Bhanu Kapil’s reading with her translator Bastien Goursaud at Michael Woolworth’s atelier in Paris.
Poets and Critics Symposium: Bhanu Kapil, Thursday 14 and Friday 15 November 2024
The next Poets and Critics Symposium will be devoted to the work of Bhanu Kapil, in collaboration with Bastien Goursaud and Université de Picardie.
Thursday 14 and Friday 15 November, 2024.
Université Paris Cité, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris
9:45 am-5 pm, room OdG 830 (8th floor of the Olympe de Gouges Building)
How to get there?
For detailed instructions and directions, click HERE.
&
double change Poetry reading with Bhanu Kapil, Nadid Belaatik & Catherine WeinzaepflenThursday 14 November, 7pm
atelier Michael Woolworth, 2 rue de la Roquette, Passage du Cheval Blanc, Cour Février, 75011 Paris M° Bastille. How to get there? For detailed instructions and directions, click HERE.
Thus far, we have focused on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on the first day of the P&C symposiums and on broader issues of poetics and practice-based criticism on the second day. But there’s no specific preconceived program for the 2 days of the symposium: as the previous sessions of the program have shown, it seems important to let the conversation take its own course.
Please note that the morning session of the first day is devoted to preparing the conversation with Bhanu Kapil which will take place during the afternoon session and the second day.
Bhanu Kapil will be joining the group at 2pm on Thursday 14 November.
As usual, we intend to address all aspects of our guest’s work.
Please feel free to make suggestions as to particular books that you would like to discuss during the symposium.
Our Thursday afternoon session with Bhanu Kapil should end by 6 pm, which will leave ample time for everybody to get to the poetry reading.
Photo from a performance at The Horse Hospital in London, © Bhanu Kapil, 2023.
*
Bhanu Kapil, FRSL is the author of six full-length collections: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), Schizophrene (Nightboat, 2011), Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat, 2015), and How to Wash a Heart (Liverpool University Press, 2020).Two new, non-identical editions of Incubation (out of print for seven years in the U.S.) were published by Prototype (UK) and Kelsey Street Press (USA) in 2023. Bhanu is based now in Cambridge, where she is an Extraordinary Fellow of Churchill College, thinking and writiing [with] [near] [beneath] the archive of Enoch Powell. She has been awarded a Cholmondeley Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. For twenty years, she taught seminars in experimental writing, performance, and ritual at Naropa University. Current manuscripts include a novel, The Secret Garden, and an unpublishable work of creative non-fiction, Promiscuity.
*
Full-length works:
Incubation: a space for monsters, Prototype, 2023 (UK) and Kelsey Street Press, 2023 (USA)
How To Wash A Heart, Liverpool University Press, 2020
Ban en Banlieue, Nightboat Books, 2016
Schizophrene, Nightboat Books, 2011
Humanimal [a project for future children], Kelsey Street Press, 2009
Incubation: a space for monsters, Leon Works, 2007 (out of print)
The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Kelsey Street Press, 2001
Chapbooks/Pamphlets:
THREADS (co-written with Sandeep Parmar and Nisha Ramayya), Clinic Publishing, 2018
Entre-Ban, Vallum Press, 2017
Treinte Ban: notes for a novel never written, New Herring Press, 2013
(a poem-essay, or precursor: NOTES: for a novel: Ban en Banlieues), Belladonna Press, 2010
THE BODY THAT DOESN’T BELONG TO YOU ANYMORE, [2nd Floor Projects], 2008
Water-damage: a map of three black days, Corollary Press, 2007
The Wolfgirls of Midnapure, Belladonna Press, 2002
Autobiography of a Cyborg, Leroy Press, 2000
Critical Bibliography
Beer, John. “The SRPR Review Essay: To Write the Larger Scene: Notes on the New Political Lyric.” The Spoon River Poetry Review, vol. 41, no. 2, 2016, pp. 106–123.
Belsare, Akash. “Feralizing the Human/Animal Distinction in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 61, no. 3, 2020, pp. 362–387.
Berlant, Lauren. “My Dark Places.” Duke University Press, Durham, NC, June 2022, pp. 149–174.
Brady , Andrea. Radical Tenderness: Poetry in Times of Catastrophe. Cambridge University Press, Aug. 2024.
Colby, Georgina. “Housing the Stranger: Feminist Sheltering in the Work of Bhanu Kapil.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 64, no. 1, 2023, pp. 24–51.
Defalco, Amelia. Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care. Oxford University Press, July 2023.
Dick, Jennifer K. “The Dissenting Red Self: Lyn Hejinian’s Tribunal, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red & Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation: A Space for Monsters” in Couleurs et Cultures / Colors and Cultures: Interdisciplinary Explorations, eds. Sami Ludwig, Astrid Starck-Adler & André Karliczek. Jena, Salana, 2022. ISBN: 978-3-00-073026-9. (364 p), pp. 143-152.
Dick, Jennifer K. “The Nonsingular Self: A study of Bhanu Kapil and Eleni Sikelianos’ Poetic Autobiographical Writing” in Vulnerability and Radicality in Contemporary British and American Autobiographies, eds. Nelly Monk & Aude Haffen. Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2025 (forthcoming).
Dowling, Sarah. “They Were Girls: Animality and Poetic Voice in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2013 Sept. 2013, pp. 735–755. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0039.
Grimmer, C. R., and Kate Rose. “Bhanu Kapil’s Schizophrene Poetics: Disability, Dispossession, and Diaspora.” Routledge, New York, NY, Apr. 2020, pp. 39–55.
Kocher, Ruth Ellen. “F/fabula A/anima: Reading Bhanu Kapil’s ‘Writing/Not-Writing: Th[a][e] Diasporic Self: Notes towards a Race Riot.’” English Language Notes, vol. 50, no. 1, 2012, pp. 47–53.
Lee, Sueyeun Juliette, and Timothy Yu. “Trauma and the Avant-Garde.” Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, May 2021, pp. 132–146.
Mitchell, K. Bellamy, et al. “‘A Historian of the Soft Tissue’: An Interview with Bhanu Kapil.” Palgrave Macmillan (Cham, Switzerland), Cham, Switzerland, Aug. 2024, pp. 585–594.
Quaid, Andrea. “Continuity and Change: Experimental Women’s Writing and the Epic Tradition.” ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global, University of California, Santa CruzProQuest, vol. 75, no. 8, 2015 Feb. 2015.
Ramayya, Nisha. “Curve Warp Corpse.” Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, vol. 12, no. 1, Apr. 2020. https://doi.org/10.16995/.
Sengupta, Shalini. “‘Enabling Entanglements’: Rethinking Modernist Difficulty in the Sixth Extinction.” Modernism/Modernity, vol. 7, no. 2 [Online section], 7 Oct. 2022.
Singh, Julietta. “Errands for the Wild.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 117, no. 3, 2018 July 2018, pp. 567–580. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-6942159.
Voris, Linda. “‘The Curious Props’: Placing Memory in Recent Experimental Writing.” West Branch, vol. 82, 2016, pp. 72–78.
Wang, Dorothy, et al. “Speculative Notes on Bhanu Kapil’s Monstrous/Cyborgian/Schizophrenic Poetics.” Kelsey Street Press, Berkeley, CA, Nov. 2015, pp. 78–91.
Yu, Timothy, et al. Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets. Kelsey Street Press, Nov. 2015.
Please contact us if you wish to share an essay or text about Bhanu Kapil’s work.
The Poets & Critics symposium on Bhanu Kapil’s work is organized in collaboration with the CERCLL Research Center of Université de Picardie Jules Verne
Poets and Critics Symposium: John Yau, Thursday 25 and Friday 26 April 2024
The next Poets and Critics Symposium will be devoted to the work of John Yau.
Thursday 25 and Friday 26 April, 2024.
Université Paris Cité, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, 8 rue Albert Einstein, 75013 Paris
9:45 am-5 pm, room OdG 830 on Thursday 25 April (8th floor of the Olympe de Gouges Building)
and room OdG 115 on Friday 26 April (1st floor of the Olympe de Gouges Building).
How to get there?
For detailed instructions and directions, click HERE.
&
double change Poetry reading with Anne Portugal, John Yau and his translator Marc Chénetier
On the occasion of the publication of
Une autre façon d’écrire sur le sable, Selected Poems by John Yau,
edited and translated by Marc Chénetier (joca seria, 2024).
Thursday 25 April, 7pm
atelier Michael Woolworth, 2 rue de la Roquette, Passage du Cheval Blanc, Cour Février, 75011 Paris M° Bastille.
How to get there? For detailed instructions and directions, click HERE.
Thus far, we have focused on the writer’s own (creative and critical) work on the first day of the P&C symposiums and on broader issues of poetics and practice-based criticism on the second day. But there’s no specific preconceived program for the 2 days of the symposium: as the previous sessions of the program have shown, it seems important to let the conversation take its own course.
Please note that the morning session of the first day is devoted to preparing the conversation with John Yau which will take place during the afternoon session and the second day.
John Yau will be joining the group at 2pm on Thursday 25 April.
As usual, we intend to address all aspects of our guest’s work as poet, prose writer, critic, editor, and publisher.
Please feel free to make suggestions as to particular books that you would like to discuss during the symposium.
Our Thursday afternoon session with John Yau should end by 6 pm, which will leave ample time for everybody to get to the poetry reading.
*
Poet, fiction writer, essayist, art critic, and publisher of Black Square Editions, John Yau has written across genres and worked in different mediums in order to expand poetry beyond the printed page. Starting in the mid-1980s, he began collaborating with American and European artists, from the widely celebrated to the young and emerging. The collaborations took the form of paintings, drawings, artist books, prints, postcards, objects, clothing, and jazz compositions. Starting in the late 1970s, he began writing reviews and essays for art magazines, galleries, and museums in the late 1970s. ) Since 2002, he has taught contemporary art history in the art department of the Mason Gross School of the Arts (Rutgers University). He has written monographs on many artists, most recently, Liu Xiaodong (2021) and Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (2022). His most recent book of essays is Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity In American Art. In 2012, he began writing reviews regularly for the online magazine, Hyperallergic. He has published more than 20 books of poetry.
