Keegan Cook Finberg

@keegancf.bsky.social

1363 Followers 528 Following

because my little dog knows me. writer. scholar. professor. recently finished a book about poetic form and the US welfare state: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/poetry-in-general/9780231219228/

Roundtable: Modernism and the Social Reproduction of Empire Location: DAV1108, Sir David Davies Building Chair: Kristin Grogan, Rutgers University Keegan Finberg (University of Maryland, Baltimor County) Natalia Cecire (University of Sussex) Seb Franklin (Kings College London) Mia You (Utrecht University) Amy De'Ath (Tufts University)
Poster for talk at Vanderbilt on Friday, Feb 27th at 2pm. Talk is by Keegan Cook Finberg and entitled "Reproduction and Generality: Feminist Diets in Poetry by Bernadette Mayer, Adrian Piper, and Eleanor Antin." There is a headshot of Keegan and a picture of her book, Poetry in Genera: How a Literary Form Became Public.
Child, young toddler, and adult standing at window watching snow removal
Poetry, meanwhile, is invisible, contemplative, and unproductive. Against barbarism and nuclear devastation there is poetry, small and still, illegible to the folk yet indebted to them, flowing from their habits and speech yet utterly separate. If the speaker fails to do gender on capital's terms—work, church, bowling—she also clears a protected space for alternative ways of being, unproductivity, and creation to flourish in the dark, and she names that space: poetry. (From Kristin Grogan’s STITCH, UNSTITCH
Feb. 7th 6PM poetry and labor a reading and discussion Keegan Finberg, author of Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public Kristin Grogan, author of Stitch, Unstitch: Modernist Poetry and the World of Work Gina Myers, author of Works & Days Lot 49 Books 408 E Girard Philadelphia
ICE Out of Our Communities! Citywide Rally & Training Learn what to do if you see ICE & how to get your community prepared. Saturday, Jan. 31 | 3:30pm Baltimore City Hall With sponsorship by many local organizations and unions.
Bug pile of books including DARK MATTERS REGAINING UNCONSCIOUSNESS The Address Book The descent of Alette LOOK THE DREAM HOTEL 24/7 NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT THIS Discipline & Punish The Watchman in Pieces
Three people having fun discussing work and poetry.
A toddler, adult, and child holding copies of POETRY IN GENERAL: How a Literary Form Became Public
A picture of a schedule with the following abstract: This seminar celebrates the publication of our special issue of the journal differences, "Lyric Beyond Containment," forthcoming in Fall 2025. In alignment with ASAP/16's Worldmaking/Worldbreaking theme, we gather to discuss how lyric tropes-the speaking "I," the address to an absent other, or the brief glimpse of finely-wrought feeling-prove fruitful in theorizing material, historical, political, and literary forms of subjectivity, personhood, relationality, and reciprocity. Whereas these tropes are often yoked to the decontextualized figure of the poetic speaker, we suggest that they are vital tools for moving beyond notions of the poem as a closed aesthetic object, held apart from its world. Moreover, we suggest that these tropes occur across a broad range of genres and media, which are themselves illuminated through engagement with lyric theory. The seminar features authors included in the special issue as well as scholars and practicing poets who share our interests in lyric theory.
The book “Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public” by Keegan Cook Finberg next to a vase of matching orange, white, and yellow dahlias and daisies.
prepositions, enigmatic, 62-64, 191n91 preservationism, 88-92 privatization, 3-4, 6-7, 12-14; of American life, 43; of architectural spaces, 12-14, 70, 81-83, 195nn43-44; of education, 13; and gender, 14; of interpretation, 126-50; and poetry, 3, 18, 128 procedural poetry, 14, 95-125 procedural reading, 28, 33 prosopopoeia, 61 protest: and Mechanical Turk, 141; Occupy Movement, 2-3, 83; Standing Rock, 1; student, 2. See also Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (Antin); Davis, Wendy, Let Her Speak (Counterpath); Mechanical Turk public good: abortion and the, 13; neoliberalism vs. the, 34; poetry and the, 18 purity: and the body, 125; Critique of Pure Reason, 101, 107-8, 10; pure media, 15, 22, 27, 36, 38; and use value, 155, 167
racial capitalism, 11-13, 15-16, 35, 37-38, 40, 43, 71, 129, 179n34, 181n11 racial liberalism, 79 Rankine, Claudia, 212n9; Citizen: An American Lyric, 159, 211n4, 214n29; Just Us: An American Conversation, 159 reading: and action/participation, 33, 52-55, 62, 65, 70; affective, 214n26; close, 199n20; ethical, 157; as "event," 5; and event scores, 39, 45, 69; as expansive process, 28; good, 26, 182n22; imperative, 41; modernist, 26, 28; and Ono's work, 22-23, 26-29; vs. performance, 16; procedural, 28, 33; and public/private, 26; and resistance, 15; surface, 157; and teleiopoesis, 142 Red Purge, 184n32 reflection: and the city, 81; of the eyes, 87; and sense of self, 107, 124 repair, 19, 149, 157. See also Zong! (Philip and Boateng) repetition: of architectural style, 87; and labor, 55; in Tender Buttons (Stein), 55 resistance: to assimilation, 31; to colonialism, 56; to commodification, 33; constraint/hunger as, 17; to efficiency, 34; to ordinality, 31, 52; reading and, 15; to self-promotion, 48, 188n37
BLOOD PIECE Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. (a) Keep painting until you die. (b) 1960 spring
With Poetry in General, Keegan Cook Finberg advances a notion of the public as a practical fiction enacted in and through social forms that exist not despite the atomized and bureaucratized forms of daily life, but through the extensive paper trails those forms generate. Poetry becomes a way of bearing witness to and living with changing social forms. With wit and verve, Finberg conceptually remaps postwar US poetry. Anthony Reed, author of Soundworks: Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production
"Poetry is forms of language adequate to history; poetics is the study of this material." Picture of the opening of Joshua Clover's "'A Form Adequate to History': Toward a Renewed Marxist Poetics" (2010)
Black book cover with orange circle on the side. Text in white and yellow reads: Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public; Keegan Cook Finberg
A picture of a book called Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a US City.
21 year old Keegan in front of le pont levant de La Seyne-sur-Mer, a part of an old bridge left in the harbor, wispy clouds in the sky and sun sparkling on the water.
Child’s drawing of sad person on grass with one flower, blue sky, and a building with books nearby.
Picture of John Ashbery’s poem “Terminal”