NB: deadline extended to 10/15!

For Adrienne Rich, those who watch “will never act,” yet therein lies the enactive potential of poetry, which “appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in [this] prevailing mode” of “managed spectacles and passive spectators.” As Sean Bonney insists, “The deep truth is imageless. When you know that, you know there’s everything to play for.” And “everything”? It is, per Diane di Prima, that for and after which we must ask: “you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything." To tap Bonney once more, “All else” — indeed, anything short of everything! — “is madness and suffering at the hands of the pigs."

For this NeMLA seminar, we invite papers about poetry that queries, critiques, and/or outright contests visual culture and its passivity-inducing spectacles (including those based in carceral capitalism, militainment, and other forms of imperial projection). In the delugional mirror-house of the image, thought itself becomes enclosed in the asphyxiating confines of consumption-based living (and dying). What are some extra-visual sensory means (whether sonic, olfactory, tactile, or gustatory) through which poets conjure the urgencies of radical transformation (social; economic; environmental)? And more broadly, how might poetry expose — and render intolerable — the inadequacies of our existing perceptions, expectations, and desires?

This panel is dedicated to poetries of uncommon sense-making and the ways in which poets dispense with cannibalistic voyeurism, instead conspiring to foist readers beyond the page and into direct confrontation with the meager rations of our “given” (and radically unequal) world, into confrontations which press toward emplaced collective struggle, asking, yes: for everything. We especially welcome abstracts that address intersections between poetry and anti-racist environmentalism, abolition, and anti-capitalist thought (and action!). Experimental and creative presentations are also encouraged.

Please direct inquiries about this seminar to Knar Gavin (kegavinn@gmail.com). Abstracts (250-300 words) must be uploaded to the NeMLA portal by October 15, 2024: https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/21363.