Скачать или смотреть What Language Shall We Borrow? Proposing Width of Feeling for the Life of the World | Process Explor

We abide amid language. As we use it, it both reveals and shapes how the world is perceived. Linguistic studies suggest as the digital age progresses, language is changing rapidly: smaller usable vocabularies, less reading, simplified syntax. Communication tends to be transactional and reflect the representative, categorical mode of perception Whitehead calls “presentational immediacy.” The contrasting mode of perception for Whitehead is “causal efficacy,” and perceiving in that mode, we feel actuality, vaguely, bodily, motions of multivalent value through which we have our being.

Literature, especially poetry, can involve the materiality of language: sound, choices of words, syntax, rhythm, mouthfeel, etymologies. Like other works of art, a poem can be a proposition, “a lure for further feeling.” When a poem uses language as a *medium*, it taps into the mode of “causal efficacy.” How might poetry aid in restoring or extending that facet of perception for the purpose of widening the sea of feeling? Is consciously crafted poetry not just an ornament of language, as often assumed, but a mode of communication we need to face the problems confronting us—climate crisis, international and domestic conflicts, and human need in general—with fuller capacities for perceiving life using widened, felt perceptions of value?

This presentation will include close reading of a few original poems, focused on climate value/agency, and a couple from other poets. No need to be used to poetry!


BIOGRAPHY

Christina Hutchins is a poet and process philosopher/theologian. She taught process thought, queer/feminist thought, and poetry at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley for 18 years as Lecturer in Theology and Literary Arts. She has also worked as a biochemist and Congregational Minister. She presently teaches privately, leads retreats, preaches, and is poet laureate of the Cobb Institute. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Graduate Theological Union, an MDiv from Harvard, and a BS from UC Davis in Biochemistry and Piano Performance. Her second poetry collection, TENDER THE MAKER (Utah State UP) won the Swenson Award, and THE STRANGER DISSOLVES (16 Rivers) was a Lambda Award Finalist. Poems appear widely, including in The Antioch Review, The New Republic, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and The Southern Review. Essays on process thought, queer theory, poetics, and creative process appear in volumes by Ashgate, Columbia UP, and SUNY. She won The Missouri Review Prize, National Poetry Review Prize, a literary fellowship to St. Petersburg, Russia, and was Dartmouth Poet in Residence living in Frost’s home in Franconia, NH. She was the first poet laureate of Albany, CA.

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Recording Date: June 17, 2025

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