“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” claims Percy Bysshe Shelley at the end of his well-known essay A Defence of Poetry, based on the idea that poetry is connatural with the origin of the human. Poetry is one of the most prestigious genres in the literary tradition, if not the most. Whether we go back to its public and ritual function in shamanic chants or in Homeric epic, or we think of its circulation in multimedia formats on digital consumption platforms on the internet, poetry has existed both as an artistic mode of verbal language and as a literary genre that encapsulates the virtues of literature.

Given this, it is striking that it should also be such a difficult genre to define. This idea may seem counterintuitive, considering that the novel has been presented as the genre in permanent transformation—always on the verge of dying—or that the essay has been conceived as the genre that surpasses generic divisions. But it is enough to recall any current definition of poetry to quickly think of a counterexample—considered poetic by consensus—that overturns the features in question. Is it rhyme, verse, rhetorical figures, length, voice? For each of these possibilities, there appears a significant exception within the literary tradition. One of these principles, especially present in poems that are socially valued as paradigmatic, is the concentration of linguistic expression. That is, it would not be so much a matter of quality as of intensity and precision. This does not imply, however, a narrowing to a specific form or format.

Building on these issues, Jahan Ramazani, in Poetry and Its Others, argues that this very indeterminacy is what has enabled poetry to develop as a protean, fully modern genre, unbound by the decorum of traditional discourses. In contrast to Bakhtin’s view of poetry as the genre most resistant to dialogism—since lyric, which has dominated poetic expression since Romanticism, is thought to cancel out heteroglossic discourse or absorb it into a monologic voice—Ramazani sees poetry as inherently dialogic in the way it opens itself to other forms and genres. Although his study focuses only on poetry’s relationship with discursive genres such as news, prayer, and song, his ideas offer a useful framework for considering its dialogism with genres like the novel, drama, and others. The very fact that we do not quite know what a poem is or how it is delimited means that it comes into being through contact with other genres; that is, through its transformations it reveals its own nature as flexible and mutable.

But it is not only hybridity with other genres that allows poetry to have a dialogic dimension; this dimension can also emerge when poetry opens itself to discursive heterogeneity, especially when this entails a critique of the lettered city and its literary manifestations. Drawing on the thesis of the “illegibility of errant writings” developed by Julio Prieto in La escritura errante, it is possible to think that the poetry of César Vallejo or Néstor Perlongher, as Prieto analyzes, embraces heterogeneity by erring from the position of peripheral modernity.

Similarly, it is possible to identify plurality as a constitutive element of the poem, since, as Chantal Maillard reminds us, the ancient poet acquired the status of téknico by adjusting their work to the artus, or the proper articulation of the parts. What else but that proper articulation is a poem composed through operations of montage, as in the work of Sara Uribe or Lyn Hejinian, or one created through subtraction and erasure, as in the poems of Susan Howe?

For this issue of Nuevas Poligrafías, we invite scholars of poetry and poetics from diverse backgrounds, as well as specialists in literature, the arts, and the humanities broadly conceived, to submit original research articles exploring hybrid, nomadic, intermedial, or heterogeneous manifestations of the poetic. Our interest is in proposals that highlight the singular ways in which poetry enters into dialogue with other genres, discourses, or media, while at the same time reflecting on its artistic nature. Without being exclusive, some suggested topics are:

• Poetry and other literary genres for poetic reflection

• Poetic appropriations of other literary genres and forms

• Formation of new poetic genres through the incorporation of features from other genres

• Crossings between poetry and other media (ekphrasis, visual‑spatial forms, sound poetry, visual poetry)

• Uses of poetry in the development of other genres such as drama, the novel, performance

• Relations between poetry and the sciences (cognitive poetics, biopoetry)

• Sociocultural heterogeneity and poetry in Latin America

• Errancy, postcoloniality, and linguistic hybridity

• World poetry in the dialogue between languages and forms

All submissions must adhere to the journal's established guidelines and be submitted through the editorial management system on this website. While submissions received throughout the year will be considered, the deadline for inclusion in this issue is July 31, 2026. Issue 15 of the journal is scheduled for publication in February 2027. The journal receives submissions in English and Spanish. It also receives submissions on other topics—besides those presented in this call for papers—related to literary studies, especially literary theory and comparative literature.