Events & Calendars CHI Salon: "Through Composed" with Kate Lilley

In both poetry and scholarship, Kate Lilley tarries with the problematic of queer historical transmission and the constitution of the queer early/modern. Her work on the genres of early modern women’s writing, sapphic modernism, the queer mid-century, and contemporary experiments with all these, turns on questions of intertextual, intermedia and interpersonal encounter as exemplary mis/alliance. Conjuring scenes of revisionist feminist critique and complaint, her critical-creative poetics of queer feminist assemblage takes shape as a practice of secondary revision and working through. In music theory, "through composition" describes a mode of invention which continuously introduces new material without repetition. Here, Lilley uses it to signify the labile multifariousness of queer citation and reference as ground or continuo, repetition without repeating. In her latest book of poems, Tilt (2018), tropism and remediation drive successive detours through the copia of material history and genre, the affects of lived experience and the archive of poetic forms, lighting on Greta Garbo, The Children’s Hour and her own #MeToo scandal.

Kate Lilley is an award-winning Australian poet, author of Versary (2002), Ladylike (2012) and Tilt (2018). She is also a well-known scholar of queer feminist literary history, editor of Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World (Penguin Classics) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (UWAP), and director of creative writing at the University of Sydney.

This salon is co-sponsored by the CHI, Creative Writing Center, Department of English and Department of Sexuality, Women's & Gender Studies. A reception will follow.