The idea for this workshop comes from a move made early in The Undercommons, when Moten and Harvey write that “critique endangers the sociality it is supposed to defend.”
One of the goals of this festival is to explore ways to reconfigure poetics. Our suggestion is that to really, radically reconfigure poetics one must first abandon poetical discourse, since poetical arguments are always genres unto themselves and proxies for literary and, by extension, cultural traditions. We’re not excited about tradition.
Since we also take to heart the notion articulated in The Undercommons that “the common perseveres as if a kind of elsewhere, here, around, on the ground, surrounding hallucinogenic facts,” our workshop will explore the common space that surrounds the hallucinogenic facts of arguments about attractiveness, power, and charm: a commons we want to call, for lack of a better term, ugliness (at least for an hour or so).
We seek “convergence” via recombination and juxtaposition of modes and styles of writing that jar, obtrude, derange, and re-function the language we use to talk about poetry, and welcome work that challenges generic, traditional, and critical definitions of fluency, harmony, and/or compatibility.
Readings will be provided with time for discussion and writing.
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