Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form

Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form

Poetic practice today is inevitably shaped by its material engagements, from the varied energies of the drafting process, embodied inscriptions, and participation in the social world. This one-day symposium centres on ‘material poetics’ broadly conceived. ‘Material poetics’ foregrounds the movements and velocities of the hand in ‘maximally excited’ wanderings (Hejinian 42). Rather than erasing stray marks, how might poetic practice retain the movements of what the textual scholar Marta Werner writes of as the ‘erring hand […] its labor, its risks, its inhabitation of time and history’? (63) In turn, how does the inscription of process into the work — ink-splashes, typos, fingerprints on the page, tears, stains — change our reading habits and interpretations? In Noise That Stays Noise (2011), Cole Swensen formulates the hand-written poetic line as itself ‘a slippery instance at which writing actually becomes visual art and visual art becomes language’ (82). Here we necessarily return to the movements of the body as part of the conceptual undertaking of the work, such as CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetics. We are interested in work that explores themes of writerly embodiment through processes and procedures of poetic practice, especially those that posit resistance to societal norms, including but not limited to those imposed by restrictive, exclusionary and/or oppressive constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, ability and class.

The symposium features keynote presentations by Cole Swensen, Jeanne Heuving, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis for an evening reading, as well as 24 presentations formed into eight parallel panels throughout the day. Parallel panel stream A will be held in room 2, and stream B will be held in room 3. The event is jointly supported by Techne Consortium and the Poetics Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London.