27-30 May 2017, Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario

This member-organized session seeks to cultivate dialogues around contemporary experimental poetics – broadly construed – in Canada to address the transpositions and dissonances between formations of neoliberal capitalism and innovations in poetic form and matter. How might we conceptualize the landscape of contemporary experimental Canadian poetics by considering the ways in which the crises, ruptures, and events of neoliberal capitalism are deeply entangled with poetic creation? At the limit of the category of the experimental, do poetics of experimentation – poetics that grapple with the category of the “new” – not both refract and reflect the fetishization of the new by neoliberal capital? What modes of critique, then, might emerge from experimental poetics in Canada? Is it precisely the very site of the otherwise, the new, that reproduces the strokes of capital? Do poetics of appropriation or conceptualist modes enact resistances to neoliberal drives in their refusal of the new? Finally, in the moment of Canada’s Sesquicentennial, how do experimental poetics in Canada offer modalities of thinking, acting, and being otherwise?

To submit an abstract for this panel, please send the following to Max Karpinski at max.karpinski@mail.utoronto.ca or Kyle Kinaschuk at kyle.kinaschuk@mail.utoronto.ca 

-       A file containing a 300 to 500-word proposal without personal identifying marks

-       A file containing a 100-word abstract and a 50-word biography

-       The 2017 Proposal Info Sheet available on the ACCUTE website