*
The following bibliographical section is a work in progress: please contact us if you see a missing title & wish to add it to one of the bibliographies below.
Bibliography
Poetry
- Crossing Canal Street, Bellevue Press, 1976
- Sometimes, Tilbury House Pub, 1980
- Broken Off by the Music, Burning Deck, 1981
- Corpse and Mirror, Henry Holt & Company, 1983
- Edificio Sayonara, Black Sparrow Press, 1992
- Forbidden Entries, Black Sparrow Press, 1996
- Berlin Diptychon, Timken Publisher, 1995
- Borrowed Love Poems, Penguin Books, 2002
- Ing Grish, Saturnalia Books, 2005
- Paradiso Diaspora, Penguin Books, 2006
- Exhibits, Letter Machine Editions, 2010
- Egyptian Sonnets, Rain Taxi, 2012
- Further Adventures in Monochrome, Copper Canyon Press, 2012
- Bijoux in the Dark, Letter Machine Editions, 2018
- Genghis Chan on Drums, Omnidawn, 2021
- Tell It Slant, Omnidawn, 2023
Fiction
- Hawaiian Cowboys, Black Sparrow Press, 1994
- My Symptoms, Black Sparrow Books, 1998
- My Heart Is That Eternal Rose Tattoo, Black Sparrow Press, 2002
Criticism, Essays, Art Books
- The sleepless night of Eugene Delacroix, Small Press, 1980
- Miklos Pogany, Paintings and Works on Paper, Phillips Collections, 1985
- Roger Brown, George Braziller, 1987
- Radiant Silhouette: New and Selected Work 1974-1988, Black Sparrow, 1989
- Four Painters: Michael Kessler, Archie Rand, Mark Schlesinger, Lynton Wells, Flint Inst of Arts, 1989
- Yuri Kuper: Recent work, Claude Bernard Gallery, 1989
- Big City Primer: Reading New York at the End of the Twentieth Century, Timken Publishers, 1991
- A.R. Penck, Harry N. Abrams Press, 1993
- In the Realm of Appearances: The Art of Andy Warhol, The Ecco Press, 1993
- Ed Moses: A Retrospective of Paintings and Drawings 1951-1996, University of California Press, 1996
- In Pursuit of the Invisible, Hard Press, 1996
- The United States of Jasper Johns, Zoland Books, 1997
- Max Gimblett , Craig Potton Publishing, 2000
- Don Gummer–sculpture: Essay, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 2000
- Dazzling Water Dazzling Light: Pat Steir Paintings, University of Washington Press, 2000
- Randy Hayes: The World Reveiled, Oglethorpe University Museum, 2000
- Tom Uttech : New Paintings, Alexandre Gallery, 2004
- Mark Di Suvero, Knoedler & Company, 2005
- James Siena : New Paintings and Gouaches, Pace Wildenstein, 2005
- The Passionate Spectator: Essays on Art and Poetry, University of Michigan Press, 2006
- A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper Johns, D.A.P, 2008
- Will Ryman : A New Beginning, Marlborough Chelsea, 2009
- William Tillyer : Watercolours, 21 Publishing Ltd, 2010
- Nicholas Krushenick : A Survey, Gary Snyder Gallery, 2011
- Sam Francis, Bernard Jacobson Ltd, 2014
- The Wild Children of William Blake, Autonomedia, 2017
- Thomas Nozkowski, Lund Humphries, 2017
- Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art, Black Sparrow Press, 2023
Editorial Work
- Fetish: An Anthology, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998
- New Smoke: An Anthology Of Poetry Inspired By Neo Rauch, Off the Park Press, 2009
- « What’s It All Mean: William T. Wiley » in Retrospect, University of California Press, 2009
- Viva La Difference: Poetry Inspired by the Painting of Peter Saul, Off the Park Press, 2010
- The Triumph of Poverty: Poetry Inspired by the Work of Nicole Eisenman, Off the Park Press, 2012
- Richard Artschwager: Into the Desert, Black Dog Publishing, 2014
Interviews
- “John Yau with Joan Waltemath,” The Brooklyn Rail, Apr-May 2003.
“A Symposium on John Yau, Commentary and Criticism”: Talisman Special Issue on John Yau (JSTOR open access – click on image)
Critical Bibliography
- Birns, Nicholas. “John Yau.” In Asian American Writers, edited by Deborah L. Madsen, 348–58. Dictionary of Literary Biography: 312. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale; Gale Cengage, 2005.
- Campbell, Bruce. “‘Pieces of a Piece.’” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 126–34.
- Caples, Garrett. “John Yau.” In American Short-Story Writers since World War II: Third Series, edited by Patrick Meanor and Richard E. Lee, 305–15. Dictionary of Literary Biography: 234. Detroit, MI: Thomson Gale; Gale Cengage, 2001.
- Chaloner, David. “On John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 113–14.
- Cooperman, Matthew. “What the Poet Sees: An Interview with John Yau.” Jubilat 19 (2011): 26–49.
- Corbett, William. “On John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 114–15.
- Donahue, Joseph. “Harmonic Interferences: A Note on John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 118–19.
- Fickle, Tara. “English Before Engrish: Asian American Poetry’s Unruly Tongue.” Comparative Literature Studies 51, no. 1 (2014): 78–105. doi:10.5325/complitstudies.51.1.0078.
- Foster, Edward Halsey. “John Yau and the Seductions of Everything That Used to Be.” MultiCultural Review 3, no. 1 (March 1994): 36–39.
- Foster, Edward. “An Interview with John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 31–50.
- Foster, Edward. “John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 31.
- Foster, Edward. “John Yau: A Selected Bibliography.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 147–51.
- Hemensley, Kris. “On John Yau.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 116–18.
- Huang, Yunte. “Pidginizing Chinese.” In Bilingual Games: Some Literary Investigations, edited by Doris Sommer, 205–20. New Directions in Latino American Cultures. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan (London), 2003.
- Jeon, Joseph Jonghyun. Racial Things, Racial Forms: Objecthood in Avant-Garde Asian American Poetry. Contemporary North American Poetry Series. Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2012.
- Kim, Hyo. “The Pleasure of Indeterminacy: John Yau’s ‘Genghis Chan: Private Eye.’” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 48, no. 2 (2021): 233–58.
- Lagapa, Jason. “Parading the Undead: Camp, Horror and Reincarnation in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara and John Yau.” Journal of Modern Literature 33, no. 2 (2010): 92–113. doi:10.2979/JML.2010.33.2.92.
- Lee, Merton. “A Canon of Alterity: John Yau’s Corpse and Mirror.” In Positioning the New: Chinese American Literature and the Changing Image of the American Literary Canon, edited by Tanfer Emin Tunc and Elisabetta Marino, 143–55. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010.
- Leong, Michael. “Neo-Surrealism’s Forked Tongue: Reflections on the Dramatic Monologue, Politics, and Community in the Recent Poetry of Will Alexander and John Yau.” Contemporary Literature 55, no. 3 (2014): 501–33. doi:10.1353/cli.2014.0027.
- Malroux, Claire. “La Poésie Au Fronton de La Ville: Jenny Holzer.” Po&sie 120 (2007): 248–55. doi:10.3917/poesi.120.0248.
- Mar, Christine. “The Language of Ethnicity: John Yau’s Poetry and the Ethnic/Aesthetic Divide.” In Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, edited by Rocío G. Davis and Sue-Im Lee, 70–85. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006.
- Mobilio, Albert. “The Dream Science of John Yau’s ‘Dragon’s Blood.’” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 119–20.
- Morris, Daniel. “Strangers and Oneself: John Yau’s Writings on Contemporary Art.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 21–22 (2001): 45–57.
- Morris, Daniel. Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
- Peterson, Eric. “A Bughouse Interaction.” Bughouse 2 (1994): 47–59.
- Rohrer, Matthew. “John Yau.” In The VERSE Book of Interviews: 27 Poets on Language, Craft, and Culture, edited by Brian Henry and Andrew Zawacki, 177–98. Amherst, MA: Verse Press, 2005.
- Schelb, Edward N. “Embalmed in the Camera’s Glowing Formaldehyde: On John Yau’s Hollywood Asians.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: A Journal of Criticism and Theory 18, no. 1 (2016): 81–95. doi:10.5325/intelitestud.18.1.0081.
- Schelb, Edward. “Corpse and Mirror, Mirror and Corpse: John Yau and the Paintings of Jasper Johns.” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 23, no. 2 (April 2007): 211–22. doi:10.1080/02666286.2007.10435781.
- Wald, Priscilla. “‘Chaos Goes Uncourted’: John Yau’s Dis(-)Orienting Poetics.” In Cohension and Dissent in America, edited by Carol Colatrella and Joseph Alkana, 133–58. SUNY Series in American Literature. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.
- Wald, Priscilla. “Guilt by Dissociation: John Yau’s Poetics of Possibility.” Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 5 (1990): 121–25.
- Wang, Dorothy J. “Undercover Asian: John Yau and the Politics of Ethnic Self-Identification.” In Asian American Literature in the International Context: Readings on Fiction, Poetry, and Performance, edited by Rocío G. Davis and Sämi Ludwig, 135–55. Contributions to Asian American Literary Studies: 1. Hamburg, Germany: LIT Verlag, 2002.
- Wang, Dorothy J. “Undercover Asian: John Yau and the Politics of Ethnic Self-Identification.” Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 162-204.
- Wang, Dorothy J. “Genghis Chan: Parodying Private Eye.” Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013, p. 205-243.
- Yao, Steven. “Oceanic Etymologies: Shanghai and the Transpacific Routes of Global Modernity.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 1 (2017): 77–106. doi:10.5749/vergstudglobasia.3.1.0077.
- Yao, Steven. “‘The Owner of One Pock-Marked Tongue’: John Yau and the Logic of Ethnic Abstraction.” Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 231-264.
- Yu, Timothy. “Forgotten Capital: Touring Berlin with John Yau and Bill Barrette.” Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics 23 (2010): 105–15.
