Lit Fest 2025

An acceleration of equitably distributed precarity—which is to say existential threat that cannot be avoided by money or nation, genetic lotto, or brute force—has made it so more of our sentences begin with, “As I write this, [insert disaster] is unfolding.” As I write this, it feels cruel to accept ‘givens’: that the room we will enter together on June 7, 2025 will still be standing, that all who can fly there now will join us then, that we will arrive with the same questions and hopes for our poems, the same sense of imagined and future reader. And yet, the life of the poem is long. What pressures does the immediate ‘now’ we find ourselves in place on the packets of poems we turned in earlier? How might we allow those questions, whatever they may be this summer, into the workshop? What might they tell us of the vocation of writing poems? We will look at our poems through their relationship to time, through syntax and rhythm, self and other, as well as through the material present of the poem and the material presents it is not yet including. Line edits and formal questions will be raised alongside ethical ones, leading to greater articulation of each poet’s perceived responsibility. Agreement on the roles of poetry is not required nor even desired, but willing and willful wrestling with such questions will be central to our time together. Accepted participants will submit up to two poems by May 9.