Posted by Eleanor Careless on 2024-01-10
Western ideas of both the production and reception of poetry often emphasise the individuality of the poet or the reader. Dominant conceptions of the act of writing poetry can thus frame it in narrow individualist-expressive terms. At the same time, Sam Solomon has described the study of poetry in the UK as closely shaped by a “lyric pedagogy” – a practice of reading poetry in a closed student-teacher dyad, with one's history, sociality, and material conditions left aside – that also functions as a strategy for the social reproduction of an individualised middle-class subject.
We are interested in the ways in which the innovative poetic counter-tradition has attempted to disrupt these individualised models of writing and reading. Grassroots practices and provisional 'institutions' such as the reading group, the workshop and the reading series, alongside collaborative approaches to poetic writing and criticism and DIY publishing and distribution, have long sought a more collective conception of poetry as a social practice.
We seek material which explores collectivised poetic practices which think about how poetry in the innovative tradition can look towards its relationships with the broader collective. We also invite works which themselves emerge from or explore collective or collaborative approaches to reading and the critical reception of poetry. We are especially open to contributions whose format – e.g. through collaborative modes of writing – reflects these commitments and their antagonisms with received models.
Please submit abstracts of c.300 words for articles, video/audio essays, creative-critical pieces, multiple-authored criticism etc. by 1st March 2024.
This call for contributions is curated by Joey Frances.