Three Poets on Hurricanes, History & the Converse MFA

Name: Three Poets on Hurricanes, History & the Converse MFA
Start: 2021-11-16T12:00:00-05:00
End: 2021-11-16T13:00:00-05:00
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When her Florida apartment is damaged by the ferocity of Hurricane Irma, Denise Duhamel turns to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem “Terza Irma.” Throughout her new poetry collection, Second Story: Poems, she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, hyper aware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. With fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second story window, she bravely faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell. In formal and nontraditional poems, Ashley M. Jones calls for long-overdue reparations to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States. In Reparations Now!, she takes on the worst of today – state-sanctioned violence, pandemic-induced crises, and white silence – all while uplifting Black joy. In In All These Hungers: Poems, Rick Mulkey turns on his hungers, turns Rimbaud into something American, small town scrappy, transparent and musky: these poems land on the tongue and in the brain and center on the stomach. Whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, very cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine – these Rabelaisian poems have a nose for the ground that smells “like dusty clocks.”

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Mulkey, Rick

Rick Mulkey is the author of six collections, including Ravenous: New & Selected Poems, Toward Any Darkness, Before the Age of Reason, and Bluefield Breakdown. His individual poems and essays have appeared in Poetry East, Georgia Review, Crab Orchard Review, and the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Southern Poetry Anthology: Volumes I and II, and A Millennial Sampler of South Carolina Poetry, among others. In his new collection, All These Hungers: Poems (Brick Road Poetry Press, Inc.), Mulkey turns the Rimbaud of “Turn my hungers. Feed, hungers, in the meadows of sounds,” into something American, small-town scrappy, transparent, and musky. Of his hunger, Mulkey makes memorable poems that celebrate food and its flavors – whisky, beans, peppered pork belly bacon, lemonade, unclean scrambled eggs, cold sweet tea, onions, beets, tomatoes, wine, and beer. These poems overflow with juice. Poet Denise Duhamel – his co-editor on the new anthology Ice on a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry (Clemson University Press) – noted that “Mulkey’s poems hunger for big truths, little truths, love, and justice. His irresistible American vernacular, visceral wisdom, and lyrical honesty make him one of the most authentic poetic voices of his generation.”

Jones, Ashley M.

Ashley M. Jones is the first Black poet to be selected poet laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She authored two previous poetry collections, Magic City Gospel and dark // thing. Her poems and essays appear or are forthcoming on many platforms and in journals and anthologies, including the Academy of American Poets, Tupelo Quarterly, Prelude, Steel Toe Review, Poets Respond to Race Anthology, and Fjords Review. Jones is also the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival in Birmingham, Alabama. In Reparations Now! (Hub City Press) she calls for what is owed to the Black descendants of enslaved people in the United States. In formal and nontraditional poems, Jones explores trauma past and present, cultural and personal. They might address the lynching of young, pregnant Mary Turner in 1918; the current white nationalist political movement; or a case of infidelity. But she also celebrates Black life and art in its many forms, from music to cooking. In its review, Publishers Weekly celebrated how in “poems that showcase a wide formal range, Jones … expertly juxtaposes historical moments and incidents with personal history in her impressive third collection.”

Duhamel, Denise

Denise Duhamel’s books include Ka-Ching!, Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems, and Kinky. When Hurricane Irma hit her Florida apartment, Duhamel kept a journal of her terrifying experience and turned to Dante and terza rima, reconstructing the form into the long poem “Terza Irma.” In Second Story: Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press), she investigates our near-catastrophic ecological and political moment, aware of her own complicity, resistance, and agency. The 37 poems in the collection include odes to her favorite uncle – who was “green” before it was a hashtag – and Mother Nature, via a retro margarine commercial. She writes letters to her failing memory as well as to America’s collective amnesia. With the fear of the water below and a burglar who enters through her second-story window, she faces the story under the story, the second story we often neglect to tell. Duhamel is also co-editor, with Rick Mulkey, of the anthology Ice on a Hot Stove: A Decade of Converse MFA Poetry (Clemson University Press). The book highlights the last decade of poetry presented in the MFA in creative writing program at Converse College and produced by the program’s faculty, visiting faculty, and graduates. For more than a century, the college has held a distinct position in the literary history of South Carolina.

Three Poets on Hurricanes, History & the Converse MFA