Event Type
The poetry world has entered into a new period of severe financial crisis. As federal funding for the arts retreats, presses, poetry centers, and academic programs are having to make hard decisions about how and what to cut. So far, the response to this crisis has been largely business as usual—more calls for donations, more private money of questionable provenance sloshing around to cover the shortfall. One might say that this reflects the limitations of our institutional imagination. In the face of an existential crisis, the liberal establishment that governs the poetry world, like the liberal establishment more broadly, falls back into a posture of retreat, defending institutions and practices which are, obviously, bankrupt, morally and financially.
The roundtable begins with an open question: Why should we defend the institutional poetry world that has come into being since the late 1970s, with its culture of scarcity and prestige? The poetry culture we operate within has dramatically failed to make poetry a livable practice for most working poets—concentrating resources in the hands of a very small minority who are able to command major prizes, honoraria, and stable teaching jobs. The results for the art itself have been predictable and abysmal. We all know people who have left the art because it is impossible to make a life here; likewise, we all know people whose values have been corrupted, utterly, in their pursuit of prestige and power within the poetry world.
To quote the former mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emmanuel (himself an architect of our current liberal episteme), "Never let a good crisis go to waste." What if, instead of, defending our institutions, we radically reimagined them? What would a poetry world that is just, equitable, open, democratic, look like? How could we make solidarity and mutual aid the basis of our lives as poets? In what spaces within the poetry world are poets and organizers already practicing viable alternatives to the neoliberal structures which have otherwise dominated our field?
This roundtable discussion, co-organized by Annulet and the RCAH Center for Poetry at Michigan State University, is intended as a place to pose these questions, and to imagine their answers; to engage in utopian dreaming and to get into the nitty-gritty practicalities of alternate institutional structures and possibilities. Our panelists include a wide range of figures in the poetry world, from institutionally secure professors to graduate students facing a bitter job market; from poets who lead or work within existing institutions to those who operate beyond them or are imagining new ones. They come together to ask the pressing question we should all be asking in this moment of crisis: what kind of poetry world should we have?
Kay Gabriel will talk about the history of the Poetry Project as an anti-war cultural organization, which for 60 years has linked culture workers to political consciousness and movement organizations and makes it possible for us to be effective in ways we otherwise couldn't have been. She will draw on the history of the Project that I've gone deep on while on staff here, and she'll talk about the origins of the Project out of the anti-Vietnam war movement, organizing in the 80s in solidarity with Nicaragua and the movement against apartheid in South Africa, and our more recent PACBI commitment.
Stephen Ira will speak about youth poetry outreach as a potential technology of trans social reproduction. Right now, we have a conversation about trans youth where the conservative side is dominated by moral panic, and the liberal one by a medicalized concept of trans childhood imposed upon trans people by heterosexual institutions. Trans children need neither of these--they need access to intergenerational connections with trans adults. In other words, they need access to the forms of trans social reproduction that are in fact being described by fascists when fascists use the term "grooming." How can the poetry world provide these spaces to youth, insuring they are not only accessible, but populated by trans working artists? In his current work in youth outreach as the Youth Services Co-Ordinator at New York City's Poets House, a literary non-profit and free poetry library, he will attempt to answer these questions.
Kelly Krumrie will discuss pedagogy, focusing on the actual pedagogical practices that have radical impacts within institutional spaces today. For all of our "radical" thinking, most of us aren’t great teachers in practice and blame the students and the environment/institution for our failure to respond creatively, empathetically, and without ego. In response to current shifts in academia (e.g., AI) and the reimagining of poetic institutions and practices outlined in this panel description, she believes we need to do a bit of un-learning as educators so that we can re-teach our students. Poetry, more than any other genre, allows this to happen.
Aditi Machado will focus on some of the actually nice things *** that have happened working with students (undergrad and graduate) and use those "outcomes" to imagine a set of classes she would love to teach but the university won't allow. She will also address how one tries to game the system or sneak in practices that are antithetical to university logics as a result of this constraint that reinforce the dynamisms of unruly poetry learning communities. ***Actually nice things: undergrads starting their own writing groups or open mic series off-campus; undergrads learning to acquire rare/special editions for the library; graduate students' experimentations (ex. ritualistically burning their dissertation); and a range of small but crucial acts that accumulate—and give Aditi some hope that those of us stuck in higher education might catalyze practices that move beyond pobiz as usual.
Nora Claire Miller will discuss Somehow School, the creative writing school/studio space for kids and teens that they recently started. Of their project, they say: “I think there should be a lot more poetry in the world world and not just the poetry world, which means we need to get more kids reading and writing poetry. The robots are coming for critical thinking, but one thing robots suck at is writing poems, because actual poems are just so WEIRD. The earlier kids learn that there’s an arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified, the better equipped they’ll be to fight fascism.”
Nick Sturm will describe the conditions in the late 1960s and 1970s that produced the institutional network of literary nonprofits that shape the field going forward. Nick will offer a brief history that tells us how the National Endowment for the Arts constructed Poets & Writers, CCLM/CLMP, AWP, and others, and how each of these nonprofits, undergirded by state funding, created American poetry's professional infrastructure. Nick's presentation is less invested in critique here than diagnosis—actually seeing and describing this history to identify macro trends and offer more nuanced origin stories for some of the crises you bring up. Part of the tension in this story about the development of the field's nonprofit organizations is seeing how these actors responded to alternative communities that both resisted and participated in those organizations' projects, often in more complicated ways than we might imagine.
Alicia Wright will focus on the fundamentally anarchic/agentic nature of the literary journal, which is an actively recombinant form through which we might think about what’s emergent in our political and aesthetic present in both its disparately composed and structurally shared expression. The literary journal, both in print and online, is the site where these two channels meet, and where we can best see the literary world organizing itself. Through a journal’s fluctuations, we can track its individual divergences, alignments, inherences, and disruptions of both experimental and mainstream poetry culture. A journal can puncture, and punctuate, these logics of affiliation and organization. Through its aggregate nature, Alicia will also argue, literary journals act as antidotes to machine-driven writing that’s stripped of its human, and subsequently its political, viability. The future of poetry in the U.S. begins with this essential form’s foundational, heterogenous, and de-institutionalizing work.
S. Yarberry will discuss what they are calling "Poetics of the Event." S. talk about literary events as sites that should move further into experimentation and disruption. For instance, "the poetry reading" has become an expectation: there is a host, someone reads, someone else reads, they sit down together and host a conversation, then take Q&A. We drink a little tiny glass of wine and eat a cookie, then go off into the night. Event over. This idea of "the poetry reading," then, has become a set of constraints, not unlike a sonnet or pantoum. These constraints that have been rearticulated over and over again, regardless of the content to which they are supposed to coordinate: should the poetry event for Aditi Machado look structurally the exact same as a poetry event for Yanyi? You'd think not, and yet this is often the case. In "Poetics of the Event," S. will call for a push for literary organizers and poets themselves to approach the event of poetry with as much imagination as one approaches the poem itself.
The panel will be moderated by RCAH Center for Poetry Director, Toby Altman.