Seminar: Cult A: Praying for the Enemy: Joy Harjo and Pádraig Ó Tuama

Praying for the Enemy: Poetry by Joy Harjo and Pádraig Ó Tuama
(with supporting roles by Kai Cheng Thom, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, and, of course, a smidgen of Emily Dickinson) 

Poetry as conflict resolution, poetry as uprising, poetry for the people, poetry for nobodies, poetry as “opening,” poetry as prophecy, poetry as reparative justice, poetry unmaking/ remaking the world, poetry as undoing of false dualisms and rigid categories, poetry as interruption of violence and oppressions, poetry making things happen, and poetry making nothing happen, too. As always, we will read poetry reading us; and, thus, become poets, one and all. And so, this is poetry as transfiguration—of ourselves, and of the world we inhabit. Poetry can only be of/in the world. “The rest is silence.”