ASAP 10, New Orleans
Saturday, 20 October 2018 (program link t/k)

• Danielle Pafunda (University of Maine)
• Rodrigo Toscano (The Labor Institute)
• Tyrone Williams (Xavier University, Cincinnati)
• Barrett Watten (Wayne State University)

In the past ten years—coinciding with the first decade of ASAP, in fact—presentism has seen a shift in meaning from a former, negative usage as “uncritical adherence to present-day attitudes, especially the tendency to interpret past events in terms of modern values and concepts,” to a critical focus on the present as historically produced and futurally oriented but irreducible to a punctual moment on a continuous timeline. The “present” of the “new presentism” is complex, layered, discontinuous, troubled. For poets writing in and of the present, the new presentism is entirely to be distinguished from the metaphysics and performativity of an embodied, authorial “presence” as hallmark of the New American poets (for example, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson, Amiri Baraka, Joanne Kyger). Rather, the poetics of the new presentism occurs as a negotiation between multiple time frames and modes of being; it cannot be described as a unifying aesthetic principle but rather as a site for critique and intervention into an ever-changing present lifeworld. As one online source puts it, “In light of [a] presentist perspective . . . the meaning of the present as a moment in historical time has come to be characterized by its indeterminacy. The diminished faith of the present age in the past’s precedents and the future’s promise has dissolved the sense of continuity essential to the idea of a single timeline of history.” This session will focus on contemporary poets and poetics working in and on the present in terms of its discontinuous and critical possibilities, focusing on how we live the present as an intervention in our art, and how our art performs its intervention within it. An important influence on the range of work in the session is the challenge to the metaphysics of presence associated with the “turn to language” and language-centered writing. At the same time, the centrality of language as a critical account of the present takes on specific meanings in a range of activist projects, from political critiques of current ideology to disability and environmental poetics to new configurations of language(s), ethnicity, and gender. Recent critical work using “presentism” its new sense—affect theory after Lauren Berlant, feminist ecocriticism after Donna Haraway, and digital theory after Kris Cohen and others—support the new usage of the term in multiple frames of reference.

Lara Glenum is the author of four full-length collections of poetry: The Hounds of No, Maximum Gaga, Pop Corpse, All Hopped Up On Fleshy Dumdums. She is also the co-editor, with Arielle Greenberg, of Gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics and the expanded second edition, Electric Gurlesque, due out in 2016. She has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and an NEA Translation Fellowship.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of eight books including The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books), Manhater (Dusie Press Books), and the forthcoming speculative memoir The Book of Scab (Ricochet Editions). Poems, essays, stories, and the like appear in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, anthologies such as Please Excuse this Poem: 100 New Poets for the Next Generation (Penguin) and Hick Poetics (Lost Roads Press), and journals such as Bennington Review, Black Clock, Black Warrior Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Essay Press, Fairy Tale Review, Fence, Interim, Kenyon Review and TriQuarterly. She sits on the Board of Directors of VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, and has taught at Columbia College, University of Wyoming, University of California San Diego and Copper Mountain College in the Mojave Desert, where she lives with her children.

Rodrigo Toscano’s newest book of poetry is Explosion Rocks Springfield (Fence Books, 2016). Previous books include Deck of Deeds, Collapsible Poetics Theater (a National Poetry Series selection), To Leveling Swerve, Platform, Partisans, and The Disparities. He works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers, the National Institute for Environmental Health Science, Communication Workers of America, and National Day Laborers Organizing Network, working on educational/training projects that involve environmental and labor justice, health and safety culture transformation, and immigrant worker rights.

Tyrone Williams teaches literature and theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the author of several chapbooks and five books of poetry: c.c., On Spec, The Hero Project of the Century, Adventures of Piand Howell. A limited-edition art project, Trump l’oeil, was published by Hostile Books in 2017. A new book of poetry, As Iz, is forthcoming from Omnidawn Publishing in fall 2018. His website is at http://home.earthlink.net/~suspend.

Barrett Watten is Professor of English at Wayne State University and a member of its Academy of Scholars. He is the author of The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics (2004 René Wellek Prize, American Comparative Literature Association) and Questions of Poetics: Language Writing and Consequences (University of Iowa Press, 2016), as well as many volumes of poetry, including Frame (1971-1990), Bad History, Progress/Under Erasure, and Plan B: Writing after the Millennium (in MS). He was one of ten co-authors of The Grand Piano: An Experiment in Collective Autobiography, San Francisco, 1975–80. He co-edited, with Carrie Noland, Diasporic Avant-Gardes (Palgrave, 2008/9); and with Lyn Hejinian, he is co-editor of A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field, 1982-98 and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan University Press, 2013/15).

Contact: b.watten@wayne.edu