Entries tagged with poetics

May 14, 2017

Document 50: Poetics as Value Thinking

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

Document 49: Poetics as Knowledge Base

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

Event 71: I Met (Louisville 2017)

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

September 3, 2016

Document 42: I Read (Questions of Poetics)

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Free Speech Movement
Ansel Adams
Allen Ginsberg
Black Panther Party
Robert Duncan
W.S. Merwin
Denise Levertov
Robert Creeley
Robert Grenier
1–10: “Non-Events”
… More

Document 41: Iowa Discount Flyer

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August 16, 2016

Entry 25: 17 Reasons Why!

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Reason 1: Language writing should not be understood in merely formalist terms.

Reason 2: It is a consequence of the cultural logic of the period(s) in which it was written and has its influence.

Reason 3: But, we must ask, what is a cultural logic, and how many of them are there to name?

Reason 4: If Enlightenment is a cultural logic, not just an abstract universal, the poetics of this situation are yet to be found out.

Reason 5: It is not exaggerating to claim these debates have scarcely been engaged, and will continue past publication of this volume.

Reason 6: The relation of Language writing to identity is a major motivation, as is the question of free speech as liberationist goal. … More

August 11, 2016

Entry 24: 17 Reasons Why!

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17 Reasons Why! 

“17 Reasons Why!” is a key site in the cognitive map of San Francisco during the period in which Language writing emerged, the 1970s. The cryptic formula, for which no adequate explanation has been given, overlooked the Mission District at the intersection of 17th and Mission—and yet also seemed hardly to be there. Its address was always already iterative and non sequitur, always a prompt for questioning. I left the Bay Area before it came down in 2000, but it has a solid place in the firmament of urban legend, as in this article, from which we learn: “The 17 did refer to the fact the store stood on the corner of 17th Street. But what were the reasons? ‘People would ask what the 17 reasons were, and we would guff it off. There were no 17 reasons,’ [the former owner’s son] said.”

[To be contd.]

August 10, 2016

Event 62: Questions of Poetics

Announcing publication of
Questions of Poetics: Language Writing
and Consequences

 

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“Questions of Poetics is full-on Watten, a book with sharp edges, relentless intelligence, and an unwavering conviction that the arts have serious work to do.”
—Peter Nicholls, author, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism

“Questions of Poetics represents a major statement by one of the highest profile poet-critics of the day. Its arguments concerning genre, form, particularity, and negativity represent a solid, easily grasped, portable way of thinking about the ongoingness of the avant-garde, its continual diversification and reinvention. Moreover, Watten offers a persuasive reappraisal of Language writing and its place in American literary history.”
—Brian Reed, author, Nobody’s Business: TwentyFirst Century Avant-Garde Poetics

Official release date: September 1, 2016. For the University of Iowa Press flyer, see here; for ordering options, see here.

December 28, 2015

Document 39: Transvaluations II

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

December 24, 2015

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

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