Past Events
2023-2024
Friday, November 10th (3154 Angell Hall): Dissertation chapter workshop on Deven Philbrick's (PhD candidate, English) chapter "Again What Speaks of Speaking: Discrepant Metaphysics in Nathaniel Mackey’s Long Song."
Monday, December 4th (3222 Angell Hall): Paper workshop on Kelly Hoffer's (Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry) "Performative Typography and the Threat of Metaphorical Identity in the Poetry of Douglas Kearney."
Wednesday, Februrary 21st (3154 Angell Hall): Paper Workshop on Asa Chen Zhang's (PhD candidate, English) "Not Once but Many Times": Noh and Tragedy in W. B. Yeats's Purgatory."
Friday, March 29th (3154 Angell Hall): Paper Workshop on James Kiselik's (PhD student, English) "Indigestible over days and days": Situating Transliteration in Dictée and Commons."
Friday, April 12th (3154 Angell Hall): Presentation by Ama Bemma Adwetewa-Badu (Assistant Professor of English, Washington University in St. Louis), entitled "When the Diaspora Gathers: The Emergence of a Black Global Poetics."
2022-2023
Friday, September 20th (3154 Angell Hall): "Towards a Poetics of the Future" from Hadji Bakara (Asst. Professor, English) and graduate students Ben Woodworth (PhD candidate, Comparative Literature), Tyler Dunston (PhD candidate, English), and Asa Chen Zhang (PhD candidate, English).
Friday, October 28th (Zoom): Dissertation chapter workshop on Amanda Kubic's (PhD candidate, Comparative Literature) "The Body in Fragments."
Monday, November 14th (3222 Angell Hall): A lecture from Johanna Winant (Asst. Professor, University of West Virginia),"Looking Into Elizabeth Bishop: Poetry and Philosophical Reasoning."
Wednesday, March 8th (3241 Angell Hall): Dissertation chapter workshop on Michaela Kotziers's (PhD candidate, English & WGS) chapter "Loving as Explanation."
Wednesday, March 22nd (3241 Angell Hall): Dissertation chapter workshop on Carlina Duan's (PhD candidate, English & Education) chapter "'Casting a net of words into the silence': Expanding poetic outcomes beyond ‘protest’ in Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory."
Friday, April 14th (Zoom): Contemporary Methods in Poetry & Poetics Colloquium | Panel: "Shaping Poetry in the Classroom" with Cody Walker (Lecturer IV and Director of the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program), Gillian White (Associate Professor of English), and John Whittier-Ferguson (Professor of English) | Panel: "Poetics Now" with Khaled Mattawa (Professor of creative writing in the Helen Zell MFA Writing Program), Marianna Hagler (PhD candidate in English Language & Literature), and Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott (Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures (Spanish))
2021-2022
Friday, October 1, 3:00p.m.-4:30p.m. (Zoom): Flash talks on Attention and Distraction from faculty members Benjamin Paloff (Comparative Literature and Slavic Languages and Literatures) and Petra Kuppers (English and Women's & Gender Studies), and graduate students Sam McCracken (Comparative Literature), Carlina Duan (English and Education), and Dana Moss (English).
Friday, October 29, 3:00p.m.-4:30p.m. (Zoom): Reading group on Lucy Alford's Forms of Poetic Attention (2020) and Lily Gurton-Wachter's Watchwords (2015).
Friday, November 29, 3:00p.m.-4:30p.m. (Zoom): Paper workshop with graduate students Jasmine An (English and Women's & Gender Studies) and Maya Day (English).
Friday, December 3, 3:00p.m.-4:30p.m. (Zoom): A lecture from Professor Brian Glavey (University of South Carolina), "Vibe Theory."
Thursday, March 17th, 4:00p.m.-5:30p.m. (Zoom): Dissertation chapter workshop on Marianna Hagler's (PhD candidate, English) chapter "What difference did Gertrude Stein make?: Anne Carson's Gertrude Stein.
Friday, April 8th, 4:00p.m.-5:30p.m. (Zoom): Reading group on Timothy Yu's Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia (2021) and Edgar Garcia's “A Migrant’s Lotería: Risk, Fortune, Fate, and Probability in the Borderlands of Juan Felipe Herrera and Artemio Rodríguez’s Lotería Cards and Fortune Poems”
Thursday, April 21st, 4:00p.m.-5:30p.m. (Zoom): Diaspora, Politics, Poetics: A Conversation with Timothy Yu (English, U of Wisconsin) and Edgar Garcia (English, UChicago).
