MITCH'S MILIUS MAGICARNUM

Abstract

Poetry, both as an aesthetic and academic field, has produced norms and standards which have come to appear as immutable boundaries: natural edges that determine what is and is not the domain of poetry. Milius Magicarnum plays on these borders, exploring what poetry can be through a tracing process which takes Derridian deconstruction and strives to account for its tendency to produce linear temporality. Benjaminian constellation-theory is used as an orientation device to produce poetry which explores the relations between things on their own terms, and to expand our perspective beyond those seemingly natural boundaries. The collection investigates the informative power of the environment on poetry: how mediums, language registers, even spaces and times can leave indelible marks upon a poem. The conditions of poetry are what made those pseudo-immutable norms, and Milius Magicarnum investigates what poetry might look like under different conditions and in different worlds. In so doing, Milius Magicarnum accesses moments of impossibility: poems which define their own geometries, their own margins and spacings, their own languages which would be impossible under a more traditional model. This power of language to break open ontological assumptions is metaphorized throughout Milius Magicarnum as a supernatural force, much like a witch’s incantations. The collection engages, not just with the norms of poetry as an artistic genre, but also the norms of poetry as a field of academic study. It seeks to expand what we consider when writing poetry, but also what we consider when we research and write about poetry as scholars in a field full of those conditional standards.