Event Type
Seeking a writing life, with time to read and write and some institutional health insurance, a poet might send herself to school. What happens then? This panel explores how research that’s presumed to be objective and scholarly inevitably bleeds into the more subjective realm of poetry as result of creative and critical life’s entwinement. While the academy offers a mirage about the promises of the life of the mind, it also places a series of material hurdles and limitations in front of the would-be scholar-poet: debt that necessitates work, disciplinary prohibitions on creative-scholarly work, very few prospects for gainful employment after graduation, and loads of service work for those who are lucky enough to get a job. For many, the dissertation is the first and last chance to do the kind of immersive intellectual work promised by the academy. This panel examines the creative shadow lives and afterlives of that research in a precarious economy that allows very few people time for writing, much less research, asking how poems can recuperate research and knowledge-making that academic institutions ultimately discourage. This panel of academic and ex-academic poet-scholars asks: How does scholarship bleed into, infect, or re-shape poetry? What is the writing that comes out of the intertwining of these two pursuits? How can we foster inclusive cultures of research and deep engagement with ideas in and through poetry, but outside of official institutions?