CALL FOR PAPERS
please circulate
25-26 March 2011
University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
"I'm not writing for 'a small circle of friends,' I'm writing to you."
After three decades of composition, Ron Silliman's _the Alphabet_ is
complete, and published under one cover (University of Alabama Press,
2008). When this twenty-six-sectioned, thousand-plus-page poem was only
available in discrete portions, in magazines, chapbooks, limited-run
books, what punctuated each was not the poem's next "new sentence" but
concurrent claims and counterclaims on contemporary life. _the Alphabet_
was written during decades when high theory and cultural studies had
arrived in the academy to exact formal and mostly progressive social
evaluations from culture and the arts, but still often at the expense of
poetry's own theoretical challenges to the academy's institutional base;
when intensified corporate consolidation of the mass media and new
technologies were transforming existing paradigms of "the consumer
society" (Baudrillard), its "captains of consciousness" (Ewen), and
"culture of narcissism" (Lasch); and when, among other factors,
manufactured consent (theorized equally by Burawoy for factory work as by
Chomsky and Herman for mass media) propelled the US mainstream rightwards
into postmodern politics. Specific responses to claims by these dominant
narratives (to pick just three) from the post-Vietnam War era are to be
found among poets associated with Language Poetry (a label in part
projected from such narratives) and other contemporaneous groupings and
tendencies. But even in a given contextual and interpretive frame such as
this one, loose and incomplete as it is in this version but in which some
idea of ideological mediation prevails, how is it that one thing _the
Alphabet_ does is embody perceptions of a sensible world ("the way old gum
leaves its spotted shadow on the cement"), which is a poetic task much
older than and yet foundational to "the ideology of the aesthetic" (in
Eagleton's title phrase)? I offer this long-debated question of art's
function - "to strengthen the perceptive faculties and free them from
encumbrance" (to quote Pound on Dante, from almost a century ago) - as an
example of how _the Alphabet_'s singularities and influences may
re-illuminate received verities regarding the politics of aesthetic forms
in Language Poetry's milieu. Put another way, once timely and key
discursive interventions associated with Silliman's name and context -
such as use of theory in poetry, "ethnography" of the everyday, critiques
of accessible communication modes and of speech-based subjectivization,
poetics of ideological mediation - may require further elaboration, or
rethinking, if not their significance re-calibrated, in the face of this
poem's challenges. For, arguably, Silliman's reputation, even notoriety,
as critic, theorist, exponent of poetry's production as a socially
relevant and collective act, has preceded and to a degree guided how the
poetry is to be received. But if a reader responds to the poetry, then how
and what does she or he see and hear? "I'm writing to you," the text says
in the section called "Lit." So, what is reading _the Alphabet_ "like,"
for you?
This symposium aims to invite readings of Ron Silliman's long poem, _the
Alphabet_, and encourages critical engagements with its formal and
socio-historical/-ideological dynamics as well as with its contexts and
interpretive frames that have accrued around the author's time and work.
Papers on any issue focussed on or around _the Alphabet_ or an aspect
thereof are welcome, including but not limited to those addressing how
_the Alphabet_ engages elements of
? language (poetic language and form, grammar, syntax, pun, cliche,
description, reference, etc)
? narrative / anti-narrative / story
? representation (recalling Stuart Hall's constructionist sense of "the
active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not
merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active
labour of making things mean," "things" including class stratification,
gender construction, whiteness / racialization, etc)
? the aesthetic (& form; & ideology; & the body; & perception)
? the social (historical; sociological; psychological; poetic)
? nature (landscape, description, etc)
? realism (& 19C / 20C codes of "the reality effect"; & knowing)
? the unconscious (political, etc)
? genre (long poems, prose poems, novels, lyrics, etc)
? group & individual affiliation / disaffiliation (Language Poets /
Language Writing / Language School; contemporaries in the poetic field
such as Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Leslie Scalapino, etc)
? "tradition" (e.g.: Whitman, Thoreau; first-, second-generation
modernists such as H.D., Reznikoff; "New American Poets" such as Whalen,
Olson, Spicer; etc)
? non-US poetry & poetics in/from Canada (e.g.: Kootenay School of
Writing; Toronto Research Group; "the Canadian long poem"), China, Russia,
France, Australia, England, etc
? theory (postmodernity / postmodernism / modernism / modernity /
globalization)
? "after" (after theory; after "the American century"; after Language
poetics; after "21st-century modernism"; etc)
Please send 300-500-word abstracts for twenty-minute papers, or detailed
proposals for panels, by 1 Nov 2010 to Louis Cabri at lcabri at uwindsor
dot ca.
please circulate
25-26 March 2011
University of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada
"I'm not writing for 'a small circle of friends,' I'm writing to you."
