Morning / Night

(via speciesbarocus)

“...even though I feel as desperate and useless as everyone else in the face of the ongoing and accelerating ecological and social catastrophe of our world, I haven’t yet been able to buy the idea that thinking and writing are just garbage activities standing in the way of ‘real action.’ In that sense, I guess I am an optimist.”

My review of Claudia Rankine's revolutionary book Citizen is in the latest issue of Puerto del Sol!

A handful of poems by Nadia Anjuman, translated by myself and Marina Omar, are in the latest issue of International Poetry Review. I also penned a brief note about Anjuman’s work and the ghazal form.

Goodbye Caldera. It’s been a magical month.

I have some poems in the latest issue of Anomalous! I used tarot cards in connection with their Oulipo constraints they gave to all of their authors (which include Harold Abramowitz, Emmett Stone, Sarah Kruse). Check it out.

Secret reading at Machine Project a couple weeks ago. One of the coolest I’ve been to in a while. Recordings available here:

Jibade-Khalil Huffman (upper left) Rebecca Wolff (upper right) Douglas Kearney (lower right) Aaron Kunin (lower left)

Hey I’m presenting (via voice) at this incredible conference in Montana this weekend. I co-created this panel with Todd Fredoson. If you’re there, check it out.

Racializing Whiteness

Presenters: Diana Arterian, Todd Fredson, Jen Hofer, Farid Matuk, Carmen Giménez Smith

This panel considers the way whiteness participates in the racial dynamics of contemporary American poetry. As Toni Morrison assures an interviewer, we are all "raced." But what does that mean for white writers who have written with whiteness as their background, white on white? Markers of whiteness are deeply embedded into the expectations that govern how a thing or a person should be composed, into notions of legibility. Where do white writers’ choices implicitly or explicitly reveal how the writers are raced? How do decisions about subject or process impact poets of color? Presenters will engage with specific aspects of what happens as the white subject position becomes racialized. Presenters will discuss the topic through close readings, interrogations of personal work, creative erasure, and socio-historical reviews. This includes notions of anger as held against people of color, anxiety around the term “racist” as an adjective versus a noun, and an exploration of white male poets dragging the dominant lyric into a mode of interiority at a time when minority voices were gaining authority from an expanding speaker position.