Metalepsis, Apostrophe, Value: Three Talks on Marxist Poetics

Fintan Calpin
Nov. 16, 17, 18, 3:00-4:30pm
Our recent return to Marx has taken seriously the idea that the critique of value is an aesthetic project. Value, this body of work shows us, is a relation mystified in its own forms of appearance. And yet, capital is never more than this world of representations, none of which are value itself. These talks will consider what a rhetorical reading of Marx can offer to poetics and hermeneutics. In particular, they will explore how the figurative operations of poems might make tangible a social substance that is objective and determinant but unavailable to direct representation.

The first talk will offer some introductory framings of the new readings of Marx as they delineate a poetics of capital. We will examine the figurative and rhetorical character of Marx’s critique of value, return to a concept of value determination as the “moving contradiction,” and consider how Marx’s critique allows us to conceptualise the “undersides” of accumulation and the wage relation, especially as these modes of value-mediated negativity relate to the reproduction of gender and race.

The following sessions will consider some figurative strategies that contemporary poets deploy in order to write from and about the “undersides” of value accumulation. The second talk will examine a turn to metalepsis in Bernadette Mayer’s late poetry as a way to extend her lifelong investigation into dailiness, consciousness, and gender as a social form. The final talk will look at how Douglas Kearney deploys apostrophe, the trope of direct address, in order to conceptualize the uncoupling of Black life from the reproduction of capital.

Fintan Calpin is a poet, publisher, and scholar from London currently living in Montréal. He completed his AHRC-funded PhD in English at King’s College London in 2025, and was previously a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Researcher at Simon Fraser University. He is a scholar of modern and contemporary poetry, with research interests in rhetoric and poetics, critical theory, and alternative literary infrastructures. He is an affiliate researcher at the Centre for Expanded Poetics at Concordia University and Associate Editor of CLCWeb. With Catherine Kelly, he edits the little magazine Weekend, and his pamphlet Terminal City came out with Veer2 in 2025.