Poetics and Precarity (The University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics)

Poets and critics address the potential of language to address the increasing level of discord and precarity in the twenty-first century. At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form. Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry also functions as a cry to protest late capitalist imperialism, misogyny, racism, climate change, and all the debilitating conditions of everyday life. Hubs of concern merge and diverge; precarity takes differently gendered, historied, embodied, geopolitical manifestations. The contributors articulate a poetics that renders what has not yet been crystallized as discourse into fields of force. They also acknowledge the beauties of sound, poetry, and music, and celebrate the power of community, marking the surge of energy that can occur at a particular place at a particular moment. Ultimately, Poetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field. Contents......Page 6 List of Figures......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 12 Notes......Page 22 1.......Page 24 2.......Page 42 Notes......Page 50 The Ga(s)p......Page 54 E-Mail Exchange with Andrea Brady (August 2016)......Page 60 Notes......Page 63 Precarity Shared: Breathing as Tactic in Air’s Uneven Commons......Page 64 Notes......Page 77 On Not Missing It......Page 82 Notes......Page 86 Here and Elsewhere: Creeley’s Notions of Community and Teaching as Circulation......Page 88 Idiorrhythmic Communities......Page 89 Rethinking Teaching Institutions......Page 92 Elsewhere: Transnational Ghosts......Page 97 Notes......Page 101 1......Page 108 2......Page 110 3 A Brief Post-Hellenic, Pre-Post Futurist History of Being Sche......Page 113 4......Page 115 5 When the Fairy Tale Ended What Happened to Mother Earth?......Page 117 6......Page 118 7......Page 121 8 Agon in Strange Parts......Page 127 9 Welcoming Alterity into the Heart of the Logos......Page 129 Notes......Page 136 Precarity, Poetry, and the Practice of Countermapping......Page 140 Radical Cartography and Tactical Mapping......Page 146 Embodied and Locative Mapping......Page 151 Forensic Mapping......Page 155 Notes......Page 161 Supine, Prone, Precarious......Page 168 Notes......Page 180 The Opening of the (Transnational Battle) Field......Page 184 Notes......Page 191 A Personal Introduction to a Public History......Page 192 Notes on the Bibliography......Page 195 Acknowledgments......Page 196 I. Print serials......Page 198 II. Online serials......Page 204 III. Books, Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Other Publications Listed by Publisher......Page 206 IV. Books, Chapbooks, Broadsides, and Other Publications Printed Without a Publisher (Organized Chronologically)......Page 220 V. Reading, Talk, and Performance Series......Page 222 VI. Student-Organized Symposia......Page 224 VII. Radio Shows......Page 226 Appendix 2: Schedule for the Robert Creeley Lecture and Celebration of Poetry, April 7–10, 2016......Page 228 Appendix 3: “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years” Conference, Seminar Topics and Participants, April 9–10, 2016......Page 232 List of Contributors......Page 240 Index......Page 244