&Now 2019 Conference

This session will follow four artists and writers who have made the digital an integral part of their practice. In performance and discussion, they will explore what poetics means to our age when received notions of humanity are intermingling with artificial intelligence. They will also explore how themes of excess, now-ness, transmediation, flow, trauma, and personal accounting/personal accountability can be incorporated. Memes, emojis, algorithmic ads, public domain texts and other digital totems will also be examined—with Bachelard never far away. Everyone present will collaborate on a list of digital spaces like chat windows, private forums, and online profiles (fake/real) befitting a new poetics. The session will conclude with a Q&A. Participants will also respond to comments from the official @AndNow2019 Twitter handle.

SPLAB is a Washington-based poetics-oriented non-profit organization founded in 1993. Using the tools of literature, our organization addresses the cultural, political, and social issues facing us in contemporary society, among them end-stage empire, the destruction of the biosphere, rampant xenophobia and violence and extreme income inequality. At &Now we seek to create a dialog around the anthologies we have conceived and published, how they fit into our bioregional cultural investigation: how the stance of bioregionalism is founded in sustainability (resistance to colonialism and empire, social diversity (or lack thereof); and the unique culture of Cascadia. SPLAB board members Cate Gable, Nadine Maestas, Paul E Nelson and Matt Trease will each discuss at least one of the recent publications: the Samthology, Make it True: Poetry From Cascadia, Make it True meets Medusario, American Prophets and 56 Days of August, the connections to bioregionalism and the bridges between cultures/interests/affinity groups we have sought to build via these projects. Some of our points of convergence are the specifics of location, transgender politics, serial poetics, ethnicity, and the fallibility of translation.

This panel will discuss work currently emerging in and around the Poetry Workshop at the Women’s Huron Valley Correctional Facility (WHV) in Michigan. All three presentations will illustrate a critical relationship between aesthetics and the production of resistance literatures inside a repressive state institution. In addition, we will consider the potential for poetry to usher new forms of consciousness into being as part of the work to transform our social relations. The prison may be the most explicit manifestation of the logic of empire within the national border and one of our most occluded sites of relation. It is in this very occlusion and separation from the public sphere that the prison structures and defines what it means to be a “free citizen.” Through poetry—the commons of language—writers writing under the most inhospitable conditions find one another along various lines of flight: care and affection, healing and resistance. It is with this assumption that our panel will consider the role of poetry and fugitive language in disrupting the logic of the carceral state. For us “out here,” the poems from the Poetry Workshop break the official register of the carceral state and organize our senses with the hope of abolishing the prison all together. In short, this panel will reflect on the role of critical literatures to index and disrupt the logics of racial capitalism and mass-incarceration but will also speak to the radical affection and care opened by poets writing inside. Our panel will include: “Sabotage, State Language and Poems from inside WHV” (Megan Stockton); “The Leper Colony in Michelle Cliff's Free Enterprise as Abolitionist Figure for Poetry ‘Inside’ (Adam Malinowski); and, “‘Mute Opposable Evidence’: Toward a Counter-Forensic Poetics for Abolition” (Rob Halpern). We also hope to present audio of work read by incarcerated poets themselves.