My poem “unfield,” which won the 2018 Celeste Turner Wright Poetry Prize at UC Davis, is now online at the Academy of American Poets website. This poem is also pretty representative of the concerns in my forthcoming book, Fossils in the Making.
The poem I amwriting is not a fieldin which I findor do not find myself. There is no fillingof graves with dirt, no trans-posing of blood and earth.
I wrote about my procedural project, “Diurne,” for Rob Mclennan’s Small Press Writing Day project.
“Writing “Diurne” helped me debunk the myth of lyric immediacy I often confronted in poetry by making the writing process durational rather than inspirational, work rather than epiphany. It was a project weighed down by mediation, that often had to muse upon its own making as a way to pass the time, that could not erase the traces of labor that kept it pinned to the ordinary.”
Read the rest here
As I sit down to write this reflection, I feel an overwhelming sense of dread. Not for the task at hand, but for the future. Is this what haunting is? I’ve never been one to believe in ghosts, at least not how they tend to be portrayed in movies and books. Specters don’t confine themselves to our simple dichotomies of absence and presence, life and death. They are both and they are between. Haunting is an atmosphere produced by these intra-worldly beings: specters of past lives, of present violence, of the seemingly unalterable conditions of what world will be. The four long poems in this issue will haunt you. You will see in them the faces of children who have been relegated to sacrifice zones; how the smallest measure of matter becomes the destroyer of worlds; how a home buckles under the weight of its history.
My poem, “Proof of Hunger” has been included Boston’s Review’s special issue, which has both print and online counterparts.
“What Nature,” as Eds. Timothy Donnelly, BK Fischer, and Stephania Heim explain in their introduction, includes poems that “were not written because poetry can save the Earth. They are themselves far cries: urgent calls for rethinking our place on an imperiled planet. Read more here.
My latest reflection on the poetry of Issue 46: A Way Through is up on Ruminate.
Ten tiles by ten tiles you scrub again
with a woman who is not your sister
(this is how you tell time is passing)
you are hungry then you are full.
–From “Fluorescent” by Jessica Yuan
I’m thrilled to have poems in the winter / spring issues of Grist Journal, Puerto Del Sol (The Science Issue), and Superstition Review (you can read that one online here). Check out these fantastic issues and support these journals by picking up a copy.
I’m thrilled to share that my first full-length poetry collection, Fossils in the Making, will be published by Black Ocean! The planned release date is AWP 2019 in Portland–stay tuned for details!
ASLE-sponsore
d panel, MLA 2019 in Chicago | 300-500word abstracts due March 1 to kgeorgebagdanov@ucdavis.edu
Panel Description:
Do we need a new nuclear criticism? How can ecocritical frameworks and new archives and methods help us re-encounter “the nuclear” and re-asses its relationship to literature and culture?
https://apps.mla.org/cfp_detail_11140
For most, nuclear criticism was a blip on the radar of literary criticism. What began as an honest attempt to ground deconstruction and “high theory” in pragmatic, ethical matters all but ended with the fall of the Berlin wall, even as “the nuclear” in its many material and symbolic valences continued to structure geopolitical relations and ecological conditions. If “the nuclear” represents a critical intersection of geopolitics and ecology, then how might contemporary ecocritical frameworks help develop a new nuclear criticism, one that is expanded and reconfigured to address the shortcomings of this project’s previous manifestation? Furthermore, how might the energy humanities, new materialisms, indigenous studies, feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, or affect theory (to name a few) offer inroads to re-examining the relationship between literature and the nuclear?
The “original” nuclear criticism, incited by President Reagan’s revival of cold war rhetoric in the 1980s, primarily analyzed nuclear narratives implicit in political discourse and uncovered unconscious nuclear fears in canonical literary texts, reaching its pinnacle with the 1984 issue of Diacritics featuring Derrida’s well-known, elliptical piece, “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead: Seven Missiles and Seven Missives)”. At its outset, proponents of nuclear criticism imagined it would be a wild success, envisioning its institutionalization and establishment as a discrete academic department in colleges around the world. Why, then, did it all but fade into obscurity simply because the Cold War had been declared over? One possible explanation is that its exigency rested too heavily on the rhetorical coupling of the Cold War and nuclear weapons, as it based its theoretical interventions on the unthinkability of nuclear apocalypse (see Frances Ferguson’s “nuclear sublime”) and on nuclear war as a totalizing event (Derrida’s “ultimate referent”). Furthermore, this version of nuclear criticism relied upon a fairly narrow archive (political discourse and novels or films), method (deconstruction), and formulation of the nuclear (“the bomb” or the spectacular event). Thus, a new nuclear criticism must rely on alterative avenues of support to defend its necessity and portability.
We invite papers that explore alternative archives (how does poetry, for instance, treat the nuclear?), expanded methods (how does critical race theory undermine ideas about the “apocalypse” as central to the nuclear imaginary?), and different forms of the nuclear (what is the relationship between the event of the bomb and the slow violence of nuclear waste?). Whether or not we agree with the New Yorker that we are entering a “Cold War 2.0,” or contend that we are simply entering another phase of the Long Cold War, “the nuclear” continues to structure both geopolitical and ecological relations and thus requires renewed attention and scholarship.
Note: this is a non-guaranteed MLA 2019 panel sponsored by the Association for Literature and the Environment (ASLE)
My Editors Ruminate blog for issue 45: unfinished is up! I hope you enjoy!
“Un- is the prefix of negation. Its identity is opposition, its power, reversal. Finish, on the other hand, signals completion, achievement, and conclusion. Self-help books proselytize the benefits of list-making, how completing daily tasks will make me fitter, happier, more productive.”
Purchase the issue here.
[update: I’ve been elected! Thanks for your support!]
I’ve been nominated for the Graduate Student Liaison role at ASLE (Association for Literature and the Environment) and would love your support! Current ASLE members can vote in the election until. Dec. 1. Check your emails or ASLE accounts for the link. Below is my statement. You can read the other candidates’ statements here.
Kristin George Bagdanov, University of California, Davis
We have all chosen to study literature and the environment because we believe that close and sustained attention to the world and its representations matters. And judging by the conferences I’ve attended in Moscow and Detroit, it is clear that the energy, collaboration, and criticism fostered by ASLE can effect change. As a third-year English PhD student at U.C. Davis who studies ecopoetics, I rely on the inspiration gleaned from ASLE on those days when theory feels very far from praxis. As graduate student liaison, I will help cultivate the ASLE community and the future of environmental scholarship by creating more opportunities for graduate students to collaborate with one another. Having started my studies in ecopoetics as a poet in Colorado State University’s MFA program, I am especially interested in strengthening ties between creative writers and literary critics, who have so much to learn from one another in terms of method, archive, and action. I also hope to create more workshops and reading groups for graduate students between conferences, expanding and strengthening the network of environmental scholarship across disciplines. As a scholar, poet, editor, and teacher with a background in non-profit development, I am equipped to manage both the logistical and creative tasks required of me in this role. An added bonus: since the ASLE 2019 conference will be at U.C. Davis, I’ll be able to tailor the graduate student conference experience to our specific campus and community. Find out more about my work at kristingeorgebagdanov.com or on Twitter: @KristinGeorgeB.