State of Mind Radiates Out Like a Lotus: Where Urgency, Trauma, Survival, and Writing Collide

This panel will discuss poetics with an eye to urgency: its fluidity, expression, and representation. Each artist will read a poem or poems and address their unique experience of focusing oneself on the present--on balance: beyond the banal and the bureaucratic, to the Cartesian and the transcendental. Hurricane Katrina and Sept 11th will serve as seminal backdrops or landscapes of ongoing disaster and survival: DACA, exile, personal grief, and crisis—the uncertainties or certainties that arise with sudden change.