8TH ANNUAL NAPOMO 30/30/30 :: WEEK 2 :: INTRODUCTION BY CURATOR KNAR GAVIN, AUTHOR OF THE FORTHCOMING CHAPBOOK VELA.
Welcome to the OS’s 8th Annual NAPOMO 30/30/30 Series! This year, contributors far and wide were gathered by four incredible curators, who are also our 2019 Chapbook Poets — to learn more about this year’s amazing curators and their forthcoming chapbooks, please click here! You can also navigate to the series archive, of over 200 entries, here! This week’s curator is Knar Gavin, author of the forthcoming chapbook, Vela..
Embarking on my curatorial journey in January, I sought out poets whom I felt were especially attuned to the environmental crises and conundrums that perforate — and so very unevenly — our everyday lives and social worlds. I am humbled by the depth of thinking and care that animates these entries. Each circles and crisscrosses the environmental question in its own way, indexing the enriching tensions of poetic inheritance while simultaneously attesting to poetry’s capacity to project (that is, to jacere, throw, pro-, forth, as in, into the future) modes of collectivist thinking and relational being. As several of these contributing posts imply, such an orientation is also a pathway to opposing the momentums of “empire-driven erasure” (I borrow this phrase from Orchid Tierney and her post on Lehua M. Taitano), so many of which manifest in environmental violence.
I hope you’ll follow along in the coming week; these featured writers provide a truly unique and vital glimpse into those parcels and vectors of connection, influence, and writerly relation that link poets across varied environments and (social) ecologies, some more man(un)made than others. Consult the list below should you wish for a brief set of sneak-peaks; minor spoilers are present, so do beware! These spoilers may charm, and beckon:
- Day 1: Jerika Marchan reflects on the physical draw of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, revealing an indispensable work which, among other things, offers “the immigrant’s story — to be so tethered to the past even as one is pulled irrevocably into the future” …
- Day 2: Craig Santos Perez shares the work of Hawaiian poet Brandy Nālani McDougall, a writer who both critiques the ongoing force of ecological imperialism in Hawai’i while also extending “representations of [that] environment as a sacred and storied place” …
- Day 3: Sara Deniz Akant stages an interrogative exchange with poet Daisy Atterbury, pursing the intimate beyond of speech and reckoning with the social ecologies produced from within (and perhaps rupturing forth from) the poem; among other questions, Akant asks, “Can writing be used to (un)settle — to deregulate space?” …
- Day 4: Orchid Tierney considers the terraqueous poetics of native Chamorro poet Lehua M. Taitano, an indigenous writer from from Guahån (Guam), whose work contends with the violent history of U.S. imperialism in Oceania; Tierney wonders “how we can enact sovereignty, citizenship, and justice in the twenty-first century” …
- Day 5: Clare Jones engages with migration, cross-creaturely kinship, and the reciprocal poetics of mimicry in Anna Jackson’s poem “Kākāpō,”as published in the collection The Pastoral Kitchen …
- Day 6: Patrick Riedy documents his relocation to Providence, Rhode Island and shares an account of his encounter with Colin Channer’s “Providential;” in Riedy’s words, the poem bears “many tributaries,” among them those of fatherhood, aging, the law, reggae, and colonialism …
- Day 7: Allison Cobb explores the teachings built into the work of Susan Howe and explains Howe’s role in revealing that formal and generic binaries are “meaningless in a work that follows its own imperatives” (these imperatives might include research, investigation, and inquiry)…
- Day 8: Carlos Price-Sanchez spends time with Anita Endrezze’s “The Language of Fossils,” a poem which introduced him to the ecopoetical realm and its sometimes resistant materials (not least of all its word-objects)…
Knar Gavin attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in AGNI, Birdfeast, Poetry, BOAAT, Caketrain, Booth, the Journal, Storm Cellar, Yemassee, Print-Oriented Bastards, Quarterly West, SoftBlow, Glittermob, Heavy Feather Review and elsewhere. She writes the occasional folk song and rides bikes with Team Laser Cats, a Philadelphia women’s cycling squad. Her tumbles can be found at knargavin.tumblr.com.
