Poetics and Precarity

Myung Mi Kim, Cristanne Miller, Myung Mi Kim, Cristanne Miller

• Publisher: The University at Buffalo Robert Creeley Lectures in Poetry and Poetics
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781438469980, 9781438469997
• eBook ISBN: 9781438470009
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

APPENDIX 1

Poetry in the Making

A Bibliography of Publications by Graduate Students in the Poetics Program, 1991–2016

A PERSONAL INTRODUCTION TO A PUBLIC HISTORY

FROM ITS BEGINNING in the fall of 1991 up through today, the University at Buffalo English Department’s Poetics Program has been largely organized around a single question: what is poetics? While far from the first to orient itself around such a pursuit, what has distinguished the program over the years is its assumption, shaped entirely in the image of its founders and continuing core faculty, that all answers to this question must invariably be experimentally derived, historically and culturally situated, and always plural. The defining vision of the program is based on an antifoundational understanding of poetry—that is, the processural activity of poiesis—as a liminal field always evolving out of its multiform past in response to the overlapping aesthetic, social, and political needs of the present. Its approach to poetry is a radical praxis in both senses of the word: rooted in particular theories and traditions and yet constantly branching out into progressively new and unforeseen directions. Pedagogically, the program has been heavily informed by former UB English Department Chair Albert Cook’s practice in the 1960s of hiring poets and writers to teach literature classes based on their experience as practitioners of language as well as by those poets (both on faculty and visiting) who had previously been associated with that other great educational experiment Black Mountain College. It is no coincidence that the Poetics Program developed in a Rust Belt city that historically has been welcoming to experimentation across the arts. Encouraging an interdisciplinary study of poetries often within and between different cultures and time periods, the program’s ethos from inception has included an openness to formal innovation, a general respect for all forms of linguistic alterity, ethnopoetics’ insistence on the significance of sound and oral performance, and an emphasis on writing as social practice.

But, to be more specific, what has been / is the poetics of the UB Poetics Program? Certainly one answer lies in the program’s dedicated and engaged faculty who have each left an indelible mark on the students like me who have been fortunate enough to study with them, so much so that it is impossible to think of the program without thinking of its core faculty Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, Raymond Federman, Judith Goldman, Susan Howe, Myung Mi Kim, Steve McCaffery, and Dennis Tedlock; its extensive group of affiliate faculty in English and other departments; and the curators of the Poetry Collection who have been longtime collaborators and participants, not to mention the hundreds of writers—some of the most interesting and significant poets and prose writers and critics and theorists from the latter half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries—who have visited over the years to give readings and guest lectures. But in my experience, biased as it surely is, I’ve always believed that the best indicator of the program’s evolving poetics, not to mention its long-standing vitality, can be found in the activities of its students and especially their publications. And this is as true today in 2016 as it was in 1991. When I first arrived in Buffalo as a new poetics student in the summer of 2001, it seemed to me like everyone I met here was publishing a magazine, sewing chapbooks, organizing readings and conferences, and/or printing letterpress covers and posters. It was a community based in large part on the collaborative activity of making, and I loved it from the start.

An empirical approach to answering this ongoing question of what has been / is the poetics of the UB Poetics Program?—which over the years has sometimes led to various tensions among the community—can be found in the rich history of publications produced here by its graduate students. Each of these titles—each made thing—offers its own articulation of a particular poetics, and their sum total demonstrates a wide variety of active traditions (e.g., Objectivism, Black Mountain poetry, New York School, Language poetry, New Narrative, HOW(ever)); a number of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Breath and Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics
• The Ga(s)p
• Precarity Shared: Breathing as Tactic in Air’s Uneven Commons
• On Not Missing It
• Here and Elsewhere: Creeley’s Notions of Community and Teaching as Circulation
• Constructive Alterities & the Agonistic Feminine
• Precarity, Poetry, and the Practice of Countermapping
• Supine, Prone, Precarious
• The Opening of the (Transnational Battle) Field
• Appendix 1: Poetry in the Making: A Bibliography of Publications by Graduate Students in the Poetics Program, 1991–2016
• Appendix 2: Schedule for the Robert Creeley Lecture and Celebration of Poetry, April 7–10, 2016
• Appendix 3: “Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years” Conference, Seminar Topics and Participants, April 9–10, 2016
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover