>> Events <<
July 22, 2017
Tuesday, July 4
Delta Airlines / DTW > MUC
Thomas Struth, Frank Bowling,
Hans Haacke, Free Music Production
@ Haus der Kunst
Wednesday, July 5
Meike Zwingenberger
Markus Faltermeier
Guest class on Language, conceptual,
performative, and digital poetries
with Franziska Ruprecht
Amerika Institut, LMU Munich
Kim Kügler
Julin Lee
Xiaoxiong Lin
Florian Roelen
Thursday, July 6
Klaus Benesch
“Plan B in Munich”
Reading at JYM Munich
with Franziska Ruprecht … More
June 27, 2017
Barrett Watten will read “Plan B,” a poem written in the aftermath of our national catastrophe, over four days in which the intensity of distorted discourse, media frenzy, and psychological projection fused in a mass of contradictions so real one could simply reach out and grab them to make a poem. The resulting work stands as a kind of “knowledge base” for the symbolic detritus of the election and the state of political crisis it produced. The keyword Gleichschaltung is drawn from the German experience of 1933 and is used as a “discrepant analogy” to the imperative not to “normalize” the result of the election—an imperative that continues for many. Both terms appear at regular intervals through the poem. Also evoked is the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald—a 1975 maritime disaster on the Great Lakes (and ballad by Gordon Lightfoot) that is iconic for residents of Michigan, for whom it represents the destruction of the state as well as the wreck itself. One might immediately compare this reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland to achieve the kinds of discrepant analogy the poem explores. For the reading in Munich, performance poet Franziska Ruprecht has translated “Plan B” into German, which she will perform. The reading will also present other texts evoking poetry as a “knowledge base,” on the one hand, and as record of catastrophe, on the other.
See above for details; click on image to download flyer.
June 25, 2017
Association for the Study
of Literature and the Environment
Wayne State University
20–24 June 2016
Offsite reading @ N-Space
23 June 2016
Linda Russo
Brenda Iijima
Megan Kaminski
Marthe Reed
Joshua Schuster
Adam Dickinson
Lynn Keller
Evelyn Reilly
Angela Hume
cris cheek
Tyrone Williams
… More
June 17, 2017
eco/poe/tics
a reading in anticipation of
Counter-Desecration: A Glossary
for Writing Within the Anthropocene
organized by Linda Russo
hosted by Barrett Watten
@ N-Space
460 W. Canfield, Detroit
7:30 Friday June 23
June 10, 2017
New York, 1–4 June 2017
Thursday, June 4
Carol Rama, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Kaari Upson, Elaine Cameron-Weir
@ The New Museum
Marcella Durand
Carla Harryman
Venus, by Suzan-Lori Parks
Signature Theater
Tony Torn
Lee Ann Brown
Stephen Paul Miller
Katy Bohinc
Q
Edward Einhorn
Lewes, Delaware
21–23 May 2017
Tom Mandel
Beth Joselow
Washington, DC
23 May 2017
Rod Smith
[after On Kawara]
May 18, 2017
Seminar: Questions of the Present
in Contemporary Poetics
@ MSA 19 Amsterdam
10–13 August 2017
to register click here
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
May 14, 2017
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
Tuesday, March 14
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
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
