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We look forward to seeing you this September at &Now: Points of Convergence!
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General Inquiries: andnowfestival2019@gmail.com.
Registration questions: iasinfo@uw.edu.


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Friday, September 20 • 3:00pm - 4:15pm
Asymptotic Convergence, Restless Slippage: Roundtable on the Work of Nathaniel Mackey

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The four-decade-spanning work of poet, novelist and scholar Nathaniel Mackey, one of &Now’s featured speakers this year, instantiates an exemplary Point of Convergence –though calling it a “point” might be too precise a trope for a body of work that revels in restless slippage, self-adjacency, asymptotic reach that acknowledges absence and loss, divergence, pervergence and multivergence as constitutive of convergence. In Mackey’s work convergence as synesthesia brings together the sonic and linear vibrations of speech and music as well as the visual properties of syntactic writing and asemic, naturally occurring forms of inscription. As well, historic and cosmological planes converge in a complex durée that situates his fiction, poetry, and critical scholarship in multiple temporal scales. Moreover, the syncretism so characteristic of diasporic cultural expression finds a kind of apotheosis in his virtuosic literary achievement.

In a roundtable (itself a convergence of minds) intended to give potential and extant readers a range of entry-points into Mackey’s work, three poet/scholars (Erica Hunt, Joseph Donahue, Jeanne Heuving), and two poetry scholars (Maria Damon and Adalaide Morris), all of whom have written on Mackey’s work, will discuss their own relationships to and entries into Mackey’s work, possibly speaking from a forthcoming book of essays on his work to which a number of us have contributed, and then include the audience in trying to expand even further the ways in which Mackey’s work can be approached, if never entirely grasped (an asymptotic relationship to it feels consistent with his ethic and aesthetic, and also with the readerly humility necessary to venture into his verbal thicket).

Speakers
avatar for Will Alexander

Will Alexander

Poet, Individual
Will Alexander works in multiple genres. In addition to being a poet, he is also a novelist, essayist, aphorist, playwright, philosopher, visual artist, and pianist. His influences range from poetic practitioners, such as Aimé Césaire, Bob Kaufman, Andre Breton, Antonin Artaud... Read More →
MD

Maria Damon

Maria Damon teaches poetry, poetics and literature at Pratt Institute of Art. She is the author of several books of poetry scholarship and chapbooks of cross-stitch visual poetry, co-author (with mIEKAL aND, Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Adeena Karasick and Alan Sondheim) of several books... Read More →
JD

Joseph Donahue

Joseph Donahue is the author of seven volumes of poetry, most recently Dark Church (Verge Editions) and Red Flash on a Black Field (Black Square Editions). He is the co-translator, with the author, of Zhang Er's First Mountain. A new collection of his poems, Wind Maps I-VII is forthcoming... Read More →
JH

Jeanne Heuving

Jeanne Heuving’s recent critical books are The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series at the University of Alabama Press and the essay collection, Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry, co-edited with Tyrone... Read More →
avatar for Erica Hunt

Erica Hunt

Parsons Family Professor of Creative Writing, Long Island University--Brooklyn
Erica Hunt works at the forefront of experimental poetry and poetics, critical race theory, and feminist aesthetics. She has written three books of poetry: Arcade, with artist Alison Saar, Piece Logic, and Local History (Roof Books, 1993). Her published and forthcoming essays include... Read More →
AM

Adalaide Morris

Adalaide Morris, Professor Emerita at the University of Iowa, writes on the expanded field of modern and contemporary poetics. She is the author of How to Live / What to Do: H.D.’s Cultural Poetics and has published an edited collection of essays, Sound States: Innovative Poetics... Read More →


Friday September 20, 2019 3:00pm - 4:15pm PDT
DISC-252