Ed Yong suggests in An Immense World that sensory inputs create an “information space”; making sense of what is around us also suggests an understanding of that space. The papers on this proposed panel turn to how a poetics focused on the senses create this information space through their activation in the text and in the audience. While the senses of sight and sound receive extensive critical attention, less addressed ones include smell, touch and proprioception. This panel works to investigate these senses to unveil the richness of poetics as “encompassing and participatory” in the information space of sensory perception.

Nate Mickelson takes on the senses of smell and touch in the work of the visual artist, Yuji Agematsu, and two poets, Harryette Mullen and Stacy Szymaszek. He proposes that activating olfactory and tactile sensations allows these artists to render complex and inclusive accounts of the larger contemporary tendency toward reconfiguring relationships among poetry, art, and the everyday. Agematsu assembles tiny sculptures from debris he collects on daily walks and “zips” them in cellophane cigarette wrappers arranged to resemble monthly calendars, one sculpture per day, evoking both an impression of disciplined labor and the disappointments of detritus. The tanka poems of Mullen's Urban Tumbleweed use the sounds and smells of daily walks to inspire metaphysical questions including the persistence of gendered divisions of labor and reflections on boredom and “awkward silence.” Szymaszek, explores embodied experience in her “Journal of Ugly Sites,” which documents a year of inconclusive medical tests, couples therapy, and her dog’s death from rectal cancer. Szymaszek describes how bodily fluids stain her clothing and apartment floor, while in parallel narrating the demands of her work as administrator of The Poetry Project. This presentation considers how sensory attentiveness functions in these diaristic works.

Marlo Starr argues that focusing on the sensory and embodied experiences enacted by Māori writer Robert Sullivan’s poems shows that language is not only a record of survival but a vehicle for imagining Indigenous futures. In his 1999 book of poems, Star Waka, Sullivan invokes Indigenous Pacific Islander voyaging and navigational techniques. Each poem features a star, a waka (or canoe), and the ocean. Together, the poems create an epic sea voyage, but the language also shuttles between English and Māori and between the past and present, creating a living link between the poet and his ancestry in an industrialized world. Examining under-explored sensory experiences in poetry, this paper turns to Sullivan’s use of proprioception, or the awareness of the body’s movement and orientation in space, to consider Indigenous Polynesian conceptions of time and place.

Eric Schmaltz approaches the tactile poetics of Kate Siklosi and Astra Papachristodoulou. Skin, he argues, is an interface between a body and the environment’s material complexities. Recognizing that language similarly operates as an “affective opening,” he conceptualizes haptic poetics to describe materially-conscious poems which invoke bodily sensation through language and tactility. For her book leavings (2021), Siklosi pressed dry transfer lettering onto the surfaces of maple leaves, tree bark, and pinecones to explore what she calls “our shared fragility.” In works such as “artificial honeycomb” (2020) and “bee war” (2021), Papachristodoulou embraces more resilient materials –– polylactic acid, cellulose acetate, and bioresin –– and cutting-edge composition methods such as 3D printing to create synthetic works that imitate “natural” structures. By drawing these poets into a comparative context, this presentation will investigate how their haptic poetics invite us to consider the meaningful role that tactile poetry can play in shaping our perception of the human future amid environmental crises.

Nikki Marie Skillman considers the sense of touch in Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) and Tyehimba Jess’ Olio (2016). These features of touch—its “motility,” and its unusually close and intense relationship to feeling—adumbrate its special relevance to the poetics of loss. To flesh out the critically underdrawn significance of this “low” sense to the rarefied genre of the elegy and elaborate the formal possibilities of touch in twenty-first century practices of poetic of commemoration, this paper will examine Carson’s and Jess’ work that centrally involve the hands of the reader. Requiring acts of folding, unfolding, turning, and cutting pages, both Carson and Jess use haptic forms to facilitate a kind of vital, fugitive intimacy with the dead and to literalize the activity of making something tangible out of irrecoverable absences in our personal and public archives.

Each of these papers will be restricted to 12 minutes to ensure adequate time for discussion following the presentations.