The Lyric Now: A one-day conference

Hosted by the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film – The University of Adelaide (Australia)

& The J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice

14 October 2022

Featuring: Hoa Nguyen, prize-winning author of A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure and Co-Chair, Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts MFA Program, Bard College

‘Why try / to revive the lyric’, writes poet Hoa Nguyen in her 2009 collection Hecate Lochia. These lines, which stand both as statement and question minus a question mark, ask us to consider the status of the lyric afresh, a call that feels ever more urgent in the wake of such critical and theoretical interventions as Gillian White’s Lyric Shame (2014), Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015), and James Longenbach’s The Lyric Now (2020). What, in a time of unprecedented and multivalent national and global crises, is the role of the lyric? What does it mean for poets to work with (or against) the lyric? We are honoured to host prize-winning poet Hoa Nguyen, who will offer a keynote reading and participate in a roundtable with other poets. Abstracts are invited for 15-minute papers that speak to one or more of the following areas: 

- Writing the lyric in a time of crisis 

- Cross-border aesthetics and investments 

- The lyric as protest 

- Questions of form 

- The prose lyric 

- Lyric address and questions of agency 

- ‘The stakes of apostrophic address’ (Culler) 

- The lyric ‘I’, agency, and subjectivity 

- Lyrics of war 

- Temporality and the lyric present. 

Please submit 250-word abstracts to patrick.flanery@adelaide.edu.au by 15 August 2022.