[MD] Fwd: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"

[Dan Glover]

Hi Arlo,

I find this fascinating as well. I tend to read lots of poetry in
hopes some of it might in some small way rub off on my own writings.
Lately I've fallen in love with Nikki Giovanni. Reading through the
questions below I think her poetry is representational of art as a way
of life as well as relevant to the social/economic/environmental
justice movement. Check this out:

When I die I hope no one who ever hurt me cries

and if they cry I hope their eyes fall out

and a million maggots that had made up their brains

crawl from the empty holes and devour the flesh

that covered the evil that passed itself off as a person

that I probably tried

to love.

Nikki Giovanni

One can almost imagine her standing in front of a group of people
reciting this poem... the way she might more fully enunciate certain
words to accentuate the (perhaps hidden) meaning they hold. She seems
to write both from her own heart as well as speaking to anyone who has
ever been hurt by someone they loved.

Avant-garde? Eh. Probably not. Nikki is an old black woman who speaks
of her life in the world in simple and yet profound ways that me as a
white man finds difficult to imagine. She's not putting on airs for
anyone. She simply speaks a sort of spiritual and aesthetic truth.

I am no expert on poetry. Far from it. But I seem to know enough to
tell good poetry from bad. Or is it that a piece of writing like the
poem above just grabs me a certain way? I'm not sure. Honestly, I
don't even recall how or where I heard of Nikki Giovanni. She's not
exactly a household name. But I like her work.

Anyway...

Dan

On Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 7:40 AM, ARLO JAMES BENSINGER JR <ajb102 at psu.edu> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> A call for abstracts under the category "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry" came through the Foucault mailing list for the American Comparative Literature Association's Annual Meeting, 17-20 March, 2016, Harvard University. I did find the premise of this endeavor very interesting, and am forwarding on the general description and reasoning behind this.
>
> Arlo
>
> ----- Forwarded Message -----
> From: "ROBERT.FARRELL" <ROBERT.FARRELL at lehman.cuny.edu>
> To: foucault-l at foucault.info
> Sent: Wednesday, September 2, 2015 9:17:38 AM
> Subject: [Foucault-L] CFP: ACLA 2016: "Poetry as Practice,        Practice as Poetry"
>
>
> "Poetry as Practice, Practice as Poetry"
>
> The philosopher Pierre Hadot worked throughout his career to locate poetry, particularly Goethe’s, within forms of “spiritual exercise” grounded in western philosophical and religious traditions. For Hadot, spiritual exercises (or practices) are forms of thinking, meditation, or dialogue that “have as their goal the transformation of our vision of the world and the metamorphosis of our being.” While Hadot’s thought on spiritual practice found its widest audience through Foucault’s work on “care of the self,” it has recently resurfaced in Gabriel Trop’s Poetry as a Way of Life (2015), whose title echoes that of the 1995 English translation of Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life (quoted above). Drawing on Hadot and Foucault, Trop argues that the reading and writing of poetry can be understood as “aesthetic exercise,” a form of practice involving "sensually oriented activity in the world attempts to form, influence, perturb or otherwise generate patterns of thought, perception, or action.” Though Trop is careful to distinguish his ideas from Hadot and Foucault, we might argue that poetry allows the aesthetic or spiritual practitioner to “struggl[e] against the ‘government of individualization’” (Foucault, 1982) and to enact “a way of being, a way of coping within, reacting to, and acting upon the world” (Trop, 2015).
>
> Our seminar takes as its starting point a broad conception of “practice,” both spiritual and aesthetic. We seek proposals that consider poetries and ways of reading as forms of practice or that challenge the premise altogether. Some questions that might be considered:
>
> • Trop suggests that religious poetries (e.g., Greek tragedy, the Divina Commedia) are conducive to “aesthetic exercise.” In what ways do poets and readers within religious/meditative traditions enact disciplines/practices of the self?
> • Poets associated with avant-garde movements often make strong claims about the urgency of their poetics. In what ways can “poetry as practice” help us understand their reading and writing practices? Can non- or even anti-avant-garde poetries be understood in similar terms?
> • How might the notion of poetry as a “way of life” help us understand contemporary lyric poetry?
> • Trop argues that late 18th century German poets, including Novalis and Holderlin, used their poetic practice to constitute themselves as non-normative subjects. What other times/places/poets might we see as concerned with poetry as a form of self-constitution?
> • George Oppen suggests that “part of the function of poetry is to serve as a test of truth.” In what ways can Oppen’s poetics, or those of similarly engaged poets, be understood as enabling spiritual or aesthetic exercise?
> • How might the concept of spiritual/aesthetic practice contribute to current debates about the relevance of poetry to the social/economic/environmental justice movements?
>
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