The 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival

The word 'weird' has different but intertwined lives as an adjective and a noun. As a noun it can mean individual fate or destiny; as an adjective it takes on the more familiar contemporary sense of odd, slant, strange, uncanny. In this panel, five poets will discuss the "weirds" and obsessive specializations of their own writing – the peculiar personal topics that compel them as writers. Can finding ways to communicate our odd enthusiasms bring us out to meet the world and others? As Philip Metres recently said, "Our obsessions have a way…of returning us to ourselves, [and] to the self that is bigger than ourselves."
Delving into poems about coral reef formation, bivalves, witchcraft, etymologies, fatness, folklore, physics, desire, and pirates, we will discuss how we have used our weird interests to explore the material that shaped (and shapes) our lives. We will also touch on the work of expressing 'weirdness' in prosody, drawing examples not only from our own writing, but from favorite poets including Lucille Clifton, Lucie Brock-Broido, Alfred Tennyson, James Merrill, Tracy K. Smith, and C.D. Wright.