poetry

The Blues and Jazz Dance Book Club website is seeking monthly feature articles ranging between 1,000 and 3,000 words on various blues and jazz topics for 2018. Our organization is looking for individuals who are actively engaged in blues and jazz culture and/or scholarship who are interested in writing conversational yet informative articles for our website.

“The natural object,” Pound writes, “is always the adequate symbol.” Nevertheless, Modernist literature is plotted along bodily representations that often seem far from the realities of their correlative “natural object.” This panel will consider the tension between Modernism’s representative strategies and the gendered objects that Modernist writers “graph,” focusing particularly on Modernist representations of female, queer, non-white, disabled, and otherwise marginalized bodies. How do the literary strategies of Modernist writers complicate, limit, or make space for bodies, or bodily functions, that might have been given a “Graphic Content Warning”?

PANEL ON POETIC DIGRESSION for ESSE 2018 (www.esse2018brno.org)

From the parecbasis or ‘stepping away’ of Quintilian to the meandering twists and turns of the ‘loiterly’ work, this panel investigates the many and various modes of digression in poetry, figuring digression as a means through which we can rethink poetic effect - poetry’s grammatical, rhetorical, formal, philosophical, lyric and/or narrative power or force.

We invite proposals for conference papers exploring poetic digression and its effects. Topics for discussion might include, but are by no means limited to the following:

Robert Frost intended to insult Stevens’ poetry when he called it mere “bric-a-brac,” verses loaded with pretty ornaments of ultimately little concrete value beyond themselves. In the context of American studies, however, “bric-a-brac” (or “Americana,” in our national tradition) often appreciates in critical value over time. This panel proposes to look at items, objects, or elements of Americana in Stevens’ poetry, essays, letters, and/or life. It welcomes presentations that consider the way Stevens uses or abuses American artifacts or lore in his work, as well as those that establish links between Stevens and other writings, cultural products, or ephemera idealized as unique to (or representative of) the American experience.

Mississippi Philological Association Meeting and Conference

March 2-3, 2018

Jackson State University

Jackson, Mississippi

Call for Papers

The Mississippi Philological Association (MPA) invites submissions of critical or pedagogical papers and creative works for the annual association meeting and conference to be held March 2-3, 2018, at the Mississppi eCenter campus at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. The conference is hosted by the Department of English, Foreign Languages, and Speech Communication, the Department of History and Philosophy, and the College of Liberal Arts at Jackson State University.