Campus Wide Poetry Reading (Thursday, April 5th)
SC Ballroom E 4.00 - 5.30 PM
In Collaboration with High Grade
February 2012 Archives
On Thursday, March 29th, I'll read with Natasha Trethewey at 4pm at Coastal Carolina University. Details here.
White Poets Writing About Race: An Invitation to Conversation
In his 2007 essay “A Mystifying Silence,” Major Jackson asks why there should be a “dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues.” Six white poets who have written about race will make very brief presentations that address not only this problem, but also questions of why and how white poets can and should deal with racial issues, and what aesthetic and ethical complexities they may encounter in doing so. By limiting our presentations to five minutes each, we will save most of the session for group discussion.
Friday, March 23 at 4:30am to 12:00am Batza Room of the Athenaeum 1021 Dulaney Valley Rd, Towson, MD 21286, USA
Poet Jake Adam York will give a reading and talk, entitled, "Re/mix : Blue-Shifting Writing Race; or: An Improvisation on Relation; or: Improvised Relations; or: Relative Improvisations." Along with a sampling of his newest poems, he will share and contextualize them with some remarks and riffs on Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation. York is the author of three books of poems, including his most recent, Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry (2010);as well as a work of literary history, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry. A fifth-generation Alabamian, York was raised in and around Gadsden, Alabama, the son of a steel-worker and a history teacher. An associate professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Denver, he has this year been a Visiting Faculty Fellow at Emory University's James Weldon Johnson Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, working on a book about images and ideas of the Civil Rights Movement in contemporary art, music, and literature, from which this talk is excerpted.
Monday, March 12th, at 8pm. 56 Brattle St, Cambridge MA. Jake Adam York author of Persons Unknown, reads with Paul Hostovsky, author of the poetry collection Dear Truth.
Saturday, March 3rd, 10:30AM
S128. In White: White Poets and Race
(Tess Taylor, Michelle Boisseau, Martha Collins, Kate Daniels, Jake Adam York)
Continental C, Hilton Chicago, Lobby Level
In his 2007 essay “A Mystifying Silence,” Major Jackson asks why there should be a “dearth of poems written by white poets that address racial issues.” The panelists, white poets who have written about race, will address but move beyond the why question, discussing their own attempts to examine racial issues, as well as aesthetic and ethical complexities they have encountered in doing so. We are aware that the panel may invite controversy and invite questions and comments from the audience.
Thursday, March 1, 12:NOON
A Face to Meet the Faces: Five Poets on Persona, Empathy, and Race
(Stacey Lynn Brown, Eduardo C. Corral, Cornelius Eady, Patricia Smith, Jake Adam York)
Waldorf, Hilton Chicago, 3rd Floor
Persona, the act of writing beyond one’s own immediate perspective or experience, is arguably one of the strongest mechanisms for empathy—and understanding—that exists for a poet. Join the co-editor and four contributing poets from A Face to Meet the Faces, the first anthology of contemporary persona poetry, for a roundtable discussion on the freedoms, limitations, and possibilities inherent in using persona as a tool to excavate the complexities and constructs of race.