may 3

Ammiel Alcalay & Kate Tarlow Morgan
Walking in the Archive

Poetics Lab No. 1 from the Center for Poetics and Social Practice
5:00 p.m. 1301 33rd St. NW

The phrase “Poetics Lab” suggests there is a definition to be attained for "poetics" as the container for what poetry can encompass as process, perception, movement, effort, and concept. Alcalay and Morgan, whose paths have crossed over the past thirty years, will be the first to collaboratively consider the "poetics lab" as the Petri-dish for thinking about poetry/poetics in the broadest sense, as form and function of human thought, human perception, and the location of experience in time.

As a Lab, this process is, by definition, experimental, part of the "fieldwork" of poetics or the way in which fieldwork "takes you somewhere" and "makes you perceive differently." The aim of the investigators is to trace the process they have chosen to engage in and record, along the way, the myriad and different paths such engagements might follow. Those to whom a Poetics Lab is addressed will need a map.

For Alcalay and Morgan the mapping process is woven in with life in New York City in the 1970s, with shared memory and travels in and among contemporary artistic movements, with all the material life of the city that entails. More specifically, Alcalay and Morgan, by virtue of their varied trainings -- as poet, scholar, mechanic, housepainter, dancer, school-teacher, archeologist, bookseller -- will focus on a kind of miraculously long-lasting orientation to poetry as a form of knowledge, as an approach to the world. Over the years, this sensibility has expanded, spanning different forms of artistic activity, becoming an organ-sense of history. In other words, there is always a 'time' in poetry and, as such, a continual layering of the sense of it over time.

As a start, Alcalay and Morgan will return to the writings of Charles Olson (a study begun back in the 1970s) to jumpstart these long-considered ideas about poetry as a cognitive form, about the body in time and space, seeking to continue a mapping process that began over 30 years ago. The investigation will begin with a trip to the Olson Archives in Storrs, Connecticut, with an emphasis on seeking out materials by Olson on or related to dance and the body. Where the project goes will depend on what they find and the form their investigation takes may include diverse media -- words, images, and movement -- perhaps even a map.

RSVP by April 30 to Ammiel Alcalay at aaka@earthlink.net.