Material Poetics: Drafting, Duration, Form

One-day conference at Stewart House, Russell Square.

Event date: November 5, 2025.

The conference is jointly supported by Techne and the Poetics Research Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Keynote speakers: Professor Cole Swensen and Professor Jeanne Heuving 

Poetic practice today is inevitably shaped by its material engagements, from the varied energies of the drafting process, embodied inscriptions, and engagements with the social world. This one-day symposium centres on ‘material poetics’ broadly conceived. ‘Material’ foregrounds the movements and velocities of the hand in ‘maximally excited’ wanderings (Hejinian 42). Rather than erasing stray marks, how might poetic practice retain the movements of what the textual scholar Marta Werner writes of as the ‘erring hand […] its labor, its risks, its inhabitation of time and history’? (63) In turn, how does the inscription of process into the work – ink-splashes, typos, fingerprints on the page, tears, stains – change our reading habits and interpretations? In Noise That Stays Noise (2011) Cole Swensen formulates the hand-written poetic line as itself ‘a slippery instance at which writing actually becomes visual art and visual art becomes language’ (82). Here we necessarily return to the movements of the body as part of the conceptual undertaking of the work, such as CAConrad’s (soma)tic poetics. We are interested in work that explores themes of writerly embodiment through processes and procedures of poetic practice, especially those that posit resistance to societal norms, including but not limited to those imposed by restrictive, exclusionary and/or oppressive constructions of race, ethnicity, gender, disability and class.

We might also think of ‘material poetics’ through what Rachel Blau DuPlessis describes as poetry’s ‘cultural work’. DuPlessis’ long poem Drafts (1986-2012) is materially engaged with its moment of production, saturated in ‘an on-going world crisis of global plunder, ecological shocks, economic depredation, gender wrongs, and national malfeasance’ (DuPlessis, Surge 17). Recent experiments in the long poem engage with the complexities of writing through duration. In the preface to Splay Anthem (2006), Nathaniel Mackey describes how ‘seriality’s mix of utopic ongoingness and recursive constraint is blutopic, an idealism shaped or shaded by blue, in-between foreboding, blue, dystopic apprehension of the way the world is’ (14). We seek to engage with poetic works that are challenging to traditional poetic conventions, and which take a radical approach to the formation of alternative conceptual materialities through ‘material poetics’ as a rigorous mode of poetics and creative-critical textual practice.

With this in mind… 

We invite proposals for 15-20 minute critical or practice-led presentations that may engage with the following topics:

- The extended duration of the long poem (e.g. Nathaniel Mackey, Allen Fisher, Drew Milne, Myung Mi Kim, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Jeanne Heuving)

- Embodied mark-making (e.g. Maggie O’Sullivan, Renee Gladman, Scott Thurston)

- Archival poetics (e.g. Bhanu Kapil, Susan Howe, Karen Sandhu, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha)

- Site responsive works (e.g. Carol Watts, Caroline Bergvall)

- Intermedial and translative practices (e.g. Vincent Broqua, Lisa Robertson, Quinn Latimer, Zoë Skoulding, Harryette Mullen)

- Process materialities of the book and related forms (e.g. Susan Johanknecht and Katharine Meynell, Erica Baum, Gill Partington)

- Handwriting, drawing, typing, gesturing

- Compositional strategies

- Embodied practices such as walking and dancing

- Digital writing technologies

- Manuscript practice

- The contemporary poetry archive

- Structures of revision, editing, and re-drafting

- Process-based works

Please send a short 250 word abstract and a brief biographical statement to Serafina Lee (serafina.lee.2024@live.rhul.ac.uk), Sara O’Brien (sara.obrien.2024@live.rhul.ac.uk) and Max Shirley (m.shirley@westminster.ac.uk) by 10 September, 2025. Participants will be notified by 17 September, 2025.

Works cited

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2006. Print.

---. Surge: Drafts 96-114. Norwich: Salt Publishing, 2013. Print.

Hejinian, Lyn. The Language of Inquiry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 2000. Print.

Mackey, Nathaniel. Splay Anthem. New York: New Directions, 2006. Print.

Swensen, Cole. Noise That Stays Noise: Essays. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Print. 

Werner, Marta. “Reportless Places’: Facing the Modern Manuscript.’ Textual Cultures: Text, Contexts, Interpretation 6.2 (2011): 60-83. Web. 25 June 2024.