poetry

Call for Papers, for a panel at the next NeMLA conference, in Boston, March 5-8, 2020.

NeMLA’s theme this year will be: "Shaping and Sharing Identities: Spaces, Places, Languages, and Cultures"

Help Thou My (Un)Belief: Reading Belief in 20th- and 21st-century American Literature

CFP for the 51st Annual NEMLA Conference in Boston, Massachusetts, March 5 - 8, 2019

Tracy K. Smith, with four books of poetry, a volume of memoirs, a Pulitzer Prize and two stints as America's poet laureate, has every claim to be a major American poet at the pinnacle of success. It is easy to dwell on the mainstream acceptance that this success has earned. Her work is often described in highly aesthetic language, with an emphasis on its beauty and craft, and she sits neatly in the American poetic tradition. Among those poets she considers “most necessary” she invokes Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Philip Larkin (Ordinary Light 336). 

“The surface is where most of the action is.”

--James Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception

This panel seeks poets writing in the narrative tradition whose poems capture the personal and the public, recording and reflecting on our world by summoning the language and creating the identity of our culture. Panelists will read from their original work and then take audience questions. The Northeast MLA conference takes place March 5-8 in Boston, MA. Submit a sample poem and a short description of your narrative work by September 30. Must submit via link on NeMLA website: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18130

While for many years, the literary canon was the province of “dead white men,” the past fifty years have dramatically altered that paradigm. Contemporary creative writers, too, would like their work to reflect the diversity and complexity of human experience in terms of race, gender, sexual identification, ethnicity, nationality, and culture. This panel invites creative writers of all genres, genders, races, sexual orientations, nationalities, cultures, etc., to consider the challenges of being more inclusive in their work. Some questions that will be considered: Is it possible to write from the perspectives of races, genders, etc., of whom one is not a representative?