Theopoetics: Si(g)ns of Copulation

Establishing that all practices - whether poetic, scientific, historical, political, or theological - are embedded in and molded by the prejudices of discourse, postmodern theorists subverted the autonomy of make-it-newism with language about deconstruction (Derrida), power (Foucault), metanarratives (Lyotard), the law of the father (Lacan), rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari), hybridity (Bhaba), performativity (Butler), and the contingency of our vocabularies (Rorty). Literary critic I. A. Richards went so far as to say that poetry is "capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means of overcoming chaos": theopoetics in a modernist key.3 In contrast, theopoetics fully informed by postmodern theory refuses to mystify the making-new - just as it refuses to mystify the ancientmade.\n If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for the pious - others will enter the Kingdom of Heaven before them.29 Sayers recognized that dogma, like drama, becomes rote when participants reiterate their scripts to the point of unthinking reiteration of diction and unreflective miming of gestures.