Dervish Poetics

"There is a standard conception of poetry as an 'expression of the soul, of lived experience,' individual or collective...[In other words, it] owes its essence to human subjectivity. Departing from this widespread conception, Heidegger understands poetry as 'the fundamental event of historical being,' the way that 'historical being brings itself to itself in words'...Exploiting both Teutonic and Greek roots of dichten [to compose, create, invent], Heidegger characterizes it as 'saying in the manner of making apparent by pointing.' What poetry points to and makes apparent is not something on-hand, but the mystery of historical being."

--Dahlstrom, THD, 166.

The predominant genres of Muslim pietism are poetry, aphorisms, brief tales and vignettes, jokes, dream narratives and complex combinations of the foregoing embedded in a kind of exegetical discourse. This is no accident as the poet, in Heidegger's thinking, is a liminal figure: for she has to be able to "attend to divine hints and at the same time intimate them to humanity, to a people. Thus, the poet is cast into the 'realm-between' divinities and humans [what Ibn al-'Arabi termed the barzakh], where it is decided who the human being is and where he settles in his Dasein [there-being]...Heidegger's conception of poetry heavily influences his efforts to rethink being historically and its appropriation of human beings. At times his remarks about the need for the transformation of human beings into Dasein appear as an attempt to reinterpret them in his image of the poet, disabusing them of the pretense of mastering being, with a view to transforming them into its shepherds."

--ibid., 168-169.

Every plowman a Dervish-poet; every Dervish-poet a plowman.