Kamran Javadizadeh: Poetry's Closed Doors

Description

Kamran Javadizadeh, an associate professor of English at Villanova University, will give a talk titled "Poetry's Closed Doors" for the Johns Hopkins English Department.

Abstract:

What would we expect of poems if closed doors were their first occasions? My talk offers a reading of the contemporary Iranian American poet Solmaz Sharif that takes that apocryphal history as its starting point. For Sharif, I argue, poetry has been a way of naming and responding to the many accommodations we make in our daily lives to the boundaries enforced by the nation state, closed doors that, in her work, often appear in airports and other more or less metaphorically liminal zones. Sharif's latest poems suggest a model for lyric that, far from being apolitical or historically decontextualized (as "lyric" often seems to connote), instead sees in the very conditions of its isolated interiority a kind of nascent, revolutionary path for poetry.

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