Showing posts with label Anne Carson. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Anne Carson. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

Jennifer K Dick's talks, readings and hosting in the coming weeks

 Jennifer K Dick, yep, me, is running around giving talks, reading, hosting. 

So where can you find me?

25 May 2023: 11am session: I will be speaking on Anne Carson--as the program says, Jennifer K Dick talk: “De-Stabilizing the Known / Restauring the Unknown: Reading Anne Carson through the Lens of Quantum Physics (and Dark Matter)” at the Anne Carson and the Unknown: Explorations in 21st Century Experimental Poetry Conference. For the entire programme, links to watch online, go to:
https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/incal/ecr/evenements/anne-carson-and-the-unknown-explorations-in-21st-century-experimental-poetry.html ABSTRACT: Perhaps it is not the unknown in Carson, but rather that one “knows” only in an instant before something changes the outcome: the uncertain, the flux returns—i.e. Schrodinger’s paradox. In this manner, Carson inhabits the transformatory space of scientific theoretical practice, ever striving for deeper knowledge where any response to a question is immediately undermined by another query. As Carson’s own admiration for Jacques Lacan’s declaration reveals: “The reason we go to poetry is not for wisdom, but for the dismantling of wisdom” (Carson/Aitkins interview). I propose to borrow from Kathryn Schaffer and Gabriela Barreto Lemos’s assessment of how quantum physics can provide ideological and theoretical tools for the arts and humanities. I will study select passages from Carson’s books where the vacillating waves of plots intersect with a potential development in consciousness for a character, consciousness related to their being part of, though often felt as outside or left of center, or of events, societies, communities, relationships and most of all a secured, fixed sense of self-understanding (self knowledge).... [truncated abstract here--full version on the conf website]

27th May 2023: starting from 15h30: I will read a text as part of the


open-forum event organized by the amazing and dynamic author Bénédicte Heim. The theme is about aging, and overall the event will be in French.: Dans le cadre de l'exposition " Faire son âge " qui se tiendra à partir du 24 mai jusqu'à la fin du mois de juin dans la galerie de la Reine Christine, au 12 rue des Patriarches 75005 (métro Censier-Daubenton), paroles, art, etc autour du vieillissement le samedi 27 mai à partir de 15h30. 

30 May 2023: 19h30 I am hosting the next IVY WRITERS PARIS evening with Susan Schultz and Françoise de LaRoque at Delaville Café, 34 bvd bonne nouvelle. Full info on the Ivy blog at: https://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com/2023/05/ivy-le-30-mai-avec-s-schultz-et-f.html

 

3 juin 2023: 9h30 I am giving another conference presentation: Jennifer K. DICK (Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse) : "Resisting Transmission: Against a poetry of communication?" at the 62nd annual SAES Congrès in RENNES on Transmission(s) in Atelier 14: Poets and Poetry. https://congres2023.saesfrance.org/programme-scientifique/programme-par-atelier/ ABSTRACT:

As the globalized world leans—as if in a kind of anglicized linguistic immigration—towards Twitter and Insta-poetry, to the directive statement and easy access in a kind of all-for-one English as dominant language, a second poetry and poetics has been slowly emerging and growing in force: that of the multilingual author. These writers’ works might be published as “English” or “American” but their pages are dotted by a wide array of other languages, languages that often absorb, cover, and bury the English. The books I am addressing here are by authors that refuse to self-translate. For some, this poses no real barrier to being interpreted as their second and third languages share roots with English. But for others, writing in radically different alphabets or where non-bilingual readers will not be able to grasp the semantic meaning of the words, the “transmission” (in a habitual sense of reading poetry) finds itself at the end of a dead end street. In this case, the foreign language(s) often acts as extra-lingual expression, pushing these works into boundary zones between poetry and visual art or performance, or poetry and music (zaum-like sound poetry practices).

These works are a reckoning and recognition of linguistic and cultural otherness within perceived unified nations and literary traditions. As such, exploration and study of these authors provide essential tools for deeper reflections on notions of transmission of meaning in poetry and literature. They also demand perhaps that we rethink our old definitions of the verb “to read”.

