The Stanford Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages (DLCL) Monday symposium on poetry and poetics featured a reading by poet and lecturer Cintia Santana and brief presentations by a panel of graduate students on poetry that they resonate with.
Although from various styles and cultures, small choices in the poems made evident the enduring power of words, while panel introductions of the pieces revealed an essential part of poetry: engaging with it.
The program began with an introduction by Lea Pao, chair of the undergraduate German Studies program and co-organizer of the event along with Marisa Galvez, the director of the Stanford Center for Poetics. The symposium was a snapshot of the DLCL’s work on poetry, Pao said, and only reflects a portion of the department’s research.
Pao then introduced Santana, who read the piece “Inherit” from her poetry collection “The Disordered Alphabet.” The poem starts by breaking apart the title into three words – “in her, it” — before playing with and deconstructing words and their sounds.
Reflecting on the collection, Santana said “I’m just fascinated by words. They give, and they give, and they give. It’s one of the strongest magics I know.” According to Santana, the book focuses on homophones and homonyms and how changes in a few letters result in entirely different meanings and pronunciations.
Beneath the mischievous wordplay, however, lies a tragic exigence. “[The poems] began with the question of grief,” said Santana. “Grief always feels like a party of one, but we will all experience [it], if we have not already.”
Following Santana’s reading, the panel of graduate students each introduced a work of poetry they found especially meaningful.
First up was Anna Galietti, a fifth year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature. Galietti’’s area of research is invective exchange poetry, or “diss tracks,” as she explained in layman’s terms. The genre’s lack of broad recognition comes from its pattern of having localized surges in popularity, Galietti said, but these tend to be short-lived as their key figures pass away.
Despite the ephemerality of their popularity, however, the insults endure. “This is going to be your first impression of the people that are named in these verses, [not] how great they are, but how bad they are,” Galietti said.
Galietti read from an Arabic invective poem describing the poet’s enemy as one so impotent as to be “ washed away by the stream of [the poet’s] urine like dust in the ocean.”
“ It’s a fantastic image,” said Galietti. “I’ve never ever encountered anything like it in poetry.”
Harry Carter, a fourth year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, examined what he called “ the first poem that [he] loved”: “The Good Morrow” by John Donne.
Carter considers the highlight of the poem to be the beginning of the second stanza, when Donne shifts from a dreamlike discussion of the past to the certainty of the now. “ It’s all about possibility and impossibility,” he said, referencing the Greek concept of kairos, the critical moment.
Reflecting on poetry in general, Carter noted schools usually teach poetry as an exercise in mastering each poem. However, Carter disagrees: ”Really, lyric masters you, because it models and lets you experience a way of kind of imagining yourself, reimagining the possibilities of what your relation to the world is,” he said.
Jon Tadmore, a third year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature, presented the Hebrew poem “Three Reasons” by Hezy Leskly.
According to Tadmore, he initially disliked poetry, which this poem changed. “Three Reasons,” which cheekily outlines the reasons why Leskly dislikes poetry, enraptured Tadmore with its “acerbic wit” and “deep longing,” he said. For Tadmore, Leskly’s mastery of the form lies in his ability to hide complex meanings within simple prose.
The reason for his obsession with the poem? “The way it lets us expect some things from it, but keep[s us] completely surprised,” Tadmore said. “The ways in which we want to touch poetry, or other people through it, because it wants to touch us.”
Second year PhD student in German studies Antje Gebhardt discussed Ulrike Draesner’s German poem, “Nachkriegsmensch” (“post-war man”). According to Gebhardt, who studies memory (“gedächt”), the poem’s concept of “ gedächtnisschleifen” (“memory loops”) interested her, especially given the triple meaning of “schleifen” — a word which can denote grinding, sanding or dragging.
Finally, Hevin Karakurt, a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature, introduced the German poem “gedichte” (“poems”), by Lütfiye Güzel. The poem was published as a piece of paper sold in a sandwich bag, of which Karakurt owns the original. According to Karakurt, the one-line poem’s simple assertion — that poems “don’t happen to you,” is both comedic in the sense that you could literally hand someone the paper and make the poem “happen to them,” but also thought-provoking in its deeper implications about the nature of poetry.
The event concluded with brief remarks from Pao and Galvez, followed by a guest reception.