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Richard Deming
John P. Birkelund Fellow - Class of Spring 2012
Lecturer in English, Yale University
Biography
Richard Deming is a poet and theorist whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture. He is the author of Listening on All Sides: Toward an Emersonian Ethics of Reading (Stanford UP, 2008), and his collection of poems, Let’s Not Call It Consequence (Shearsman, 2008), received the 2009 Norma Farber Award from the Poetry Society of America. Deming is a contributor a variety of magazines, such as Artforum and The Boston Review, and his works have appeared, among others, in Sulfur, Field, Indiana Review, and The Nation. He teaches at Yale University.
American Academy Project
Everyday Domain: The Ordinary in Art, Film, Philosophy and Poetry, Day for Night
During his time at the American Academy in Berlin, Deming will work on the completion of two books, Everyday Domain: The Ordinary in Art, Film, Philosophy and Poetry: Day for Night. The first aims to reveal the ongoing “philosophicality, interpretation, and imagination that are experienced in the ordinary and everyday.” Using a cross-disciplinary approach, and studying a myriad of principal figures, Everyday Domain argues for the foundational claim of Wittgenstein that culture and community both circulate language and circulate as language. For his second book, Deming will compile a collection of poems that raise the questions central to discovering what we are doing when we attempt to express self’s relationship to others through language and visual metaphors.
Lecture Summary
How to Do Things with the Ordinary
Richard Deming, a poet and theorist at Yale University whose work explores the intersections of poetry, philosophy, and visual culture, thinks that the ordinary has things to teach us about belief and skepticism, and about hope and despair, about our own lives as reflected in the lives of others -- if we pay attention. »