Kyle Dacuyan Leonard Schwartz: Poetry Project, February, 2019
I always think the word poiesis is the same as the word poetics but they are not really interchangeable. I forget that poiesis extends to any creative production, refers more broadly to the exercise of thought that makes from nothing something. Whereas poetics, seem always to have the fraught question appended (What are our poetics!), what are the verbal and structural decisions we make to make the something.
Of course thought and language forge one another, but what strikes me in Leonard Schwartz’s work is the particular way we watch that cascade happen. What are the poetics that emerge when we layer eco-consciousness, the marketplace, and the libidinal with one another. We get language like:
“This encounter between ocean and shore
goes on all night.
Continues even in the morning.
As waves drain away the shore’s strength
We reach afternoon.
And the approach of new night.
And still, shore pleads to be emptied.
So we locate our bodies in relation to bodies folding over us.”
And then what sort of new critical terrain does that language constitute. The work in Leonard Schwartz’s recent books – The New Babel and Heavy Sublimation – flicker with the encounter of bodies and land, and it is through the foreground of encounter that Schwartz presents questions about desire, intuition, power, value, consequence. What happens to contact within the contexts of war, overconsumption, and our increasingly endangered natural world. And are there antidotes, or at least alternatives, that can be conceived through energies of contact. And how do poetics render new conditions of contact possible?
In addition to the aforementioned, Leonard Schwartz is the author of Salamander: A Bestiary with the painter Simon Carr, as well as If, At Element, A Message Back and Other Furors, The Library of Seven Readings, and Language as Responsibility. He also edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books. Schwartz hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsound. Schwartz splits his time between Washington State and NYC. And we are very pleased tonight to welcome him to The Poetry Project.
Of course thought and language forge one another, but what strikes me in Leonard Schwartz’s work is the particular way we watch that cascade happen. What are the poetics that emerge when we layer eco-consciousness, the marketplace, and the libidinal with one another. We get language like:
“This encounter between ocean and shore
goes on all night.
Continues even in the morning.
As waves drain away the shore’s strength
We reach afternoon.
And the approach of new night.
And still, shore pleads to be emptied.
So we locate our bodies in relation to bodies folding over us.”
And then what sort of new critical terrain does that language constitute. The work in Leonard Schwartz’s recent books – The New Babel and Heavy Sublimation – flicker with the encounter of bodies and land, and it is through the foreground of encounter that Schwartz presents questions about desire, intuition, power, value, consequence. What happens to contact within the contexts of war, overconsumption, and our increasingly endangered natural world. And are there antidotes, or at least alternatives, that can be conceived through energies of contact. And how do poetics render new conditions of contact possible?
In addition to the aforementioned, Leonard Schwartz is the author of Salamander: A Bestiary with the painter Simon Carr, as well as If, At Element, A Message Back and Other Furors, The Library of Seven Readings, and Language as Responsibility. He also edited and co-translated Benjamin Fondane’s Cine-Poems and Other, with New York Review Books. Schwartz hosts the radio program Cross Cultural Poetics, archived online at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsound. Schwartz splits his time between Washington State and NYC. And we are very pleased tonight to welcome him to The Poetry Project.
