Roundtable

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.

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).

Panelists will explore how contemporary poets use transgression and ritual to challenge conventions, reclaim autonomy, and confront oppressive structures through their craft.

This intimate roundtable explores the relationship between creative writers and their collaborators, delving into perspectives offered by multiple disciplines including music, film, photography, and visual arts. Inviting curiosity and dialogue around fostering meaningful poetical partnerships, this session will spotlight non-hierarchical approaches to art-making, emphasizing equity, mutual inspiration, and the fusion of perspectives. Kristen Nelson and Samantha Bounkeau will discuss a decade of collaborative music and poetry performances.

Women in Independent Publishing is a book of interviews with and resources about women actively engaged in small-press publishing between the 1950s and the 1980s. The interviewees include Hettie Jones, Bernadette Mayer, Barbara Smith, and many others. The book illuminates the unifying and diverging elements between multiple publishing “scenes,” revealing their particularities and commonalities, and showcases the variety of types of publishing possible within the small press community.

This panel will think about the work of translation as a source for poetry writing. Translation introduces a different kind of music into the writer’s ear – other melodies, other rhythms. Reading and writing translation loosens the conventional bindings of syntax. It reminds the poet how flexible language is and how it longs to be played with in unusual ways. We’re interested in misunderstanding as a method of writing, interested in mistranslation as a way of generating new images (Moses with horns on his head!).

What happens when a poem moves beyond the page to become a tactile object in three dimensions? Following M.C. Richards’s notion that “the skin seems to be the best listener, as it prickles and thrills,” this panel will discuss the creative and critical potentials of working at the intersection of language and tactile experience. How, for example, can we render the divergences of the disabled body in the somatic textbody of 3D poems? What assumptions about poetry might “touchy” poem objects reveal and upset?

Poetry is kin to prayer and spells not only in its aims—to praise and petition the more-than-human world—but in its bodied mechanisms of repetition and rhythm. This roundtable considers the craft of spiritual seeking through poetry, emphasizing the transformative powers of literary language and drawing from diverse literary, religious, and ecopoetic traditions. Panelists also offer a handout of prompts for writers to consider in their own journeys.

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?

Poetry has a long and complex history in colleges and universities, but higher education is in a weird spot. Cultural pressure, debt, decades of adjunctification, schools closing: this panel will explore how poetry might help us think about education, institutions, and what’s still possible.