AWP Reading: Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN/Radical WRITING + Poem: Evie Shockley

I'm back from a few days at this year's annual Associated Writing Programs (AWP) conference, which was held over the last week in an unseasonably cool Tampa, Florida. AWP has grown considerably since I first attended it years ago, with several generations of new writers and students now attending, and though I find the sheer number of people and events overwhelming at times, I once again found it an enjoyable and invigorating event to attend since it provides an opportunity to see so many friends that I otherwise would not run into, and meet, hear and learn about the work of so many writers I was not already familiar with, or only knew in print and not in person. C joined me, and we had a great time over all.

R. Erica Doyle

I participated on two panels, one that I moderated, titled "Translating Blackness," sparked in part by my 2016 Poetry Foundation essay. It included translators and authors Aaron Coleman, Kristin Dykstra, Tiffany Higgins, and Lawrence Schimel; the second focused on style, and included Christian Kiefer (organizer and moderator), Caroline Casey, Kim O'Neill, and Christine Schutt. Both were full houses, I was happy to see, and I plan to post my notes for the second within the next few days. In lieu of the kinds of reports I've posted on this blog in the past, I thought I'd feature a few photos, and poem, from one of the events I attended, a reading and pre-launch of the forthcoming must-read anthology Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN/Radical WRITING, edited by Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin, and on bookshelves in June from Kore Press.

L-r: Ruth Ellen Kocher, Dawn Lundy
Martin, and Erica Hunt

According to its description on Kore Press's site, the collection

celebrates temporal, spatial, formal, and linguistically innovative literature. The anthology will collect late-modern and contemporary work by Black women from the United States, England, Canada, and the Caribbean—work that challenges readers to participate in meaning making. Because one contextual framework for the collection is “art as a form of epistemology,” we envision the writing in the anthology will be the kind of work driven by the writer’s desire to radically present, uncovering what she knows and does not know, as well as critically addressing the future.

It continues:

This anthology will help re-write the misnomer that innovative writing is white writing and do it with a particularly interest in gender. Is it a coincidence that #blacklivesmatter was coined and put into action by black queer women in the same moment that there is a proliferation of black women writing experimental work? We don’t think so. This anthology is part of our means of investigation, or of simply looking at, what we are doing together to re-write the future world as unfamiliar. Indeed, it is the familiar, the well-worn racial and racist past that is killing us.

The audience

The reading, on International Women's Day, took place at the Floridan Palace hotel, in downtown Tampa, and featured a handful of writers whose work appears in the collection, including LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, R. Erica Doyle, Duriel Harris, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Tracie Morris, Evie Shockley, and giovanni singleton. Given this lineup, every poet's performance sparkled, and made a very strong case for getting a copy of the anthology, which will be perfect not just for reading from cover to cover, but in a wide array of courses.

Dawn Lundy Martin and Evie Shockley reading

Below is one of my Rutgers colleague Evie Shockley's poems, "What's Not to Liken," from the anthology, which I found especially moving, and a few photos from the event. The poem also appears in Evie's most recent collection, semiautomatic, Wesleyan University Press, 2017. This is one poetry collection you definitely want to add to your bookshelf; it is fantastic! You can pre-order the anthology at Kore Press's site, or via Small Press Distributors.

Copyright © Evie Shockley, from semiautomatic,
Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2017

Pattern Recognition: Reading/Panel @ MoCADA in BKYN Tonight!

If you are in or around Brooklyn this evening, drop by MoCADA to catch PATTERN RECOGNITION, an amazing exhibit of contemporary abstract art, and then stay for the reading and conversation I'll be participating in!

POETRY READING & DISCUSSION:

EXPERIMENTATION AND THE BLACK AESTHETIC

Friday, September 13

6:30-8:30PM | MoCADA

Evie Shockley, author of the new black and Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, will join celebrated innovative poets LaTasha N. Diggs, John Keene, and Dawn Lundy Martin for a reading and discussion on craft, language, politics and the search for a “black aesthetic” in contemporary art. 

Seating is limited, please arrive early. Wine will be served and author books will be available in the MoCADA Shop. $3 contribution.

Congrats to Wilson & Martin & Dowdy + Glissant Book Launches + Mille Grazie to Gukira

Congratulations to the one and only Ronaldo V. Wilson, who received the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry for his lightning bolt of a second collection, Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009)! This is an extraordinarily important collection embodying what's most exciting these days in poetry. It's great to see it and Ronaldo, who also won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for his first book, so honored.

Congratulations also to Ronaldo's fellow Black Took Collective member Dawn Lundy Martin, whom I got to hang out with a little at AWP, for winning the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, for her new collection, Discipline, which will be published in 2011. Fanny Howe was the judge. If you know Dawn's work, including her first book, which also received the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, you can be sure this new collection will leave you thinking about it every time you set it down. Props to a brilliant and blazing poet.

Congratulations to my cousin, Dawn Cecilia Dowdy, whose new Christian Romance three novels-in-one, Chesapeake Weddings (Barbour Books, 2010) is now available! I remember back when Dawn began actively seeking a publisher for her first novel, and her persistance, determination and vision have paid off; she's the author of 6 volumes, totally 10 or so works of long fiction, and her talent and prodigiousness never cease to impress me!

Also, congratulations on Nightboat Books' recent publication of Edouard Glissant's Poetic Intention, translated by Nathalie Stephens/Nathanaël. As part of the book's official launch, Glissant and Stephens participated in a public discussion with NYU Professor J. Michael Dash last week at the Maison Française. Glissant's Caribbean Discourse and The Poetics of Relation are seminal works, and Stephens is a superb translator, so I'm really looking forward, when I have a breather (months from now), to get a copy and dive in.

Lastly, I would like to thank Keguro Macharia, the dazzlingly sharp thinker and scholar whose blog, Gukira, is an indispensible read. He is one of those people for who loftiness, in the best sense, comes readily and compellingly, and I'm very glad that he continues to blog even as his career in academe takes off. Some years ago he wrote a short meditation on my first book, Annotations, that was so profound and lyrical it left me speechless.  I don't think that's up any longer, but I recently learned from Chris Stackhouse that last year, around this time, there appeared on Gukira a review of Seismosis. About it will say no more, since it speaks for itself, but I do want to thank Keguro from the bottom of my heart, not only for how positive it is, but for full of insight, really deep reading, and knowingness it is. Chris and I have been lucky to have received praise for various quarters for the work, and have also seen it taught in various places (and by people who aren't friends), but as with a good deal of the things I have done, it has also met with great bafflement, to put it mildly, and relative silence in terms of reviews (though we have also received some very good ones), particularly from fellow black and queer writers and thinkers. I will not go into the history of my discouragement about such things, but I do want to make it clear I am aware that there are numerous works out there, including works of this sort, and that scholars in particular have pressing concerns they must address, so for a young scholar to devote his critical eye and acumen to our work is a great honor, and I think it's fair to say on behalf of Chris, once again, thank you!