In order to imagine a place
must we inhabit it?

and by inhabiting, raze the imagination
that made it?

Catherine Kasper (1)

If experimental poets often seek to empty conceptual categories,
including constructions of place, how, then, is the lived experience of
place represented in their work? According to geographer Miles
Richardson, place is "both grounded in the physical world and . . .
lodged in the world of symbolic discourse," "something fixed and
fleeting, something you can walk on and something you can speak" (2).
The notion of a dialogue between the two realms of groundedness and
symbolic expression may provide an entrance to the consideration of the
place of place in contemporary experimental poetry, in which the
destabilization of social constructions, nostalgic idealisms, and
mythologizing is in dialogue with the acknowledgement of lived
experience in the here and now.

This panel will explore issues of place in particular contemporary
experimental poets. Theoretical explorations might include (but are not
limited to) recent writings on place in social anthropology and
cultural geography, such as the work of Miles Richardson, Margaret
Rodman, J. Nicholas Entrikin, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Arjun Appadurai.

Please email a 400- to 500-word proposal with a brief cv by March 25,
2006, to c8martin_at_ryerson.ca

The 2006 MLA Convention will be in Philadelphia, December 27-30.

Camille Martin, Ph.D.
Ryerson University
Toronto, ON
CANADA

NOTES
1. Katherine Kasper, Blueprints of the City (Denver: Transparent Tiger
Press, 2000), 20.

2. Miles Richardson, "Introduction," in Place: Experience and Symbol,
Geoscience and Man, ed. Miles Richardson, vol. 24 (Baton Rouge:
Geoscience Publications, Department of Geography and Anthropology,
Louisiana State University, 1984), 1.

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Received on Mon Feb 20 2006 - 19:28:29 EST