&NOW 2018

This panel explores literary practices that are a blend of autobiography and analysis complicated by observations that challenge bodily experience. How does intellection change the purity of the past? How does body/mind entwinement question the very nature of editing? 
What would it mean to animate a creative/critical poetics subtended by somatic attunement? Four writers will explore these questions through the exploration and performance of critical memoir writing that challenges traditional generic boundaries between the personal and the critical. Creative/critical poetics, here, becomes a useful mechanism for moving between the idiosyncratic and the systemic, bringing into public view individual experiences that, however particular, can be understood as reflective of more collective encounters. By moving between, through, alongside, and beyond traditional genres, these acts of personal storytelling offer the possibility of glimpsing what’s at stake in public culture. For us, the imbrication of creative, personal, poetic reflection, with broader, critical, structural interventions makes possible the kind of organic vitalism which can shift cultural geometries of attention, and bring precarious memories and bodies into view. We will relate: the curated space of the vagina to gentrification; blondeness to conditions of personhood; extractive mining in Peru to fatherhood; and domestic violence to daily aesthetic façade.