2020-2021
2021 Virtual Graduate Student Conference: Poetry & Poetics of Loneliness
Friday, March 26.
Borders and Loneliness 12:00–1:30pm EST
Arnav Adhikari (Brown University) An Impossible Writing: The Border Poetics of Agha Shahid Ali
Surabhi Balachander (University of Michigan) Border-Collapsers: Globalization and Anthropocene Assemblage in the Work of Juan Felipe Herrera
Lonely Germans 2:00–3:30pm EST
Alex Lugo (Harvard University) A Loneliness at the Heart of God: On Rilke’s Reverse Platonism
Britton Edelen (Duke University) “wenn / nur das Nichts zwischen uns stand”: Difficult Poetry in Difficult Times
Friday, April 2.
Race and Loneliness 1–2:30pm EST
Bethany Swann (University of Pennsylvania) Racial Dissociation & the Real Self: Bearing the Intimacy of Scrutiny in the Postconfessional Lyric
Amber Kinui (UT Austin) Jean Toomer’s Hybrid Cane and Liminal Passing
Loneliness in Orality and Sound 3–4:30pm EST
Tara M. Holman (Brown University) Retuning: Memory, Matrilineage, and Blues Form in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora
Maya Patel Day (University of Michigan) “A Mist of Sound”: Bob Kaufman’s Oral Poetics
Michaela Kotziers (University of Michigan) Lyric Essay
Friday, April 9.
Eco-Loneliness 12:00–1:30pm EST
Leila Braun (University of Michigan) Poetics of the Non-Event in Ben Lerner’s 10:04
Jake Rose (UC Davis)
Pranav Menon (Columbia University) “The Company John Clare Keeps”: Critical Solitude in the Anthropocene
19th Century Loneliness 2:00–3:30pm EST
Anna Wingfield (University of Virginia) Wordsworth’s Later Ballads and the Poetics of Loneliness
Ellie Reese (University of Michigan) “To endure the things which I behold at home”: Domestic Restlessness in Wordsworth and Tennyson
Zaina Ujayli (University of Virginia) Following the Religion of Love: A Poetic Comparison of William Blake and Mohammad Ibn al-Arabi
Hannah Loeb (University of Virginia) Whitman’s Leaning Posture
2019–2020
Friday, November 8, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): An article workshop with Sumita Chakraborty (Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry) (“Anthropocene Ethics and its Lapses: Lyric Eros, Racism, and the Example of Sylvia Plath’s Bees”)
Friday, October 25, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): A reading group on ecopoetics: “Intimacy: The Poetics of Thick Time,” the first chapter of David Farrier’s Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction (2019)
Friday, October 4, 10:00 a.m.–11:00 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): A talk/workshop with Karen Jallatyan (Comparative Literature) (“Reading Diaspora Armenian Poetry to Contribute to an Interdisciplinary Heritage Language Discourse”)
2018–2019
Monday, April 8–Tuesday, April 9. Our capstone event for the academic year, "Transnationalism and Poetry," was a series of events that featured lectures from visiting scholars Harris Feinsod (Northwestern University) and Jahan Ramazani (University of Virginia) as well as a panel-style discussion, moderated by Professor Gillian White, featuring Feinsod, Ramazani, and Professor Yopie Prins
Tuesday, March 19, 2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m. (3154 Angell Hall): A reading group on transnational poetics: Harris Feinsod’s The Poetry of the Americas & Jahan Ramazani’s A Transnational Poetics; free copies of both books were provided to participants
Friday, February 15, 2:00 p.m.–3:00 p.m. (3154 Angell Hall): Article workshop with Dana Murphy (Postdoctoral Fellow, English) (“Praisesong for Margaret Walker’s Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival”)
Friday, November 30, 10 a.m.–11 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): Dissertation chapter workshop with Annie Bolotin (“Dooming Love: Sapphic Publics in Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone with Lungs and The Transformation”)
Thursday, October 25–Friday, October 26. A visit from Professor Virginia Jackson (University of California, Irvine) under the joint auspices of the American Studies Consortium (ASC) and P&PW; events will include a workshop (10/25), lecture (10/25), and a graduate student panel (10/26) moderated by Professor Gillian White and featuring comments from Annie Bolotin (English Language and Literature), Annika Pattenaude (English Language and Literature), and Talin Tahajian (M.F.A., Poetry), who will discuss how issues and theories of genre—both qua and beyond the question of whether lyric, itself, is a genre—factor into their current work
Friday, October 5, 10 a.m.–11 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): A reading group on transnational poetics; the pre-circulated reading material was the first chapter of Aamir R. Mufti’s Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Harvard University Press, 2016)
Friday, September 14, 10 a.m.–11 a.m. (3154 Angell Hall): Dissertation chapter workshop with Yeshua Tolle (“Black Studies and Black Music: Sarah Webster Fabio between Folkways Records and the University”)
2016–2017
October 2016: D. Gilson (Texas Tech): “Michael Jackson and Racial Illegibility” and Will Stockton (Clemson): “Why are the Utopians Monogamous?’
