Introduction

Abstract

The poetics of otherness combines two strange and familiar ideas: first, that of making, and second, the other of what is different from ourselves. Poetics is a making of words and also the study of that making. Otherness is alterity, alternative and alienation. Poetry comes from the Greek for making, something I have made much of elsewhere.¹ The etymology of other-which is cognate with forms in Old Frisian, Middle Dutch, Old Saxon, and various German languages-seems to derive from the Indo-European base of Sanskrit anya and relates to the Latin alter. The Indo-European comparative suffix is, as the Oxford English Dictionary attests, also represented by the Sanskrit -tara, the ancient Greek -τεροζ, the classical Latin -ter, the English -ther, and the Early Irish equitive suffix -ithir, and it suggests the meaning ofthat original: “The Indo-European suffix seen in this word originally had a spatial sense, expressing the contrast between two or more things with regard to their location.”² There is, then, in my book a poetics of space, of here and there, as well as a poetics of time, of now and then. This poetics also has some hiddenness of unknown places to explore as well as the unknown of the future.