During the 2022-2023 season, across a range of workshops, readings, and panels, Poetry Matters focused on “Aesthetic Experience.” Forming a core part of our relationship with poetry, and art of all kinds, the legacies of Romanticism and of the New Critics have influenced contemporary thinkers such that aesthetic experience has become understudied, underappreciated, and treated with suspicion by academicians. Poetry Matters’ work this season aimed at exploring aesthetic experience and ways of approaching and appreciating it.
Climate, War, & Oysters
October 26 and 28, 2022
A workshop and reading with prolific Canadian poet Gary Geddes featuring, among other areas, his anti-war, anti-violence, and persona poetry.
Textures of Hope, Libraries of the Mind
November 16, 2022
A reading of new work by McGill-affiliated poets and frequent Poetry Matters collaborators, Kasia van Schaik and Sarah Wolfson.
What Do You Mean? The Syntax of Analogy and the Language of Thought
Jan 19, 2023
A talk with McGill alum Hillary Muller on the syntax and process of analogy in contemporary Canadian poetry.
Varieties of Aesthetic Experience
March 23, 2023
A panel discussion with Laura Bertrand, Aqsa Ijaz, and Setrag Manoukian on their research and the aesthetic theories of Rita Felski, in particular those stemming from her book Hooked.
Faith Paré Reads
May 19, 2023
A reading of new work engaging the Computer Centre Occupation of 1969 with Montréal-based poet, and curator of the Atwater Poetry Project, Faith Paré.
Wonder Machines
June 29, 2023
A workshop on the abecedarian by Claire Wahmanholm, winner of the Montréal International Poetry Prize 2022; given alongside a reading sponsored by the Prize.