Poetics of Liveliness - by Ada Smailbegovic

About the Book

Ada Smailbegovic shows how twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds.

Book Synopsis

Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life cycle of a silkworm, or the vaporous movements that constitute the ever-shifting edges of clouds? We tend to think of these subjects as reserved for science, but, as Ada Smailbegovic argues, twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers have intermingled scientific methodologies with poetic form to reveal unfolding processes of change. Their works can be envisioned as laboratories within which the methodologies of experimentation, natural historical description, and taxonomic classification allow poetic language to register the rhythms and durations of material transformation.

Poetics of Liveliness moves across scales to explore the realms of molecules, fibers, tissues, and clouds. It investigates works such as Christian Bök's insertion of a poetic text into the DNA code of living bacteria in order to generate a new poem in the shape of a protein molecule, Jen Bervin's considerations of silk fibers and their use in biomedicine, Gertrude Stein's examination of brain tissues in medical school and its subsequent influence on her literary taxonomies of character, and Lisa Robertson's studies of nineteenth-century meteorology and the soft architecture of clouds. In their attempt to understand physical processes unfolding within lively material worlds, Smailbegovic contends, these poets have developed a distinctive materialist poetics. Structured as a poetic cosmology akin to Lucretius's "On the Nature of Things," which begins at the atomic level and expands out to the vastness of the universe, Poetics of Liveliness provides an innovative and surprising vision of the relationship between science and poetry.

Review Quotes

Smailbegovic addresses the entwined relations between contemporary North American poetry and developments in philosophy, art, and science. She argues that each of these fields or practices address the same kinds of complexity in the world, both enabling language to emerge from the world (whether in human or animal form) and materiality to complexify and elaborate itself chemically and evolutionarily.--Elizabeth Grosz, author of The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism

Poetics of Liveliness has two muses. One, Gertrude Stein, is named; the other, William Blake, is the "unnamed form" animating this book of wonders. Meshing handwork to brainwork, Blake's multimedia inventions release from "the merely natural" a body of knowledge--and knowledge of bodies--that is larger, more minutely organized, and more alive than our philosophy had dreamt of. Smailbegovic proves herself a member of Blake's tribe, not just its ethnographer. Her study addresses poetry and poetics, new and old ontology, science, technology, and media studies, and ecopoetics.--Marjorie Levinson, author of Thinking Through Poetry: Field Reports on Romantic Lyric

In a remarkable feat of interdisciplinary scholarship, this book plumbs the depths and scans the horizons of what it means to write on, in, of, and with "life" through a poetry and poetics of experimentation. Science meets poetry meets the ongoing unknown in a redefinition of environmental poetics--bravo!--Cary Wolfe, author of Ecological Poetics; or, Wallace Stevens's Birds

Writing as a poet versed in biology, physics, and meteorology, Smailbegovic explains minute and slow-moving material phenomena as acutely as she does poetic nuance. Rather than unveil worlds normally imperceptible at human scale, her "edge work" tracks partial contact between actants moving past and through one another at different speeds. Offering a feminist account of the pliability or softness of matter, Poetics of Liveliness reads as an incipient, emergent organism in its own right, slowly and recursively proceeding by multiplying surfaces of responsiveness.--Anne-Lise François, author of Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience

About the Author

Ada Smailbegovic is an assistant professor of English at Brown University. She is a cofounder of the digital publishing platform the Organism for Poetic Research, and she has published essays and poetic work in a variety of venues.