Research Poetics Field School, or, How To Subvert Your Observations Every Day


July Hazard, UW Seattle;
Cleo Woelfle-Erskine, UW Seattle

Posted: August 14, 2019

Field writing is a way of making a relation with one’s immediate surroundings: call that the field, the world, the phenomenal, the present, the real. Field poetics urge you to put aside goals and frameworks, and to let the world in. Scientists, poets, anthropologists, spies, cartographers, navigators, philosophers, and others use field writing—to capture observations, to generate theory in relation to place, and to document processes as they occur.

This Making and Doing exhibit highlights July Hazard and Cleo Woelfle-Erskine’s field poetics practices and pedagogy. We will showcase ephemera and our and our students’ shoreline relational poetics, in forms ranging from hypotheses for ecological studies, to poems, to quilts reflecting on histories of conquest and ongoing Indigenous life resurgence, to theory on queer and trans embodiment in more-than-human dimensions. Exhibit visitors will use shoreline-gathered ocular and aural apparatus to compose a polyvocal Aqua-festo.

https://shorelinepoetics.com/