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News | Kristin George Bagdanov - Part 3

Addressing the Atomic Specter

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My article, “Addressing the Atomic Specter: Ginsberg’s ‘Plutonian Ode’ and America’s Nuclear Unconscious” is now available to read in Symplokē 27.1-2 (2019).

“The poem, prophetic in its moment of writing, anticipated the larger social movement in which it would participate and addresses what I will call America’s nuclear unconscious. In the years following, during the peak of antinuclear protests in the United States, Ginsberg continued to revise and perform the poem. However, when the antinuclear protests of the late 1970s began to separate the issues of nuclear disarmament and power plant decommissioning, despite their many linked environmental, social, and political consequences, Ginsberg’s poem tried to hold them together.2 Composed at the edge of cold war détente, “Plutonian Ode” articulates what would soon be subsumed under Reagan-era escalation by figuratively drawing together nuclear weapons, waste, energy, and raw materials—forms of the nuclear that had been disarticulated in service of proliferation and what cultural historian Joseph Masco calls America’s “radioactive nation-building project” (2006). It is the repression of the relations between nuclear forms that forms America’s nuclear unconscious. And it is the work of the poem to manifest the contradictions that structure this enduring site and condition.”

Read the full article here.

Review of Fossils in the Making

By admin in Book Review, Books Tags: , ,

Madeleine Wattenberg, Assistant Editor of the Cincinnati Review has written a thoughtful and compelling review of Fossils in the Making. Here is just one of the many insights she has into the book: 

The final poem, fittingly named “echo / o” turns on its internal sounds; “o” is, after all, the symbol for Oxygen, the gyre’s center, the mark of invocation. The invocation is to anyone—or anything—that is listening. Bagdanov encourages us to make our attempts but also recognize that these attempts are folded within other bodies, that we both carry and are carried by the gyre’s currents. And if our making is an undoing, then perhaps our undoing will be our making too.

Read the rest here.

Happy Pub Day, DIURNE!

By admin in Books Tags: , ,

Diurne is officially out in the world! You can catch poem 1 here, poem 2, tweeted hourly, here, and poems 3 and 4 here. The rest you’ll have to read in the book, which can be purchased here or here. Check out the events page for upcoming readings, which will feature Fossils and Diurne. 

Also, if you want me to send you a poetry postcard, made in collaboration with Diurne‘s cover artist Pecos Pryor, send me a message!

New Article in Oxford Literary Review

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My article, Atomic Afrofuturism and Amiri Baraka’s Compulsive Futures, is now available in the special issue of Oxford Literary Review: EXT: Writing Extinction (41.1).

You can read the manuscript version on Academia.edu, or contact me for the published version if you do not have access to OLR. 

Abstract:

In 1984, the same year that scholars were gathering at Cornell University to theorise ‘Nuclear Criticism,’ Amiri Baraka was formulating his own version of nuclear futurity in Primitive World: An Anti-Nuclear Jazz Musical. Baraka’s musical manifests and conceptualises atomic afrofuturism, a historically specific affirmation of black existence that was forged while facing nuclear apocalypse. Nuclear Criticism, which lost much of its exigency after the end of the Cold War, needs to evolve to account for the present nuclear era, as its focus on totalities leaves it ill-equipped for incorporating the disparate lived experiences of those who have already experienced the apocalypse and for whom nuclear apocalypse is a repetition or extension of white supremacy’s agenda of extinction. This article offers a genealogy of atomic afrofuturism, examining how throughout the cold war period African American artists like Sun Ra, Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka were exploring the post-apocalyptic conditions of black existence, including its conflicting temporalities and tenses, while much of America still believed the apocalypse was imminent, not immanent. And so it is Derrida’s anti-apocalyptic missives together with Baraka’s anti-nuclear musical that can offer the framework Nuclear Criticism so desperately desires for imagining the unimaginable.

Largehearted Boy: Book Notes Play List

By admin in blog posts, Fossils in the Making

I made a playlist for Fossils in the Making! Listen and read more about it at Largehearted Boy. 

My poetry is grounded in music. I do not consider sense to be more important than sound in any hierarchy of “meaning” and often trust what I call the “sonic logic” of a line or phrase more than its semantic logic. For this playlist, rather than choosing songs that influenced or inspired individual poems, I collaborated with musicians Trevor Welch and Levi Bagdanov to do the reverse: to find songs that were conjured or evoked by the music in the poems themselves. What follows, then, is a type of sonic accompaniment for Fossils in the Making that echoes, recalls, and responds to different aspects of the collection.

Read / Listen here. 

The Making of Fossils in the Making

By admin in blog posts, Fossils in the Making

Thanks to EcoTheo Review for asking me to discuss the process of writing Fossils in the Making as part of their Micro-Essay Series on First Books.

No one’s asked me for advice, including this essay prompt, but if I were to offer any, it would be to pay more attention to these quiet poems. These poems usually don’t get published. They don’t like being alone. Like our own selves, they are formed through their relationship with others, emerging from the ecology of the book rather than being inserted, fully formed, into it. I think this is where the real joy of a collection comes from—the surprising turns and pitches and swerves that propel the reader through it. Journals and magazines tend to favor poems that resemble hit singles, especially in this like-and-share-driven literary market, but you need quiet poems to bring those poems down to earth and draw them into conversation with one another. Nurturing these interstices is, I think, what turns a collection of poems into a poetry collection.

You can read the full essay here.

Interview with Chicago Review of Books

By admin in Fossils in the Making Tags: , , ,

I talked with Amy Brady at Chicago Review of Books about Fossils in the Making and how it addresses ecological crisis. We discussed the suburbs, the relationship between science and poetry, and what, if anything, poetry can do to contend with climate change and other forms of violence:

I think that, climate-change deniers aside, most people accept the fact that scientific disciplines can tell us something true about the world. There’s an unquestioned belief in scientific objectivity, faith in its ability to impartially apprehend “reality.” I think people are generally more skeptical of the claim that art can tell us something true and necessary about reality as well. However, scientific instruments are still mediating objects constructed by humans, and the knowledge they produce must be supplemented with other ways of knowing, as the sciences do not have privileged access to what is “real.” Throughout the collection, I’m interested in exploring the relationship between scientific “objectivity” and lyric “subjectivity” and the places where these methods of knowing contradict and supplement each other. I’m also interested in what a poem itself proves, if anything. Is a poem a proof of thought? The residue of experience? Can its figures and forms manifest what is intangible, unconscious, ungraspable? Or does it merely prove, again and again, the failure of language to close the gap between the world and our own bodies?

Read the rest here. 

 

DIURNE: Winner of 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award

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Thrilled to announce that my project, DIURNE, which was written over the course of a month while at Vermont Studio Center in 2017, has been selected by Timothy Donnelly as the winner of the 2019 Tupelo Press Sunken Garden Chapbook Award!

Kristin George Bagdanov’s Diurne begins with the proclamation:  “a line each hour of waking / a poem each day of making.”  In the gorgeously lyrical hybrid text that follows, Bagdanov does the nearly impossible—that is, she merges procedural and confessional modes of writing.  The end result is a text as deeply felt as it is restrained, as grounded as it is philosophical in its implications.

Read more about the prize, finalists & semi-finalists here.

You can read a blogpost that goes into detail about the logic behind this project here. 

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