On PhiloSOPHIA’s Poetry, Politics and Feminist Theory Conference
Hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Colorado at Denver
Organized by Julie Carr and Sarah Tyson March 9-12, 2016
Hosted by the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Colorado at Denver
Organized by Julie Carr and Sarah Tyson March 9-12, 2016
What a pleasure it was to be part of this conference bringing together scholars and writers from the worlds of philosophy, poetry, feminist theory, and literature. The conference offered a rich set of readings, talks, panels, workshops and a closing dance party.
On Thursday evening Lisa Robertson and Cathy Park Hong read
in Boulder, sadly an event I missed though both Lisa and Cathy, along with
Laura Moriarty, Dawn Lundy Martin and Lyn Hejinian read Saturday night at
CounterPath Gallery in Denver and I had a chance to hear them then. People read from old and new work,
mesmerizing the audience. Then, the chairs were moved and the music and our
bodies thrummed.
Leading up to this grand finale, there were a host of
panels. On Friday I attended one that was supposed to include Mary Hickman presenting
“‘Thigh to thigh’: Trans-Life and the Arena in Anne Carson’s ‘Antigo-Nick’ and
the Paintings of Jenny Saville,” though Mary’s plane was delayed, leaving Bryan
Kimoto from the University of Memphis to fly solo. And fly Bryan did! Thrillingly
unfolding “Trans* Poetics, Erotic Embodiment, and Self-Love: A Response to
Talia Bettcher’s ‘When Selves Have Sex,’” Bryan’s talk was a critical engagement with
Bettcher’s piece (which I haven’t read but am eager to) and traversed a number
of arenas including, erotic structuralism, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Gabe
Moses’s poem “How to Make Love to a Trans Person,” and more.
Friday afternoon I
was part of a collaborative panel organized by Karen Lepri and Andrea Quaid
which also included Madhu Kaza, Margaret Rhee, and Sueyeun Juliette Lee. For our panel, “Alarming Logics: Feminist
Poetics as Discursive/Pedagogic Intervention”:
We return to Rosmarie Waldrop’s
“Alarms and Excursions,” published in The
Politics of Poetic Form: Poetry and Public Policy (1990). We ask: how does the form of Waldrop’s essay
invite us to reframe our approach to the thesis-based college essay that we
teach as scholars and poets working in academia. Waldrop’s form occasions a
feminist critique of ensconced methodologies based in rationalism, logic,
evidence, and single-stance argumentation (Lepri & Quaid).
Based on Waldrop’s essay, we provided panel attendees with
note-cards with the headings “alarm,”
“excursion,” “thesis,” and “counter-alarm,” and invited participants to
write on these note-cards and to interrupt our performance with their own
alarms, excursions, theses. At various points, we moved around the room,
improvising with our bodies in the space. This was one of the most enjoyable
and engaging presentations I’ve ever participated in. People seemed to take to
it and entered into the conversation while it was happening. Their
contributions added to the fabric of our work, deepening it. It was exciting and
generative.
Later that afternoon Lyn Hejinian gave a wonderfully
absorbing plenary talk entitled “The Intimate Excess of Philosophy: Dear Sophie,”
in which she discussed the epistolary in the work of Margaret Cavendish and
Virginia Woolf. Cavendish’s letters are a philosophic project while Woolf’s,
interestingly, are not. Lyn pointed out that Woolf uses her diaries to work out
intellectual and literary concerns but her letters are a kind of phenomenology
of the sociability of everyday life. Hejinian noted that Woolf is interested in
not only the stuff of life but also the life of stuff.
Saturday morning I speed read through three papers—Ella
Longpre’s “The Wanting of Disaster: A New Erotics of Writing and Performance”; Katherine Davies’ “The Poetry of Gender; Anne
Carson, Sound, and Language”; and Beata Stawarska’s “Language as Poeisis,
Linguistic Productivity in Kristeva and Saussure,” so I could attend this
workshop on poetry and philosophy moderated by Lisa Robertson. Rather than read
through their conference papers, these writers presented a brief sketch of
their work and Lisa established some contextualizing and initial observations and comments. Robertson noted the
historical tension between poetry and philosophy, the current global state of
crisis around borders, refugees, and race, and then urged us to nuance and keep
complex some of the terms that get taken for granted or remain uninterrogated—the
political, the social, eros.
