1. Title

Found Poetry and/as Pedagogy

2. Background

Poetry, labelled by Wallace Stevens as "the supreme fiction" (1961), as the highest form of creative production, also evidences the mastery of a target language, and by extension the instruction of a target language or literary aesthetic. Poetry, reified and increasingly instrumentalised today, is also used in various industries as a way of promoting empathy with a client or patient (as in the case of medical workers and practitioners (Mazza and Hayton, 2013)). Found poetry, subsequently, as conceived by Walter Benjamin in the early 20th century, is unique in that it collects existing lines (or pearls) from material production (verse, prose, film) in order to create new meaning—in essence formulating novel readings through the collage of once seemingly disparate, and now conjoined, lines. Found poetry places divergent forms and genres into conversation—it creatively combines the old and the new, the putative high and low. Perhaps pursuant to William H. Burroughs and Brion Gysin's (1977) popular extension of found poetry in their famous Dadaist cut-ups and Burroughs' Nova Trilogy, Benjamin's high modernist poetic exercise now finds itself used in teaching and learning through, for example, the multitude of lesson plans published online for primary and secondary schools (NCTE 2013; and William Victor, S.L., 2010). Little scholarly research, however, has so far been conducted concerning the contemporary usage of found poetry vis-à-vis Teaching & Learning (Love 2012), especially in university and/or second-language learning contexts.

3. Purpose

Found poetry evidences the fruitful marriage of existing language, scholarship, and pedagogy. This panel proposes to inaugurate a community of creative writers, researchers, and instructors under the ample latitudes of our deliberately broad title "Found Poetry and/as Pedagogy" at the WEI Bali 2014 Conference. Invited panel attendees may also have the opportunity to publish extended versions of their presentations in book form. The tentative title for the book is eponymous with our panel title: Found Poetry and/as Pedagogy.

4. What we want

We solicit 15-minute papers that consider, combine, or supplement any of the following suggestive (rather than prescriptive) topics:
found poetry produced in the university classroom in Asia
found poetry and context (mediated discourse analysis, Fish's interpretive communities, Foucault's knowledge/power)
found poetry and hybridity (Bhabha's dissemination and/or third space)
found poetry and the (post)colonial project (Spivak's subalternity, Said's exoticism)
cento (resistance/reification in Antiquity)
cut-up (the Dadaists, the Beats, Burroughs, Hip-Hop)
how (not) to teach a found poem
why (not) teach found poetry

5. Submission instructions

By 1 March 2014, please submit the following:
300-word abstracts and representative bibliographies
Author institution and contact email address
Up to 5 keywords

Moreover, given the broad-based T & L logic of the panel, it would be helpful to complete individual syllabi that integrate found poetry and pedagogy to be disseminated at the conference. Send submissions to either dean.a.f.gui@polyu.edu.hk or jspolley@hkbu.edu.hk.

6. What we hope the panel participants will acquire at the conference

A sense of being a part of a unique research community; the opportunity to be published in a unique and innovative research publication; the opportunity critically to examine the usefulness of incorporating found poetry into the Humanities classroom.

http://www.westeastinstitute.com/panel-presentation/