6 June 2023: 19h30 Back in Paris it is already time for me to host another Ivy night. This one is the final of our spring 2023 season, and will feature visiting American author and translator Cynthia Hogue alongside Paris local authors and translators Vincent Broqua and Virginie Poitrasson. at Delaville Café, 34 bvd bonne nouvelle. A pre-announcement for this is already up on the Ivy blog at https://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com/2023/05/ivy-le-30-mai-avec-s-schultz-et-f.html


Saturday, February 11, 2023

Jennifer K Dick is Reading Anne Carson through the Lens of Quantum Physics and Dark Matter at this May 2023 conference

 I am thrilled to be participating in this very exciting conference on Anne Carson in May. Below you can find the provisional schedule. I am in the final panel before the conference closes. 


 

Anne Carson and the Unknown: Explorations in 21st-Century Experimental Poetry
PROVISIONAL PROGRAMME
24-25 May 2023, UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium

“A phenomenologist from Louvain-la-Neuve
is telling us what Heidegger thought during the winter term
of 1935.
There was an interrogation of art.
There was a circle to be made.”
—Anne Carson, Plainwater (2000 [1995], p. 56)

DAY 1: WEDNESDAY 24 MAY 2023
8.30 – 9.00 Registration & coffee
9.00 – 9.15 Conference opening by the Embassy of Canada to Belgium
9.15 – 9.30 Opening remarks
9.30 – 10.15 Keynote by Ian Rae (King’s University College at Western University), “Knowing Collapse: Anne Carson’s ‘The Fall of Rome’”

10.15 – 10.45 Coffee break

10.45 – 12.15 Session 1 (“Reaching Towards Other Selves and Otherness”)
- “Norma Jeane Baker, ‘Harlot of Troy’: Anne Carson’s Unknowable Hellenic Eidolon” – Amanda Kubic (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
- “Albertine or the Unknowability of the Other: Carson’s Reading of Proust” – Christina Kkona (Bordeaux-Montaigne University)
- “Poetics of the Caesura” – Elizabeth D. Harvey (University of Toronto)

12.15 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 14.15 Performance by Annabel Wilson (Massey University), “‘Dismantling of Wisdom’: Creative-Critical Responses to Anne Carson’s Nox”

14.15 – 15.45 Session 2 (“Oscillations between Knowing and Sensing”)
- “Anne Carson’s Radical Formalism” – David Fearn (University of Warwick)
- “Anne Carson’s ‘Anarchitecture’ and the Disrupting Potential of Matter in Float” – Helena Van Praet (Université catholique de Louvain)
- “A Montaging of the Senses: The Chor(e)o-Phonographics of Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook” – Annie Felix (University of California, Berkeley)

15.45 – 16.15 Coffee break

16.15 – 17.00 Keynote by Laura Jansen (University of Bristol), “On Not Knowing – Yet”
UCLOUVAIN | LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE | BELGIUM
Collège Erasme, Place Blaise Pascal, 1 bte L3.03.31, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique
– www.uclouvain.be –https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/incal

17.30 – 19.15 Walking dinner

19.30 – 21.00 Poetry performance by Margaret Christakos


DAY 2: THURSDAY 25 MAY 2023
8.45 – 9.15 Registration & coffee
9.15 – 10.15 Session 3 (“Experiments with Myth and Media”)
- “Tracing the Unknown Herakles in Anne Carson’s H of H Playbook” - Zina Giannopoulou (University of California, Irvine) & Lena Grimm (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor)
- “Re-reading Tragedy with Comics in Carson & Bruno’s The Trojan Women” - Natalie J. Swain (University of Winnipeg)

10.15 – 10.45 Coffee break

10.45 – 12.15 Session 4 (“Towards Critical Epistemologies”)
- “On Carson’s Transparency” – Elizabeth Sarah Coles (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
- “Dogs Talking: Translation, the Female and the Unintelligible in and between Anne Carson’s Texts” – Theresa Mayer (University of Hildesheim)
- “The ‘Floating’ Gender: Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red and the Lost Trans Archive” – Mary Mussman (University of California, Berkeley)

12.15 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 14.30 Keynote by Christine Wiesenthal (University of Alberta), “A Poet’s (Unpredictable) Techne Semeiotike”

