This weekend, two rival campuses will come together in the name of poetry. Organized by graduate students at both Duke and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions, invites academics and poets from across the Triangle and the country to share perspectives and research on different topics in poetry.
The conference was conceived by Pete Moore and Adra Raine, graduate students in Duke’s Department of English and UNC’s Department of English and Comparative Literature, respectively, as a way to introduce poets and poetry to the local community, and vice versa.
“[One Makes Many] is important because it brings visibility, both locally and nationally, to the incredibly rich community of people here in the Triangle working in contemporary poetry and poetics,” Raine said. “It helps put that work in a larger national and international dialogue.”
The interdisciplinary focus of the conference extends from anthropology to history, from traditional forms to digital ones.
Such breadth of experience and variety is exemplified by the keynote reader of the conference, Nathaniel Tarn. Tarn, a cultural anthropologist by training, has done fieldwork in Guatemala and Myanmar and translated Pablo Neruda’s works into English. Translation of South American poetry is the topic of one of the panels at the conference.
Another panel centered around religious poetry challenges the division between the sacred and the secular, while a panel about sound in African poetry blurs the lines between high and low art and between song and speech. Also represented in the conference is a panel entitled “The Digital Muse,” which invites reflection on new media, poetry and literature and features Duke Visual Studies professor Bill Seaman. Overall, the conference aims to introduce and ignite discussion about experimental poetic form.
“We are at the cusp of a transformation in the way we express ourselves” said Joseph Donahue, professor of the practice of English and Poetry. “The conference is a timely intervention in an era of globalization and information technology.”
Donahue describes the conference as a culmination of a series of poetry events and reading groups, and of an increasing interest in experimental poetry among Duke faculty.
“One Makes Many is also a stepping stone,” he said. “We’re trying to capitalize on the strengths of the people who are already here but haven’t had a chance to speak. This is a rare and encouraging moment in the history of poetry in this country.”
Both Moore and Raine picked up on the Triangle’s tradition of cultural and intellectual engagement in developing the conference. One Makes Many also responds specifically to Duke’s focus on interdisciplinary academic work through projects such as the humanities labs.
“The conference reflects the interdisciplinary relevance of poetry–and in two days, we are really only representing a fraction of the ways in which poetry relates to and interacts with other cultural and academic fields,” Raine said.
One Makes Many: A Conference of Poetic Interactions will take place tomorrow at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Saturday at UNC’s campus YMCA on Cameron Ave. Both days begin at 9:45 a.m.
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