Call for Papers: ‘Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form’
Deadline for submission: 10 September, 2025.
One-day conference at Stewart House, Russell Square.
Event date: November 5, 2025.
Poetic practice today is inevitably shaped by its material engagements, from the varied energies of the drafting process, embodied inscriptions, and engagements with the social world. This one-day symposium centres on ‘material poetics’ broadly conceived. ‘Material’ foregrounds the movements and velocities of the hand in ‘maximally excited’ wanderings (Hejinian 42). Rather than erasing stray marks, how might poetic practice retain the movements of what the textual scholar Marta Werner writes of as the ‘erring hand […] its labor, its risks, its inhabitation of time and history’? (63) In turn, how does the inscription of process into the work – ink-splashes, typos, fingerprints on the page, tears, stains – change our reading habits and interpretations? In Noise That Stays Noise (2011) Cole Swensen formulates the hand-written poetic line as itself ‘a slippery instance at which writing actually becomes visual art and visual art becomes language’ (82). Here we necessarily return to the movements of the body as part of the conceptual undertaking of the work, such as CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetics. We are interested in work that explores themes of writerly embodiment through processes and procedures of poetic practice, especially those that posit resistance to societal norms, including but not limited to those imposed by restrictive, exclusionary and/or oppressive constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, disability and class.
We invite proposals for 15-20 minute critical or practice-led presentations that may engage with the following topics:
- The extended duration of the long poem
- Embodied mark-making
- Archival poetics
- Site responsive works
- Intermedial and translative practices
- Process materialities of the book and related forms
- Handwriting, drawing, typing, gesturing
- Compositional strategies
- Embodied practices such as walking and dancing
- Digital writing technologies
- Manuscript practice
- The contemporary poetry archive
- Structures of revision, editing, and re-drafting
- Process-based works
Please send a short 250 word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Serafina Lee (
c2VyYWZpbmEgISBsZWUgISAyMDI0IHwgbGl2ZSAhIHJodWwgISBhYyAhIHVr), Sara O’Brien (
c2FyYSAhIG9icmllbiAhIDIwMjQgfCBsaXZlICEgcmh1bCAhIGFjICEgdWs=) and Max Shirley (
bSAhIHNoaXJsZXkgfCB3ZXN0bWluc3RlciAhIGFjICEgdWs=) by 10 September, 2025. Participants will be notified by 17 September, 2025.
More info:
https://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/cfp/2025/07/28/material-poetics-drafting-duration-form
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