2016 MMLA Conference St Louis MO

I am honored to give two presentations at the 2016 MMLA (Midwest Modern Languages Association) Conference in St Louis, MO in November.

Here they are:

My Secret Wars of 1984: A Hybrid Mashup

“The self and the poem make each other real,” Rachel Zucker confirms, but what if the place of the poem is set when the self has no voice? What other complication arises as the self writing the poem [now] has a voice?
           This presentation goes through the process of my hybrid mashup My Secret Wars of 1984, an alphabetized 366-sentence poetry-memoir collage, using texts from the year 1984 (Lyn Hejinian, Ronald Johnson, bell hooks, Marvel Comics, Dungeons & Dragons, President Reagan, etc.) with sentences of my own—within the context of political and personal struggles of that time (my mother coming out in the midst of living in a conservative neighborhood, bullying I faced, the American recession, daily nuclear bomb threats, etc.).
           It challenges the genre and expectations of prose poetry via my appropriation of texts that “represent who I was” in 1984 (comic books, D&D, films, songs), as well as “who I became” in the now from those texts I didn’t have access to (Hejinian, hooks). With the alphabetization (because I alphabetized everything back then as a way to cope), the reader helps to create new contexts within the sentences, as new meanings come out of the multi-contextualized sentences to make new connections and contexts.
            For the presentation, I will go through the process of the book’s conception, getting permissions and gathering sentences, the feedback (positive, negative, and neutral), and continuing with the work through a book-music video with a punk band. The story of this project definitely meets the call for a work in negotiation of “borders between poetry and prose, between artistic and academic, between theory and practice, between artistry and pedagogy to bring together sides that traditionally do not converge.” It is a blur between the public and the private, surviving and having survived.
Amy King says about the collection, “To read My Secret Wars of 1984 is to ride an old wooden rollercoaster through a spacious gallery of stained-glass windows, all their colorful shards having been stolen, shattered, then chewed into shape: what we have here are gorgeous and wise assemblages of sharp, scavenged graffiti. Ricocheting from Pac-Man to Topeka to institutional structures to AIDS awareness to Reagan, Dennis Etzel, Jr. masters the skills of fragmentation and disharmony without losing one bit of torque. Sharpen your political acumen on this poetry-memoir of the highest order—and discover much pleasure in the process.”


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Teaching Documentary Poetics to Students Without Creative Writing [and Reading] Experience: A Pedagogical Journey

Documentary Poetics uses text and image, map and rhetoric, alongside the poet’s own choices in collage and mixed form to reflect social concerns and activism with a personal connection. In other words, Documentary Poetics combines a hybrid of historical sources alongside the poet’s story to create a kind of mashup of resistance, voice, and investigation.
            Can this complex, critical-meets-creative form be intimidating to students without experience in reading poetry? Oh, yes! Can students successfully emerge and come out with their own quality, highly-generative, publishable work? Even in a Freshman Composition course?
            This pedagogical presentation highlights my experience with successfully teaching Documentary Poetry—both reading, interpretation, and writing—with wonderful results. I will begin with a brief history of the movement, beginning with Reznikoff and highlighting poets from the last ten years. I will then share my lesson plans for a variety of classes using Documentary Poetry focusing on Kaia Sand’s Remember to Wave and Joseph Harrington’s Things Come On: an amnoir, what worked, what didn’t, and the positive student reactions and projects. Often, we would enter the books bewildered and come out ready to write our own, to take our own psychogeographical drifts and compile our “truths” via memory and documents.
            The session will end with participants beginning their own Documentary Poetics projects.

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​More about the conference is here.