Welcome to the fifth & final episode of Season Seven of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series on Poetry podcast.

Season Seven is comprised of lectures written and delivered by Douglas Kearney during his tenure as a Bagley Wright Lecturer. Today we'll hear “Read Red / Red Read: Putting Violence Down in Poetry,” a collaborative performance with Val-Inc, given in person at the Ace Hotel Brooklyn in partnership with BOMB magazine, November 9, 2021.  

Douglas Kearney has long engaged the conflation of violence and entertainment in U.S.American culture, from badman folklore to postcards of lynchings. Still, there are questions that haunt. What are the ethics of representing violence? How might poetic aesthetications of brutality transform, reinscribe, or abet violence? Through a versioned series of essayistic vignettes presented in collaboration with SoundChemist, Val-Inc, Kearney entangles his encounters with violence as a reader, poet and performer.

Visit us at our website, www.bagleywrightlectures.org, for more information about Bagley Wright lecturers, as well as links to supplementary materials on each lecturer’s archive page, including selected writings.

Douglas Kearney's book based on his BWLS lectures, Optic Subwoof (Wave Books, 2022) is available here.

Music: "I Recall" by Blue Dot Sessions

from the Free Music Archive

CC BY NC