Forced Migrations & Poetry as Encounter

Slought is pleased to announce "Forced Migrations & Poetry as Encounter," a reading and conversation with Argentine poet Dani Zelko on Monday April 22, 2019 from 6-8 pm. Zelko will discuss his latest bilingual book Reunión: North Border / Frontera Norte, which he co-produced with persons from Latin America and the Middle East in the context of their migration to the U.S. and Canada. Zelko will be in conversation with scholar Jennifer Ponce de León of the Social Justice / Global South working group at the University of Pennsylvania, which is co-presenting this program with support from Hispanic & Portuguese Studies, the Kelly Writers House Wexler Studio, and the Latin American & Latino Studies (LALS) program.

Zelko is a poet from Buenos Aires who describes his practice as a search for an "affective conceptualism." His ongoing project Reunión is organized around a procedure in which invites strangers to write poems together. After spending time together, these persons dictate their stories to Zelko, who acts as their scribe. The next day, he prints the poems in chapbooks and organizes a gathering where the author will read his book, and other books from Reunión are also read. In the project's second phase, Zelko finds spokespersons for the writers, who then read the poems aloud in other towns. As he writes, "At the beginning, in an encounter, spoken word becomes written word. At the end, poems make possible an encounter where the written word becomes oral. Poems are at last between two persons instead of two pages."

To create Reunión: North Border / Frontera Norte, Zelko traveled through towns, rural communities, and border crossings in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada, where he met people who had been forced to leave their homes – in Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Iraq, Jordan, Haiti, Cuba -– and migrate to North America. Reunión: North Border is a collection of their life stories. It also includes analyses of contemporary migration by leading intellectuals from Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina.