A couple of years ago, I was reading Irigaray and Barthes and a bunch of feminist texts for a course in Queer Theory. That was also the semester I read Archaeology of Knowledge, which was not the best text to pick as an introduction to Foucault. Foucault has moments of beauty in his writing, but he rarely achieves the level of poetry that Barthes and Irigaray often manage. I was thinking a lot about the differences in their styles, wondering if poetry and theory can or should share the same space. It seemed to me that texts were more effective when both elements were present. Somewhere toward the end of that semester, I ran across this:

But what about the 'conflict' between poetry and theory, between their separate and seemingly incompatible spheres? We have been told that poetry expresses what we feel, and theory states what we know; that the poet creates out of the heat of the moment, while the theorist's mode is, of necessity, cool and reasoned; that one is art and therefore experienced "subjectively," and the other is scholarship, held accountable in the "objective" world of ideas. We have been told that poetry has a soul and theory has a mind and that we have to choose between them.

The white western patriarchal ordering of things requires that we believe there is an inherent conflict between what we feel and what we think - between poetry and theory. We are easier to control when one part of our selves is split from another, fragmented, off balance. There are other configurations, however, other ways of experiencing the world, though they are often difficult to name. We can sense them and seek their articulation.

Nancy K. Bereano, Introduction to "Sister Outsider" by Audre Lorde

So I copied it down in an email that I sent to my professor (who has since become a very good friend) and Mister Boyfriend (who was not then occupying the space of Boyfriend). Mister Boyfriend, as a Blakean and Romanticist, replied with a strong arguement for poetry, which goes a long way toward explaining why he quickly became much dearer to me. My professor, a former-poet-turned-tech-writer, surprised us (and herself) with the vehemance of her disagreement. She contended that poetry had no place in theory, that she found it aggravating and frivolous to find bits of fluff in an otherwise dense text. At the time, I thought that was very sad. What is life without poetry?
So now I'm reading Buber, who is also heavy on the poetic. Reading him is a very slow process for me, especially since we're trying to apply his work to Rhetoric. Mister Boyfriend is also in the Ethics course that Buber is assigned for, and he came into my study one night last week and reminded me of that old conversation about theory and poetry. We talked about it awhile, and were sort of appalled that we found Buber's poetic elements extremely distracting. But now I wonder - is it the poetic that I find distracting, or the spiritual? Have I become so accustomed to concentrating on theoretical text and discourse that I'm annoyed by any inclusion of spirituality or mysticism in considerations of them?
I think Buber, had he been more interested in the study of rhetoric, would have argued that the ideal text or discourse can't not involve poetry or spirituality. In Dialogue, he writes that God is in the space between two people, in the open exchange of idea and heart. God exists in the liminality created by true engagement. And what else do text and discourse really aspire to on their best days? Nothing less.