The "Poetry and Pain" panel at the NeMLA Conference in spring 2025 will address how pain is felt, articulated, negotiated, alleviated, withstood, or appreciated through poetry and poetics. Elaine Scarry’s formative work, The Body in Pain (1985), describes physical suffering as an inexpressible, singular force that establishes an interpretive void between sufferer and witness. More recently, scholars of disability studies such as Margaret Price have retheorized pain as shared, structural, creative, or even desirable. This session aims to explore the many ways in which poetry thus contends with pain. Does poetry’s speaker/reader construction mimic or alter the sufferer/witness divide? How might poetic form represent bodily sensations accurately or inventively? Does experimentation with the language of pain constitute a political tool for bridging the individuality of suffering? Can poetry materially help us confront injury, find healing, or challenge altogether the normative mandate of pain’s absence? This session invites papers which center poetry and pain (both broadly conceived). Proposals dealing with health/medical humanities, disability studies, trauma studies, or gender and women’s studies are especially welcome.

Please submit an abstract (250-300 words) and a brief bio (<100 words) by September 30 through the NeMLA portal for consideration: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21327. Questions can be directed to Caroline Hensley at cmhensley@wisc.edu. Thanks!