Retallack, Joan (ed.): The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times

The Supposium: Thought Experiments & Poethical Play in Difficult Times Edited Joan Retallack (Litmus Press, paperback)

Publication Date: May 14, 2018

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Poetics. Essay. Art. Collaboration. Think of it as a multi-genre catalog of seriously humorous and grave responses to the crises of attention and value our human plurality of "we"s is so spectacularly prone to. Urgent in the moment, always intricately linked to present pasts and futures seen as the arcs or flatlines of history, the first challenge is sustaining enough vitality of intellect and imagination to engage in procedural optimism — thought experiments and other forms of creative play that express at minimum the willingness to be pleasantly surprised. THE SUPPOSIUM is, in that spirit, a collaboration that began as x-centric event at MoMA and, in this final stage, has become a strangely joyous book.

The gamut of intellectual and imaginative; performative, visual, and poetic experiments and interventions in this volume enact poethical responses as seemingly divergent as decolonizing architecture in a Palestinian refugee camp while rethinking the socio-political geometry of the global refugee crisis (why is the refugee never in the center?); Black Dada vis-à-vis Black Lives Matter; misogyny as Feminist Responsibility Project; the art of If; Miles Davis's and other's s'posin; and of course Fall Guys. With all that, THE SUPPOSIUM is a polyvocal attempt to edge beyond default geometries of attention. Its implicitly conversational sequence is homage and play on Plato's Symposium — Socratic dialogue on the nature of love (erōs) with its humor, gravitas, and improbable feminine swerve out of a prototypic masculine culture.

Contributors include Lauren Bakst, Lynne Beckenstein, Nova Benway, Allie Biswas, Anne Carson, Alan Devenish, Sandi Hilal, Alhena Katsof, erica kaufman, John Keene, Peter Krapp, Fred Moten, Adam Pendleton, Evelyn Reilly, Danica Savonick, Ingrid Schaffner, Beverly Semmes, James Sherry, and Mónica de la Torre.