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

Robert Warlov poetzzz at gmail.com
Mon Sep 7 19:36:31 PDT 2015


On Monday, September 7, 2015, Dan Glover <daneglover at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <javascript:;>> 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 <javascript:;>>
> > To: foucault-l at foucault.info <javascript:;>
> > 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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>
> The  salient difference between poetry and other 'art forms', vis a vis
> Quality Metaphyics, is that poetry arises from society/intellect,  whereas
> other forms precede it.  ( Didn't read all the preceedings yet, but noted
> reference to some German poets. See 'Paul Celan' for re-creation /
> revolution of Mankind through language ).
>
 A cat can react sensibly to visual, auditory or tactile phonomona,
produced by 'material' arts, but must fail with poetry. . R.W.


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