Hamilton College Hosts Two Talks on Poetics: Hoa Nguyen & John Rufo

Hoa Nguyen and John Rufo will present two talks on poetics on Monday April 18th. Hoa Nguyen's talk + reading will be at 4:30pm in KJ 005. John Rufo's talk will be at Ha7:00pm in KJ 005.In this talk, Hoa Nguyen addresses poetry as a site of simultaneous struggle and recovery. She begins with a 1976 talk by poet Robert Duncan called "Warp and Woof," seeing in poetry's structure what Duncan calls "double events," a woven tapestry of competing terms. Nguyen's meditation situates poetry in an international context of Vietnamese folks songs, southern US ballads, North American punk, and Delta Blues where artists can be seen performing a range of cross-cultural defiance, political acknowledgment, and social crossings. Hoa Nguyen is the author of As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and the forthcoming Violet Energy Ingots (all from Wave Books). She teaches poetics at Ryerson University’s Chang School, in Miami University’s MFA program, at the Milton Avery School for Fine Arts at Bard College, and in a long-running, private workshop.John Rufo's performance involves a presentation / process / discussion of interviews he conducted with twelve poets over the past year in fulfillment of a Senior Fellowship. Both involve the use of multimedia and various approaches to poetics.