Event Type
This roundtable will explore how poets adopt or imbue personas, voices, or masks in their work and on stage—and how the shift into performance transforms the text, the writer, and the audience.
The act of poetic performance often involves a voice that is not strictly the “I” of everyday life–a voice that is dispersed, a voice that arrives from a split subject, an “I” that is a pun of many different composite “I”s; this roundtable will examine the generative possibilities of that invitation towards persona, invite reflection and discussion on where the “self” ends and the “voice” begins.
Some opening questions:
Multiplicity of the “I” — How does the poem make room for multiple or fractured selves? What happens when the “I” becomes plural, composite, or performative rather than confessional or autobiographical?
Voice as Threshold — How does voice act as a site of crossing between the written and the performed, the interior and the social, the living and the dead?
Mask and Revelation — In what ways does persona conceal in order to reveal, or reveal through concealment? How does the act of disguise invite new modes of truth-telling?
The Dispersed Self in Performance — How does performance re-animate or further dissolve the poetic self? What transformations occur when a written voice becomes embodied or voiced aloud?
Voice as Invocation — What kinds of presences enter when we perform a voice that is not our own? How does persona function as invocation, possession, or ritual speech?In what ways does performance (reading aloud, staging, movement) reshape the poem’s voice?
Voice as Clairvoyance / Divination — Can performance act as a form of channeling, a way of accessing or listening to the unseen? What is the relationship between voice and prophecy, between writing and the ritual technologies of mediumship? In taking on persona, do poets become translators of otherworldly speech—carriers for voices that do not belong entirely to them? How might divinatory poetics expand the notion of authorship toward something more porous, collective, or cosmological?
Format:
Short “lightning” sharing by each panelist: artist talk? Mini performance? Reading of one passage in which they use persona/voice in a particular way? 10 minutes each, 4 participants = ~40 minutes)
Moderated discussion with audience participation—questions like “When does the poem become a performance of voice rather than an expression of self?” (10 minutes)
Confirmed participants: Stella Corso, Valerie Hsiung, Bo Hwang, [Zack Darsee & Elise Houcek - as one unit]