Roundtable

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings by three poets currently based in the south whose work could be considered in Post-Confessionalist. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, touching on how their work engages with the Anthropocene as a geologic age that threatens humanity, and how this thread to larger humanity plays a role in their routine dramas and ongoing life choices. The roundtable will engage the audience and end with ideas on how to incorporate similar themes and lenses in their own work. Kimberly Ann Southwick will chair the panel and speak about her work, and two other poets will be featured, Spencer Silverthorne and Maxwell Gontarek.

As a poetry festival situated in the cultural capital of the Gulf South, the New Orleans Poetry Festival serves as a meeting ground for poets and critics from across this region at the same time as it showcases these writers to the rest of the country and the world. NOPF 2023 offers the first entry in what we hope to be a new series, this talk on Gulf South Poetics, exploring recent trends in a specific Gulf South region or state. This talk will focus on Mississippi, which has seen a resurgence of national-level poetic work appearing in the last decade. Contextualizing this work and offering a detailed overview of the concerns, themes, styles, and politics that currently occupy the attention of Mississippi-based poets, this lecture will discuss the poetry of Natasha Trethewey, Beth Ann Fennelly, Adam Clay, Derrick Harriell, Aimee Nezukumatathil, Joshua Nguyen, Catherine Pierce, Melissa Ginsburg, and more, with a full bibliography provided. Benjamin Morris will deliver the talk, approximately 30 minutes, and CT Salazar will serve as respondent, followed by an audience discussion.

Emily Marie Passos Duffy, Natalie Earnhart, Stephanie Kaylor, Aristilde Kirby, Dylan Krieger, and Shay Reynolds join forces to engage the glistening intersections of sex work and poetry. Dominate media representations have been created by those whose standpoints limit them from seeing the full realities of all who engage in sex work. Sex workers have long been pigeonholed as metaphor or muse, criminal or victim, empowered or dis-empowered through culturally influenced vectors such as media, social media, and puritanical ideologies. We are all of the above, none of the above, some of the above and then some. Between duality, and beyond. This reading features poets from all over the country and many corners of the industry. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, as well as discuss issues including sex worker representation, the dual nature of increasing visibility in movements for sex workers’ rights, pedagogical practices related to writings of erotic labor, affect theory, and stigmatization–as well as how these issues and subsequent resistance are made manifest in spaces dedicated to the literary arts.

This panel will consist of BIPOC writers discussing the politics and poetics of agenre, mixed genre, cross-genre, and hybrid work, as well as the use of lyricism and antipoetry as a means of challenging typical poetic genres. The panelists will discuss how their individual works incorporate theory, song, visual art, plot, erasure and typography, and multiple voices and narrators as a means to break away from—and also break down—the idea of Western and/or “formal” poetic genre constructs. Additionally, we will also discuss the possibilities that occur when working with and against tropes and traditions, so that our conversation will speak to the speculative, comedic, tragic, romantic, mundane, and mysterious aspects that arise when one asks the question: What is poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, and where is the line between them?

How are poets in Oklahoma using poetry to serve diverse, marginalized communities outside of the usual channels and to effect positive social changes in a state that consistently ranks quite low in terms of socio-economic indicators and that continues to pass some of the most regressive legislation in the US? This roundtable will feature poets working with collectives, on radio shows, on immigration issues, and in archives, public schools, and prisons. They will discuss their paths, methods, outcomes, insights, and future plans as well as read related work.

“Poetry is language whose through-passage leaves poet, reader, and itself somehow changed.” – Jane Hirschfield

In her 2013 essay, “Poetry, Transformation, and the Column of Tears,” Jane Hirschfield writes, "When the shape of the outer alters, the inner must shift to meet it, or we will be left in broken incoherence inside our own lives." Since long before 2020, poetry has given us the tools to reshape our inner worlds to meet exterior changes. When the pandemic hit, lockdown silenced much of the world, and in that space, a vacuum opened to new landscapes of meaning. What is the role of poetry in a time of chaos? What does it mean to adapt to unprecedented times? What comes next? In this panel, poets Stacey Balkun, Carolyn Hembree, Jade Hurter, and Tiana Nobile will discuss the writing practices that sustained them during the pandemic and share the poems they wrote and read during the first three years of the altered world.

As writers with a range of daily commitments, it’s often a challenge to find time to write. When we do finally find that time, a piece or a poem will often sit, untouched and unseen for months or years. (Re)Vision was formed in response to this quandary: how can we help each other push work forward while also acknowledging that time is so hard to come by? By connecting online via Google Docs and email, (Re)Vision is a mixed genre group of BIPOC writers who share work on a monthly basis in ways that are meaningful and sustainable amid life’s other commitments. Participants will discuss the significance of BIPOC writing spaces when sharing new, vulnerable material and how their mixed genre grouping allows for rich dialogue and unique discussions of all works-in-progress. They will also share how their workshop framework enables them to give and receive feedback while requiring minimal time commitment--allowing the group to be sustained over years (and still going strong!).

This panel will feature writers whose work engages practices of invocation and poetic summoning, calling on the dead to be collaborators, whether as a spiritual practice or ego challenge or something in between/else. Panelists will discuss their reasons for writing beyond the self, opening oneself and one’s writing up to inhabitation, animating intertextuality, and reconfiguring theories of influence, then they will read some of their pertinent writing.

https://youtu.be/rlB8iXqn_Gg

Protest poetry informs us about crisis, attempting to inspire change among human beings. This roundtable, however, addresses an increasingly common variety of protest poetry that delivers its petitions for change to the more-than-human world. Participants Cynthia Hogue, Lesley Wheeler, Pamela Uschuk, and Andy Young will discuss the stakes and audiences of prayers and spells; what stylistic and structural elements help focus such a poem’s energy; and what social, environmental, and personal transformations the authors seek. Each poet will comment on these questions and read a few poems. The event will close with several writing prompts to inspire the audience to experiment with this powerful mode.

https://youtu.be/dUunM-OStho

This roundtable will feature a discussion and readings by three Louisiana-based poets who engage ecopoetics through different modes and lenses. Each poet will discuss and read from recent projects, highlighting the ecopoetical intersections with their other concerns as poets, humans, and readers.