We, Fools Who Refuse Reality! The Political Imaginary in Poetry (Lecture)

Literature has long been a privileged site for shaping the imaginary—through acts of worlding, montage, and collage that reorganize how reality is sensed and narrated. This lecture approaches poetry as one such force of collective imagination, not merely operating within language but acting on it: through its capacity to reconfigure perception, relation, being, and agency. Poetry is treated here as an active mode of world-making, one that unsettles inherited grammars of thought and opens language to what exceeds representation.

Moving between historical and contemporary examples of experimental poetry, sound practices, and artist writing, the lecture tests the notion of the political imaginary as a form of general intellect, an uneven, distributed capacity that shapes our shared understanding of what is possible, sayable, and thinkable. Rather than locating politics only in explicit statements, the lecture attends to how form itself, such as rhythm, repetition, fragmentation, breath, and silence materializes imaginaries by reorganizing attention, temporality, and collective sensibility.

Poetry appears here not simply as one form of human expression among others, but as a technique for structural change: a practice that intervenes in the conditions under which meaning, subjectivity, and futurity are produced. As such, poetry becomes a way of thinking and sensing otherwise, of staging futures that do not yet have a language or where language is emerging or already lost, futures that can invoked through experiments with voice, form, and the limits of the sayable.

Conditions for Participation:

The public lecture starts 10.00 am in lecture hall Doppingen at the Royal Institute of Art, Flaggmansvägen 1, Stockholm.

This lecture inaugurates the course Experimental Writing 3 Hp, a mandatory course within the Fine Arts Program at the Royal Institute of Art.

Participation is free. Booking required — please sign up via the form (click here).