Poetry Now: Who Reads It? How Do We Read? Why? [DEADLINE EXTENDED]
PAMLA 2023 Special Session
October 26-29, 2023
This panel is and isn’t about poetry. At its core, it is a panel about our reading habits surrounding poetry, the ways in which the definition of poetry has shifted in its capaciousness, about how we recognize a poem, what has happened to poetry’s public in the wake of Amanda Gorman’s powerful reading of "The Hill We Climb" in Joseph Biden’s presidential inauguration, and what poetry might become in a heavily digitized, perhaps even metaversal future. The specter that haunts this panel is Stanley Fish’s “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One,” but his essay is really just one starting point in how critics have been fervently trying to recognize our reading habits on poetry.