Post-Genre Lit: Form in the 21st Century. (Lacy M. Johnson, Nick Flynn, Claudia Rankine, Kazim Ali, Stephen Elliott) An increasing body of literature not only blurs the boundaries between creative and critical, prose and verse, observation and invention, but also transcends and transgresses our most basic convictions about genre. Post-genre lit can alter our conversations about perception, experience, and reality; or it can kindle deep-seated animosities about the rules and limits of form. These divergent writers will discuss how they read, teach, write and publish work that defies classification.
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Feminism Meets Neo-Benshi: Movietelling Talks Back. (Sarah Rosenthal, Tracie Morris, Bhanu Kapil, Paolo Javier, Jennifer Firestone) Neo-benshi, also called movietelling, meets contemporary feminism in this panel where poets co-opt popular film and subvert its plots and purposes for their own. The panelists have rewritten film scripts to critique and respond to current social issues. Panelists will perform these short pieces, which explore Neo-benshi’s potential for feminist dialogue and collaboration as well as its capacity to talk back, as it were, to society at large.
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Options of the I: The Post-Memoir Memoir. (Sven Birkerts, Lia Purpura, Brian Christian, Nin Andrews, Alex Lemon) AGNI marks its 40th birthday with an exploration of personal writing in the age of the complexified I. Panelists Lia Purpura, Brian Christian, Nin Andrews, and Alex Lemon (with moderator Sven Birkerts) will consider issues of obliquity, fragmentation, collage and counterpoint, truth-telling, personae, tonal ventriloquism, and other approaches that conduce to projecting new configurations of the contemplative and narrative self.
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Bending Genre. (Margot Singer, Nicole Walker, Robin Hemley, Dave Madden, Ander Monson) The hot debate over ethics in creative nonfiction has sidelined important questions of literary form. Hybrid, innovative, and unconventional, nonfiction is arguably the most exciting area on the literary scene today. But how does nonfiction actually work? How does it recombine and transform elements of other genres? What techniques distinguish nonfiction from other kinds of prose? Contributors to a groundbreaking new anthology of critical essays share their perspectives and ideas.
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Wesleyan Poetry Series Reading. (Stephanie Elliott, Rae Armantrout, Kazim Ali, Annie Finch, Jena Osman) Readings from the newest titles in the Wesleyan Poetry series. Rae Armantrout’s Just Saying continues her standard of inventive, tightly written verse. Spells: New and Collected Poems represents Annie Finch’s technical mastery and her illuminating response to the world. Kazim Ali’s carefully crafted Icarus is an ethereal meditation on the human spirit. Jena Osman’s Public Figures employs a hybrid form of poetry, prose, and found text to explore memory and remembrance in American culture.
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The Arcadia Project: Writing the Postmodern Pastoral. (Joshua Corey, Brenda Iijima, Dan Beachy-Quick, Jennifer Moxley, Jonathan Skinner) The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral is a groundbreaking new anthology from Ahsahta Press of contemporary poems that interrogate, refurbish, and upend the American pastoral tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. Four poets represented in the book discuss their work and explore the relevance of the ancient genre of idealized nature poetry to a world increasingly dominated by the discourse of disaster and environmental crisis.
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A Monster for Your Bridegroom: Jewish Mysticism in Contemporary Poetry. (Sheri Allen, Peter Cole, Willis Barnstone, Joy Ladin, Jacqueline Osherow) A complex Jewish mystical tradition threaded with erotic elements has been a generous source of material appropriated by poets such as Allen Ginsberg amid the sexual and social revolutions of the 20th century. But in a current cultural milieu which often associates religion with repressive violence and antagonism toward sexual exploration, how do poets make use of this erotic mysticism to speak to contemporary experience?
