Sam indicated to me that one of his explicit briefs is to increase the conference's diversity, which, [REDACTED] convinced me to say yes. Both conferences have a concomitant (and acknowledged) need to, for their own medium-term viability, to get their demographics a bit younger (that I'm still widely considered "young" despite being a month shy of turning forty, with the wrinkles on my forehead and aches in my joints to prove it, is a problem). In these days of declining enrollment, "jobless recovery," academic and general austerity, and a population that is going to get older in aggregate for the next twenty years or so, at least, this could be difficult.
I agree with you about New Formalism's race problem (while acknowledging Rafael Campo, Elizabeth Alexander, Marilyn Nelson, and others), and indeed I've written on it, but let's face it, minus scholarships, paying in the vicinity of $1,000 plus travel to go to a conference will skew the demographics, too. I say this not to criticize (I know for a fact that Poetry by the Sea isn't generating scads of wealth for Anna and Kim), but because it must play a role in the question of who goes and who doesn't.
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Originally Posted by Andrew Mandelbaum
Is there some public commitment to following the more inclusive trajectory into relevance that it sounds like Kim began as well as a promise to make right any wrongs done her? New formalism or whatever you wanna name the band has had problems getting gigs in the past because so many of the lyrics appealed only to the Whitebread Metal fans. The vague aftertaste from firing a female director under sketchy (sounding?) circumstances isn't exactly bait for youth.
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