Urgent Matter

Authors

  • Jonathan Monroe Cornell University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.8.0.3697

Abstract

Opening questions about “things” onto the bureaucratically-maintained, compartmentalized discursive, disciplinary claims of “philosophy,” “theory,” and “poetry,” “Urgent Matter” explores these three terms in relation to one another through attention to recent work by Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, the German-American poet Rosmarie Waldrop, and the German poet Ulf Stolterfoht, whose fachsprachen. Gedichte. I-IX (Lingos I-IX. Poems) Waldrop rendered into English in an award-winning translation. The difference between the "things" called "poetry" and "philosophy," as now institutionalized within the academy, is not epistemological, ontological, ahistorical, but a matter of linguistic domains, of so-called concrete "images" as the policed domain of the former and of "abstraction" as the policed domain of the latter. Challenging the binary logics that dominate language use in diverse discursive/disciplinary cultures, Waldrop’s linguistically self-referential, appositional procedures develop ways to use language that are neither linear, nor so much without direction, as multi-directional, offering complexes of adjacency, of asides, of digression, of errancy, of being “alongside,” in lieu of being “opposed to,” that constitute at once a poetics, an aesthetics, an ethics, and a politics. Elaborating a complementary understanding of poetry as “the most philosophic of all writing,” a medium of being “contemporary,” Waldrop and Stolterfoht question poetry’s purposes as one kind of language apparatus among others in the general economy. Whatever poetry might be, it aspires to be in their hands not a thing in itself but a form of self-questioning, of all discourses, all disciplines, that “thing” that binds “poetry” and “philosophy” together, as urgent matter, in continuing.

Author Biography

Jonathan Monroe, Cornell University

Jonathan Monroe’s recent articles and book contributions include his forthcoming chapter on “Genre” for Literature Now: Key Terms and Methods for Literary History (2015); "Poetry, Philosophy, Parataxis"; "Composite Cultures, Chaos Wor(l)ds: Relational Poetics, Textual Hybridity, and the Future of Opacity"; "Autrement Dire: La poussée vers l'abstraction de Rosmarie Waldrop"; "Los amores y juegos del joven Berger" (in Bolaño Salvaje); and "Every Person, Many Studies" (in the ADFL Bulletin). Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, he is the author of A Poverty of Objects: The Prose Poem and the Politics of Genre; Demosthenes’ Legacy, a collection of prose poems and short fiction; and co-author and editor of two special issues on modern and contemporary poetry— Poetry, Community, Movement (Diacritics), and Aftershock: Poetry and Cultural Politics since 1989 (Poetics Today)—as well as two books on writing in the academy: Writing and Revising the Disciplines and Local Knowledges, Local Practices: Writing in the Disciplines at Cornell. His verse and prose poetry, short fiction, and cross-genre writing have appeared as well in numerous journals, including The American Poetry Review, Epoch, Harvard Review, /nor New Ohio Review, Verse, Volt, and Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics. A former DAAD Fellow at the Universität Konstanz, he has served as a steering committee member of Cornell's Institute for German Cultural Studies; as a member of the Fulbright selection committee; and as Director of Cornell’s John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. His current research focuses on contemporary poetry and poetics in Europe and the Americas.

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Published

2015-10-09

How to Cite

Monroe, J. (2015). Urgent Matter. Konturen, 8, 8–39. https://doi.org/10.5399/uo/konturen.8.0.3697

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Section

Articles