2015–2016
April 2016: Rachel Galvin (U Chicago): “‘Citation is Exaltation’: Post-9/11 Poetry”
November 2015: Paul Jaussen (Lawrence Technological University): “The Catalogue as a Transhistorical Device”
October 2015: Pedagogy Roundtable with Marjorie Levinson (English), Aric Knuth (English), Benjamin Paloff (Slavic and Comp Lit) and John Whittier-Ferguson (English)
September 2015: Dimiter Kenarov, “News that Stays Poetry”
2014–2015
April 2015: Logan Wall, “Louis Zukofsky and the Poetics of Exodus” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop]
February 2015: Barrett Watten (Wayne State University): “Language Writing’s Concrete Utopia: From Leningrad to Occupy.” Co-sponsored with Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group.
January 2015: “Making Abstracts Concrete” a round table discussion with Gillian White (English), Benjamin Paloff (Slavic and Comp Lit) and John Whittier-Ferguson (English)
November 2014: Paul Magee (University of Canberra) “Question: Whose emotions are expressed in your poems?” Co-sponsored with Helen Zell Creative Writing Program.
October 2014: Maureen McLane (New York University): “Toward a Compositionist Poetics: from Ballad Rhizomatics to the Mesh, or, An Arbor for Ann Arbor” and “A Reading with Divagations and Discussion”
September 2014: Reading group discussion of Maureen McLane’s My Poets
2013–2014
April 2014: Evie Shockley (Rutgers University): “Julie Patton’s Visual Poetics and the Discourse of Colorblindness” and a poetry reading. Both events co-sponsored with the Avant-Garde Interest Group (AGIG).
February 2014: Alexandra Socarides (University of Missouri): “Introduction: From Everywhere to Nowhere” and “Writing Public Scholarship.”
February 2014: Reading group discussion of Max Cavitch’s “Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty” (The Traffic in Poems, 2008) and Alexandra Socarides’s “The Poems (We Think) We Know: Emma Lazarus’s ‘The New Colossus.'”
November 2013: David Lucas, “The Self in the Song: Identity and Authority in Contemporary American Poetry.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop]
October 2013: Ramie Targoff (Brandeis University): “Posthumous Love in Renaissance England” and “Limit Cases: Henry King and John Milton.” Both events co-sponsored with the Early Modern Colloquium (EMC).
October 2013: Matt Pfaff (Classics), “C=L=A=S=S=I=C=I=S=M=S and Beyond” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop]
September 2013: “A Conversation with Rob Halpern.” Rob Halpern (EMU) will read from and discuss selections of his poetry, including his latest publication, “Music for Porn” (2012).
2012–2013
April 2013: Emily Howard, “A Natural History of the Natural History Footnote: Charlotte Smith and Poetic Apparatus.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop.]
March 2013: Adam Mazel, “Oxbridge Re-visited: The Youth of Rhyme at the Fin de Siecle.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop.]
February 2013: Christopher Nealon (Johns Hopkins University): “The Prynne Reflex”
November 2012: Maria Damon (University of Minnesota): Poetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader (2009)
November 2012: Leila Watkins, “Inner Weather: George Herbert and Lyric Consolation.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop.]
