My current research project is titled Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry. I thought I might briefly explain what it is all about.
Recent experimental poetry may, for instance, be disjunctive and use appropriated material extracted from other texts, as in much conceptual and post-conceptual poetry. And of course, at least since the 1970s and 80s phenomenon Language Writing, problematizing the position of the speaking self has been commonplace.
Emotional and affective responses easily appear antithetical to reading experimental writing that reflects something beyond the boundaries of a fixed authorial self and that seems to demand excessive cognitive work (due to, for instance, disjunctions). Experimental writers do, however, engage with affective content – even conceptual poets, although some, like Calvin Bedient, have claimed otherwise (his claim was, though, already refuted by David Kaufmann in his interesting recent book Reading Uncreative Writing (99, 120)).
What I want to do in my project, then, is to consider, by looking at a few different examples, how experimental writers engage with emotion and what happens to a reader’s ability to “feel with” the text under various experimental circumstances. We respond to experimental poetry not only through affective responses to content, like feelings of happiness or sadness, but also through the uncertainties we face in dealing with complex texts. Considering how to deal with such uncertainties, and other affects encountered through experimental writing, as I suggest, can be beneficial for empowerment and critical reading skills. I am interested in approaches from affect studies, aesthetic theory and cognitive poetics, among others.
During the project, I intend to write a several articles. An article entitled “Conceptual Confession: Recycled Emotion and Private Provisions in Trisha Low’s The Compleat Purge” is currently under review and will hopefully appear in the near future. In the article, I discuss Low’s post-conceptual poetry work that develops a relationship to authenticity that is, I argue, characterized by vulnerability as Low manipulates emotional relations through her combination of conceptualism and confession.
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I would like to thank the Ella and Georg Foundation for having funded the project in 2016-2017 and the Kone Foundation for support in 3/2018-2/2020.
Works cited:
Bedient, Calvin. “Against Conceptualism: Defending the Poetry of Affect.” Boston Review July 24, 2013.
Kaufmann, David. Reading Uncreative Writing: Conceptualism, Expression and the Lyric. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.