To say that poetry is in a moment of crisis is both an understatement and simultaneously a misreading of the field's history. Poetry, it turns out, is always in crisis. From the end of the nineteenth century move from rural spaces to urban ones (as John Timberman Newcomb notes across his two books on the field of poetry) and from outside of academia into it as well (as I note in my work), the field of poetry has been struggling to keep up with every change in political economy, doomed by every new media artifice that comes along.

This crisis feels new because the space into which poetry has been "entirely absorbed" (according to Mark McGurl) is also desperate. Higher education institutions are facing many and numerous crises themselves— from a loss of their mission and purpose thanks to the proliferation of where knowledge and information come from, to various political and cultural crises which are bringing the outside climate of anti-intellectualism to our very doors.

This panel asks basic questions: how do these various changes affect the cultural object that is the poem and the producer of said object, the poet? If our absorption is the source of poetry's detachment from various forms of industrialized cultural production externally, where can poetry as art form and poets escape? Of course, we begin by taking McGurl's words as writ, that poetry came to live in the American university and college system at the start of the twentieth century and blossomed as those spaces were incorporated into American life throughout the rest of the century. It allowed American poets to have a home and also provided support for other things the field required: office space, money for readings and presses and journals.

Michelle Taransky is a poet who will speak about new approaches to workshops— both inside and outside of academic spaces— and how those approaches might make the appeal of pedagogical spaces more accessible. What Taransky calls "a voicist pedagogy and expressivism and identity-focused writing and craft and pedagogy" lead to silencing and stifling marginalized writers in our composition classrooms or, in contrast, to student success. And among poet teachers, are these conversations and critiques of voice-based writing difficult because of the absence of shared terms across fields and disciplines, affinities, and discourse communities?

Morberly Luger at University of British Columbia will discuss perhaps the most outward expression of poetry's field at the moment: social media. One place we have found poetry going is onto Instagram and my paper will discuss the Indo-Canadian “Insta Poet” Rupi Kaur. With 4.5 million followers, 4 published books, and after several world tours, Kaur is an example of how poetry circulates widely in our time. Luger's analysis of Kaur understands her work, not as an “exit” for poetry
but as an example of how expectations of poetry developed within (neoliberal) institutions are
replicated in the (neoliberal) landscape of social media. Kaur’s poems are personal, confessional;
they offer intimate glimpses into the life of a young East Asian woman. Yet, Luger argues, Kaur's
message is complicated by her medium.

Pulling back slightly, Jay Shelat explores McGurl's assertion more fully: While Mark McGurl’s claim that poetry is “entirely absorbed” within universities reasserts neoliberalism’s encroachment of higher education and participates in devaluing the humanities, it should not take away from the simple fact that contemporary poetry continues to have powerful political resonances. Indeed, as Solmaz Sharif writes, “Where weapons try to limit the possibilities of speech and thereby the possibilities of desire, of recognition, poetry exists in speech. Where one has no song, the other is only.” Poetry, in other words, makes room to interrogate matrices of power through its purported style. If the field is indeed enmeshed solely in higher education, what are the affordances of political poetry in the classroom?

Finally, I have centered much of this panel around Al Filreis and the work he has done for the ModPo MOOC over these last years, breaking the wall of the university down (only metaphorically) and reaching huge audiences who are interested in poetry beyond its walls. Dr. Filreis' work has spanned many generations of poets, but it is in this effort that he has done something truly incredible: brought poetry out of a space considered exclusive and made it a public art form again.

After a 2-3 minute broad overview and 2-3 minutes of introducing the panel, each panelist will present for 10-12 minutes, including transitions. This should allow for 20 minutes+ of discussion time.