14.30 – 15.00 Coffee break

15.00 – 16.30 Session 5 (“Exploring Emotions and the Invisible”)
- “Emotional Commitment and Response: Simone White, Anne Carson and Affective Criticism” – Nicholas Vila Byers (University of California, Berkeley)
- “De-Stabilizing the Known / Restauring the Unknown: Reading Anne Carson through the Lens of Quantum Physics and Dark Matter” – Jennifer K Dick (Université de Haute Alsace)
- “‘That Emptiness Where God Would Be’: Anne Carson and the Postsecular” – Kyra Sutton (University of California, Berkeley)

16.30 – 17.00 Concluding remarks


Coordinating committee:
- Ben De Bruyn, Professeur (UCLouvain)
- Michel Delville, Professeur ordinaire (ULiège)
- Stéphanie Vanasten, Professeure (UCLouvain)
- Helena Van Praet, Assistante (UCLouvain)
UCLOUVAIN | LOUVAIN-LA-NEUVE | BELGIUM
Collège Erasme, Place Blaise Pascal, 1 bte L3.03.31, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgique
– www.uclouvain.be – https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/incal - https://uclouvain.be/fr/institutsrecherche/
incal/ecr


Scientific committee:
- Jan Baetens, Professeur émérite (KU Leuven)
- Ben De Bruyn, Professeur (UCLouvain)
- Michel Delville, Professeur ordinaire (ULiège)
- Bart Eeckhout, Professeur ordinaire (University of Antwerp)
- Bertrand Gervais, Professeur titulaire (Université du Québec à Montréal)
- Laura Jansen, Associate Professor (University of Bristol)
- Stéphanie Vanasten, Professeure (UCLouvain)
- Helena Van Praet, Assistante (UCLouvain)

Organised in association with and the support of NEDLIT (Groupe de Recherche en littératures et cultures de langue néerlandaise et comparées), ECR (Centre de recherche écriture, création, représentation), and INCAL (Institut des civilisations, arts et lettres) at the UCLouvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium.

Organised in collaboration with Poëziecentrum, Ghent, Belgium.
With the support of the Fund for Scientific Research (F.R.S.–FNRS) and the Embassy of Canada to Belgium.

Contact: annecarsonconference2023 [at] uclouvain.be
Website:
https://uclouvain.be/fr/instituts-recherche/incal/ecr/evenements/anne-carson-and-the-unknown-explorations-in-21st-century-experimental-poetry.html

Saturday, April 02, 2016

Kinetic Conflicts in Carson and Kandinsky essay now available in Points, Dot, Line

I am thrilled to announce the publication of Points, Dot, Line: The Dynamics of Punctuation in Text and Image (Cambridge Scholars, 2016, 215pp, hardback edition) edited and introduced by Pascale Tollance and Laurence Petit including my chapter (chapter 4 pp 48-67) titled "Circles and Lines / Limits and Extentions: The Kinetic Conflicts Inherent in Anne Carson's The Life of Towns and Wassily Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane"

Contributors to this book of essays on text and image include: Sophie Aymes, Pascale Tollance, Hélene Gaillard, Lynn Blin, Valerie Morisson, Claude Maisonnat, Jennifer K Dick, Christelle Serée-Chaussinand, Cathy Roche-Liger, Liliaue Louvel, Chantal Delourme, and  Kerry-Jane Wallart.

Preorder the book at the special rate of 19pounds99 instead of 47pounds (a MAJOR discount!) and see the synopsis here: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/point-dot-period-the-dynamics-of-punctuation-in-text-and-image
 
You can read the intro and a selection of chapter one at: http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/63115
 

Monday, October 13, 2014

Essay in Forthcoming book Anne Carson Ecstatic Lyre!

