the crowds
evisceral subjects         sun-setting
in the sun
clashes waste
                depopulating fray

afraid

hurled

_____________________

                                              the revolt

                                              executed

                                              in spasms

                                              projected

                                              projectiles

                                                                     human or plastic

                                              embraces

                                                  shadows grounding

Back in February, when I started this column, I wanted to interview Fernando Diaz about his sound art projects and also — because he's a computer scientist — about algorithms in poetry. The word "algorithm" appears often in critical analyses of conceptual writing, so I had been wondering what, if anything, conceptual writing and algorithms had to do with each other. I wanted to believe, but Fernando was skeptical about this metaphor. After 2.5 months of meeting, discussing, questioning, and haggling, we have only just begun to work through the chasm between our fields, our different values, histories, vocabularies, etc. Latour would be proud. It's been challenging and fun. And I'm grateful for Fernando's patience, generosity, and humor in working with me towards this provisional document.

Laynie Browne: Is there such a thing as the poet’s novel?

Bhanu Kapil: The poet’s brain changes, perhaps in mid-life.  Perhaps the poet moves from one part of the country to another.  The poet turns to the sentence as the place where questions of magnetism, gravity and light — the forces that bind a person to the earth and then release them, abruptly — might most fully be worked out.  Why?  On a scrap of paper, I draw three overlapping rough arcs.  These are sentences.  These are vectors, complicated — in this preliminary sketch —by refraction and shame: the reality of what happens — does happen — has happened — at the limit of a nation state.  Sometimes, as I’ve thought about elsewhere, a person doesn't get to cross.  A person sees their body reflected, perhaps, in the gelation membrane that extends above and just beyond the border like an invisible dome. To exit you rupture.  What the novel-shaped space lets the poet do (perhaps) is work out what happens both before and afterwards: the approach to that multi-valent perimeter [the shredded plastic on the floor.]

Following the Advisory Board Roundtable that launched the Conference on Ecopoetics, Charles Altieri, who later in the weekend led a seminar on “Ecopoetics and Affect,” asked a question: “Is ecopoetics a way to go beyond ethics to love?” (A paraphrase.) This question acknowledged a legacy of ethically motivated poetics—or “poethics” as Joan Retallack would say—while at the same time inquiring about something potentially far gushier and subject driven. And in fact, this possibility of an ecopoetics motivated by or productive of love, or loves, resurfaced throughout the weekend.

Robert Hass responded to Altieri’s question during the same Q&A by invoking Wordsworth’s “most watchful power of love,” which, early in the Prelude, registers both “transitory qualities,” “permanent relations,” and “difference” in the passing seasons. Wordsworth’s love is an acute attention, seeing what would otherwise go unseen, inviting the object world of matter to infiltrate the poet’s heart and mind and leave its mark. This attentive love serves an instructive function, driving the “Growth of a Poet’s Mind” that the Prelude chronicles. The pinnacle of what the poet learns from watching and loving is the exact hinge within his self that swings open toward the sublime.