Maryam Ivette Parhizkar with Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle: March 14, 2019

Following an introduction by Steve Dickison, Maryam Ivette Parhizkar begins her reading with her unpublished works "Progress," "A Safety That is Not Safe," and "Monarchs." She then reads "Look at What You've Done" (published at Social Text Online) and "Devotional," an unpublished work. This is followed by "Study Guide Toward Naturalization of the Mouth" (Poem-A-Day, Academy of American Poets). Parhizkar then reads "Study From The Shape of Time," an unpublished poem and "Postcard from a Place That No Longer Exists" (from Precipice: Writing on the Edge), followed by "On Outer Island" and "The Future Will Hold a Place Like This," both unpublished poems. She then reads "The History of Orphans" (Omniverse). Parhizkar finishes her reading with "More Tender Crevices" and "An Attentiveness to Those Things," both unpublished poems.

Maryam Parhizkar and Kenyatta Hinkle converse at length with one another and the audience. Together they discuss ideas around concepts of abstraction in poetry, the intimacy involved in shifting a reader from "spectator" to "witness," uses of family history in making art and writing, the "right to opacity" as articulated in Edouard Glissant's "poetics of relation," considerations of privacy and safety when making work concerning others' lives, growing up in a polylingual environment, family influence on language use, musicality as allowing for a kind of ethics, tactics for working within the academy against the grain of its institutional racial, class and gender based biases, and multiple insights that arise from Hinkle's practice as both visual artist and poet, and Parhizkar's work as scholar and poet.