The River City Lecture, Sponsored by Alice Major. Poetry translates experience into writing that often helps us navigate compromised categories of belonging and home. As poets, our perceptions of the world departs from and involves our use of language—and depends on the social for meanings to cohere. Poetry offers many reminders to ourselves, that to use language to create is always an act of transgression—less about a strict crossing of decided borders than an act that puts us imminently always in relation to someone else, in their own place, with their own ways of seeing and being and moving through the world. We are as poets always in search of marking our encounters by shaping language towards making something concrete of the mysteries that surround us. Poetry is a means of entering abstract categories in order to turn out forms and shapes for our lives beyond the mere immediacy of […]