- Yu, Timothy. “Form and Identity in Language Poetry and Asian American Poetry.” Contemporary Literature 41, no. 3 (2000): 422–61. doi:10.2307/1208892.
- Yu, Timothy. “John Yau and Experimental Asian American Writing.” Race and the Avant-Garde, Experimental and Asian American Poetry Since 1965, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009, p. 138-159.
- Zhou, Xiaojing. “Postmodernism and Subversive Parody: John Yau’s ‘Genghis Chan: Private Eye’ Series.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 31, no. 1 (2004): 73–102.
- Zhou, Xiaojing. “Two Hat Softeners ‘In the Trade Confession’: John Yau and Kimiko Hahn.” In Form and Transformation in Asian American Literature, edited by Xiaojing Zhou and Samina Najmi, 168–89. The Scott and Laurie Oki Series in Asian American Studies. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2005.
Bibliographie de poésie des États-Unis d’Amérique en traduction française, 1786-2023 (anthologies, formes anthologiques et volumes)
This page is in French. For automated translation click on
Pour accéder à la bibliographie, cliquer sur l’image ci-dessus.
Pour une présentation de la bibliographie, voir le bandeau à droite de cette publication, ou se rendre sur cette page.
Pour une carte géographique des éditeurs de poésie des Etats-Unis en traduction française (carte arrêtée en septembre 2022), cliquer sur l’image ci-dessous.
Pour une carte du réseau auteurs/autrices-traducteurs-traductrices (beta version août 2022, work in progress), cliquer sur la carte ci-dessous.
CFP “Documentary Poetry, Popular Protest and Activism: An International Poetry and Poetics Seminar”
“Documentary Poetry, Popular Protest and Activism: An International Poetry and Poetics Seminar”
The American University of Paris.
Co-Directors: Geoff Gilbert and William Dow.
June 15-17, 2023.
The American University of Paris announces a call for papers for a documentary poetry conference to be held 15-17 June 2023 at the American University of Paris.
How do contemporary poets in the US and France position themselves in relation to popular political protest and activism? What use are they making of experimental documentary traditions (whose practices can be placed along a continuum from “subjective” auto-ethnographies to “objective” documentary tendencies)? How does writing outside France and the US relate to these two centers for poetry and poetics? What challenges does this offer to conceptions of the relation between poetry as an art form and other social and political utterances and actions? The conference will also look at the history of documentary poetry traditions in France and the United States, locating this history in an international, transnational, and pluri-disciplinary context.
Topics may include but are not limited to:
The documentary traditions of innovation and experiment in French and American poetry and how such traditions are articulated with political, economic, and social struggles; periodization and the documentary traditions
Contradictory tensions: documentary poetry as resistance to and a haven for the personal.
Documentary poetry takes as its primary subject historical events and the people who are the perpetrators and victims of such events. How might this poetry help readers to become “virtual witnesses”? What alternatives to the model of ‘temoignage’ and ‘witness’ can be proposed?
How poetry works with pre-existing cultural documents to uncover hidden historical claims and voices.
Documentary poetics and the question of appropriation.
The relationship between documentary modalities and social resistance poetry.
French and American documentary epistemologies and documentary poetry as alternatives to the viewpoints and subjects of mass media journalism.
Documentary poetry as an “investigative poetics”; and as an “investigative poetry” (P. Metres).
Documentary poetry as an international phenomenon.
Documentary poetry and the forms through which collective life is imagined – class, gender, race, sexuality, and debates within the left about these formations
Documentary poetry as forms of empowerment and rethinking reading practices.
How French and American documentary poetry implicitly questions the status of both poetry and documentary materials; questions of the canon and the archive.
Documentary poetry, the polyvocal, intertextual, and multimedia.
Documentary poetry: articulations of collectivity and social justice.
Plenary speakers: Juliana Spahr, Mark Nowak, Nathalie Quintane, Franck Leibovici.
Conference Fee: (includes coffee breaks and opening and closing receptions): 40 euros.
Dinner Fee: 60 euros.
Proposal for papers should include
- A brief (250-300 word) abstract
- A one to two page vita.
Submissions to ggilbert@aup.edu and wdow@aup.edu
Deadline for Submissions: March 15, 2023.
Just Out! William S. Merwin, Un temps au jardin, trad. Thomas Dutoit et Cécile Roudeau, Périgueux, Fanlac, 2022 & Lecture, 19.10.22, Librairie EXC, Paris
Le colloque Merwin Across Borders Conference (Université Paris Cité et ENS Ulm, 20-21 octobre) s’ouvrira par une lecture bilingue des poèmes de W.S. Merwin à la librairie EXC, Passage Molière, 75003 Paris, Mercredi 19 octobre à 18h.
W. S. Merwin Across Borders. Université Paris Cité/ ENS Ulm, Paris, France, October 20-21, 2022
“North American Poetry 2000-2020/2: Poetics, Aesthetics, Politics.” Conference, 29 June-2 July 2022, Paris.
From Wednesday 29 June to Friday 1 July, the conference will be held at Institut Universitaire de France. On Saturday 2 July, the conference will be held at Université Paris Cité.
To attend the conference at the Institut Universitaire de France, located in the Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, ONLINE REGISTRATION is REQUIRED. Please register by Friday 24 June HERE
Wednesday 29 June – Friday 1 July
Institut Universitaire de France
25 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève
75005 Paris
Wednesday 29 June
Institut Universitaire de France, Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac, 25 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, 75005 Paris
1:30 pm Coffee & Welcome address
2-3:30 pm Panel 1: National, Transnational, Moderator: Michel Delville
1. Elizabeth Brunazzi, scholar, editor, with Charlot Lucien, storyteller, poet and visual art artist, “Contemporary Haitian Performance Poetry in and around New York, Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area and Montréal”
2. Zoë Skoulding, Bangor University, “Cross-border Ecologies of Translation”
3. Aurore Clavier, Université de Lille, “Place, Site, Nation : Joy Harjo and the multiscalar poetics of ‘Living Nations, Living Words'”
3:30-4 pm Coffee Break
4-5:30 pm Panel 2: Renewed Ecopoetics Constellations, Moderator: Jennifer Scappettone
1. Evelyn Reilly, poet, critic, “Lucretius, Extinction Rebellion, and the Poetics of Love and Rage”
2. Marta Werbanowska, University of Vienna, “African American Ecopoetics and Black Atlantic Ecological Thinking”
3. Joshua Schuster, Western University, Canada, “After the Last Avant-Gardes: Environmental Poetics as Extreme Writing”
Atelier Michael Woolworth, 2 rue de la Roquette, 75011 Paris :
Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy, Lisa Robertson
Thursday 30 June
Institut Universitaire de France, Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac, 25 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, 75005 Paris
9:15 Coffee
9:30-10:30 am Panel 3 Rethinking Montage, Moderator: Lacy Rumsey
1. Michel Delville, University of Liège, “Erasurist Poetics and Politics in North-America: 1998-2016”
2. Steven Zultanski, poet, critic, “Genre and Process in the Poetry of Tan Lin”
10:30-11 am Coffee Break
11 am-12:30 pm Panel 4 Documentary Poetics, Moderator: Hélène Aji
1. William Dow, University Gustave Eiffel, “Metabolizing Genres: American Poetry and Literary Journalism”
2. Naomi Toth, University Paris Nanterre, “Poetic justice? Appropriating legal documents in contemporary North American poetry”
3. Martin Glaz Serup, University of Copenhagen, “To appellant, every woman is a bitch – a reading of Vanessa Place’ Statement of Facts.”
*
2-3 pm Panel 5 Queer & Feminist Interventions, Moderator: Lisa Robertson
1. Claire Finch, University Paris 8, “Kathy Acker’s Cuntemporary – feminism, fuck you’s, and avant-garde literary technologies”
2. Héloïse Thomas, University Bordeaux-Montaigne, “‘It’s a poem I memorized to stay alive when everything in me screamed otherwise’: Poetry, Form, and Liberation in the 21st Century”
3-3:30 pm Coffee Break
3:30-4:30 pm Panel 6.1 The Poetics of Care and Health, Moderator: Daniel Katz
1. Toni R. Juncosa, University of Barcelona, “‘Every day is a funeral and a miracle:’ Danez Smith’s Poetry, HIV, and 21st-Century Elegiac Genre”
Friday 1 July
Institut Universitaire de France, Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac, 25 rue de la Montagne Sainte-Geneviève, 75005 Paris
9:15 Coffee
9:30-11 am Panel 7 Anthologies, Race, and Identities, Moderator: Olivier Brossard
1. Maria Manning, University College Cork, “‘This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for’: Identity and Action in Breakbeat Poetry”
2. Samantha Majhor, Marquette University, “Indigenous Rising: Native Voices in the 21st Century North American Poetic Landscape”
3. Patrick Durgin, Art Institute of Chicago, “Xenophobia, Cosmopolitanism, Our Heuristic Conditions”
11-11:30 am Coffee Break
11:30 am-1 pm Panel 8 Xenoglossia, Accents, and Polyvocality, Moderator: Zoë Skoulding
1. Jennifer Scappettone, University of Chicago, Visiting Professor, Université Gustave Eiffel, “Glottal Stop: Xenoglossic Breathing and Poetic Transmutations of the Mother Tongue”
2. Andrew Eastman, Université de Strasbourg, “Listening with the body: poetics of accent in the work of Cathy Park Hong”
3. Shiv Kotecha, New York University / Rhode Island School of Design, “Side Kicks: Not White Fabulation in White Poetry”
*
2:30-4 pm Panel 9 Digital Poetics and Mixed Media, Moderator: Martin Glaz Serup
1. Alessandro De Francesco, Turin Academy of Fine Arts, Bern Academy of the Arts, and Danny Snelson, University of California, Los Angeles, “Immersive Poetry and VR Poetics”
2. Joe Milutis, University of Washington-Bothell, “Attack of the Vernacular: Internet Poetics, Platforms, Pedagogy”
3. Zsófia Szatmári, Université Paris 8 / Eötvös Loránd University, “Abigail Child’s ‘Foreign’ Poems”
4-4:30 pm Coffee Break
4:30-6 pm Panel 10 The Politics of Teaching, Moderator: Vincent Broqua
1. Hélène Aji, Ecole normale supérieure, “Modernist Hangover : Bob Perelman, ‘poet, teacher and critic'”
2. Chloé Thomas, Université d’Angers, “Revisiting the poetry workshop”
3. Michael Barnholden, poet, artist, scholar, “The Kootenay School of Writing: A political intervention more than anything else”
7:30 pm, Collective Poetry Reading,
Michael Barnholden, Alessandro De Francesco, Patrick Durgin, Claire Finch, Toni R. Juncosa, Shiv Kotecha, Charlot Lucien, Joe Milutis, Evelyn Reilly, Jennifer Scappettone, Sophie Seita, Martin Glaz Serup, Zoë Skoulding, Danny Snelson et Steve Zultanski
Maison de la poésie de Paris, 157 Rue Saint-Martin, 75003 Paris
Saturday 2 July
Université Paris Cité
Salle des thèses 580F
10, 16 rue Françoise Dolto 75013 Paris
9, 15 esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet 75013 Paris
La salle des thèses se situe au 5e étage de la Halle aux Farines (Hall F, accès par le Hall E, allée paire, ascenseur F, Salle 580). Vous pouvez y accéder par le 10, rue Françoise Dolto ou par le 9, Esplanade Vidal-Naquet.
