Poetic Vectors

Slought is pleased to announce "Poetic Vectors," a reading and conversation with poet Katy Bohinc, Orchid Tierny, and Jean-Michel Rabaté, about the capacity of poetry to bridge fields, languages and community, on Tuesday, April 23, 2019 from 6-7:30 pm.

Katy Bohinc's work is varied in concept and content, but a unifying thread is bridging the seemingly disparate. With Dear Alain (2014) she bridges poetry and philosophy; with Trinity Star Trinity (2017), poetry and the occult; with the feminist press Tender Buttons, publishing and activism; and with The Ratio, data science and astrology. Bohinc contends that in an age of innovation, the most interesting intersections in the arts are those that bridge and break mediums, structures and audiences. The work of translation builds exposure to diverse systems of thought and supports communication across audiences and through all available forms.

Bohinc's poetry is conceptual as well as mystical, challenging conventions of form and assumptions of content. In Dear Alain, her first book, the challenge is a direct address to the world-leading philosopher Alain Badiou from the poet "Katya." The book asks the question, if the poet is "non structure" and the philosopher is "structure," then what would a poet say to a philosopher, and could they fall in love? Jamieson Webster described the book as a "psycho-sexual Lacanian thriller" and Slavoj Zizek said it "should be banished!" More recently, Trinity Star Trinity is a long poem about the divine feminine dedicated to Hera. Bohinc reclaims the ancient form of the ode or chant in an Oulipian mathematical reinvention focused on taking faith and the trinity to an expanded dimension: three cubed, or 27 poems of 27 words each.