Budding Bodies: A Moving Poem

[Calleja Smiley]

Abstract:

This body of work is twofold, comprised of an academic paper and a creative work of poetry and movement. The paper discusses my creative process for this interwoven work of dance and words, and how that process helps to illuminate place related meaning-making. Specifically, I argue that any act of creativity involves imaginative collaboration between the primary creator and witness through a body of work. This way of viewing art and the created natural world presupposes a place of importance for the physical body and locality. I draw on scholarship from James K.A. Smith, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Mark Johnson to highlight a primary “kinaesthetics” or “poetics” of understanding the world, philosophies that emphasize a bodily basis of knowing. I then propose that we might shift our relationship to Scripture and sacred text by affirming our bodily comportment to the world over intellectualism. In this way, I invite readers to interact with Scripture as an enabling entity that is meant to draw together the immense creative capabilities of God and humans. By assuming that meaning is found in the between spaces through bodies—the bodies of people and the bodies of created work or nature—we assign creative power to these agents and make room for living, breathing interactions.

The full paper is attached to this post.