Event Type
For this roundtable discussion, contributors to Annulet’s special spring issue folio, “American Poetry and Poetics, 2008–2025” will present talks that detail and open up their individual and collaboratively authored contributions for discussion, which will also welcome audience participation. Presentations respond to the foundational question driving the folio, which is—what is the history of American poetry and poetics in this period from the 2008 recession to the present, and why isn't there yet a clear understanding of it? Our conversation will address how we might begin to attend to the past seventeen years of influences and trends in poetics, or critical theory’s application to or interpretation of poetry, as we consider whether there have been significant publishing outlets or networks, or noteworthy affects and affinities particular to this time period. We will also consider what holdovers may continue from previous aesthetic groupings or movements, and whether these legacies are still operative or intact. As part of our conversation, we all also discuss which forms of poetics, practices, or methods, like documentary poetics, translation, or archival study, are cresting or have waned, and which poets or methods might currently be ascendant. Finally, we’ll also include discussion of presses, organizations, journals, conferences, cohorts or coteries, and other social forms and solidarities will or should define the post-recession years until today. Further questions that we’ll pose to our audience include, but are not limited to: Can it be said that there are generational traits, or intergenerational aesthetic links, that have developed in the past decade and a half? Which figures have defined their respective traditions, or their own oeuvres? Whose influence do you suggest will become increasingly ascendant? When you look into the pool of current poetics, what do you see?