Reading

Over two decades ago, a small group of New Orleans teacher-writers resolved to meet every other Sunday to read and critique each other's poetry "cold." Through the Hurricane Katrina aftermath and Covid-19 pandemic, this workshop has continued to meet. Original members of this poetry workshop will briefly discuss the origin and evolution of the group over the past twenty years. All group members will read poems that the workshop helped them re-envision. 90 minutes.

https://youtu.be/nACp4nC2ncc

Queer history is innately informed by lack, by myriad lacunae. Our collective cultural consciousness is permeated by an intractable trajectory of systemic omissions, missing reels and redacted documents. Our subjective lineages are porous and incomplete, equally marked by loss and by potentiality. How can we explore the negative space within the archive, what film scholar Giuliana Bruno refers to as "streetwalking on a ruined map," as both a generative constraint and as a locus for utopian revisionism?

What topics and forms are deemed “poetic,” and what gets to become a poem? Formal or free verse, every text has the capacity to rupture familiar structures or elevate mundane objects. As poet Michele Battiste told Gulf Coast magazine, “Poetry bears witness. History is best documented not by scholars or journalists or writers of textbooks, but by poets and artists in all of our enraged or fascinated or seduced subjectivities.” What can the everyday tell us about history, about witness?

Poets and translators reading from recent Lavender Ink / Diálogos releases, featuring:

Live events will commence on Thursday April 21 at 7pm with our first live reading, featuring New Orleans poets Karisma Price, Té V. Smith, Henry Goldkamp, & Daniel W.K.

Friday April 22 at 7 PM we will host our International Feature, at Zeitgeist Theater. Headlining the event will be Mexican performance poet and multimedia artist Rocío Cerón, Chilean poet Enrique Winter, and Chilean indigenous poets and advocates Jaime Luis Huenún and Daniela Catrileo with translators Thomas Rothe and Edith Adams.

Note: Rocío Cerón will perform a piece from her book Diorama entirely in Spanish. For mono-lingual viewers, this is a link to the English translation.