My introduction to Kristin Prevallet’s work was hearing a reading she gave from “The Parasite Poems” at a Boston poetry event in the late 90s, and I was fascinated by the way she explained the project, her description of what procedures she had used; this seemed new because I had not heard a poet go on at length about such things at a reading before. Later books of Prevallet’s such as Scratch Sides demonstrated a radical sense of personal connectedness or investment through the activity of documentation. Prevallet explores rhetorical and ideological form in poetry through this documentarian impulse. As she says of her own strategy as a teacher, one of the most effective ways to do this is to examine one’s “personal story as the basis for a larger inquiry into the forces – social, economic, political, moral – that shape them.” This documentarian interest of Prevallet’s extends from her invaluable work in editing A Helen Adam Reader (National Poetry Foundation, 2007) to her engagements with thinking about processes of mourning in the recent book I, Afterlife: Essay in Mourning Time. Prevallet has extended this emphasis to a concern with the body and live performance, most recently in a series of inspired public actions addressing the Bp oil spill. Prevallet’s contributions to thinking about poetics underlie so much of what claims to be innovative at this moment. As we move forward, it would serve us well to take a second look at her many accomplishments, especially the way in which these link procedural writing with documentary. Prevallet’s latest project that she’ll be reading from today, an act of rewriting or writing through T.S.Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” is deeply problematic in all the best ways. I’m pleased to welcome Kristin Prevallet to the EOAGH reading series today.
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