Reflecting on the 2024 Spring Celebration event held at the Stanford Humanities Center, Phillips asks “what sort of thing do we mean when we talk about hope”?

Tsur suggests that a reader’s rhythmical performance of complex lines (i.e., lines in which the linguistic pattern and the versification pattern diverge) may be regarded as a problem-solving activity that makes the conflicting patterns perceptible.

As they share the belief that it is referential language that, in its predictable and transparent patterns, causes death of the mind and rebroadcasts, on the level of writing, the rules of commodity fetishism, Language poets set out to create an alternative linguistic discourse that aims to undermine the instrumental use of language.

What is it about the human (Western?) mind that compels us to think in narratives?