Dr Rebecca Kosick

My research addresses interart relations with poetry, with particular interests in material poetics, multilingualism and translation, the politics of form, and participatory art. I work primarily on the 20th and 21st centuries, with a focus on artists and poets from the American hemisphere. At Bristol, I codirect the Bristol Poetry Institute and founded the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster, which explores poetry’s connections with extrapoetic modes of inquiry and practice. My recent books include the critical edition/translation Hélio Oiticica: Secret Poetics (2023), the monograph Material Poetics in Hemispheric America: Words and Objects 1950-2010  (2020) and the poetry collection Labor Day (2020). 

My current research projects include a book-length study, forthcoming in 2025 from Wayne State University Press, of the Detroit-based “Alternative Press,” whose publications included letterpress and hand-made poetry postcards and mail art distributed between 1969 and 1999. Detroit's Alternative Press: Dispatches from the Avant-Garage will bring to light a significant archival collection of small batch and often one-of-kind aesthetic objects circulated by mail in the late twentieth-century United States by contributors such as Alice Notley, Victor Hernández Cruz, Diane di Prima, and Ray Johnson. It argues that the press, founded by Ann and Ken Mikolowski, was one of the 20th century's most significant engines of vanguard production, and was responsible for forging novel inter-aesthetic collaborations in the border zones between politics, art, and life. 

Currently in progress, another book-length study, The Art We Call Poetry explores what happens when poetic language, structures, and devices turn up not within poetry itself, but within the visual arts. It engages works of art whose primary identifications are with other genres of practice—painting, sculpture, etc.—yet incorporate or call themselves “poetry.” This book asks: what is poetry doing there? And how do we understand both poetry and the visual arts when they are reconfigured by the other? As The Art We Call Poetry argues, some works of art that incorporate poetry use it to signal a traversal of linguistic and material modes of human communication. Others turn to poetry for its apparent lack of value in a challenge to the highly capitalized contemporary art market. Further works occlude language as they include it, defying the assumption that poetry circulates primarily as a verbal art and demonstrating new poetic vitalities beyond literary domains. Through a series of detailed studies, each examining a single work of art and its use of poetry, this book makes the case for a new poetics of art in coversation with figures including Brazilian artist/process-poet Paulo Bruscky and Japanese conceptual artist On Kawara.

A further monograph project underway, Multiverses: Languages of Contemporary Poetry cultivates a theory of poetic language that accounts for its contemporary multiplicity. Against the binary of ordinary v. poetic, Multiverses argues that poetic language today includes translingual literary deployment of words, letters, and sounds, but also means of communication that exceed verbal language itself—languages that are visual, material, scientific, and mathematical. It aims to broaden our frameworks for understanding the nature of poetic language and reconsider poetry's relationship to the literary arts. Chapters draw from diverse transatlantic sites including Cuba, Mexico, Chile, Brazil, Canada, and Britain addressing work by figures such as Cecilia Vicuña, Ulises Carrión, Wanda Coleman, and bp Nichol. As a component of this research project, I am also collaborating with members of the Indisciplinary Poetics Research Cluster to publish Poetrishy, an experimental hub for investigating the convolution of poetry and mathematics (also available in print).

I am currently translating the public writings of Hélio Oiticica (as a follow-up volume to Secret Poetics) to be published by Soberscove Press and Winter Editions. These include selections of the artist's writings for newspapers, magazines, exhibitions, interviews and other public-facing venues from 1960 through to his death in 1980. I am also translating Ferreira Gullar's Avant-Garde and Underdevelopment and other closely related 1960s essays by the Brazilian poet and theorist. Gullar's works of leftist literary and cultural theory address the purpose and function of aesthetic production during a time of political repression and economic “underdevelopment,” with critical analyses of avant-garde and popular culture alike. 

Additional publications of my poetry and translations of poetry can be found in journals and literary publications such as Fence, the Iowa Review, Two Lines, and The Recluse. Recent work is available in JUKUB: Poems from Chiapas for the Reverse Conquest, Luigi Ten Co, and Action, Spectacle.