The Tenderest Research: Scholarly Methodologies in Contemporary Poetic Practice

 

This presentation will consider the ways that scholarly methods in today's university—archival research, interdisciplinary inquiry, translation theory, and the like--inform contemporary poetic practice. Works as various as Susan Howe's "That This," Don Mee Choi's "Hardly War," and m. nourbese phillips' "Zong!" imagine research methods in the humanities as new forms of literary "procedure." What are the horizons and limitations of "academic poetry"? How does the institutional life of the liberal arts inflect and inform poetics in our time, when compared with prior historical regimes such as the church and the state? What do recent developments in the humanities, from the “material turn” to “post-criticality" (and even “post-humanism”) spell for venerable literary modes such as lyric verse? Last but not least, what new forms and genres are made possible by the mobilization of scholarly methods within an expanded poetic field?