Divinatory Poetics: A Talk by Hoa Nguyen on Future Feed
“Speaking beyond the immediately known to the perceived elsewhere has been a constant preoccupation of mine and informs my poetics and relationship with the lyric poem. Sometimes this elsewhere speaks from ‘extra-human’ sources: messages from ancestors, animal communications, divination methods, and dream. I’ll be talking about these and modes of attention—an extension of what Robert Duncan spoke of, divination as a strategy for writing out of mysteries when he writes, ‘We do not understand all that we render up to understanding… I study what I write as I study out any mystery.’”
“But instead, it was a different kind of shock and discovery, an impossible-seeming synchronicity.”
Hoa Nguyen’s book A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure was made possible by support from the Canada Council for the Arts.