develops a profoundly complex post-secular vision, trenchantly critical of secular, calculative reason and boldly comprehensive in its articulation of “what is missing” from the present world order. Enlightenment is both “outer” and “inner”. Its “outer”, social and political, manifestation appears as “development”, the rational workings of constitutional democracy, and calculative reason. As development, it has been perverted by its complicity with the covert, imperialist machinations characteristic of American foreign policy, such as the regime change in Indonesia in 1965, the topic of the trilogy’s first volume, Coming to Jakarta. As constitutional democracy, it has been further subverted by these same “deep political” forces as well as the influence of the hyperwealthy. As calculative reason, secular Enlightenment subjects itself and the world to an atomizing analysis whose “objectivity” leads to a moral anomie and all-too-often an obfuscation and reification of the existing, unjust status quo. Seculum might be said to deploy “the mystical” (the unsaid, unspoken, and unsayable) to root out the suppressed truths of our political order, to free “inner” Enlightenment from the analogous personal repressions of our being implicated in this order, and to point to the limits of language-dependent Reason. By the third volume, Minding the Darkness, the Yin to the Yang of Enlightenment appears as the voice of the global poetic canon fused with that of the world’s major religious traditions in a kind of universal wisdom literature, restoring the anchor of tradition and the orientation of moral value. In Scott’s next volume, Mosaic Orpheus (2009), this post-secular sensibility finds fluent expression in poems with titles such as “The Tao of 9/11” and “Secular Prayer”.

I essay the representation of urban nature in three English-language poets from Montreal, Carmine... more I essay the representation of urban nature in three English-language poets from Montreal, Carmine Starnino, Oana Avasilichioaei, and Norman Nawrocki. The work of each is arguably representative of more general poetic tendencies in North America and, as such, provides salient examples of how poetry both articulates and fails to come to terms with urban ecology.