Poetry and Theory: A Roundtable

Extract

The question of how poetry and theory intersect drew forty or so people to a session at the MLA annual meeting in San Diego on 29 December 2003. Bruce R. Smith, the convener, had asked three practicing poets who also write criticism (David Gewanter, Roberta Hill, and Mark McMorris) and a specialist in technocultural studies (Douglas Kahn) to join him in each choosing a single poem and using it as a test case for discussing how theory and poetry are related. David Gewanter chose Czeslaw Milosz's “Incantation”; Roberta Hill, Edward Brathwaite's “Negus”; Douglas Kahn, Allen Ginsberg's “Laughing Gas” and “Ether”; Mark McMorris, two passages from Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land; and Bruce Smith, Thomas Nashe's song “Spring.” After the five presentations, several members of the audience joined the discussion. Here are excerpts from the proceedings. Short biographies of the speakers can be found at the end.