poetry

The proposal H.R. 861, a bill recently introduced to terminate the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, prompts us to address the directions of ecocritical discourse in order to attend to the current material-specific, aesthetic, and rhetorical renderings of changing landscapes on a warming planet. What kind of citizenry is possible in environments overflowing with toxic waste? How do fossil fuels shape the imaginaries of urban and rural ecologies? What are the limits and possibilities of forensic and material analyses to shed light on catastrophic degradations of the environment without recuperating or fabricating disgust?

Call for papers: The Sentence (FPC n° 13)

The sentence is defined as the linguistic unit that makes up most texts, whether poetic or not; it is structured into an autonomous shape in which lexical elements are organised along syntactic relations and offer a semantic unity which is in turn inscribed in the text’s logical and discursive organisation.

As a formal element in the poetic text, the sentence is here viewed as offering two sides: its syntactic dimension and its textual function. In the context of poetic modernity these two dimensions are subjected to developments and experimentations that can contribute to the formal statute of poeticity.

Pomona Valley Review is looking for poetry, short fiction, and artwork for our 11th issue this July. PVR needs quality work from undergraduates, graduates, and professionals alike from any college campus, but all are welcome to submit. Quality is our only criterion. Please see our website for details on submitting online and for free versions of previous issues. Deadline is May 31st.

www.pomonavalleyreview.com

An “Aesthetic Apartheid” occurs when the artistic innovations of a minoritized group are neglected due to their difference. [1] The focus on white and western innovations in literature have created the assumption that non-white avant-garde poetry, "however singular its ‘voice’ is not ‘formally innovative’.”[2] Examples of this bias are evident in monographs about the avant-garde, in which people of color are far too often excluded. Dorothy Wang writes that “anyone who has spent time in avant-garde poetry/and or critical circles in the States [….] knows that these circles are overwhelmingly unpigmented.”[3]

This panel reflects on the place of confusion in British and American modernism. Confusion has not been traditionally considered a proper scholarly response to textual analysis; critics are supposed to interpret a text rather than allow themselves to experience its uncertainties. What happens when we explore the confusion we feel when reading not as something to be worked through, but as something to be worked with? Building on affect theorists’ work on how our feelings can influence the way we read, such as Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading and Rita Felski’s reflective and post-critical reading, how can considering confusion change both our experience of reading and our critical practices?