Event Type
In 2024, Blue Bag Press released two editions of Tina Darragh's agitprop plays: FOUR PLAYS (AGITPROP) (collecting work from the 2000s) and MUTANT SOLIDARITIES (one of Darragh's final projects written between early 2000 and 2019/20). Darragh is a respected and influential poet to older generations of innovative writers, however, over time (and for perturbing reasons), in recent years, much of her work has gone out of print and proved of great difficulty to access. Alongside a substantial digitization effort which provided copies of much of that out of print material, Blue Bag Press' editions were published with the explicit goal of enabling a wider readership of Darragh's writing by new audiences largely unfamiliar with her intensely ethical, political writing which radically questions the power and purpose of the text, especially the creative one. This roundtable, led by Thom Eichelberger-Young, who edited the editions in question, features four early career writers, practicing a variety of styles and forms, and working towards various ends, coming together to read and discuss Darragh's work Mutant Solidarities, a hybrid poem-documentary-drama interrogating manifold matters such as radioactive waste, animal and human consciousness, and human dominion over the natural. Panelists will reflect on Darragh's increasingly relevant political and ecological text, and its impacts upon them, in hopes to show the potentials of its influence and demands upon new generations of writers, editors, and artists.