After three decades of composition, Ron Silliman's _the Alphabet_ is
complete, and published under one cover (University of Alabama Press,
2008). When this twenty-six-sectioned, thousand-plus-page poem was only
available in discrete portions, in magazines, chapbooks, limited-run
books, what punctuated each was not the poem's next "new sentence" but
concurrent claims and counterclaims on contemporary life. _the Alphabet_
was written during decades when high theory and cultural studies had
arrived in the academy to exact formal and mostly progressive social
evaluations from culture and the arts, but still often at the expense of
poetry's own theoretical challenges to the academy's institutional base;
when intensified corporate consolidation of the mass media and new
technologies were transforming existing paradigms of "the consumer
society" (Baudrillard), its "captains of consciousness" (Ewen), and
"culture of narcissism" (Lasch); and when, among other factors,
manufactured consent (theorized equally by Burawoy for factory work as by
Chomsky and Herman for mass media) propelled the US mainstream rightwards
into postmodern politics. Specific responses to claims by these dominant
narratives (to pick just three) from the post-Vietnam War era are to be
found among poets associated with Language Poetry (a label in part
projected from such narratives) and other contemporaneous groupings and
tendencies. But even in a given contextual and interpretive frame such as
this one, loose and incomplete as it is in this version but in which some
idea of ideological mediation prevails, how is it that one thing _the
Alphabet_ does is embody perceptions of a sensible world ("the way old gum
leaves its spotted shadow on the cement"), which is a poetic task much
older than and yet foundational to "the ideology of the aesthetic" (in
Eagleton's title phrase)? I offer this long-debated question of art's
function - "to strengthen the perceptive faculties and free them from
encumbrance" (to quote Pound on Dante, from almost a century ago) - as an
example of how _the Alphabet_'s singularities and influences may
re-illuminate received verities regarding the politics of aesthetic forms
in Language Poetry's milieu. Put another way, once timely and key
discursive interventions associated with Silliman's name and context -
such as use of theory in poetry, "ethnography" of the everyday, critiques
of accessible communication modes and of speech-based subjectivization,
poetics of ideological mediation - may require further elaboration, or
rethinking, if not their significance re-calibrated, in the face of this
poem's challenges. For, arguably, Silliman's reputation, even notoriety,
as critic, theorist, exponent of poetry's production as a socially
relevant and collective act, has preceded and to a degree guided how the
poetry is to be received. But if a reader responds to the poetry, then how
and what does she or he see and hear? "I'm writing to you," the text says
in the section called "Lit." So, what is reading _the Alphabet_ "like,"
for you?
This symposium aims to invite readings of Ron Silliman's long poem, _the
Alphabet_, and encourages critical engagements with its formal and
socio-historical/-ideological dynamics as well as with its contexts and
interpretive frames that have accrued around the author's time and work.
Papers on any issue focussed on or around _the Alphabet_ or an aspect
thereof are welcome, including but not limited to those addressing how
_the Alphabet_ engages elements of
? language (poetic language and form, grammar, syntax, pun, cliche,
description, reference, etc)
? narrative / anti-narrative / story
? representation (recalling Stuart Hall's constructionist sense of "the
active work of selecting and presenting, of structuring and shaping: not
merely the transmitting of already-existing meaning, but the more active
labour of making things mean," "things" including class stratification,
gender construction, whiteness / racialization, etc)
? the aesthetic (& form; & ideology; & the body; & perception)
? the social (historical; sociological; psychological; poetic)
? nature (landscape, description, etc)
? realism (& 19C / 20C codes of "the reality effect"; & knowing)
? the unconscious (political, etc)
? genre (long poems, prose poems, novels, lyrics, etc)
? group & individual affiliation / disaffiliation (Language Poets /
Language Writing / Language School; contemporaries in the poetic field
such as Rae Armantrout, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Leslie Scalapino, etc)
? "tradition" (e.g.: Whitman, Thoreau; first-, second-generation
modernists such as H.D., Reznikoff; "New American Poets" such as Whalen,
Olson, Spicer; etc)
? non-US poetry & poetics in/from Canada (e.g.: Kootenay School of
Writing; Toronto Research Group; "the Canadian long poem"), China, Russia,
France, Australia, England, etc
? theory (postmodernity / postmodernism / modernism / modernity /
globalization)
? "after" (after theory; after "the American century"; after Language
poetics; after "21st-century modernism"; etc)
Please send 300-500-word abstracts for twenty-minute papers, or detailed
proposals for panels, by 1 Nov 2010 to Louis Cabri at lcabri at uwindsor
dot ca.
