November 4, 2022
Tarren Andrews (Yale University)
“Monstrous Property: or, Who Gets to Write an Epic Poem”
at Fordham University
12:00 pm, Joseph McShane Campus Center, 311
This talk will consider the socio-political legacies of Old English studies as they relate to current poetry. Old English and the tradition of epic poetry is a kind of “monstrous property” of the present settler colonial structures within which we all live. In the wake of such legacies, how do Indigenous scholars engage with Old English? In answer, this paper turns to Kumeyaay poet Tommy Pico’s epic, Nature Poem, to ask, how do Indigenous poets write an epic poem? How do they enter into and turn inside out a genre so intensely associated with Western ideals of whiteness, cultural capital, and monstrous possession?