October 2012: Reading group discussion of Christopher Nealon’s “Affect, Performativity, and Actually Existing Poetry,” Textual Practice (Spring 2011).
September 2012: “Poetry’s Publishing Media,” a panel discussion with English Language and Literature librarian Aaron McCollough, Benjamin Paloff (Slavic Languages and Literatures), Meghan Forbes (Slavic Languages and Literatures), book designer Jeff Clark, and poet Christine Hume.
2011–2012
April 2012: Vassilis Lampropoulos and Pantelis Polychronidis, “‘The Silken Skilled Transmemberment of Song”: How does Music read Poetry?”
March 2012: Ming-Qian Ma (SUNY Buffalo), “‘The Ectopic Eye’: Re-Vision and its Typology of the Page in Avant-Garde Visual Prosody” (Lecture) & “A Seminar Workshop” (Workshop Discussion of Shared Readings). [With the Avant-Garde Interest Group.]
February 2012: Linda Gregerson, “Telling Time.”
January 2012: Mackin Smith and Aurko Joshi, “New Work on Hip Hop Poetics.”
November 2011: Damir Arsenijevic, “Love after Genocide.” [With the Comparative Literature Department.]
November 2011: Mikey Rinaldo, “Breaking the Letter: Susan Howe & Microfont Poetics.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop]
October 2011: Mary Louise Kete (University of Vermont), “Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the Promies of Ekphrasis.” [With the Visual Culture Workshop.]
September 2011: General Interest Meeting for the 2011-12 Academic Year
2010–2011
March 2011: Lynn Keller (University of Wisconsin), “The (Un)Natural Resources of Experimental Ecopoetics, and the Example of a. rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists.”
February 2011: J. Paul Hunter (University of Virginia), “Poetry on the Page and the Mind’s Ear” (Lecture) & “Historical Aesthetics” (Roundtable Discussion). [With the Eighteenth-Century Studies Group.]
December 2010: Rebecca Porte, “Luminous, Necessary, & Frequent: A Brief History of Poetic Logic.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop.]
November 2010: Eliza Richards (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Storms Behind the Storms We Feel: Melville’s Civil War Weather Reports.” [With the Visual Cultrue Workshop.]
October 2010: Caroline Miller, “Abstract Concrete: Experimental Poetry and Art in Post-WWII New York City.” [Dissertation Chapter Workshop.]
September 2010: Craig Dworkin (University of Utah), “Poetics & Prosaics.”
2009–2010
April 2010: Benjamin Paloff, “95 Theses on Poetry and Impermanence.”
March 2010: Tung-Hui Hu & Vivian Lee, “The Last Time You Cried: poetry and voice in the digital environment.”
January 2010: Laurence Goldstein, “Politics by Parable: Denise Levertov and the Gulf War.”
December 2010: Amy Sara Carroll, Discussion of Recent Works
October 2009: “Dot Dot Dot: Two Talks-In-Progress”; Gillian White, “‘To Speak of Woe’: Dramatic Ellipses in the American Confessional Lyric after Modernism"; Rachel Feder, “Urban Infinity, Rural Sublime.”
April 2009: Adela Pinch, “Thinking in the Second Person in 19th Century Poetry.”
March 2009: David Mason (Colorado College), “Transatlantic Influences in Contemporary Poetry.”
November 2009: Toshiaki Komura, “Elizabeth Bishop and Anxiety of Lost Loss: Covert-, Non-, Anti-Elegies in Bishop’s Later Elegiac Work.”
October 2009: Jennifer Ashton (University of Illinois-Chicago), “Sincerity and the Second Person: Lyric after Language Poetry.”
2008–2009
April 2009: A discussion of New Lyric Studies with Yopie Prins and Virginia Jackson (Tufts University).
January 2009: A discussion of the GHAZAL, featuring new poems by Rebecca Porte and Emily Mahan as well as the history of the form presented by Khaled Mattawa.
November 2008: Macklin Smith, “Langland’s Unruly Caesura,” with a discussion of Hopkins & Outkast.
October 2008: Petra Kuppers, “Tiresian Journey: Touching Words, Veils, Manna,” along with a screening of footage from the ongoing “Tiresias” project.