Poetics and Precarity

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. UltimatelyPoetics and Precarity fosters further conversations that will imagine the concerns of poetics as a continuously emerging field.

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Myung Mi Kim andCristanne Miller

Breath and Precarity: The Inaugural Robert Creeley Lecture in Poetry and Poetics
Nathaniel Mackey

The Ga(s)p
M. NourbeSe Philip

Precarity Shared: Breathing as Tactic in Air’s Uneven Commons
Jennifer Scappettone

On Not Missing It
Elizabeth Willis

Here and Elsewhere: Creeley’s Notions of Community and Teaching as Circulation
Vincent Broqua

Constructive Alterities & the Agonistic Feminine
Joan Retallack

Precarity, Poetry, and the Practice of Countermapping
Adalaide Morris andStephen Voyce

Supine, Prone, Precarious
Sarah Dowling

The Opening of the (Transnational Battle) Field
Heriberto Yépez

Appendix 1: Poetry in the Making: A Bibliography of Publications by Graduate Students in the Poetics Program, 1991–2016
James Maynard

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