The Salle des thèses is located on the 5th floor of the Halle aux Farines (Hall F, access by Hall E, allée paire, elevator F, Room 580). You can access the building at 10, rue Françoise Dolto or 9, Esplanade Vidal-Naquet.
10:30 am Coffee
11 am-12:30 pm Panel 11 Listening to Poetry, Moderator : Abigail Lang
1. Alexander Bell, University of East Anglia, “Lisa Robertson’s Prosody”
2. Lacy Rumsey, Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, “Directions and Limits in Twenty-First Century Prosody”
3. Sophie Seita, artist, writer, researcher, “Poetry Live: A Playlist”
*
2-2:30 pm Panel 6.2 The Poetics of Care and Health, Moderator: Vincent Broqua
1. Adam Clay, University of la Rochelle, “Politics and aesthetics of care in Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poems”
2:30-4 pm Panel 12 Poetics of Address, Moderator: Xavier Kalck
1. Paulina Ambroży, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, “The Unfindable Self and Poem-as-Habitat in Evelyn Reilley’s Echolocation and a. rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists”
2. Andrew Gorin, New York University, “Lyric Noise: The Phatic Subject of Poetry in the Mass Public Sphere”
3. Daniel Katz, University of Warwick, “‘These Feelings of Futurelessness’: Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark“
*
Colloque organisé avec le soutien de l’Institut Universitaire de France, des laboratoires LISAA EA 4120 de l’Université Gustave Eiffel, LARCA UMR8225 de l’Université Paris Cité, et TransCrit de l’Université Paris 8. Avec le soutien de l’association double change, de l’atelier Michael Woolworth et de la Maison de la Poésie de Paris.
*
This is the closing conference of a 5-year research program on the history of US poetry and poetics, in relation with the Poets and Critics program in Paris.
What has been happening on the US poetry scene over the past twenty years? According to what criteria and principles can the field of US poetry be read today? In the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, the scene was structured and defined by poetic, aesthetic, and political tensions: is this still the case today? Or should it be approached differently, by inventing new categories? How is poetry as a genre defined today, and particularly in relation to other genres, and other forms of art? How have the internet and digitization changed the production and distribution of poetry? Who or what authorities legitimize poetry? What relationships do poets develop with institutions? With academia? How is poetry taught? How does poetry redefine the uses of language? How does it incorporate languages other than English? How important is translation in North American poetry today? What privileged connections are being established between the poetry of the United States and the poetries of other countries, especially its North American neighbors (whether the Caribbean, Central America, or Canada)? Are the local and regional poetry scenes as active as in the 1960s? Or do poets tend to associate on a larger scale based on professed identities? How do gender, race, and class call for and enact redefinitions of the poetic spectrum? What are the sociological specificities of North American poetry today? What are the preferred forms for poetics and the critique of poetry? What forms does formal exploration assume?
The ambition of this conference is to explore the field of contemporary poetry in North America over the past twenty years and to identify the relevant notions and concepts that will allow us to map its current configurations. We invite papers which focus on English-language poetry as well as bilingual or multilingual works including English as one of their languages. We welcome submissions that question and recontextualize the term “North American.” We are particularly interested in groups, poets, and works that stem from the modernist and experimental traditions even as they may question and overturn this legacy. We also invite submissions focusing on poems and poetics, groups and distribution networks, the geography and sociology of North American poetry, with the hope that they will contribute to sketching a recent history of North American poetry.
Proposals for papers (English only) should include a brief abstract (300 words) and a short biographical note and be addressed to northamericanpoetry2020@gmail.com by January 8, 2021.
North American Poetry 2000-2020/2 Conference Registration (Required) + How to get there
The first three days of the North American Poetry 200-2020/2 Conference will take place in the Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac of the Institut Universitaire de France, Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche, 25 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève, 75005 Paris.
REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND THE CONFERENCE (Please register below by June 24). There is no fee to attend.
Metro stations nearby: Cardinal Lemoine (line 10), Maubert Mutualité (line 10).
On Saturday 2 July, the Conference will be held at Université Paris Cité, see main page and program for details.
Registration is required to attend the conference at the Institut Universitaire de France. Please register below by Friday 24 June, 2022 and see instructions below as to how to get to Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac.
Instructions to get to Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac, Institut Universitaire de France, Ministère de l’Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche
Please allow 10 minutes to go through security and reach the amphithéâtre.
1. On the day of the conference, please go to 25 rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève: a pass will be given to you (you have to have registered online first).
2. Once you have your pass (1), please exit and make a left: use main entrance (2)
3. Proceed to Amphithéâtre Gay Lussac (which will be signposted).
4. Once you’re inside the building, go down the stairs and you will be there.
North American Poetry 2000-2020/2 Conference Abstracts
“We must make a new map together where poetry is sung” is the invitation addressed by Joy Harjo, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States (2019-2022), and the first Native American woman to hold this title. Conceived within the heart of the country’s cultural institutions, her signature project “Living Nations, Living Words” – at once a literary anthology, a counter-mapping operation, a sound archive, and an interactive history of Native American poetry – thus challenges the very myths on which “America” ’s national construction is built, by affirming the visibility of the first Nations which it has long attempted to exclude. What does being a poet laureate – a “national poet” – mean in the twenty-first century, and what nation(s) may they represent? By focusing more specifically on the unprecedented space opened up by Harjo’s project, and on the various scales it articulates, my paper aims at questioning what becomes of “American” literature as its lines are irremediably made to shift by a plurality of locales, cultures and languages. How do local, tribal, national or transcontinental boundaries intersect on the map? What various poetic communities may interact and what cultural and physical goods may be exchanged in the process? How does Harjo’s collective endeavor prolong and complexify American poetry’s movement “from place to site” (Lytle Shaw), calling for more fine-grained critical tools to assess Native authors’ engagement with various creative and discursive traditions? And how may they help us reassess the poetic and political configurations of North American poetry at large?
Panel 2: Renewed Ecopoetics Constellations
Last Fall, when COP26 was convening in Glasgow, Scotland, climate activists around the world poured out their general scorn for the proceedings. Every day my email was flooded with calls to the streets. Those sent by Extinction Rebellion often closed “With love & rage,” an apt description, I thought, of the state in which many poets find themselves writing these days. I had long been asking questions about what role poetry might play in countering the destructive alienation that has brought the human species to such a disastrous relationship with the planet we depend upon, and had recently turned to Lucretius’ The Nature of Things, seeking a language of material being and radical connectivity in this long poem about the natural world, which is also, famously, a hymn to love. My talk will consider the power as well as limitations of Lucretian love, as well as of Lisa Robertson’s notion of Lucretian “nilling” as an aspect of writing in an age of compound extremities. I’ll compare these with the “affection” Wendell Berry calls for in essays that pulse with both Lucretian ardor and environmental rage. Lastly I’ll look at how these varieties of love and rage might or might not cohere with Ed Roberson’s definition of “the ecopoetic” which, he states, “occurs when an individual’s sense of the larger Earth enters into the world of human knowledge.”
At the height of the movements of language poetry (1980-2000) and conceptualism (2000-2010), both declared themselves to be the last avant-garde. The two movements pushed language to its extreme ends and appeared to arrive at the limits of poetic experimentation. Language poetry claimed that dislodging traditional poetic signifiers from the signified – disrupting Romantic conceptions of the lyric self and modernist use of artifice as the signature of genius – allowed for poetry to take a self-critical stance towards the relation of form and history. Conceptualism pursued an extreme formalism by elevating mimesis and data transfer into master tropes that allegorized postmodern depthlessness and the spread of Internet culture. This paper argues that these movements are best understood not as last avant-gardes but as pursuing the extremes of certain formal poetics devices while abandoning other devices, which themselves still harbor avant-garde potentials. The multitudinous movement of ecopoetics takes up the avant-garde tradition in this other direction, pursuing a new panoply of extreme writing techniques and tropes as a way of making sense of the environmental extremes overtaking the planet. In particular, I argue that personification, a trope disdained by Language poets for its Romantic vestiges and only of marginal interest in Conceptualism insofar as it suggests a mask for assuming any identity on the Internet, has become a newly extreme trope. Recent ecopoetic work in the last two decades by Mei-Mei Bersenbrugge and Will Alexander presses personification to new limits in order to address and converse with flowers and stars (Bersenbrugge) and geological and cosmological forces (Alexander). These poets also draw from legacies of animism and personification in non-Western cultures. Such poetry shows a new direction for avant-garde poetics in finding a form of experimental address with the nonhuman and the planetary. Understanding environmental poetics as an extension and critique of past avant-gardes requires a new theorization of the relation of experimental poetic forms in connection to both social history and environmental history.
