Montuno: Poetics, Improvisation, and Liveness

A Critical Conversations Event

Where does the poem end and breath begin? While other arts—theater, song, dance—are intimately connected to their sense of liveness, poetry is often thought about as being precise and stable, crafted so intricately that any change would only make it worse. The completed poem is thought to have “found its form”; it no longer changes; it is dead—which is true of so-called “page poetry” but also of much of performance in the age of short-form video. But when art moves between the strict page and the living air, what must it shed, and what can it gain? How does it become new, changed, alive? And how must we change our reading and listening practices to honor the work, especially the work done by Black and Latine poets, that straddles the line between text, sound, and performance?

This event is open to the public and will be recorded.

This event is part of Critical Conversations: creating space for and educating one another about our multiple cultural contexts, activism, civil discourse, and academic engagement.