One Poem: Reading Fast and Slow
Description
In the digital age, headlines, tweets, posts, and updates have trained us to glance at short form text and quickly absorb its meaning. But lyric poetry demands that we slow down, read line for line, word for word, syllable for syllable, even letter for letter, preferably over and over again. Both the power and the politics of a poem lie at least partially in the labor of synchronizing the time of the poem with the time of the reader, a work that is distributed between the poet’s composition process and the reader’s hermeneutic process. Poetry demands, that is, highly focused, microscopic, and slow reading practices at the same time as it successfully uses immediate effects and the allure of quick glances to captivate the reader–a combination of conflicting tasks unfamiliar (or un-useful) to most other short compositions in today’s media and text ecologies.
This seminar proposes an experimental format to explore the relationship between single poems and shared reading practices: papers will each focus on one poem from any language, tradition, or period. From a constellation of unique and independent poetic texts, the seminar will build an as-yet unknown sharedness among a community of reception. We see the open inquiry mode of this seminar as comparativeness in practice, arising from our engagement with different models of sustained attention, our methods of teaching poems and being taught by poems, the variety of our hermeneutic cultures and disciplinary backgrounds, and our willingness to let poems confront us with what we do not know.
We invite participants to use a single poem to:
- intervene in concepts of time (time as a mediated experience, the relationship between time and rhythm, fast and slow time, etc.)
- address and engage with concepts of hermeneutics (Foucauldian groundlessness, Bourdieu’s sociology of literature, translation as interpretation, etc.)
- experiment with the phenomenology of reading (esp. while foregrounding the reader’s positionality)
- encounter a poem’s form in relationship to the social and cultural forms with which it is surrounded and imbricated
- offer a historical analysis of different interpretive approaches
- examine its “biographical” context to propose readings, counter-readings, or speculative readings
Structures for presentations might be based on interventions into the interpretation of canonical poems, Chinese-style zhujie annotations, explications de texte, experiments in poetry teaching, reports on research archives (including reception research), or the reading journal/personal essay. Organizers will be looking for contributions that speak towards a larger community of readers of poetry from all languages, eras, and cultures; we are seeking contributions that center how to read, rather than which poems to read and what to think about them.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Joanna Krenz (dr hab.) is an assistant professor at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan. Her research focuses on modern Chinese poetry in intercultural and interdisciplinary contexts, esp. its interactions with philosophy, religion, science, and technology. She's the author of "In Search of Singularity: Poetry in Poland and China Since 1989" (Brill, 2022). She translates Chinese poetry and prose into Polish, including authors such as Yu Jian, Li Hao, Yan Lianke, Shang Keyi, Hao Jingfang, et al.
Speaker Bio
Maggie Greaves is associate professor of English at Skidmore College. Her research focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century poetry and poetics, world literature, and the history of science. She is the author of Lyric Poetry and Space Exploration from Einstein to the Present (Oxford University Press, 2023), and her poems have appeared in magazines such as The Missouri Review and Seneca Review.
Speaker Bio
Abigail Culpepper is a doctoral candidate in the Department of French and Francophone Studies at Brown University. With an attention to textuality, her research focuses on problems of ecocritical reading, questions of literary scale, and the political relevance of literary criticism. Her dissertation reads ecological figures of stillness in modernist Francophone poetry, and her next project explores genre as the horizon of possibility for literary criticism.
Speaker Bio
Lea Pao is Assistant Professor of German Studies. Her forthcoming book (An Archaeology of Forgotten Information Practices: Klopstock, Meister, Egger, Kräftner, Cornell UP) offers a vertical thinking about information and poetry as overlapping layers of human engagement. At Stanford, she teaches both graduate seminars and undergraduate courses on poetry, most recently “German Poetry, Global Poetics,” “10 Poems That Will Change Your Life” and “Close Reading: History, Theory, Practice.”
Papers
Speaker Bio
Timothy Billings is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Middlebury College, and the author of three bilingual critical editions: Victor Segalen’s Stèles / 古今碑錄 (Wesleyan UP, 2007), with Christopher Bush; Matteo Ricci’s 1595 treatise Jiaoyou lun 交友論 published as On Friendship: One Hundred Maxims for a Chinese Prince (Columbia UP, 2009); and Ezra Pound’s Cathay / 耀 (Fordham UP, 2020); as well as Twenty-Nine Goodbyes: An Introduction to Chinese Poetry (Fordham UP, 2024).
Speaker Bio
Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature and culture at Cornell University. He is the author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the translator of Floral Mutter by Ya Shi, and a practicing poet whose most recent collection is titled Stand Back, Don't Fear the Change.
Speaker Bio
Jenn M Hoyer is an associate professor of German at the University of Arkansas. They founded the Jewish Studies program there in 2015 and directed it until 2025. Past presentations and publications revolved around Holocaust poetry and the work of Nelly Sachs. Recent presentations and publications explore lyrical (mis)use of mathematical ideas; neuroqueering; and theorizing a cultural studies approach to autistic reading practice drawn from the impulse of the Neurodiversity Paradigm.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Ross Etherton is Assistant Professor of German at Denison University. He has published on Ernst Jünger’s novella Sturm, Alexander Kluge’s The Battle, and Neil Young’s “Powderfinger.” He is also a translator, songwriter, and recording artist who has been featured on many albums and has opened for artists like Nick Cave and Charlie Louvin. His interests include media theory, music, translation, intersections of technology and literature, and 19th- and 20th-century German literature.
Speaker Bio
Oren Izenberg is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Daniel Heffernan is a sixth-year PhD candidate at Fordham University. He studies twentieth- and twenty-first century American poetry, with an emphasis on poems that challenge, question, or subvert the givenness of the first-person pronoun, or the so-called lyric "I." His current work focuses on the relation between post-war avant-garde poetic formations, such as the New York School and the Language movement, and the lyric tradition.
Speaker Bio
Serafina Lee is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is currently a Visiting Student at Yale University. Her thesis focuses on the drafting process in relation to American avant-garde poetics, from 1970-2020. Focusing on Susan Howe, Lyn Hejinian, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, her thesis maps drafting as a prominent source of poetic practice and theory. She is convening a Techne conference titled ‘Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form’ in November 2025.
Speaker Bio
Chi Le is a PhD candidate in English at Brown University. She studies modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, postcolonial and critical theory, and global Anglophone literature. She sometimes writes poetry when she is not thinking with the poetry of others, and holds an MFA degree from Cornell University.