Panel 3: Rethinking Montage
After a brief general introduction to the history of erasurism since the 1960s, this paper adopts a hauntological perspective (via Jacques Derrida, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds) to investigate Ronald Johnson’s foundational erasurist experiment RADI OS, whose title (especially to a French or etymologically-trained ear) evokes medical radiographies, the caesura between RADI and OS in Johnson’s title implicitly stripping Milton’s epic Paradise Lost to the bone so as to lay bare its lyric ossature. It proceeds to consider recent examples of erasurist activism including Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), Travis Macdonald’s 2008 The O Mission Repo (an erasure of the 9/11 Commission Report), M. NourbeSe Philip’s erasure of a late 18th century Middle Passage legal report ZONG! (2008), Jonathan Safran Foer’s un-representations of the Holocaust in Tree of Codes (2010), and Steve McCaffery’s Menippean repurposing of Shakespeare’s sonnets in Dark Ladies (2016).
- Peter Middleton, University of Southampton, “The Politics of Repetition in Juliana Spahr, Layli Long Soldier, and Srikanth Reddy“
I shall discuss three 21st century poets who have been redeploying new affordances made available by digital media to the more considered art of the poem. Juliana Spahr, Layli Long Soldier, and Srikanth Reddy, connect anarchic forms of petition by which social media users resist the corporate attention economy, back to earlier twentieth century modernist practices of repetition and dense intertextuality. Their poems provocatively reframe environmental audit, erasure poetics, extensive textual borrowing, and scrutiny of official documents. Spahr’s poetics emerges from concern that even the most radical “literature has been sequestered into irrelevance” by postwar American governments. Long Soldier imagines poetic repair to the legal linguistics of the text of the US government Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. Srikanth Reddy’s poem Voyager disrupts the algorithms of a deceptive record of historical violence, unexpectedly revealing complacent assumptions about authorship and copyright regimes. Like Spahr and Long Soldier, he wonders how a progressive politics can find semantically latent possibilities of hope within texts that enforce governmental sequestration.
Tan Lin’s writing occupies a unique position in recent-ish US poetry. Engaging with art, theory, fiction, and para-literary texts, his books Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking, Heath, and Insomnia and the Aunt are difficult to categorize because they dismiss familiar criteria by which literature is evaluated. Published as poetry, they ignore many of the generic characteristic of poetry and borrow from other media. Moreover, Lin produced variations and derivations on these works, releasing digital supplementary materials to Seven Controlled Vocabularies and a revised second edition of Heath, both made in collaboration with other poets and students. In this way, Lin’s work links genre to process and form to change. In this paper, I will catalogue various genre tropes (especially from fiction, theory, and memoir) that Lin adopts in his work and connect these to the open-ended collaborative procedures that continually reshape the texts.
Panel 4: Documentary Poetics
- William Dow, University Gustave Eiffel, “Metabolizing Genres: American Poetry and Literary Journalism”
In the spirit of the conference, I would like to focus on some of US poetry’s “current configurations,” particularly in the context of its “experimental traditions” and relationship to other genres. The poets Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976), Muriel Rukeyser (1913–80), Mark Nowak (b. 1964), C. D. Wright (1949–2016), and Claudia Rankine (b. 1963) did, or are doing, some of their best and most influential work in long poems that encompass a large documentary and literary-journalistic picture. These poets offer a range of versions of how poetry and journalism have evolved together and work together in narrative reporting while at the same time showing the variety of possibilities open to poets about the uses of journalism. Each poet specializes in reconciling the language of information with the language of art through their poetic discourses and each sheds much light on the question of what poetry is—or perhaps what it does or might do. In the tradition of American poets who employ literary-journalistic and documentary devices in their poetry and/or integrate distinctly poetic forms into their journalism (e.g., Walt Whitman, Adrienne Rich), these five poets show representative meeting points in an American tradition of experimental poetry and journalism.
As Andrea Pitzer has recently pointed out, “When people talk about journalism tottering off into quaint irrelevance, there is a tendency to compare journalism to poetry.” Alongside actual combinations of poetry and journalism, such comparisons, particularly in reference to twentieth century and contemporary American poetry, ask some hard questions for literary journalism studies. Can a poetic use of literary journalism create an ethos that might be arrived at in a fashion that strikes the imagination and makes observation a little richer than what it was? Can poetry be a more direct narrative mode than has been historically imagined for narrative journalism? How can scholars best confront the fact that contemporary American poets are increasingly writing “documentary” poems that “report” on events and that journalists are resorting to poetic prose in order to convey perspectives that cannot be presented in any other form? “Poetry seems unlikely to replace standard print narratives and even less likely to supplant the inverted pyramid,” as Pitzer argues, but “the future of poetry and the future of news” may be intertwined more tightly than critics have previously recognized. Not static or universal but situational, contextual, shifting depending on the other nonpoetry discourses engaged, poetry certainly deserves its place in debates on genres within literary-journalistic texts and on notions of representations and stylistic innovations in journalism.
I will do this by tracing the tradition of American poets who employ literary-journalistic and documentary devices in their poetry and/or integrate distinctly poetic forms into their journalism. (e.g., Walt Whitman, Melvin B. Tolson, Kenneth Fearing, Charles Reznikoff, Tillie Olson, Adrienne Rich, C.D. Wright), this paper will focus on representative meeting points among an American tradition of experimental poetry, literary journalism, and the depictions of oppressed and suffering individuals and communities. It will examine how such poets get the news into their poems and how they respond to journalism’s mimeticism, objectivity, and resistance to abstraction.
My argument is also a response to what I see as an inadequate taxonomy regarding certain “social forms” of experimental American poetry from the 1930s to present. The taxonomy that I’ll take issue with is the grouping of documentary or “modern mass media” poets (Kalajidian 1993: 201) as mere “extenders of the document” (Thurston). Although these poets were working out of a documentary culture that had infiltrated modernist fiction—especially following the economic events of 1929—their poetry is much more than “juxtapose[ed] snatches of discourse drawn from diverse registers and locations” (Thurston). Rather, there are hard strains of objective journalistic discourse in their work that resist the inclusive categories of “documentary style” or a “documentary modernism” to which their poetry is frequently assigned.
- Naomi Toth, University Paris Nanterre, “Poetic justice? Appropriating legal documents in contemporary North American poetry”
Pleas and trial judgements, title deeds, citizenship application forms, the last words of prisoners condemned to death: a broad range of documents from the legal system have been appropriated by poets and visual artists over the last two decades, an act that each time changes the political potential of the documents concerned. Such practices, in spite of what practitioners themselves might claim, necessarily engage with conceptions of justice beyond the law, and such extra-judical conceptions of justice are often called upon so as to underscore the absurdity of a justice system considered unjust. And yet, dependent as they are on official sources, their critical potential remains fragile. To what extent do such works actually reinforce the law as it stands? To what extent might they allow, on the contrary, for oppositions to the legal system to be formulated? And what kinds of concerns are addressed – property rights, the rights of women, prisoners, foreign subjects? To answer such questions, this paper will present a survey of contemporary practices along two axes. The first concerns the treatment given to the documents, including forms of reproduction, excision, erasure, selection, redistribution of elements on the page or canvas. The second considers the objectives of such practices: reprisal as a form of social analysis or history; reprisal as exposure of legal failings; reprisal as violence against the law; reprisal as reparation. Poets and artists that will be situated on this map include M. NourbeSe Philip, Vanessa Place, Carlos Soto Roman, Philip Metres, Tomashi Jackson, Luis Camnitzer, Nicole Cooley, Niina Pollieri and Jenny Holzer. These practitioners may be situated in relation to two historical forerunners, Charles Reznikoff and Muriel Rukeyser, who represent diverging positions concerning political engagement.
- Martin Glaz Serup, University of Copenhagen, “To appellant, every woman is a bitch – a reading of Vanessa Place’ Statement of Facts.”
In court documents the continuous effort to sound the impersonal, objective, neutral and true is often being played out. From Charles Reznikoff and beyond, a literary tradition of appropriation, post-production, manipulation and investigation of these documentary legal documents have unfolded. Amongst other places in the work of Vanessa Place. In her Tragodía trilogy, Place, herself an appellate attorney, appropriates her own legal writing and republishes it as poetry. Transferred from the courtroom to the poetry book, the rhetoric of witnessing is no longer performative in the same way as before – but what is it then? Reading the first part the trilogy, Statement of Facts (2010), raises many questions; maybe first and foremost: What is a fact? And what does a fact actually tell us? When is it important and who is to decide? The language under scrutiny is the language of the law; the language and the ways of the court. Place’s poetry is also a reportage from Los Angeles, that bring stories and voices belonging to a marginalized group of society to the fore. This paper wants to show how the conceptual witness literature of Vanessa Place operates, and discuss some of its obvious political potential.
Panel 5: Queer & Feminist Interventions
- Claire Finch, University Paris 8, “Kathy Acker’s Cuntemporary – feminism, fuck you’s, and avant-garde literary technologies”
In this talk I focus on contemporaneity and avant-garde textual practices, and the kinds of feminist interventions that we can do in literary theory. Literary history and poetics have a way of forgetting where they intersect with feminism. The US-born poet and experimental prose writer Kathy Acker started writing at exactly the moment when feminism was becoming a legible social, academic, and literary presence in the United States and Europe. And she began writing at exactly the time—a time that still hasn’t been totally resolved or categorized—when what people were calling “modernism” was mingling with “postmodernism,” “avant-garde,” and “contemporary.” I propose that by tracing Acker’s early poetic text experiments and in particular those from the the early 70s, prior to her publications with The Vanishing Rotating Triangle Press, can reflect back the historical unease with which feminism and avant-garde poetic practices collided. While doing this, I am keeping in mind how feminism as a political, social, academic, and literary historical movement was a key driving force in the establishment of avant-garde technologies. Using Kathy Acker as a case study I’m looking at what theorists such as Peter Osborne and Terry Smith have called “contemporaneity”—focusing on what afab* and femme** people did with this contemporaneity, or in it, or against it. Instead of reading Kathy Acker into what Geoff Cox and Jacob Lund have called “The Contemporary Condition” (drawing on the translation of Giorgio Agamben’s Che cos’è il contemporaneo? into English), I want to talk about how Kathy Acker fits into a cuntemporary condition. I elaborate the cuntemporary through Acker, focusing on shifts in her writing from the late-sixties to the mid-seventies. Within these texts I follow two main threads: that of pornographic literary codes, and that of autobiographic literary codes. Following these two threads allows me to both refigure Acker’s position within current accounts of her contemporary – her contemporaneity – and to point out ways in which accounts of contemporary and avant-garde poetic innovations have largely downplayed the role of queer feminist literary technologies.
