WLC Seminar: Poetic form and labor’s invisibility – Grogan on 6th October 10am

Writing, Literature & Culture Monthly Seminar Series – Where the world meets the word….

Our WLC October seminar features a presentation from Kristin Grogan:

Title: Casual, durable: Lorine Niedecker, poetic form, and labor’s invisibility  

Kristin Grogan is Assistant Professor in the English department at Rutgers University, where she teaches courses on poetry and poetics. 

In the fall and winter of 1964, the poet Lorine Niedecker sent three homemade books to friends. …see more below

 

When: Wednesday 6 October from 10.00 am to 11.00 am.

Where:  Join Zoom Meeting https://deakin.zoom.us/j/83284452220?pwd=OHd5Rnhkd2wzc2ZNdUE4N21yNlhvdz09

Meeting ID: 832 8445 2220. Password: 91817017

Abstract:

In the fall and winter of 1964, the poet Lorine Niedecker sent three homemade books to friends. Covered in colored wrapping paper and illustrated with her own watercolors of her Wisconsin home, the books present themselves as the products of craft labor of an inexpensive, amateur, and resourceful kind. Departing from the well-worn critical terrain of craft labor, in this paper I locate another laboring source for these poems: the period of time that Niedecker spent employed as a hospital cleaner, a labor which is only rarely and briefly mentioned in the poems themselves. Taking this non-appearance as a starting point, I suggest that Niedecker’s cleaning work provided the grounds for a poetics that values, rather than seeks to remedy, the invisibility of custodial work and that prizes an ethic of minimal imposition. My readings stage a broader argument about formal minimalism, the relationship between literary value and unproductive and diminished production, and the gendered labor of post-war poetry.