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Sweet Repetition: A Reading by Cynthia Cruz
Tulsa Artist Fellowship hosts a reading and conversation with Cynthia Cruz, one of the most important poets working today. She is the author of some dozen books, including eight collections of poetry, and has been awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her latest collection, Sweet Repetition, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Informed by psychoanalytic theory yet intensely lyrical, this collection "considers how repetition holds both the power to constrain and to generate." Is repetition a trap? A move forward? Both? These questions are relevant not only to artists of every kind, but to all of us looking for ways to move forward when our feet seem to be mired in the past. Presented by Tulsa Artist Fellowship 2024-2026 Awardee, Boris Dralyuk.
Thursday, November 20
6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Doors Open: 5:30 PM
Tulsa Artist Fellowship Project Space
205 E Archer Street, Tulsa, OK 74103
Free Event
ABOUT SWEET REPETITION:
Integrating Lacanian and Freudian psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and the works of other poets, this collection explores narrative through abstraction and considers how repetition holds both the power to constrain and to generate. Freud explains how what we repress—what we know but don’t want to acknowledge—reappears in our actions through repetition. Through slips of the tongue or selective memory, we engage with what our unconscious knows, finding knowledge through unknowing. The psychoanalytic session is centered on bringing forth repressed knowledge through acts of unknowing—speaking without thinking—which brings one closer to recognizing an obscured desire. The poetry of Sweet Repetition works in ways akin to the psychoanalytic act. These pulsing poems follow the definitions of the word revolution—to revolve, change direction, unroll, unwind, happen again, repeat, orbit around. Images and words reappear in the motion of Cynthia Cruz’s poems, inviting us into their revolutionary, political, and cumulative effects.
