The body in the room: Embodied poetics and the traces of loss

"The Body in the Room: Embodied Poetics and the Traces of Loss" investigates poetic and artistic practices that seek to foreground the materiality of art and of the body, and examines the ways in which the products of these practices are preserved. Taking as its starting point the Charles Olson archives at Simon Fraser University, this project focuses on three twentieth-century figures: a poet, Charles Olson; a pianist, Sergei Rachmaninoff; and, finally, a painter, Carolee Schneemann. Each offer in turn a model of artistic embodiment and a method of material production. The spaces, both institutional and private, in which these bodies find their preservation, form, beyond a linkage between my examinations of separate artists, a call to further inquiry: while this project chiefly examines bodies, their rooms, too, bear exploring. These rooms are sites for a manner of reproduction facilitated by the material traces of embodied art – a process of reincarnation that is at odds with the alleged embodiment of these artists.