&Now 2019 Conference

In a conversation between Aditi Machado and S. Yarberry, Machado describes how she felt faced with a false choice as she wrote her first book: to write either toward ideas with a dense impenetrability or toward an unrestrained emotion. How, she wondered, to be both intellectual and sensuous in the contemporary moment? This panel gathers together writers interested in Machado's terms "intellectual" and "sensuous," their overlap, and their collapse. Trained as poets but pursuing a variety of forms, these writers will share their experiences asking after the sensory quality of ideas and the investigative quality of emotions. Although inspired by Machado's observation about her own poetic investigation into the physical body's movement through a contemporary pastoral scene, the panelists offer a variety of angles: Corfman writes about the relationship of past trauma and future anxiety to gender identity in prose poems, asking how the feeling of doing a formerly prohibited gendered action surprises us in its specificity, or how a forgotten feeling is resurrected; Ralambo-Rajerison writes in lyric prose about the role of global anti-Blackness as it shapes intimate relationships of love, family, and friendship as well as more unidirectional attachments to media icons; and Yarberry's poetry thinks deeply about the physicality of any intimacy, how the loss of such intimacy is the loss of sensation as much as communication. Sharing work and reflecting on that work, this quartet will consider how the normative separation of these two terms can be productive as well as how their union can guide a investigatory poetics.