As Lisa parsed the three papers, I scribbled this:
Ella
Longpre
|
Beata
Stawarska
|
Katherine
Davies
|
|
Disaster
Performance
|
E
R
O
T
I
C
D
E
S
I
R
E
S P A C E/ S P A C I A L |
Revolt
Negativity
|
Ololyga
Grief
Pun
|
There was a rich conversation during this panel which it is
impossible to render effectively, but I will say Stawarska’s paper generated
interest around a new understanding of Saussure’s work based on materials from
his Nachlass, “some of them recently
discovered and published in Writings in General Linguistics (2006)”
(Stawarska 1). Based on these materials, this version of Saussure attests to
the importance of speakers, asserting, “a speaking collectivity [masse parlante] is part of the ‘very definition’ of language itself”
(Saussure qtd in Stawarska 5). Stawarska went on to explore Kristeva’s work and to argue that "linguistic productivity....offers a strategy of
resistance and revolt against normalization within individual and social life" (2).
Longpre’s interest in the disaster and diagrammatic
representations of the circuitry of erotics and disaster was thought-provoking
as was Katherine Davies’ fascinating thinking about sophrosyne (Greek virtue of self-control), logos, and ololyga “a
ritual shout peculiar to females. It is a high pitched piercing cry uttered at
certain climactic moments in ritual practice [e.g., at the moment when a
victim’s throat is slashed during sacrifice] or at climactic moments in real
life [e.g., at the birth of a child] and also a common feature of women’s
festivals” (Carson qtd in Davies).
Later Saturday afternoon another plenary session included
talks by Dawn Lundy Martin, Elena Ruiz, and Rachel Jones. Dawn’s awesome talk was entitled “Discomfort
as Feminist Poetic: 7 Short Lectures.” In it she proposed, via Kathleen Fraser,
a “laboratory,” a reaching toward “ragged bits” as she thought about race,
discomfort, silence on the internet, the accident and failure as swerves which,
with respect to Kara Walker’s 2014 Domino Sugar Factory installation, “A
Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby,” reveal violence. Lundy Martin proposed mobilizing discomfort rather than silence and began to ask what might be
possible regarding re-conceptualizing feminist poetics outside of the sphere of
the female body; she also opened up the possibility of re-consideration of the term "feminist."
Rachel Jones’s talk, “The Relational Poetics of Barbara
Köhler: Weaving a Grammar of Singularity, Solidarity and Difference” was
engaging. She presented the work of Köhler, a German writer who reworks the Odyssey and whose writing mobilizes some
interesting properties of German grammar which make it possible to read “sie”
as [she-they-you].
Last but not least, Elena Ruiz presented a talk “The
Aesthetics of Resistance: Poetic Language, Trauma and Feminist Narratives of
Selfhood.” Her sharp and incisive paper focused on Latin America,
state-sponsored violence, the challenges of history and memory in a totalitarian
state and the problematic of European philosophical concepts and methodological strategies emerging out of
them as a basis for praxis in Latin America. She reminded us of the erasure of
Mesoamerican scripts, of the violence of the alphabet, of the fact that when
there are more than 30,000 people disappeared, there is no time for syntax,
that European ontology and epistemology articulates a historical horizon of
continuity, continues to construe universality and presumes a baseline
stability of experience. Thus, disciplinary paradigms emerge out of, reflect,
and re-enact various violences and oppressions.
In short, I attended just a few of many provocative and
wide-ranging panels and workshops that left us with a lot to think and write
about and much to reflect on.
One challenge that emerges out of this conference is
thinking about how we work with materials from multiple disciplines. Sometimes
philosophy uses poetry as an illustration, seeming to simplify what poetry and
the poetic is or can be and what its work and other possibilities are. I am
sure philosophers probably find the use of philosophy by poets and others to be
similarly odd angled. I don’t think there are rules for how one can make use of
materials across disciplines and life worlds, but it is certainly worth
endeavoring to continually seek the complex and nuanced for the most capacious,
or to use a Lisa Robertson term—the most commodious--investigations; simultaneously, as Elena Ruiz argues, we need to consider the historical, political, and ideological foundations of the concepts and practices we use and engage.
