Event Type
Fredric Jameson, drawing on Lévi-Strauss, puts forward the proposition that “all cultural artifacts are to be read as symbolic resolutions of real political and social contradictions.” Yet what does it mean when artifacts, specifically poems, foreground contradiction at the level of form and text? For this roundtable, four poets will interrogate the possibilities and functions of contradiction in poetry, working through oppositions and entanglements between registers, languages, and sensory systems, between signal and noise, inside and outside, alienation and utopia, and ultimately between contradiction and seamlessness. Zack Anderson will explore tensions between translation, communication, and noise in Eugene Jolas’ “polyglot” poems from the 1938 collection I Have Seen Monsters and Angels (Sublunary Editions, 2023). Maxime Berclaz will consider how horror functions across a range of poetic texts as a mode of attention that both generates contradictions and heightens our awareness of existing ones, with the pleasure of its fascination serving to resist the desire for resolution, symbolic or otherwise. Ellen Boyette will investigate disjunction-as-locomotion in Lisa Robertson’s The Apothecary (Book*hug Press, 2007) by imagining the possible communion between the text's frictional modes: generous visual brevity versus oscillatory tonal play. Abby Ryder-Huth will ask how intersections of translation and poetic response assert contradictory states of visibility and occlusion in work by Sawako Nakayasu and Rosmarie Waldrop.