Divya Victor

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Divya Victor is the author of Curb (Nighboat Books, 2021); Kith (Fence, 2017); Natural Subjects (Trembling Pillow Press, 2015), winner of the Bob Kaufman Award; Things To Do With Your Mouth (Les Figues, 2014); Partial Derivative of the Unnameable (Troll Thread, 2005); and Goodbye John! On John Baldessari (2012); and the chapbooks UNSUB (2014), Hellocasts by Charles Reznikoff by Divya Victor by Vanessa Place (2011), and SUTURES (2009). Her poetry, poetics, and criticism have appeared in Dusie, Journal of Commonwealth & Postcolonial Studies, Crux, and P-QUEUE, among others, and her poetry has been translated into French and Czech. 

She has been a Mark Diamond Research Fellow at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, a riverrun Fellow at the Archive for New Poetry at University of California San Diego, and a writer-in-residence at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibit (LACE). Her work has been performed and installed for or at Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Singapore, LACE, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Victor earned a PhD from the State University of New York at Buffalo and is an assistant professor of Poetry and Writing at Michigan State University. She is an editor of Jacket2. Source  

THE AUDRE LORDE QUESTIONNAIRE TO ONESELF

  1. What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]

  2. What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]

  3. “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”  [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow. And the day after.]

  4. If we have been “socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition”, ask yourself: “What’s the worst that could happen to me if I tell this truth?”* [So, answer this today. And every day.]

Published:

2016

Length:

Shorty

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2023

Themes:

Ars Poetica

Education & Learning

Literary Devices:

Imperative

an instruction or a command

List Poem

A list poem features an inventory of people, places, things, or ideas organized in a particular way, usually numbered.