Sites of History, Direction and Space in Poetry and Poetics

This roundtable will think through the dimension, direction and historiography of the site in poetry, and how it manifests through mapping, scoring, and representation. We are interested in how sites are articulated as language in traces on the page—as sentences, lines, points, fragments—that erase as they take up space, creating new sites of negation, of vacuum, violence, reconciliation, conjunction. In our discussion, we will examine how a point as a marker on a map scores the memory of an image, thereby transforming a specific location. We will examine how place and history directs a route on the page and can hold the memory of intense violence. In reading critical and creative work, we will investigate space and indeterminacy, and what writing can do to collapse time and space into a site and reexamine what the space of a text can be.

Emily Barton Altman
Kelly Krumrie
Alicia Wright