Entries published during May, 2017

Seminar: Questions of the Present
in Contemporary Poetics

@ MSA 19 Amsterdam
10–13 August 2017
to register click here

desk 170517

Since 2011, there has been an explosion of new writing in poetics as an academic discourse and a proliferation of new approaches to poetry that unite formal concerns (after Language writing, conceptualism, Flarf, and other avant-gardes) with radical accounts of the millennial present—in a manner reflecting on, but departing from, modernism. This seminar will perform several tasks: first, to survey recent writing in poetics that “question the present,” involving concerns of political economy, ideology and public discourse, documentary and digital sources, gender and sexuality, race and poets of color, hybrid forms, and multi-languaged writing/translation. Then, it will undertake an overview of new forms of writing that engage these questions of the present. Finally, it will ask how poetry and poetics can create new critical and creative, activist and interventionist, initiatives, to counter deformed public discourse(s) of our presentist epoch. What does it mean to question poetics and poetry as a historicism of the present?

Seminar organizer: Barrett Watten
Professor, English, Wayne State University
Contact: barrett.watten@gmail.com
Registration: MSA 19 website here

Poetics as Value Thinking:
Transvaluations of Language Writing

Presented at Fondation des Etats-Unis, Paris
sponsored by Double Change/Ecole normale supérieure
15 March 2017

This lecture is a hybrid of two thought experiments—one, a discussion of the poetics of value that sees political economy and poetics as twin forms of historically specific making, linked discourses of the determination of value. The second is a proposal for the transvaluation of poetics, and specifically Language writing, as a prospective organization of poetic labor as a form of a “knowledge base” (adopted from information and digital theory). The notion that unites both is that poetry and poetics are forms not only of value making but value thinking—sites for the transvaluation of a general notion of value into particular values. … More

Paris, 13–20 March 2017

Monday, March 13

DTW > CDG

Françoise de Laroque
Juliette de Laroque

Le Tagada Bar

Tuesday, March 14

Isakaya Issé

Abigail Lang

Wednesday, March 15

Lecture and reading @
Fondation des Etats-Unis
sponsored by Double Change
& Ecole normale supérieure

“Poetics as Value Thinking:
Transvaluations of Language Writing”

Reading of “Plan B” and translation

… More

Poetics as Knowledge Base:
The Example of “Plan B”

Presented at the Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture after 1900
24 February 2017

This paper is a thought experiment that reads experimental poetry and poetics in relation to the concept of “knowledge base”—even as poetic attempts to create a knowledge base itself. The making of poetry has always been attended by some kind of “lore,” the necessary but often obscure or intractable set of background knowledges and beliefs that are crucial for its understanding—T.S. Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land or Louis Zukofsky’s parallel texts for “Mantis” are modern examples of this. Historicism in poetics depends on accessing and developing this lore, which it extends to more nuanced contexts; at the same time, theory-based approaches creates a metadiscourse of key concepts that may become part of the knowledge base of poetics. From the romantics to the postmoderns, the construction of such a knowledge base is a necessary entailment of “the making of the work in its condition of possibility”—the task of poetics as a discourse. I want to look at a range of ways this knowledge base is represented and accessed, from the archiving of writings in poetics to modernist and postmodern concordances to major works (such as Zukofsky’s “A”) to online poetry/poetics archives to recent experimental methods. What would a rigorous use of the concept of “knowledge base” in computing and information theory bring to understanding poetics in such terms? … More

The Louisville Conference
on Literature and Culture since 1900
23–25 February 2017
University of Louisville

Alan Golding
George Hart
Jennifer Bartlett
Aldon Lynn Nielsen
Diana Rosenberger
Kelly Roy Polasek
Jill Darling
Erik Mortenson
cris cheek
Lisa Hollenbach
Jack Halberstam
Juliana Spahr
James Smethurst
Magdalena Zurawski
Norman Finkelstein
Tyrone Williams
… More