Event Type
The green scum atop swamps & five-inch mud in marshlands. Carcasses in the desert & rat-infested sewers. Toxic waste build-up, invisible yet powerful. In cityscapes, nature preserves, and all the spaces between, we encounter grotesque landscapes. These places shape us: how we interact, think, love, form identity. “To be at all—to exist in any way—is to be somewhere,” Edward S. Casey writes, “and to be somewhere is to be in some kind of place.” What do we do, then, with haunted, polluted, radioactive nowheres? What do we make of floods & famine, soft pelts & barbed wire? What do we owe ourselves and the landscapes we create in the face of human-initiated climate change? This panel investigates how the grotesque, liminal, and unquantifiable elements of place shape poetic voice and how surviving in such habitats infects and inflects our poetry. Poets will share works that embody place and discuss their poetics of place, climate, habitat, and community.