A poetics of the body is a poetics of disruption, and with disruption comes the fracturing of space and flesh. Writing on a black poetics and confronting the quest for artistic mastery, writer Dawn Lundy Martin argues “To imagine the black body is to imagine the creative is to imagine discomfort. What is more disruptive to the American fantasy of itself than this black or brown body, that lurks and hulks, the one that opens and spills, that is uncontained and uncontainable, unbreakable/brutal and just as fragile, the one that threatens the imaginary fabric that weaves us all together? But what is a black body if we can imagine it outside of this context and imagine instead the person?” (159).[1] What is most striking about Martin’s formulation, is how the black body disrupts the status quo, how it cannot be bound to a preconceived notion of a reality marked by violation and restraint. With this panel, the objective is to think of the ways poets and poetry unsettle power structures, geography, and identity formations. 

Can poetry be a theoretical vehicle of possibility for the body that marshals incarcerated, fractured, displaced, and wounded peoples into the future? What exactly does this future of possibility look like? Is framing the future as utopic in this way misguided, and what might an alternative conceptualization of a someplace beyond/other than the future look like? Is it worthwhile to mold and weld a poetics that can carry our wounded world and selves through the now and beyond? 

This seminar proposes to look at poetry as critique and methodology for (re)making (re)defining what it means to be wounded in our present, past, and future times. How do bodies become wounded? How can we think about the body as the architecture of our wounded homes and landscapes? This seminar looks for presenters to help better theorize a poetics that witnesses wounds as windows, ones that have been shattered but beckon for repair, and to see in the light that enters a space to swim through. 

Presentations may consider contemporary poets such as Diana Khoi Nguyen, M. NourbeSe Philip,  Mee Choi, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Danez Smith, Solmaz Sharif, Jordan Abel, Jake Skeets, Ocean Vuong, and Aracelis Girmay just to name a few poets. However, paper proposals do not have to be geared toward poets and poetry exclusively from the twenty-first century. This panel also welcomes presenters who wish to highlight poets who haven’t been given a wide enough spotlight and whose work challenges/contests how we read and engage poetry within the academy and institutionalized spaces. 

Abstracts should be between 200-250 word. Please include with submission a brief author bio. All inquiries can be sent to [email protected] 

[1] Martin, Dawn Lundy. “A Black Poetics: Against Mastery,” boundary 2, vol. 44, no. 3, 2017, pp. 159-163.