Thinking Feelingly: Somatic Approaches to Poetry
Thinking Feelingly explores how poetry might be experienced with the whole self, through emotion, physiology, and intuition. The book selects poems for each week of the calendar year, spends a few pages lingering with them, and offers an embodied practice for engaging them at the level of bone and skin. Hawkins draws from a wide range of somatic techniques, from breathwork to movement to visualizations to way quirkier experiments. Her whimsical writerly style is peppered with jokes and personal anecdotes, in an intentional departure from normative academic modes of analysis. These pages want to share shivers with you, relishing poems using the same sense-based capacities with which we actually encounter them. Aligned with emergent liberatory work that seeks to mobilize stuck spots in our current thinking, this project hopes to open up new questions rather than answering old ones. Most centrally: what practices drop poetry into gut feeling?
Anthologized here, you'll find an eclectic gathering of poets, both contemporary and old-school. For anyone who loves poetry or who wonders why someone they love loves poetry, Thinking Feelingly hopes to hook you.
"Re-Creating Eve: Sedgwick's Art and the Practice of Renewal" in Criticism 52:2
"Katherine Hawkins's piece recognizes a certain development or transformation across the span of Sedgwick's career... in the intersection of Sedgwick's art and her increasingly Buddhist-inflected readings of Proust. In carefully layered readings of several examples of Sedgwick's textile and book art, all of which engage Proust's work, Hawkins shows how they explore closed and open systems, body and mind, paranoid and reparative modes, the individual and the supraindividual. Hawkins's take on Sedgwick's tactile turn also illuminates a new approach, inspired by Buddhist teachings of emptiness, to the overcoming of identity. Hawkins goes on to describe what she calls the 'almost indistinguishable attractions to nonidentity and nonbeing' evident in Sedgwick's work as what might differentiate her from Proust."
- Keith Vincent
"Woven Spaces" in Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 16:2
This examination of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's A Dialogue on Love is part of a larger project that studies unusual illness narratives to determine how experimentation with form facilitates new ways of understanding bodily crisis. Sedgwick's approach to metastatic breast cancer develops the theoretical concepts from across her oeuvre; A Dialoguelayers theories of nonlinear time, hybrid form, and intersubjective relation within a 17th-century mode of Japanese linked verse called haibun. Close engagement with these historical, formal and theoretical matrices reveal how Sedgwick's interventions in queer theory achieve their most radical expression in her illness narrative, which has not received adequate critical attention as an important extension of her scholarship.
"Alchemy Girl" in Painted Bride Quarterly #69
"I’m watching Jamie watching blue
on a Tuesday in the Musée Picasso
Her head is cocked like she’s sorry for him
And I want to smack that disenchanted pout
off her head till it straightens out
her head with the perfect little freckles shaken
like salt from the brown doe eyes shaken
like salt like sweat like smoke
smoke like hot on her neck
the neck that makes me hate the shirt
for covering half of it (like birches intertwined, her neck)
the stiff-collared shirt tucked into her jeans...."