F198. Poetics of Oblique Violence

D139-140, Oregon Convention Center, Level 1
Friday, March 29, 2019
12:00 pm to 1:15 pm

 

Of violence, Toni Morrison writes: “wanting to is doing it.” This panel responds to Morrison’s provocation by exploring the poetics of oblique violence. When a poem’s speaker hints at violence, rehearses destruction in their imagination, nests allusions to brutal acts, articulates a desire to cause pain through fictional or historical conceits, or utters dreams of mayhem in the most ambiguous terms—do these more ambivalent articulations imply desire? And, if so: is wanting to a way of doing it?


Participants

Moderator:

Nomi Stone's second collection of poems, Kill Class, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Poems appear recently or will soon in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a postdoctoral researcher in anthropology at Princeton University.

Sumita Chakraborty is poetry editor of AGNI, art editor of At Length, and a doctoral candidate in English at Emory. Her poems and prose can be found in POETRY, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Cultural Critique, and more.

Sara Eliza Johnson is the recipient of an NEA Fellowship in poetry, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and two Winter Fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her first book, Bone Map, won the 2013 National Poetry Series. She teaches at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.

Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck. Their poems have appeared in PoetryAmerican Poetry ReviewPloughsharesThe Georgia ReviewBest New Poets, and elsewhere.

Roy G. Guzmán is pursuing a PhD in Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, where they also received an MFA in creative writing. They are a 2017 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellow.

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