Thinking Its Presence Conference 2023
Thursday, March 30 • 9:00am – 10:30am
Poetics and Translation: Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Michael Leong, and Vivek Narayanan
Vivek Narayanan’s books of poems include Universal Beach, Life and Times of Mr S and the forthcoming After (NYRB Poets, 2022). A full-length collection of his selected poems in Swedish translation was published by the Stockholm-based Wahlström & Widstrand in 2015. He has been a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (2013-14) and a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library (2015-16). His poems, stories, translations and critical essays have appeared in journals like The Paris Review, Chimurenga Chronic, Granta.com, Poetry Review (UK), Modern Poetry in Translation, Harvard Review, Agni, The Caribbean Review of Books and elsewhere, as well as in anthologies like The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry. Narayanan is also a member of Poetry Daily’s editorial board. He was the Co-editor of Almost Island, an India-based international literary journal from 2007-2019.
Michael Leong is the author of the critical study “Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry” (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the poetry books “e.s.p.” (Silenced Press, 2009), “Cutting Time with a Knife” (Black Square Editions, 2012), “Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?” (Fence Digital, 2017), and “Words on Edge” (Black Square Editions, 2018). His creative work has been anthologized in “The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing” (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), “Best American Experimental Writing 2018” (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and “Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3” (Bettering Books, 2019). His co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s long poem “Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven” was published by co•im•press in 2020. He serves on the editorial board of American Literature and the advisory board of Journal of Modern Literature. He is currently working on a long poem called “Disorientations” and a critical book tentatively entitled “Post-Craft: Essays on Pedagogy, Poetics, and Experimental Literature.”
Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of Ghazal Cosmopolitan, Kohl & Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. Her poems have been translated into Spanish and Urdu, and published in journals and anthologies worldwide– most recently in McSweeney’s anthology of international poetry “In the Shape of a Human Body I am Visiting the Earth” ‘and “Aeolian Harp” (Glass Lyre Press). Her work has appeared in journals such as Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, Wasafiri, The Cortland Review, Vallum, POEM, World Literature Today, Spillway, Atlanta Review, Journal of Postcolonial Writings, The Adirondack Review, RHINO, Nimrod, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Oleander, South Asian Review, Hubbub, One, The Citron Review, Paris Lit Up, Serving House Journal and other places. Her essays on eastern poetic forms such as the Ghazal and Qasida have been published in World Literature Today, Mizna, Journal of Contemporary World Literature and 3 Quarks Daily, and her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Pakistaniaat: A Journal of Pakistan Studies, and Knot magazine. She represents Pakistan on Universe: A United Nations of Poetry. Her work also appears in a video reading on Huffington Post.
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Friday, March 31 • 11:00am – 12:30pm
Picturing Us: Kin, Kith, Kindred in and as Text-Image Relationships
DESCRIPTION
In this panel, we celebrate and explore how poets have used text-image relationships to examine the tension between what the media studies scholar Thy Phu has described as the “inscrutable Asian” and the “beneficent model minority.” How have poets resisted the “visual domestication” of the Asian American by engaging the imagistic dramas of intimacy, domesticity, and bureaucracy captured in passport photographs, family portraits, and documents rendered as images?
Can a photograph or visual image embedded in a poetic text offer an opportunity for the racially marked reader of poetry to examine the triangulation between an unmarked (white) viewer/readership, their own subjective frame of reading, and the autobiographical and/or communal positionality proposed by the narrator/speaker? How might this triangulation radiate an emergent kinship or kithship into chromatic communities (of an us of color and an us of migrancy) through acts of reading as looking and vice versa?
Through readings, quick studies, celebratory snapshots, and notes from scholarship, we explore how the story of a nation teeters on the hyphen between text-image. We will contemplate the rhetorical and aesthetic functions of that medial hyphen in our own work and in the formal precedents that have both framed and pierced what Alan Trachtenberg has called the “American album.”
Aarushi Phalke will introduce panel.
Serena Chopra (Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Seattle University) is a teacher, writer, dancer, filmmaker and a visual and performance artist. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Denver and is a MacDowell Fellow, a Kundiman Fellow and a Fulbright Scholar. She has two books, This Human (Coconut Books 2013) and Ic (Horse Less Press 2017), as well as two films, Dogana/Chapti (Official Selection at Frameline43, Oregon Documentary Film Festival, QueerX and Seattle Queer Film Festival) and Mother Ghosting (2018). She was a featured artist in Harper’s Bazaar (India), Revry, as well as in the Denver Westword’s “100 Colorado Creatives” and has recent creative publications in Sink, Foglifter as well as in the anthology Alone Together: Love, Grief and Comfort in the Time of COVID-19 (Central Avenue Publishing, 2020). She also has critical essays in Matters of Feminist Practice (Belladonna Collective), Rehearsing Racial Equity: A Critical Anthology on Anti-Racism and Repair in the Arts (forthcoming 2023) and in the republication of Judy Grahn’s The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (Sinister Wisdom, forthcoming fall 2022). In October 2020, Serena co-directed No Place to Go, an immersive, artist-made queer haunted house with Kate Speer and Frankie Toan. Serena is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Seattle University. You can find out more at SerenaChopra.com
Divya Victor is the author of CURB from Nightboat Books. CURB is the winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the winner of the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. It was also a finalist for the 2022 CLMP Firecracker Award (Poetry). She is also the author of KITH (Fence Books/ Book*hug); Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays(Merve Verlag, trans. Lena Schmidt); NATURAL SUBJECTS (Trembling Pillow), UNSUB (Insert Blanc), THINGS TO DO WITH YOUR MOUTH(Les Figues). Her work has been collected in numerous venues, including BOMB, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, POETRY, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and boundary2. Her work has been translated into French, German, Spanish, and Czech. She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the U.S Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a Writer in Residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.). Her work has been performed or installed at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, The National Gallery of Singapore, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She has been an editor at Jacket2 (United States), Ethos Books (Singapore), Invisible Publishing (Canada) and Book*hug Press (Canada). She is currently an Associate Professor of English and Writing at Michigan State University, where she is the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
Michael Leong is the author of the critical study “Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry” (University of Iowa Press, 2020) and the poetry books “e.s.p.” (Silenced Press, 2009), “Cutting Time with a Knife” (Black Square Editions, 2012), “Who Unfolded My Origami Brain?” (Fence Digital, 2017), and “Words on Edge” (Black Square Editions, 2018). His creative work has been anthologized in “The &NOW Awards 2: The Best Innovative Writing” (Lake Forest College Press, 2013), “Best American Experimental Writing 2018” (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and “Bettering American Poetry, Volume 3” (Bettering Books, 2019). His co-translation, with Ignacio Infante, of Vicente Huidobro’s long poem “Sky-Quake: Tremor of Heaven” was published by co•im•press in 2020. He serves on the editorial board of American Literature and the advisory board of Journal of Modern Literature. He is currently working on a long poem called “Disorientations” and a critical book tentatively entitled “Post-Craft: Essays on Pedagogy, Poetics, and Experimental Literature.”
Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva’s American Canyon (Kaya Press, 2015) uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person’s apprehension of the ghosts of history. This narrative of a son’s love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are. American Canyon was a finalist for the 2015 PEN USA Literary Award in Non-Fiction and the 1913 First Book Prize. He has an MFA in Creative Writing/Integrated Media from Calarts and a BA in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley. He is currently working on a book about Victorian era botanical expeditions called The Glass House.
michael leong's poetry blog 