ABSTRACT
This chapter brings a poetic dimension to the vision and discourse of integral development. Mainstream discourse and practice of development mainly focuses on what can be called the prose of development: the hard core and hardware issues of economics, politics and infrastructure. There is very little poetics in the mood and methods of its advocates. This chapter argues that we should turn this approach around in a transformative way, by putting what is usually considered the lowest at the top. Poetics of development builds upon inner and shared transformations in prose and poetics, as it seeks to express the suffering and joys of souls and societies. It offers a new dimension to the social quality idea about “the social” as the outcome of the dialectic between processes of self-realization of human beings and the formation of collective identities. It also explores new pathways of healing with the work and cultivation of the poetic in self and society.
