VISCERAL POETICS
Eleni Stecopoulos
with a foreword by Alphonso Lingis
VISCERAL POETICS tracks “the chronic syndrome of
the West” and the cruel treatments of poetry’s resistance. At once a call for
an embodied scholarship, a poetic work of criticism, and a fragmentary
autoethnography of the author’s health crisis at the millennium, Eleni
Stecopoulos’ book moves in a complex field of languages and bodies, between
symptom and art, diagnosis and composition, fascia and form. Stecopoulos aligns
her method with diviners of entrails and holistic healers, tracing the
resonance between locations that range from demonic possession and parasitic
vowels to acupuncture and diaspora Greek. Opening new directions in poetry and
poetics as well as literature and medicine, Stecopoulos argues for the body’s
poetic agency and a different understanding of the therapeutic potency of art.
Focusing on works by Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf,
Stecopoulos articulates a remarkable set of correspondences between
experimental writing and the modalities and diagnostics of holistic
medicine. In new readings of Artaud, Stecopoulos explores his
collaboration with pain and use of energetic principles derived from modalities
like homeopathy and acupuncture. She revisits the poetry and “translation
therapy” of Artaud’s asylum years, understanding his exoticism as a technology
of healing through world languages. Stecopoulos animates the complicated role
of Artaud’s multiethnic background and ties his translations to histories of
linguistic imagination situated in colonial encounter and nationalist and
imperialist strategies.
VISCERAL POETICS also includes one of the few sustained
meditations on Paul Metcalf’s documentary narrative GENOA: A TELLING OF
WONDERS, a hybrid text that becomes a navigation of Western disease and the
imperial conceptions to which American letters bear witness.
A critique both of the ways institutions disembody us
and the primitivism that persists in heterodox seeking, VISCERAL POETICS
seeks “to overwrite discourses of pathology with currents of empathy.” It
joins the tradition of American poets’ scholarship exemplified by Charles
Olson’s CALL ME ISHMAEL and Susan Howe’s THE BIRTH-MARK, and does something
uniquely its own—a grand refusal of the division between who feels and who
interprets. Stecopoulos’ book is the second in ON Contemporary
Practice’s Monograph Series, which features extensive essays and collections by
single authors as well as collections by multiple authors regarding discourses
in contemporary poetics.
PRAISE FOR VISCERAL POETICS
Eleni Stecopoulos is singularly aware of a healing power
in poetry that touches the most obscure depths of our carnal existence. She
seeks to uncover “how the body in its opaque poetry can be homeopathically
treated by poetry—as aesthetic, not anaesthetic, therapy.” Eleni Stecopoulos’
researches open an important field for investigation and practice: the healing
force of language, of poetry.
- Alphonso
Lingis, from the Foreword
Searching in real time, thinking/feeling as writing,
this tour de force of authentic scholarship reaches far back to the matrix of
writing/embodiment at the crux of human consciousness, far forward into a
modernism (Artaud, Metcalf) that explores the edges of such embodied writing,
and in all directions as Stecopoulos’ every insight emerges from and remains
immersed in a surround of the immediately personal. This is a lyrical study of
great depth, an epic poem of experiential erudition.
- Maria
Damon
Eleni Stecopoulos’ brilliantly provocative, syncretic
manifesto identifies idiopathic disease with ideolectical poetics, pathology
with anomaly – the flesh of the text and the text of the flesh – bringing home
the liberatory potential for visceral readings of the unintelligible. For
Stecopoulos, diagnosis is a practice of aesthetic translation and poetry a
quest for knowledge outside the disabling strictures of Western rationalism.
Written in lyric bursts of telegraphic intensity, Stecopoulos follows her
guides, Artaud and Metcalf, through veils of suffering in order to repossess,
from the jaws of evisceration, her own life – and ours.
-
Charles Bernstein
In a thick rich book of Artaudian trickster moves, Eleni
Stecopoulos performs healing rituals upon medical practices and cultural
prescriptions, writing toward her own healing process, with opacity as
sustaining wayfarer and shield against early collapse. Disease emerges as
narrative symptom for disconnect, and language becomes subtle homeopathy,
weaves a new myth, for suffering writers and suffering war-torn worlds, in a
visceral poetics based on Artaud’s asylum writings: “a rhythm of exorcism
against the drying out of opium by conspiracies and consecrations”
(Artaud, SELECTED WRITINGS).
- Petra
Kuppers
Experience what “radiates from a text,” “the gravity at
the core of theater” in this long awaited critical work from Eleni
Stecopoulos, the genesis of her Poetics of Healing—a curated series of stages
in which these ideas are enacted and the isolated patient finds place in a
complicated communal as both are changed. Placing the psychic reading of the
body that refuses with will next to the reading of poetries claimed unreadable,
she makes a document of vital forms for a new kind of scholarship, for a new
and ancient kind of person or poet one and the same in the hopes that they
won’t be re-swallowed by the dominant but will find their own breath. A breath
that will resist and resist singularity and in the failures or blocks, the
resetting, find the choral-tragic—through a different kind of
reading/witnessing. The violences of a larger social body made visible though a
syncope pressing right up against poetry. In this epic lyric, everything and
nothing at once. In “a form that holds, rather than explains”—the mystery of
how this beautiful important project came to be.
- Melissa
Buzzeo
The central question of VISCERAL POETICS is how to be.
How to be a body. How to be a body in pain, a body not in pain. How to be a
thinker, a scholar, a writer about literary works. How to be a poem too. It is
unusual for a piece of literary criticism to take on such weighty questions.
And Eleni Stecopoulos gives us no easy answers as she consults various forms of
literatures and healing, questioning all of them and her relationship to them
too. And as she does this she writes a book that is beautiful and moving, a
life’s work dedicated to the work of living.
- Juliana
Spahr
Pricing
$45 institutions
$25 individuals
Send cheques (payable to Michael Cross) to
ON Contemporary Practice
2556 Frances Street
Oakland, CA 94601
Pay online via Pay Pal at
