AWP Panel Outline THE TOPICAL POEM

The last year has been full of momentous and deeply troubling events including a pandemic disrupting our society and disconnecting us from others during an election year and at a time when we are faced with horrific police brutality. This panel will deal with the ways in which poets can engage (or choose not to engage) with current events. How do poets write good topical poetry? Does topical poetry run the risk of being ephemeral or, perhaps, short on craft? How have poets dealt with such risks? How subtle can a poem be and still be considered topical? Is there an argument to be made for avoiding contemporary reference? Panelists will discuss and read from their own work as well as, perhaps, poems by others.

EVENT CATEGORY: Poetry Craft and Criticism

Event Organizer:

Rae Armantrout is the author of fifteen books of poems, including Conjure (Wesleyan, 2020), Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, Partly, New and Selected Poems (2016), and Versed (2009) which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. An “Art of Poetry” interview with Armantrout, conducted by Brian Reed, was published in The Paris Review in Dec., 2019. She is professor emerita at UC San Diego and currently lives in Washington State.

Event Participants:

Paolo Javier: the former Queens Borough Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Paolo Javier was born in the Philippines and grew up in Las Pinas, Metro, Manila; Katonah, Westchester County, El-Ma’adi, Cairo, Burnaby and North Delta, Metro Vancouver. He’s produced three albums of sound poetry with listening center (David Mason), including the limited edition pamphlet/cassette Ur’lyeh/Aklopolis and the booklet/cassette Maybe the Sweet Honey Pours. A featured artist in Greater NY 2015 Queens International 2018: Volume, he is the author O.B.B aka The Original Brown Boy, a full length (weird post-colonial techno dreampop forthcoming in 2021 by Nightboat Books:

Monica Youn: Monica Youn’s book Blackacre won the Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and Kingsley Tufts Award and was longlisted for The National Book Award. Her previous book Ignatz was a finalist for the National Book Award. She teaches at Princeton.

Lyn Hejinian: For twenty years, taught in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where her academic work was addressed principally to modernist, postmodern, and contemporary poetry and poetics, with a particular interest in avant-garde movements and the social practices they entail. These remain of interest and inform her continuing research and writing. She is the author of over twenty-five volumes of poetry and critical prose, the most recent of which are Tribunal (Omnidawn Books, 2019) and Positions of the Sun (Belladonna, 2019). Translations of her work have been published in Denmark, France, Spain, Japan, Italy, Russia, Sweden, China, Serbia, and Finland. She is the co-director (with Travis Ortiz) of Atelos, a literary project commissioning and publishing cross-genre work by poets, and co-editor (with Jane Gregory and Claire Marie Stancek) of Nion Editions, a chapbook press. She lives in Berkeley, California.

Event Moderator:

Stephanie Elliott-Prieto: Stephanie Elliott-Prieto has been with Wesleyan University Press for 17 years. She is currently Publicist and Web Manager.