Eleni Stecopoulos’ brilliantly provocative, syncretic manifesto, Visceral Poetics, 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.
On March 15, a group of poets gathered at New York's Poetry Project to celebrate the book and engage in a conversation on "opacity." The evening was organized by Stecopoulos and Thom Donovan. Here is the handout of statements by several people who could not be present at the event: Will Alexander, Margit Galanter, Petra Kuppers, Sean Labrador y Manzano, Miranda Mellis, William Rowe, and Robin-Tremblay-McGaw. Prefaced by Donvan's introduction.