*afab: assigned female at birth.
**femme: queer person who plays with cultural protocols of femininity.
- Héloïse Thomas, University Bordeaux-Montaigne, “‘It’s a poem I memorized to stay alive when everything in me screamed otherwise’: Poetry, Form, and Liberation in the 21st Century”
21st-century North American literature is, by and large, one of collapse and reconstruction, concerned both with excavating lost archives from the past in order to recover the voices from marginalized communities and with imagining new futures that take us beyond the fate that politics and media, saturated with apocalyptic rhetoric, have seemingly condemned us to. Contemporary poetry, specifically, echoes these dynamics and refracts them through its own aesthetic concerns. In this paper, drawing from a line in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel The Book of Joan, I contend that the formal experimentations enacted by a major part of contemporary North American poetry, offer us a space to reshape historical consciousness and imagine worlds without hegemony, shaped by feminist, queer, and decolonial visions of futurity. Poetry, as a part of literature, becomes a space where one can outline and interrogate what constitutes subjectivity and selfhood (both national and personal) in the age of the Anthropocene; as a specific genre that questions the expectations of narrative or the claims to truth and authenticity of nonfiction, poetry is renewing with its highly politicized history that positioned it as a means of liberation. I will draw on Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution and Robin Coste Lewis’s Voyage of the Sable Venus as examples of how poetry is used to investigate the intersecting power dynamics of gender, sexuality, race, class, colonialism, and emancipation on a transnational level. I will also discuss such poets as Marwa Helal, Natalie Diaz, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine, who have been acclaimed in their work to subvert conventional forms and create new aesthetics, as well as the growing presence of poetry within non-poetic genres, such as the novel or the essay, and what that means for poetry as a space of radical reimagining of the future.
Panel 6: The Poetics of Care and Health
- Adam Clay, University of la Rochelle, “Politics and aesthetics of care in Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poems”
This paper aims to demonstrate that reading Brandy Nalani McDougall’s poems through the lens of the concept of care yields insights into some of the subtle ways in which this contemporary Hawaiian poet and academic is able to intertwine politics and aesthetics. Care, I further contend, is a notion that sheds light on what poetry like McDougall’s achieves and calls for: a bringing to the fore of ordinary and neglected experiences, words, and world views. Indeed, McDougall’s caring in and through poetry, including through her frequent use of Hawaiian words in her poems, is as much an aesthetic move as it is a political one. I will put this argument forward by drawing on works by care ethicists such as contemporary French philosopher Sandra Laugier: just as the latter claims that “[t]he ethics of care draws our attention to the ordinary, to what we are unable to see, to what is right before our eyes and is for this very reason invisible to us,” I will contend that McDougall’s
poetry “has given voice to the ordinary” all the while putting care itself at the centre (“The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary,” 2015). I will do so by analysing McDougall’s 2013 poem “The Second Gift” before turning to her 2008 collection The Salt-Wind and demonstrating how pervasive and effective the concept of care is therein. While Laugier has discussed ways in which Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s works testify to an interest in the ordinary (“Transcendentalism and the Ordinary,” 2009), I will argue that McDougall’s poems constitute a contemporary expression of a focus on the ordinary which pertains the ethics of care and which intertwines aesthetics and politics in ways that are perhaps just as significant for America nowadays as Transcendentalism was in its time.
- Toni Juncosa, University of Barcelona, “‘Every day is a funeral and a miracle:’ Danez Smith’s Poetry, HIV, and 21st-Century Elegiac Genre”
Danez Smith’s second volume of poetry Don’t Call Us Dead (2017) bears testimony to the complex social position, as well as intricate experience, of Black, queer, HIV+ subjects in contemporary US society. Smith’s portrayal of institutionalized violence against the intersectional body has owned the poet renown as one of the leading “contemporary African American practitioners of the elegy” (Lennon 193), but which loss exactly Smith’s verse elegizes is not clearly evident. Both Black literature and AIDS literature have been read as artistic responses to loss, and therefore as elegiac work (respectively, Cavitch, Muñoz, Tettenborn; and Fuss, Ramazani, Zeiger). Yet, can the experience of grief resulting from white supremacy be clearly separated from that of the AIDS crisis? And, most importantly, to what extent can HIV in the 21st century be said to continue to imply loss as it did in the 80s and 90s, now that antiretroviral treatment can be accessed? Further, may HIV equal experiences other than loss – even positive or constructive experiences – after the “pharmaceutical threshold” of 1996 (Pearl)? The aim of this presentation is to consider the persistence of elegy as a genre, with a specific focus on the contemporary experience of living with HIV. With this goal in mind, I will be reading Danez Smith’s work in light of scholarly approaches to the elegy as well as through the prism of queer theory (Castiglia & Reed, Cvetkovicz) and Black studies (Douglass & Wilderson).
Panel 7: Anthologies, Race, and Identities
- Samantha Majhor, Marquette University, “Indigenous Rising: Native Voices in the 21st Century North American Poetic Landscape”
In the introduction to the 2018 anthology of poetry titled New Poets of Native Nations, Heid E. Erdrich writes “‘Native American poetry’ does no really exist. Our poetry might be hundreds of distinct tribal and cultural poetries as well as American poetry.” Native American poets not only engage their own national and cultural legacies, but their poetry continues to influence and speak back to what we consider North American poetic movements. In my presentation, I argue for the recognition of a strong dialogue between Native North American poets and various movements in poetry in the latter half of the 20th century and the early 21st century. I specifically highlight a generative exchange of influence with regard to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets and two theoretical turns, postmodernism and materialism. I argue that Indigenous North American poets express specific connections between language, landscape, art, and nations in dialogue with these schools and theoretical movements. My presentation will look closely at a selection of Native American poetry from three recently published anthologies, including Erdrich’s edited selection in New Poets of Native Nations, quoted above, When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through, edited by Joy Harjo, and Native Voices, edited by C. Marie Furman and Dean Rader. The last anthology of Native American poetry had been published in 1988, and so these three compilations that have been published in the last two years were long overdue and call for a fresh look at the continued vibrancy in Indigenous writing in North America. Now is the time to take a closer look at Native American and Indigenous contributions to the North American poetic landscape at the turn of the century and beyond.
In the mid-1970’s, Gilles Deleuze claimed “Anglo-American literature” was superior to its French counterpart’s “romanticism” because its “collective assemblage of enunciation” necessitated the “invent[ion]” of new logics. He feigned to take part in this “minoritarian becoming,” declaring, “We have painted ourselves in the colors of the world” (Dialogues II 46). Deleuze might have predicted a currently throbbing tug of war between North American cosmopolitanism and xenophobia. Witness Deleuze and Guattari citing Michèle Lalonde’s “Speak White” to exemplify the “rhizomatic” subject, or see Ronald Bogue’s recuperation of their “cosmopolitanism” in terms of what Deleuze, in his interviews with Claire Parent, called the promise of “universal migration.” How does anthologizing become responsive to this prediction, but also to Trump-era populism, authoritarianism, in short: xenophobia? (“Nature, Law and Cosmopolitanism” in Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze). What’s informative about an anthology is that it is a consequence of its heuristic conditions. One of which is the risk of cooptation in the desire to know. Can an anthology exemplify these conditions if its “innovation” is due to its power to alter them? The alteration and the exemplification, taken together, are what Deleuze meant by “painting.”
Xenophobia’s guiding principle: even the unknown is already seen. I will discuss xenophobia and cosmopolitanism in light of anthologizing practices in 21st century North American poetry. After elucidating the changing problematics with a survey of USAmerican anthologies of the last two decades, I will offer a new collection of poetry by Legna Rodríguez Iglesias, translated by Katherine M. Hedeen, and discuss it as an exemplification of this problem of rubrics, xenophobia and cosmopolitanism. It is important to me that the author’s attribution is hyphenated: Cuban-American. She writes in Spanish from Miami, her home. It is important that it is a single author collection, not an anthology; but it is collaborative, refractory, and indexed to its context in time and space. This is in response to the implied dominance of English within North American poetries, a dominance that, while still felt, is really a collusion with and becoming of what David Buuck and Juliana Spahr have called “other Englishes” or the Antena collaborative call “language justice.” The unknown is unseen, and probably invisible, at least spectral. That is what anthologies in North American have been attempting, in the generations of “New American” poetry—to cast a light through that specter.
Panel 8: Xenoglossia, Accents, and Polyvocality
- Jennifer Scappettone, University of Chicago, “Glottal Stop: Xenoglossic Breathing and Poetic Transmutations of the Mother Tongue”
This paper explores the political and conceptual implications of translingualism in the poetics, both written and performed, of LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs. The talk begins with Diggs’s 2014 commentary on the album Albion Voice by the London-based musician of Bengali heritage, Bishi, and goes on to analyze a comparable register of “multiculturalism” present in Diggs’s 2013 collection TwERK that is laced with traces of its foundations in multilingual Harlem—yet which, unlike Bishi’s performances aimed at complicating Englishness, registers as global or better, planetary rather than localizably urban or national, in a geopolitically destabilizing key. The talk seeks to chart the repercussions of disrupted breathing in Diggs’s performances—namely the glottal stop—as introduced to a range of natural languages to which that technique of elocution does not “belong.” This virtuosic, percussive mode of punctuating a lyric comprising many tongues manifests Diggs’s study of Indigenous languages and, though laying itself open to charges of cultural appropriation, might be interpreted as a lyric proposal toward transcultural solidarity that implodes our common sense of both the mother tongue and of geopolitical belonging.