I am thrilled to be part of this collection ANNE CARSON ECSTATIC LYRE--edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson. Due out from University of Michigan Press in January 2015. Christine Hume, Kristi Maxwell, and I (Jennifer K. Dick) wrote about Plainwater. This collection of critical and creative essays on the work of Anne Carson is a fundamental start to the much needed scholarship on one of the greatest authors living and writing today.
Thirty-two essays on Anne Carson's work and an unpublished interview with Anne Carson--
Explains the editor, JMW. To read the list of authors and the work they have dedicated their reflections to, see the list Joshua posted on his own blog:
http://www.joshuamariewilkinson.com/annecarson.html

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Ruminations while re-reading Anne Carson's Kinds of Water

From May 3rd-May 5th 2013:

Sitting in a café on the French-Swiss-German border reading Anne Carson's Kinds of Water. It has been 23 years since I first read Carson's poetic essay. I've since read every other text by her I could get my hands on and have myself walked over 1080 kilometers to Saint Jacques de Compostelle--not because "Something had to break" (Plainwater, p122) but because something was broken, had broken--or at least cracked--in me at the end of my PhD thesis as I read and re-read Susan Howe, Anne-Marie Albiach and Myung Mi Kim. I'd gone out to see whether going out could fix the rift, I suppose, or just because the question of possible recovery, change, recuperation, rejuvenation, visitation (of / by past or future ghosts?), meditation infused me with the same question she asks at the end of section I, on the eve of the summer solstice (June 20th) as she is about to embark on her own walk: "What is it others know?" (p125) Because, "Pilgrims were people who loved a good riddle." (p125) Pilgrims are. Because, when I first began her essay in the back recesses among the tattered shelves of the used books at the Haymarket Café in Northampton, MA, waiting for a friend, I became a pilgrim. I jumped up out of the sinking old comfy chair at 19 years old because nothing had ever quite electrified me, hurt me, left me wounded and alive quite like Carson's words. I could not contain them, had to shed (share) them right then and there with my friend Alexandra who was still in line for her coffee. I had to shake them off, fling them outwards. I knew so little, then, of myself (the world). But I had unwittingly fallen onto a path (outside myself). I'd begun to travel. I'd opened a door. As I sit here now, in the café, alone--because here one is mostly alone (it is a peculiarity of this city bordering other places, that its betweeness is not as well-rounded or radical as being marginalized, that its aloneness is hollow, like waiting in line, like being part of the line between places, or languages) in the blue bowl between les Vosges and the Black Forest not far from the snowcapped (Swiss) Alps. I look up. Have I stepped out once again? Turned? If this is a road returning, the route of my return, certainly it does follow Carson's own rule for travel: "Don't come back the way you went. Come back a new way."(Plainwater, p123) 

*

I begin scribbling about Carson, here in the offensively named Café le bon nègre. That's one café name I'll never include in a poem. It is horribly grey out today and I actually feel both pained by and furious at it, as if my anger could spark a bright yellow light somewhere behind the clouds and transform it. I keep feeling I am on the verge. I am eeking out, leaking. It is still early morning so I cannot escape myself, call someone somewhere (in the States?), chat about it. Time differences are made for long-distance consolation. But here, now, I cannot escape myself. A dog barks loudly 8 times. People mill and rush about on errands outside. There is the sound of construction or perhaps just a loud lawnmower someplace wherever a lawn might be hiding. A phone. A tram. An espresso machine. A printout of a receipt and the quick steps of the waitress. I do not know how to be in the world. I lack the tools. How is it that these tools were not automatically given over to me by some member of my well-adjusted family, or my friends? I know they know I do not entirely know how to be (behave properly) in this world. These are the kinds of things no one says to each other. 

*

Some of us are hardwired into a space between full tension and slack disconnection. I've never been able to find the right formula for maintaining equilibrium. This is a grey day. A grey block. A grey view. A grey mood? A gaze as grey as it is blue. If all of this is about  reading, re-reading Kinds of Water...then? I am afloat. I dive under. I inhale. The depths of the ocean have always terrified me. Often I (we) fear the thing we (I) cannot see. The riptide. The shark. Things that rumble in the night. In the empty dark of my own house I sometimes awaken and think another someone is there. What might they be doing? Reading my books? Trying out my nail polish? Eating my crackers? Watching over me as I sleep? I wait and listen, eyes wide open to the black dark as if I will see a shadow move against shadow. In the night there is the low hum of the walls, the fridge, the building, my body. The subtle, almost indistinguishable vibration, keening.


