The Will To Poetry and The Will Of Poetry: Intersubjectivity and Transcorporeality in Virginia Woolf's and Rita Wong's Texts

The will to poetry is a raw, creative drive to word new wor(l)ds as it imagines a future-in-becoming. The will of poetry, also a creative linguistic drive, is the particular lexicon and episteme a writer is born into; it mirrors reality-in-the-present. Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own tells us the writer must become incandescent and speak truthfully in order to channel poetic will ethically. My thesis is motivated by the question: what kind of aesthetic of being can the queer woman writer imagine in a world threatened by heteropatriarchy, neocolonialism, neoliberalism and mass-consumption? Virginia Woolf's and Rita Wong's texts gesture toward an ethic of care grounded in an awareness of our intersubjectivity and transcorporeality. Intersubjectivity suggests a collective consciousness in which we either co-create or destroy each other. By transcorporeality, I mean that our bodies are porous and open-ended systems made up of other bodies, other living organisms.