- Andrew Eastman, Université de Strasbourg, “Listening with the body: poetics of accent in the work of Cathy Park Hong”
“If you want to truly understand accented English, you have to slow down and listen with your body,” writes Cathy Park Hong, in her recently published collection of essays Minor Feelings: An Asian-American Reckoning. From Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to The Dream Songs, accent—in the sense of a distinctive way of speaking typical of a subgroup or locality—has been a notable preoccupation of U. S. writing and its representation of a multilingual America. Yet print-based poetry, as Charles Bernstein argues, has long tended to the suppression of accent. This linguistic feature comes to the fore when poems are voiced: “the artifice of accent,” notes Bernstein, “is the New Wilderness of poetry performance”. For what accent brings into play, is, of course, not simply the internal multiplicity of English, but the way linguistic variation is worked out as prosody, as specific reinventions of English articulatory behaviors. What is at stake, then, with accent and its representation, is orality in the sense in which Henri Meschonnic uses this term, as “primacy of rhythm and prosody in the way of signifying”: the accents of accent, or the poetics of accent, are central to its political thrust.
Orality, in Meschonnic’s approach, is paradoxically a production of writing and by the same token an identifying characteristic of literature (“literature is maximal orality,” he notes); given which, one might wonder whether “accent” is not more specifically in play through its written inventions than in oral performance. Bernstein sees performed accent as “that which marks our poetries with the inflections of our particular trajectories within our spoken language”—as a registration of the individual. But written accent is a fiction, writing accent a play with letters and rhymes, a play on verbal gesture as signifiance. The political stakes of accent are most acutely focused in the ways it is written down, which, whether they caricature or bear witness, are essentially fantasized language.
Perhaps no work in recent U.S. poetry plays more forcefully with the poetics of accent than Cathy Park Hong’s Dance Dance Revolution (Norton, 2007), a work composed largely of the fictive recorded-and-transcribed speech of a Korean political refugee working as a tourist guide in a sinister Las Vegas-like vacation destination called the Desert. Unequivocally inspired by Finnegans Wake in its dense and often hilarious punning, the guide’s written speech is an unlikely hodgepodge of nonstandard pronunciations, pidginesque grammar, and foreign words borrowed notably from Spanish and Latin, a quasi-English haunted with the ghosts of other languages. Its most characteristic effect is to make words indeterminate, such that “dim” might be determiner or adjective, “fes” equivalent to English “face” or French “fesse”; meanwhile blurring the borderline of the distinction between lexicon and grammar so essential to an English sense of language.
While we tend to think of accent as a matter of pronunciation, Hong’s poems make it a means of rhyming and rhyming a means of morphemic invention: mispronunciations build up their own discursive subsystems, effecting a reshuffling and redistribution of grammatical markers and categories characteristic of pidgins, as in the guide’s imitation of American vernacular pronunciation: “Many ’Merikken dumplings unhinge/ dim talk holes y ejaculate ooh y hot-diggity,/dis is de shee-it”—here discovering and associating in a vulgarity the feminine and neuter subject pronouns so basic to English gendering. Meanwhile, the references here to bodily functions and parts—“dim talk holes” presumably designating the mouth—connects with a description Hong gives of her writing practice in Minor Feelings, viz. that her aim is to “eat English before it eats me”: what is at stake with the writing of accent is how the body is mixed up in language.
Written accent, precisely because it opens up the possibility of multiple accentings (that is, stressings: as with “dim” determiner or adjective) would seem to be more charged with signifiance than the individual renditions of performed accent can be. At stake then in the inventions of accent is the sense of one’s own body engendered by linguistic activity and the way it inscribes one in a linguistic and political community. The grammars of Dance Dance Revolution show how the written medium engages the political stakes of accent, exactly because they allow for “maximal orality” in Meschonnic’s sense.
The proposed paper will offer a reading of Dance Dance Revolution as a way of formulating a poetics of accent in contemporary U.S. poetry.- Shiv Kotecha, New York University / Rhode Island School of Design, “Side Kicks: Not White Fabulation in White Poetry”
In “Side Kicks,” I examine how contemporary non-BIPOC North American poets and artists— among them, the filmmaker Todd Haynes, and the writers Brandon Brown, Andrew Durbin, Ben Lerner, Vanessa Place, and 2020 Nobel Prize Winner Louise Glück—fabulate the lives of “real” BIPOC in their respective works. I begin by offering a short reading of how the filmmaker Todd Haynes and the conceptual writer Vanessa Place address the subjugation of black women in popular historical narratives by providing a close reading that contrasts Haynes’s adaptation of Mildred Pierce (2011) with Vanessa Place’s ongoing “poetic” adaptation of Gone with the Wind for Twitter. I draw this connection so as to contextualize how I am thinking about “racial
fabulation” in the era of the racially inclusive auto-fictive novel. This paper does not aim to make an argument about the ethics of representation as much as it aims to articulate the various means by which race is fabulated within the historical narrative versus the autobiographical narrative. What are the poetic tools, devices, and conventions with which writers—like filmmakers and visual artists—articulate and/or document interracial intimacies, sympathies, and frictions? How may poetry offer forms of polyvocality that suggest a different representational register than those commanded by the regime of the visual?
Panel 9: Digital Poetics and Mixed Media
- Alessandro De Francesco, Turin Academy of Fine Arts, Visiting Professor, Bern Academy of the Arts, and Danny Snelson, University of California, Los Angeles, “Immersive Poetry and VR Poetics”
In this dialogue, we would like to explore several poetical and technical questions pertaining to our own respective practices and, more generally, to the rapidly evolving interaction between poetry and immersive environments. We will distinguish between virtual, augmented, and mixed realities and recount the questions and problems posed by these different digital configurations in relation to emerging poetry and poetics. We will also speak about expanded, immersive, sonic, and visual installations we have each realized over the years, such as Without Need to See and the Poetic Engines by Alessandro De Francesco and Doctored and Bricked by Danny Snelson. Confronting our two very different yet complementary practices, we will outline some current and future possibilities for this broad field of investigation and creation. Beginning with our own practices, we will open onto larger possibilities for newly expanded potentials for immersive poetic activity, tracing ongoing technological developments in relation to the work by a range of authors.
- Joe Milutis, University of Washington-Bothell, “Attack of the Vernacular: Internet Poetics, Platforms, Pedagogy”
If there have been very few clearly defined poetic “movements” in twenty-first-century North American poetics, it is because the presence of the Internet has both confounded coterie as defined by geographic, social and publishing networks, and extended aesthetic insight far beyond the mastery of just a few. Not only does experimentation more likely happen in swarms, but also “poetry” proliferates in a way more akin to Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s notion of the “remainder.” Language games in text-image combinations proliferate in counterpoint to official symbolic meaning, and any poetic scene emerges in ways that have been unprecedented.
To what extent, then, should we consider the specificity of “internet poetry,” not based on authorial personality and location, medium or file-format but upon branding, platform and cultural capital? The focus of my discussion will focus around work from the Internet Poetry Tumblr, an early attempt to brand internet poetry as a genre, connected to Alt-Lit and emerging from the Midwest United States. The Internet Poetry Tumblr’s use of text-image macros retained elements of irony, distancing, and concretism germane to the avant-garde while responding to the more general meme culture. But while it attempted a branding of “internet poetry” through a specific platform—a fraught and paradoxical maneuver—its failure seemed to coincide with an eclipsing of the communitarian ethos nurtured by Tumblr (a New York company) by the more hypercommodified lifestyle ethos of Instagram (a San Francisco company). Does this vernacularism of internet poetry, as it gains popularity, stage the return of the unformalizable, unruly remainder, or is it easily absorbed by corporate formalism? I will approach these questions not only as a practitioner and a theorist but also as a teacher of media-poetry, interested in specific ways that these more “pop” forms can enable experimentalism for beginning students, but also pose pedagogical challenges.
Coming from the field of cinema, Abigail Child’s Foreign Films series join a tendency in contemporary poetry of searching for new forms of expression in audiovisual works. As a United States experimental filmmaker and poet, Abigail Child (1948) refers by this title to subtitled non-English language films, and by then, to the experience of fruitful disjunction between image and text. She combines preexisting images with poetic text written by other poets. By editing texts, images and sound, the author creates new works, as she says, “in collaboration with” (living) poets and (dead) filmmakers. Collaboration is more of a word for recognition of others’ works than real cooperation: while Child chooses basic film material according to poets’ suggestions, she reinterprets original films and texts, often through a feminist critical point of view, and as a consideration of how language makes sense.
This ongoing series is composed of four films: To And No Fro (2005), Mirror World (2006), I’d Sing a Song About (Ligatures) (2009) and Salomé (2014). All of them arrange contemporary poets’ texts (Monica de la Torre, Gary Sullivan, Nada Gordon, Adeena Karasick) on the screen, and apart from I’d Sing…, they all use moving images (by Luis Buñuel, Mehboob Khan and Charles Bryant-Alla Nazimova). In every case, Child dynamically disposes on the screen words chosen from poetic text: new arrangements of text, emphasis in typography, variable length of projection of all of the words create a new poem. Multiple connections take place between image and text (and sound). Foreign Films draw their quality of strangeness from being foreign poems too, foreign to poetry, in an extended form of this genre at the junction of page and screen. I propose to analyze how the overlapping fields of film and poetry create meaning and a new reading dispositive by reconsidering poetic page through film medium.
Panel 10: The Politics of Teaching
- Hélène Aji, Ecole normale supérieure, “Modernist Hangover : Bob Perelman, ‘poet, teacher and critic’”
How to recover from the Modernist past? How to carry on once the do’s and don’t’s of Modernism have been assessed, decentered, and reinvested, producing poetic gestures and a form of poetic activism over a period of some 50 years?
