Kempf Lecture with Ada Smailbegović (Brown University)

Please join us in HQ 134 for a lecture by Ada Smailbegović entitled, “like blood in a dragonfly wing”: Molecular Poetics of Morphogenesis in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s Poetry. **Please RSVP by September 15.

The poetry of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge explores the correspondences between human perception and the rhythms of elements that make up the cosmos, stretching in scale from the shape of specific molecules that plants may use to communicate to the astrophysics of stars. In a recent interview, following the publication of her book A Treatise on Stars, Berssenbrugge expresses her desire for a unifying ecological vision that would span across such cosmic scales: “I’ve been writing about the stars and how to join the stars and the earth as one ecosystem.” My reading argues that this desire for continuity creates a fluid relationship between time and materiality in Berssenbrugge’s poetry, which is manifested through the process of morphogenesis or coming into form. In other words, the compositions of material entities in Berssenbrugge’s poetry are never given or stable but must continually materialize and re-materialize as the movement of time acquires the particularity of form, or as she puts it in Hello, the Roses: “Each appearance has a materiality more significant than we usually expect from bodies. Style, soul, is power through which matter is formed. Like historic change, a body can re-materialize in its chrysalis” (16). As its focalizing point, this talk addresses how Berssenbrugge’s poetics situates the morphogenetic relationship between time and matter within the minutia of molecular scales that populate biological bodies, or, as she writes in her collection Four Year Old Girl: “time enters, cell to cell of the line between yellow and bloodred in a petal” (36). 

Ada Smailbegović is a poet and theorist born in Sarajevo and currently living in Brooklyn. She is an Associate Professor of English at Brown University. Her writing explores relations between poetics, ecologies of displacement, nonhuman forms of materiality, histories of description, and the natural sciences. 

Ada is the author of two books, Poetics of Liveliness: Molecules, Fibers, Tissues, Clouds (Columbia UP, 2021) and The Cloud Notebook (Litmus, 2023).