Event Type
Throughout time, poets have written intimately about the places they call home, where they live, work, travel, love—always, it seems, we have something to say based on where we find ourselves to be. For some, this spatially attentive writing misses much where it manifests only a joy and energy taken from comfortably occupied terrains, while for others—looking deeper—it is moved not only by positive, romantic notions, but by what we witness unfolding before our eyes—the consequences of space, the ways in which subjective actors occupy them, and the coercive mediations upon us as those forces spatially merge. Impossible and irresponsible to ignore, locally unfolding worlds and their data generate for these certain poets an organizing force impulsing their art through its structural impact on their speech, thus altering the tongue of existence. This panel explores this necessitated, spatially compulsed, poetic dynamic through the voice and work of five poets actively inhabiting such a geospatially witness-driven praxis. Organized by poets and theorists Yuyi Chen (Johns Hopkins University, Erotic Continent) and Thom Eichelberger-Young (SUNY Buffalo, Ointment Weather), and also including Sylvia Jones (George Washington University, Television Fathers), Joe Hall (St. Bonaventure University, People Finder Buffalo), and Cait O’Kane (The Wasted Land), this panel features reading and expository discussion by each poet from their recent creative projects, imbued by urban spaces for each in unique ways and out of “their own” terrains: Buffalo, Baltimore, New York, Kansas City, Philadelphia, Chicago; and often far beyond, as the digitally enveloped world brings the locales of all others handily, though querulously, into our homes, on our screens, “before” our eyes. The poets will be paying particular attention not exclusively to the content of their writing, but also to the craft of it, the ‘why’ of their approach and discussing how their style itself is informed and shaped by the political economy that has designed the city spaces surrounding them. On these terms, the poets will situate the consequences and stakes of such poetries, potential strategies for disseminating stylistic approaches to wider audiences and writers towards community pedagogical ends, and share personal and academic discoveries, realizations, and frameworks developed and furthered by their practices.