Entries published during December, 2015

Event 56: Poets Theater

From Amiri Baraka, Home on the Range

From Amiri Baraka, Home on the Range

Festival of Poets Theater
Sector 2337, Chicago
2–5 December 2015
(After On Kawara)

Heidi Bean
Patrick Durgin
Carla Harryman
Devin King
John Beer
Daniel Borzutzky
John Tipton
Jennifer Karmin
Jennifer Rupert
Chris Glomski
Peter O’Leary
Laura Goldstein
Dan Godston
Analeah Rosen … More

Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic:
Transvaluations of Value after Modernism”
MSA, 20 November 2015

I continue my discussion of the poetics of value in modernism (Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams) in taking up political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, twin discourses of the determination of value. For poetics as value making, let me advance that the thirty-six individual essays in our recent Guide to Poetics Journal, along with the editorial and publication work involved in soliciting, editing, rethinking, and repurposing their content, counts as such. Each essay in our Guide—for example, Ron Silliman on “the parsimony principle,” George Lakoff on avant-garde framing, Susan Howe on Emily Dickinson, Lyn Hejinian on “the rejection of closure,” in the volume’s first section—demonstrates how poetry is a value-making activity, in giving value to it. … More

Transvaluations of Value: Poetics and Political Economy
Session P28, 8:30–10:00 A.M., Friday, 20 November 2015
Modernist Studies Association

Herman Rapaport, “Transvaluations of Value: Fredric Jameson, Jackson Mac Low”
Barrett Watten, “The Poet/Critic: Transvaluations of Value After Modernism”
Tyrone Williams, “‘The Changing Same’: Value in Marx and Amiri Baraka”

This panel takes up debates between poetics and political economy after the recent turn to Marxist political economy as a materialist interpretive strategy for poetry and poetics. In a contrary move, a return to the aesthetic as a construction of value, sited in a more classical reading of modernist form by Charles Altieri, appropriates the concept of “value” for self-reflexive poetic forms. The three presenters will develop approaches to the concept of value that are irreducible either to economism, especially the commodity form, or to the aesthetic, e.g. modernism, and will seek to articulate more inclusive accounts of value that extend political economy to other value-producing registers in the horizons of art, history, ethics, and politics. [See next post.]

Modernist Studies Association
Boston, Massachusetts
19–22 November 2015
(after On Kawara)

Herman Rapaport
Tyrone Williams
Carla Billiterri
Ben Friedlander
Alisa Allkins
Alan Golding
Aaron Nyerges
Sarah Posman
Dorothy Wang
Rachel Galvin
Kaplan Harris
… More

Document 38: Occupy Poetics

Barrett Watten, “Occupy Poetics:
A Work in Progress”
ASAP, 28 September 2015

This paper follows on a contribution to the EAM meeting in Helsinki that tracked two opposing accounts of language-centered writing’s influence on experimental poets engaged in Occupy movements, specifically Oakland. Moving from a materialist account of utopian possibility realized in poetic form to a combinatorial freedom associated with chance-generated strategies, the essay sought a convergence between contingent decision, radical freedom, and experimental practices among Occupy poets, focusing on poets David Lau and Brian Ang. In extending my argument, I survey a greater range of poets in the movement, beginning with Sara Larsen and Jasper Bernes, to develop a set of terms that interpret Occupy itself as informed by poetic principles. I return to the proliferation of poetics in the various Occupy sites, both to confirm the importance of a poetics of “combinatorial materialism,” and to extend the analysis of my first two examples by alternative concerns more prominent or visible in other poets. … More

Association for the Study
of the Arts of the Present
Greenville, South Carolina
24–27 September 2015
(after On Kawara)

Jonathan Eburne
Nico Israel
Lytle Shaw
Sarah Brouillette
Mark Goble
Gloria Fisk
Brian McHale
Esther Gottlieb
Jennifer Ashton
Walter Benn Michaels
… More