Locating the Self: Intertextual Poetic Strategies
Since long before Julia Kristeva coined the term “intertextuality,” poets across the globe have been in dialogue and interdependent relationship, shaping their poems and poetics in response to those of others. Whether homage, critique, or anything between, an intertext poses interpretative questions with profound political implications: Why choose to be in conversation with this poet? With this poem? In this form? To what end? And how to foreground that conversation, or signal it at all? How do these choices position us aesthetically, socially, and historically? In this craft lab, we will consider these questions by reading from among a selection of intertexts, written by a range of contemporary poets, including Lynn Emanuel, Toi Derricotte, Roger Reeves, Natasha Trethewey, and Ocean Vuong, and drafting an intertext (or two) of our own. Participants are asked to bring with them a poem that they greatly admire and a poem that troubles them in some way.
Charif Shanahan is the author of two collections of poetry: Trace Evidence (Tin House, 2023) and Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry/SIU Press, 2017). Shanahan’s poems have appeared in the Nation, the New Republic, the New Yorker and the Paris Review. Shanahan is a recipient of the Whiting Award; the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship; and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Originally from the Bronx, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Northwestern University.
$110 GA / $85 for members