Roundtable

Join us for a special display of rare books from the Tulane University Special Collections celebrating the intersection of poetry and printing from Les Cenelles, the groundbreaking collection of poetry published by free men of color in nineteenth-century Louisiana, to contemporary poetry set and printed by the visionary and innovative Perishable Press. 

This collection will be on display from 11am to 2pm, on Saturday, April 12, and Sunday, April 13.

Join Louisiana Poet Laureate Alison Pelegrin over a complimentary lunch to learn about the Lifelines Poetry Project which has brought poetry workshops to prisons and communities across the state. Louisiana is the incarceration capital of the world, and arts education and experiences for the incarcerated are rare to nonexistent. Learn about the various prompts and bits of inspiration that worked well in the carceral environment, and listen to Pelegrin and those who worked with her recall snippets of poetry and conversation still on their minds after these poetry workshops.

Fredric Jameson, drawing on Lévi-Strauss, puts forward the proposition that “all cultural artifacts are to be read as symbolic resolutions of real political and social contradictions.” Yet what does it mean when artifacts, specifically poems, foreground contradiction at the level of form and text?

This roundtable discussion brings together a group of five poets and translators whose work mines essential questions about time, memory, speculation, and practices of correspondence. Critical questions guiding our conversation will include: how can we, as poets, operate as cronistas–chroniclers and correspondents across languages and historiographies? How do we activate the ethics of deep time in our correspondence with the dead? How do memory and the imaginal operate in poetry to create a space of confluence between our psychic and material realities?

When so much of our reading happens through phones and screens, what does it mean to share poetry that takes not just printed, but specifcally handmade, forms? The participants in this roundtable make postcards, books, broadsides, and other poetry objects on kitchen tables, in letterpress shops, and in book-folding or sewing parties, one at a time, by hand. How does hand-seting type, or hand-stitching chapbooks, change our relationship to poems, or to language more generally? What can we learn about poetics by making it by hand?

Poets sometimes use other artists' work as an entry point for addressing societal issues. Visual art can provide a way of triangulating trauma, for example, offering a necessary distance to look at the overwhelming, or provide a unique lens through which to reflect on an overwhelming subject. What ethical and artistic pitfalls must we be mindful of in adopting such strategies? How do we give voice to political upheaval without appropriating others' experiences?

This roundtable will consist of writer-translators who work and live within both French and English. The panelists will discuss how their individual approaches confront bilingualism, intermedial translation, and the question of authenticity. Can we say that the original poem and its translation are authentic in different ways? We will examine the process of co-translation and what means to work collectively through languages and gender.

Given that the work of BIPOC writers is judged first as a political statement, then as an aesthetic object, this Form and (Dis)Content panel will explore the idea of exactly what makes for a political text. In light of the arch-conservative outcome of the recent national election, the diarists, essayists, and poets on this panel will discuss how their individual works often address, unpack, and disrupt our contemporary political climate in both overt and covert ways.

Both dance and poetry share a long history as forms of resistance in the wake of intergenerational trauma. We’ll speak to how dance, and its role in our poetic practices, allows us a way back into our bodies. Trauma comes from the Greek word for wound, and dance is a method of tending to said wounds, of embodying and reimagining aliveness within all that we have inherited. Dance as empowered creation. Dance as a way of informing a poetics that attends to a deeply embodied practice of imagination. In this way, dance poetics is a form of imagined futurity in the wake of past atrocity.

In this panel, five poets who work across genre and media will discuss how their alternative creative practices alter, inflect, or enliven their poetry. Stella Corso will discuss her background in fashion design and her experience making visual and performance art, and how these practices inform both her poetic style and approach to craft. Michael Joseph Walsh will talk about translation, improvisation, and collage. Rachel Franklin Wood will talk about sculpture and filmmaking as methods of being distracted (back) into poetry.