Looking at What We Leave

Abstract
How do images help us reckon with loss? Why do we seek visual representations to explain, complicate, or otherwise substitute for grief? Unlike sounds and smells which permeate, images are more contained. Pictures have borders and films have frames. “Looking at What We Leave” explores the relationship between images and loss–how we create, use, and destroy them to reckon with personal, historical, and ecological losses. What can images recover? What do they leave behind? The poems selected for this panel range in subject matter from a historical figure whose life and relation to the art world has only recently been recovered to a place of personal significance visibly changed over time to a relationship in which different ways of looking unify and separate the speakers from each other.
Presenter Biography
Anna Broadwell-Gulde is a poet and scholar living in central North Carolina, where she is completing her PhD in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In her poetry, she aims to explore the relationship between vision and form—an interest that grew out of her scholarly work. Her dissertation examines how writers during the modernist era incorporated visual portraiture to explore the limits of representations of consciousness. Her poetry thinks imagistically and sensuously–psychic traumas are often reconfigured as perceptual awakenings. Through her poetry and scholarly work, Anna questions how different kinds of vision reveal and occlude—uncover and hide—meaning.