CFP: Chinese Poetry: Institution and Life
Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association (RMMLA) Annual Convention
Conference Dates: October 8-10, 2026
Location: Marriott Courtyard in Ogden, Utah

Session 1 The Institutions of Chinese Poetry

Poetry, as theorized by Peter Bürger and the avant-garde tradition he describes, exists in opposition to the institution of art, the apparatus of production, distribution, and reception that governs art’s place in society. This framing has been especially influential for Chinese poetry, where narratives of underground versus official, minjian versus zhishifenzi, have long structured the field. Yet poets have always written from within institutions: universities, writers’ associations, journals, publishing houses, fellowships, and, increasingly, digital platforms. If the sociology of literature taught us to see these structures, recent shifts make revisiting them urgent. The accelerating academicization of poets across literary cultures, the rise of platforms that algorithmically mediate poetic circulation, and the expansion of transnational networks of translation, fellowship, and consecration have transformed the institutional landscape of poetry in ways that demand renewed attention, not only to contemporary conditions but to the institutional formations they have displaced or reconfigured. This panel welcomes proposals that examine the institutional life of Chinese poetry from any period, including but not limited to the following:

• Writers’ associations, literary journals, and state patronage systems
• The university as a site of poetic production and consecration
• Digital platforms as institutional forms
• Transnational institutions: translation networks, foreign research centers, international festivals
• Poets’ navigation of multiple or competing institutional identities
• Institutional dimensions of canon formation and literary historiography
• Comparisons with institutional structures in other poetic traditions

Please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words in English, along with a short biography (2–3 sentences) and contact information through this google form, by April 1, 2026. Presentations will be delivered in English; papers may address any period of modern and contemporary Chinese-language poetry, including Sinophone and diasporic contexts.

Please direct any inquiries to: Meiling Xiao (meiling2@ualberta.ca)

Session 2 Manifestations of “Life” in Chinese Poetry

This session focuses on the manifold manifestations of “life” as theme, trope, and lived condition in modern and contemporary Chinese-language poetry. Few concepts have been as pervasive or as contested as shenghuo 生活: variously understood as survival, livelihood, everydayness, realism, or embodied experience. Across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, poetry has repeatedly claimed “life” as its grounding, whether in the name of social struggle, stylistic authenticity, or aesthetic renewal.

Recent developments intensify these debates. Migrant worker or “battler” poetry foregrounds labor, precarity, ecological entanglement, and post-socialist extraction as lived realities. Internet poetry cultures and transmedial circulation reconfigure textuality, positioning poetry as performance within platformed and algorithmic environments. In Hong Kong, the discourse of shenghuohua and the everyday have shaped a distinct Sinophone poetic identity, while also generating sustained debates over realism, survival, and political subtlety. Meanwhile, technologically inflected poetics, from digital imagery to new media experimentation, register new modes of perception in an age of ubiquitous mediation. Translation and world-literary circulation further complicate these formations, reframing genres such as battler poetry, internet poetry, and Hong Kong poetry for global audiences and producing new regimes of visibility and emblematic authorship.

This panel invites papers that explore how Chinese poetry figures, mediates, or contests “life” across social strata, media ecologies, and linguistic borders. We particularly welcome work that thinks together embodiment, technology, and everyday practice, including but not limited to the following topics:

• Translation, hypertranslatability, and the positioning of Chinese “life-oriented” poetry in world literature
• Migrant worker/battler poetry and representations of labor, precarity, and social mobility
• Ecopoetics, chorography, and environmental “life” in contemporary worker poetry
• Internet poetry, performance, and transmedial poetics (e.g., Yu Xiuhua, social media, video platforms)
• Disability, gender, and embodiment in online and offline poetic cultures
• The trope of “life” and debates over realism, survival, and shenghuohua
• New media, technology, and digital imagery in contemporary Chinese poetry (e.g., Cao Seng)
• Sinophone and diasporic refigurations of “life” across regions, languages, and media

Please submit an abstract of approximately 250 words in English, along with a short biography (2–3 sentences) and contact information through this google form, by April 1, 2026. . Presentations will be delivered in English; papers may address any period of Chinese-language poetry, including Sinophone, Hong Kong, and diasporic contexts.

Please direct any inquiries to: Fay Zhen (fzhen2@asu.edu)