cfp.english.upenn.edu

Proposals are sought for a critical volume titled Form is Emptiness, Emptiness is Form: Buddhism and American Poetry. I am looking for a few additional essays complete the collection, which is already secured for publication.

This collection gathers critical essays addressing American poets, poetry, and poetics intersecting with Buddhist philosophy and practice. Although the Buddha’s teachings have long influenced American literature over the last century, within the last twenty years we have seen the publication of three collections specifically featuring Buddhist American Poetry, with the most recent being The Wisdom Anthology of North American Buddhist Poetry (2005). Therefore, proposals may engage the work of individual poets, particular volumes of poetry, trends among Buddhist American poetics, or concentrate attention on specific poems in conversation with Buddhism——but all proposals should root theoretical complexities in a mindful reading of poetry.

Approaches and connections could include but are not limited to:

• what constitutes a “Buddhist poem”
• how Buddhist philosophy and practice figure in the American poetic text
• aspects of lineage, teachers, and gurus
• representations of varying Buddhist schools and practices
• poetry representing Theravada, Mahayana, or Vajrayana traditions
• visualizations and the language of imagery
• the poetry of bodhicitta and the Bodhisattva path
• sitting, walking, or writing meditation
• contemplation of karma and samsara, interdependence and emptiness
• “Western” Buddhism and the dispersal of the Dharma
• esoteric philosophy and/or American Avant-Garde poetics
• the role of form in Dharma poetry
• interconnections between Buddhism and science
• Buddhism, the environment, and American ecopoetics or ecospirituality
• engaged Buddhism and nonviolent poetics
• the Buddhist protest poem.

Email submissions preferred; please send 400-600 word abstracts as MSWord attachments to Dr. Clare Emily Clifford by July 30, 2012 at ccliffor[at]bsc[dot]edu.

Dr. Clare Emily Clifford
Department of English
Birmingham-Southern College
ccliffor[at]bsc[dot]edu.