&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.

Even if traditional, socially-normative notions and representations of home ever truly reflected lived experience, it is clear they no longer can accommodate the social, cultural, and political realities of contemporary American life. In this interdisciplinary, cross-genre panel, five authors, including two translators, interrogate and deconstruct these limited, commercially-driven ideas of what constitutes home through formally experimental narratives, to offer alternative notions of home. As Wittgenstein famously wrote, “the limits of our world are the limits of our language.” If language is a kind of home, then these writers, whose experiences fall outside existing codifications of belonging, are compelled to employ collage and juxtaposition across medium and genre to invent new formal means of expression. Approaches that traverse boundaries between, within, and across genres—allows these authors to address complicated themes such as transnational identity, adoption, loss, gender, and language through an expansion of given forms. These complex narratives often explore cultural, political, and personal realities. Authors draw from research, biography, criticism, art, popular media, and philosophy to create culturally-relevant artworks that challenge received social norms and push the boundaries of language. Presenters discuss how in crafting (an) alternate notion(s) of home, hybrid forms also invite the critique of social categories in our family-centric culture.

“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” - William James

How are the frames of reference and relationships between and of living being: plants, animal, (including human animals) activated, and how do these activations create new conditions for increased sensitivities among others(ness)? That is, how do bodies and worlds articulate each other, how does a human body allow an animal’s world to affect her, and in turn, how does a human’s world affect an animal’s body? Or, how do we learn to be affected? By disbanding normative and normalizing positionality vis-à-vis bodily and psychic interrelationality with other animal and plant presences, how does personhood expand and gain complexity manifoldly. Exploring how various systems of language, knowledge and sensing create relations between different bodies, this panel will explore notions of personhood, co-dependency, interspecies communication, insurgency, queerness, and polyphony.

Recent years have seen the rise of novels, such as Ready, Player, One and The Hike, that pattern themselves on or around games. What motivates this literary turn, and what does a game model do for and/or to the traditional literary text? Where, also, do these game narratives fit into a larger and longer tradition of fictions that conceive of and play their own games, formal and linguistic and otherwise (some examples being modern and postmodern avant-garde and experimental texts).

We feel ambivalent. About many things—personal, political, cultural—we feel more than one way. Often, these ways seem to contradict each other, or to cancel each other out. Then what’s left is a lazy hum. But the hum persists. And in its persistence, it becomes less lazy. It’s an earworm, it’s a generator. How might ambivalence be cast not as apathy but as engine?

Narrative prose provides an ideal site for investigating ambivalence as active simultaneity, as both/and, because it inherently always feels both ways, as it contends simultaneously with lived, embodied experience and represents that experience in language on the page. Formal and stylistic considerations—around syntax, proximity, layout, structure—can draw out these dualities without diluting or resolving them.

Ambivalence has a political valence as well. The blunt force of fascism comes without nuance. Politically activated ambivalence is not undone by complexity but views its frictions and multiplicities as power-generating. Intersectionality might be an ambivalent consideration of subjectivity; the split subject doubly, triply asserts herself.

Ambivalence figures differently and divergently in the work of the panelists: Jess Arndt’s subjects straining to be and not be in their bodies; Lucy Corin’s destabilizing narrative structures; Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s juxtapositions of potent cultural moments; Lily Hoang’s movement between animal and human, personal history and myth. Sara Jaffe will introduce and moderate. Together, we’ll work toward a collective understanding of ambivalence—on the page and in the now—that is as dynamic and irreducible as the term itself.

Panel on new book, "Experimental Literature: A Collection of Statements" edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo and Warren Motte. Panelist will be some of the 33 contributors to the volume.

In The Poethical Wager, Joan Retallack points out that, given our "complexly interrelational" situation ("from weather to neural networks to all forms of culture, there are so many variables, that large-scale or even modestly scaled predictive accuracy is impossible"), "the level of individual agency, the effects of any one person’s actions or work … are quite mysterious." In this panel we explore, from a variety of perspectives and through collaborative practices, how the work of Marthe Reed merges writing, activism for social justice, and pedagogy. Reed was a poet and person who, in committing to her belief in justice for all people across racial, economic, and other lines, worked to change social structures and attitudes. We reflect on her work as an environmental and social justice activist and writer, as a teacher and mentor, as a person who had ongoing relationships and projects with writers and activists around the country. We explore her influence through video interviews with those who were affected by her; we reflect on her example of ways of being in the world, merging activism and poetry in a kind of ethopoetics, acting as an artistic and pedagogical influence that ripples through to our own students; we explore how she merged the fight for environmental justice with contemporary racial and social politics; and we highlight the anger, grief, empathy and hope that fueled the collaborative curating process of Counter-Desecration: A Glossary for Writing Within the Anthropocene, edited by Reed and Linda Russo. Marthe died in April, 2018; she was only 59.

Poetry is not an answer— it is a space for working things out speculatively. How can ideas on the page be drawn out and used actively as weapons against what would destroy us? Just as a gambler makes a confident wager on an impossible bet, poetry can assume a win even when the odds are against us, generating a space of new possibilities in which to move. Our wager is this: Even as avant-garde art is constantly recuperated and sold back to us in gift shops, poetry offers a multitude of poetic weapons which act as defiant tools in transitions and crises—through foam, objects, ambivalence, excess, garbage, swarms, and more—and which allow lines of flight to begin forming.

In our panel/ activity, we would like to offer ideas and examples of poetic weapons in specific poems and other literature and also discuss how they have been/ could be deployed in marches, occupations, daily resistance, and other political topographies. We will frame our presentation through a participatory engagement with the audience, possibly through a writing exercise, movements and gestures, or speculative acts that assume the existence of a desired reality.

War has always infected American writing, but a new militarism emerging in recent decades challenges poets, novelists, and non-fiction writers to think in innovative ways about the relationship between state violence, consumer culture, and the literary imagination. This panel will discuss how fiction and poetry might address ongoing contemporary wars, often distant, undeclared, covert, and fought by drones, mercenaries, and special forces operators, while recognizing the long history of American militarism and the dubious complicity of much American war literature. Creative and critical responses will focus on questions of form, rhetoric, style, audience, and narrative: How do we write, and rewrite, the story of American war?

Panel format will begin with introductory remarks by Roy Scranton, then creative and critical presentations from participants, approximately 8-10 minutes each, and conclude with a discussion and Q&A with the audience.

How might we engage with story material that is multimodal, hypertextual, or experiential in nature? How do we ethically and respectfully transcribe experiences and pasts that resist verbal or textual representation? And -- perhaps most pressing -- how might our engagements with sound archives, oral narratives, and dreamscapes create new possibilities for print forms? In this panel, writers will dialogue about translating and transcribing tarot energies, dreamscapes, and oral histories, exploring how hybridity (fluidly defined) provides a platform for putting such experiences into print. Panelists will offer inventive presentations on their currently developing projects and converse with each other and the audience about process. Projects include remixing multimodal archival material; investigating the logic of dreams; translating, transliterating, and transcribing multilingual/vocal family histories of trauma; and drawing on the energetics of tarot to dive deeper into and defamiliarize autobiographical material. Audiences will leave with a spectrum of approaches and methods for conducting “research” that is slippery and subversive.