&NOW 2018

This conversation considers contemporary forms of political resistance through an examination of poetry that deconstructs, misuses, and talks back to state policies and ideologies. We explore the oppositional stances that contemporary poetry takes in its relation to oppressive regimes and discuss our own everyday, poetic, and pedagogical practices of resistance.

In “The Uses of Poetry: Cuba’s Neoliberal Turn,” Candice Amich compares the differing definitions and uses of “poetry” in official versus independent spaces in order to articulate the shifting relationship between politics and aesthetics since the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

Keegan Cook Finberg’s “Poetry of State-Sanctioned Violence” discusses poetry collections published since 2015 that expose how the shared vocabulary and grammars of public state-sanctioned violence are also experienced privately and intimately. These recent collections subvert and eschew usual poetic classifications, expressing political resistance through major tropes of both confessional lyric and the hallmarks of the avant-garde.

In “The Feminist Poetics of Refusal,” Becca Klaver investigates the tactics of two texts that refuse the social conditions of the poetry world as a microcosm of patriarchal culture: the collectively written “No Manifesto” (2015) and Jennif(f)er Tamayo’s book YOU DA ONE (2017). Drawing on theories from queer and black radical traditions, refusal can be understood as a way to actualize alternative worlds and as a mode of care.

In the second half of the session, we will invite the audience to discuss their own forms of resistance in small groups, finally reconvening to share poetic and practical strategies.