Thursday 10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m.
R175. Love Poems in Place: Ecotone Poets in Fourteen Lines. (Kathryn M. Barber, Anna Maria Hong, Maryann Corbett, V. Penelope Pelizzon, Chad Abushanab) Room 305, Henry B. González Convention Center, Ballroom Level Ecotone’s Fall 2019 Love Issue features poems in 14-line forms, including sonnets, rondels prime, and brefs double. In this reading and conversation, contributors will share poems and will speak to the enduring nature of these forms and the transformations they and others have worked upon them. What does it mean to write a love poem in place, or to place? How do such forms allow us to reimagine place—our home landscapes, regions in ecological crisis? What might poets do with these forms next?
Thursday 1:45 p.m. to 3 p.m.
R230. Frustrated Pastorals: Burning Fields, Ruined Gardens, Desert Shores. (Joseph Campana, Jennifer Foerster, Katie Peterson, Cecily Parks, Sandra Lim) Room 214A, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level Once pastoral was code for nostalgia, escapism, idealization. Poets of late invoke pastoral as ecological engagement, as making palpable elusive realities in a virtual, counterfactual world. This panel returns not to fantasies of green space but to the tedium of the desert, frustration of difficult weather, alienation of ravaged shores, discomfort of exposure. Pastoral’s ancient contradictions may not idealize but rather realize the world, and our place in it, in an era of precarious climate.
Thursday 3:20 p.m. to 4:25 p.m.
R251. Strangers in a Changing Land: Poets on Living and Working in Texas. (Joseph Campana, Sasha West, Jehanne Dubrow, Niki Herd, Sasha Pimentel) Room 006D, Henry B. González Convention Center, River Level
The real world puts pressure on a poet, and thus on poems. Since the writing-teaching life can be an itinerant one, we are often navigating new landscapes, communities, and political realities. Join poets from across Texas as they read from their work and discuss the experience of being transplants in a state that looms large in the national consciousness.
R264. Reworking the Workshop: Changing Dynamics for a Diverse Classroom. (Alexandra Teague, Sean Hill, Prageeta Sharma, Divya Victor, CMarie Fuhrman) Room 212, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
Professors and students spend hours in workshops, often using the classic model of the silent writer who listens. How does this model, and even taxonomies such as “essay” versus “story,” privilege dominant power structures? How can poetry and prose workshops serve writers who are indigenous, of color, multilingual, and/or women and LGBTQ+ when workshop themselves often reinforce their silence? Professors and a recent grad consider ways to better serve complex communities and diverse voices.
Friday 10:35 a.m. to 11:50 a.m.
F144. Science at the Source: Poetic Methods. (Rosalie Moffett, Nomi Stone, John James, Rushi Vyas, Kathryn Nuernberger) Room 006A, Henry B. González Convention Center, River Level
Is poetry science? What happens when poets engage research and adopt strategies of scientific inquiry? Five poets will discuss the influence of science on their craft (observation, form, and discovery), and also as a method of investigating truth. We will demonstrate how studying the intricacies of our natural world offers new insight on the image-less territories of the interior and how poetry can make our complex, shared reality penetrable and knowable in ways science by itself cannot.
F176. Seeking the Ex-Centric: A Conversation with Editors and Translators. (Katherine Hedeen, Johannes Goransson, Jeannine Marie Pitas, Michelle Gil-Montero, Jesse Lee Kercheval) Room 305, Henry B. González Convention Center, Ballroom Level
This panel gathers translators and editors to discuss the crucial yet overlooked curatorial aspect of translation. How to resist the forces of (cultural) imperialism? With little time and resources, what criteria for selection should we follow? How to address persistent inequities? Panelists showcase recent projects from various cultural, aesthetic, and geographical peripheries and discuss the complex process of encountering, translating, and building context for poets in English translation.
FRIDAY 12:10 p.m. to 1:25 p.m.
F199. Contemporary Poets in the 19th-Century Archive. (Dan Beachy-Quick, José Alvergue, Joshua Bennett, Stefania Heim, Alexandra Manglis) Room 214D, Henry B. González Convention Center, Meeting Room Level
This roundtable discussion will focus on the 19th-century US literary archive as a site for contemporary poetic engagement and contestation. While the archive offers models for engaging the world that we might turn to with hope and reverence, it also inscribes modes of violence and erasure with which we are still reckoning. This panel features the work of poets engaged in various intimate ways of thinking in, with, and against the archive. Short readings will be followed by moderated discussion.
Saturday 1:45 p.m. to 3 p.m.
S242. Paul Celan at 100: Looking Back, Looking Forward. (Catherine Barnett,Tarfia Faizullah, francine j. harris, Ilya Kaminsky,Valzhyna Mort) Room 301, Henry B. González Convention Center, Ballroom Level
To mark the centennial of Celan’s birth, five poets talk about him as continuing catalyst, model, and influence, with a focus on poetry as “urgent conversation,” as “encounter, dissent, and leave-taking all in one.” What can poets make–what have they made—if guided, as Celan said of his own work, by experience, fate, and “a need for responsibility and solidarity.” A newly published translation of Celan’s complete posthumous prose calls for further celebration and reconsideration.