Dr Rebecca Kosick
BA Hons(Mich.), MA(Chic.), MA(C'nell), PhD(C'nell)
Expertise
Comparative poetry and poetics.
Current positions
Associate Professor in Comparative Poetry and Poetics
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American Studies
Contact
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Research interests
My research addresses interart relations with poetry, with particular interests in material poetics, multilingualism and translation, the politics of form, and participatory art. I work primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on artists and poets from the American hemisphere. At Bristol, I codirect the Bristol Poetry Institute and founded the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster, which explores poetry’s connections with extrapoetic modes of inquiry and practice. My recent books include the critical edition/translation Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics (2023), the monograph Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950-2010 (2020) and the poetry collection Labor Day (2020).
My current research projects include a book-length study, under contract with Wayne State University Press, of the Detroit-based “Alternative Press,” whose publications included letterpress and hand-made poetry postcards and mail art distributed between 1969 and 1999. Detroit's Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage will bring to light a significant archival collection of small batch and often one-of-kind aesthetic objects circulated by mail in the late twentieth-century United States by contributors such as Alice Notley, Victor Hernández Cruz, Diane di Prima, and Ray Johnson. It argues that the Detroit-based press, founded by Ann and Ken Mikolowski, was one of the 20th century's most significant engines of vanguard production, and was responsible for forging novel inter-aesthetic collaborations in the border zones between politics, art, and life.
A second monograph project underway, Multiverses: Languages of Contemporary Poetry cultivates a theory of poetic language that accounts for its contemporary multiplicity. Against the binary of ordinary v. poetic, Multiverses argues that poetic language today includes translingual literary deployment of words, letters, and sounds, but also means of communication that exceed verbal language itself—languages that are visual, material, scientific, and mathematical. It aims to broaden our frameworks for understanding the nature of poetic language and reconsider poetry's relationship to the literary arts. Chapters draw from diverse transatlantic sites including Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Canada, and Britain addressing work by figures such as Cecilia Vicuña, Ulises Carrión, Wanda Coleman, and bp Nichol. As a component of this research project, I am also collaborating with members of the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster to publish Poetrishy, an experimental hub for investigating the convolution of poetry and mathematics (also available in print).
A third book I am working on, The Art We Call Poetry, explores what happens when poetic language, structures, and devices turn up not within poetry itself, but within the visual arts. This book engages works of art whose primary identifications are with other genres of practice—painting, sculpture, etc.—yet incorporate or call themselves “poetry.” This book asks: what is poetry doing there? And how do we understand both poetry and the visual arts when they are reconfigured by the other? Through a series of detailed studies, each examining a single work of art, this book makes the case for a new poetics of art in conversation with figures including Brazilian artist/process-poet Paulo Bruscky, Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara, and British artist and poet Heather Phillipson.
I am currently translating the public writings of Hélio Oiticica (as a follow-up volume to Secret Poetics) as well as Ferreira Gullar's Avant-Garde and Underdevelopment and other closely related 1960s essays by the Brazilian poet and theorist. These works of leftist literary and cultural theory address the purpose and function of aesthetic production during a time of political repression and economic “underdevelopment,” with critical analyses of avant-garde and popular culture alike.
Additional publications of my own poetry and translations of poetry can be found in journals and literary publications such as Fence, the Iowa Review, Two Lines, and The Recluse. Recent work is available in JUKUB: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest, Luigi Ten Co, and Action, Spectacle.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
Exploring Bristol-Toulouse Research Synergies in the Arts
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
Two themes were identified for further development: small nations (identity, language and politics) and African Studies. We will also explore further exchanges between academics at both institutions at all stages…Managing organisational unit
Department of FrenchDates
20/05/2024 to 31/07/2028
Multiverses: Global Developments in Contemporary Poetry
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
01/04/2024 to 31/07/2024
Page Against the Machine: Poetry and AI
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
Department of Hispanic, Portuguese and Latin American StudiesDates
20/02/2024 to 31/07/2024
Poetrishy
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Modern LanguagesDates
01/07/2021 to 30/06/2022
The British Library Michael Hamburger Collection
Principal Investigator
Role
Co-Investigator
Description
This PhD project is funded by the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership scheme, in collaboration with the British Library,Managing organisational unit
School of Modern LanguagesDates
01/01/2021 to 31/12/2024
Publications
Selected publications
14/11/2023Hélio Oiticica
Hélio Oiticica
Material Poetics in Hemispheric America
Material Poetics in Hemispheric America
Labor Day
Labor Day
Recent publications
01/01/2024"Day 1, year 0" and "Wake"
On Translating Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics
"Say It" and "The Snail"
“Water/ glassy surface/ plunge.”: A Conversation with Translator Rebecca Kosick about Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics, translated from Portuguese
Out of Your Head and Into Your Body
Poetry Foundation