HOTB 2020 Panel 6.4: Anthropocene Poetics

HUMANITIES ON THE BRINK: ENERGY, ENVIRONMENT, EMERGENCY

AN ASLE-SPONSORED NEARLY CARBON-NEUTRAL CONFERENCE

Panel 6.4: Anthropocene Poetics

“‘Things of Each Possible Relation Hashing Against Each Other’: Juliana Spahr’s Climate Crisis Entanglement”

Becca Hamilton (University of Cambridge)

“Listing Atrocity: Queering the Epic with Ecopoetics in Dionne Brand’s Inventory”

Matthew Ellis (Brock University)

“Different Daylight: Crises of Visuality and Futurity in Sueyeun Juliette Lee’s Post-Fluorescent Poetics”

Emily Simon (Brown University)

 

 

Q & A

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4 replies
  1. Emily Simon, Brown University says:

    Thank you for your patience in following along as I read my paper, and my sincerest apologies for the poor sound quality (it is hard to find a quiet space to record in a big city, and the pandemic has certainly made that even harder!).

    I’m very grateful for the opportunity to conceptualize poetics in this context alongside my fellow panelists. I’m taken by the way we were all, in varying ways, interested in considering formal disruptions—either disruptions to poetic conventions, or the way poetry disrupts other conventions of thought and organization, or even how both of those disruptions might be mutually-informing. Experiments in form may be one way that poetry conducts a kind of constructive interference in expected timeframes and structures and produces sites of emergence. Becca and Matthew, thank you for the beautiful close readings of how this might take shape! It’s wonderful to think alongside y’all.

  2. Lucien Darjeun Meadows says:

    Matthew, I first encountered Dionne Brand through her A Map to the Door of No Return (2001), and the way she explores the arbitrary fiction of origins, and the interconnection of geography and identity, has had a profound impact on me. I hadn’t read Inventory, though — and I’m grateful to you for sharing your scholarship on that text in your presentation! With Brand’s focus on interconnection (or “interrelatedness,” the term you share that Jill Magi uses), I’m intrigued by connections between this work and queer studies, as you discuss, and also Ahmed (and others’) work on queer phenomenology and/or Black queer phenomenology. There’s so much to think about with your presentation — wado! thank you!

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