&NOW 2018

This panel will address ways in which occult, imaginative, and non-human methods of poiesis can de-center, interrogate, and re-compose what is traditionally thought of as the "real," in some of its complex permutations. Our papers will explore ways in which nature and the non-human provide powerful models by which we can come to new understandings of non-human creative processes and the formation of a non-human ontology. The term "nature" is fraught with complexities, and no longer signifies a space apart from human activity and intervention. But, without reverting to a naive or Romantic understanding of the natural world, our presentations will invoke nature as a location which de-prioritizes the human subject or a location in which human and non-human can blur and conjoin. Or, perhaps we will find that non-human methods of poiesis and poetic inquiry into the real close themselves off from the human subject and can only be peered into from a distance. In the case of so-called occult poets, the magical aspiration to actually invoke the supernatural through poiesis demonstrates another way that writers have attempted to escape subjectivity. The presentations will blend creative work and critical writing as a means of endeavoring to both define and exemplify (or at least to point towards) a way to use cryptic and non-human knowledge to articulate the real through objects and poetic forms.

*This panel is a hybrid of critical papers and creative reading*