Visceral Poetics

Book excerpt: "VISCERAL POETICS tracks “the chronic syndrome of the West” and the cruel treatments of poetry’s resistance. At once a call for an embodied scholarship, a poetic work of criticism, and a fragmentary autoethnography of the author’s health crisis at the millennium, Eleni Stecopoulos’ book moves in a complex field of languages and bodies, between symptom and art, diagnosis and composition, fascia and form. Stecopoulos aligns her method with diviners of entrails and holistic healers, tracing the resonance between locations that range from demonic possession and parasitic vowels to acupuncture and diaspora Greek. Opening new directions in poetry and poetics as well as literature and medicine, Stecopoulos argues for the body’s poetic agency and a different understanding of the therapeutic potency of art. Focusing on works by Antonin Artaud and Paul Metcalf, Stecopoulos articulates a remarkable set of correspondences between experimental writing and the modalities and diagnostics of holistic medicine. In new readings of Artaud, Stecopoulos explores his collaboration with pain and use of energetic principles derived from modalities like homeopathy and acupuncture. She revisits the poetry and “translation therapy” of Artaud’s asylum years, understanding his exoticism as a technology of healing through world languages. Stecopoulos animates the complicated role of Artaud’s multiethnic background and ties his translations to histories of linguistic imagination situated in colonial encounter and nationalist and imperialist strategies."-Publisher's website.