Camille Dungy Reading Her Poetry



Camille Dungy was one of the workshop faculty at the Sacramento Poetry Center on April 4, 2009. In a discussion I had with her after the workshop, I liked her perspective on language use in creative writing, especially in writing that crosses linguistic boundaries. She believes that a text may be disorienting and unsettling to the readers, demanding that they move out of their comfort zones and experience what the text has to offer, even if it contains untranslated portions of a language the reader does not understand. If the writer has done a good job, the untranslated parts of the text shouldn't be much of a distraction.

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