I have been doing some haphazard reading  about Heidegger rethinking and conception of  poetics and   poiesis in order to develop  my understanding of, and explore  the possibilities  f photography as a poetics. 

Heidegger is difficult going and I've been struggling to understand what he is trying to do.  Heidegger's   reflections on art as poiesis highlights that it is directed toward the question of being and that it  locates the artwork as a specific modality of truth, a way in which truth can occur. This is premised on n decisively ontological distinction between the product (reduction of beings to  the will of the human being) and the work of art.  The artwork is traditionally distinguished from the product insofar as it is not merely formed matter, but formed matter that shows something other than itself, that in some way has an intellectual content or meaning.

The end point  of Heidegger's account of poiesis is that it is  a mode of disclosure  (a-letheia) of being in general (usually referred to as Being) Poiesis refers to  beings themselves to come to presence into the unhidden.   

This  account emerges from  Heidegger's  re-discovery of the pre-Socratics (eg., Heraclitus)  as  distinct from assimilating the pre-Socratics  to Plato and Aristotle, whom Heidegger interpreted as  the foundation  of Western philosophy.  The appropriation and critique of Aristotle lies at the very  heart of Heidegger's philosophical enterprise  regarding the question of being and its history. The  past from out of which we think has to be re-appropriated and interpreted anew, and his pathway was  to  rethink Greek ontology ‘more originally than’ the Greeks themselves.  Heidegger’s critique of the tradition (Aristotle) attempts to think more originally than this tradition in order to transform it.

In the foundational Greek  philosophy, according to Heidegger,   poiesis was orientated to everyday production: ie., the artist  projects an image of the object  i.e. its intended look with the artist shaping the raw material into an artefact thereby  fulfilling this intention.with the product becoming a likeness of imitation of this image/model. This representational model of art is premised on the subject/object  duality. Heifdegger initially accepts this model of poiesis,   but he then deconstructs it by way of returning to the pre-Socratics: he sees them differently to Plato and Aristotle. 

In doing so he  and revises this interpretation of poiesis to a more original sense one in the pre-Socratics--namely poiesis as  disclosure of the event of Being as  phusis,  or the emergence of an entity into presence: the coming forth of what comes itself.  As light phusis is presence, the event of presence which allows each and every being to show itself in its own particular shape and figure.

Poiesis is not the imitation or copy of a projected model of stable presence as it is in Plato and Aristotle, but a response to an overpowering sense of absence and instability with the art work  is the disclosure of Being to human beings-in-the-world. The site of poiesis is the clearing in which Being dwells but the source of poiesis is the overpowering  event--the bursting off the blossom into bloom-- the coming out of unconcealment.  

 Tthe artwork  opens up a world that  allows beings to show themselves as what they authentically as a result of being as such is given as, an ‘emerging and rising into presence,   as making manifest earth. This coming into presence (presencing) avoids   reducing this originality to a merely subjective play of human faculties.