In September 2025, our first-year cohort member Abigail Drach took part in the London Centre for Interdisciplinary Research’s international conference on poetry. The theme of the conference was “Poetry Between Creation and Interpretation,” and she presented an excerpt of her in-progress poetry collection that plays with the boundary of these two activities. Entitled Notes App Elegies, her collection thinks through the poetic process and attempts to resituate the autobiographical sensibility of much contemporary literature within the social-historical forces and public spaces in which personal narratives unfold. It struggles against the “I,” the unique and inwardly-oriented self, by attending to that which produces the autobiographic poetic speaker, from political structures to other writers to the landscapes in which this “I” writes.
Her fellow panelists presented on a range of different subjects, but shared her commitment to understanding poetry as something embedded in the world beyond the page. There were presentations on using poetry to express one’s social and political standpoint, comparing how poets T.S. Eliot and G.M. Muktibodh developed their writing process in response to their specific historical circumstances, reading avant-garde and neo-avant-garde poetry for distinctly kinetic sensibilities, and thinking of architecture as a form of poetic expression. How wonderful a start to the fall 2025 with poetry!