S205.

God Talk: Poetics of Wonder, Awe, and Ecstasy

Signature Room, Summit Building, Seattle Convention Center, Level 5
Saturday, March 11, 2023
1:45 pm to 3:00 pm

 

How do poets—contemporary and ancient, living and ancestral—engage with the divine, and what happens when our poems turn toward the Unsayable? Drawing upon inherited or chosen traditions as they face our living moment, poets Kaveh Akbar, Chase Berggrun, Victoria Chang, Ajanae Dawkins, and Philip Metres wrestle with language and the architectures of wonder, awe, and ecstasy offer a new way to consider poetic practice alongside spiritual practice—or poetic practice as a spiritual practice.



Outline & Supplemental Documents

Event Outline: AWP_2023_Panel_God_Talk_Outline.pdf
Supplemental Document 1: Yesterday_by_WS_Merwin.pdf

Participants

Moderator:

Philip Metres is the author and translator of a number of books, including Shrapnel Maps, The Sound of Listening, Sand Opera, Pictures at an Exhibition, and To See the Earth. His work has garnered Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships, two NEAs, three Arab American book awards, and the Hunt Prize.

Kaveh Akbar's poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf  and the forthcoming collection Pilgrim Bell. He teaches at Purdue University.

Victoria Chang's latest poetry books are The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022) and OBIT (Copper Canyon, 2020). Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief was published by Milkweed in 2001. She lives in L.A., and she teaches within Antioch's MFA program.

Ajanae Dawkins is a poet, performance artist, and educator. Ajanae is currently a cohost of VS Podcast, the theology editor for the EcoTheo Review, a Nancy Craig Blackburn Fellow at Randolph College, and an Alford Scholar at Methodist Theological School of Ohio.

Chase Berggrun is a trans woman poet and the author of R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018). Her work has appeared in Poetry, APR, Jubilat, and elsewhere. She received her MFA from New York University.

#AWP24

February 7–10, 2024
Kansas City, Missouri

Kansas City Convention Center