On the 6:46 TER from Mulhouse to Strasbourg, we pass les Vosges at pre-dusk. Rays of sun and shade stripe down from under a grey cloud. The mountains become layers of lands rippling away from us like waves. I feel the world's a tide approaching, departing. The oncoming night is tender and sorrowful as I read, "What is the fear inside language? No accident of the body can make it stop burning" (Plainwater, p 141). Nothing is burning (here). I am blue or green--a cold color for a cold mood, though in California a wildfire rages closer and closer to L.A. Fires are a summer menace but I have not fully given myself over to spring. Will it snow on the 12th? It snows still, high up, on the mountain peaks nearby. We pause to let out a few passengers in Selestat. A few passengers embark as well. The day is suddenly brighter. It is at its end. The sun's below cloud-cover, exposed, rays of light extending over the stilled factory outlets and truck containers left abandoned near them. And now some red-earth fields awaiting growth, tufts of a few lawns, wildflowers and trees like spring broccoli. I cannot tell whether I am fully awake. A thin finger of neon yellow points overland towards the Germanic towers of a village church. Mustard yellow. Fluff of forest. Another, closer village circles a white church--clapboard--with its traditional, modest spire. The clouds grow darker to the East. The woman passenger in the seat in front of me says "Bene" and "Enthusiaste" and "Certo". The music of Italian makes me want to dance, to make love, to be able to sing libretti, to belt out a perky string of notes from Mozart's The Magic Flute.

*

A little later. Little time left before arrival. I read, "When is a pilgrim like a letter of the alphabet? When he cries out." (Plainwater, p 143) and think a letter cries out for a word, to be connected, made into meaning. Lexique. Lexical. Semantic. Sense. To be. Being. I think about the nights I have not slept of late, of how, when I do, I often wake myself. Not with words or dreams or snores but a kind of groaning. I can feel myself pressing a kind of moaning sound out of my chest, a subconscious forcing of vibrato. In my sleep, I become a kind of instrument which sounds out the hollows of the sleeping self and seeks resonance. What am I waking for? Or sleeping? Our train pulls into the station and I have to give up on this odd series of automatic writings to hop out, be with others.


Cinco de Mayo. Sun. Woke in an unfamiliar house in a room up under the eaves with no charm except for the quiet and the bright light coming in a little, high-up window. Downstairs a note's been left on the table to help me figure out how to get from this banlieue back to Strasbourg Centre. I take a quick shower then head out but catch the bus in the wrong direction. Out and out into the country we go. At one point the driver hops off the bus, crosses the road halfway--standing in the lane for oncoming cars (there are none)--to meet an older woman, weatherworn face, rugged hands, who unlatches her large garden gate, steps out to greet him, a little potted plant on her palm. She lifts a sprig like a limb, showing him something about the sprouting green, then hands it over quickly as they head back to their places, out of the suddenly oncoming traffic. We drive past lots of colorful little Alsatian houses, gardens in bloom, past a canal opening beyond into fields. Joggers, late morning strollers abound. We pass the kind of half-highrises one sees on the generic edges of cities everywhere, though some have large balconies more fit for a seaside village with a view. At the terminus, Gare de Hoenheim, the parking lot is entirely empty. I catch Tram B back towards town, changing at Homme de Fer opposite Printemps' spectacularly designed decorous windows bulging from the flat walls of different floors like unexpected glass and metallic growths, for Tram D to Gare Centrale. The timing is perfect: I catch my train almost immediately.

*

There is something about leaving one's home. Once out the door, you can just keep going. The difficulty is in closing the door behind you. Our train pulls into Colmar station. I spotted a red brick spire not far back and the mountains beyond. What kept me from getting off the bus to walk along an unfamiliar canal? Or through that green, inviting field? What keeps me from disembarking right now in Colmar? A stroll awaits. Unknowns. Streets, ruelles, streams, forests. But the difficulty remains. To open and close the door. Leave behind the projects, plans, rules, tasks, objects that people one's life. My sack is too large. My chapter needs to be written. Someone must feed the cat, dog, bird. People are animals who need a nudge. Even the most adventurous among us must find the activating force to dis-inertia. Once in motion, though, the body remains in motion. Perhaps it is this I / she / he / you / they / we fear. "Pilgrims" Carson wrote "were people who figured things out as they walked" (Plainwater, p 129).

...