Poetic Presence and Absence

This is a talk about poems and about ghosts and about poems by ghosts. It is also a talk about how poems make a particular claim to presence (consider here the heightened language of poetry, the making of occasion), and how poems are also artifacts of absence (what the poem seeks to restore or repair through the poetic act). At the heart of the talk will be a set of readings of classical Chinese poems attributed to ghosts, through which I will ask questions about what poems do that other literary modes cannot and attempt to show how the logic of the poem is the logic of haunting itself. The talk will begin with a literary historical framing of the phenomenon of ghost poetry in China, but the focus will be on the poem as a mediaform that allows the dead to be recorded and revived.

Jack W. Chen is Professor of Chinese Literature at the University of Virginia, where he is also Chair of the Department of East Asian Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures. He is the author of two books and co-editor of three volumes, and has written on various topics such as emperors and poetry, social networks, gossip, topic modeling, and, mostly recently, ghosts and cats. He is working on a co-edited six-volume literary history of China and a new co-edited volume on “bad” reading. This talk is part of a new book project, Lyric Haunting: Ghosts, Poetry, Mediation.

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Host or Publisher Center for East Asian Studies