Breath Poetics

There is a long history across traditions linking rhythms of breath to poetic formation, inspiration, invocation, and voice. More recently, the term ‘breath poetics’ has come to refer to a particular moment in mid C20th America, associated with Black Mountain and Beat writers. For the New American Poets of the 1950s and 60s, poetic breath signaled jazz-inflected spontaneity, an often masculine vigor, and the vital signature of authorial presence. “Breath,” as Nathaniel Mackey writes in ‘Breath and Precarity’ (2018), “was in the air.”

Mackey’s essay marks a shift in contemporary thinking around breath and poetics. His turn toward breath as a precarious trope in the work of black poets and musicians is symptomatic of a broader cultural turn toward breathlessness and its discontents, revealing the breathless modalities – social as well as environmental – that characterize our global moment, from Covid-19 to the Black Lives Matter movement, ecological crisis, air pollution, rising cases of respiratory disease linked to resource extraction labor, and the expanded use of biochemical warfare. As Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (2018) observes, there are signs of “physical and psychological breathlessness everywhere, in the megacities choked by pollution, in the precarious social condition of the majority of exploited workers, in the pervading fear of violence, war, and aggression.”

This seminar aims to expand critical conversations around breath and poetry to situate contemporary inflections of breath poetics within wider comparative and transhistorical discourses. We seek papers that present alternative trajectories to the canonical narrative of postwar breath poetics, shifting theoretical ground by engaging critically with the formal, thematic, and cultural valences of breath and breathlessness. Key questions that this seminar hopes to address are:

How does breath shape poetic form?
How does breath inflect poetic practices in non-western traditions?
How might critical engagements with poetic breath offer responses to global cultural crises of breathing?
What modes of critical thinking intersect with poetic breath?
Is there something particular about the relationship between poetry and breath or can we find traces of breath in other literary/artistic forms?
What comparative possibilities might breath afford the study of literature?
Can breath offer new ways for theorizing the lyric and/or the poetic?

Topics may include:

Breath & race
Breath & the environment
Breath & gender
Breath & labor
Breath & illness
Breath & form
Breath & rhythm
Breath & performance
Breath & the lyric subject
Breath & cognitive states

This seminar welcomes scholars working across languages, geographies, and theoretical frameworks, and encourages proposals that take cross-disciplinary and/or transhistorical approaches. Please submit abstracts (300-400 words) and a short bio by October 14.