Event Type
This panel looks at the legacy of the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo—an anonymous collective of writers who took to X (formerly Twitter) in 2015 to challenge what they saw as the white supremacist ethos of conceptual poetry—a decade after their formation. Although short-lived, the Mongrel Coalition’s distinctive all-caps styling and combative tone sparked intense discussion and debate about the racial politics of avant-garde movements and of official institutions of poetry, with some finding their activities appropriately pitched to the severity of their accusations and others accusing them of targeted harassment, including of writers of color. We will discuss the group in terms of its aesthetics strategies, its implications for the state of the poetry world today, the difficulties of historicizing contemporary literary movements, the uniquely online circulation (and disappearance) of its work, and its place in the fraught lineage of the avant-garde.