If one looks at Bob Perelman’s beginnings in San Francisco in the 1970s, coming of age with the Language poets, working with them but also sometimes against the grain of some of their more radical experiments in composition, one witnesses the progressive outlining of the personal field of energy that unfolds in Modernism The Morning After (2017). This collection of essays expands further from the initial canon of The Trouble with Genius (1994). Where Perelman’s first book of essays added Gertrude Stein (and to some extent Louis Zukofsky) to the more conventional Modernist pairing of Ezra Pound and James Joyce, the second collection contributed to the self-definition of a poetic group: in The Marginalization of Poetry (1996), the declared goal was to cast light on the lineage of Language writing, its relation to “literary history,” but the main effect remained to underline the meshing of poetics and pedagogy in Perelman’s own vision of poetry. In the 2017 collection of essays, the “wild party / regret scenario” underpins the overall discourse questioning all dogmatic stances in poetry. It advocates a continuous rewriting of the narratives that attempt to account for poetic changes and decisions: by reformulating their rationale, the poet builds diverse responses to the deadly crystallization of Modernism as tradition.
The main purpose of this paper will thus be to underline the specificities of Perelman’s poetic practice in terms of a commitment to teaching and to a radical questioning of assertive and coercive theoretical statements. Seeing the “glass half-full” (Jack and Jill in Troy, 2019), Perelman posits the poet amidst the chaos of wars and disasters as “that fun-loving nobody, / born like us // in the midst of the alphabet.”
In the past ten years, MFA programs in creative writing have been the object of close scrutiny, starting with Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (2011) and its important echo beyond academic circles which triggered a reflection on the weight, power and impact of these programs on American letters. A number of much talked-about pieces followed, from Chad Harbach’s “MFA vs NYC” (2014) to Junot Diaz’s “MFA vs POC” (2014). Interestingly, these essays focused on fiction writing. That the novel is a bigger money-maker than poetry probably explains the relatively weaker public attention granted to “verse making classes” — this being, interestingly, the name that was given to what would later become the Iowa Writers Workshop. “Workshop poetry”, although not analyzed in book-length studies, has been enough of a concept to be derided as such by some avant-garde movements since at least the 1970s, leading to the creation of “anti-workshop” programs such as, in 1991, the Buffalo Poetics Program. This paper would like to consider the current situation of “program poetry” in the United States: how the phrase “workshop poetry” has been used negatively to dismiss writing that was regarded as too instituionalized by a budding avant-garde; how the anti-workshops became, in themselves, institutionalized and what it says of the relationship between poetry writing and academia; and to what extent the conclusions of McGurl and Harbach’s essays can be adapted to poetry, especially in a context where “post-genre” pieces have themselves become an established genre.
- Michael Barnholden, poet, artist, scholar, “The Kootenay School of Writing: A political intervention more than anything else”
The Kootenay School of Writing ended in 2015 after 30 years in Vancouver BC. KSW was founded in 1984 in Nelson, British Columbia by students and faculty when the Social Credit Government closed David Thomson University Centre under the proto-‐ neo-‐liberal cover of “restraint”. This rollback in government spending was pitched as a cost savings policy that attacked human rights legislation, the social safety net, education and arts funding.
The Kootenay School of Writing moved 400 miles west from the isolated sparsely populated resource based interior of the province to the Coastal city of Vancouver that was busily preparing for the 1986 World’s Fair. The largest city on Canada’s west coast was dreaming of becoming a world class city: a move that would require a shift in the economy from a tightly regulated union based work force to a deregulated and privatized cog in the global economy.
As part of a contingent coalition fomenting a general strike the Kootenay School of Writing Collective found its footing as a class based writer run collective. Exploiting the few remaining gaps in social and arts funding, the school was aggressively opposed to compromises with capital while insisting on an aesthetic that was collective and radical.
After thirty years of organizing, despite much criticism and little support the organization has gone into “deep hibernation”, with ex members taking on important roles in writing, teaching, publishing and social organizing, while continuing to develop and present a radical critique of capital and its analogs in the arts.
I will present a necessarily personal but hopefully historical accurate reading of the end of the formal phase of KSW’s existence while speculating on the legacy of the work done by the collective and its possible future.
Panel 11: Listening to Poetry
In 1989 Rita Felski’s Beyond Feminist Aesthetics accused experimental writing of valuing literature’s formal resistance at the expense of “the necessarily more determinate interests of an oppositional politics.” This paper will consider the poetry of Lisa Robertson as indicative of one way in which contemporary North American poetics has sought to suture this gap between the erotic pleasures of pure textuality and the determinate situations of worldly utterance. It considers how certain instances of language use, familiar, quotidian, and regularized might nevertheless contain the potential for innovation. Robertson is attentive to organizations of language and gesture in which the unthought constraints and protocols which govern verbal conduct can become objects of pleasurable identifications and expanded perception. Robertson is distinctive in that, while she is critical of the confinements of gendered identity—the postures which one is constrained to reiterate and by which one becomes intelligible as a subject—she searches for agency within, rather than before or beyond, these constraints. Far from a post-feminist capitulation, her effort involves detaching the gestures, expressions and rhetoric which have historically underwritten gendered subjectivity from the hierarchical order of value in which they are bound up. Prosody is the category of this enlivening potentiality, where the contours of speaking become sensible as evidence of a history of collective expressive capacity. Those contours and constraints are not revealed and disavowed in favour of an unfettered, a priori self-constituting energy, but change their function or modality once we become aware of them, generating new possibilities within even hackneyed and generic speech. Robertson’s writing provokes us to think about the embodied animation of institutionalised techniques. It emphasises the capacities of the speaker in the moment of utterance, and therefore differs from the way in which Language writing located its politics in the excesses of textual materiality.
- Lacy Rumsey, Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon, “Directions and Limits in Twenty-First Century Prosody”
To what extent is the contemporary English-language poetry of the United States able to build the prosodic resources of that language – its rhythms and intonations – into sustained aesthetic structures? My talk does not aim to answer this question, but to posit it as a central line of inquiry for any poetics that seeks to account for, and valorize, the aesthetic. It points to the descriptive tools that are currently available for the study of poetic prosody, and offers short readings that suggest a contrast in prosodic practice between some older poets still active in the period 2000-2020, notably Clark Coolidge and August Kleinzahler, and younger writers such as Kevin Davies and Terrance Hayes. These poets’ attempts to move beyond the micropoetic may be indicative of certain limits: Davies as regards the extension of intonational structure across the long poem, Hayes as regards a largely post-metrical era’s appetite for sustained rhythmic patterning within lyric.
This paper, which we could call a playlist, emerges from one of my current projects—provisionally titled Literary Live Art—which explores writing and text in, for, and through performance. I’m using ‘literary live art’ as a poetic placeholder or new generic descriptor for something that doesn’t quite fit either under the usual banner of live art on the one hand and straightforward poetry readings on the other. I look at and also experiment with explicitly literary movement-based work, multi-media performances, sound recordings, and hybrid formats like the lecture-performance, the video essay, and performance writing. Part of this work is scholarly in the conventional sense (there’s analysis, there is probably an argument), another part is practice-based, that means I’m trying to address my research questions performatively (through performances, lecture performances, performance writing, and community workshops), in order to figure out new imaginative, collaborative, and embodied ways of producing knowledge. For the conference, I will share some of my recent work on live readings and sound work, responding to and inviting in: Cassandra Gillig’s poetry mixtape, Montez Radio, Bricks from the Kiln’s sound-based magazine contributions, Wayne Koestenbaum’s Instagram video-poems, and some poetry readings that happened over Zoom during the pandemic (the Annual New Year’s Day Poetry Marathon organised by the Poetry Project; Edwin Torres’s Body Language Series, one of which included KJ Holmes dancing in response to the live poetry readings). Much of this work requires new forms of listening and listening-writing on my part, perhaps through a more ‘sensorially charged prose’, as Dylan Robinson puts it, or by embodying the affective charge of the subject in question. Given the nature of this project and welcoming excess, failure, and silliness, the form of this paper will probably diverge somewhat from a conventional conference paper.
Panel 12: Poetics of Address
- Kasper Bartczak, University of Łódź, “Voice as figure for ‘more life’ in Peter Gizzi’s psycho-political poetry”
This paper discusses Peter Gizzi’s renewal of the lyric voice as a mode of vitalist opposition to the pressures and crises of psycho-politics. Critics such as Olivier Brossard or David Herd have discussed how Gizzi renews the lyrical voice by utilizing the discovery of the loss and artificiality of the self toward building politically and civically viable positions. Building on such discussions, I would like to show how Gizzi’s constructed voice is also a form of vitalist rethinking of the concept of life. Gizzi’s complex engagement with nature and biosphere leads the poet to experimenting with the figure of “more life” which is a form of post-secular messianic vitalism, as discussed in the work of the Polish philosopher Agata Bielik-Robson. I am going to argue that the variety of vitalism that informs Gizzi’s politically active artificial selves is the poet’s strategy for protecting life as a medium of creative experiment in the times of constant political crisis, a pernicious and corrosive climate that the late Bernard Stiegler characterized as psycho-politics.
- Daniel Katz, University of Warwick, “‘These Feelings of Futurelessness’: Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark”
Peter Gizzi’s Now It’s Dark is a book about death and about time, about what disappears and remains, about corpses, ghosts, voices and printed words. That there is nothing new about this is part of its point. And yet, this is a book that consistently scrambles the articulations which habitually govern those elements. In Now It’s Dark, the corpse walks through life, ghosts speak for the living as much as the departed, voices sing in ink, on paper. Throughout the book, one finds a distinctly Whitmanian (reinforced by echoes and allusions)
consideration of the ever-replaying cyclical in relation to other modalities of non-futurity. When the book mentions “These feelings/of futurelessness” is this futurelessness due to an ultimate ending, or to the idea that there is no future if everything has already returned and will only return again?
Notably, the book pursues these problems in its formal organisation also, consisting of three sections and a “coda”—an element which by its very definition comes after that to which it is appended, and by that token, also renders the completeness of the prior object problematic. Where does the book, or a life, or a moment, actually end? When is the “now” of “Now it’s dark”? These questions are mirrored in that each of the three sections proper operates with a very different formal economy in terms of linearity, seriality, or circularity. For these reasons, the book is able to discuss “the way / the technology of an I/ is filled with the dead” with unique complexity, constantly showing how “we,” whomever that pronoun encompasses, also feed others as we disappear.