James A. Winn Graduate Fellow
About
“Poetic Relations: Communal Readings of Poems and Poetic Readings of Community in the PostWar United States”
In Poetic Relations, I investigate how a "we" forms and, in particular, poetry’s part in forming a "we." My project details specific communities across the mid-20th century to the 21st century where poetry reimagined what community could look like: Beat poet Bob Kaufman’s neighborhood of North Beach, San Francisco from 1956 to 1986; teacher, activist, and poet Audre Lorde’s global network of Black and Third World feminists in the 1970s and 80s; and contemporary poet Layli LongSoldier’s collaborations with the Lakota arts and cultural organization Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota in 2017. In each of these communities, community members look away from the page and instead read poems as the histories, relationships, and circumstances that bring a community together. Due to reading habits that have been influenced by New Critical classroom pedagogies in the 1950s, poems are often read through paradigms of abstraction and universalism that imply an amorphous, universal, and homogenous national community as its base. The goal for my dissertation’s intervention is to suggest that poems can be thought of as lived historical relations that make up a given community, and these three communities’ distinct methods of reading poems not only can teach us how communities cohere through poetry, but can also expand what counts as poetry once we change what we think poetic communities can look like through local and historically situated examples.
Maya Day is a PhD candidate in English Language and Literature.
