Event Type
This panel stages encounters between poets, fiction writers, and translators with the infrastructure of capitalist life—from physical infrastructure, like concrete barriers, to institutional infrastructures like hospitals, universities, and financial institutions. Our responses will ask how literary practice can challenge and transform the infrastructures we live within. Toby Altman will present selections from his forthcoming book, Discipline Park, which traces the demolition of Prentice Women's Hospital in Chicago—and treats the demolition as an allegory of neoliberalism. Kelly Krumrie will read from her chapbook Infrastructural, which follows a speaker's engagements with sidewalks, concrete barriers, gas lines, and construction. She turns down various streets, walks, turns around, gets lost. Men come and go; there are aluminum signs. The sentences---using technical, institutional, and plain language---layer on top of one another like felled bricks. Jack Jung will read from his forthcoming translation of Kim Hyesoon's "Thus Spoke n't" (2016). In some of these lyrical passages that often deal with life in modern-day Seoul, Kim Hyesoon muses about teaching creative writing at an institution of higher learning, and what it means to be part of such an institution for supposedly training young artists and writers. Often bitingly witty, some of Kim Hyesoon's writings in this collection reveal to us what the institutionalization of creative writing instruction has been in contemporary South Korea. Jose-Luis Moctezuma will read from his forthcoming Black Box Syndrome, which articulates the tension between lyric excess and digital compaction that encodes poetic discourse in the age of pandemic. Over and against the corrosive world-shrinking effects of Wall Street risk management and futures trading, the black boxes in this book propose a counter-divination that distorts, deranges, and decolonizes the logic of empire.
https://youtu.be/mrjpw8YrbxA