Roundtable

Divinatory poetics is a writing practice rooted in encounter. It engages uncertainty and the invisible as generative conditions of relation rather than threats to be solved, controlled, flattened, or monetized. Through ritual attention and oracular methods, the page becomes a site where dream, memory, ancestry—both known and unknown, gather. Meaning emerges through close listening and creative risk: an attunement to the charged drift of what moves between bodies, histories, and worlds.

What constitutes the Latin American neo-avant-garde and what challenges and opportunities arise when translating and publishing the poetry of this influential generation? This panel examines a pioneering yet frequently overlooked generation of Latin American poets who began publishing in the late 1950s. Their relative invisibility stems, in part, from having worked alongside the fiction writers of the so-called Latin American “boom,” whose prominence often overshadowed contemporaneous poetic innovation.

The poetry world has entered into a new period of severe financial crisis. As federal funding for the arts retreats, presses, poetry centers, and academic programs are having to make hard decisions about how and what to cut. So far, the response to this crisis has been largely business as usual—more calls for donations, more private money of questionable provenance sloshing around to cover the shortfall. One might say that this reflects the limitations of our institutional imagination.

In Seoul, the city of K-pop, you’ll find poems featured on every subway platform door. On its main streets, lined with huge LED screens, new verses are displayed every couple weeks. People pause to read those verses and fully feel the change of seasons. For Koreans, poetry is part of their everyday landscape and lives, a part of their collective spirit they’ve long preserved. Even in this dopamine-addled era where everyone is glued to their smartphones, new poets continue to emerge steadily in Korea and new poetry collections are being published.

In a time of overwhelming language extinction, as histories are rewritten by the powerful, as war and resource extraction threaten both lives and legacies, literary translation is an act of both defense and resistance. This roundtable brings together two co-editors and two contributors to the 2026 edition of the Best Literary Translations series for a discussion and reading of poetry in translation. (Best Literary Translations 2026, the third edition in the annual series, was guest edited by U.S.

Poets often are operating in modes influenced by the visual arts and the ekphrastic mode is one example of a popular medium. However, poets also create visual art. Consider Derek Walcott, a painter, and his collection, Tiepolo’s Hound, and how the poet engages with Pissarro impressionist visual observations in his own work. This is abundant in contemporary poetry. We bring together several different poets who work in visual art modes of projection mapping, hybrid, and other forms to discuss how poets who also work in visual art are defining and expanding their work.

Throughout time, poets have written intimately about the places they call home, where they live, work, travel, love—always, it seems, we have something to say based on where we find ourselves to be.

This roundtable offers a rigorous investigation into the complex relationship between fidelity and creativity in contemporary translation, exploring the transformative process between languages, media, and materiality as the site of profound philosophical inquiry. How does political history reverberate through the rift opened by the distance of translation? What is this distance composed of? Is it present in other language acts, or in the construction of meaning generally? What transformations can be called translation, and how does stretching this definition inform each mode?

This roundtable will explore how poets adopt or imbue personas, voices, or masks in their work and on stage—and how the shift into performance transforms the text, the writer, and the audience.
 

Translation projects often come to us, as both readers and translators, through the small press–a series of personal exchanges, books and broadsides passed in and out of communities through editors, friends, and colleagues.