Miscellany While I’m still finishing off the one essay/review – which, as I said before, I may post on the North American Center for Interdisciplinary Poetics until I can find a print home for it – I’ve got to move onto the next one. So at the moment, I’m just doing my homework, so to speak… Well, this afternoon I re-read Steve McCaffery’s Introduction to Parapoetics. It’s an important step in adumbrating a trajectory of possibility within poetry/poetics. The gist of the article is of a (para-) poetics resisting specialization in any discipline, probing, I think he says, the fungibility and centrifugality of specialized discourse. Said more simply, it will investigate the ruptures within the study of a single discipline. Instead, for example, looking at poetry within the context of poetic history or even literary history, parapoetics looks to the interstices. Hmm. Still not so simple is it? Anyhow, I’ve framed it to look like a discipline in itself – perhaps for the English department – but I think the general idea is intended to impact practice as much as study. Every artist is to some extent be concerned with context, historical, temporal, special etc. The context an artist identifies often contributes to the work in varying degree. Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Calvacanti and the Troubadors is an act of contextualizing, for example. It seems a parapoetics is a kind of contextualizing that goes outside of discipline and outside of the concerns considered relevant to a particular practice. It allows questions such as, how does architectural space impact writing or vice versa? And we can construct non-reductive answers creatively as well as academically, perhaps. Well, I’m outta time…