This Autumn term Dr Ben Hickman gave a research seminar on ‘Poetry’s Undone Politics: Vulnerability after the Avant-Garde’. Following Ben’s presentation, Professor Wendy Parkins, who had been chosen to act as a respondent at the seminar offered her own thoughts and reflections on the research presented by Dr Hickman. Below is Dr Hickman’s account of how this worked.
I gave the beginnings of some speculative thoughts on a post-avant-garde mode of poetic production and the importance of vulnerability within it. My respondent, Wendy Parkins, was at once able to look freshly at the material as a Dickensian and non-specialist in the field of contemporary poetics, and rigorously, as a scholar also interested in vulnerability theory. Her thoughtful question regarding ethics and politics set the tone for the Q&A that followed: all responses were intellectually challenging and will undoubtedly inform the project (whatever it may be) going forward. I was especially grateful for the scope and acumen of the questions: I mainly had to confess a need to go away and think about them, being unable to respond there and then, but I take that to be a positive outcome from the seminar. I will go forward thinking about the relation of vulnerability to precarity, of the concrete ways in which contemporary poetry might look outside itself, and of the role of 20th century communism’s failures in the kind of post-capitalism I was tentatively pointing to.