Contingent poetics: ethics, immanence, conceptual poetry.
The contingency of things, their radical uncertainty, has become very apparent in recent convergences and crises of capitalism, ecology, migration, population, agriculture, religion. Subsequently, over the last decade, contingency has become an increasingly debated concept in philosophy, art and poetry. Indeed, my argument is that exploring (new) ways to think about contingency will help us find democratic, ethical ways to organise (ourselves in) the world.
Quentin Meillassoux argues for “the necessity of contingency”, the subtitle to his 2006 book After Finitude, which marks the beginning of a series of new movements in philosophy that speculate about the nature of matter and objects outside of human, subjective perception. Whence names such as Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology, New Materialism.
Similar circumstances signalled the advent of conceptual poetry, a movement that likewise, speculates about the material and objective qualities of language and poems. Conceptualism, in my view, offers the most direct poetic response to today’s many contingent events, by placing contingency at the center of its definition of poetry. Vanessa Place -‐ a leading practitioner and theorist of conceptual poetry -‐ constantly reiterates her claim that “anything is poetry that exists within the institution of poetry” (cf. eg. Notes on Conceptualisms (2009).
Put another way, conceptualism begins with an empty frame that could include anything, is open to any kind of contingent eventuality. Of course, once this frame is filled by a certain object as poem, the possibilities are immediately highly specific and contextual. Conceptual poet and theorist Craig Dworkin describes this as a new New Formalism (in his introduction to the online Conceptual Writing Anthology on UBUWeb); denoting precisely the fact that rigorous conceptual poems are formally contingent. The form of a properly executed conceptual poem is singular and reflective of the poem’s informing concept. In contrast, traditional formalism, dictates a poem’s form according to received templates, such as the the famous sonnet (or sestina, haiku, etc). It is precisely in this space between an initial radical openness, and a subsequent specific framing of a certain slice of the world as a poem, that the uncertain possibilities and limitations of contingency can be explored (even if never fully grasped).
This radical openness can and does lead to a divergent range of poetic styles, methods, registers; for example, experiments with new media, Flash poetry, bio poetry, or Eduardo Qac’s enigmatic perfume poetry; Christian Bök’s Xenotext Project (a poem encoded in the DNA of an Extremofile bacteria); Vanessa Place’s Statement of Facts (appropriations of victims’ testimonies, from her work as a defence lawyer for sexual offenders). However, conceptual poems also take the more traditional printed form (see the two main anthologies Against Expression (2011) and I’ll Drown My Book (2012) for a plethora of examples).
It is precisely the radical difference of conceptual poems that foregrounds their own contingency; thereby inviting new ways of thinking about contemporary understandings of poetry, subjective expression, perception, language, technology.
