Mar 25, 2022

About: Blank

Adam Wyeth

Hosted by Bridget English

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Summary

The city of Dublin, with its ancient cobblestones, historic pubs, and legendary river Liffey, has been a source of inspiration for writers and poets for centuries. Though it might provide a creative buzz, modern city existence can often prove exhausting for the contemporary poet constantly bombarded with new sights, sounds, and smells, as well as the increasing pull of technology, with smartphone apps and messages vying for attention, offering new ways of interacting with the history of the city, or with imagined versions of it. Adam Wyeth’s new experimental poetry collection about:blank (Salmon Poetry, 2021) takes the city of Dublin as its setting and depicts the pressures of contemporary urban life by expanding the poetic form to include a variety of genres and short forms: monologue, dialogue, and instructions for yoga poses. These narratives are interwoven to give readers a remarkable impression of contemporary human existence and the ways that human consciousness is shaped by myth, literary references, music, technology, and lived environments.

Wyeth’s clever and thought-provoking book of poetry—the title itself a reference to the message that appears in internet browser’s address bar to indicate an empty web page—meditates on what it means to be a writer in an ever-changing world and touches on philosophical questions surrounding identity, selfhood, and the absurdity of existence.

Bridget English is a scholar of Irish literature and culture, modernism, and health humanities, based at the University of Illinois Chicago. She co-convenes the Irish Studies Seminar at the Newberry Library and is the Literature Representative for the American Conference for Irish Studies.

Twitter feed: https://twitter.com/bridgetrenglis2

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Bridget English

Brigid Wallace is a graduate student at Lehigh University. A historian of the French Atlantic world, my research explores how race, migration, revolution, and science shaped the lives of ordinary people during the Age of Revolutions. Her work traces the movement of people, plants, and ideas across the Atlantic, focusing on mixed-race families who fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution and rebuilt their lives in Charleston, South Carolina. Her master's thesis, "Preservation of a Family: The Noisettes' Journey from Saint-Domingue to Charleston, 1794–1860," examines how one family navigated the political upheavals of the French, Haitian, and American Revolutions while preserving kinship networks across shifting racial and national boundaries. Through the story of the Noisette family, I investigate how migration transformed identities and how refugees carried not only memories and traditions but also scientific knowledge. Her work demonstrates that the history of revolution is not only a story of politics and war but also one of families, mobility, and the exchange of knowledge that reshaped the modern Atlantic world.

"You may encounter many obstacles, but you must not be defeated!" Maya Angelou

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