Teachers Finding Poetic Refuge through Dystopian Times

Title: Poetic Inner Speech, Personal Agency and Empathy

Robert Lake-Georgia Southern University

In this presentation, I stress the immense importance of the role of inward poetic processes of metaphor creation that transcend the confines of the current manifestations of Orwellian Newspeak and the authoritarian drift toward flat and divisive language.

Title: Making Love

Pauline Sameshima, Lakehead University

I choose exile—to seek refuge in an endangered home is futile. The political imagination turns away from the source of resistance and contention emerging through fertile acts of creation to generate new networks and systems of social relationships. In the poetic creation of the not yet, as we think, imagine, and make, we construct a new social of love and possibility.

Title: Poetry That Breaks Down, and Builds Up

Sean Wiebe, University of Prince Edward Island

I will be reading a poem inspired by Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four and Kortege's "Do you have any advice for those of us just starting out?" His poem, in the form of a ghazal, will consider ways teachers can reframe, reflame, and refuse refuge.

Title: One Art in F***ed up USA

John Weaver, Georgia Southern University

Elizabeth Bishop thought her love life was a disaster, yet she still had her poetry. It was her one art that did not fail her. What do we have? A narcissist for a president, fascists for a constituency, a pedarast senator from Alabama, evangelicals who love a mythical non world over anything earthly, white people who express outrage over kneeling players and silence over murder, and a populace whose source of life is rage, not against a capitalist machine but against any helpless group they can find wandering the streets.

Poem Title: The Lives of Others

Laura Apol, Michigan State University

In my years of working with genocide survivors in Rwanda—individuals who had endured the worst kinds of trauma—I observed the importance of survivors and witnesses expressing (often for the first time) and hearing, deeply, the stories that came from personal and political woundedness. In my own life and in my teaching, these types of tellings have taken the form of poems—the art of making something beautiful and powerful from pain, and in the process creating not only a refuge but also a site of activism and change.