This is a call for The American Comparative Literature Association's 2017 Annual Meeting, which will take place at Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands July 6-9, 2017. It means to investigate the entangled relationship of modern and contemporary poetry and ecology. Referencing Rey Chow’s notion of entanglement, i.e., a “condition of overlapping recurrences,” the panel seeks to analyze the points of recursive coincidence that ensue between cultural manifestations, poetic production, and environmental thinking. Entanglement points to associations of spatial proximity, of overlaying, but also of resistance and tension between phenomena. It thus brings occurrences together through affinity and disjunction alike and offers a powerful paradigm to think about mediation in relation to complex networks and loop interactions. The connection of matter and thought entails an act of transference, translation, and transposition, which language, in particular poetic language, accomplishes. Through metaphors and other figurative devices, poetry shows the continuity and progression between the biological body and the symbolic realm and vice-versa. Does ecologically minded poetry attempt to bridge, mediate, or translate between the “language” of beings and things and the language of humans? Does poetry seek to theorize a new consciousness of belonging among beings so as to destabilize the split between nature and culture, the human and the ecosystem? What is poetry’s response to extinction? Or rather, how does the figure of the apocalypse generate poems or emerge as a force of syntactical and semantic destruction? Are biological categories and concepts helpful for an understanding of the relation between poetry and the environment? In short, how does poetry mediate ecology? Among other possibilities, we seek research on how the idioms, wisdoms, and views of the cultural and religious traditions of the indigenous populations of the Americas have permeated (or failed to permeate) the vocabulary and attitudes of modern and contemporary American poets from diverse ethnic, cultural, gendered, economic and religious backgrounds; and theories of translation from the standpoint of ecopoetics.

To submit, please follow the link: http://www.acla.org/node/12425