Dr. Antje Schmidt’s talk on post-human entanglements in contemporary poetry taught me several things. Still, one of the things I felt was most relevant to me and our class was regarding the importance of political and cultural situations occurring at the time certain things are written and published. During her presentation, she focuses on the work of Carla Cerda who is a biologist, poet and author of Loops. Loops is a series of poems all connected and intertwined with one another, where both the author and reader are included in this sort of journey up and down an elevator which seem to represent many different scenarios.

In one instance, Dr. Antje Schmidt pointed out the relevance of one poem and how Cerda took a real life issue that occured regarding lithium mining, and how it affected flamingos. In the poem, there is a line where she talks about the lithium shining on the feathers of flamingos. I felt its important because if I would’ve read this poem it might hav caught me off guard to see her talking about flamingos, but when looking at the context in which the world was in at the time it makes a lot of sense.

In learning this, so far it has helped me think and do some research on other literature I may be consuming, especially in our class. Since a lot of the texts we read, are not modern, i think this was helpful in showing me how important it is to look at the background of literature and see what important events were happening at the time to understand the relevance of said literature.