Poetics

This chapter begins with an overview of 2022’s monumental place in the study of poetics, as marked by the centenary anniversary of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the publication of Dionne Brand’s Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems. From the retrospective celebration of literary modernism and the projective appraisal of new diasporic writing, this review then goes on to examine several new works in the field of poetics, including one journal article and five books. These works are investigated according to four major topics: 1. The Poetics of Inconvenience; 2. World-Building Poetics; 3. The Poetics of Articulation; and 4. Typewriter Poetics; before 5. Ending with a Joke. The case studies of the year’s work in poetics are wide in their array, such that they include modernist sound writing, suicidal ideations in film and literature, and digital trans of color bioart. Ultimately, however, these works are united by one tendency, which is to extend the field of poetics across populations, nations, and disciplines. What these works do is ‘loosen’ the concept of poetics: ‘to make it available to transition’ (Berlant, On the Inconvenience of Other People, p. 12), in order ‘to provide dimension, texture, and resonance for emergent and ongoing’ (p. 13) forms in the field.