Multiverses: Contemporary Poetry beyond the Lyric

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in poetry while poetry has undergone profound changes in form, genre, and mode. Poetry now reaches well beyond the page of a lyric poem and incorporates an increasing range of languages and modes of communication, from mathematics, to animal sounds, to computer code, to the slogan. Poetry’s compressed and variable form makes it particularly attentive to shifts in the social fabric of contemporary life as well: it registers, as several theorists have recently argued, insurgency, vagabondage, and ecological calamity. While this surge of scholarly interest in the lyric has accompanied poetry’s renewed popularity, with Jonathan Culler’s 2015 Theory of the Lyric being a prominent example, this seminar asks how we can approach the poetic today as irreducible to the lyric. Its goal is to expand our understanding of what constitutes poetics in the present, both beyond the conventions of lyric and beyond existing models of poetic language. How does contemporary poetry intersect with extrapoetic practices, disciplines, and modes of communication? How does a poetics of the present demand more precise accounts of the transversals and multiverses of poetry? These are questions we will ask as we read past and current theories of poetry alongside a selection of contemporary poetry in German and English. 

Bildrechte: © Ann Cotten: https://www.logbuch-suhrkamp.de/ann-cotten/wie-passiert-das-teil-drei/