Hannah Loeb. “‘Like leaves against the sunlight’: Translucent Trans-Historicism in Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight“
In Derek Walcott’s The Schooner Flight, translucence — leaves through which the light shines, the silver of the sun refracted through seawater, glowing silken nightgowns, diaphanous ocean froth like lace, and even the translucent bones of ghosts — occasions some of the poem’s most
profoundly transformative moments. Walcott weaves this network of motifs related to translucence in order to posit metaphorical interconnections between poetry, the sea, islands, dead bodies, ghosts, animals like lizards and birds, the bridal gown, and the marriage bed, and thereby to evoke the changes that Shabine, the poem’s speaker, undergoes. More importantly to a full appreciation of The Schooner Flight, however, these associations also invite readers to interrogate the role of the concept of translucence in Walcott’s poetics and politics. Translucence, a hybrid property that combines transparency with luster or radiance, suggests both the ability to see through a poem and that poem’s impressionistic play with the sight-altering warp of light; thus, it gestures toward both a theory of how to read a poem and a method for how to write one. In a discussion of postcolonial critics’ tendencies to read “world” poems in particular as window panes, Vidyan Ravinthiran writes that “poetry is translucent, not transparent: the world shines through, but its own linguistic warp cultivates opacities.” Ravinthiran introduces the distinction as a way of defending a relatively antihistoricist approach to postcolonial poetry. This presentation will examine instances of translucence in The Schooner Flight to argue that Walcott’s translucence invites trans- not a-historical readings. Translucence allows Walcott to write poems that lend themselves to aesthetic reception, to the appreciation of the gorgeous warp in all its glory, but that nevertheless embed an element of transparency, inviting the reader to look through and towards as well as at.
Robert Balun. “Atmospheric Poetics: (Eco)Poetry in the Anthropocene”
As the epoch of the Anthropocene presents radically new conditions of existence, so too does it require new aesthetic conceptions and representations. More specifically, apropos of this panel, I want to frame these conditions as atmospheric, a metaphysical air. How then do poets respond to and write within this environment? Building upon Franco Beradi’s Breathing: Chaos and Poetry and the work of the philosopher Peter Slotderjik this paper will characterize a poetics that responds to these circumstances. I will then perform a close reading of poems by Myung Mi Kim in an effort to show these concepts in action and to situate Kim’s poetics as crucial to defining poetry and ecopoetry in the Age of the Anthropocene.
