&Now 2019 Conference

What can words do when martialed against the forces of the contemporary political moment? Three panelists explore language’s ability to shape lived experience.

Joel Felix will develop a poetics of haunted space, discussing the coming together of multiple, contested perspectives within the spatial relations of this contemporary political moment marked by space infused with threat and fraught with real and imagined harm. Drawing on theorists of Black futurity from Wynter to Campt, and poems of Williams, Brand, Bonney, Davies, Wang and others, he presents a poetics that seeks a difficult embrace of a haunted present not shy of what it suffers and framing futures we have never seen before.

Broc Rossel turns our attention to the Ars Poetica, examining debates in lyric theory as poetry’s political theater. As a poem that argues for itself as a preferred method and form (whether conceptual, lyrical, or otherwise), the ars poetica both reifies and subverts poetical discourse by acknowledging the necessity of critical self-reflection, and in so doing makes an implicit case for poetry as both individually produced and socially constructed.

In “Being Pointless,” Mady Schutzman performs and celebrates ambiguity, imprecision, and indirectness as playful means of restructuring hierarchies and reimagining communities. Through a lyrical compendium of tools and tactics culled from jokes and koans, riddles and clown acts, mobius strips, feedback loops, fugues and fractals, and a condition known as Ganser syndrome, Schutzman suggests being pointless as a means of eliciting unanticipated, edgy but potent convergences within contested terrains.

Edwin Torres will present “World-Making As Poetic Interruption,” where the relative aspects of language-making are delivered as convergent points of world-making. He asks: how do we use say to see? Where can cryptic signifiers become visual noise to then interrupt/interpret new vocalities? Can the imagination step aside to allow connection a deeper path? Is there still a place for making new worlds in poetry?