I Understand You, Across the Chasm that Divides Us Rethinking Community Through Poetry

In this reflective essay, I examine how feminist emancipatory poetic practices show us a way to rethink the idea of community, as a genuinely intersubjective mode of being with others. Thinking along with Hannah Arendt’s theory of political plurality, and John Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics, I suggest that reading poems not as subjective 'I' expressions, but intersubjective 'we' expressions, facilitates a 'we’ that is not bound by identity, a political cause, or commonality in feeling. I operationalize the concept of ‘poetic understanding’ as showing us the way to radical forms of solidarity and new ways of being with, sharing, and acting together with others, without reducing or eliminating the particularities of difference and otherness.