Unsettling encounters

Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis in conversation

Kristen Case and Alexandra Manglis will be in conversation about collaboration, the radical practices of lingering and sitting with texts from our past, and the resulting intimate encounters that such practices bear.

Case and Manglis come to this conversation having just completed a three-year long collaborative project: a collection of essays to be published by Milkweed Editions in the USA in 2019. These essays are written by twelve North American poets approached by Case and Manglis, who asked them to write on the nineteenth-century archive without aloofness, but with intimacy and kinship, and about the range of emotions that come from such close encounters. The final version of the book bears testament to how what we imagine may result from a suggested methodology is quickly surpassed and expanded when given to others to make their own. This collection of essays has resulted in an irruption of undisciplined collaboration: radical, resistant, politicized, and complex -- a book of unsettling encounters.

This event is one in a series of presentations organized by Haris Pellapaisiotis in collaboration with Point Centre of Contemporary Art, prompted by Pellapaisiotis’s own project, "Walking Narratives and Affective Spaces", which is to be exhibited at Point Centre in 2019.

Kristen Case is the author of "American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe" (Camden House, 2011). Her poetry chapbook, "Temple", was published in 2014 by MIEL and her full-length collection, "Little Arias", in 2015 by New Issues Press. She has published scholarly work on Thoreau, Ezra Pound, Frost, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and William James, and her poems have appeared in "Chelsea", "The Iowa Review", "Brooklyn Review", "Wave Composition", "Eleven Eleven" and several other journals. She is co-editor of "Thoreau at 200" (Cambridge UP, 2017) and director of "Thoreau’s Kalendar: A Digital Archive of Henry David Thoreau’s Phenological Manuscripts". She is also the author of the Introduction of the Penguin Classics bicentennial edition of "Walden and Civil Disobedience". She teaches at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she also heads the New Commons Project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Alexandra Manglis is founder and, for six years, editor of the experimenting literary journal "Wave Composition", where she published work by writers including John Ashbery, Rae Armentrout, M. NourbeSe Philip, Eileen Myles, and Lydia Davis and for which she interviewed authors Ursula K. Le Guin and China Miéville. She has published work in "The Times Literary Supplement", the "LA Review of Books", "The Millions", and "Strange Horizons" and is currently working on fiction and creative non-fiction writing projects. She holds a DPhil in 19th-century American literature and contemporary poetics from the University of Oxford and is an enthusiastic graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop.

Point Centre for Contemporary Art

Opening: Monday, 5 March 2018 | 18:30

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