Thirty poets published an open letter to the Poetry Foundation on June 6, 2020. They insisted the organization take a more active role in confronting anti-black racism and other forms of social injustice and refused to publish their work with Poetry Magazine or participate in other programming until their demands were met. Hundreds of poets and readers signed on in the days after the letter’s publication. The act of collective refusal produced results, including turnover among the foundation’s leadership, a review of editorial policies, and substantial investments in programming for communities in the greater Chicago area. There is more work to be done.

The letter and the responses it elicited demonstrate the critical entanglement of strategies of resistance, refusal, and repair in forcing structural change. Inspired by the episode, this special session will explore how contemporary American poets use similar tactics at the level of individual poems to respond to racialized trauma, anti-immigrant violence, and environmental catastrophe. Focusing on poets working in divergent modes and traditions, the session will enact the principle—advocated by Evie Shockley, Trace Peterson, Dorothy Wang, Timothy Yu, and others—that 21st-century poetry unfolds through active intersections of lyric expression, identity-based affiliation, and formal innovation. The session’s primary goal is to complicate ongoing debates over poetry’s public functions, for example, whether it should document and thereby resist the inevitability of our “calamitous present,” as Margaret Ronda suggests in Remainders: American Poetry at Nature’s End (2018); orient readers toward “ethical obligations” of solidarity and repair, as Heather Milne argues in Poetry Matters (2018); or/and commit to the “negation and refusal” of false political hopes, as Tom Fisher proposes in Writing Not Writing (2017).

In the session’s first presentation, Cole Morgan will consider how photography figures in three poems from Natasha Trethewey’s Native Guard (2006). Situating the poems in the theoretical tension between Afropessimist refusal, as articulated by Frank B. Wilderson, III, and the resistant modalities of radical Black aesthetics, as theorized by Fred Moten and Tina Campt, Morgan will suggest that Trethewey’s poetry expands our view of literature’s capacity to image and imagine Black life. Indeed, from direct citations of images produced by historical figures to meditations on her own family snapshots, Trethewey’s diverse engagements with photography illuminate the complex relationship between photographic representation and Black poetics of memory and memorialization. Trethewey’s poetic speakers regularly testify to the uncanny limits of photographic mediation. As they refuse photography’s more obvious evidentiary and hagiographic functions, Morgan will argue, these figures reveal the less obvious, reparative potential of hermeneutic approaches to photographic truth.

Yuki Tanaka will extend Morgan’s consideration of public and private memory in the session’s second presentation by discussing the ways political language muddles and invalidates the private language of feeling in Iranian-American poet Solmaz Sharif’s 2016 collection Look. If lyric poetry has been traditionally read as originating from a single voice, such as the speakers Morgan identifies in Tretheway’s photographic poems, recent scholarship, including Bonnie Costello’s The Plural of Us (2017) and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2017), as well as the critical provocations of the new lyric studies, have challenged this definition by engaging the lyric’s social, ethical, and racial dimensions. Noting a difference in Sharif and Tretheway’s methods, Tanaka will describe how Sharif resists post-September 11 racial hostility and aggression toward the Middle East by juxtaposing the language of love poetry with text appropriated from the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms compiled by the US Department of Defense. His presentation will propose that by testing the lyric tradition in this way, Sharif ultimately affirms the capacity of lyric language to integrate the personal and political, love and war.

In the session’s final presentation, Emma J. Train will link the visual, documentary, and lyric strategies of Tretheway and Sharif’s work to CAConrad’s performance-based (soma)tic poetry rituals. Approaching Conrad’s (soma)tics as a radical queer politics of repair, Train will offer detailed analysis of the poet’s most recent ritual, “Resurrect Extinct Vibration” (2019), which involves tapping into the “vibrational absences” of extinct species as a means of manifesting poetry and healing from trauma. Like Tretheway and Sharif, but through radically different means, Conrad draws bold causal lines between normative discourse, American imperialism, and environmental destruction. Their (soma)tics elaborate forms of interpersonal and intra-species care analogous to Donna Haraway’s kin-making. As a culminating example of the critical entanglement of resistance, refusal, and repair, Conrad’s poetry demonstrates that the epistemologies and practices of 21st-century American poetry may be capacious enough to function as a praxis against extinction.