Awards

• Commended for Matei Calinescu Prize, Modern Language Association 2021

Overview

Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegović argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök's insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin's considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein's examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson's studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegović contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius's ""On the Nature of Things,"" which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

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Reviews

Smailbegovic addresses the entwined relations between contemporary North American poetry and developments in philosophy, art, and science, arguing that each of these fields or practices address the same kinds of complexity in the world, a complexity that enables both language to emerge from the world (whether in human or animal form) and for materiality to complexify and elaborate itself chemically and evolutionarily. -- Elizabeth Grosz, author of <i>The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism</i>

Author Information

Ada Smailbegović is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. She is a cofounder of the digital publishing platform the Organism for Poetic Research, and she has published essays and poetic work in a variety of venues.

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