ABSTRACT
This essay explores how affect, which is experienced outside of rational thought, can be rendered conscious through a linguistic medium like poetry, and how the affective currents of poetry connect to the politics of gender, race, and identity. Caroline Bergvall’s Drift, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, and Rachel Zolf’s Janey’s Arcadia deploy conceptual methods and explore the unreadable as a site for the exploration and transmission of affect. These writers reject the apolitical nature of some conceptual poetry, but they also steer clear of commonly held assumptions about poetry as a self-reflexive expression of a speaker’s emotional state. Affect in these works operates on two levels: first, through the encounter with the limits of the readable, and second, through the ways in which this unreadability can gesture toward, without fully expressing, unbearable forms of violence and trauma. This type of writing can offer possibilities for engagements that lie outside of patriarchal and white supremacist language, law, and nation.
