Review of the Sixth International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry: Breaking Through the Abstract: Poetry as/in/for Social Justice

Abstract

This is a review of the 6th International Symposium on Poetic Inquiry held at Bowling Green State University, and graciously hosted by Sandra Faulkner. This symposium meets biennially with presenters from many different areas of the world such as Nova Scotia, Canada, and New Zealand. The theme this year was poetry in/as/for social justice. In this review, I seek to think through some of the questions and uncertainties that arose over the course of the few days we met in November. We complicated meanings of social justice at this contemporary time and revisited formulations of social justice through past events. Within this review, I write a personal/theoretical piece embedded with citations from poets, and in the end compose a poem that is an amalgamation of language from presenters’ abstracts and my own ideas.

Keywords

• art/research reviews
• poetic inquiry, poetry, social justice