Thom Donovan wraps our hearts and minds around Somatic Poetics

We'd like to point you to a "part essay, part proposition, part thinking in motion" by our friend Thom Donovan over at Jacket2. Donovan focuses on Somatic Poetics--being careful not to define, but to continue "a discourse that has become visible to [him] in the past few years." His conversation partners in this vein are many, and include Daria Fain, Robert Kocik, Rob Halpern, Eleni Stecopoulos, Amber DiPietra, David Wolach, Taylor Brady, CAConrad, Dorothea Lasky, Brenda Iijima, David Buuck, and Bhanu Kapil. And while it truly does not serve as a manifesto, Donovan does clarify his terms. "Somatic poetics as..."

The body foregrounded by the poem’s content.

The body foregrounded by the poem’s form.

The body, as a form, coextensive with a (written) content.

The body, as a form, becoming written.

Or the body as a site of “material,” of information or content for the making of the poem.

The poem quivering “off-page” and on in this relation.

Or the body as a site whereof language becomes cited.

Or language as a site whereof the body becomes seen.

Or the body between non-site and site, a kind of shuddering caesura, a Shabbat or intervention into what is sensed.

Or the poem as that which makes visible the body as a place where cultural, political, social, moral, and economic forces converge and convolute becoming visible in their play.

We're also told that this might be the first article to take up "somatics" with regards to contemporary poetry/poetics, with the possible exception of Petra Kuppers' recent Chain Links anthology (but let us know if you've got others!). And as for poetics! Donovan looks particularly at the work of Rob Halpern in relation to the Projectivist breath, Eleni Stecopoulos ("I dreamt we were susceptive to language // that care might be agency’s complement // and form never more than condition / passing as body"), and the Phoneme Choir of choreographer Daria Fain and designer/writer/architect Robert Kocik. "How can entering the room be like learning how to breathe?" asks Kocik. Of Kocik's language practice, Donovan notes that it "seeks through prosodic means to reveal language as a subtle material and, moreover, as a transformative, empowering, and healing force. Regarding the couple's larger project:

Coupling gesture with dance, spoken or sung lyric with phonemics, the Phoneme Choir seeks after a future anterior in which futures past may come to be and what will have been is expressed as the now time of current bodies choreographically and chorically. Likewise, in Kocik’s practices as a designer and architect, potential is maximized through the design of a particular piece of furniture (such as the bookcases Kocik has become known for, which rotate and are set on wheels for rearrangement), or, in the case of Kocik’s proposed design for a renovated Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan, through a designed interior. What is striking about the Feldenkrais Center proposal is that, true to Moshé Feldenkrais’s somatic philosophy whereby the Israeli physicist sought to focus on “relationship[s] between movement and thought” in the belief that “increased mental awareness and creativity accompany physical improvements,”[4] the building’s design seeks to cultivate facility in its occupant-users — awareness, perception, corporeal know-how.

Donovan also looks at "somatics"--"a term coined in the 1970s around contemporary dance circles alluding to various movement-based healing techniques and techniques for exploring the body’s physical processes," he tells us--in relation to Rebecca Solnit, Bhanu Kapil, Rachel Zolf, and CAConrad. He also reminds us that somatics "cannot be divorced from environment." And so of course any discussion of any artist's work delves into larger matters. Here, those include ecological disaster, "using art and writing as 'legal material,'" the "non-'normative' body," "metaphors of the inhuman or liminally human," somatics as aesethtic site, and remediation/recognition. But none of the terms as we use them here will do this piece much justice--so out of context! We'll give you a bit more from the man himself:

Amber DiPietra: “The body becomes the problem.” [Hannah] Weiner’s body becomes her problem in the sense that she must overcome, or merely deal with, somatic exigencies — exigencies of her neural-chemical becoming — through an aesthetic means. Clairvoyant journalism is thus born from oversensitivity in Weiner’s journal The Fast (1992). Undergoing writing (a somatic poetics?) is not “better” or more “authentic” than other kinds of writing or art. Just different. Coming from a different place/set of concerns/needs (like Kafka’s use of the journal, whereof Blanchot said that Kafka wrote in a journal to observe who he was when he was not writing.)

Can one undergo through the poem the conditions of a landscape, geographical or social location, intersubjective formation, or sociopolitical incommensurability? To what extent could this undergoing produce a different set of affective or intersubjective coordinates, or simply make visible the conditions that made the work of art/poem possible or necessary? In Rachel Zolf’s Neighbour Procedure (2010), she says that the book is an attempt to compose a series of “mad affects.” What about the mad affects of places? Relations? Histories of relation? The body is an extension of places and beings in ‘space-time.’ Susan Howe: “Once I was driving to Buffalo alone, moving up there for the winter to teach. It was me and my car and the mountains. I had a tape of Articulations from a reading I had done, and I thought I would turn it on as I was passing the place near where Hope [Atherton] had been wandering after the raid — and it was a wonderful feeling because the sounds seemed to be pieces still in the air there. I was returning them home as I drove away from home.”

Enjoy the entire piece here.