How does lyric address create forms of relation across difference? This panel invites papers examining the intersections of poetry, lyric address, and peacebuilding, with particular attention to coexistence, care, responsibility, witness, repair, and collective life.

Northeast Modern Language Association 58th Annual Convention, Newport, RI, March 6-9, 2027 (Salve Regina University)

Deadline for abstract submissions: September 30, 2026 

Please submit abstracts via the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22533

In 1977, Jonathan Culler identified apostrophe as both lyric's "most embarrassing" feature and one of its most powerful means of constructing relation. Still, the nature of the relationship conjured by lyric address remains elusive, particularly when speaker, addressee, and reader occupy different social positionalities. Under conditions of difference, what kinds of ethical, political, ecological, or affective encounters become possible through acts of poetic address? How might lyric relations inform broader understandings of peace, coexistence, responsibility, care, and collective life?

Poets across time have turned to lyric address as a means of bearing witness to violence—efforts gathered, for example, in Carolyn Forché's anthology Poetry of Witness. Yet lyric address does more than register rupture; it also imagines forms of responsibility and repair beyond it. As Joy Harjo reminds us in "How to Write a Poem in a Time of War," "You can't begin just anywhere." Peacebuilding, too, begins from situated forms of relation. Rather than limiting peace to the aftermath of violence, this panel understands peacebuilding broadly as a set of practices through which social bonds, coexistence, care, and collective life are imagined and negotiated.

This panel invites papers that examine the intersections of lyric address and peacebuilding across periods, traditions, and methodologies—seeking to bring lyric theory into conversation with peace studies in order to highlight poetry’s capacity to imagine new forms of relation. Topics may include poetry and peace studies; lyric theory; witness and testimony; environmental and ecological relations; feminist, queer, decolonial, and Indigenous approaches to coexistence; mourning, repair, and reconciliation; political forms of address; imagined communities; and broader questions concerning the possibilities and limits of poetry as a mode of ethical encounter.

Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please reach out with any questions.